>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Good to have you back here on theCube we are live in Boston at the Convention Center here. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls and on theCUBE we're continuing our coverage of Red Hat Summit 2019 in Boston, as I said. Joined now by Reza Shafii, who is the VP of Platform Services at Red Hat. Former CoreOS guy >> That's right. >> Stu actually has his CoreOS socks on, >> He told me. >> Today, yeah, so he came dressed for the occasion. >> Shh, can't see those on camera, John. I can't be wearing vendor here. >> Don't show it to the camera. >> Well I just say they're cool! They're cool. Glad to have you with us, Reza. And first off, your impression, you have a big announcement, right, with OpenShift. OpenShift 4 being launched officially on the keynote stage today. That's some big news, right? >> It's a big deal, it's a big deal. The way I think about it is that it's really a culmination of the efforts that we planned out when we sat down between the CoreOS leadership team and the Red Hat leadership team, when the acquisition was closed. And we planned this out, I remember a meeting we had in the white board room. We planned this out. In terms of bringing the best of OpenShift and CoreOS technology together. And it's really great to see it out there on the keynote, and actually all demoed and working. >> And working, right? Key part. >> Reza, dig in for us a little bit here, because it's one thing to say okay, we got a white board and we put things together. You know, when I looked at both companies, at first both, CoreOS before the acquisition and Red Hat, I mean open source, absolutely as its core. I remember talking to the CoreOS team, I'm like, you guys are gonna build a whole bunch of really cool tools, but what's the business there? Do you guys think you're gonna be the next Red Hat? Come on. Well, now you're part of Red Hat. So, give us a little bit of the insight as to what it took to get from there to the announcements, CoreOS infused in many of the pieces that we heard announced this week. >> Yeah, so the way I like to think about it is that Red Hat's OpenShift's roots, it started with making sure that they create a really nice comfortable surface area for the deaf teams. The deaf teams can go in and start pushing the applications and it just ensures that it's running those applications in the right way. The CoreOS roots came from the operations perspective and the system administrator. We always looked at the world from the system administrator. Yes, you're right, CoreOS had a number of technologies they were working on, etcd, Rocket, clair. I used to joke that there's a constellation of open source services that we're working on, but where is the one product? And, towards the end, right before the acquisition, the one product I think was pretty clear is Tectonic, the Kubernetes software. Now, if you look at Tectonic, the key value difference was automated operations. The core tenants of what Alex Polvi and Brandon Philips said into the mindset of the company was we're outnumbered, the number of machines out there is going to be way more than we can handle, therefore we need to automate all operations. They started that on the operating system itself, with CoreOS, the namesake of the company. And then they brought that to Kubernetes. What you see with OpenShift is, OpenShift 4, you see us bringing that to, not only the Kubernetes core, that's the foundation of OpenShift 4, so all capabilities of running Kubernetes are automated with 20 plus operators now. But you see that apply to all the other value capabilities that are on top of OpenShift as well, and we're bringing that to ISV. I was walking around and a number of ISV's have their operators as the number one thing they're advertising. So you're seeing automated operations really take hold and with OpenShift 4 being a foundation for that. >> You talk about operations or operators, you have Operator Hub that was launched earlier this year, what was the driving force behind that? And then ultimately what are you trying to get out of that in terms of advancement and going forward here? >> Right, I think it means it's worked. Going back a little bit of history on this, the operator pattern was coined at CoreOS as a way to do things on a Kubernetes cluster to automate operations. The right way. You have to expose it as a proper API, you have to use a controller, so on and so forth. Then as the team started doing that we realized well there's a lot of demand for this pattern, we started documenting it, describing it better and so on. But then we realized there's a good case for a framework to help people build these automations. Therefore we announced the operator framework at Cubeacon. I think it was a year and a half ago. What happened then was interesting, suddenly we started seeing hundreds plus operators being built on the operator framework. But, it was hard because you could see five Redis operators, 10 MySQL operators. It was hard for our customers to know where can I find the right set of operators that have the right functionality and how do they compare to each other? OperatorHub.IO is a registry that we launched together with AWS, Google and Microsoft to solve for that problem. Now that we have a way to create operators easily and capture that automated operations, we have sort of created a pattern and a framework around it, where do you go to find the right set of operators. >> It's an interesting point because if you look in the container space, especially Kubernetes, it's like, okay well what's standardized, what works across all of these environments? We always worry, I've probably got some pain from previous projects and foundations as to well what's certified and what's not and how do we do that? So, did I see there's a certification now for operators and how do you balance that we need it to work everywhere, we don't wanna have it's Red Hat's building an open ecosystem not something that's limited to only this? >> Yes. So OperatorHub.IO is a community initiative. And, every operator you find on there should work on any Kubernetes. So in fact as part of the vetting process we make sure that that's the case. And then on the certification we launched today, actually, and you can see a number of, we have already 20 plus operators that are certified. This is where we take it a step further and we work with the vendors to make sure that it works on OpenShift. It's following a number of guidelines that we have, in terms of using, for example, Rail as the basis. They work with us to run the updates through security checks and so on. And that's just to give our enterprise customers more levels of guarantees and validation, if they would like to. >> So what are they getting out of that, out of the certification system? What, I guess, stability and certainty and all those kinds of things that I'm looking for, standardization of some kind, is that what's driving that? >> It's simple, at the end of the day they got three things. They get automated updates that are pushed through the OpenShift update mechanism. So if you are using the Redis one, for example, and it's certified, you're gonna be able to update the Redis operator through the same cluster administration mechanism, then you would apply it to the entire cluster itself. You see updates from Redis come in, you can put it through the same approval work so on, so on. The second is they get support. So they get first line of support from Red Hat. They can call Red Hat, our customers and actually we work with them on that. And the third is that they actually get that security vulnerability scans that we put them through to make sure that they pass certain checks. And actually one last one, they also get Rail as the basis of the operator, so, yup. >> Reza, help bring us into the customer point of view. What does all this mean to them, what are the big challenges, how do they modernize their applications and get more applications moving along this path? >> Yeah, in this case the operator customer is mainly the infrastructure administrators. It's important to point that out. The developers will get some benefit on that in that it's self service, so the provision, but there's other ways to do that as well. You can go to a Helm chart, deploy that Helm chart, you get that level of self service automated provisioning. To go ahead and configure for example, a charted MongoDB database on a Kubernetes cluster, you have to create something like 20 different objects. And then to update that to change the charts, you have to go and modify all those 20 different objects. Let's just stay at that level alone. An operator makes that before different parameters on a yaml file that you change. The operator takes that and applies all these configurations for you. So, it's all about simplifying the life of the infrastructure administrators. I truly believe that operators, human operators, infrastructure administrators are one of the least appreciated personas right now that we have out there. They're not the most important ones, but there is a lot of pain points and challenges that they have we're not really thinking about too much. And I think OpenShift goes a long way and operators go a long way to actually start thinking about their pain point as well. >> So what do you think their reaction was this morning when they're looking, first off, the general announcement, right? And then some of the demonstrations and all those things that are occurring? Is there, do you have or are you talking to customers? Are you getting the sense of relief or of anticipation or expectation? I mean, how would you characterize that? >> Think they're falling into a couple of different buckets. There's the customers we've talked to, for awhile now, that know this stuff, so this is not super new to them, but they're very happy to see it. There's one big automaker that's a customer of us and the main human operator was telling me awhile ago that he does not want any service on the cluster unless it has an operator, this is a year and a half ago. And he kept pushing me well I want a Kafka one and I want an Elasticsearch one, and you know. And we, CoreOS, were too small to try to build that ourselves. Obviously that's not, we can't maintain a Kafka operator and a CoreOS one. Now, he's able to go to our operator APP, he's gonna be able to get a Kafka operator that's maintained by Kafka experts. He's gonna be able to get a Redis operator that's maintained by Redis experts. So that bucket of customers are super happy. And then there's another one that's just starting to understand the power of all this. And I think they're just starting to kick the tires and play around with this. Hopefully they will get to the same point as the first bucket of customers, and be asking for everything to be operator based all the time. >> Convert the tire kickers, you're gonna be okay, right? >> That's right. >> Thank you for the time. >> Thank you. >> We appreciate that and continued success at Red Hat, and, once again, good to see you. >> Thank you, always a pleasure. >> You bet. Live, here on theCUBE, you're watching Red Hat Summit 2019. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DockerCon 18. Brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of DockerCon 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer. We are in San Francisco on a spectacularly sunny day. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE some guys from Red Hat. We've got Ben Breard, Senior Technical Products Manager, and Reza Shafii, VP of Platform Services. Guys, thanks so much for stopping by. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> It's great. >> So, Reza, you come from the CoreOS acquisition, you've been with Red Hat for about five months, Ben, you've been there about eight years, but I did see online that it's Red Hat's 25th anniversary. You guys have been doing something right for 25 years. >> Open source, that's what we do. (laughs) >> Open source. So talk to us, what's going on at Red Hat, what's new, what's exciting? >> I mean, OpenShift is, I mean, that's the big thing, right? I mean, so, just, this is a humbling time to be in the industry, like with this container wave and to see the industry adoption that we've had with OpenShift and, like, how all the technology in Red Hat's portfolio is just pushing and driving that along, it's, I don't know. It's exciting to me. >> No, it's very exciting. For us I think that cultural compatibility between CoreOS and Red Hat has been just fabulous to see. And then seeing how Red Hat provides a platform to really extend that and enhance that is just great, yeah. >> Culture is key. We talk about culture a lot when, at every event we talk about digital transformation, right? And culture is key to that, so maybe, Reza, give us a little bit of perspective, it's been five months now. How has CoreOS been embraced by the Red Hat guys and how are you now living in harmony? >> Right, well, first of all, CoreOS had, we always believed in open source. We were behind many open source projects in the containerized infrastructure space. And in that space, especially there on Kubernetes, we worked very closely with Red Hat. So, we knew each other really well. So as the teams got together, it was very easy for us to really get together and brainstorm towards what are the possibilities. And that's what we've been working on and, you know, the shovel has been hitting the ground for a while now and we're working on a conversion platform that brings Tectonic's technology to OpenShift. That's been very exciting as well as bringing the container Linux technology together with Red Hat, so. >> Some of those announcements happened at Red Hat summit a few weeks back or a month or so back. Can you talk about have there been any other updates? And also like, okay, maybe go one level deeper, so Tectonic was CoreOS', Kubernetes', I don't know, I don't wanna call it, would you call it a distribution? But a lot of autonomic and automation technologies for the operator built into Tectonic which was part of CoreOS' core DNA, now being brought into, kind of, the Red Hat platforms. So maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the stats, some of the recent developments. >> Yeah, so where we're at, it's kind of a phased implementation of bringing those technologies in, right? And so our next quarterly release, right, is gonna start, that's where, you know, we start bringing in some of the components, right? And then the one after that, you know, it's more on the operator side and then, you know, end of the year is when it's fully converged and so that's the path we're on, yeah. >> In terms of Kubernetes in general, Red Hat made a really early bet on Kubernetes and a big shift, a big pivot for its OpenShift platform. Kind of really embracing, throwing out a lot of the internals and embracing Kubernetes. Here at DockerCon, Kubernetes was a big topic, Docker's doing a lot of integration with Kubernetes, I kind of think that maybe that is, one size doesn't fit all but certainly Kubernetes is becoming accepted a lot more places. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, the implications of that, this phenomenon? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, well I think it's, there's a recognition that Kubernetes is now the defacto standard for orchestration, right? I think even if you go back a year ago, that was probably not quite there but now I think that that sense is there, and I think you're right, like, Red Hat embraced that three or four years ago and so did CoreOS and we both had to do a big shift, right? CoreOs was using fleets before that and we made a shift to Kubernetes. That has paid dividends, I think, because now we're really focusing on many of the concerns above and beyond just operating Kubernetes itself. It's what do you do above the stack and how do you operate everything above the stack, and that's where all the operator framework and everything we've been working on comes in. >> Yeah, I mean, it's basically how you get value in a more applied technology and a more application centered way. And so it's just been great to see the whole industry really rally around those standards and API's and everything and, you know, all the cloud platforms, everything, and so it's, you know, it's where the ecosystem is. >> Let's talk about collaboration. When you're talking with customers, you know, we've talked a lot today and at other events too, our enterprises are spending a lot of money, a lot of their IT budgets, on just keeping the lights on on mission-critical applications that they have to have but there's very little budget for innovation. Which is key to an organization being competitive, being relevant and being a leader. What are some of the customer conversations that you guys are having and what are some of the common barriers to container adoption that you're helping, with open to public customers, to eliminate? >> Yeah. >> I can take a shot at it. So, essentially, now on Kubernetes running stateless work goal at Kubernetes, is something that most people can do, right? Once you get to stateful work mode, that starts getting tricky and what we're seeing is that people who have now adopted Kubernetes for a year plus, they're starting to think, how do I run my stateful work on the databases, backend storage, in a, you know, scalable fashion on top of Kubernetes. And that's where we're coming in ans trying to help people, help the community, deliver that, really. Through creation of operators, through creation of reusable business logic that can do that across any Kubernetes department. >> Yip, I was just gonna add on to that, it's, like, as far just keeping the lights on and freeing up resources, right? When you look at all of the path and the deployment models on the net and new stuff, right, we're able to take away a serious amount of, like, operational overhead and just everything to where people can scale and just move way faster, right, and so there's a certain amount of that value that carries over to the traditional stuff, right, and so, you know, I think the biggest thing on the customer side is just, like, a mindset and culture change and getting, getting people to, like, change the way they look at the problem, right? And so, you know, those things and just understanding security, those are the big topics. >> Nice. I was at some Red Hat summit and one of the things that really impressed me there was this promise that, you know, we've all been trying to promise the end customer a time to value that you can actually do things faster, that you actually can innovate, was actually starting to be real in the sense that all of the customer examples were in terms of weeks or months and not years. And the Apple's app and the Apple's multi-cloud and all those other, and, so, can you talk a little about maybe some customers that are doing that or some examples of that, of both time to value and then the fact that a very few number of people were controlling very large infrastructures and I think you were just touching on that in terms of the operators and just all the automation, the day two sort of things. It seems like, I kind of think we've turned a corner in terms of productivity and time to value and real-life, real production workloads. >> Yeah, absolutely, and when you look at, like, where we see adoption, be it the financial sector, or, I mean, it's all over the place, it's really encouraging. And so at summit we had, I don't know, I think, like, 300, or 200 customer talks, it was insane. Going through the use cases and everything. Some of the big ones we're seeing from Amadeus, Optum and it was great. >> I saw an IDC report, I think on the Red Hat website, that showed that customers that adopt OpenShift can see a massive ROI, I wanna say it was, like, over 500% ROI within a 5 year period. >> Well, I think, part of, there's multiple factors to that, right? Part of it comes out of, just the sheer power of containerized infrastructure. Instead of deploying applications on a per compute basis and having to map them to single compute nose, you have the orchestrator that plays that perfect Tetris game with all of your applications. The other part comes a bit out of simplified operations, right? And that's where I think we're just at the beginning of the road. There is plenty more work to do on simplifying operations of Kubernetes and that's what I'm most excited about on this. >> Nice. Let's talk about the future. We are, I don't know, at an inflection point of this container technology, it's becoming more mature, people are in production, multi-cloud is certainly an aspect of what's going on, but I'd love for you to kind of explore a little bit more about some of the tooling. Like, I don't know if you need to get down into the OCI and the runtime level but, you know, what do we see the tooling doing? So, Kubernetes is there, you know, that level is there, but, like, what about, you know, builder and other things like that, like, what other pieces of tooling and automation are being developed to help, again, help developer productivity? >> Yeah, that's a good one, so I'll take a shot. So, it's a couple of things, so Kubernetes itself is plugable on, like, every tier, right, so it's finding that balance of seeing defaults and guidance of what works but then being flexible to work in customer environments so we can lock into, whether we're in, kind of, build strategy pipelines and, you know, whatever works for the customer and their, frankly, different teams, right? Because they all have different levels of maturity and stuff, so that's one thing, is just providing that level of flexibility. And the other thing is, you know, you said multi-cloud, just the way OpenShift provides that, like, common platform across anything, right, it just abstracts away any of the, you know, differences and whatever. >> Yeah, and we're seeing multi-cloud more and more with our customer base. And having a consistent model to deal with every one of them, including your non-prep environment, is becoming a bigger deal. >> In terms of, so on prep, maybe, actually I think it'd be useful. We've been talking about Kubernetes and OpenShift a lot but maybe let's step up a level and say, okay, OpenShift, how do you decide, so OpenShift has Kubernetes in it, but it's much more, it's a services platform built up off of, you know, rail on the bottom all the way up to, kind of, operators now. Can you talk a little bit about what else, what is some of the special sauce of OpenShift? >> Yeah, so, kind of what I was saying earlier about just, like, kind of every layer. So, we start, you know, like you said, rail, right, so the supported bulletproof kernel right up to the runtime, to the, literally the enterprise cube distribution is OpenShift. And then what we bring to it is this, like, amazing developer experience, right? And, like, the secret sauce of where it's going is all of the beauty from the CoreOS side on top of that. So, we've had the developer story, right, so, really, prescriptive onboarding of applications is the power because an empty cluster is useless, right, so you've gotta have that easy path to onboard. And then when we marry that with the day two stuff and all of the, you know, the deployment, and say, operators, everything, I mean, that's the, those pieces coming together is what differentiates it. >> From just up in the air of, kind of, Kubernetes. >> Right. >> Gets you part of the way but there's certainly a lot more. >> Yeah, it doesn't have any of the developer experience, the web console, the admin console, none of that stuff exists, right? >> The way I look at it is that the value add comes from two perspectives, right? One is from the system administrators and the infrastructural owners. That certainly comes to day two operations and how much to simplify that. How do you get a consistent interface across different environments? And how do you do things like accountability? Converging everything on to the same cluster, which is really what Kubernetes does, also changes the focus from a cost perspective, for example. From different application owners to a single owner. How do you make sure that, like, that owner is able to say, well, these are the people that are using it. We have services on top of Kubernetes, in OpenShift, that provide you that capability, for example. Through metering and charge back. Sometimes people call it metering and shame back. (laughing) And then from the point of view of developers, you know, there is multiple opinionated ways of simplifying developers life, right? And any given large enterprise has many, many ways of doing that and we wanna just be ready to address all of them and by the way, we have our own opinions and we have built that on top of OpenShift as well. >> So, you guys work a lot with developers. We have about five or six thousand people that are here at this event. I'm curious, when you go to open source events, including your own, are you finding that same mix of developers, IT professionals, enterprise architects and execs? And if so, what is that conversation like at that higher level where there might be, you know, checkbooks and keys to the kingdom and a business saying, hey, we have to iterate quickly. What is, kind of, the mix of conversations that you guys find in these communities? >> Yeah, it's the difference between the strategy, right, versus, like, bits, right? So, the admin, developer, we wanna focus, we wanna get in the weeds, right, and then the higher levels it's all about strategy, direction and enablement and those types of, you know, higher level concepts, right? So, I mean, that's, I don't know, my perspective. >> Are you learning that your conversations and maybe education of developers helps them then go up the chain within their organizations to explain, this is why we need to do this? >> I think there's some of that, right? The other thing I left off the lift though, is the cultural piece, because traditional enterprises, there's something here that they want to glean and take home in the culture space, right? And so that's a, you know, that's the other big one. >> I find that the conversation varies widely, right? So, when you talk to the infrastructure administrators and developers, you gotta be able to talk very technical and explain to them exactly how all this is working. And they're interested in the feature and technology. But when you talk to the CIO's out there, and the CTO's out there, really they're in interested in the outcome. And when you talk about the outcome it's easy just to show just what everybody wants to get to a pure DevOps model, everybody wants to get to a microservices model. This is kind of like going to the gym and seeing the of really fit people and then saying, well, yeah, but how do I get there, right? And this is where I think a company like Red Hat can come in and say, well, we'll work with you to get you there, right? So that's, that's important. >> Well the other one is just the value of being there and talking to your peers in the industry too, right? I mean, yeah, it's us, we're facilitating, but it's peers too, right? >> But you're right, culture, we talked about that, John, a number of times today, how critical culture is to being able to move past inertia. You know, we mentioned when I kicked off the segment that Red Hat is just celebrating its 25th birthday, so I imagine, I know you've been there, Ben, for 8 years, that there's been a lot of change there and a lot of cultural, kind of, mindset shift. Obviously, Reza, coming on in the last 5 months. Give us a little bit of an insight into the Red Hat culture that's helping to drive the agility that you need to also give your customers. >> Yeah, this is something our CEO talks about all the time, right? He wrote a book on it, The Open Organization, and, you know, just, like, lays out clear values of transparency, doing things very visually. We go through these exercises all the time just for changing our slogans and brands and these types of things, and the way where everybody participates and everybody takes ownership in it, right, and is part of it. And so that's one thing, I mean, we've been going through crazy growth. When I joined it was 3,000 people, now it's, like, 12,000 or so. I don't know the exact number but, and so how we scale that culture has been, it's been interesting, but it's been really successful. I mean, it's a big part of it. Open was a really clear message from summit, you know, basically in the cloud, open has won, right? Open innovation, open source, open culture. That's what's driving all the things we see now, I'd say. >> Yes. >> Well guys, thanks so much, Ben and Reza for stopping by theCUBE and sharing with us what's new at Red Hat and what excites you guys and we look forward to having you back on. >> Thanks so much for having us. >> Thank you. >> We wanna thank you guys for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with John Troyer, from DockerCon 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)