>> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from The Cube and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> The world's leading telcos are trying to shed the stigma of being monopolies lacking innovation. Telcos have been great at operational efficiency and connectivity and living off of transmission, and the costs and expenses or revenue associated with that transmission. But in a world beyond telephone poles and basic wireless and mobile services, how will telcos modernize and become more agile and monetize new opportunities brought about by 5G and private wireless and a spate of new innovations and infrastructure, cloud data and apps? Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis and ahead of Mobile World Congress or now, MWC23, we explore the evolution of the telco business and how the industry is in many ways, mimicking transformations that took place decades ago in enterprise IT. We'll model some of the traditional enterprise vendors using ETR data and investigate how they're faring in the telecommunications sector, and we'll pose some of the key issues facing the industry this decade. First, let's take a look at what the GSMA has in store for MWC23. GSMA is the host of what used to be called Mobile World Congress. They've set the theme for this year's event as "Velocity" and they've rebranded MWC to reflect the fact that mobile technology is only one part of the story. MWC has become one of the world's premier events highlighting innovations not only in Telco, mobile and 5G, but the collision between cloud, infrastructure, apps, private networks, smart industries, machine intelligence, and AI, and more. MWC comprises an enormous ecosystem of service providers, technology companies, and firms from virtually every industry including sports and entertainment. And as well, GSMA, along with its venue partner at the Fira Barcelona, have placed a major emphasis on sustainability and public and private partnerships. Virtually every industry will be represented at the event because every industry is impacted by the trends and opportunities in this space. GSMA has said it expects 80,000 attendees at MWC this year, not quite back to 2019 levels, but trending in that direction. Of course, attendance from Chinese participants has historically been very high at the show, and obviously the continued travel issues from that region are affecting the overall attendance, but still very strong. And despite these concerns, Huawei, the giant Chinese technology company. has the largest physical presence of any exhibitor at the show. And finally, GSMA estimates that more than $300 million in economic benefit will result from the event which takes place at the end of February and early March. And The Cube will be back at MWC this year with a major presence thanks to our anchor sponsor, Dell Technologies and other supporters of our content program, including Enterprise Web, ArcaOS, VMware, Snowflake, Cisco, AWS, and others. And one of the areas we're interested in exploring is the evolution of the telco stack. It's a topic that's often talked about and one that we've observed taking place in the 1990s when the vertically integrated IBM mainframe monopoly gave way to a disintegrated and horizontal industry structure. And in many ways, the same thing is happening today in telecommunications, which is shown on the left-hand side of this diagram. Historically, telcos have relied on a hardened, integrated, and incredibly reliable, and secure set of hardware and software services that have been fully vetted and tested, and certified, and relied upon for decades. And at the top of that stack on the left are the crown jewels of the telco stack, the operational support systems and the business support systems. For the OSS, we're talking about things like network management, network operations, service delivery, quality of service, fulfillment assurance, and things like that. For the BSS systems, these refer to customer-facing elements of the stack, like revenue, order management, what products they sell, billing, and customer service. And what we're seeing is telcos have been really good at operational efficiency and making money off of transport and connectivity, but they've lacked the innovation in services and applications. They own the pipes and that works well, but others, be the over-the-top content companies, or private network providers and increasingly, cloud providers have been able to bypass the telcos, reach around them, if you will, and drive innovation. And so, the right-most diagram speaks to the need to disaggregate pieces of the stack. And while the similarities to the 1990s in enterprise IT are greater than the differences, there are things that are different. For example, the granularity of hardware infrastructure will not likely be as high where competition occurred back in the 90s at every layer of the value chain with very little infrastructure integration. That of course changed in the 2010s with converged infrastructure and hyper-converged and also software defined. So, that's one difference. And the advent of cloud, containers, microservices, and AI, none of that was really a major factor in the disintegration of legacy IT. And that probably means that disruptors can move even faster than did the likes of Intel and Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, and the Seagates of the 1990s. As well, while many of the products and services will come from traditional enterprise IT names like Dell, HPE, Cisco, Red Hat, VMware, AWS, Microsoft, Google, et cetera, many of the names are going to be different and come from traditional network equipment providers. These are names like Ericsson and Huawei, and Nokia, and other names, like Wind River, and Rakuten, and Dish Networks. And there are enormous opportunities in data to help telecom companies and their competitors go beyond telemetry data into more advanced analytics and data monetization. There's also going to be an entirely new set of apps based on the workloads and use cases ranging from hospitals, sports arenas, race tracks, shipping ports, you name it. Virtually every vertical will participate in this transformation as the industry evolves its focus toward innovation, agility, and open ecosystems. Now remember, this is not a binary state. There are going to be greenfield companies disrupting the apple cart, but the incumbent telcos are going to have to continue to ensure newer systems work with their legacy infrastructure, in their OSS and BSS existing systems. And as we know, this is not going to be an overnight task. Integration is a difficult thing, transformations, migrations. So that's what makes this all so interesting because others can come in with Greenfield and potentially disrupt. There'll be interesting partnerships and ecosystems will form and coalitions will also form. Now, we mentioned that several traditional enterprise companies are or will be playing in this space. Now, ETR doesn't have a ton of data on specific telecom equipment and software providers, but it does have some interesting data that we cut for this breaking analysis. What we're showing here in this graphic is some of the names that we've followed over the years and how they're faring. Specifically, we did the cut within the telco sector. So the Y-axis here shows net score or spending velocity. And the horizontal axis, that shows the presence or pervasiveness in the data set. And that table insert in the upper left, that informs as to how the dots are plotted. You know, the two columns there, net score and the ends. And that red-dotted line, that horizontal line at 40%, that is an indicator of a highly elevated level. Anything above that, we consider quite outstanding. And what we'll do now is we'll comment on some of the cohorts and share with you how they're doing in telecommunications, and that sector, that vertical relative to their position overall in the data set. Let's start with the public cloud players. They're prominent in every industry. Telcos, telecommunications is no exception and it's quite an interesting cohort here. On the one hand, they can help telecommunication firms modernize and become more agile by eliminating the heavy lifting and you know, all the cloud, you know, value prop, data center costs, and the cloud benefits. At the same time, public cloud players are bringing their services to the edge, building out their own global networks and are a disruptive force to traditional telcos. All right, let's talk about Azure first. Their net score is basically identical to telco relative to its overall average. AWS's net score is higher in telco by just a few percentage points. Google Cloud platform is eight percentage points higher in telco with a 53% net score. So all three hyperscalers have an equal or stronger presence in telco than their average overall. Okay, let's look at the traditional enterprise hardware and software infrastructure cohort. Dell, Cisco, HPE, Red Hat, VMware, and Oracle. We've highlighted in this chart just as sort of indicators or proxies. Dell's net score's 10 percentage points higher in telco than its overall average. Interesting. Cisco's is a bit higher. HPE's is actually lower by about nine percentage points in the ETR survey, and VMware's is lower by about four percentage points. Now, Red Hat is really interesting. OpenStack, as we've previously reported is popular with telcos who want to build out their own private cloud. And the data shows that Red Hat OpenStack's net score is 15 percentage points higher in the telco sector than its overall average. OpenShift, on the other hand, has a net score that's four percentage points lower in telco than its overall average. So this to us talks to the pace of adoption of microservices and containers. You know, it's going to happen, but it's going to happen more slowly. Finally, Oracle's spending momentum is somewhat lower in the sector than its average, despite the firm having a decent telco business. IBM and Accenture, heavy services companies are both lower in this sector than their average. And real quickly, snowflake's net score is much lower by about 12 percentage points relative to its very high average net score of 62%. But we look for them to be a player in this space as telcos need to modernize their analytics stack and share data in a governed manner. Databricks' net score is also much lower than its average by about 13 points. And same, I would expect them to be a player as open architectures and cloud gains steam in telco. All right, let's close out now on what we're going to be talking about at MWC23 and some of the key issues that we'll be unpacking. We've talked about stack disaggregation in this breaking analysis, but the key here will be the pace at which it will reach the operational efficiency and reliability of closed stacks. Telcos, you know, in a large part, they're engineering heavy firms and much of their work takes place, kind of in the basement, in the dark. It's not really a big public hype machine, and they tend to move slowly and cautiously. While they understand the importance of agility, they're going to be careful because, you know, it's in their DNA. And so at the same time, if they don't move fast enough, they're going to get hurt and disrupted by competitors. So that's going to be a topic of conversation, and we'll be looking for proof points. And the other comment I'll make is around integration. Telcos because of their conservatism will benefit from better testing and those firms that can innovate on the testing front and have labs and certifications and innovate at that level, with an ecosystem are going to be in a better position. Because open sometimes means wild west. So the more players like Dell, HPE, Cisco, Red Hat, et cetera, that do that and align with their ecosystems and provide those resources, the faster adoption is going to go. So we'll be looking for, you know, who's actually doing that, Open RAN or Radio Access Networks. That fits in this discussion because O-RAN is an emerging network architecture. It essentially enables the use of open technologies from an ecosystem and over time, look at O-RAN is going to be open, but the questions, you know, a lot of questions remain as to when it will be able to deliver the operational efficiency of traditional RAN. Got some interesting dynamics going on. Rakuten is a company that's working hard on this problem, really focusing on operational efficiency. Then you got Dish Networks. They're also embracing O-RAN. They're coming at it more from service innovation. So that's something that we'll be monitoring and unpacking. We're going to look at cloud as a disruptor. On the one hand, cloud can help drive agility, as we said earlier and optionality, and innovation for incumbent telcos. But the flip side is going to also do the same for startups trying to disrupt and cloud attracts startups. While some of the telcos are actually embracing the cloud, many are being cautious. So that's going to be an interesting topic of discussion. And there's private wireless networks and 5G, and hyperlocal private networks, they're being deployed, you know, at the edge. This idea of open edge is also a really hot topic and this trend is going to accelerate. You know, the importance here is that the use cases are going to be widely varied. The needs of a hospital are going to be different than those of a sports venue are different from a remote drilling location, and energy or a concert venue. Things like real-time AI inference and data flows are going to bring new services and monetization opportunities. And many firms are going to be bypassing traditional telecommunications networks to build these out. Satellites as well, we're going to see, you know, in this decade, you're going to have, you're going to look down at Google Earth and you're going to see real-time. You know, today you see snapshots and so, lots of innovations going in that space. So how is this going to disrupt industries and traditional industry structures? Now, as always, we'll be looking at data angles, right? 'Cause it's in The Cube's DNA to follow the data and what opportunities and risks data brings. The Cube is going to be on location at MWC23 at the end of the month. We got a great set. We're in the walkway between halls four and five, right in Congress Square, it's booths CS60. So we'll have a full, they're called Stan CS60. We have a full schedule. I'm going to be there with Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson and the entire Cube crew, so don't forget to stop by. All right, that's a wrap. I want to thank Alex Myerson, who's on production and manages the podcast, Ken Schiffman as well. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at Silicon Angle, does some great stuff for us. Thank you all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search "Breaking Analysis" podcasts I publish each week on wikibon.com and silicon angle.com. And all the video content is available on demand at thecube.net. You can email me directly at david.vellante@silicon angle.com. You can DM me at dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn post. Please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you at Mobile World Congress, and/or at next time on "Breaking Analysis." (bright music) (bright music fades)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Confidential computing is a technology that aims to enhance data privacy and security by providing encrypted computation on sensitive data and isolating data from apps in a fenced off enclave during processing. The concept of confidential computing is gaining popularity, especially in the cloud computing space where sensitive data is often stored and of course processed. However, there are some who view confidential computing as an unnecessary technology in a marketing ploy by cloud providers aimed at calming customers who are cloud phobic. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we revisit the notion of confidential computing, and to do so, we'll invite two Google experts to the show, but before we get there, let's summarize briefly. There's not a ton of ETR data on the topic of confidential computing. I mean, it's a technology that's deeply embedded into silicon and computing architectures. But at the highest level, security remains the number one priority being addressed by IT decision makers in the coming year as shown here. And this data is pretty much across the board by industry, by region, by size of company. I mean we dug into it and the only slight deviation from the mean is in financial services. The second and third most cited priorities, cloud migration and analytics, are noticeably closer to cybersecurity in financial services than in other sectors, likely because financial services has always been hyper security conscious, but security is still a clear number one priority in that sector. The idea behind confidential computing is to better address threat models for data in execution. Protecting data at rest and data and transit have long been a focus of security approaches, but more recently, silicon manufacturers have introduced architectures that separate data and applications from the host system. Arm, Intel, AMD, Nvidia and other suppliers are all on board, as are the big cloud players. Now the argument against confidential computing is that it narrowly focuses on memory encryption and it doesn't solve the biggest problems in security. Multiple system images updates different services and the entire code flow aren't directly addressed by memory encryption, rather to truly attack these problems, many believe that OSs need to be re-engineered with the attacker and hacker in mind. There are so many variables and at the end of the day, critics say the emphasis on confidential computing made by cloud providers is overstated and largely hype. This tweet from security researcher Rodrigo Branco sums up the sentiment of many skeptics. He says, "Confidential computing is mostly a marketing campaign for memory encryption. It's not driving the industry towards the hard open problems. It is selling an illusion." Okay. Nonetheless, encrypting data in use and fencing off key components of the system isn't a bad thing, especially if it comes with the package essentially for free. There has been a lack of standardization and interoperability between different confidential computing approaches. But the confidential computing consortium was established in 2019 ostensibly to accelerate the market and influence standards. Notably, AWS is not part of the consortium, likely because the politics of the consortium were probably a conundrum for AWS because the base technology defined by the the consortium is seen as limiting by AWS. This is my guess, not AWS's words, and but I think joining the consortium would validate a definition which AWS isn't aligned with. And two, it's got a lead with this Annapurna acquisition. This was way ahead with Arm integration and so it probably doesn't feel the need to validate its competitors. Anyway, one of the premier members of the confidential computing consortium is Google, along with many high profile names including Arm, Intel, Meta, Red Hat, Microsoft, and others. And we're pleased to welcome two experts on confidential computing from Google to unpack the topic, Nelly Porter is head of product for GCP confidential computing and encryption, and Dr. Patricia Florissi is the technical director for the office of the CTO at Google Cloud. Welcome Nelly and Patricia, great to have you. >> Great to be here. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> You're very welcome. Nelly, why don't you start and then Patricia, you can weigh in. Just tell the audience a little bit about each of your roles at Google Cloud. >> So I'll start, I'm owning a lot of interesting activities in Google and again security or infrastructure securities that I usually own. And we are talking about encryption and when encryption and confidential computing is a part of portfolio in additional areas that I contribute together with my team to Google and our customers is secure software supply chain. Because you need to trust your software. Is it operate in your confidential environment to have end-to-end story about if you believe that your software and your environment doing what you expect, it's my role. >> Got it. Okay. Patricia? >> Well, I am a technical director in the office of the CTO, OCTO for short, in Google Cloud. And we are a global team. We include former CTOs like myself and senior technologists from large corporations, institutions and a lot of success, we're startups as well. And we have two main goals. First, we walk side by side with some of our largest, more strategic or most strategical customers and we help them solve complex engineering technical problems. And second, we are devise Google and Google Cloud engineering and product management and tech on there, on emerging trends and technologies to guide the trajectory of our business. We are unique group, I think, because we have created this collaborative culture with our customers. And within OCTO, I spend a lot of time collaborating with customers and the industry at large on technologies that can address privacy, security, and sovereignty of data in general. >> Excellent. Thank you for that both of you. Let's get into it. So Nelly, what is confidential computing? From Google's perspective, how do you define it? >> Confidential computing is a tool and it's still one of the tools in our toolbox. And confidential computing is a way how we would help our customers to complete this very interesting end-to-end lifecycle of the data. And when customers bring in the data to cloud and want to protect it as they ingest it to the cloud, they protect it at rest when they store data in the cloud. But what was missing for many, many years is ability for us to continue protecting data and workloads of our customers when they running them. And again, because data is not brought to cloud to have huge graveyard, we need to ensure that this data is actually indexed. Again, there is some insights driven and drawn from this data. You have to process this data and confidential computing here to help. Now we have end to end protection of our customer's data when they bring the workloads and data to cloud, thanks to confidential computing. >> Thank you for that. Okay, we're going to get into the architecture a bit, but before we do, Patricia, why do you think this topic of confidential computing is such an important technology? Can you explain, do you think it's transformative for customers and if so, why? >> Yeah, I would maybe like to use one thought, one way, one intuition behind why confidential commuting matters, because at the end of the day, it reduces more and more the customer's thresh boundaries and the attack surface. That's about reducing that periphery, the boundary in which the customer needs to mind about trust and safety. And in a way, is a natural progression that you're using encryption to secure and protect the data. In the same way that we are encrypting data in transit and at rest, now we are also encrypting data while in use. And among other beneficials, I would say one of the most transformative ones is that organizations will be able to collaborate with each other and retain the confidentiality of the data. And that is across industry, even though it's highly focused on, I wouldn't say highly focused, but very beneficial for highly regulated industries. It applies to all of industries. And if you look at financing for example, where bankers are trying to detect fraud, and specifically double finance where you are, a customer is actually trying to get a finance on an asset, let's say a boat or a house, and then it goes to another bank and gets another finance on that asset. Now bankers would be able to collaborate and detect fraud while preserving confidentiality and privacy of the data. >> Interesting. And I want to understand that a little bit more but I'm going to push you a little bit on this, Nelly, if I can because there's a narrative out there that says confidential computing is a marketing ploy, I talked about this upfront, by cloud providers that are just trying to placate people that are scared of the cloud. And I'm presuming you don't agree with that, but I'd like you to weigh in here. The argument is confidential computing is just memory encryption and it doesn't address many other problems. It is over hyped by cloud providers. What do you say to that line of thinking? >> I absolutely disagree, as you can imagine, with this statement, but the most importantly is we mixing multiple concepts, I guess. And exactly as Patricia said, we need to look at the end-to-end story, not again the mechanism how confidential computing trying to again, execute and protect a customer's data and why it's so critically important because what confidential computing was able to do, it's in addition to isolate our tenants in multi-tenant environments the cloud covering to offer additional stronger isolation. They called it cryptographic isolation. It's why customers will have more trust to customers and to other customers, the tenant that's running on the same host but also us because they don't need to worry about against threats and more malicious attempts to penetrate the environment. So what confidential computing is helping us to offer our customers, stronger isolation between tenants in this multi-tenant environment, but also incredibly important, stronger isolation of our customers, so tenants from us. We also writing code, we also software providers will also make mistakes or have some zero days. Sometimes again us introduced, sometimes introduced by our adversaries. But what I'm trying to say by creating this cryptographic layer of isolation between us and our tenants and amongst those tenants, we're really providing meaningful security to our customers and eliminate some of the worries that they have running on multi-tenant spaces or even collaborating to gather this very sensitive data knowing that this particular protection is available to them. >> Okay, thank you. Appreciate that. And I think malicious code is often a threat model missed in these narratives. Operator access, yeah, maybe I trust my clouds provider, but if I can fence off your access even better, I'll sleep better at night. Separating a code from the data, everybody's, Arm, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, others, they're all doing it. I wonder if, Nelly, if we could stay with you and bring up the slide on the architecture. What's architecturally different with confidential computing versus how operating systems and VMs have worked traditionally. We're showing a slide here with some VMs, maybe you could take us through that. >> Absolutely. And Dave, the whole idea for Google and now industry way of dealing with confidential computing is to ensure that three main property is actually preserved. Customers don't need to change the code. They can operate on those VMs exactly as they would with normal non-confidential VMs, but to give them this opportunity of lift and shift or no changing their apps and performing and having very, very, very low latency and scale as any cloud can, something that Google actually pioneer in confidential computing. I think we need to open and explain how this magic was actually done. And as I said, it's again the whole entire system have to change to be able to provide this magic. And I would start with we have this concept of root of trust and root of trust where we will ensure that this machine, when the whole entire post has integrity guarantee, means nobody changing my code on the most low level of system. And we introduce this in 2017 called Titan. It was our specific ASIC, specific, again, inch by inch system on every single motherboard that we have that ensures that your low level former, your actually system code, your kernel, the most powerful system is actually proper configured and not changed, not tampered. We do it for everybody, confidential computing included. But for confidential computing, what we have to change, we bring in AMD, or again, future silicon vendors and we have to trust their former, their way to deal with our confidential environments. And that's why we have obligation to validate integrity, not only our software and our former but also former and software of our vendors, silicon vendors. So we actually, when we booting this machine, as you can see, we validate that integrity of all of the system is in place. It means nobody touching, nobody changing, nobody modifying it. But then we have this concept of AMD secure processor, it's special ASICs, best specific things that generate a key for every single VM that our customers will run or every single node in Kubernetes or every single worker thread in our Hadoop or Spark capability. We offer all of that. And those keys are not available to us. It's the best keys ever in encryption space because when we are talking about encryption, the first question that I'm receiving all the time, where's the key, who will have access to the key? Because if you have access to the key then it doesn't matter if you encrypted or not. So, but the case in confidential computing provides so revolutionary technology, us cloud providers, who don't have access to the keys. They sitting in the hardware and they head to memory controller. And it means when hypervisors that also know about these wonderful things saying I need to get access to the memories that this particular VM trying to get access to, they do not decrypt the data, they don't have access to the key because those keys are random, ephemeral and per VM, but the most importantly, in hardware not exportable. And it means now you would be able to have this very interesting role that customers or cloud providers will not be able to get access to your memory. And what we do, again, as you can see our customers don't need to change their applications, their VMs are running exactly as it should run and what you're running in VM, you actually see your memory in clear, it's not encrypted, but God forbid is trying somebody to do it outside of my confidential box. No, no, no, no, no, they would not be able to do it. Now you'll see cyber and it's exactly what combination of these multiple hardware pieces and software pieces have to do. So OS is also modified. And OS is modified such way to provide integrity. It means even OS that you're running in your VM box is not modifiable and you, as customer, can verify. But the most interesting thing, I guess, how to ensure the super performance of this environment because you can imagine, Dave, that encrypting and it's additional performance, additional time, additional latency. So we were able to mitigate all of that by providing incredibly interesting capability in the OS itself. So our customers will get no changes needed, fantastic performance and scales as they would expect from cloud providers like Google. >> Okay, thank you. Excellent. Appreciate that explanation. So, again, the narrative on this as well, you've already given me guarantees as a cloud provider that you don't have access to my data, but this gives another level of assurance, key management as they say is key. Now humans aren't managing the keys, the machines are managing them. So Patricia, my question to you is, in addition to, let's go pre confidential computing days, what are the sort of new guarantees that these hardware-based technologies are going to provide to customers? >> So if I am a customer, I am saying I now have full guarantee of confidentiality and integrity of the data and of the code. So if you look at code and data confidentiality, the customer cares and they want to know whether their systems are protected from outside or unauthorized access, and that recovered with Nelly, that it is. Confidential computing actually ensures that the applications and data internals remain secret, right? The code is actually looking at the data, the only the memory is decrypting the data with a key that is ephemeral and per VM and generated on demand. Then you have the second point where you have code and data integrity, and now customers want to know whether their data was corrupted, tampered with or impacted by outside actors. And what confidential computing ensures is that application internals are not tampered with. So the application, the workload as we call it, that is processing the data, it's also, it has not been tampered and preserves integrity. I would also say that this is all verifiable. So you have attestation and these attestation actually generates a log trail and the log trail guarantees that, provides a proof that it was preserved. And I think that the offer's also a guarantee of what we call ceiling, this idea that the secrets have been preserved and not tampered with, confidentiality and integrity of code and data. >> Got it. Okay, thank you. Nelly, you mentioned, I think I heard you say that the applications, it's transparent, you don't have to change the application, it just comes for free essentially. And we showed some various parts of the stack before. I'm curious as to what's affected, but really more importantly, what is specifically Google's value add? How do partners participate in this, the ecosystem, or maybe said another way, how does Google ensure the compatibility of confidential computing with existing systems and applications? >> And a fantastic question by the way. And it's very difficult and definitely complicated world because to be able to provide these guarantees, actually a lot of work was done by community. Google is very much operate in open, so again, our operating system, we working with operating system repository OSs, OS vendors to ensure that all capabilities that we need is part of the kernels, are part of the releases and it's available for customers to understand and even explore if they have fun to explore a lot of code. We have also modified together with our silicon vendors a kernel, host kernel to support this capability and it means working this community to ensure that all of those patches are there. We also worked with every single silicon vendor as you've seen, and that's what I probably feel that Google contributed quite a bit in this whole, we moved our industry, our community, our vendors to understand the value of easy to use confidential computing or removing barriers. And now I don't know if you noticed, Intel is pulling the lead and also announcing their trusted domain extension, very similar architecture. And no surprise, it's, again, a lot of work done with our partners to, again, convince, work with them and make this capability available. The same with Arm this year, actually last year, Arm announced their future design for confidential computing. It's called Confidential Computing Architecture. And it's also influenced very heavily with similar ideas by Google and industry overall. So it's a lot of work in confidential computing consortiums that we are doing, for example, simply to mention, to ensure interop, as you mentioned, between different confidential environments of cloud providers. They want to ensure that they can attest to each other because when you're communicating with different environments, you need to trust them. And if it's running on different cloud providers, you need to ensure that you can trust your receiver when you are sharing your sensitive data workloads or secret with them. So we coming as a community and we have this attestation sig, the, again, the community based systems that we want to build and influence and work with Arm and every other cloud providers to ensure that we can interrupt and it means it doesn't matter where confidential workloads will be hosted, but they can exchange the data in secure, verifiable and controlled by customers way. And to do it, we need to continue what we are doing, working open, again, and contribute with our ideas and ideas of our partners to this role to become what we see confidential computing has to become, it has to become utility. It doesn't need to be so special, but it's what we want it to become. >> Let's talk about, thank you for that explanation. Let's talk about data sovereignty because when you think about data sharing, you think about data sharing across the ecosystem and different regions and then of course data sovereignty comes up. Typically public policy lags, the technology industry and sometimes is problematic. I know there's a lot of discussions about exceptions, but Patricia, we have a graphic on data sovereignty. I'm interested in how confidential computing ensures that data sovereignty and privacy edicts are adhered to, even if they're out of alignment maybe with the pace of technology. One of the frequent examples is when you delete data, can you actually prove that data is deleted with a hundred percent certainty? You got to prove that and a lot of other issues. So looking at this slide, maybe you could take us through your thinking on data sovereignty. >> Perfect. So for us, data sovereignty is only one of the three pillars of digital sovereignty. And I don't want to give the impression that confidential computing addresses it all. That's why we want to step back and say, hey, digital sovereignty includes data sovereignty where we are giving you full control and ownership of the location, encryption and access to your data. Operational sovereignty where the goal is to give our Google Cloud customers full visibility and control over the provider operations, right? So if there are any updates on hardware, software stack, any operations, there is full transparency, full visibility. And then the third pillar is around software sovereignty where the customer wants to ensure that they can run their workloads without dependency on the provider's software. So they have sometimes is often referred as survivability, that you can actually survive if you are untethered to the cloud and that you can use open source. Now let's take a deep dive on data sovereignty, which by the way is one of my favorite topics. And we typically focus on saying, hey, we need to care about data residency. We care where the data resides because where the data is at rest or in processing, it typically abides to the jurisdiction, the regulations of the jurisdiction where the data resides. And others say, hey, let's focus on data protection. We want to ensure the confidentiality and integrity and availability of the data, which confidential computing is at the heart of that data protection. But it is yet another element that people typically don't talk about when talking about data sovereignty, which is the element of user control. And here, Dave, is about what happens to the data when I give you access to my data. And this reminds me of security two decades ago, even a decade ago, where we started the security movement by putting firewall protections and login accesses. But once you were in, you were able to do everything you wanted with the data. An insider had access to all the infrastructure, the data and the code. And that's similar because with data sovereignty we care about whether it resides, where, who is operating on the data. But the moment that the data is being processed, I need to trust that the processing of the data will abide by user control, by the policies that I put in place of how my data is going to be used. And if you look at a lot of the regulation today and a lot of the initiatives around the International Data Space Association, IDSA, and Gaia-X, there is a movement of saying the two parties, the provider of the data and the receiver of the data are going to agree on a contract that describes what my data can be used for. The challenge is to ensure that once the data crosses boundaries, that the data will be used for the purposes that it was intended and specified in the contract. And if you actually bring together, and this is the exciting part, confidential computing together with policy enforcement, now the policy enforcement can guarantee that the data is only processed within the confines of a confidential computing environment, that the workload is cryptographically verified that there is the workload that was meant to process the data and that the data will be only used when abiding to the confidentiality and integrity safety of the confidential computing environment. And that's why we believe confidential computing is one necessary and essential technology that will allow us to ensure data sovereignty, especially when it comes to user control. >> Thank you for that. I mean it was a deep dive, I mean brief, but really detailed. So I appreciate that, especially the verification of the enforcement. Last question, I met you two because as part of my year end prediction post, you guys sent in some predictions and I wasn't able to get to them in the predictions post. So I'm thrilled that you were able to make the time to come on the program. How widespread do you think the adoption of confidential computing will be in 23 and what's the maturity curve look like, this decade in your opinion? Maybe each of you could give us a brief answer. >> So my prediction in five, seven years, as I started, it'll become utility. It'll become TLS as of, again, 10 years ago we couldn't believe that websites will have certificates and we will support encrypted traffic. Now we do and it's become ubiquity. It's exactly where confidential computing is getting and heading, I don't know we deserve yet. It'll take a few years of maturity for us, but we will be there. >> Thank you. And Patricia, what's your prediction? >> I will double that and say, hey, in the future, in the very near future, you will not be able to afford not having it. I believe as digital sovereignty becomes evermore top of mind with sovereign states and also for multi national organizations and for organizations that want to collaborate with each other, confidential computing will become the norm. It'll become the default, if I say, mode of operation. I like to compare that today is inconceivable. If we talk to the young technologists, it's inconceivable to think that at some point in history, and I happen to be alive that we had data at rest that was not encrypted, data in transit that was not encrypted, and I think that will be inconceivable at some point in the near future that to have unencrypted data while in use. >> And plus I think the beauty of the this industry is because there's so much competition, this essentially comes for free. I want to thank you both for spending some time on Breaking Analysis. There's so much more we could cover. I hope you'll come back to share the progress that you're making in this area and we can double click on some of these topics. Really appreciate your time. >> Anytime. >> Thank you so much. >> In summary, while confidential computing is being touted by the cloud players as a promising technology for enhancing data privacy and security, there are also those, as we said, who remain skeptical. The truth probably lies somewhere in between and it will depend on the specific implementation and the use case as to how effective confidential computing will be. Look, as with any new tech, it's important to carefully evaluate the potential benefits, the drawbacks, and make informed decisions based on the specific requirements in the situation and the constraints of each individual customer. But the bottom line is silicon manufacturers are working with cloud providers and other system companies to include confidential computing into their architectures. Competition, in our view, will moderate price hikes. And at the end of the day, this is under the covers technology that essentially will come for free. So we'll take it. I want to thank our guests today, Nelly and Patricia from Google, and thanks to Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Ken Schiffman as well out of our Boston studio, Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at siliconangle.com. Does some great editing for us, thank you all. Remember all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com where you can get all the news. If you want to get in touch, you can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or dm me @DVellante. And you can also comment on my LinkedIn post. Definitely you want to check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. I know we didn't hit on a lot today, but there's some amazing data and it's always being updated, so check that out. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Confidential computing is a technology that aims to enhance data privacy and security, by providing encrypted computation on sensitive data and isolating data, and apps that are fenced off enclave during processing. The concept of, I got to start over. I fucked that up, I'm sorry. That's not right, what I said was not right. On Dave in five, four, three. Confidential computing is a technology that aims to enhance data privacy and security by providing encrypted computation on sensitive data, isolating data from apps and a fenced off enclave during processing. The concept of confidential computing is gaining popularity, especially in the cloud computing space, where sensitive data is often stored and of course processed. However, there are some who view confidential computing as an unnecessary technology in a marketing ploy by cloud providers aimed at calming customers who are cloud phobic. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we revisit the notion of confidential computing, and to do so, we'll invite two Google experts to the show. But before we get there, let's summarize briefly. There's not a ton of ETR data on the topic of confidential computing, I mean, it's a technology that's deeply embedded into silicon and computing architectures. But at the highest level, security remains the number one priority being addressed by IT decision makers in the coming year as shown here. And this data is pretty much across the board by industry, by region, by size of company. I mean we dug into it and the only slight deviation from the mean is in financial services. The second and third most cited priorities, cloud migration and analytics are noticeably closer to cybersecurity in financial services than in other sectors, likely because financial services has always been hyper security conscious, but security is still a clear number one priority in that sector. The idea behind confidential computing is to better address threat models for data in execution. Protecting data at rest and data in transit have long been a focus of security approaches, but more recently, silicon manufacturers have introduced architectures that separate data and applications from the host system, ARM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia and other suppliers are all on board, as are the big cloud players. Now, the argument against confidential computing is that it narrowly focuses on memory encryption and it doesn't solve the biggest problems in security. Multiple system images, updates, different services and the entire code flow aren't directly addressed by memory encryption. Rather to truly attack these problems, many believe that OSs need to be re-engineered with the attacker and hacker in mind. There are so many variables and at the end of the day, critics say the emphasis on confidential computing made by cloud providers is overstated and largely hype. This tweet from security researcher Rodrigo Bronco, sums up the sentiment of many skeptics. He says, "Confidential computing is mostly a marketing campaign from memory encryption. It's not driving the industry towards the hard open problems. It is selling an illusion." Okay. Nonetheless, encrypting data in use and fencing off key components of the system isn't a bad thing, especially if it comes with the package essentially for free. There has been a lack of standardization and interoperability between different confidential computing approaches. But the confidential computing consortium was established in 2019 ostensibly to accelerate the market and influence standards. Notably, AWS is not part of the consortium, likely because the politics of the consortium were probably a conundrum for AWS because the base technology defined by the consortium is seen as limiting by AWS. This is my guess, not AWS' words. But I think joining the consortium would validate a definition which AWS isn't aligned with. And two, it's got to lead with this Annapurna acquisition. It was way ahead with ARM integration, and so it's probably doesn't feel the need to validate its competitors. Anyway, one of the premier members of the confidential computing consortium is Google, along with many high profile names, including Aem, Intel, Meta, Red Hat, Microsoft, and others. And we're pleased to welcome two experts on confidential computing from Google to unpack the topic. Nelly Porter is Head of Product for GCP Confidential Computing and Encryption and Dr. Patricia Florissi is the Technical Director for the Office of the CTO at Google Cloud. Welcome Nelly and Patricia, great to have you. >> Great to be here. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> You're very welcome. Nelly, why don't you start and then Patricia, you can weigh in. Just tell the audience a little bit about each of your roles at Google Cloud. >> So I'll start, I'm owning a lot of interesting activities in Google and again, security or infrastructure securities that I usually own. And we are talking about encryption, end-to-end encryption, and confidential computing is a part of portfolio. Additional areas that I contribute to get with my team to Google and our customers is secure software supply chain because you need to trust your software. Is it operate in your confidential environment to have end-to-end security, about if you believe that your software and your environment doing what you expect, it's my role. >> Got it. Okay, Patricia? >> Well, I am a Technical Director in the Office of the CTO, OCTO for short in Google Cloud. And we are a global team, we include former CTOs like myself and senior technologies from large corporations, institutions and a lot of success for startups as well. And we have two main goals, first, we walk side by side with some of our largest, more strategic or most strategical customers and we help them solve complex engineering technical problems. And second, we advice Google and Google Cloud Engineering, product management on emerging trends and technologies to guide the trajectory of our business. We are unique group, I think, because we have created this collaborative culture with our customers. And within OCTO I spend a lot of time collaborating with customers in the industry at large on technologies that can address privacy, security, and sovereignty of data in general. >> Excellent. Thank you for that both of you. Let's get into it. So Nelly, what is confidential computing from Google's perspective? How do you define it? >> Confidential computing is a tool and one of the tools in our toolbox. And confidential computing is a way how we would help our customers to complete this very interesting end-to-end lifecycle of the data. And when customers bring in the data to cloud and want to protect it as they ingest it to the cloud, they protect it at rest when they store data in the cloud. But what was missing for many, many years is ability for us to continue protecting data and workloads of our customers when they run them. And again, because data is not brought to cloud to have huge graveyard, we need to ensure that this data is actually indexed. Again, there is some insights driven and drawn from this data. You have to process this data and confidential computing here to help. Now we have end-to-end protection of our customer's data when they bring the workloads and data to cloud thanks to confidential computing. >> Thank you for that. Okay, we're going to get into the architecture a bit, but before we do Patricia, why do you think this topic of confidential computing is such an important technology? Can you explain? Do you think it's transformative for customers and if so, why? >> Yeah, I would maybe like to use one thought, one way, one intuition behind why confidential computing matters because at the end of the day, it reduces more and more the customer's thrush boundaries and the attack surface. That's about reducing that periphery, the boundary in which the customer needs to mind about trust and safety. And in a way is a natural progression that you're using encryption to secure and protect data in the same way that we are encrypting data in transit and at rest. Now, we are also encrypting data while in the use. And among other beneficials, I would say one of the most transformative ones is that organizations will be able to collaborate with each other and retain the confidentiality of the data. And that is across industry, even though it's highly focused on, I wouldn't say highly focused but very beneficial for highly regulated industries, it applies to all of industries. And if you look at financing for example, where bankers are trying to detect fraud and specifically double finance where a customer is actually trying to get a finance on an asset, let's say a boat or a house, and then it goes to another bank and gets another finance on that asset. Now bankers would be able to collaborate and detect fraud while preserving confidentiality and privacy of the data. >> Interesting and I want to understand that a little bit more but I got to push you a little bit on this, Nellie if I can, because there's a narrative out there that says confidential computing is a marketing ploy I talked about this up front, by cloud providers that are just trying to placate people that are scared of the cloud. And I'm presuming you don't agree with that, but I'd like you to weigh in here. The argument is confidential computing is just memory encryption, it doesn't address many other problems. It is over hyped by cloud providers. What do you say to that line of thinking? >> I absolutely disagree as you can imagine Dave, with this statement. But the most importantly is we mixing a multiple concepts I guess, and exactly as Patricia said, we need to look at the end-to-end story, not again, is a mechanism. How confidential computing trying to execute and protect customer's data and why it's so critically important. Because what confidential computing was able to do, it's in addition to isolate our tenants in multi-tenant environments the cloud offering to offer additional stronger isolation, they called it cryptographic isolation. It's why customers will have more trust to customers and to other customers, the tenants running on the same host but also us because they don't need to worry about against rats and more malicious attempts to penetrate the environment. So what confidential computing is helping us to offer our customers stronger isolation between tenants in this multi-tenant environment, but also incredibly important, stronger isolation of our customers to tenants from us. We also writing code, we also software providers, we also make mistakes or have some zero days. Sometimes again us introduce, sometimes introduced by our adversaries. But what I'm trying to say by creating this cryptographic layer of isolation between us and our tenants and among those tenants, we really providing meaningful security to our customers and eliminate some of the worries that they have running on multi-tenant spaces or even collaborating together with very sensitive data knowing that this particular protection is available to them. >> Okay, thank you. Appreciate that. And I think malicious code is often a threat model missed in these narratives. You know, operator access. Yeah, maybe I trust my cloud's provider, but if I can fence off your access even better, I'll sleep better at night separating a code from the data. Everybody's ARM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia and others, they're all doing it. I wonder if Nell, if we could stay with you and bring up the slide on the architecture. What's architecturally different with confidential computing versus how operating systems and VMs have worked traditionally? We're showing a slide here with some VMs, maybe you could take us through that. >> Absolutely, and Dave, the whole idea for Google and now industry way of dealing with confidential computing is to ensure that three main property is actually preserved. Customers don't need to change the code. They can operate in those VMs exactly as they would with normal non-confidential VMs. But to give them this opportunity of lift and shift though, no changing the apps and performing and having very, very, very low latency and scale as any cloud can, some things that Google actually pioneer in confidential computing. I think we need to open and explain how this magic was actually done, and as I said, it's again the whole entire system have to change to be able to provide this magic. And I would start with we have this concept of root of trust and root of trust where we will ensure that this machine within the whole entire host has integrity guarantee, means nobody changing my code on the most low level of system, and we introduce this in 2017 called Titan. So our specific ASIC, specific inch by inch system on every single motherboard that we have that ensures that your low level former, your actually system code, your kernel, the most powerful system is actually proper configured and not changed, not tempered. We do it for everybody, confidential computing included, but for confidential computing is what we have to change, we bring in AMD or future silicon vendors and we have to trust their former, their way to deal with our confidential environments. And that's why we have obligation to validate intelligent not only our software and our former but also former and software of our vendors, silicon vendors. So we actually, when we booting this machine as you can see, we validate that integrity of all of this system is in place. It means nobody touching, nobody changing, nobody modifying it. But then we have this concept of AMD Secure Processor, it's special ASIC best specific things that generate a key for every single VM that our customers will run or every single node in Kubernetes or every single worker thread in our Hadoop spark capability. We offer all of that and those keys are not available to us. It's the best case ever in encryption space because when we are talking about encryption, the first question that I'm receiving all the time, "Where's the key? Who will have access to the key?" because if you have access to the key then it doesn't matter if you encrypted or not. So, but the case in confidential computing why it's so revolutionary technology, us cloud providers who don't have access to the keys, they're sitting in the hardware and they fed to memory controller. And it means when hypervisors that also know about this wonderful things saying I need to get access to the memories, that this particular VM I'm trying to get access to. They do not decrypt the data, they don't have access to the key because those keys are random, ephemeral and per VM, but most importantly in hardware not exportable. And it means now you will be able to have this very interesting world that customers or cloud providers will not be able to get access to your memory. And what we do, again as you can see, our customers don't need to change their applications. Their VMs are running exactly as it should run. And what you've running in VM, you actually see your memory clear, it's not encrypted. But God forbid is trying somebody to do it outside of my confidential box, no, no, no, no, no, you will now be able to do it. Now, you'll see cyber test and it's exactly what combination of these multiple hardware pieces and software pieces have to do. So OS is also modified and OS is modified such way to provide integrity. It means even OS that you're running in your VM box is not modifiable and you as customer can verify. But the most interesting thing I guess how to ensure the super performance of this environment because you can imagine Dave, that's increasing and it's additional performance, additional time, additional latency. So we're able to mitigate all of that by providing incredibly interesting capability in the OS itself. So our customers will get no changes needed, fantastic performance and scales as they would expect from cloud providers like Google. >> Okay, thank you. Excellent, appreciate that explanation. So you know again, the narrative on this is, well, you've already given me guarantees as a cloud provider that you don't have access to my data, but this gives another level of assurance, key management as they say is key. Now humans aren't managing the keys, the machines are managing them. So Patricia, my question to you is in addition to, let's go pre-confidential computing days, what are the sort of new guarantees that these hardware based technologies are going to provide to customers? >> So if I am a customer, I am saying I now have full guarantee of confidentiality and integrity of the data and of the code. So if you look at code and data confidentiality, the customer cares and they want to know whether their systems are protected from outside or unauthorized access, and that we covered with Nelly that it is. Confidential computing actually ensures that the applications and data antennas remain secret. The code is actually looking at the data, only the memory is decrypting the data with a key that is ephemeral, and per VM, and generated on demand. Then you have the second point where you have code and data integrity and now customers want to know whether their data was corrupted, tempered with or impacted by outside actors. And what confidential computing ensures is that application internals are not tempered with. So the application, the workload as we call it, that is processing the data is also has not been tempered and preserves integrity. I would also say that this is all verifiable, so you have attestation and this attestation actually generates a log trail and the log trail guarantees that provides a proof that it was preserved. And I think that the offers also a guarantee of what we call sealing, this idea that the secrets have been preserved and not tempered with, confidentiality and integrity of code and data. >> Got it. Okay, thank you. Nelly, you mentioned, I think I heard you say that the applications is transparent, you don't have to change the application, it just comes for free essentially. And we showed some various parts of the stack before, I'm curious as to what's affected, but really more importantly, what is specifically Google's value add? How do partners participate in this, the ecosystem or maybe said another way, how does Google ensure the compatibility of confidential computing with existing systems and applications? >> And a fantastic question by the way, and it's very difficult and definitely complicated world because to be able to provide these guarantees, actually a lot of work was done by community. Google is very much operate and open. So again our operating system, we working this operating system repository OS is OS vendors to ensure that all capabilities that we need is part of the kernels are part of the releases and it's available for customers to understand and even explore if they have fun to explore a lot of code. We have also modified together with our silicon vendors kernel, host kernel to support this capability and it means working this community to ensure that all of those pages are there. We also worked with every single silicon vendor as you've seen, and it's what I probably feel that Google contributed quite a bit in this world. We moved our industry, our community, our vendors to understand the value of easy to use confidential computing or removing barriers. And now I don't know if you noticed Intel is following the lead and also announcing a trusted domain extension, very similar architecture and no surprise, it's a lot of work done with our partners to convince work with them and make this capability available. The same with ARM this year, actually last year, ARM announced future design for confidential computing, it's called confidential computing architecture. And it's also influenced very heavily with similar ideas by Google and industry overall. So it's a lot of work in confidential computing consortiums that we are doing, for example, simply to mention, to ensure interop as you mentioned, between different confidential environments of cloud providers. They want to ensure that they can attest to each other because when you're communicating with different environments, you need to trust them. And if it's running on different cloud providers, you need to ensure that you can trust your receiver when you sharing your sensitive data workloads or secret with them. So we coming as a community and we have this at Station Sig, the community-based systems that we want to build, and influence, and work with ARM and every other cloud providers to ensure that they can interop. And it means it doesn't matter where confidential workloads will be hosted, but they can exchange the data in secure, verifiable and controlled by customers really. And to do it, we need to continue what we are doing, working open and contribute with our ideas and ideas of our partners to this role to become what we see confidential computing has to become, it has to become utility. It doesn't need to be so special, but it's what what we've wanted to become. >> Let's talk about, thank you for that explanation. Let's talk about data sovereignty because when you think about data sharing, you think about data sharing across the ecosystem in different regions and then of course data sovereignty comes up, typically public policy, lags, the technology industry and sometimes it's problematic. I know there's a lot of discussions about exceptions but Patricia, we have a graphic on data sovereignty. I'm interested in how confidential computing ensures that data sovereignty and privacy edicts are adhered to, even if they're out of alignment maybe with the pace of technology. One of the frequent examples is when you delete data, can you actually prove the data is deleted with a hundred percent certainty, you got to prove that and a lot of other issues. So looking at this slide, maybe you could take us through your thinking on data sovereignty. >> Perfect. So for us, data sovereignty is only one of the three pillars of digital sovereignty. And I don't want to give the impression that confidential computing addresses it at all, that's why we want to step back and say, hey, digital sovereignty includes data sovereignty where we are giving you full control and ownership of the location, encryption and access to your data. Operational sovereignty where the goal is to give our Google Cloud customers full visibility and control over the provider operations, right? So if there are any updates on hardware, software stack, any operations, there is full transparency, full visibility. And then the third pillar is around software sovereignty, where the customer wants to ensure that they can run their workloads without dependency on the provider's software. So they have sometimes is often referred as survivability that you can actually survive if you are untethered to the cloud and that you can use open source. Now, let's take a deep dive on data sovereignty, which by the way is one of my favorite topics. And we typically focus on saying, hey, we need to care about data residency. We care where the data resides because where the data is at rest or in processing need to typically abides to the jurisdiction, the regulations of the jurisdiction where the data resides. And others say, hey, let's focus on data protection, we want to ensure the confidentiality, and integrity, and availability of the data, which confidential computing is at the heart of that data protection. But it is yet another element that people typically don't talk about when talking about data sovereignty, which is the element of user control. And here Dave, is about what happens to the data when I give you access to my data, and this reminds me of security two decades ago, even a decade ago, where we started the security movement by putting firewall protections and logging accesses. But once you were in, you were able to do everything you wanted with the data. An insider had access to all the infrastructure, the data, and the code. And that's similar because with data sovereignty, we care about whether it resides, who is operating on the data, but the moment that the data is being processed, I need to trust that the processing of the data we abide by user's control, by the policies that I put in place of how my data is going to be used. And if you look at a lot of the regulation today and a lot of the initiatives around the International Data Space Association, IDSA and Gaia-X, there is a movement of saying the two parties, the provider of the data and the receiver of the data going to agree on a contract that describes what my data can be used for. The challenge is to ensure that once the data crosses boundaries, that the data will be used for the purposes that it was intended and specified in the contract. And if you actually bring together, and this is the exciting part, confidential computing together with policy enforcement. Now, the policy enforcement can guarantee that the data is only processed within the confines of a confidential computing environment, that the workload is in cryptographically verified that there is the workload that was meant to process the data and that the data will be only used when abiding to the confidentiality and integrity safety of the confidential computing environment. And that's why we believe confidential computing is one necessary and essential technology that will allow us to ensure data sovereignty, especially when it comes to user's control. >> Thank you for that. I mean it was a deep dive, I mean brief, but really detailed. So I appreciate that, especially the verification of the enforcement. Last question, I met you two because as part of my year-end prediction post, you guys sent in some predictions and I wasn't able to get to them in the predictions post, so I'm thrilled that you were able to make the time to come on the program. How widespread do you think the adoption of confidential computing will be in '23 and what's the maturity curve look like this decade in your opinion? Maybe each of you could give us a brief answer. >> So my prediction in five, seven years as I started, it will become utility, it will become TLS. As of freakin' 10 years ago, we couldn't believe that websites will have certificates and we will support encrypted traffic. Now we do, and it's become ubiquity. It's exactly where our confidential computing is heeding and heading, I don't know we deserve yet. It'll take a few years of maturity for us, but we'll do that. >> Thank you. And Patricia, what's your prediction? >> I would double that and say, hey, in the very near future, you will not be able to afford not having it. I believe as digital sovereignty becomes ever more top of mind with sovereign states and also for multinational organizations, and for organizations that want to collaborate with each other, confidential computing will become the norm, it will become the default, if I say mode of operation. I like to compare that today is inconceivable if we talk to the young technologists, it's inconceivable to think that at some point in history and I happen to be alive, that we had data at rest that was non-encrypted, data in transit that was not encrypted. And I think that we'll be inconceivable at some point in the near future that to have unencrypted data while we use. >> You know, and plus I think the beauty of the this industry is because there's so much competition, this essentially comes for free. I want to thank you both for spending some time on Breaking Analysis, there's so much more we could cover. I hope you'll come back to share the progress that you're making in this area and we can double click on some of these topics. Really appreciate your time. >> Anytime. >> Thank you so much, yeah. >> In summary, while confidential computing is being touted by the cloud players as a promising technology for enhancing data privacy and security, there are also those as we said, who remain skeptical. The truth probably lies somewhere in between and it will depend on the specific implementation and the use case as to how effective confidential computing will be. Look as with any new tech, it's important to carefully evaluate the potential benefits, the drawbacks, and make informed decisions based on the specific requirements in the situation and the constraints of each individual customer. But the bottom line is silicon manufacturers are working with cloud providers and other system companies to include confidential computing into their architectures. Competition in our view will moderate price hikes and at the end of the day, this is under-the-covers technology that essentially will come for free, so we'll take it. I want to thank our guests today, Nelly and Patricia from Google. And thanks to Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Ken Schiffman as well out of our Boston studio. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters, and Rob Hoof is our editor-in-chief over at siliconangle.com, does some great editing for us. Thank you all. Remember all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com where you can get all the news. If you want to get in touch, you can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me at D Vellante, and you can also comment on my LinkedIn post. Definitely you want to check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. I know we didn't hit on a lot today, but there's some amazing data and it's always being updated, so check that out. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (subtle music)

>>From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and E T R. This is breaking analysis with Dave Valante. >>Making technology predictions in 2022 was tricky business, especially if you were projecting the performance of markets or identifying I P O prospects and making binary forecast on data AI and the macro spending climate and other related topics in enterprise tech 2022, of course was characterized by a seesaw economy where central banks were restructuring their balance sheets. The war on Ukraine fueled inflation supply chains were a mess. And the unintended consequences of of forced march to digital and the acceleration still being sorted out. Hello and welcome to this week's weekly on Cube Insights powered by E T R. In this breaking analysis, we continue our annual tradition of transparently grading last year's enterprise tech predictions. And you may or may not agree with our self grading system, but look, we're gonna give you the data and you can draw your own conclusions and tell you what, tell us what you think. >>All right, let's get right to it. So our first prediction was tech spending increases by 8% in 2022. And as we exited 2021 CIOs, they were optimistic about their digital transformation plans. You know, they rushed to make changes to their business and were eager to sharpen their focus and continue to iterate on their digital business models and plug the holes that they, the, in the learnings that they had. And so we predicted that 8% rise in enterprise tech spending, which looked pretty good until Ukraine and the Fed decided that, you know, had to rush and make up for lost time. We kind of nailed the momentum in the energy sector, but we can't give ourselves too much credit for that layup. And as of October, Gartner had it spending growing at just over 5%. I think it was 5.1%. So we're gonna take a C plus on this one and, and move on. >>Our next prediction was basically kind of a slow ground ball. The second base, if I have to be honest, but we felt it was important to highlight that security would remain front and center as the number one priority for organizations in 2022. As is our tradition, you know, we try to up the degree of difficulty by specifically identifying companies that are gonna benefit from these trends. So we highlighted some possible I P O candidates, which of course didn't pan out. S NQ was on our radar. The company had just had to do another raise and they recently took a valuation hit and it was a down round. They raised 196 million. So good chunk of cash, but, but not the i p O that we had predicted Aqua Securities focus on containers and cloud native. That was a trendy call and we thought maybe an M SS P or multiple managed security service providers like Arctic Wolf would I p o, but no way that was happening in the crummy market. >>Nonetheless, we think these types of companies, they're still faring well as the talent shortage in security remains really acute, particularly in the sort of mid-size and small businesses that often don't have a sock Lacework laid off 20% of its workforce in 2022. And CO C e o Dave Hatfield left the company. So that I p o didn't, didn't happen. It was probably too early for Lacework. Anyway, meanwhile you got Netscope, which we've cited as strong in the E T R data as particularly in the emerging technology survey. And then, you know, I lumia holding its own, you know, we never liked that 7 billion price tag that Okta paid for auth zero, but we loved the TAM expansion strategy to target developers beyond sort of Okta's enterprise strength. But we gotta take some points off of the failure thus far of, of Okta to really nail the integration and the go to market model with azero and build, you know, bring that into the, the, the core Okta. >>So the focus on endpoint security that was a winner in 2022 is CrowdStrike led that charge with others holding their own, not the least of which was Palo Alto Networks as it continued to expand beyond its core network security and firewall business, you know, through acquisition. So overall we're gonna give ourselves an A minus for this relatively easy call, but again, we had some specifics associated with it to make it a little tougher. And of course we're watching ve very closely this this coming year in 2023. The vendor consolidation trend. You know, according to a recent Palo Alto network survey with 1300 SecOps pros on average organizations have more than 30 tools to manage security tools. So this is a logical way to optimize cost consolidating vendors and consolidating redundant vendors. The E T R data shows that's clearly a trend that's on the upswing. >>Now moving on, a big theme of 2020 and 2021 of course was remote work and hybrid work and new ways to work and return to work. So we predicted in 2022 that hybrid work models would become the dominant protocol, which clearly is the case. We predicted that about 33% of the workforce would come back to the office in 2022 in September. The E T R data showed that figure was at 29%, but organizations expected that 32% would be in the office, you know, pretty much full-time by year end. That hasn't quite happened, but we were pretty close with the projection, so we're gonna take an A minus on this one. Now, supply chain disruption was another big theme that we felt would carry through 2022. And sure that sounds like another easy one, but as is our tradition, again we try to put some binary metrics around our predictions to put some meat in the bone, so to speak, and and allow us than you to say, okay, did it come true or not? >>So we had some data that we presented last year and supply chain issues impacting hardware spend. We said at the time, you can see this on the left hand side of this chart, the PC laptop demand would remain above pre covid levels, which would reverse a decade of year on year declines, which I think started in around 2011, 2012. Now, while demand is down this year pretty substantially relative to 2021, I D C has worldwide unit shipments for PCs at just over 300 million for 22. If you go back to 2019 and you're looking at around let's say 260 million units shipped globally, you know, roughly, so, you know, pretty good call there. Definitely much higher than pre covid levels. But so what you might be asking why the B, well, we projected that 30% of customers would replace security appliances with cloud-based services and that more than a third would replace their internal data center server and storage hardware with cloud services like 30 and 40% respectively. >>And we don't have explicit survey data on exactly these metrics, but anecdotally we see this happening in earnest. And we do have some data that we're showing here on cloud adoption from ET R'S October survey where the midpoint of workloads running in the cloud is around 34% and forecast, as you can see, to grow steadily over the next three years. So this, well look, this is not, we understand it's not a one-to-one correlation with our prediction, but it's a pretty good bet that we were right, but we gotta take some points off, we think for the lack of unequivocal proof. Cause again, we always strive to make our predictions in ways that can be measured as accurate or not. Is it binary? Did it happen, did it not? Kind of like an O K R and you know, we strive to provide data as proof and in this case it's a bit fuzzy. >>We have to admit that although we're pretty comfortable that the prediction was accurate. And look, when you make an hard forecast, sometimes you gotta pay the price. All right, next, we said in 2022 that the big four cloud players would generate 167 billion in IS and PaaS revenue combining for 38% market growth. And our current forecasts are shown here with a comparison to our January, 2022 figures. So coming into this year now where we are today, so currently we expect 162 billion in total revenue and a 33% growth rate. Still very healthy, but not on our mark. So we think a w s is gonna miss our predictions by about a billion dollars, not, you know, not bad for an 80 billion company. So they're not gonna hit that expectation though of getting really close to a hundred billion run rate. We thought they'd exit the year, you know, closer to, you know, 25 billion a quarter and we don't think they're gonna get there. >>Look, we pretty much nailed Azure even though our prediction W was was correct about g Google Cloud platform surpassing Alibaba, Alibaba, we way overestimated the performance of both of those companies. So we're gonna give ourselves a C plus here and we think, yeah, you might think it's a little bit harsh, we could argue for a B minus to the professor, but the misses on GCP and Alibaba we think warrant a a self penalty on this one. All right, let's move on to our prediction about Supercloud. We said it becomes a thing in 2022 and we think by many accounts it has, despite the naysayers, we're seeing clear evidence that the concept of a layer of value add that sits above and across clouds is taking shape. And on this slide we showed just some of the pickup in the industry. I mean one of the most interesting is CloudFlare, the biggest supercloud antagonist. >>Charles Fitzgerald even predicted that no vendor would ever use the term in their marketing. And that would be proof if that happened that Supercloud was a thing and he said it would never happen. Well CloudFlare has, and they launched their version of Supercloud at their developer week. Chris Miller of the register put out a Supercloud block diagram, something else that Charles Fitzgerald was, it was was pushing us for, which is rightly so, it was a good call on his part. And Chris Miller actually came up with one that's pretty good at David Linthicum also has produced a a a A block diagram, kind of similar, David uses the term metacloud and he uses the term supercloud kind of interchangeably to describe that trend. And so we we're aligned on that front. Brian Gracely has covered the concept on the popular cloud podcast. Berkeley launched the Sky computing initiative. >>You read through that white paper and many of the concepts highlighted in the Supercloud 3.0 community developed definition align with that. Walmart launched a platform with many of the supercloud salient attributes. So did Goldman Sachs, so did Capital One, so did nasdaq. So you know, sorry you can hate the term, but very clearly the evidence is gathering for the super cloud storm. We're gonna take an a plus on this one. Sorry, haters. Alright, let's talk about data mesh in our 21 predictions posts. We said that in the 2020s, 75% of large organizations are gonna re-architect their big data platforms. So kind of a decade long prediction. We don't like to do that always, but sometimes it's warranted. And because it was a longer term prediction, we, at the time in, in coming into 22 when we were evaluating our 21 predictions, we took a grade of incomplete because the sort of decade long or majority of the decade better part of the decade prediction. >>So last year, earlier this year, we said our number seven prediction was data mesh gains momentum in 22. But it's largely confined and narrow data problems with limited scope as you can see here with some of the key bullets. So there's a lot of discussion in the data community about data mesh and while there are an increasing number of examples, JP Morgan Chase, Intuit, H S P C, HelloFresh, and others that are completely rearchitecting parts of their data platform completely rearchitecting entire data platforms is non-trivial. There are organizational challenges, there're data, data ownership, debates, technical considerations, and in particular two of the four fundamental data mesh principles that the, the need for a self-service infrastructure and federated computational governance are challenging. Look, democratizing data and facilitating data sharing creates conflicts with regulatory requirements around data privacy. As such many organizations are being really selective with their data mesh implementations and hence our prediction of narrowing the scope of data mesh initiatives. >>I think that was right on J P M C is a good example of this, where you got a single group within a, within a division narrowly implementing the data mesh architecture. They're using a w s, they're using data lakes, they're using Amazon Glue, creating a catalog and a variety of other techniques to meet their objectives. They kind of automating data quality and it was pretty well thought out and interesting approach and I think it's gonna be made easier by some of the announcements that Amazon made at the recent, you know, reinvent, particularly trying to eliminate ET t l, better connections between Aurora and Redshift and, and, and better data sharing the data clean room. So a lot of that is gonna help. Of course, snowflake has been on this for a while now. Many other companies are facing, you know, limitations as we said here and this slide with their Hadoop data platforms. They need to do new, some new thinking around that to scale. HelloFresh is a really good example of this. Look, the bottom line is that organizations want to get more value from data and having a centralized, highly specialized teams that own the data problem, it's been a barrier and a blocker to success. The data mesh starts with organizational considerations as described in great detail by Ash Nair of Warner Brothers. So take a listen to this clip. >>Yeah, so when people think of Warner Brothers, you always think of like the movie studio, but we're more than that, right? I mean, you think of H B O, you think of t n t, you think of C N N. We have 30 plus brands in our portfolio and each have their own needs. So the, the idea of a data mesh really helps us because what we can do is we can federate access across the company so that, you know, CNN can work at their own pace. You know, when there's election season, they can ingest their own data and they don't have to, you know, bump up against, as an example, HBO if Game of Thrones is going on. >>So it's often the case that data mesh is in the eyes of the implementer. And while a company's implementation may not strictly adhere to Jamma Dani's vision of data mesh, and that's okay, the goal is to use data more effectively. And despite Gartner's attempts to deposition data mesh in favor of the somewhat confusing or frankly far more confusing data fabric concept that they stole from NetApp data mesh is taking hold in organizations globally today. So we're gonna take a B on this one. The prediction is shaping up the way we envision, but as we previously reported, it's gonna take some time. The better part of a decade in our view, new standards have to emerge to make this vision become reality and they'll come in the form of both open and de facto approaches. Okay, our eighth prediction last year focused on the face off between Snowflake and Databricks. >>And we realized this popular topic, and maybe one that's getting a little overplayed, but these are two companies that initially, you know, looked like they were shaping up as partners and they, by the way, they are still partnering in the field. But you go back a couple years ago, the idea of using an AW w s infrastructure, Databricks machine intelligence and applying that on top of Snowflake as a facile data warehouse, still very viable. But both of these companies, they have much larger ambitions. They got big total available markets to chase and large valuations that they have to justify. So what's happening is, as we've previously reported, each of these companies is moving toward the other firm's core domain and they're building out an ecosystem that'll be critical for their future. So as part of that effort, we said each is gonna become aggressive investors and maybe start doing some m and a and they have in various companies. >>And on this chart that we produced last year, we studied some of the companies that were targets and we've added some recent investments of both Snowflake and Databricks. As you can see, they've both, for example, invested in elation snowflake's, put money into Lacework, the Secur security firm, ThoughtSpot, which is trying to democratize data with ai. Collibra is a governance platform and you can see Databricks investments in data transformation with D B T labs, Matillion doing simplified business intelligence hunters. So that's, you know, they're security investment and so forth. So other than our thought that we'd see Databricks I p o last year, this prediction been pretty spot on. So we'll give ourselves an A on that one. Now observability has been a hot topic and we've been covering it for a while with our friends at E T R, particularly Eric Bradley. Our number nine prediction last year was basically that if you're not cloud native and observability, you are gonna be in big trouble. >>So everything guys gotta go cloud native. And that's clearly been the case. Splunk, the big player in the space has been transitioning to the cloud, hasn't always been pretty, as we reported, Datadog real momentum, the elk stack, that's open source model. You got new entrants that we've cited before, like observe, honeycomb, chaos search and others that we've, we've reported on, they're all born in the cloud. So we're gonna take another a on this one, admittedly, yeah, it's a re reasonably easy call, but you gotta have a few of those in the mix. Okay, our last prediction, our number 10 was around events. Something the cube knows a little bit about. We said that a new category of events would emerge as hybrid and that for the most part is happened. So that's gonna be the mainstay is what we said. That pure play virtual events are gonna give way to hi hybrid. >>And the narrative is that virtual only events are, you know, they're good for quick hits, but lousy replacements for in-person events. And you know that said, organizations of all shapes and sizes, they learn how to create better virtual content and support remote audiences during the pandemic. So when we set at pure play is gonna give way to hybrid, we said we, we i we implied or specific or specified that the physical event that v i p experience is going defined. That overall experience and those v i p events would create a little fomo, fear of, of missing out in a virtual component would overlay that serves an audience 10 x the size of the physical. We saw that really two really good examples. Red Hat Summit in Boston, small event, couple thousand people served tens of thousands, you know, online. Second was Google Cloud next v i p event in, in New York City. >>Everything else was, was, was, was virtual. You know, even examples of our prediction of metaverse like immersion have popped up and, and and, and you know, other companies are doing roadshow as we predicted like a lot of companies are doing it. You're seeing that as a major trend where organizations are going with their sales teams out into the regions and doing a little belly to belly action as opposed to the big giant event. That's a definitely a, a trend that we're seeing. So in reviewing this prediction, the grade we gave ourselves is, you know, maybe a bit unfair, it should be, you could argue for a higher grade, but the, but the organization still haven't figured it out. They have hybrid experiences but they generally do a really poor job of leveraging the afterglow and of event of an event. It still tends to be one and done, let's move on to the next event or the next city. >>Let the sales team pick up the pieces if they were paying attention. So because of that, we're only taking a B plus on this one. Okay, so that's the review of last year's predictions. You know, overall if you average out our grade on the 10 predictions that come out to a b plus, I dunno why we can't seem to get that elusive a, but we're gonna keep trying our friends at E T R and we are starting to look at the data for 2023 from the surveys and all the work that we've done on the cube and our, our analysis and we're gonna put together our predictions. We've had literally hundreds of inbounds from PR pros pitching us. We've got this huge thick folder that we've started to review with our yellow highlighter. And our plan is to review it this month, take a look at all the data, get some ideas from the inbounds and then the e t R of January surveys in the field. >>It's probably got a little over a thousand responses right now. You know, they'll get up to, you know, 1400 or so. And once we've digested all that, we're gonna go back and publish our predictions for 2023 sometime in January. So stay tuned for that. All right, we're gonna leave it there for today. You wanna thank Alex Myerson who's on production and he manages the podcast, Ken Schiffman as well out of our, our Boston studio. I gotta really heartfelt thank you to Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight and their team. They helped get the word out on social and in our newsletters. Rob Ho is our editor in chief over at Silicon Angle who does some great editing for us. Thank you all. Remember all these podcasts are available or all these episodes are available is podcasts. Wherever you listen, just all you do Search Breaking analysis podcast, really getting some great traction there. Appreciate you guys subscribing. I published each week on wikibon.com, silicon angle.com or you can email me directly at david dot valante silicon angle.com or dm me Dante, or you can comment on my LinkedIn post. And please check out ETR AI for the very best survey data in the enterprise tech business. Some awesome stuff in there. This is Dante for the Cube Insights powered by etr. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis.

>>Hello, brilliant humans and welcome back to Las Vegas, Nevada, where we are live from the AWS Reinvent Show floor here with the cube. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined with Dave Valante, and we have a very exciting conversation with you. Two, two companies you may have heard of. We've got AWS and Red Hat in the house. Manu and Joel, thank you so much for being here. Love this little fist bump. Started off, that's right. Before we even got rolling, Manu, you said that you wanted this to be the best segment of, of the cubes airing. We we're doing over a hundred segments, so you're gonna have to bring the heat. >>We're ready. We're did go. Are we ready? Yeah, go. We're ready. Let's bring it on. >>We're ready. All right. I'm, I'm ready. Dave's ready. Let's do it. How's the show going for you guys real quick before we dig in? >>Yeah, I think after Covid, it's really nice to see that we're back into the 2019 level and, you know, people just want to get out, meet people, have that human touch with each other, and I think a lot of trust gets built as a functional that, so it's super amazing to see our partners and customers here at Reedman. Yeah, >>And you've got a few in the house. That's true. Just a few maybe, maybe a couple >>Very few shows can say that, by the way. Yeah, it's maybe a handful. >>I think one of the things we were saying, it's almost like the entire Silicon Valley descended in the expo hall area, so >>Yeah, it's >>For a few different reasons. There's a few different silicon defined. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't have strong on for you. So far >>It's, it's, it is amazing. It's the 10th year, right? It's decade, I think I've been to five and it's, it grows every single year. It's the, you have to be here. It's as simple as that. And customers from every single industry are here too. You don't get, a lot of shows have every single industry and almost every single location around the globe. So it's, it's a must, must be >>Here. Well, and the personas evolved, right? I was at reinvent number two. That was my first, and it was all developers, not all, but a lot of developers. And today it's a business mix, really is >>Totally, is a business mix. And I just, I've talked about it a little bit down the show, but the diversity on the show floor, it's the first time I've had to wait in line for the ladies' room at a tech conference. Almost a two decade career. It is, yeah. And it was really refreshing. I'm so impressed. So clearly there's a commitment to community, but also a commitment to diversity. Yeah. And, and it's brilliant to see on the show floor. This is a partnership that is robust and has been around for a little while. Money. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the partnership here? >>Yes. So Red Hand and AWS are best friends, you know, forever together. >>Aw, no wonder we got the fist bumps and all the good vibes coming out. I know, it's great. I love that >>We have a decade of working together. I think the relationship in the first phase was around running rail bundled with E two. Sure. We have about 70,000 customers that are running rail, which are running mission critical workloads such as sap, Oracle databases, bespoke applications across the state of verticals. Now, as more and more enterprise customers are finally, you know, endorsing and adopting public cloud, I think that business is just gonna continue to grow. So a, a lot of progress there. The second titration has been around, you know, developers tearing Red Hat and aws, Hey, listen, we wanna, it's getting competitive. We wanna deliver new features faster, quicker, we want scale and we want resilience. So just entire push towards devs containers. So that's the second chapter with, you know, red Hat OpenShift on aws, which launched as a, a joint manage service in 2021 last year. And I think the third phase, which you're super excited about, is just bringing the ease of consumption, one click deployment, and then having our customers, you know, benefit from the joint committed spend programs together. So, you know, making sure that re and Ansible and JBoss, the entire portfolio of Red Hat products are available on AWS marketplace. So that's the 1, 2, 3, it of our relationship. It's a decade of working together and, you know, best friends are super committed to making sure our customers and partners continue successful. >>Yeah, that he said it, he said it perfectly. 2008, I know you don't like that, but we started with Rel on demand just in 2008 before E two even had a console. So the partnership has been there, like Manu says, for a long time, we got the partnership, we got the products up there now, and we just gotta finalize that, go to market and get that gas on the fire. >>Yeah. So Graviton Outpost, local zones, you lead it into all the new stuff. So that portends, I mean, 2008, we're talking two years after the launch of s3. >>That's right. >>Right. So, and now look, so is this a harbinger of things to come with these new innovations? >>Yeah, I, I would say, you know, the innovation is a key tenant of our partnership, our relationship. So if you look at from a product standpoint, red Hat or Rel was one of the first platforms that made a support for graviton, which is basically 40% better price performance than any other distribution. Then that translated into making sure that Rel is available on all of our regions globally. So this year we launched Switzerland, Spain, India, and Red Hat was available on launch there, support for Nitro support for Outpost Rosa support on Outpost as well. So I think that relationship, that innovation on the product side, that's pretty visible. I think that innovation again then translates into what we are doing on marketplace with one click deployments we spoke about. I think the third aspect of the know innovation is around making sure that we are making our partners and our customers successful. So one of the things that we've done so far is Joe leads a, you know, a black belt team that really goes into each customer opportunity, making sure how can we help you be successful. We launched and you know, we should be able to share that on a link. After this, we launched like a big playlist, which talks about every single use case on how do you get successful and running OpenShift on aws. So that innovation on behalf of our customers partners to make them successful, that's been a key tenant for us together as >>Well. That's right. And that team that Manu is talking about, we're gonna, gonna 10 x that team this year going into January. Our fiscal yield starts in January. Love that. So yeah, we're gonna have a lot of no hiring freeze over here. Nope. No ma'am. No. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And you know what I love about working with aws and, and, and Manu just said it very, all of that's customer driven. Every single event that we, that he just talked about in that timeline, it's customer driven, right? Customers wanted rail on demand, customers want JBoss up in the cloud, Ansible this week, you know, everything's up there now. So it's just getting that go to market tight and we're gonna, we're gonna get that done. >>So what's the algorithm for customer driven in terms of taking the input? Because if every customers saying, Hey, I this a >>Really similar >>Question right up, right? I, that's what I want. And if you know, 95% of the customers say it, Jay, maybe that's a good idea. >>Yeah, that's right. Trends. But >>Yeah. You know, 30% you might be like, mm, you know, 20%, you know, how do you guys decide when to put gas on the fire? >>No, that, I think, as I mentioned, there are about 70,000 large customers that are running rail on Easy Two, many of these customers are informing our product strategy. So we have, you know, close to about couple of thousand power users. We have customer advisory booths, and these are the, you know, customers are informing us, Hey, let's get all of the Red Hat portfolio and marketplace support for graviton, support for Outpost. Why don't we, why are we not able to dip into the consumption committed spend programs for both Red Hat and aws? That's right. So it's these power users both at the developer level as well as the guys who are actually doing large commercial consumption. They are the ones who are informing the roadmap for both Red Hat and aws. >>But do, do you codify the the feedback? >>Yeah, I'm like, I wanna see the database, >>The, I think it was, I don't know, it was maybe Chasy, maybe it was Besos, that that data beats intuition. So do you take that information and somehow, I mean, it's global, 70,000 customers, right? And they have different weights, different spending patterns, different levels of maturity. Yeah. Do you, how do you codify that and then ultimately make the decision? Yeah, I >>If, I mean, well you, you've got the strategic advisory boards, which are made up of customers and partners and you know, you get, you get a good, you gotta get a good slice of your customer base to get, and you gotta take their feedback and you gotta do something with it, right? That's the, that's the way we do it and codify it at the product level, I'm sure open source. That's, that's basically how we work at the product level, right? The most elegant solution in open source wins. And that's, that's pretty much how we do that at the, >>I would just add, I think it's also just the implicit trust that the two companies had built with each other, working in the trenches, making our customers and partners successful over the last decade. And Alex, give an example. So that manifests itself in context of like, you know, Amazon and Red Hat just published the entire roadmap for OpenShift. What are the new features that are becoming over the next six to nine to 12 months? It's open source available on GitHub. Customers can see, and then they can basically come back and give feedback like, Hey, you know, we want hip compliance. We just launched. That was a big request that was coming from our >>Customers. That is not any process >>Also for Graviton or Nvidia instances. So I I I think it's a, >>Here's the thing, the reason I'm pounding on this is because you guys have a pretty high hit rate, and I think as a >>Customer, mildly successful company >>As, as a customer advocate, the better, you know, if, if you guys make bets that pay off, it's gonna pay off for customers. Right. And because there's a lot of failures in it. Yeah. I mean, let's face it. That's >>Right. And I think, I think you said the key word bets. You place a lot of small bets. Do you have the, the innovation engine to do that? AWS is the perfect place to place those small bets. And then you, you know, pour gas on the fire when, when they take off. >>Yeah, it's a good point. I mean, it's not expensive to experiment. Yeah. >>Especially in the managed service world. Right? >>And I know you love taking things to market and you're a go to market guy. Let's talk gtm, what's got your snow pumped about GTM for 2023? >>We, we are gonna, you know, 10 x the teams that's gonna be focused on these products, right? So we're gonna also come out with a hybrid committed spend program for our customers that meet them where they want to go. So they're coming outta the data center going into a cloud. We're gonna have a nice financial model for them to do that. And that's gonna take a lot of the friction out. >>Yeah. I mean, you've nailed it. I, I think the, the fact that now entire Red Hat portfolio is available on marketplace, you can do it on one click deployment. It's deeply integrated with Amazon services and the most important part that Joel was making now customers can double dip. They can drive benefit from the consumption committed spend programs, both from Red Hat and from aws, which is amazing. Which is a game changer That's right. For many of our large >>Customers. That's right. And that, so we're gonna, we're gonna really go to town on that next year. That's, and all the, all the resources that I have, which are the technology sellers and the sas, you know, the engineers we're growing this team the most out that team. So it's, >>When you say 10 x, how many are you at now? I'm >>Curious to see where you're headed. Tell you, okay. There's not right? Oh no, there's not one. It's triple digit. Yeah, yeah. >>Today. Oh, sweet. Awesome. >>So, and it's a very sizable team. They're actually making sure that each of our customers are successful and then really making sure that, you know, no customer left behind policy. >>And it's a great point that customers love when Amazonians and Red Hats show up, they love it and it's, they want to get more of it, and we're gonna, we're gonna give it to 'em. >>Must feel great to be loved like that. >>Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. I would say yes. >>Seems like it's safe to say that there's another decade of partnership between your two companies. >>Hope so. That's right. That's the plan. >>Yeah. And I would say also, you know, just the IBM coming into the mix here. Yeah. I, you know, red Hat has informed the way we have turned around our partnership with ibm, essentially we, we signed the strategic collaboration agreement with the company. All of IBM software now runs on Rosa. So that is now also providing a lot of tailwinds both to our rail customers and as well as Rosa customers. And I think it's a very net creative, very positive for our partnership. >>That's right. It's been very positive. Yep. Yeah. >>You see the >>Billboards positive. Yeah, right. Also that, that's great. Great point, Dave. Yep. We have a, we have a new challenge, a new tradition on the cube here at Reinvent where we're, well, it's actually kind of a glamor moment for you, depending on how you leverage it. We're looking for your 32nd hot take your Instagram reel, your sizzle thought leadership, biggest takeaway, most important theme from this year's show. I know you want, right, Joel? I mean, you TM boy, I feel like you can spit the time. >>Yeah. It is all about Rosa for us. It is all in on that, that's the native OpenShift offering on aws and that's, that's the soundbite we're going go to town with. Now, I don't wanna forget all the other products that are in there, but Rosa is a, is a very key push for us this year. >>Fantastic. All right. Manu. >>I think our customers, it's getting super competitive. Our customers want to innovate just a >>Little bit. >>The enterprise customers see the cloud native companies. I wanna do what these guys are doing. I wanna develop features at a fast clip. I wanna scale, I wanna be resilient. And I think that's really the spirit that's coming out. So to Joel's point, you know, move to worlds containers, serverless, DevOps, which was like, you know, aha, something that's happening on the side of an enterprise is not becoming mainstream. The business is demanding it. The, it is becoming the centerpiece in the business strategy. So that's been really like the aha. Big thing that's happening here. >>Yeah. And those architectures are coming together, aren't they? That's correct. Right. You know, VMs and containers, it used to be one architecture and then at the other end of the spectrum is serverless. People thought of those as different things and now it's a single architecture and, and it's kind of right approach for the right job. >>And, and a compliments say to Red Hat, they do an incredible job of hiding that complexity. Yeah. Yes. And making sure that, you know, for example, just like, make it easier for the developers to create value and then, and you know, >>Yeah, that's right. Those, they were previously siloed architectures and >>That's right. OpenShift wanna be place where you wanna run containers or virtual machines. We want that to be this Yeah. Single place. Not, not go bolt on another piece of architecture to just do one or the other. Yeah. >>And hey, the hybrid cloud vision is working for ibm. No question. You know, and it's achievable. Yeah. I mean, I just, I've said unlike, you know, some of the previous, you know, visions on fixing the world with ai, hybrid cloud is actually a real problem that you're attacking and it's showing the results. Agreed. Oh yeah. >>Great. Alright. Last question for you guys. Cause it might be kind of fun, 10 years from now, oh, we're at another, we're sitting here, we all look the same. Time has passed, but we are not aging, which is a part of the new technology that's come out in skincare. That's my, I'm just throwing that out there. Why not? What do you guys hope that you can say about the partnership and, and your continued commitment to community? >>Oh, that's a good question. You go first this time. Yeah. >>I think, you know, the, you know, for looking into the future, you need to look into the past. And Amazon has always been driven by working back from our customers. That's like our key tenant, principle number 1 0 1. >>Couple people have said that on this stage this week. Yeah. >>Yeah. And I think our partnership, I hope over the next decade continues to keep that tenant as a centerpiece. And then whatever comes out of that, I think we, we are gonna be, you know, working through that. >>Yeah. I, I would say this, I think you said that, well, the customer innovation is gonna lead us to wherever that is. And it's, it's, it's gonna be in the cloud for sure. I think we can say that in 10 years. But yeah, anything from, from AI to the quant quantum computing that IBM's really pushing behind that, you know, those are, those are gonna be things that hopefully we show up on a, on a partnership with Manu in 10 years, maybe sooner. >>Well, whatever happens next, we'll certainly be covering it here on the cube. That's right. Thank you both for being here. Joel Manu, fantastic interview. Thanks to see you guys. Yeah, good to see you brought the energy. I think you're definitely ranking high on the top interviews. We >>Love that for >>The day. >>Thank >>My pleasure >>Job, guys. Now that you're competitive at all, and thank you all for tuning in to our live coverage here from AWS Reinvent in Las Vegas, Nevada, with Dave Valante. I'm Savannah Peterson. You're watching The Cube, the leading source for high tech coverage.

>>Set restaurants. And who says TEUs had got a little ass more skin in the game for us, in charge of his destiny? You guys are excited. Robert Worship is Chief Alumni. >>My name is Dave Ante, and I'm a long time industry analyst. So when you're as old as I am, you've seen a lot of transitions. Everybody talks about industry cycles and waves. I've seen many, many waves. Met a lot of industry executives and of a little bit of a, an industry historian. When you interview many thousands of people, probably five or 6,000 people as I have over the last half of a decade, you get to interact with a lot of people's knowledge and you begin to develop patterns. And so that's sort of what I bring is, is an ability to catalyze the conversation and, you know, share that knowledge with others in the community. Our philosophy is everybody's expert at something. Everybody's passionate about something and has real deep knowledge about that's something well, we wanna focus in on that area and extract that knowledge and share it with our communities. This is Dave Ante. Thanks for watching the Cube. >>Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cube where we are streaming live this week from CubeCon. I am Savannah Peterson and I am joined by an absolutely stellar lineup of cube brilliance this afternoon. To my left, a familiar face, Lisa Martin. Lisa, how you feeling? End of day two. >>Excellent. It was so much fun today. The buzz started yesterday, the momentum, the swell, and we only heard even more greatness today. >>Yeah, yeah, abs, absolutely. You know, I, I sometimes think we've hit an energy cliff, but it feels like the energy is just >>Continuous. Well, I think we're gonna, we're gonna slide right into tomorrow. >>Yeah, me too. I love it. And we've got two fantastic analysts with us today, Sarge and Keith. Thank you both for joining us. We feel so lucky today. >>Great being back on. >>Thanks for having us. Yeah, Yeah. It's nice to have you back on the show. We were, had you yesterday, but I miss hosting with you. It's been a while. >>It has been a while. We haven't done anything in since, Since pre >>Pandemic, right? Yeah, I think you're >>Right. Four times there >>Be four times back in the day. >>We, I always enjoy whole thing, Lisa, cuz she's so well prepared. I don't have to do any research when I come >>Home. >>Lisa will bring up some, Oh, sorry. Jeep, I see that in 2008 you won this award for Yeah. Being just excellent and I, I'm like, Oh >>Yeah. All right Keith. So, >>So did you do his analysis? >>Yeah, it's all done. Yeah. Great. He only part, he's not sitting next to me too. We can't see it, so it's gonna be like a magic crystal bell. Right. So a lot of people here. You got some stats in terms of the attendees compared >>To last year? Yeah, Priyanka told us we were double last year up to 8,000. We also got the scoop earlier that 2023 is gonna be in Chicago, which is very exciting. >>Oh, that is, is nice. Yeah, >>We got to break that here. >>Excellent. Keith, talk to us about what some of the things are that you've seen the last couple of days. The momentum. What's the vibe? I saw your tweet about the top three things you were being asked. Kubernetes was not one of them. >>Kubernetes were, was not one of 'em. This conference is starting to, it, it still feels very different than a vendor conference. The keynote is kind of, you know, kind of all over the place talking about projects, but the hallway track has been, you know, I've, this is maybe my fifth or sixth CU con in person. And the hallway track is different. It's less about projects and more about how, how do we adjust to the enterprise? How do we Yes. Actually do enterprise things. And it has been amazing watching this community grow. I'm gonna say grow up and mature. Yes. You know, you know, they're not wearing ties yet, but they are definitely understanding kind of the, the friction of implementing new technology in, in an enterprise. >>Yeah. So ge what's your, what's been your take, We were with you yesterday. What's been the take today to take aways? >>NOMA has changed since yesterday, but a few things I think I, I missed talking about that yesterday were that, first of all, let's just talk about Amazon. Amazon earnings came out, it spooked the market and I think it's relevant in this context as well, because they're number one cloud provider. Yeah. And all, I mean, almost all of these technologies on the back of us here, they are related to cloud, right? So it will have some impact on these. Like we have to analyze that. Like will it make the open source go faster or slower in, in lieu of the fact that the, the cloud growth is slowing. Right? So that's, that's one thing that's put that's put that aside. I've been thinking about the, the future of Kubernetes. What is the future of Kubernetes? And in that context, I was thinking like, you know, I think in, when I put a pointer there, I think in tangents, like, what else is around this thing? So I think CN CNCF has been writing the success of Kubernetes. They are, that was their number one flagship project, if you will. And it was mature enough to stand on its own. It it was Google, it's Google's Borg dub da Kubernetes. It's a genericized version of that. Right? So folks who do tech deep down, they know that, Right. So I think it's easier to stand with a solid, you know, project. But when the newer projects come in, then your medal will get tested at cncf. Right. >>And cncf, I mean they've got over 140 projects Yeah. Right now. So there's definitely much beyond >>Kubernetes. Yeah. So they, I have numbers there. 18 graduated, right, 37 in incubation and then 81 in Sandbox stage. They have three stages, right. So it's, they have a lot to chew on and the more they take on, the less, you know, quality you get goes into it. Who is, who's putting the money behind it? Which vendors are sponsoring like cncf, like how they're getting funded up. I think it >>Something I pay attention to as well. Yeah. Yeah. Lisa, I know you've got >>Some insight. Those are the things I was thinking about today. >>I gotta ask you, what's your take on what Keith said? Are you also seeing the maturation of the enterprise here at at coupon? >>Yes, I am actually, when you say enterprise versus what's the other side? Startups, right? Yeah. So startups start using open source a lot more earlier or lot more than enterprises. The enterprise is what they need. Number one thing is the, for their production workloads, they want a vendor sporting them. I said that yesterday as well, right? So it depend depending on the size of the enterprise. If you're a big shop, definitely if you have one of the 500 or Fortune five hundreds and your tech savvy shop, then you can absorb the open source directly coming from the open source sort of universe right. Coming to you. But if you are the second tier of enterprise, you want to go to a provider which is managed service provider, or it can be cloud service provider in this case. Yep. Most of the cloud service providers have multiple versions of Kubernetes, for example. >>I'm not talking about Kubernetes only, but like, but that is one example, right? So at Amazon you can get five different flavors of Kubernetes, right? Fully manage, have, manage all kind of stuff. So people don't have bandwidth to manage that stuff locally. You have to patch it, you have to roll in the new, you know, updates and all that stuff. Like, it's a lot of work for many. So CNCF actually is formed for that reason. Like the, the charter is to bring the quality to open source. Like in other companies they have the release process and they, the stringent guidelines and QA and all that stuff. So is is something ready for production? That's the question when it comes to any software, right? So they do that kind of work and, and, and they have these buckets defined at high level, but it needs more >>Work. Yeah. So one of the things that, you know, kind of stood out to me, I have good friend in the community, Alex Ellis, who does open Fast. It's a serverless platform, great platform. Two years ago or in 2019, there was a serverless day date. And in serverless day you had K Native, you had Open Pass, you had Ws, which is supported by IBM completely, not CNCF platforms. K native came into the CNCF full when Google donated the project a few months ago or a couple of years ago, now all of a sudden there's a K native day. Yes. Not a serverless day, it's a K native day. And I asked the, the CNCF event folks like, what happened to Serverless Day? I missed having open at serverless day. And you know, they, they came out and said, you know what, K native got big enough. >>They came in and I think Red Hat and Google wanted to sponsor a K native day. So serverless day went away. So I think what what I'm interested in and over the next couple of years is, is they're gonna be pushback from the C against the cncf. Is the CNCF now too big? Is it now the gatekeeper for do I have to be one of those 147 projects, right? In order enough to get my project noticed the open, fast, great project. I don't think Al Alex has any desire to have his project hosted by cncf, but it probably deserves, you know, shoulder left recognition with that. So I'm pushing to happen to say, okay, if this is open community, this is open source. If CNC is the place to have the cloud native conversation, what about the projects that's not cncf? Like how do we have that conversation when we don't have the power of a Google right. Or a, or a Lenox, et cetera, or a Lenox Foundation. So GE what, >>What are your thoughts on that? Is, is CNC too big? >>I don't think it's too big. I think it's too small to handle the, what we are doing in open source, right? So it's a bottle. It can become a bottleneck. Okay. I think too big in a way that yeah, it has, it has, it has power from that point of view. It has that cloud, if you will. The people listen to it. If it's CNCF project or this must be good, it's like in, in incubators. Like if you are y white Combinator, you know, company, it must be good. You know, I mean, may not be >>True, but, >>Oh, I think there's a bold assumption there though. I mean, I think everyone's just trying to do the best they can. And when we're evaluating projects, a very different origin and background, it's incredibly hard. Very c and staff is a staff of 30 people. They've got 180,000 people that are contributing to these projects and a thousand maintainers that they're trying to uphold. I think the challenge is actually really great. And to me, I actually look at events as an illustration of, you know, what's the culture and the health of an organization. If I were to evaluate CNCF based on that, I'd say we're very healthy right now. I would say that we're in a good spot. There's a lot of momentum. >>Yeah. I, I think CNCF is very healthy. I'm, I'm appreciative for it being here. I love coupon. It's becoming the, the facto conference to have this conversation has >>A totally >>Different vibe to other, It's a totally different vibe. Yeah. There needs to be a conduit and truth be told, enterprise buyers, to subject's point, this is something that we do absolutely agree on, on enterprise buyers. We want someone to pick winners and losers. We do, we, we don't want a box of Lego dumped on our, the middle of our table. We want somebody to have sorted that out. So while there may be five or six different service mesh solutions, at least the cncf, I can go there and say, Oh, I'll pick between the three or four that are most popular. And it, it's a place to curate. But I think with that curation comes the other side of it. Of how do we, how, you know, without the big corporate sponsor, how do I get my project pushed up? Right? Elevated. Elevated, Yep. And, and put onto the show floor. You know, another way that projects get noticed is that startups will adopt them, Push them. They may not even be, I don't, my CNCF project may not, my product may not even be based on the CNCF product. But the new stack has a booth, Ford has a booth. Nothing to do with a individual prod up, but promoting open source. What happens when you're not sponsored? >>I gotta ask you guys, what do you disagree on? >>Oh, so what, what do we disagree on? So I'm of the mindset, I can, I can say this, I I believe hybrid infrastructure is the future of it. Bar none. If I built my infrastructure, if I built my application in the cloud 10 years ago and I'm still building net new applications, I have stuff that I built 10 years ago that looks a lot like on-prem, what do I do with it? I can't modernize it cuz I don't have the developers to do it. I need to stick that somewhere. And where I'm going to stick that at is probably a hybrid infrastructure. So colo, I'm not gonna go back to the data center, but I'm, I'm gonna look, pick up something that looks very much like the data center and I'm saying embrace that it's the future. And if you're Boeing and you have, and Boeing is a member, cncf, that's a whole nother topic. If you have as 400 s, hpu X, et cetera, stick that stuff. Colo, build new stuff, but, and, and continue to support OpenStack, et cetera, et cetera. Because that's the future. Hybrid is the future. >>And sub g agree, disagree. >>I okay. Hybrid. Nobody can deny that the hybrid is the reality, not the future. It's a reality right now. It's, it's a necessity right now you can't do without it. Right. And okay, hybrid is very relative term. You can be like 10% here, 90% still hybrid, right? So the data center is shrinking and it will keep shrinking. Right? And >>So if by whole is the data center shrinking? >>This is where >>Quick one quick getting guys for it. How is growing by a clip? Yeah, but there's no data supporting. David Lym just came out for a report I think last year that showed that the data center is holding steady, holding steady, not growing, but not shrinking. >>Who sponsored that study? Wait, hold on. So the, that's a question, right? So more than 1 million data centers have been closed. I have, I can dig that through number through somebody like some organizations we published that maybe they're cloud, you know, people only. So the, when you get these kind of statements like it, it can be very skewed statements, right. But if you have seen the, the scene out there, which you have, I know, but I have also seen a lot of data centers walk the floor of, you know, a hundred thousand servers in a data center. I cannot imagine us consuming the infrastructure the way we were going into the future of co Okay. With, with one caveat actually. I am not big fan of like broad strokes. Like make a blanket statement. Oh no, data center's dead. Or if you are, >>That's how you get those esty headlines now. Yeah, I know. >>I'm all about to >>Put a stake in the ground. >>Actually. The, I think that you get more intelligence from the new end, right? A small little details if you will. If you're golden gold manak or Bank of America, you have so many data centers and you will still have data centers because performance matters to you, right? Your late latency matters for applications. But if you are even a Fortune 500 company on the lower end and or a healthcare vertical, right? That your situation is different. If you are a high, you know, growth startup, your situation is different, right? You will be a hundred percent cloud. So cloud gives you velocity, the, the, the pace of change, the pace of experimentation that actually you are buying innovation through cloud. It's proxy for innovation. And that's how I see it. But if you have, if you're stuck with older applications, I totally understand. >>Yeah. So the >>We need that OnPrem. Yeah, >>Well I think the, the bring your fuel sober, what we agree is that cloud is the place where innovation happens. Okay? At some point innovation becomes legacy debt and you have thus hybrid, you are not going to keep your old applications up to date forever. The, the, the math just doesn't add up. And where I differ in opinion is that not everyone needs innovation to keep moving. They need innovation for a period of time and then they need steady state. So Sergeant, we >>Argue about this. I have a, I >>Love this debate though. I say it's efficiency and stability also plays an important role. I see exactly what you're talking about. No, it's >>Great. I have a counter to that. Let me tell you >>Why. Let's >>Hear it. Because if you look at the storage only, right? Just storage. Just take storage computer network for, for a minute. There three cost reps in, in infrastructure, right? So storage earlier, early on there was one tier of storage. You say pay the same price, then now there are like five storage tiers, right? What I'm trying to say is the market sets the price, the market will tell you where this whole thing will go, but I know their margins are high in cloud, 20 plus percent and margin will shrink as, as we go forward. That means the, the cloud will become cheaper relative to on-prem. It, it, in some cases it's already cheaper. But even if it's a stable workload, even in that case, we will have a lower tier of service. I mean, you, you can't argue with me that the cloud versus your data center, they are on the same tier of services. Like cloud is a better, you know, product than your data center. Hands off. >>I love it. We, we are gonna relish in the debates between the two of you. Mic drops. The energy is great. I love it. Perspective. It's not like any of us can quite see through the crystal ball that we have very informed opinions, which is super exciting. Yeah. Lisa, any last thoughts today? >>Just love, I love the debate as well. That, and that's, that's part of what being in this community is all about. So sharing about, sharing opinions, expressing opinions. That's how it grows. That's how, that's how we innovate. Yeah. Obviously we need the cloud, but that's how we innovate. That's how we grow. Yeah. And we've seen that demonstrated the last couple days and I and your, your takes here on the Cuban on Twitter. Brilliant. >>Thank you. I absolutely love it. I'm gonna close this out with a really important analysis on the swag of the show. Yes. And if you know, yesterday we were looking at what is the weirdest swag or most unique swag We had that bucket hat that took the grand prize. Today we're gonna focus on something that's actually quite cool. A lot of the vendors here have really dedicated their swag to being local to Detroit. Very specific in their sourcing. Sonotype here has COOs. They're beautiful. You can't quite feel this flannel, but it's very legit hand sound here in Michigan. I can't say that I've been to too many conferences, if any, where there was this kind of commitment to localizing and sourcing swag from around the corner. We also see this with the Intel booth. They've got screen printers out here doing custom hoodies on spot. >>Oh fun. They're even like appropriately sized. They had local artists do these designs and if you're like me and you care about what's on your wrist, you're familiar with Shinola. This is one of my favorite swags that's available. There is a contest. Oh going on. Hello here. Yeah, so if you are Atan, make sure that you go and check this out. The we, I talked about this on the show. We've had the founder on the show or the CEO and yeah, I mean Shine is just full of class as since we are in Detroit as well. One of the fun themes is cars. >>Yes. >>And Storm Forge, who are also on the show, is actually giving away an Aston Martin, which is very exciting. Not exactly manufactured in Detroit. However, still very cool on the car front and >>The double oh seven version named the best I >>Know in the sixties. It's love it. It's very cool. Two quick last things. We talk about it a lot on the show. Every company now wants to be a software company. Yep. On that vein, and keeping up with my hat theme, the Home Depot is here because they want everybody to know that they in fact are a technology company, which is very cool. They have over 500,000 employees. You can imagine there's a lot of technology that has to go into keeping Napa. Absolutely. Yep. Wild to think about. And then last, but not at least very quick, rapid fire, best t-shirt contest. If you've ever ran to one of these events, there are a ton of T-shirts out there. I rate them on two things. Wittiest line and softness. If you combine the two, you'll really be our grand champion for the year. I'm just gonna hold these up and set them down for your laughs. Not afraid to commit, which is pretty great. This is another one designed by locals here. Detroit Code City. Oh, love it. This one made me chuckle the most. Kiss my cash. >>Oh, that's >>Good. These are also really nice and soft, which is fantastic. Also high on the softness category is this Op Sarah one. I also like their bird logo. These guys, there's just, you know, just real nice touch. So unfortunately, if you have the fumble, you're not here with us, live in Detroit. At least you're gonna get taste of the swag. I taste of the stories and some smiles hear from those of us on the cube. Thank you both so much for being here with us. Lisa, thanks for another fabulous day. Got it, girl. My name's Savannah Peterson. Thank you for joining us from Detroit. We're the cube and we can't wait to see you tomorrow.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone. Live coverage here at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon here in Detroit, Michigan. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE for special one-on-one conversation with Scott Johnston, who's the CEO of Docker, CUBE alumni, been around the industry, multiple cycles of innovation, leading one of the most important companies in today's industry inflection point as Docker what they've done since they're, I would say restart from the old Docker to the new Docker, now modern, and the center of the conversation with containers driving the growth of Kubernetes. Scott, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> John, thanks for the invite. Glad to be here. >> You guys have had great success this year with extensions. Docker as a business model's grown. Congratulations, you guys are monetizing well. Pushing up over 50 million. >> Thank you. >> I hear over pushing a hundred million maybe. What the year to the ground will tell me, but it's good sign. Plus you've got the community and nurturing of the ecosystem continuing to power away and open source is not stopping. It's thundering away growth. Younger generation coming in. >> That's right. >> Developer tool chain that you have has become consistent. Almost de facto standard. Others are coming in the market. A lot of competition emerging. You got a lot going on right now. What's going on? >> Well, I know it's fantastic time in our industry. Like all companies are becoming software companies. That means they need to build new applications. That means they need developers to be productive and to be safely productive. And we, and this wonderful CNCF ecosystem are right in the middle of that trend, so it's fantastic. >> So you have millions of developers using Docker. >> Tens of millions. >> Tens of millions of developed Docker and as the market's changing, I was commenting before we came on camera, and I'd love to get your reaction, comment on it. You guys represent the modernization of containers, open source. You haven't really changed how open source works, but you've kind of modernized it. You're starting to see developers at the front lines, more and more power going to developers. >> Scott: That's right. >> They want self-service. They vote with their code. >> That's right. >> They vote with their actions. >> Scott: That's right. >> And if you take digital transformation to its conclusion, it's not IT serves the business or it's a department, the company is IT. >> That's right. >> The company is the application, which means developers are running everything. >> Yes, yes. I mean, one of the jokes, not jokes in the valley is that Tesla is in a car company. Tesla is a computer company that happens to have wheels on the computer. And I think we can smile at that, but there's so many businesses, particularly during COVID, that realize that. What happened during COCID? If you're going to the movies, nope, you're now going to Netflix. If you're going to the gym, now you're doing Peloton. So this realization that like I have to have a digital game, not just on the side, but it has to be the forefront of my business and drive my business. That realization is now any industry, any company across the board. >> We've been reporting aggressively for past three years now. Even now we're calling some things supercloud. If companies, if they don't realize that IT is not a department, they will probably be out of business. >> That's a hundred percent. >> It's going to transform into full on invisible infrastructure. Infrastructure as code, whatever you want to call that going, configuration, operations, developers will set the pace. This has a lot to do with some of your success. You're at the beginning of it. This is just the beginning. What can you talk about that in your mind is contributing to the success of Docker? I know you're going to say team, everything, I get that, but like what specifically in the industry is driving Docker's success right now? >> Well, it did. We did have a fantastic team. We do have a fantastic team and that is one of the reasons, primary reasons our success. But what is also happening, John, is because there's a demand for applications, I'll just throw it out there. 750 million new applications are coming in the market in the next two years. That is more applications that have been developed in the entire 40 years history of IT. So just think about the productivity demands that are coming at developers. And then you also see the need to do so safely, meaning ship quickly, but ship safely. And yet 90 some percent of every application consists of open source components that are now on attack surface for criminals. And so typically our industry has had to say one or the other, okay, you can ship quickly but not safely, or you can ship safely, but it's not going to go fast. And one of the reasons I think Docker is where it is today is that we're able to offer both. We're able to unlock that you can ship quickly, safely using Docker, using the Docker toolchain, using integrations we have with all the wonderful partners here at CNCF that is unique. And that's a big reason why we're seeing the success we're seeing. >> And you're probably pleased with extensions this year. >> Yes. >> The performance of extensions that you launched at DockerCon '22. >> Yes. Well, extensions are part of that story and that developers have multiple tools. They want choice, developers like choice to be productive and Docker is part of that, but it's not the only solution. And so Docker extensions allow the monitoring providers and the observability and if you want a separate Kubernetes stack, like all of that flexibility, extensions allows. And again, offers the power and the innovation of this ecosystem to be used in a Docker development and context. >> Well, I want to get into some of the details of some of your products and how they're evolving. But first I want to get your thoughts on the trend line here that we reported at the opening segment. The hot story is WebAssembly, the Wasm, which really got a lot of traction or interest. People enthous about it. >> Interest, yeah. >> Lot of enthusiasm. Confidence we'll see how that evolves, but a lot of enthusiasm for sure. I've never seen something this hyped up since Envoy, in my opinion. So a lot of interest from developers. What is Wasm or WebAssembly is actually what it is, but Wasm is the codeword or nickname. What is Wasm? >> So in brief, WebAssembly is a new application type, full stop. And it's just enough of the components that you need and it's just a binary format that is very, very secure. And so it's lightweight, it's fast and secure. And so it opens up a lot of interesting use cases for developer, particularly on the edge. Another use case for Wasm is in the browser. Again, lightweight, fast, secure also. >> John: Sounds like an app server to me. >> And so we think it's a very, very interesting trend. And you ask, Okay, what's Docker's role in that? Well, Docker has been around eight years now, eight plus years, tens of millions developers using it. They've already made investments in skills, talent, automation, toolchains, pipelines. And Docker started with Linux containers as we know, then brought that same experience to Windows containers, then brought it to serverless functions. About 25% of Amazon Lambdas are OCI image containers. And so we were seeing that trend. We were also seeing the community actually without any prompting from us, start to fork and play with Docker and apply it to Wasm. And we're like, Huh, that's interesting. What if we helped get behind that trend, such that you changed just one line of a Docker file, now you're able to produce Wasm objects instead of Linux containers and just bring that same easy to use. >> So that's not a competition to Docker's? >> Not a competition at all. In fact, very complimentary. We showed off on Monday at the Wasm day, how in the same Docker compose application, multi-service application. One service is delivered via Linux container, Another service is delivered via Wasm. >> And Wasm is what? Multiple languages? 'Cause what is it? >> Yes. So the binary can be compiled from multiple languages. So RAS, JavaScript, on and on and on. At the end of the day, it's a smaller binary that provides a function, typically a single function that you can stand up and deploy on an edge. You can stand up and deploy on the server side or stand up and deploy on the browser. >> So from a container standpoint, from your customer standpoint, what a Linux container is is a similar thing to what a Wasm container is. >> They could implement the same function. That's right. Now a Linux container can have more capabilities that a function might not have, but that's. >> John: From a workflow standpoint. >> That's right. And that's more of a use case by use case standpoint. What we serve is we serve developers and we started out serving developers with Linux containers, then Windows containers, then Lambdas, now Wasm. Whatever other use case, what other application type comes along, we want to be there to serve developers. >> So one of the things I want to get your thoughts on, because this has come up in a couple CUBE interviews before, and we were talking before we came on camera, is developers want ease of use and simplicity. They don't want more steps to do things. They don't want things harder. >> That's right. So the classic innovation is reduce the time it takes to do something, reduce the steps, make it easier. That's a formula of success. >> Scott: That's right. >> When you start adding more toolchains into the mix, you get tool sprawl. So that's not really, that's antithesis to developer. So the argument is, okay, do I have to use a new tool chain for Wasm? Is that a fact or no? >> That's exactly right. That was what we were seeing and we thought, well, how can Docker help with this situation? And Docker can help by bringing the same existing toolchain that developers are already familiar with. The same automation, the same pipelines. And just by changing a line of Docker file, changing a single line of composed file, now they get the power of Wasm unlocked in the very same tools they were using before. >> So your position is, hey, don't adopt some toolchain for Wasm. You can just do it in line with Docker. >> No need to, no need to. We're providing it right there out of the box, ready for them. >> That's raise and extend, as they would say, build Microsoft strategy there. That's nice. Okay, so let's get back into like the secure trusted 'cause that was another theme at DockerCon. We covered that deeply. Software supply chain, I was commenting on my intro with Savannah and Lisa that at some point open source means so plentiful. You might not have to write code. You got to glue together. So as code proliferates, the question what's in there? >> That's right. This is what they call the software supply chain. You've been all over this. Where are we with this? Is it harder now? Is it easier? Was there progress? Take us through what's the state of the art. I think we're early on this one, John, in the industry because I think the realization of how much open source is inside a given app is just now hitting consciousness. And so the data we have is that for any given application, anywhere from 75 to 85% is actually not unique to the developer or the organization. It's open source components that they have put together. And it's really down to that last 15, 25%, which is their own unique code that they're adding on top of all this open source code. So right there, it's like, aha, that's a pretty interesting profile or distribution of value, which means those open source components, where are they finding them? How are they integrating them? How do they know those open source components are going to be supported and trusted and secured? And that's the challenge for us as an industry right now is to make it just obvious where to get the components, how safe they are, who's standing behind them, and how easy it is to assemble them into a working application. >> All right. So the question that I had specifically on security 'cause this had come up before. All good on the trusted and I think that message is evergreen. It's a north star. That's a north star for you. How are you making images more secure and how are you enabling organizations to identify security issues in containers? Can you share your strategy and thoughts on that particular point? >> Yes. So there's a range of things in the secure software supply chain and it starts with, are you starting with trusted open source components that you know have support, that you know are secured? So in Docker Hub today, we have 14 million applications, but a subset of that, we've worked with the upstream providers to basically designate as trusted open source content. So this is the Docker official images, Docker verified publisher images, Docker sponsored open source. And those different categories have levels of certification assurance that they must go through. Generate an SBOM, so you know what's inside that container. It has to be scanned by a scanning tool and those scanning results have to be made available. >> John: Are you guys scanning that? >> So we provide a scanner, they can use another scanner as long as they publish the results of that scan. And then the whole thing is signed. >> Are you publishing the results on your side too? >> Yeah, we published our results through an open database that's accessible to all. >> Free. >> Free, a hundred percent free. You come in and you can see every image on hub. >> So I'm a user, for free I can see security vulnerabilities that are out there that have been identified. >> By version, by layer, all the way through. And you can see tracking all the way back to the package that's upstream. So you know how to remediate and we provide recommendations on how to remediate that with the latest version. >> John: And you don't charge for that. >> We don't charge for that. We do not charge for that. And so that's the trusted upstream. >> So organization can look at the scan, they can look at the scan data and hopefully, what happens if they're not scanned? >> So we provide scanning tools both for the local environments for Docker Desktop, as well as for hub. So if you want to do your own scan, so for example, when you're that developer adding the 15, 25%, you got to scan your stuff as well. Not just leave it up to the already scanned components. And so we provide tools there. We also provide tools to track the packages that that developer might be including in their custom code, all the way back upstream to whatever MPM repo or what have you that they picked up. And then if there's a CVE 30 days later, we also track that as well. We say, Hey, that package was was safe 29 days ago, but today CVE just came out, better upgrade to the latest version and get that out there. So basically if you get down to it, it's like start with trusted components and then have observability not just on the moment. >> And scan all the time. >> Scan all the time and scanning gives you that observability and importantly not just at that moment, but through the lifecycle of the application, through lifecycle of the artifact. So end-to-end 24/7 observability of the state of your supply chain. That's what's key, John. >> That's the best practice. >> That's the key. That's the key. >> Awesome, I agree. That's great. Well, I'm glad we've dug into that's super important. Obviously organizations can get that scanning that's exceed the vulnerabilities, that can take action. That's going to be a big focus here for you, security. It's not going to stop, is it? >> It's never going to stop because criminals are incentive to keep attacking. And so it's the gift that keeps on giving, if you will. >> Okay, so let's get into some of the products. Docker Desktop seems to be doing well. Docker Hub has always been a staple of it. And how's that going? >> Yeah, Docker Hub has 18 million monthly actives hitting it and that's growing by double digits year over year. And what they're finding, going back to our previous thread, John, is that they're coming there for the trusted content. In fact, those three categories that I referenced earlier are about 2000 applications of the 14 million. And yet they represent 56% of the 15 billion downloads a month from Docker Hub. Meaning developers are identifying that, hey, I want trusted source. We raise those in the search results and we have a visual cue. And so that's the big driver of hub's growth right now, is I want trusted content, where do I go? I go to Hub, download that trusted open source and I'm ready to go. >> I have been seeing some chatter on the internet and some people's sharing that they're looking at other places, besides hub, to do some things. What's your message to folks out there around Docker Hub? Why Docker Hub and desktop together? 'Cause you mentioned the toolchain before, but those two areas, I know they've been around for a while, you continue to work on them. What's the message to the folks out there about stay with the hub? >> Sure. I mean the beauty of our ecosystem is that it's interoperable. The standards for build, share and run, we're all using them here at CNCF. So yes, there's other registries. What we would say is we have the 18 million monthly active that are pulling, we have the worldwide distribution that is 24/7 high, five nines reliability, and frankly, we're there to provide choice. And so yes, we have have our trusted content, but for example, the Tanzu apps, they also distribute through us. Red Hat applications also distribute through us because we have the reach and the distribution and offer developers choice of Dockers content, choice of Red Hats content, choice of VMware's, choice of Bitnami, so on so forth. So come to the hub for the distribution to reach and that the requirements we have for security that we put in place for our publishers, give users and publishers an extra degree of assurance. >> So the Docker Hub is an important part of the system? >> Scott: Yes, very much so. >> And desktop, what's new with desktop? >> So desktop of course is the other end of the spectrum. So if trusted components start up on Docker Hub, developers are pulling them down to the desktop to start assembling their application. And so the desktop gives that developer all the tools he or she needs to build that modern application. So you can have your build tooling, your debug tooling, your IDE sitting alongside there, your Docker run, your Docker compose up. And so the loop that we see happening is the dev will have a database they download from hub, a front-end, they'll add their code to it and they'll just rapidly iterate. They'll make a change, stand it up, do a unit test, and when they're satisfied do a git commit, off it goes into production. >> And your goal obviously is to have developers stay with Docker for their toolchain, their experience, make it their home base. >> And their trusted content. That's right. And the trusted content and the extensions are part of that. 'Cause the extensions provide complimentary tooling for that local experience. >> You guys have done an amazing job. I want to give you personal props. I've been following Docker from the beginning when they had the pivot, they sold the enterprise to Mirantis, went back to the roots, modernized, riding the wave. You guys are having a good time. I got to ask the question 'cause people always want to know 'cause open source is about transparency. How you guys making your money? Business is good. How's that work and what was the lucky, what was the not lucky strike, but what was the aha moment? What was the trigger that just made you just kick in this new monetization growth wave? >> So the monetization is per seat, per developer seat. And that changed in November 2019. We were pricing on the server side before, and as you said, we sold that off. And what changed is some of the trends we were talking about that the realization by all organizations that they had to become software companies. And Docker provided the productivity in an engineered desktop product and the trusted content, it provided the productivity safely to developers. And frankly then we priced it at a rate that is very reasonable from an economic standpoint. If you look at developer productivity, developers are paid anywhere from 150 to 300 to 400, 500,000 even higher. >> But when you're paying your developers that much, then productivity is a premium. And what we were asking for from companies from a licensing standpoint was really a modest relative to the making those developers product. >> It's not like Oracle. I mean talk about extracting the value out of the customer. But your point is your positioning is always stay quarter of the open source, but for companies that adopt the structural change to be developer first, a software company, there's a premium to pay because you devalue there. >> And need the tooling to roll it out at scales. So the companies are paying us. They're rolling it out to tens of thousand developers, John. So they need management, they need visibility, they need guardrails that are all around the desktop. So, but just to put a stat on it, so to your point about open source and the freemium wheel working, of our 13 million Docker accounts, 12 are free, about a million are paid for accounts. And that's by design because the open source. >> And you're not gouging developers per se, it's just, not gouging anyone, but you're not taking money out of their hands. It's the company. >> If the company is paying for their productivity so that they can build safely. >> More goodness more for the developer. >> That's right. That's right. >> Gouging would be more like the Oracle strategy. Don't comment. You don't need to comment. I keep saying that, but it's not like you're taxing. It's not a heavy. >> No, $5 a month, $9 a month, $24 a month depending on level. >> But I think the big aha to me and in my opinion is that you nailed the structural change culturally for a company. If they adopt the software ecosystem approach for transforming their business, they got to pay for it. So like a workflow, it's a developer. >> It's another tool. I mean, do they pay for their spreadsheet software? Do they pay for their back office ERP software? They do >> That's my point. >> to make those people popular or sorry, make those people successful, those employees successful. This is a developer tool to make developer successful. >> It's a great, great business model. Congratulations. What's next for you guys? What are you looking for? You just had your community events, you got DockerCon coming up next year. What's on the horizon for you? Put a plugin for the company. What are you looking for? Hiring? >> Yeah, so we're growing like gangbusters. We grew from 60 with the reset. We're now above 300 and we're continuing to grow despite this economic climate. Like our customers are very much investing in software capabilities. So that means they're investing in Docker. So we're looking for roles across the board, software engineers, product managers, designers, marketing, sales, customer success. So if you're interested, please reach out. The next year is going to be really interesting because we're bringing to market products that are doubling down on these areas, doubling down a developer productivity, doubling down on safety to make it even more just automatic that developers just build so they don't have to think about it. They don't need a new tool just to be safer. We hinted a bit about automating SBOM creation. You can see more of that pull through. And in particular, developers want to make the right decision. Everyone comes to work wanting to make the right decision. But what they often lack is context. They often lack like, well, is this bit of code safe or not? Or is this package that I just downloaded over here safe or not? And so you're going to see us roll out additional capabilities that give them very explicit contextual guidance of like, should you use this or not? Or here's a better version over here, a safer version over there. So stay tuned for some exciting stuff. >> It's going to be a massive developer growth wave coming even bigger we've ever seen. Final questions just while I got you here. Where do you see WebAssembly, Wasm going? If you had to throw a dart at the board out a couple years, what does it turn into? >> Yeah, so I think it's super exciting. Super exciting, John. And there's three use cases today. There's browser, there's edge, and there's service side in the data center of the cloud. We see the edge taking off in the next couple years. It's just such a straight line through from what they're doing today and the value that standing up a single service on the edge go. The service side needs some work on the Wasm runtime. The Wasm runtime is not multi-threaded today. And so there's some deep, deep technical work that's going on. The community's doing a fantastic job, but that'll take a while to play through. Browsers also making good progress. There's a component model that Wasm's working on that'll really ignite the industry. That is going to take another couple years as well. So I'd say let's start with the edge use case. Let's get everyone excited about that value proposition. And these other two use cases will come along. >> It'll all work itself out in the wash as open source always does. Scott Johnston, the Chief Executive Officer at Docker. Took over at the reset, kicking butt and taking names. Congratulations. You guys are doing great. Continue to power the developer movement. Thanks for coming on. >> John, thanks so much. Pleasure to be here. >> We're bringing you all the action here. Extracting the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, day one of three days of wall-to-wall live coverages. We'll be back for our next guest after this short break. (gentle music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Ansible Fest 2022. We are live in Chicago. This is day two of Waldo Wall coverage on the cube. John Fhrer here with me. Lisa Martin. John, today's a big news day. Yeah, >>Big time. I mean, we got the chief architect on this segments to be great. We have the lead product management. All the new stuff coming out really is a game changer. It's very cool and relevant. Very key to be relevant. And then, and being a part of the future. This is a changeover you see in the NextGen Cloud developer environment. Open source all coming together. So Ansible we've been covering for many, many years. We've always said they're in the middle of all the action and you're starting to see the picture. Yes. For me. So we're looking forward to a great segment. >>Yes. We've got two alumni back with us to unpack the news and all the great stuff that's going on here. Richard Hensel joins us Senior manager, Ansible Product Management, and Matthew Jones here, fresh from the keynote stage, Chief architect of Ansible Automation. Guys, great to have you on the program. Thanks >>For having us. Good to be here. >>So this morning was all about event driven Ansible. Unpack that. Talk about the impact that this is gonna have, The excitement, the buzz that you've heard on the show floor today. >>Yeah. You know, it's, it's exciting. We've been working on this for a while. We've been really excited to show this off because it's something that feels like the natural evolution of the platform and where it's going. Really being able to connect the automation with the sources of data and the actions that we know people want to use. We, we came into this knowing everybody here at this conference, this is something that everybody will be able to use. >>Talk about the innovations strategy. Cause we've always had these great conversations with Ansible. Oh yeah. The, the practitioners, they're, they're building the product with you. You guys are very hardcore on that. No secret. This is different. This is like a whole nother level of opportunity that's gonna take the, the community to new heights in terms of what they do in their job and free them up to do more creative development. >>Yeah, you're exactly right. You know, we, we know that people need to bring that sort of reactive and active automation to it. We've, we've done a lot of work to bring automation to everybody, to the masses. Now we need to meet them at the place where they are, where the, the where, where they have to do the most work and, and act in the most strategic and specific ways. >>All right. So now before we get into some of the deep dive, cause a ton of questions. This is really exciting product. Take a minute to explain what was the key announcement? Why, what specifically does this mean for the audience, watching customers and future customers? What's the big deal? To take a minute to explain what was announced. >>So this is about the, the evolution and the maturity of the automation that our users are doing. So, you know, you think about provisioning servers, you know, configuring networks, all that sort of, the stuff that we've established and everybody's been doing for a number of years. And then you go, Well, I've invested in that. I've done the heavy lifting, I've done the things that cost me agility. I think that cost me time. Well now I need to go further. So what can I go further into? And you move further at the stacks. You move away from the infrastructure, please. You move away from infrastructure as code. You move towards through configures code, up to officer's code. And you start to get into, well, I've got, I've got road tasks, I've got repetitive actions that I'm doing. I've got investigations, I've got remediations, I've got responses. >>Well, there's work that I do on a daily basis that is toil. Right. It's not efficient work. Right. Actually, we doing valuable work in the operation space as much as you were doing in, in the build space. And how do we move them up into that space? And it's, this is all based off observation. You can do this today, but how do we make it easier? We've gonna make it easier for them to do that and get, it's all about success. It's about the outcomes we're gonna drive users towards. They need to be successful as quickly as possible. How do we make that >>Happen? And Matt, I remember we talked in 2019 with Ansible, the word platform where we say, Hey, you know, platforms are super important. It's not a tool, tools and platforms as distinctions. You mentioned platform. This is now platform. A lot of people put a lot of work in into this Yeah. Claim what went on behind the scenes. So >>You're exactly right. And we've spent the last couple of years really taking that disparate set of tools that, that we've invested a lot of time in building that platform. It's been exciting to see it come together. We always knew that we wanted to capture more of, more of where people find automation and find they need automation, not just out on the edge, on the end of the, of the, of the actions and tasks that they need to do. They've got a lot of things coming in, a lot of things that they need to take care of. And the community is really what drives this for us. People who have been doing this for years and they've been asking us, Meet me halfway. Give me something. Give me a part of this platform and a capability that enables me to do this. So I I feel like we've done that and you did >>It. Yeah, exactly. For step one. >>And that must feel pretty good too, to be able to deliver what, you know, the masses are looking for and why they're looking >>For it. Yeah. This was, there was no question that we knew this was gonna deliver the kind of real value that people were looking for. >>Take us through the building blocks real quick. I know on stage you went through it in detail. What should people know about the core building blocks of, of this particular event driven >>Piece? Yeah. You know, I think the most important thing to understand at the, at the outset is the sources of data and events that come in. It's really easy to get lost in the details. Like, what do you mean a source? But, you know, we've shown examples using Kafka, but it's not just Kafka, right? It's, it's, it's web hooks, it's CI systems, it's any, any place that you can imagine an evict coming from your monitoring platforms. You can bring those together under the same umbrella. We're not requiring you to pick one or choose or what's your favorite one. You can bring, you can use them all and and condense them down into the, into the same place. >>There's a lot of data events everywhere now. There's more events. Yeah. Is there a standard interface? Is what's the, is there any kind of hook in there? Is what's, what's gonna limit? Or is there any limits? >>I I don't think there is a limit. I, you know, it's, and we can't even imagine where events and data are gonna come from, but we know we need to get them into the system in a way that makes the most sense for the, the customers. And then that, that drives through into the rule books. Like, okay, we have the data now, but what do we do with that data? How do we translate that into, into the action? What are the rules that need to follow? It's giving the, the, the person who is automating, who understands the data that's coming in and understands the task that they need to take. The, the rules are where they map those into it. And then the last part, of course is the playbook, the automation itself, which they already know. They're already experts in the system. So we've, we've, we've built this like eight lane highway. They get some right end of those actions. >>Let's talk about Richard, let's unpack those actions and the really kind of double click on the business outcomes that this is actually gonna enable organizations and any industry to achieve. >>Yeah, so >>I mean, it's, it, like Matt said, it's really hard to encapsulate everything that we see as possible. But if you just think about what happens when a system goes down, right? At that point in time, I'm potentially not making money, right? I'd say it's costing me time, it's costing me, that's a business impact. If I can speed up how quick I can resolve that problem, if I can reduce time in there, that's customer improvement, that's custom satisfaction. That's bottom line money for businesses, right? But it's also, it's also satisfaction for the users. You know, they're not involved in having the stressful get online, get quickly, activate whatever accounts you need to do, go and start doing discovery. You can detect a lot of that information for the discovery use case that we see, respond to an event, scan the system for that same logic that you would normally do as a user, as a human. >>And that's why the rules are important to add into ed. It's like, how do I take that human, that brain part that I would say, well, if I see this bit, oh, I'll go and have a look in this other log file. If I see this piece, I'll go and do something different. How do we translate that into Ansible so that you've got that conditional logic just to be able to say, if this do that, or if I see these three things, it means a certain outcome has happened. And then again, that defined, that's what's gonna help people like choose where it becomes useful. And that's how we, that's how we take that process >>Forward. I'm sure people are gonna get excited by this. I'm not sure the community already knows that, but as it's gonna attract more potential customers, what's different about it? Can you share the differentiation? Like wait minute, I already have that already. Do they have it already? What's different? What makes this different? What's, what's in it for them? >>Yeah. When we step up into a customer situation, an enterprise, an organization, what's really important becomes the, the ability to control where you do some of that work. So the control and the trust, You know, would you trust an automatic system to go and start making changes to hundreds of thousands of devices? And the answer is often not, not straight away. So how do we put this sort of sep the same separation of duties we have between dev and ops and all the nice structures we've done over the last number of years, and actually apply that to that programmatic access of automation that other systems do. So let's say a AIML systems that are detecting what's going on, observability platforms are, are much more intru or intrusive is the wrong word. They're much more observable of what's going on in the systems, right? But at the same time you go, I wanna make sure that I know that any point in time I can decide what, what is there and what can be run and who can run it and when they can run it. And that becomes an important dimension. >>The versatility seems like a big deal too. They can, Yeah. Any team could get >>Involved. And, and that's the, the same flexibility and the same extensibility of Ansible exists in this use case, right? The, the, the ability to take any of those tasks you wanna do in action, string them together, but what the way that it works for you, not the way that it works that we see, but the way that you see and you convert your operational DNA into how you do that automation and how that gets triggered as you see fit. >>Talk about this both of you. I'd like to get your perspectives on event driven Ansible as part of the automation journey that businesses are on. Obviously you can look at different industries and different businesses are, are at different places along that journey, but where does this fit in and kind of plugin to accelerating that journey? That's, >>That's a good question. You know, sometimes this ends up being like that last mile of we've adopted this automation, we've learned how to write automation. We even understand the things that we would need to automate, but how do we carry it over that last topic and connect it to our, our knowledge systems, our data stores, our data lakes, and how do we combine the expertise of the systems that we're managing with this automation that we've learned? Like you, you mentioned the, the, the community and the, the coalescing of data and information, the, the definition of the event rules and, and the event driven architecture. It lives alongside the automation that you've developed in the exact same place where you can feel that trust and ubiquity that we keep talking about. Right? It's there, it's certified. And we've talked a lot about secure supply chain recently. This gives you the ability to sign and certify that the rules and actions that we're taking and the sources that we're communicating with works exactly the same way. Yeah. And >>There's something we didn't, we didn't correlate this when we first started doing the work. We were, we were, we observe teams doing self-healing and you know, extending Ansible. And then over the last 18 months, what we've also seen is this movement, this platform engineering movement, the SRE teams becoming much more prominent. And this just nicely sits in as a type of use case for that type of transformation. You know, we've gotta remember that Ansible at is heart is also a transformative tool. Is like, how do you teach this behavior to a bunch of people? How do you upscale a larger base of engineers with what you want to be able to do? And I think this is such an important part that we, we just one say we stumbled into it, but it was a very, very nice, >>It was a natural progression. >>Exactly. >>Yeah. Yeah. Tom, Tom, when we were talking about Tom yesterday, Tom Anderson and he said, You guys bring up the SRE to you guys when you come on the cube. This is exactly a culture shift that we're talking about. I mean, SRE is really his legacy with Google. We all know that. Everyone kind of knows that, but it's become like a job title. Well they kind of, what does that even mean now if you're not Google, it means you're running stuff. DevOps has become a title. Yeah. So what that means is that's a cultural shift, not so much semantics Yeah. On title. This is kind of what you guys are targeting here, enabling people to run platforms, engineer them. Yeah. Like an architect and enable more co composability coding. >>And, and it's, so that's, that distinction is so important because one of the, you know, we see many customers come from different places. Many users from, you know, all the legacy or heritage of tools that have existed. And so often those processes are defined by the way that tool worked. Right? You had no other way that, that, and the, and it's, it happened 10 years ago, somebody implemented it, that's how it now works. And then they come and try and take something new and you go, well, you can't let the tool define your process. Now your culture and your objective has to define the process. So this is really, you know, how do we make sure we match that ability by giving them a flexible tool that let's say, Well what are you trying to achieve? I wanna achieve this outcome. That's the way you can do it. I >>Mean, that's how we match basically means my mind to get your reaction. It means I'm running stuff at scale. Yep. Engineer, I'm engineering and infrastructure at scale to enable, >>I'm responsible for it. And it's, it's my, it's my baby. It's my responsibility to do that. And how do we, how do we allow people to do that better? And you know, it, it's about, it's about freeing people up to focus on things that are really important and transformative. We can be transformative. And we do that by taking away the complexity and making things work fast. >>And that's what people want. People in their daily jobs want to be able to deliver value to the organization. You wanna feel that. But something Richard that you were talking about that struck me a couple minutes ago is, was a venture of an Ansible. There's employee benefits, there's customer benefits, Those two are ex inextricably linked. But I liked how you were talking about what it facilitates for both Yes. And all the way to the customer satisfaction, brand reputation. That's an important Yeah. Element for any brand to >>Consider. And that, I mean, you know, think about what digital transformation was all about. I mean, as we evolve past all these initial terms that come about, you know, we actually start getting to the meat of what these things are. And that is it connecting what you do with actually what is the purpose of what your business is trying to achieve. And you can't, you can't almost put money on that. That's, that's the, that's the holy grail of what you're trying to get to. So how, you know, and again, it just comes back to how do we facilitate, how do we make it easy? If we don't make it easier, we're not doing it right. We've gotta make it easier. >>Right. Well, exciting news. I want to get your guys' reaction and if you don't mind sharing your opinion or your commentary on what's different now with Ansible this year than just a few years ago in terms of the scope of what's out there, what's been built, what you guys are doing for the, for the customer base and the community. What's changed? Obviously the people's roles looked that they're gonna expand and have more, I say more power, you know, more keys to the kingdom, however you wanna look at it. But things have changed. What's changed now from a few years >>Ago. It's, you know, it, it's funny because we've spent a lot of time over the last couple years setting up the capabilities that you're seeing us deliver right now. Right. We, we look back two or three years ago and we knew where we wanted to be. We wanted to build things like eda. We wanted to invest in systems like Project Wisdom and the, the types of content, the cloud journey that, that now we're on and we're enabling for folks. But we had to make some really big changes. And those changes take time and, and take investment. The move into last year, John, we talked about execution environments. Yeah. And separating the control plane from the execution plane. All of that work that we did and the investment into the platform and stability of the platform leads us now into what >>Cap. And that's architectural decision. That's the long game in mind. Exactly. Making things more cohesive, but decoupled, that's an operating system kind of thinking. >>It, it totally is. It's a systems engineering and system architecture thinking. And now we can start building on top of these things like what comes after ed, what does ED allow us to do within the platform? All of the dev tools that we focused on that we haven't spent a lot of time talking about that from the product side. But being, coming in with prescriptive and opinionated dev tools, now we can show you how to build it. We can show you how to use it and connect it to your systems. Where can we go next? I'm really excited. >>Yeah. Your customer base two has also been part of from the beginning and they solve their own problems and they rolled it up, grow with it, and now it's a full on platform. The question I then ask is, okay, you believe it's a platform, which it is, it's enabling. What do you guys see as that possible dots that could connect that might come on top of this from a creativity standpoint, from an ecosystem standpoint, from an Ansible standpoint, from maybe Red Hat. I mean, wisdom shows that you can go into the treasure trove of IBM's research, pull out some AI and some machine learning. Both that in or shim layered in whatever you do. >>I mean, what I'm starting to see much more, especially as I, the nice thing about being here is actually getting face to face with customers again and you know, actually hearing what they're talking about. But you know, we've moved away from a Ansible specific story where I'm talking about how I, I was always, I was looking to automate, I was looking to go to Ansible. Well now I've got the automation capability. Now we've enhanced the automation. Capabil wisdom enhances the automation capability further. What about all those, those broader set of management solutions that I've got that I would like to start connecting to each other. So we're starting to take the same like, you know, you mentioned as then software architecture, software design principles. We'll apply those same application design principles, apply them to your IT management because we've got data center with the pressures on there. We've got the expansion into cloud, we've got the expansion to the edge, right? Each adding a new layer of complexity and a new layer of, you know, more that you have to then look after. But there's still the same >>Number of people. So a thousand flower blooms kind of situation. >>Exactly. And so how do I, how do I constrain, how do I tame it, right? How do I sit there and go, I, I can control that now I can look after that. I contain that. I can, I can deal with what I wanna do. So I'm focusing on what's important and we are getting stuff done. >>We, we've been quoting Andy Grove on the cube lately. Let chaos, rain and then rain in the chaos. Yes. Right? I mean that's kind of every inflection point has complexity before it gets simpler. >>Yeah, that's right. >>Yeah. You can't, there's answer that one. That's >>Perfectly. >>Yeah. Yeah. What do you expect to see chief ar you gotta have the vision. What's gonna pop out? What's that low, low hanging fruit? What's gonna bloom first? What do you think's gonna come? >>I, you know, my overarching vision is that I just want to be able to automate more. Where, where can we bring back, So edge cloud, right? That's obvious, but what things run in the cloud and and on the edge, right? Devices, you heard Chad in the keynote this morning talk about programmable logic controllers, sensors, fans, motors, things like that. This is the, the sort of, this is the next frontier of automation is that connecting your data centers and your systems, your applications and needs all the way out to where your customers are. Gas stations, point of sale systems. >>It's instant. It's instant. It is what it is. It's like just add, Just >>Add faster and bigger. Yeah. >>But what happens if, I'll give you a tease. What I think is, is what happens if this happens? So I've got much more rich feature, rich diverse set of tools looking after my systems, observing what's going on. And they go through a whole filtering process and they say such and such has happened, right? Wisdom picks that up and decides from that natural language statement that comes outta the back of that system. That's the task I think is now appropriate to run. Where do you run that? You need a secure execution capability. Pass that to an support, that single task. And now we run inside the automation platform at any of those locations that you just mentioned, right? Stitching those things together and having that sequence of events all the way through where you, you predefine what's possible. You know, you start to bias the system towards what is your accepted standard and then let those clever systems do what you are investing in them for, which is to run your IT and make it >>Easier. Rich here was on earlier, I said, hey, about voice activated it. Provision the cluster. Yeah. >>Last question guys, before we run out of time for this. For customers who take advantage of this new frontier, how can they get started with the bench of an what's? >>That's a good question. You know, we, we've engaged our community because they trust us and we trust them to build really good products. ansible.com/events. Oh man, >>I did have the, I >>Had the cup, the landing page. >>Find somebody find that. >>Well it's on GitHub, right? GitHub It is. >>Yeah it >>Is. Absolutely ansible.com. It's probably a link somewhere if I on the front page. Exactly. On GitHub. The good code too. >>Right? Exactly. And so look at there, you can see where we're going on our roadmap, what we're capable of today. Examples, we're gonna be doing labs and blogs and demonstrations of it over the next day, week, month. Right. You'll be able to see this evolve. You get to be the, the sort of vanguard of support and actions on this and >>Cause we really want, we really want users to play with it, right? Of course. We've been doing this for a while. We've seen what we think is right. We want users to play with it. Tell us whether the syntax works, whether it makes sense, how does it run, how does it work? That's the exciting part. But at the same time, we want the partners, you know, we, we don't know all the technologies, right? We want the partners that we have that work with us already in the community to go and sort of, you know, do those integrations, do those triggers to their systems, define rules for their stuff cuz they'll talk to their customers about it as >>Well. Right? Right. It'll be exciting to see what unfolds over the next six to nine months or so with the partners getting involved, the community getting involved. Guys, congratulations on the big announcements. Sounds like a lot of work. I can tell. We can tell. Your excitement level is huge and job well done. Thank you so much for joining us on the Cube. Thank you very much. Thank you. Our pleasure. Just All right, for our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, Ansible Fest 22. John and I will be right back with our next guest of Stay tuned.

(soft music) >> Welcome back to Chicago guys and gals. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We have been covering Ansible Fest '22 for the last two days. This is our show wrap. We're going to leave you with some great insights into the things that we were able to dissect over the last two days. John, this has been an action packed two days. A lot of excitement, a lot of momentum. Good to be back in person. >> It's great to be back in person. It was the first time for you to do Ansible Fest. >> Yes. >> My first one was 2019 in person. That's the last time they had an event in person. So again, it's a very chill environment here, but it's content packed, great active loyal community and is growing. It's changing. Ansible now owned by Red Hat, and now Red Hat owned by IBM. Kind of see some game changing kind of movements here on the chess board, so to speak, in the industry. Ansible has always been a great product. It started in open source. It evolved configuration management configuring servers, networks. You know, really the nuts and bolts of IT. And became a fan favorite mainly because it was built by the fans and I think that never stopped. And I think you started to see an opportunity for Ansible to be not only just a, I won't say niche product or niche kind of use case to being the overall capabilities for large scale enterprise system architectures, system management. So it's very interesting. I mean I find it fascinating how, how it stays relevant and cool and continues to power through a massive shift >> A massive shift. They've done a great job though since the inception and through the acquisition of being still community first. You know, we talked a lot yesterday and today about helping organizations become automation first that Ansible has really stayed true to its roots in being community first, community driven and really that community flywheel was something that was very obvious the last couple of days. >> Yeah, I mean the community thing is is is their production system. I mean if you look at Red Hat, their open source, Ansible started open source, good that they're together. But what people may or may not know about Ansible is that they build their product from the community. So the community actually makes the suggestions. Ansible's just in listening modes. So when you have a system that's that efficient where you have direct working backwards from the customer like that, it's very efficient. Now, as a product manager you might want to worry about scope creep, but at the end of the day they do a good job of democratizing that process. So again, very strong product production system with open source, very relevant, solves the right problems. But this year the big story to me is the cultural shift of Ansible's relevance. And I think with multicloud on the horizon, operations is the new kind of developer kind of ground. DevOps has been around for a while. That's now shifted up to the developer themselves, the cloud native developer. But at cloud scale and hybrid computing, it's about the operations. It's about the data and the security. All of it's about the data. So to me there's a new ops configuration operating model that you're seeing people use, SRE and DevOps. That's the new culture, and the persona's changing. The operator of a large scale enterprise is going to be a lot different than it was past five, 10 years. So major cultural shift, and I think this community's going to step up to that position and fill that role. >> They seem to be having a lot of success meeting people where they are, meeting the demographics, delivering on how their community wants to work, how they want to collaborate. But yesterday you talked about operations. We talked a lot about Ops as code. Talk about what does that mean from your perspective, and what did you hear from our guests on the program with respect that being viable? >> Well great, that's a great point. Ops as code is the kind of their next layer of progression. Infrastructure is code. Configuration is code. Operations is code. To me that means running the company as software. So software influencing how operators, usually hardware in the past. Now it's infrastructure and software going to run things. So ops as code's, the next progression in how people are going to manage it. And I think most people think of that as enterprises get larger, when they hear words like SRE, which stands for Site Reliable Engineer. That came out of Google, and Google had all these servers that ran the search engine and at scale. And so one person managed boatload of servers and that was efficient. It was like a multiple 10x engineer, they used to call it. So that that was unique to Google but not everyone's Google. So it became language or parlance for someone who's running infrastructure but not everyone's that scale. So scale is a big issue. Ops as code is about scale and having that program ability as an operator. That's what Ops as code is. And that to me is a sign of where the scale meets the automation. Large scale is hard to do. Automating at large scale is even harder. So that's where Ansible fits in with their new automation platform. And you're seeing new things like signing code, making sure it's trusted and verified. So that's the software supply chain issue. So they're getting into the world where software, open source, automation are all happening at scale. So to me that's a huge concept of Ops as code. It's going to be very relevant, kind of the next gen positioning. >> Let's switch gears and talk about the partner ecosystem. We had Stefanie Chiras on yesterday, one of our longtime theCUBE alumni, talking about what they're doing with AWS in the marketplace. What was your take on that, and what's the "what's in it for me" for both Red Hat, Ansible and AWS? >> Yeah, so the big news on the automation platform was one. The other big news I thought was really, I won't say watered down, but it seems small but it's not. It's the Amazon Web Services relationship with Red Hat, now Ansible, where Ansible's now a product in AWS's marketplace. AWS marketplace is kind of hanging around. It's a catalog right now. It's not the most advanced technical system in the world, and it does over 2 billion plus revenue transactions. So even if it's just sitting there as a large marketplace, that's already doing massive amounts of disruption in the procurement, how software is bought. So we interviewed them in the past, and they're innovating on that. They're going to make that a real great platform. But the fact that Ansible's in the marketplace means that their sales are going to go up, number one. Number two, that means customers can consume it simply by clicking a button on their Amazon bill. That means they don't have to do anything. It's like getting a PO for free. It's like, hey, I'm going to buy Ansible, click, click, click. And then by the way, draw that down from their commitment to AWS. So that means Amazon's going into business with Ansible, and that is a huge revenue thing for Ansible, but also an operational efficiency thing that gives them more of an advantage over the competition. >> Talk what's in it for me as a customer. At Red Hat Summit a few months ago they announced similar partnership with Azure. Now we're talking about AWS. Customers are living in this hybrid cloud world, often by default. We're going to see that proliferate. What do you think this means for customers in terms of being able to- >> In the marketplace deal or Ansible? >> Yeah, the marketplace deal, but also what Red Hat and Ansible are doing with the hyperscalers to enable customers to live successfully in the hyper hybrid cloud world. >> It's just in the roots of the company. They give them the choice to consume the product on clouds that they like. So we're seeing a lot of clients that have standardized on AWS with their dev teams but also have productivity software on Azure. So you have the large enterprises, they sit on both clouds. So you know, Ansible, the customer wants to use Ansible anyway, they want that to happen. So it's a natural thing for them to work anywhere. I call that the Switzerland strategy. They'll play with all the clouds. Even though the clouds are fighting against each other, and they have to to differentiate, there's still going to be some common services. I think Ansible fits this shim layer between clouds but also a bolt on. Now that's a really a double win for them. They can bolt on to the cloud, Azure and bolt on to AWS and Google, and also be a shim layer technically in clouds as well. So there's two technical advantages to that strategy >> Can Ansible be a facilitator of hybrid cloud infrastructure for organizations, or a catalyst? >> I think it's going to be a gateway on ramp or gateway to multicloud or supercloud, as we call it, because Ansible's in that configuration layer. So you know, it's interesting to hear the IBM research story, which we're going to get to in a second around how they're doing the AI for Ansible with that wisdom project. But the idea of configuring stuff on the fly is really a concept that's needed for multicloud 'Cause programs don't want to have to configure anything. (he laughs) So standing up an application to run on Azure that's on AWS that spans both clouds, you're going to need to have that automation, and I think this is an opportunity whether they can get it or not, we'll see. I think Red Hat is probably angling on that hard, and I can see them kind of going there and some of the commentary kind of connects the dots for that. >> Let's dig into some of news that came out today. You just alluded to this. IBM research, we had on with Red Hat. Talk about what they call project wisdom, the value in that, what it also means for for Red Hat and IBM working together very synergistically. >> I mean, I think the project wisdom is an interesting dynamic because you got the confluence of the organic community of Ansible partnering with a research institution of IBM research. And I think that combination of practitioners and research groups is going to map itself out to academic and then you're going to see this kind of collaboration going forward. So I think it's a very nuanced story, but the impact to me is very clear that this is the new power brokers in the tech industry, because researchers have a lot of muscle in terms of deep research in the academic area, and the practitioners are the ones who are actually doing it. So when you bring those two forces together, that pretty much trumps any kind of standards bodies or anything else. So I think that's a huge signaling benefit to Ansible and Red Hat. I think that's an influence of Red Hat being bought by IBM. But the project itself is really amazing. It's taking AI and bringing it to Ansible, so you can do automated configurations. So for people who don't know how to code they can actually just automate stuff and know the process. I don't need to be a coder, I can just use the AI to do that. That's a low code, no code dynamic. That kind of helps with skill gaps, because I need to hire someone to do that. Today if I want to automate something, and I don't know how to code, I've got to get someone who codes. Here I can just do it and automate it. So if that continues to progress the way they want it to, that could literally be a game changer, 'cause now you have software configuring machines and that's pretty badass in my opinion. So that thought that was pretty cool. And again it's just an evolution of how AI is becoming more relevant. And I think it's directionally correct, and we'll see how it goes. >> And they also talked about we're nearing an inflection point in AI. You agree? >> Yeah I think AI is at an inflection point because it just falls short on the scale side. You see it with chatbots, NLP. You see what Amazon's doing. They're building these models. I think we're one step away from model scaling. I think the building the models is going to be one of these things where you're going to start to see marketplace and models and you start to composability of AI. That's where it's going to get very interesting to see which cloud is the best AI scale. So I think AI at scale's coming, and that's going to be something to watch really closely. >> Something exciting. Another thing that was big news today was the event driven Ansible. Talk about that, and that's something they've been working on in conjunction with the community for quite a while. They were very proud of that release and what that's going to enable organizations to do. >> Well I think that's more meat on the bone on the AI side 'cause in the big trend right now is MLAI ops. You hear that a lot. Oh, data ops or AI ops. What event driven automation does is allows you to take things that are going on in your world, infrastructure, triggers, alarms, notifications, data pipelining flows, things that go on in the plumbing of infrastructure. are being monitored and observed. So when events happen they trigger events. You want to stream something, you send a trigger and things happen. So these are called events. Events are wide ranging number of events. Kafka streaming for data. You got anything that produces data is an event. So harnessing that data into a pipeline is huge. So doing that at scale, that's where I think that product's a home run, and I think that's going to be a very valuable product, 'cause once you understand what the event triggers are, you then can automate that, and no humans involved. So that will save a lot of time for people in the the higher pay grade of MLAI ops automate some of that low level plumbing. They move their skill set to something more valuable or more impactful. >> And we talked about, speaking of impact, we talked about a lot of the business impact that organizations across industries are going to be able to likely achieve by using that. >> Yeah, I mean I think that you're going to see the community fill the gap on that. I mean the big part about all this is that their community builds the product and they have the the playbooks and they're shareable and they're reusable. So we produce content as a media company. They'd talk about content as is playbooks and documentation for people to use. So reuse and and reusing these playbooks is a huge part of it. So as they build up these catalogs and these playbooks and rules, it gets better by the community. So it's going to be interesting to see the adoption. That's going to be a big tell sign for what's going to happen. >> Yep, we get definitely are going to be watching that space. And the last thing, we got to talk to a couple of customers. We talked to Wells Fargo who says "We are a tech company that does banking," which I loved. We got to talk with Rockwell Automation. What are some of your takeaways from how the customers are leveraging Ansible and the technology to drive their businesses forward to meet demanding customers where they are? >> I think you're seeing the script flipping a little bit here, where the folks that used to use Ansible for configuration are flipping to be on the front edge of the innovation strategy where what process to automate is going to drive the profitability and scale. Cause you're talking about things like skill gaps, workflows. These are business constructs and people These are assets so they have economic value. So before it was just, IT serve the business, configure some servers, do some stuff. When you start getting into automation where you have expertise around what this means, that's economic value. So I think you're going to see the personas change significantly in this community where they're on the front lines, kind of like developers are. That's why ops as code is to me a developer kind of vibe. That's going to completely change how operations runs in IT. And I think that's going to be a very interesting cultural shift. And some will make it, some won't. That's going to be a big thing. Some people say, I'm going to retire. I'm old school storage server person, or no, I'm the new guard. I'm going to be the new team. I'm going be on the right side of history here. So they're clearly going down that right path in my opinion. >> What's your overall summary in the last minute of what this event delivered the last couple of days in terms of really talking about the transformation of enterprises and industries through automation? >> I think the big takeaway from me in listening and reading the tea leaves was the Ansible company and staff and the community together. It was really a call for arms. Like, hey, we've had it right from the beginning. We're on the right wave and the wave's getting bigger. So expand your scope, uplevel your skills. They're on the right side of history. And I think the message was engage more. Bring more people in because it is open source, and if they are on that track, you're going to see more of hey, we got it right, let's continue. So they got platform release. They got the key products coming out after years of work. So you know, they're doing their work. And the message I heard was, it's bigger than we thought. So I think that's interesting. We'll see what that means. We're going to unpack that after the event in series of showcases. But yeah, it was very positive, I thought. Very positive. >> Yeah, I think there was definitely some surprises in there for them. John, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure co-hosting with you the last couple of days, really uncovering what Ansible is doing, what they're enabling customers in every industry to achieve. >> Been fun. >> Yes. All right for my co-host, John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE's coverage of Ansible Fest 2022 live from Chicago. We hope you take good care and we'll see you soon.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Chicago. The Cube is excited to be live on day two of Ansible Fest, 2022. Lisa Martin and John Fur. You're here having some great conversations, a lot of cube alumni, a lot of wisdom from the Ansible community coming at you on this program this week. You know, John, we've been, we've been hearing stories about the power and the capabilities and the collective wisdom of the Ansible community. You can feel it here. Yeah, there's no doubt about that. It's, Ansible is nothing, as Stephanie Chair said yesterday, if not a community and the significant contributions that it makes over and over again, or it's fuel. >>I mean the power of the community is what drives Ansible is gonna drive the future of, I think, cloud in our next generation modern application environment. And it's collective intelligence. It's a production system at the end of the day. And I think these guys have harnessed it. So it should be a really great segment to talk about all the contributor work that's been done. So I'm looking forward to it. >>We've got two great alumni here to talk about the contributor work, how you can get involved. Please welcome back to the cube. Carol Chen, principal community architect at Red Hat. Adam Miller joins us as well, fresh from the keynote stage senior principal software engineer at Red Hat. Guys, great to have you on the cube. Great to be here. Yeah, thank you. So we, we talked, we enjoyed your keynotes, Adam, and what you were talking about on stage, the Ansible contributor summit. That's, you guys have been doing what, this is the seven you've had seven so far in just a couple of years. >>Well, we had seven virtual contributor summits. >>Seven virtual. This is the first Monday was the first in person in. >>First in person since the pandemic and actually the 15th contributor summit overall >>15th overall. Talk about the contributor summits, what the contributors are able to do and the influence that it's having on Ansible Red Hat and what people are able to do with cloud. At the Edge automation. Yeah. >>So our community contributors have always had ways to influence and contribute to the project. But the contributor Summit is really a place where we can get people together, preferably in the same place so that we can, you know, have a really great dynamic conversations and interactions. But we also want to make sure that we don't leave out people who have been constantly online joining us. So this year we are so happy to be here in Chicago in person. We've had about 60 to 70 here joining us. And at first I thought maybe we'll have one third of the attendees joining online because about 30 to 40 people signed up to join online. But in the end, we have more than 100 per people watching our live stream. So that's more than half of the attendees overall, were joining us online. So that really shows where, you know, the contributors are interested in participating for >>Develop. Right. Yeah, it's been, it's been interesting. It's been since 2019, since the in-person Ansible Fest in Atlanta. Now we're in Chicago, we had the pandemic. Couple interesting observations from our side that I wanna get your reaction to Adam Carol. And that is one Ansible's relevance has grown significantly since then. Just from a cloud growth standpoint, developer open source standpoint, and how people work and collaborate has changed. So your contributor based in your community is getting more powerful in scope, in my opinion. Like in, as they become, have the keys to the kingdom in the, in their respective worlds as it gets bigger and larger. So the personas are changing, the makeup of the community's changing and also how you guys collaborate is changing. Can you share your, what's going on with those two dynamics? Cause I think that power dynamic is, is looking really good. How are you guys handling >>That? Yeah, so I mean, I, I had the opportunity to represent the community on stage yesterday as part of the keynote and talk to this point specifically is one of the things that we've seen is the project has had the opportunity to kind of grow and evolve. There's been certain elements that have had to kind of decompose from a technology perspective. We actually had to kind of break it apart and change the architecture a little bit and move things into what are called Ansible collections, which, you know, folks here are very familiar with No One Love. And we've seen a lot of community work in the form of working groups coalesce around those organically. However, they've done so in kind of different ways. They, they pick tools and collaboration platforms that are popular to their subject matter expertise audience and things like that. So we find ourselves in a place where kind of the, the community itself had more or less segmented naturally in a way. And we needed to find ways to, you know, kind of ke that >>Fragmentation by demographics or by expertise or both as >>A Mostly, mostly expertise. Yeah. And so there was a open source technology called Matrix. It is a open source, standardized, federated messaging platform that we're able to use to start to bridge back some of those communities that have kind of broken off and, and made their their own home elsewhere on the internet. So now we're able to, for example, the right, the docs organization, they had a, a group of people who was very interested in contributing to the Ansible documentation, but they'd already self-organized on Discord. And what was interesting there is the existing team for the Ansible documentation, they were already on internet Relay Chat, also known as irc. And Matrix allowed us to actually bring those two together and bridge that into the other matrix cha chat channels that we had. So now we're able to have people from all over the world in different areas and different platforms, coalesce and, and cross. It's like a festival cross pollinate. Yeah. >>And you're meeting the contributors exactly where they are and where they want to be, where they're comfortable. >>Yes. Yeah, we always say we, we reach out to where they are. So, >>And, and, and much in the way that Ansible has the capability to reach out to things in their own way, Right. And allow that subject matter expertise to, you know, cause the technology has the potential and possibility and capability to talk to anything over any protocol. We're able to do, you know, kind of the same thing with Matrix, allowing us to bridge into any chat platform that it has support for bridging and, and we're able to bring a lot of people >>Together. Yeah. And how's that, how's the feedback been on that so far? >>I, I think it has been very positive. For example, I want to highlight that the technical writers that we have contributing via Discord is actually a group from Nigeria. And Dave also participated in the contributor summit online virtually joining us in, in, you know, on the matrix platform. So that, that bridge that really helps to bring together people from different geographical regions and also different topics and arenas like that. >>So what were some of the outcomes of the contributor summit? The, the first in person in a while, great. That you guys were able to do seven virtually during the pandemic. That's hard. It's hard to get people together. You, there's so much greatness and innovation that comes when we're all together in person that just can't replicate by video. You can do a lot. Right. But talk about some of the outcomes from Monday. What were some of the feedback? What were some of the contributions that you think are really going to impact the community? >>I think for a lot of us, myself included, the fact that we are in person and meeting people face to face, it helps to really build the connections. And when we do talk about contribution, the connection is so important that you understand, well this person a little bit about their background, what they've done for the SPO project and or just generally what, what they're interested in that builds the rapport and connection that helps, you know, further, further collaboration in the future. Because maybe on that day we did not have any, you know, co contributions or anything, but the fact that we had a chance to sit together in the same place to discuss things and share new ideas, roadmaps is really the, the kind of a big step to the future for our community. Yes, >>Yes. And in a lot of ways we often online the project has various elements that are able to function asynchronously. So we work very well globally across many time zones. And now we were able to get a lot of people in the same place at the same time, synchronously in the same time zone. And then we had breakout sessions where the subject matter, you know, working groups were able to kind of go and focus on things that maybe have been taking a little while to discuss in, in that asynchronous form of communication and do it synchronously and, you know, be in the same room and work on things. It's been, it's been fantastic >>Developers there, like they, they take to asynchronous like fish to water. It's not a problem. But I do want to ask if there's any observations that you guys have had now that we're kind of coming out of that one way, but the pandemic, but the world's changed. It's hybrid, hybrid work environment, steady state. So we see that. Any observations on your end on what's new that you observed that people are gravitating to? Is there a pattern of styles is or same old self-governing, or what's new? What do you see that's coming out of the pandemic that might be a norm? >>I I think that even though people are excited to get back in person, there are, things have changed, like you said, and we have to be more aware of, there are people who think that not be in person, it's okay. And that's how they want to do it. And we have to make sure that they, they are included. So we, we did want to make a high priority for online participation in this event. And like I said, even though only 4 30, 40 people signed up to join us online initially, so that it was what we were expecting, but in the end, more than 100 people were watching us and, and joining participation in >>Actually on demand consumption be good too, >>Right? Yeah. So, you know, I think going forward that is probably the trend. And as, as much as we, we love being in person, we, we want this to continue that we, we take care of people who are, has been constantly participating online and contributing you >>Meaning again, meaning folks where they are, but also allowing the, the, those members that want to get together to, to collaborate in person. I can only imagine the innovation that's gonna come even from having part of the back, Right. >>And, and not to continue to harp on the matrix point, but it, it's been very cool because Matrix has the ability to do live video sessions using open source another to open source technology called jy. So we're able to actually use the same place that we normally find ourselves, you know, congregating and collaborating for the project itself in an asynchronous and, you know, somewhat synchronous way to also host these types of things that are, are now hybrid that used to be, you know, all one way or all the other. Yeah. And it's been, it's >>Been incredible. Integration is, the integration is have been fascinating to watch how you guys do that. And also, you know, with q we've been virtual too. It's like, it's like people don't want another microsite, but they want a more of a festival vibe, a hub, right? Like a place to kind of check in and have choice, not get absolutely jammed into a, you know, forum or, you know, or whatever. Hey, if you wanna be on Discord, be on Discord, right? Why >>Not? And we still, you know, we do still have our asynchronous forms of >>Work through >>Our get GitHub. We have our projects, we have our issues, we have our, you know, wiki, we have various elements there that everybody can continue to collaborate on. And it's all been, it's all been very good. >>Speaking of festivals, octoberfest that's going on, not to be confused with Octoberfest, that was last month. Talk about how the Ansible project and the Ansible community is involved in Octoberfest. Give us the dates, Carol. So >>YesTo Fest is a annual thing in October. So October Octoberfest, I think it's organized by Digital Ocean for the past eight or nine years. And it's really a, a way to kind of encourage people to contribute to open source projects. So it's not anal specific, but we as an Ansible project encourage people to take this opportunity to, you know, a lot of them doing their first contributions during this event. And when, when we first announced, we're participating in Octoberfest within the first four days of October, which is over a weekend actually. We've had 24 contributions, it, 24 issues fixed, which is like amazing, like, you know, just the interest and the, the momentum that we had. And so far until I just checked with my teammates this morning that we've had about 35 contributions so far during the month, which is, and I'm sorry, I forgot to mention this is only for Ansible documentation. So yeah, specifically. And, and that's also one thing we want to highlight, that contributions don't just come in code in, you know, kind of software side, but really there's many ways to contribute and documentation is such a, a great way for first time users, first time contributors to get involved. So it's really amazing to see these contributions from all over the world. And also partly thanks to the technical writers in Nigeria kind of promoting and sharing this initiative. And it's just great to see the, the results from that. Can >>You double click on the different ways of contribution? You mentioned a couple documentation being one, code being the other, but what is the breadth of opportunities that the contributors have to contribute to the project? >>Oh, there's, there's so many. So I actually take care more of outreach efforts in the community. So I helped to organize events and meetups from around the world. And now that we're slowly coming out of the pandemic, I've seen more and more in person meetups. I was just talking to someone from Minneapolis, they're trying to get, get people back together again. They have people in Singapore, in Netherlands from pretty much, you know, all corners of the globe wanting to form not just for the Ansible project, but the local kind of connection with the re people in the region, sometimes in their own language, in their local languages to really work together on the project and just, >>You know, you to create a global Yeah. Network, right? I mean it's like Ansible Global. >>Exactly. >>Create local subnets not to get all networking, >>Right? >>Yeah. >>Yeah. One, one quick thing I want to touch on Theto Fest. I think it's a great opportunity for existing contributors to mentor cause many people like to help bring in new contributors and this is kind of a focal point to be able to focus on that. And then to, to the the other point we, you know, it, it's been, it's been extremely powerful to see as we return these sub communities pop up and, and kind of work with themselves, so on different ways to contribute. So code is kind of the one that gets the most attention. I think documentation I think is a unsung hero, highly important, great way. The logistical component, which is invaluable because it allows us to continue with our adoption and evangelization and things like that. So specifically adoption and evangelize. Evangelization is another place that contributors can join and actually spawn a local meetup and then connect in with the existing community and try to, you know, help increase the network, create a new subject. Yeah. >>Yeah. Network affects huge. And I think the thing that you brought up about reuse is, is part of that whole things get documented properly. The leverage that comes out of that just feeds into the system that flywheel. Absolutely. I mean it's, that's how communities are supposed to work, right? Yep. Yes. >>That's what I was just gonna comment on is the flywheel effect that it's clearly present and very palpable. Thank you so much for joining John, me on the program, talking about the contributors summit, the ways of contribution, the impacts that are being made so far, what Octoberfest is already delivering. And we're, we still have about 10 days or so left in October, so there's still more time for contributors to get involved. We thank you so much for your insights and your time. Thank >>You. Thank you so much for having us. >>Our pleasure. For our guests and John Purer, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, day two of our coverage of Red Hat Ansible Summit 22. We will see you right n after this short break with our next guest.

>>Good morning, everyone from Chicago Live. The Cube is live at Ansible Fast 2022. Lisa Martin and John Ferer are here for two days of multiple coverage on the cube. Very excited to be back in person. Ansible's 10th anniversary, the first in-person event. John, since 2019. Yeah, great to be perfect. One of the nuggets dropped this morning and I know you was Opss code. >>Yeah, we're gonna hear about that OPSIS code here in this segment. We're gonna get in, but the leader of the, the business unit at Ansible, part of Red Hat. So look forward >>To this. Exactly. Tom Anderson joins us, one of our alumni. Welcome back to the program. Thank you. The VP and general manager of Red Hat. First of all, how great is it to be back in person with live guests and an engaged audience and then robust community? >>It is amazing. It really is. I kind of question whether this day was ever gonna come again after three years of being apart, but to see the crowd here and to see, like you said, the energy in the room this morning and the keynotes, it's fantastic. So it's fa I just couldn't be happier. >>So opsis code nugget drop this morning. Yep. We wanna dissect that with you as, as that was mentioned in the keynote this morning. As Ansible is pushing into the cloud and and into the edge, what does OPSIS code mean for end users and how is it gonna help them to use a term that was used a lot in the keynote level up their automation? >>Yeah, so what we see is, look, the day zero, day one provisioning of infrastructure. There's lots of tools, there's lots of ways to do that. Again, it's just the company's ambition and dedication to doing it. The tools are there, they can do that. We see the next big opportunity for automation is in day two operations. And what's happening right now in ops is that you have multiple clouds, you've got multiple data centers and now you've got edge environments. The number of things to manage on a day-to-day basis is only increasing. The complexity is only increasing this idea of a couple years ago where we're gonna do shift everything left onto the developer. It's nice idea, but you still have to operate these environments on a day two basis. So we see this opportunity as opsis code, just like we did infrastructures code, just like we did configuration as code. We see the next frontier as operations code. >>Yeah, and this is really a big trend as you know with cube reporting a lot on the cloud native velocity of the modern application developer these days, they're under, they're, it's a great time to be a software developer because all the open source goodness is happening, but they're going faster. They want self-service, they want it built in secure, They need guardrails, they need, they need faster ops. So that seems to be the pressure point. Is ops as code going to be that solution? Because you have a lot of people talking about multi-cloud, multiple environments, which sounds great on paper, but when you try to execute it, Yeah, there's complexity. So you know, the goal of complexity management has really been one of the key things around ops. How do I keep speed up and how do I reduce the complexities? These are big. How does, how does ops code fit into that? >>Yeah, so look, we, we see Ansible as this common automation back plane, if you will, that goes across all of these environments. It provides a common abstraction layer so that whether you're running on Azure, whether you're a GCP or whether you're AWS or whether you're, you know, a PLC out on a shop industrial edge floor with a plc, each of those things need to be automated. If we can abstract that into a common automation language, then that allows these domain experts to be able to offer their services to developers in a way that promotes the acceleration, if you will, of those developers tasks. And that developer doesn't have to know about the underlying complexities of storage or database or cloud or edge. They can just do their >>Job. You know, Tom, one of the things I observed in Keynote, and it comes across every time I, we have an event and in person it's more amplified. Cause you see it, the loyalty of the customer base. You have great community. It's very not corporate like here. It's very no big flashy news. But there's some news, hard news, It's very community driven. Check the box there. So continuing on the roots, I wanna get your thoughts on how now the modern era we're in, in this world, the purchasing power, again, I mentioned multicloud looks good on paper, which every CX I wanna be multiple clouds. I want choice now. Now you talk to the people running things like, whoa, hold on, boss. Yeah, the bottoms up is big part of the selection process of how people select and buying consume technology with open source, you don't need to like do a full buy. You can use open source and then get Ansible. Yeah. This is gonna be a big part of how the future of buying product is and implementing it. So I think it's gonna be a groundswell, bottoms up market in this new cloud native with O in the ops world. What's your reaction to that? What's your thoughts? >>So here, here's my thoughts. The bulk of the people here are practitioners. They love Ansible, they use Ansible in their day to day job. It's how it helped, makes 'em successful. Almost every executive that I go out and talk to and our customers, they tell me one of their number one pro or their number one problem is attracting you talent and retaining the talent that they have. And so how can they do that? They can give them the tools to do their job, the tools that they actually like. So not a top down, you know, old fashioned systems management. You're gonna use this tool whether you like it or not. But that bottoms up swell of people adopting open source tools like Ansible to do their job and enjoy it. So I see it as a way of the bottoms up addressing the top down initiative of the organization, which is skills retention, skills enhancement. And that's what we focus on here at this event. Are the practitioners, >>Is that the biggest customer conversation topic these days? Is this the skills gap, retention, attraction talent? Would you say it's more expansive as the organizations are so different? >>Well, so a lot of the folks that I meet are, you know, maybe not sea level, but they're executives in the organization, right? So they're struggling with attract, you know, pretty much everywhere I go, I was in Europe this summer, conversation was always the same. We got two problems. Tracking people. We can't find people, people we find we can't afford. So we need to automate what they would do. And, and then the second piece is the complexity of our environment is growing, right? I'm being asked to do more and I can't find more people to do it. What's my solution? It's automation, you know, at the end of the day, that's what it comes down to. >>It's interesting, the people who are gonna be involved in the scaling horizontally with automation are gonna have the keys to the kingdom. The old joke when it was, you know, they run everything. They power the business now the business is digital. You gotta be hybrid. So we see hybrids a steady state right now, hybrid cloud. When you bring the edge into the equation, how do you see that developing? Because we think it's gonna be continually be hybrid and that's gonna extend out on the edge. What is the ansible's view on how the edge evolves? What's, what's going on there? Can you share your thoughts on the expansion to the edge? >>There's a, our experience is there's a rapid modernization happening out at the edge, industrial edge, you know, oil and gas platforms, retail locations, industrial floors, all that kind of stuff. We see this convergence of OT and IT happening right now where some of the disciplines that enterprises have used in the IT area are gonna expand out into ot. But some of the requirements of ot of not having skilled IT resources, you know, in the store, in the fast food restaurant, on the oil platform, needing to have the tools to be able to automate those changes remotely. We're seeing a real acceleration of that right now. And frankly, Ansible's playing a big role in that. And it's connecting a lot of the connective tissue is around network. What is the key piece that connects all of this environment as network and those number of endpoints that need to be managed. Ansible is, you know, >>It's way use case for Ansible because Ansible built their business on configuration automation, which was don't send someone out to that branch office back in the old days. Exactly. Do it. Manual versus automation. Hey, automation every time. Yes. This is at large scale. I mean the scale magnitude, can you scope the scale of what's different? I mean go even go back 10 years, okay, where we were and how we got here, where we are today. Scope the size of the scale that's happening here. >>You know, hundreds of thousands of endpoints and things. That's not even the API points, but that's the kind of compute points, the network points, the servers it's in. It's, it's, you know what we would've never thought, you know, 10 years ago, a thousand endpoints was a lot or 10,000 endpoints was a lot of things to manage when you start talking about network devices. Yeah, yeah. Home network devices for employees that are remote employees that need to be in a secured network. Just the order of magnitude, maybe two orders of magnitude larger than it has been in the past. And so again, coming home to the automation world, >>The world's spun in your front, your front door right now. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, >>Absolutely. Talk about, you talked about the acceleration. If we think of about the proliferation of, of devices online, especially the last two years, when, to your point, so many people shifted to remote and are still there. What are some of the, the changes in automation that we've seen as businesses have had to pivot and change so frequently and so many times to be successful? >>Yeah, so here's what we've seen, which is it's no longer acceptable for the owner of the network team or the ownership of the database or of the storage facility to, you can't wait for them to offer their service to people. Self-service is now the rule of thumb, right? So how can those infrastructure owners be able to offer their services to non IT people in a way that manages their compliance and makes them feel that they can get those resources without having to come and ask. And they do that by automating with Ansible and then offering those as package services out to their developers, to their QE teams, to their end users, to be able to consume and subscribe to that infrastructure knowing that they are the ones who are controlling how it's being provisioned, how it's being used. >>What are some of the, there were some great customers mentioned this morning in the keynote, but do you have a favorite example of a customer, regardless of industry that you think really shows the value and, and the evolution of the Ansible platform in its first 10 years and that really articulates the business value that automation delivers to a company? >>Yeah, no, it's a great question. I would think that, you know, if you wound the clock back 10 years, Ansible was all about server configuration management, right? That's what it was about was per provisioning, provisioning, you know, VMware infrastructure, vSphere, and then loading on VMs on top of that as it's expanded into network, into security and to storage and to database into cloud. It's become a much broader platform, if you will. And a good example is we have a customer, large oil and gas customer who is modernizing their oil platforms. I can imagine I not, I've not been on one, but I imagine the people that are out working on that oil platforms have greasy hands that are pushing on things. And they had this platform that the technology modernization included Azure. So connecting to data on Azure, rolling out new application updates, has to have a firewall, has to have network capabilities, has to have underlying OS to be able to do that. And Ansible was the glue that brought all that together to be able to modernize that oil platform. And so for me, that's the kind of thing where it sort of makes it real. You know, the actual businesses, >>The common set of services, this is, this is where we're seeing multi-cloud. Yeah. You start to have that conversation where, okay, I got this edge, it kind of looks the same, I gotta make it work. I'm a developer, I want some compute, I want to put this together. I have containers and orchestration behind it and kind of seeing the same kind of pattern. Yeah. Evolving at scale. So you guys have the platform, okay, I'm an open source. I love the open source. I got the platform 2.3, I see supply chain management in there. You got trusted signatures. That's a supply chain. We've been hearing a lot about security in the code. What else is in the platform that's updated? Can you share the, the, the new things that people should pay attention to in the platform? >>Yeah, we're gonna talk about a couple of things smaller around event driven Ansible, which is bringing Ansible into that really day two ops world where it's sort of hands free automation and, and, and operations where rather than someone pushing a button to trigger or initiate a piece of, of automation, an event will take place. I've detected an outta space condition, I've detected a security violation, I've detected something. Go to a rule book. That rule book will kick off in automation close that remediate that problem and close the thing without anyone ever having to do anything with that. So that's kind of one big area. And we're gonna talk tomorrow. We've got a real special announcement tomorrow with our friends from IBM research that I'm gonna, >>We'll have you on 10 30 Martha Calendars. >>But there's some really great stuff going on on the platform as we start to expand these use cases in multiple directions and how we take Ansible out to more and more people, automation out to more and more people from the inside, experts out to the consumers of automation, make it easier to create automation. >>Yeah. And one of the things I wanted to follow up on that and the skill gap, tying that together is you seeing heard in the keynote today around Stephanie was talking about enterprise architecture. It's not, I won't say corner case answer. I mean it's not one niche or narrow focus. Expanding the scope was mentioned by Katie, expand your scope grow, you got a lot of openings. People are hire now, Now Ansible is part of the enterprise architecture. It's not just one thing, it's, it's a complete, Explain what that means for the folks out there. Yeah. >>So when you start to connect what I call the technology domains, so the network team uses Ansible to automate their network infrastructure and configure all their systems. And the compute team uses it to deploy new servers on aws. And the security ops team use it to go out and gather facts when they have a threat detection happening and the storage team is using it to provision storage. When you start to then say, Okay, we have all these different domains and we want to connect those together into a set of workflows that goes across all of those domains. You have this common language and we're saying, okay, so it's not just the language, it's also the underlying platform that has to be scalable. It's gotta be secure. We talked about signing content. I mean, people don't understand the risk of an automation gone wild. You can, you can do a lot of damage to your infrastructure real fast with automation, just like you can do repair, right? So is what's running in my environment secure? Is it performant and is it scalable? I mean, those are the two, those are the three areas that we're really looking at with the platform right >>Now. Automation gone wild, it sounds like the next reality TV show. Yeah, I >>May, I may regret saying that. >>Sounds >>Like great. Especially on live tv. Great, >>Great podcast title right there. I made a mental note. Automation Gone Wild episode one. Here we are >>Talk about Ansible as is really being the, the catalyst to allow organizations to truly democratize automation. Okay. You, you talked about the different domains there and it seems to me like it's, it's positioned to really be the catalyst that's the driver of that democratization, which is where a lot of people wanna get to. >>Yeah. I mean for us, and you'll see in our sessions at Ansible Fest, we talk a lot about the culture, the culture of automation, right? And saying, okay, how do you include more and more people in your organization in this process? How can you get them to participate? So we talk about these ideas of communities of practice. So we bring the open source, the concepts of open source communities down into enterprises to build their own internal communities of practice around Ansible, where they're sharing best practices, skills, reusable content. That is one of the kind of key factors that we see as a success in inside organizations is the scales, is sort of bringing everybody into that culture of automation and not being afraid of automation saying, Look, it's not gonna take my job, it's gonna help me do my job better. >>Exactly. That automation argument always went, went to me crazy. Oh yeah, automating is gonna take my job away. You know, bank teller example, there's more bank tellers now than ever before. More atm. So the, the job shifts, I mean the value shifts. Yeah. This is kind of where the, where the automation helps. What's real quick, final minute we have left. Where does that value shift? I'm the person being automated away or job. Yeah. Where do you see the value job? Cause it's still tons of openings for people's skills, >>You know? So we see the shift from, particularly in operations from, here's my job, I look at a ticket queue, I grab a ticket, it's got a problem, I go look at a log, I look for a string and a log, I find out the air and I go, configuration change that. That's not a really, I wouldn't call that a fund existence for eight or 10 hours a day, but the idea, if I can use automation to do that for me and then focus on innovating, creating new capabilities in my environment, then you start to attract a new, you know, the next generation of operations people into a much more exciting role. >>Yeah. Architects too, they turned into architects that turned into the multiple jobs scope. It's like multi-tool player. It's like >>A, you know, Yeah, yeah. The five tool player, >>Five tool player in baseball is the best of the best. But, but kind of that's what's >>Happening. That's exactly what's happening, right? That's exactly what's happening. And it helps address that skills challenge. Yeah. And the talent challenge that organizations have as well. >>And everybody wants to be able to focus on delivering value to the organization. I have to get the end of the day. That's a human component that we all want. So it sounds like Ansible is well on its way to helping more and more organizations across industries achieve just that. Tom, it's great to have you back on the program. Sounds like you're coming back tomorrow, so we get day two of Tom. All right, excellent. Look forward to it. Congratulations on the first in-person event in three years and we look forward to talking to you >>Tomorrow. Thank you so much. >>All right, for our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, Day one of our coverage of Ansible Fest 2022. Stick around. John and I welcome back another Cube alumni next.

>>Hello from Chicago, Lisa Martin, back with you and John Furrier. This is day one of the Cube's coverage of Ansible Fest 2022. John, we've been having great conversations all morning about automation and how it's really pivotal and central. One of the things that we want to talk about next is automation as a strategy. Yeah. You know, some of the barriers to customer adoption, one of them is, well, can we, can we really understand where the most ROI is gonna be? But another one is automation happening kind of in pockets and silos. And we're gonna be talking next with one of our alumni about breaking those down. >>This is gonna be a great segment from the customer perspective, the conversations they're having problems trying to solve, and really got a great cube alumni back to share. And we're excited. It's be a good segment. >>We do have a great alumni, Walter Bentley, Fresh from the keynote stages back with us, the senior manager of the automation practice at Red Hat. Walter, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me back. I really look forward to doing this every year and you know, it's, it's >>Exciting. So we had your great energetic keynote this morning and you were really talking about organizations need to think about automation from a strategic lens perspective, a really a true long term investment. Where are most organizations today and how are you gonna help them get there? >>Right. So most organizations today are kind of in that sweet spot where they've discovered that they can do the tactical automation and they can deal with those small day-to-day things. And now they wanna move into the space where they're really able to plug automation into their current workflows and try to optimize it. And, and that's the perfect direction to be heading. And, and what I always encourage our customers is that once you get to that point, don't stop. You gotta keep going because the next phase is, is when you begin to innovate with automation. And when automation is at first is, is at the beginning of the, of everything you're creating. And at that point, that's when you're really gonna see the great benefits from it. >>How have your customer conversations evolved over the last couple of years, particularly as the world has changed, but we've also seen the acceleration of automation and so much, so much advancement in the technology. >>Right. You know, you'll be shocked that our customers wanted us to speak to them in more of an enterprise architecture level. They wanted us to really be able to come in and help them design how they're going to lay out their automation vision. And that surprised me at first. My background being in architecture for many years, I didn't know that, you know, automation had evolved to that level. And, and that was one of the things that we, we tried to do our best to rise to the occasion and be able to answer that call. >>You know, Walter, one of the things when we were in person last in 2019, you were on the cube and then we did the remote. We were kind of right. You got it right. When we were, we were talking about this, Hey, if this goes the way we think it's gonna go, the automation layer is gonna be horizontally scaled with the cloud. So income, cloud, growth, lift and shift. Now I got some refactored applications in the cloud and I got on premises edge coming hybrid steady state. What does automation look like? You had said it's gonna scale. Yep. And so as clients realize, well this is was the kind of a group within the group doing some automation stuff with Ansible, all great stuff, Product leadership, great community check, check, check. Now, how do you make that a global architecture for a company? What, what's it take to make that an enterprise scale architecture? What's the next step for the, for the journey and, and for the community and the customers? >>So one of the major announcements today is actually one of the right steps in the right direction, which is now that you can deploy a on all of your hyperscalers, right? So you have it local, you're covering your private cloud area, now you're able to cover your hyperscalers. Now it's time to unite them together so that they can all kind of work as one function. And to me, that is the enterprise approach that that to aap. And I'm just so excited that we finally have rolled it out for aws. We have it for Azure, of course we have it inside. And we're also working on things like you said, like the edge, but also things like making sure we're covering customers that are air gaped customers that do not have the capability of the ingress in, in, in, in being, of being able to go in and out of that environment and that network. Right. We're working on strategic, strategic solutions to be able to do that better >>For what's interesting, we've been talking about super cloud on the cube. I, we coined that term at reinvent about people using cloud in a different way to kind of do things and it's become kind of also a, a term for multi-cloud. Yes. So if you think about what you just said, it's interesting, this cloud services that could, they all have stores, they have compute, There might be a day where they're all kind of invisible. Yes. And you can have spanning services across the cloud, but yet they can still differentiate on their own. So it's not so much about sneakers, it's more about that interoperability. How do you see that? What's your reaction to that? Right. >>Well, that's one of the core reasons why we move to the name of the answ automation platform. Platform being the key right? Is, is the platform is supposed to be able to span into different environments and really kind of unite them together. And that was one of the the things that I really liked about when we went to that late last year. Yeah. Late last year. And, and we've been working with our customers and make sure that we make that front and center, that they move towards that environment so that they can begin to do better scale and really operate at that, at that executive level. >>What's your favorite customer story that you think really articulates the value of what you just said? >>Right. So the one, so I'll give you a different one from the one that I, that I talked about on stage. And, and again, it it, when we went in from a services engagement, we did not expect the outcome of the fact that they would access this particular customer. We went in something very tactical, just laying down the platform for them. And, and the expectation was we would lay it down and walk away and then hopefully they would pick it up and kind of run with it. What we came to realize is that they liked the oversight and they liked the way that we were working with them. And they wanted to take those preferred approaches and really embed them Right. And their organization. And so they invited us back actually for two or three different consulting engagements to come back and just help them drive that adoption. And this is at the, they're at the very beginning, right? So they're doing it a little bit different in a lot of other organizations. The other organizations would lay down the platform, do some things, and then call us back to help them them with adoption, Right. >>Is the report card out? Yeah, >>Absolutely. They did it differently. And, and that to me stood out as the level of maturity their IT organization is. >>It sounds like they went from tactical to strategic Yes. Pretty quickly. Which is not normally the >>Case. No, no, not at all. Not normally the case. But as you can clearly see that, we're starting to see that more and more with our customers. They're upleveling, I hate for the theme, but they're upleveling. Right. And, and, and that's what I meant by my organization, my team that I, that I run, we have to do more with our customers because they're expecting more >>For them to level up. And I loved how that was used this morning. I'm like, Yeah, that's a cool term. Level up. We all gotta level up to some degree. How are you helping organizations do that from a cultural shift perspective? Because of course the people are so integral to this being successful. Can't forget >>That. Absolutely. So, you know, you know, remember the days of when you would have the DevOps team and that was like the thing, like you have to form your DevOps team and once you got that, you're good to go. And, and I always tell our customers that's a good start, but that's definitely not where you want to end. And you have to get to the point where you have all parts of your organization writing automation content, feeling comfortable, being able to kind of control their day to day. And so that's where you have to break down those silos. You have to really have those, you know, your operators and your developers and, and your DBAs and your networking folks really communicating. And, and if everyone kind of takes care of their own world and write content to control what they do on a day to day, they can bring those together. >>Walter, on buzzword it's been kicking around Silicon Valley in the tech industry re recently is multiplayer versus single player software. Yes. And I I heard that must be from gamers obviously. Yes. Discourse pop. I heard that on, stayed here in the matrix announcement earlier. You know, when you talk about teamwork ops devs while working together, clearly the operator role is changing. What that means is changing devs are getting stronger and more open source, they're shifting left and all that good stuff in the, in the CID pipeline as the teams work together, multiplayer in an organization. What's the success form of that you see emerging for how to organize, how to motivate, how to get people kind of in a good, you know, teamwork pass score kind of team oriented approach? >>Well, I'm really proud to talk about is how AAP has really enabled that and, and kind of fast tracks that ability for everyone to work together within a, the all the functionality that's now built into it. There's pieces of it that are focused on different operators or different parts of the IT organization, right. And, and, and we're made to be able to help to bring them all together. You know, I love the components such as the service catalog. You know, imagine being able to have a place where you can publish all of your, your content for other people to consume. You know, back in the day everything was stored in, in a repository, right? And you had to know what you were looking for. And so just small changes like that, having the, the, the Ansible toy, right? So you're having tools that are actually built in for those who are writing the content to be able to have at their fingertips the ability to test their content right from inside of the, the, the toy, right? So the terminal interface, just those small little nuances to me is what helps to bring it all together and kind of create that >>Great leverage glue. Yes. Not a lot of busy work and you know, absolutely. Hunting and packing for stuff like configuring manually. >>Absolutely. >>Awesome. What's next for you guys? >>Well, you know, we have some big announcements coming up tomorrow. I won't, I won't get into as much as I want to talk about >>It. Events. Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. Something starts with the e but also some really fantastic technology. We're, what we're doing is, is we're really taking the idea of automation and really feeding into it in a sense that we're building into some mar some, some really smart technology into aap. And I'm, I'm, I'm excited, I'm excited for direction it's going and I know everyone tomorrow are gonna really, really hear some great >>Things. We heard upleveling, we heard upleveling culture shift. If I asked you what does culture shift mean, how would you answer that? >>I would answer that in a sense that it, it, the culture shift is, is shifting from the place where you feel that you're on an island and you have to solve for it alone as well as feeling that you have to solve for the whole ribbon of whatever you're working on. And that culture shift is moving from that mentality to the fact that you have a whole team of folks who may know how to solve for that already. And you feel comfortable being able to reach out to them and work with them to be able to build that. And that's, that to me is the change. You know, I'm, I'm a old school infrastructure dude, you know, I was the one who would, who would wake up two o'clock in the morning to fix a problem, right? I thought it was on me, but now the culture shift is now it's, we are a team and we're gonna work together to solve it. So that's, that's kind of my view on >>It. And the appetite in organizations is there, cuz oftentimes in the, in the siloed world, it's, I own this, this is my baby. Right? Right. How do you help them as a, as a trusted advisor to really open up the kimono and embrace that collaboration? Because ultimately that's the right strategic direction for the business, >>Right? The first step in that is making sure that everyone is kind of operating from the same book, right. Or the same plan. And, and until you actually write that plan down and publish it in a place for other people to consume it, it creates a little bit of a barrier, right? So that's the first thing we do is write down that plan, make it available for all the consume. And at the beginning, you know, not everyone runs to it, but over time if their curiosity begins to peak and then over time they begin to consume it and possibly contribute to it themselves over time, that's, that's how we kind of conquer that. And so far we've seen some good success. >>What would you say if someone said, you know, I want some proof, proof in the pudding proven methods to help accelerate the time to value with automation and help organizations to really understand and quantify the ROI for doing so. >>Right. And, and to me that's, this is the conversation I love having because we've, we've come out with something that we call success metrics and, and yes, they are exactly what they sound like, right? There are some metrics that you can use to measure in your organization to kind of determine your maturity around automation. The two key things that I would love to share about that is that when we think of metrics, right? We think of performance, we think of, you know, how well something is running, how long it's been running. Those are all great, but the two additional success metrics that we include in there are around more of the cultural field. The perception, right? The perception as well as how comfortable your employees feel using that product. And that's where that, that the shift of looking at the cultural, not just the technical side, but the cultural side of things has made a big difference. So I love sharing those metrics with our customers. It usually resonates and then we help them dig in on, to see how they, how they fit, and also give them some ideas as to how they can improve going forward. >>I'm sure they appreciate that knowing where that, where we are now, how do we get to the end, not the end state. Obviously it's a journey, but how do we get farther along in this from a unified front approach rather than absolutely operating in these silos, which is not gonna get us to the, the the on the journey that we should be on. Correct. Yeah. Yep. So some good stuff coming out tomorrow. Not gonna give us any nuggets, which totally understands. Nope. >>No, but it's, you're gonna be very excited. Yes. It's good stuff. >>Awesome. I gotta ask you one quick question before we wrap up. You mentioned multi-cloud earlier. This is a big conversation in the industry. A lot of people are debating what that is. It sounds good on paper. Where is the customer's view as they look at this journey? Because we, we see a future where there'll be services that won't be common across clouds. There's a differentiation and some that will be, and that, that just be shared like compute for instance. And let, let us be there where you can call in to the multi-cloud. What's, how do you, how do your customers think about multi-cloud? Are they having that conversation more they go, Is that more of a destination of the future? In their mind >>It feels more like a destination of the future. Right now, a lot of organizations have kind of solidified on one cloud per se that they want to be able to roll out as far as being able to scale up and down their resources. But the idea is, is eventually, you know, you, you're gonna go with whatever works best for that product or whatever works best for that, that business case that you're trying to solve for. And, and that's why I love the fact that AEP is kind of generically being able to be applied across all of them. So that, that is, that is gonna be your unifier, right? That's gonna be the layer that will stay the same no matter where you go. And that's one of the things that I love about our product around that is that, that we are meant to be the unifier and we're >>Bless the whole today. It's a great opportunity for Ansible that's there. All >>Right. To be the unifier. Last question for you before we wrap. What was some of the feedback about, from your session this morning on Ansible really being that unifier? Any, any folks come up to you and say anything that was particularly insightful? >>Well, you know what, it it, what was kind of alluded to or shared with me directly was the fact that, you know, thinking about automation as you would traditional platforms, right? And, and building a strategy and, and the idea that you need to write that down and actually make some decisions around that. And, and it wasn't that it wasn't thought about it, it was just, it just never came front to mind. And, and so I'm happy that I was able to plant that seed because that, that's what we're seeing that makes the difference between those who are very successful with automation and those, those who may >>Not be writing it down. Sometimes it's fact to basics that back to basics really help absolutely fuel the growth of organizations. Walter, thank you. Thanks for joining John and me on the queue today talking about what's going on, automation as a strategy, the vision and how Ansible is really on its way to becoming that unifier. We appreciate your insights. Cool. >>No, it's my pleasure. And thank you for having me again. All >>Right, cool. Our pleasure for Walter Bentley and John Furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago. Day one of our coverage of Ansible Fest 2022 continues next.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to Chicago theCUBE is live on the floor at AnsibleFest 2022, the first in-person Ansible event that we've covered since 2019. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, great to be here. There's about 1400 to 1500 people here in person, the partner ecosystem is growing and evolving, and that's going to be one of the themes of our next conversation. >> CloudScale is continuing to change the ecosystem, and this segment with AWS is going to be awesome. >> Exactly, we've got one of our alumni back with us, Stefanie Chiras joins us again, senior vice president, partner ecosystem success at Red Hat. and Manasi Jagannatha is also here Global Alliance Manager at AWS. Ladies, welcome to the program. >> Both: Thank you. >> Manasi: Nice to be here. >> Stefanie: Yeah. >> So some exciting news that came out. First of all was great to see you on stage. >> Thank you. >> In front of a live audience. The community is, you talked about this before we went live. The Ansible is nothing, if not the community. So I can only imagine how great that felt to be on stage in front of live bodies announcing the next step with Ansible and AWS. Tell us about that. >> I mean, you can't compete with the energy that comes from a live event. And I remember the first AnsibleFest I came to, it's just this electric feeling born out of the community, born out of collaboration and getting together feeds that collaboration in a way that like nothing else. >> Lisa: Can't do it by video alone. >> You cannot. And so it was so fun cuz today was big news. We announced that Ansible will be available through the AWS marketplace, the next step in our partnership journey. And we've been hearing like most of our announcements, we do these because customers ask for them. And that's really what is key. And the combination of what Red Hat brings to the table and what AWS brings to the table. That's what underpins this announcement this morning. >> Talk about it from a customer demand perspective and how you are not only meeting customers where they are, but you're speaking their language. >> Manasi: Yeah. >> Yeah, there's a couple of aspects and then I want to pass it to Manasi because nothing speaks better than a customer experience. But the specifics I think of what come together is this is where technology, procurement, experience, accessibility all come together. And it took both of us in order to do that. But we actually talked about a great example today, the TransUnion. >> So we have TransUnion, they are a credit reporting company and they're a giant customer. They use RHEL, they use AWS services. So while they were transitioning to the cloud, the first thing they wanted to know was compliance, right? Like, how do we have guardrails around compliance? That was a key feature for them. And then the other piece was how do we scale without increasing the complexity? And then the critical piece was being able to integrate with the depth of AWS services without having to do it over and over again. So what TransUnion did was they basically integrated Ansible automation platform with the AWS Cloud Control API that gave them the flexibility To basically integrate with what, 200 plus services? And it's amazing to see them grow over time. >> What's interesting is that Amazon, obviously cloud has been awesome. We've been covering it since the beginning. DevOps infrastructures code was the dream. Now it's app says code, you have configuration code before that. As cloud goes next level here, we're starting to see a lot more higher level services on AWS being adopted by customers. And so I want to get into how the marketplace deal works. So what's in it for the customer? Because as they bring Ansible across the enterprise and edge, now we're seeing that develop. If I'm the customer, am I buying it through the marketplace? What's the mechanics of the deal? Can I just tap into the bill, explain the marketplace workflow or how it works? >> Yeah, I'd love to do that. So customers come to the marketplace for three key benefits, right? Like one is the consumption based model, pay as you go, you can get hourly, annual, and spot instances. For some services you even get per second billing, right? Like, that's amazing, that's one. And then the other piece is John and Stefanie, as you know, customers would love to draw down on their EDPs, right? Like they want a single- >> EDPs, explain that with acronym. >> It's enterprise discount program. So they want a single bill where they can use third party services and AWS services and they don't have to go through the hustle of saying, "Hey, let me combine all these different pieces." So combining that, and of course the power of Ansible, right? Like customers love Ansible, they've built playbooks. The beauty of it is whatever you want to build on AWS, there is most likely a playbook or a module that already exists. So they can just tap into that and build into- >> Operationally it's a purchasing through marketplace. >> And you know, I mean, being an engineer myself, we always often get caught up in the technology aspect. Like what's the greatest technology? And everyone, as Manasi said, everyone loves the technology of Ansible, but the procurement aspect is also so important. And this is where I think this partnership really comes together. It is natively, Ansible is now, natively integrated into AWS billing. So one bill, you go and you log in. Now you have a Red Hat subscription, you get all the benefits from Red Hat that comes along with that subscription. But the like Ansible is all about simplicity. This brings simplicity to that procurement model and it allows you to scale within your AWS cloud environment that you have set up. And as Manasi mentioned, pull in those other native services from AWS. It's Great. >> It's interesting one of the things that buzzword Lisa and I were just talking as in the industry is the word multiplayer. I've heard people say that's multiplayer software, kind of a gaming analogy. But what you guys are doing is setting up, once they go with Ansible in the marketplace, they're just buying as things get more collaborative off the marketplace. So it kind of streamlines, if I get this right. >> Stefanie: Yep. >> The purchasing process. So they're already in, they just use it's on the bill. Is that kind of how it works? >> Yep. >> Absolutely done, yeah. >> So it the customer has a partnership with us more on the technology side and this particular case and with AWS and the procurement side, it brings that together. >> So multiplayer software, is it multiplayer software? >> We like to talk about multi-partner solutions and I think this provides a new grounding for other partners to come in and build upon that with their services capabilities, with their other technology capabilities. So well clearly in my world, we talk about multi-partner. (both laughs) >> Well, what you're doing is empowering the developers. I know that Red Hat is one of its goals is let's make things much more seamless, much smoother for the developers as the buyer's journey has changed. And John, you've talked about that quite a bit. You're empowering those buyers to actually have a much simpler, streamlined process and to be able to start seeing automation become democratized across organizations. >> Yeah, and one of the things I love about the announcement as well is it pulls in the other values of Ansible automation platform in that simplicity model that you mentioned with like things like certified collections, certified collections that have been built by partners. We have built certified collections, to go along with this offering as well as part of the AWS offering that pulls in these other partner engagements together. And as you said, democratizes not only what we've done together, but what we've done with other partners together. >> Lisa: Right. >> Yeah. >> Can you kind of talk kind of about the depths of the partnership, the co-engineering, and sort of the evolution and the customer involvement in the expansion of the partnership? >> Yeah, I'd love to walk you through that. So we've had a longstanding partnership coming up on 15 years now Stefanie, can you believe it? >> Stefanie: Yeah. (laughs) >> 15 years we've been building, to give you some historical context, right? In back in 2008 we launched RHEL and in 2015 we supported SAP workloads on RHEL. And then the list goes on, right? Like we've been launching Graviton instances, Arm instances, Nitro. The key to be noted here is that every new instance Launch, RHEL has always been supported on day one, right? Like that's been our motto. So that's one. And then in 2021, as you know, we launched Rosa Red Hat OpenShift service on AWS. And that's helped customers with their modernization journey to AWS. So that's been context historically around where we were and where we are today. And now with Ansible, it just gives customer another tool in their arsenal, right? And then the goal is to make sure we meet customers where they are, give them all the Red Hat products that they love using on their hybrid workloads. >> Sounds like a lot is coming maybe at re:Invent too, coming up. >> Yeah. >> What's next? >> This is the beginning, right? We'll continue to grow and based upon not only laying the building blocks for what customers can build with, and you mentioned Lisa, right? We follow this journey that Manasi talked about because of what customers ask for. So it's always a new adventure to determine what'll come next based upon what we hear from our joint customers. >> On that front though, Stefanie, talk about the impact of the broader ecosystem that this is just scratching the surface. >> One of the things, and we've been going through a whole transformation at Red Hat about how we engage with the ecosystem. We've done organizational shifts, we've done a complete revamp of how we engage with the ecosystem. One of our biggest focus is to make sure that the partnerships that we have with one partner bring value to the rest of our partners. No better example than something like this when we work with AWS to create accessibility and capability through a procurement model that we know is important to customers. But that then serves as a launch point for other partners to build certified collections around or now around validated content, which we talked about today at AnsibleFest, that allows other partners to engage. And we're seeing a huge amount in services partners, right? Automation is so pervasive now as customers want to go out and scale. We're seeing services partners really come in and help customers go from, it's always challenging when you have a broad set of IT. You have cloud native over here, you have bare metal over here, you have virtual, it's complex. >> John: Yeah. >> There's sometimes an energy activation barrier to get over that initial automation. We're seeing partners come in with really skilled services capabilities to help customers get over that hump to consolidate with an automation plan. It gets them better equipped to do day one automation and day two automation. And that's where Ansible automation platform is going. It's not just about configuration management, it's about day two management as well. >> Talk about those barriers a little bit more and how Ansible and AWS together are helping customers really knock those out of the park. Another baseball reference for you. We see that a lot of organizations, the skills gap, which we've talked about already on the conversation today, but Ansible as being a facilitator of helping organizations to attract talent, to retain talent, but also customers that maybe don't know where to start or don't know how to determine the ROI that automating processes will bring. How can this partnership help customers nock those out of the park? >> So I'll start and then I'll pass it to Manasi here. But I think one of the key things in this particular partnership is just plain old accessibility. Accessibility, which public cloud has taught the world a new way to get fast access that consumption based pricing. Right you can get your hands on it, you can test it out, you can have a team go in and test it out, and then you can see it's built for scale. So then you can scale it as far as you want to go forward. We clearly have an ecosystem of services partners, so does AWS to help people then sort of take it to the next level as they want to build upon it. But to me the first step is about accessibility, getting your hands dirty. You can build it into those committed spend programs that you may have with AWS as well to try new things. But it's a great test bed. >> Absolutely. And then to add to what Stefanie said, together Red Hat and AWS, we have about a hundred thousand partners combined, right? Like resellers, sis, GSI, distributors. So the reach the combined partnership has just amplifies. >> Yeah, it's huge news. I think it's a big deal because you operationalize the heavy lifting of procurement for all your joint customers and the scale piece is huge. So congratulations. I think it's going to make a lot of money for Ansible. So good call there. My question is, as we hear here, the next level's edge. So AWS has been doing a ton of hybrids since outpost announcement years ago. Now you got all kinds of regional expansions, you've got local zones, you've got all kinds of new edge activity. So are there dots connecting here with the edge with Red Hat Ansible? >> Do you want- >> Yeah, so I think we see two trends with our customers, right? Like mainly I'm specifically talking about our RHEL customer base on AWS. We have almost hundreds to thousands of customers using RHEL on AWS. These are 90% of fortune 500 companies use RHEL, right? So with that customer base, they are looking to expand your point into the edge. There's outposts, there are so many hybrid environments that they're trying to expand in. So just adding Ansible, RHEL, Rosa, OpenShift, that entire makes, just gives customers that the plethora of products they need to run their workloads everywhere, right? Like we have certifications outpost, we have certifications with OpenShift, right? So it just completes the puzzle, if you- >> So it's a nice fit. >> Yeah. >> It is a really nice fit. And I love Edge and Edge once you start going distributed, this automation aspect is key for all the reasons, for security reasons to make sure you do it the same way every single time. It's just pervasive in it. But things like the Cloud Control API allow it to bridge into things like Outpost. It allows a simple way, one clean way to do API and then you can expand it out and get the value. >> So this is why you are on stage and you said that Ansible's going to expand the scope to be more enterprise architecture. >> Stefanie: That's right. >> That's essentially what you're getting at. This is now a distributed computing fabric at cloud scale on AWS. >> Stefanie: That's right. >> Did I get that right? >> Yep, and it touches all the different deployments you may have, on-prem, virtual, cloud native, you name it. >> So how do the people turn into architects? Cuz this is, again, we had this earlier conversation with Tom, multi-tool players, a baseball analogy I used. It's like signifies the best player, your customers are becoming multiple tool players or operators. The new operator is now the top talent. They got to run Ansible, they got to automate, they got to provide services to the cloud native developers. So this new role is emerging, it's not a cloud architect but it's, if it's going to be system architecture wide, what's this new person look like that's going to run all this? >> I think it's an interesting question. We were talking yesterday, actually, Tom and I were talking with the partners. We had Partner Day, the first ever at AnsibleFest yesterday, which was great. We got a lot of insight. They talked a lot about this platform focus, right? Customers are looking to create that platform so that the developers can come in and build upon it without compromising what they want to do. So I do think there's a move in that direction to say how do you create these platforms at a company that no compromises, but it provides that consistency. I would say one thing in partnerships like this, I think customer expectations on the partner ecosystem to have it be trusted is increasing. They expect us as we've done to have our engineers roll up their sleeves together to come to the table together. That's going to show up in our curated content. It's going to show up in our validated content. Those are the places I think where we come up from the bottom through our partnership and we help bridge that gap. >> John: Awesome. >> And trust was brought up a number of times this morning during the keynote. We're almost out of time here, but I think it's one of those words that a lot of companies use. But I think what you're showing is really the value in it from Ansible's perspective from AWS's perspective and ultimately the value in it for the customer. >> Stefanie: Yes. >> So I got to ask you one final question. >> Stefanie: Absolutely. >> And maybe as as reinvent is around the corner, what's next for the partnership? Obviously big news today, Manasi, looking down down the pipe- >> Stefanie: Big news today. >> What are some of the things that you think are going to become next that you can share? >> I mean at this point, and I'll pass it to Manasi to close us out, but we are continuing to follow, to meet our customers where they want to be. We are looking across our portfolio for different ways that customers want to consume within AWS. We'll continue to look at the procurement models through the partner programs that Manasi and the team have had. And to me the next step is really bringing in the rest of the ecosystem. How do we use this as a grounding step? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we are always listening to customer feedback and they want more Red Hat products in the marketplace. So that's where we'll be. >> In the marketplace. >> Congratulations great deal. >> Yes great work there guys. And customers always want more. That's the thing. But that's what keeps us going. So we love it. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you so much for joining John and me on the program today. It's been great to have you. And congratulations again. >> It's a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Chicago at AnsibleFest 2022. This is only day one of our coverage. We'll be back after a short break for more. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Hello from Chicago, Lisa Martin here at AnsibleFest 2022 with John Furrier. John, it's great to be here. The transformation of enterprise and industry through automation. This is not only the 10th anniversary of Ansible, this was the first in-person AnsibleFest since 2019. >> It's awesome, it's awesome, Lisa, and I want to welcome everyone to our live performance here in Chicago. We were remote for two years, 2019 in Atlanta. AnsibleFest, part of Red Hat now, Red Hat part of IBM. So much has happened in the past couple years and I think one of the things that we're going to cover this week here in Chicago, is the evolution of Ansible, where it fits into the new cloud-native ecosystems emerging, and also, kind of, what it means for developers and operators. And we're going to see a lot of that here at AnsibleFest with wall-to-wall coverage, keynote just happened. Very interesting to see, you know, Ansible stayed true to their knitting, as you say, you know. What do they do? No big announcements. Some big community news. But humble. >> Very humble. Very humble, but also very excited. All the keynotes did a great job of addressing that community, and being grateful to the community for, really, the evolution that we see at Ansible and now 10 years later. They were talking a lot about smoothing operations for the developers, democratizing automation across the organization. They talked a little bit about that skills gap. I wanted to get your opinion, 'cause as we know there's, they talked about it from a demand perspective, there's over 300,000 open positions on LinkedIn for Ansible skills. So a lot of opportunity there, a lot of opportunity for them to help democratize automation across organizations. >> Yeah, I mean, I think the big theme last year we heard, "Three things, top three things at AnsibleFest 2021, Animation, Automation, Automation." Again, this year the same theme, "Automate everywhere" is what they're talking about. But I think you're right, there's a cultural shift where the entire cloud ecosystems kind of spun to the doorstep of what Ansible's ecosystem stood for for many years in the decade, which is configuration, running things at scale. That notion is now persistent across all the enterprise. And I think the key takeaway from the keynote, in my opinion, is that configuration and automation around devices and infrastructure stuff is an enterprise architecture now, it's not just a, kind of a corner case, or a specific use case, it's going to be native across the entire enterprise architecture. And that's why we heard a lot of cultural shift conversations. And that is where the people who are running the Ansible stuff, they're going to be the keys to having the keys to the kingdom. And I think you're going to see a lot more of this automation at scale. I love the introduction of ops-as-code, that's a little piggyback off of infrastructure-as-code and infrastructure-as-configuration. They're saying operations now is the new software model and it's like ops dev, not dev ops. So it's really interesting to see how the operator is now a very big important role in the next level of cloud native. And it's really exciting because this is kind of what we've been reporting on theCUBE, for over 12 years. So, watching Ansible grow organically into a powerhouse community is very interesting. To see how they operationalize this, you know, going forward. >> Well the operator's becoming really pivotal catalysts in this next way, that you've been covering for 12 years. You know, if we think about some of the challenges and the barriers to adopting automation that organizations have had, one of them has been skills, staff rather. The other has been, "Hey, we need to really determine which processes to automate, that's actually going to give us the most ROI, most bang for our buck." They talked a little bit about that today, but that's still something that Ansible is working with its customers and the community to help sort of demystify. >> Yeah and I think that they were front and center around, "You on the room," people in the room, "you make this happen." They're very much, it's not a top-down corporate thing, Ansible staying true to their roots as I mentioned. But the thing about skills gap is interesting, you heard Kaete Piccirilli talking about, "Level Up how your organization automates, push your people, expand your scope." So the theme is, the power is in the hands of this community to essentially be the new enterprise architecture for operations. At the same time that feeds the trend around, we're seeing this accelerated cloud-native developer we're seeing, we're going to be at KubeCon next week, that cloud-native developer, they want to go faster, they want self-service. So you're seeing higher velocity cloud-native development putting pressure on the ops teams to level up, so the theme kind of connects for me. I think Red Hat has got it right here, with Ansible, that the theme is shifting to ops better get their act together, to level up and to the velocity of what the developers are expecting. At the same time, giving them the freedom to be using infrastructure-as-code, infrastructure-as-configuration, and ultimately, ops-as-code. To me, I think this is like the evolution of how infrastructure-as-code, which is the nirvana of DevOps, now is ops-as-code. Which means, if that's true, ops becomes much more invisible, if you will, which is what developers want. >> And we're going to be breaking down ops-as-code today, no doubt, in our conversations with some of the great Ansible community folks and partners and leaders that we have on, as well as tomorrow in our full two days of coverage. You talked about cultural shift, we talk about that a lot John, it's challenging, but one of the things I think that was very palpable this morning, is the power of the Ansible community. Not just those folks that are here with us in Chicago, but all the folks watching virtually online. >> Yeah. >> Truly help drive that cultural shift that is needed for organizations to really be able to streamline cloud ops. >> Yeah and I think Adam Miller who came on, I thought his portion was excellent, around community. He talked about, you know, the 10 years, put a little exclamation point on that. Managing the communications within the community. He actually brought up IRC and Slack and then, "We have Discord." And they introduced a new standard for communications it's called Matrix, which is open-source based. And even in their decision making, their principles around open source stay true. Again, they checked the box there, I thought that was really cool. The other thing that, within the meat of the product, the automation platform, Matt Jones was talking about the scale, the managing at scale, is one thing. But the thing that I think that hit, jumped out at me, was that this trusted automation messaging was really huge. Signing, having signatures, that really hits the supply chain that we've been talking about, and we're going to talk about it next week at KubeCon, the software supply chain is trusting the code. And I think as you have automation, it's a really big part of the new platform. So, I thought that was really the meat on the bone there. >> That was a very strong theme, was the trust this morning. You know, another thing that was important was Walter Bentley, who's coming on, I believe, later today, talked about how organizations really need to think about the value that automation can deliver to the business and then develop an automation strategy, really thinking at it strategically rather than what a lot of folks have done. And they've put automation in sort of in silos and pockets. He's really talking about, how can you actually make it strategic across the organization and make sure that you really fully see and understand and can articulate the value to the business, from a competitive advantage perspective, that it's going to deliver. >> Yeah, and Stefanie Chiras who's coming on too, she mentioned a lot about the multi-cloud, multi-environment layer, how Ansible can sit across all the environments and then still support the cloud-native through what she called "an automation loop". That's going to be really talking to what we're seeing as multi-cloud or super-cloud, next-gen cloud, where Ansible's role of automating isn't just corner case in the enterprise. Again, if it's an enterprise-wide architecture, it will be a centerpiece of multi-cloud, multiple capabilities. Whether that's compatibility services or, you know, stuff running best of breed on different clouds. 'Cause, obviously Amazon was on stage here, they're talking about this, big Ansible supporter. So, we've got Google supporting Ansible, so you got the multiple clouds and even VM-Ware environments. So, Ansible sits across all this. And so, I think the big opportunity that I'm seeing come out of this, is that if Ansible is in this position, this could be a catalyst for them to be the multi-cloud hybrid architecture for configuration and operations, and I think, the edge is going to be a really interesting conversation. We have a lot of guests coming on, I'll talk about that. But, I think running distributed workloads across multiple clouds in multiple environments, that's a killer app and we'll see if they can pull it off. We're going to be drilling everyone on that topic today, so I'm looking forward to it. >> We're going to be dissecting that. I like how you paint that picture of Ansible really as the nucleus of that hybrid cloud strategy. You know, so many organizations are living in a hybrid cloud world for many reasons, but for Ansible to be able to be that catalyst. And question for you, if we think about that, when we talk about multi-cloud strategically or organically or whatnot, where is automation moving in terms of the customer conversation? We know Ansible's really focused on smoothing the developer experience, but where is automation going, in your vision, up the C-suite stack? >> Well, multi-cloud is a C-suite message and they love to hear that, but you talk to anyone who's in the trenches, they hate multi-cloud. It's more complexity and there's a lot of issues around latency. So what you're seeing is, you're starting to see an evolution of more about compatibility and interoperability. And this is kind of classic enterprise abstraction layers when you start getting into these inflection points, as things get better, so it gets sometimes more complex. So I think Ansible's notion of simplicity and ease of use, could be the catalyst for this abstraction layer between clouds. So it's all about reducing the complexities, because at the end of the day, if you want to do something on multiple clouds, whether that's run common services across, that's not making it simpler. You got to, it's going to be harder before it gets easier. So, if that makes any sense. So doing multi-cloud sounds great on paper, but it's really hard and that's why no one's really doing it. So you're going to start to see multi-cloud, what we call super-cloud, which is more capabilities on one cloud. And then having them still differentiate the idea that some standard's going to emerge, is complete fantasy. I think you're going to, we still need more innovation. Amazon does a great job, Microsoft's coming up on number two position as well, the clouds still need to differentiate. But that doesn't change Ansible's position. They can still be that shim layer or bolt-on, to whatever clouds do best. If you run 'em on machine learning on Google, that's cool. You want to use Amazon for this? How do you make those work? That's a hard problem. And, again, that's where automation ends up. >> And with that context, do you think that Ansible has the capability of helping to dial down some of the complexity that's in this hybrid multi-cloud world? >> Yeah, I mean, I think the thing about what's going on great here, that's unique in the history of the computer industry, is open source is so powerful and it continues to power away with growth. So, more code is coming. So, software supply chain is a big issue, we heard that with the trusted thing, but also now, how people buy now is different. You can actually try stuff out on open source and then go to Red Hat, Ansible, and say, "Hey, I'm going to get some support." So there's a lot of community collective intelligence involved in decision making, not just coding, but buyer selection and consumption. So the entire paradigm of purchasing software and using it, has completely changed. So, that puts Ansible in a leading position because they got a great community, and now you've got open source continuing to thrive away. So, if you're a customer, you don't need the big enterprise sales pitch you can just try the code, if you like it, then you go with Ansible. So it's really kind of set up nicely, this cloud market, for companies like Ansible, because they have the community and they got the software, it's open and it is what it is, it's transparent, everything's above board. >> Yeah, you know, you talk about the community, you mentioned Matrix earlier, and one of the things that was also quite resonant during the keynote this morning was the power of collaboration and how incredibly important that is to them, to stay native to their open-source roots, as you you said. But also really go to where the customers are. And they talked about that with respect to Matrix and Discord and that was an interesting, this is the community reaching out to really kind of grow upon itself. >> Well, being someone who's used all those tools, even IRC 'cause I'm old, all the old folks use IRC. Then the, kind of, Gen X'ers use, and the millennials use Slack. Discord, the way they mentioned Discord, it's so true. If you're a gamer, you're younger, you're using Discord. Now, Matrix is new, they're trying to introduce an open source, 'cause remember they don't control Discord and they don't control Slack. So Slack's Salesforce now, and Discord is probably going to try to get bought by Microsoft, but still, it's not open. So Matrix is their open-sourced chat service. And I thought that was interesting and I think, that got my attention, because that went against the principles of users that like Slack. So, it'd be great. I mean if Matrix, if that takes off, then that's going to be a case study of going against-the-grain on the best-of-breed package software like Slack or Discord. But I think the demographic shift is interesting. Discord is for younger generations, let's see how Matrix will do. And the uptake wasn't that big. Only been around for a couple months, we've seen almost 5,000 members. But, you know, not a failure. >> Right. >> But not a home run either. >> Right. Well we'll have to see how that progresses- >> Yeah, we'll see how that plays out. >> as all of the generations in the workforce today try to work together and collaborate. You know, if we think about some of the things that we're going to talk about today and tomorrow, business outcomes, increasing business agility, being able to ensure compliance, with security and regulatory requirements, which are only proliferating, really also helping organizations to optimize those costs and be as competitive as they possibly can. So I'm excited to dissect the announcements that came out today, some of the things that we're going to hear today and tomorrow, and really get a great view of the automation infrastructure marketplace and what's going on. >> Yeah, it's going to be great. Infrastructure-as-code, infrastructure-as-config, operations-as-code, it's all leading to, you know, distributed computing edge. It's hybrid. >> Yep. All right John- >> Yeah. >> looking forward to two days of wall-to-wall CUBE coverage with you, coming to you live from Chicago, at the first AnsibleFest in person, since 2019. Lisa Martin and John Furrier with you here all day today and tomorrow, stick around, our first guest joins us. We're going to dissect ops-as-code, stick around. (gentle music)

>>Hello, welcome to the Cube here in Palo Alto, California. We're here for a preview of Ansible Fest 2022 this year in Chicago, in Person. And I'm here with Andreas. I've been on Craus, who's a senior manager for Ansible Technical Marketing at Red Hat. And just great to see you Cube alumni. Thanks for coming on and giving us a preview of what to expect at Ansible Fest. Thanks. >>No problem. Thanks for having us and thanks for everyone tuning in. >>You know, one of the things that's exciting this year is one, it's back in person from 2019 was the last in person Ansible Fest. Always a great event for folks doing it. Cloud native configuration management and automation, I think, and last year in our virtual event was the three things where automation, automation, automation kind of drove the point home. This year it's, it's more exciting than ever because if you look at the growth of Cloud Native, we're seeing a lot more traction in mainstream enterprises with Kubernetes. And obviously containers continue to grow with open source, powering everything under the coverage. So like this has like become such a whole nother inflection point this year more than ever. There's a focus on not just automation, but where the dots are gonna connect into the future. So I'd like to get your thoughts on what we're gonna expect this year at Ansible Fest. What's the themes? What do you, what do you see coming down the pike? What can people expect, >>People can really expect? Thanks. Thanks very much John. Really excited. So we're gonna see a lot of what we've seen before, right? So a little difference is from the previous onsite Ansel Fest is, I think we no longer have to say, you know, what's Ansible? We typically have had to say, you know, what is this Ansible thing? I don't know what this is. This is automation. I think we've gone beyond that and this is great. Ansible itself is now the defacto, what we believe is the de facto kind of automation language and Ansible automation platform is the defacto automation platform. So as you move into this year, we we're gonna be able to see, be able to really hone in on really having those beginners starting off much, much more quickly. But also those that have no and love Ansible for over the years to take that automation to the next level to, to new areas. Either new domains going beyond the data center, into the cloud, and then going beyond by all the partner certifications, integrations that we have. So it's a lot, it's just more of, of everything I think. So it's more for everyone all the time. So it's not, it's you, it's, it's no longer kind of a beginner's for everything, but we go all the way to kind of crawl, walk, run for this one. >>You know, it always surprises me every year, I'm always surprised by how great open source I remember every year. It's like, pinch me, This is amazing. If you're a developer right now, it's a good time to be coding because of open source growth is, is at an all time high, continues to grow, more projects are emerging. DevOps, which really came out of the ethos of the kind of the early days of the cloud and, and and scaling infrastructure was, was about infrastructure as code, which was the dream we all had in the late two thousands. If you remember right now that's happened. DevOps is now in the C I C D pipeline. Developers are shifting. Left cloud native hybrid actually now is a steady state and that's pretty well documented. What, what's next beyond infrastructures code? What's beyond the on premise cloud integration from a, from a, from a tech standpoint, what are you guys seeing around infrastructures, code, what's next and then what's beyond on premise? >>I think the big thing is scale, right? So we've always been able to kind of automate people, developers, as you said, DevOps, you can automate from your laptop, you can open up your laptop, download some open source Ansible and you know, automate your windows, your Linux, your network, no problem. But how do you actually operationalize that in an enterprise way across large teams, right? A global environment and then being able to like actually secure that, right? Security is such a big, sp a big piece of that now. So being able to actually apply automation securely in secure environments. So, and wrap all of that around cloud, right? So we've always been talking about a, you, you mentioned it on premises going into the cloud, right? So being able to operationalize in the cloud. So being able to automate cloud targets. So being able to automate aws, Azure GCP targets, but also running your automation on the cloud like say OpenShift. So being able to dynamically load load balance, create execution on demand for Ansible in OpenShift. So it's kind of hard and we, we hope that an Ansible fest will be able to kind of like demystify that from like when you hear, when you hear the word cloud and, and cloud native and hybrid cloud, it kind of goes in your head. We hope to kind of clear that up for folks at, at the fest. >>Certainly we're gonna talk about Super Cloud as well with the cube there. I wanna hear your thoughts real quick on the edge. You know, we gonna hear anything about the edge. This, this year, again, Edge has become hugely important, but yet it's not clear to a lot of people what that looks like. Are we gonna hear anything there? >>Absolutely. Edges is huge. And to some people I will say that when, when you say edge automation, it may not click to some folks, but if you were to say automating wireless access points in a branch office, you thinking, oh, okay, I can't now I know what you're talking about. Right? So a lot of people really may not have made the connection to what Edge Automation is because we, you know, maybe that hasn't been defined. And as we start moving into edge automation, we can start talking about extending, right? We're already talking about extending the data center, especially for network automation. So network automation no longer is in data center. You can now extend that out to the branch office to campus Wireless, right? And you can also extend that out into other areas such as industrial applications, right? If you wanna move a glue gun from one end of the warehouse to the other, you know, that has to be automated and we'll be able to be able to do that by means of some of the enhancements we made for that. >>What can customers and attendees who are gonna be there either in person and after remote hybrid expect us hear about Ansible's automation platform this year? What's gonna be some of the announcements? Can you tease a little bit out on what >>I can tease a little bit? Yeah. You know, day one's gonna be more of making me upleveling what you have today. I think you're gonna see some of the, the futures, right? A lot of the things around Edge, you'll hear something called event driven automation. So you, this is, this is very akin to maybe self-driving or self-healing or, you know, being able to automatically say event is triggered and then you can actually cause some automation to be spun up to actually remediate those things. So going beyond observability, right? Observability is great, but just observing problems is, is, you know, I can look at a million things wrong in my network, but if they're not being remediated, you know, it doesn't really mean much. So, you know, talking about event driven there is gonna be really hot. And then a lot of the other use cases in frameworks, you know, going beyond the configuration, I think, yeah, >>I think they develop things. Cool. And, and final question for you, because one of the things that last year we came away with was automation. What's that next automation at scale. Because remember, you know, we remember where we came from writing scripts, automating things from just basic scripting and, and configuration automation to full scale automation. That's become a big part and we see a lot of that in the cloud. Native conversations with containers and whatnot. How do you scale at, at, at, in the cloud with the cloud na hyperscalers. So again, the relationship with the hyperscalers and scale, what can we expect to hear there? >>Oh, everything from, so we'll be teasing out a little bit. You, you know that we have Ansible automation platform on Azure as a marketplace offering. We may be extending that to maybe some other hyperscalers. So making it super easy for customers or prospects to get automating quickly in their hyperscaler of choice, using their own means and, and, and methods and processes. And then going beyond that and ensuring security. So I mess in security again, how do you ensure that what you're in, what you're actually automating is part of like a security supply chain is part of your content or part of your playbooks and keeping things actually running well at scale, like you said, >>Okay, you got Azure, I'll put, I'll put my guessing hat on. There's only a few others in the pull from. That's awesome. Congratulations. And looking forward to the event, final word here. What's, what's, what do you see outcome at the end of the event? What's gonna, what's in your mind's eye? What's the, what's the outcome look like? >>Yeah, I, I just gotta do a shameless plug. I'm actually running the labs and workshops. So if you're in person or if you're not, you know, come check out the labs and workshops. We have four rooms. You can just camp out and just do hands on learning with workshop instructor led learnings or self-paced training. You can see me and all that. But I think the future learnings here is really trying to futureproof everyone's use cases. So actually, you know, you talk about ai, you talk about Cloud native, talking about other Red Hat products being, being part of that conversation with re and OpenShift, it's really a great time to, to be automating right now. >>And it's interesting. And the Ansible community that's well, well known. They all know each other and it's, it, I won't say niche, it's not niche anymore. It used to be one of those areas where super important for making things run now we need to take cloud and cloud scale. Horizontal scalability across multiple environments is kind of an Ansible thing, right? It's like you need to think about how to scale the Ansible concept. And I think that's the big exciting thing that I see with Cloud Native Andrews is this idea that, you know, what Ansible stood for back then now applies to almost all environments. So the automation, the scaling of, of, of configurations and tearing stuff down and standing things up with machines and software is just, I think, an incredible opportunity. And I think it operations is now in the developer's hands and data and security ops are front and center in, in all these conversations. And it's gonna be super exciting. Can't wait to, can't wait to hear. Okay. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thanks for, for giving your opinion. >>All right. I appreciate it. Thank you very much for hosting us. See you and we'll see you there in Chicago. >>Okay. Andrew's been a creative senior manager and it's potential marketing to breaking it down, getting the preview on what's coming, expect to hear more about automation and how it's relevant at scale and, and all new things are happening with cloud native inflection point. We're living right now. So we'll see you there. Thanks for watching.

>> Welcome back to Supercloud22, #Supercloud22. This is Dave Vellante. In 2019 Oracle and Microsoft announced a collaboration to bring interoperability between OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Azure Clouds. It was Oracle's initial foray into so-called multi-cloud and we're joined by Karan Batta, who's the Vice President for Product Management at OCI. And Kris Rice is the Vice President of Software Development at Oracle Database. And we're going to talk about how this technology's evolving and whether it fits our view of what we call supercloud. Welcome gentlemen, thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> So you recently just last month announced the new service. It extends on the initial partnership with Microsoft Oracle interconnect with Azure, and you refer to this as a secure private link between the two clouds, it cross 11 regions around the world, under two milliseconds data transmission sounds pretty cool. It enables customers to run Microsoft applications against data stored in Oracle databases without any loss in efficiency or presumably performance. So we use this term supercloud to describe a service or sets of services built on hyper scale infrastructure that leverages the core primitives and APIs of an individual cloud platform, but abstracts that underlying complexity to create a continuous experience across more than one cloud. Is that what you've done? >> Absolutely. I think it starts at the top layer in terms of just making things very simple for the customer, right. I think at the end of the day we want to enable true workloads running across two different clouds where you're potentially running maybe the app layer in one and the database layer or the back in another. And the integration I think starts with, you know, making it ease of use. Right. So you can start with things like, okay can you log into your second or your third cloud with the first cloud provider's credentials? Can you make calls against another cloud using another cloud's APIs? Can you peer the networks together? Can you make it seamless? I think those are all the components that are sort of, they're kind of the ingredients to making a multi-cloud or supercloud experience successful. >> Oh, thank you for that, Karan. So I guess there's a question for Chris is I'm trying to understand what you're really solving for? What specific customer problems are you focused on? What's the service optimized for presumably it's database but maybe you could double click on that. >> Sure. So, I mean, of course it's database. So it's a super fast network so that we can split the workload across two different clouds leveraging the best from both, but above the networking, what we had to do do is we had to think about what a true multi-cloud or what you're calling supercloud experience would be it's more than just making the network bites flow. So what we did is we took a look as Karan hinted at right, is where is my identity? Where is my observability? How do I connect these things across how it feels native to that other cloud? >> So what kind of engineering do you have to do to make that work? It's not just plugging stuff together. Maybe you could explain a little bit more detail, the the resources that you had to bring to bear and the technology behind the architecture. >> Sure. I think, it starts with actually, what our goal was, right? Our goal was to actually provide customers with a fully managed experience. What that means is we had to basically create a brand new service. So, we have obviously an Azure like portal and an experience that allows customers to do this but under the covers, we actually have a fully managed service that manages the networking layer, the physical infrastructure, and it actually calls APIs on both sides of the fence. It actually manages your Azure resources, creates them but it also interacts with OCI at the same time. And under the covers this service actually takes Azure primitives as inputs. And then it sort of like essentially translates them to OCI action. So, we actually truly integrated this as a service that's essentially built as a PaaS layer on top of these two clouds. >> So, the customer doesn't really care or know maybe they know cuz they might be coming through, an Azure experience, but you can run work on either Azure and or OCI. And it's a common experience across those clouds. Is that correct? >> That's correct. So like you said, the customer does know that they know there is a relationship with both clouds but thanks to all the things we built there's this thing we invented we created called a multi-cloud control plane. This control plane does operate against both clouds at the same time to make it as seamless as possible so that maybe they don't notice, you know, the power of the interconnect is extremely fast networking, as fast as what we could see inside a single cloud. If you think about how big a data center might be from edge to edge in that cloud, going across the interconnect makes it so that that workload is not important that it's spanning two clouds anymore. >> So you say extremely fast networking. I remember I used to, I wrote a piece a long time ago. Larry Ellison loves InfiniBand. I presume we've moved on from them, but maybe not. What is that interconnect? >> Yeah, so it's funny you mentioned interconnect you know, my previous history comes from Edge PC where we actually inside OCI today, we've moved from Infinite Band as is part of Exadata's core to what we call Rocky V two. So that's just another RDMA network. We actually use it very successfully, not just for Exadata but we use it for our standard computers that we provide to high performance computing customers. >> And the multi-cloud control plane runs. Where does that live? Does it live on OCI? Does it live on Azure? Yes? >> So it does it lives on our side. Our side of the house as part of our Oracle OCI control plane. And it is the veneer that makes these two clouds possible so that we can wire them together. So it knows how to take those Azure primitives and the OCI primitives and wire them at the appropriate levels together. >> Now I want to talk about this PaaS layer. Part of supercloud, we said to actually make it work you're going to have to have a super PaaS. I know we're taking this this term a little far but it's still it's instructive in that, what we surmised was you're probably not going to just use off the shelf, plain old vanilla PaaS, you're actually going to have a purpose built PaaS to solve for the specific problem. So as an example, if you're solving for ultra low latency, which I think you're doing, you're probably no offense to my friends at Red Hat but you're probably not going to develop this on OpenShift, but tell us about that PaaS layer or what we call the super PaaS layer. >> Go ahead, Chris. >> Well, so you're right. We weren't going to build it out on OpenShift. So we have Oracle OCI, you know, the standard is Terraform. So the back end of everything we do is based around Terraform. Today, what we've done is we built that control plane and it will be API drivable, it'll be drivable from the UI and it will let people operate and create primitives across both sides. So you can, you mentioned developers, developers love automation, right, because it makes our lives easy. We will be able to automate a multi-cloud workload from ground up config is code these days. So we can config an entire multi-cloud experience from one place. >> So, double click Chris on that developer experience. What is that like? They're using the same tool set irrespective of, which cloud we're running on is, and it's specific to this service or is it more generic, across other Oracle services? >> There's two parts to that. So one is the, we've only onboarded a portion. So the database portfolio and other services will be coming into this multi-cloud. For the majority of Oracle cloud, the automation, the config layer is based on Terraform. So using Terraform, anyone can configure everything from a mid-tier to an Exadata, all the way soup to nuts from smallest thing possible to the largest. What we've not done yet is integrated truly with the Azure API, from command line drivable. That is coming in the future. It is on the roadmap, it is coming. Then they could get into one tool but right now they would have half their automation for the multi-cloud config on the Azure tool set and half on the OCI tool set. >> But we're not crazy saying from a roadmap standpoint that will provide some benefit to developers and is a reasonable direction for the industry generally but Oracle and Microsoft specifically. >> Absolutely. I'm a developer at heart. And so one of the things we want to make sure is that developers' lives are as easy as possible. >> And is there a metadata management layer or intelligence that you've built in to optimize for performance or low latency or cost across the respective clouds? >> Yeah, definitely. I think, latency's going to be an important factor. The service that we've initially built isn't going to serve, the sort of the tens of microseconds but most applications that are sort of in, running on top of the enterprise applications that are running on top of the database are in the several millisecond range. And we've actually done a lot of work on the networking pairing side to make sure that when we launch these resources across the two clouds we actually picked the right trial site. We picked the right region we pick the right availability zone or domain. So we actually do the due diligence under the cover so the customer doesn't have to do the trial and error and try to find the right latency range. And this is actually one of the big reasons why we only launch the service on the interconnect regions. Even though we have close to, I think close to 40 regions at this point in OCI, this service is only built for the regions that we have an interconnect relationship with Microsoft. >> Okay, so you started with Microsoft in 2019. You're going deeper now in that relationship, is there any reason that you couldn't, I mean technically what would you have to do to go to other clouds? You talked about understanding the primitives and leveraging the primitives of Azure. Presumably if you wanted to do this with AWS or Google or Alibaba, you would have to do similar engineering work, is that correct? Or does what you've developed just kind of poured over to any cloud? >> Yeah, that's absolutely correct Dave. I think Chris talked a lot about the multi-cloud control plane, right? That's essentially the control plane that goes and does stuff on other clouds. We would have to essentially go and build that level of integration into the other clouds. And I think, as we get more popularity and as more products come online through these services I think we'll listen to what customers want. Whether it's, maybe it's the other way around too, Dave maybe it's the fact that they want to use Oracle cloud but they want to use other complimentary services within Oracle cloud. So I think it can go both ways. I think, the market and the customer base will dictate that. >> Yeah. So if I understand that correctly, somebody from another cloud Google cloud could say, Hey we actually want to run this service on OCI cuz we want to expand our market. And if TK gets together with his old friends and figures that out but then we're just, hypothesizing here. But, like you said, it can go both ways. And then, and I have another question related to that. So, multi clouds. Okay, great. Supercloud. How about the Edge? Do you ever see a day where that becomes part of the equation? Certainly the near Edge would, you know, a Home Depot or Lowe's store or a bank, but what about the far Edge, the tiny Edge. Can you talk about the Edge and where that fits in your vision? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think Edge is a interestingly, it's getting fuzzier and fuzzier day by day. I think, the term. Obviously every cloud has their own sort of philosophy in what Edge is, right. We have our own. It starts from, if you do want to do far Edge, we have devices like red devices, which is our ruggedized servers that talk back to our control plane in OCI. You could deploy those things unlike, into war zones and things like that underground. But then we also have things like clouded customer where customers can actually deploy components of our infrastructure like compute or Exadata into a facility where they only need that certain capability. And then a few years ago we launched, what's now called Dedicated Region. And that actually is a different take on Edge in some sense where you get the entire capability of our public commercial region, but within your facility. So imagine if a customer was to essentially point a finger on a commercial map and say, Hey, look, that region is just mine. Essentially that's the capability that we're providing to our customers, where if you have a white space if you have a facility, if you're exiting out of your data center space, you could essentially place an OCI region within your confines behind your firewall. And then you could interconnect that to a cloud provider if you wanted to, and get the same multi-cloud capability that you get in a commercial region. So we have all the spectrums of possibilities here. >> Guys, super interesting discussion. It's very clear to us that the next 10 years of cloud ain't going to be like the last 10. There's a whole new layer. Developing, data is a big key to that. We see industries getting involved. We obviously didn't get into the Oracle Cerner acquisitions. It's a little too early for that but we've actually predicted that companies like Cerner and you're seeing it with Goldman Sachs and Capital One they're actually building services on the cloud. So this is a really exciting new area and really appreciate you guys coming on the Supercloud22 event and sharing your insights. Thanks for your time. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay. Keep it right there. #Supercloud22. We'll be right back with more great content right after this short break. (lighthearted marimba music)