(melodic music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hey, welcome back. Get ready, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, it's virtual this year. But we've had a lot of great interviews and just coming off the keynotes, want to invite John Furrier in, he's been doing a lot of the keynotes and attending this thing for years. So John, first off, get your impressions of AnsibleFest 2020. >> Hey Jeff, great to cover this event. It's too bad we're not in person, we're virtual, theCUBE virtual AnsibleFest is virtual. Last year was in person, it's a really intimate event last year. And again with that theme, a similar vibe here for 2020 again, not face-to-face, but the content has that same kind of community vibe. Just some notable things just of the Keynote and some of the news is obviously last year they launched the Ansible Automation Platform. They've grown their collections community from five supported platforms to 50. And they launched the automation services catalog. So, you starting to see from the Keynotes, the positioning of Red Hat and Ansible. Just a series of announcements at AnsibleFest that include a lot integrations. Okay, and I think that's the key thing, obviously Kubernetes we heard at VMworld continued to take center stage in cloud native and CI/CD Pipeline. So yeah, with that, that's the vibe collections, collections, collections, and some new terminology, which could be confused depending on where you come from, but the word 'content' means something here and content is code and there's a collaboration aspect. And so, overall you seeing that positioning of agile, DevOps, security network automation and obviously community, a big part of Red Hat and Ansible is the core community and this future development environment of easy to consume, easy to code, easy to troubleshoot and built-in security and make it collaborative. That's the open-source ethos. And that's really the focus of AnsibleFest 2020 virtual. >> Yeah, I thought it was interesting. Richard Henshaw you know came out with, and it really reinforced the theme that automate and connect. And it's pretty interesting 'cause he talks about Ansible being the language of collaboration and how important collaboration is. And as we know with COVID and everybody working from home, now kind of the traditional methods of development teams getting together and a DevOps culture and doing daily stand-ups and having this kind of co-mingling of people isn't available anymore really as an option. So the pressure to collaborate is harder than ever before. So really an interesting twist for Ansible taking that tack that they are the language of collaboration. >> I liked his philosophy and some of his narrative around, he used to be a developer. They had a different group from their network-op brethren and they had different kind of siloed bill work together, it's all IT back in the day. But as things have become more cloud native, they have to integrate more and work together. And so this notion of collections is a big deal at Ansible. It's the idea of having these, these playbooks and having people be responsible for their playbooks and share those playbooks. They have a thing called content, which is how you can share these playbooks as content to be consumed and also collaborated and built on and with. But ultimately the theme around Ansible has always been a tool for automation. And now as a platform, the focus is making that automation platform wide across multiple environments, not just public cloud or on premises, it's edge, it's multicloud. So this idea of network automation has moved resources across the environments. And security is a big part of it. The automation platform for instance has a new 2.10 release, which brings back a huge amount of change releases where you don't have to be tied to the local host where you have this module updates are not directly tied to release cycles. Now this means that there's more availability of code. So network automation and updates, synchronous updates are huge. They talked about the VMware collection, IBM Z collections, all these things point to integrations. And that's really the focus of this integrate, this cloud native is, can I play well with others? This is again an extension to the community theme of open source. And if you're not integrating well in cloud native, you probably not going to be around longer. And that's a good theme for them. >> Yeah. So John, I wonder if you can unpack it a little bit, Robyn Bergeron and her Keynote went through this concept of the collection that I'm checking my notes here. They actually have three different types, they've got playbooks, roles, modules, PES, docks and plugins. And she talked about this is a way to basically aggregate information and share it in a bundle that other people can take full advantage of. >> Yeah, and I think that's the key of these collections. And I asked each of them when I was talking to them on camera prior to the event. And I say, what's the big theme for AnsibleFest this year? And they all said, Robyn was like collections, collections, collections. But the idea of writing code in a collection is all about Integry, so the VMware for instance is a great example. IBM Z, which is their mainframe piece. Ansible now part of Red Hat, and now Red Hat's part of IBM, you seeing that they now have more innovation going on with let's say mainframes. So the IBM Z integration allows Ansible to be compatible and bring a modern error to the mainframes. And this speaks to how people are working with these new roles and can leverage code in a new way. So, I think that's a real big thing about providing that last mile innovation and bringing it in other environments. Not just being on Ansible, but really integrating in with others. >> The other piece getting a lot attention John is OpenShift and the rule of OpenShift and the play of OpenShift. So how should people think about how OpenShift fits in this whole puzzle? >> I think OpenShift brings the Red Hat, a hybrid cloud automation piece to it, to Ansible, which is the, where the developers are playing with the CI/CD Pipeline. So the combination of, if you remember back in the days of OpenStack when we covered Red Hat and when OpenShift kind of really hit the scene, that was around private cloud. And then OpenShift adopted Kubernetes and that kind of cloud native vibe. And then since then the growth has been phenomenal. So when you take Red Hat's OpenShift, which is the cloud platform and you bring it to the automation platform of Ansible, it allows customers to have an easy to use capability to do hybrid and multicloud automation. And where this matters is where containers are getting traction. IDC was reporting numbers where only five to 15% of the enterprise, depending upon how you look at it are containerized, which means there's a huge surge of opportunity in these enterprises to bring containers into the cloud model. So for lift and shift and for modern workloads. So the OpenShift provides that path. So it's a nice compliment for the two together to work. So when we heard customers talking about the game system, one customer we talked about using Ansible Tower and the entire cloud, private cloud environment across data centers. So it's a good fit, automation with cloud. And honestly that's where the magic is. >> Right, right. The other piece that we keep hearing about over and over and over, and there's a play here as well as the edge, right. And really moving the compute closer to the place the data is generated and closer to the place that the data is consumed. But where do you see kind of the edge, the edge play here at AnsibleFest? (deep breath) >> Well this kind of ties into the earlier question about OpenShift and Ansible, that kind of automation meets hybrid cloud and addressing this like last mile aspect that Ansible provides in terms of load balancing, configuration, applications, application servers, pushing the apps to the edge. That's a big deal. And as 5G comes out and as edge becomes more, more important, you're going to need to have automation, the surface area of things (chuckles) to automate becomes critical. So the whole discussion is, it's larger scale, more devices, more code being shipped. This is where the engineers got to get involved early, bake security in from the beginning. But also have that automation capability, so it's not context switching between I ship some code, I got to troubleshoot it. They can all do it from within the Ansible platform. (hands rubs together) And that's where the traction with developers is. And this notion, this was the notion of sharing and collections and content become important because you have more people involved. And the betterment of the, of the collections and the crowd and the developers make sense. So edge is real and you got to have a software defined operational model. And you got to have a cloud piece like OpenShift, and you got to have an automation component like Ansible. So, this is a critical, whether you're talking space or 5G or inside an office or on a person, software defined operations will be the key. And that is a big trend that we're seeing right now. >> Yeah, so final question, John, what are you hoping to get out of this show, AnsibleFest 2020? Are there any open questions that you're hoping to get, get kind of answered or closed? Or what are you hoping to walk away with at the end of this event? >> Well, I'm curious to see how they handle the virtual event. Obviously the face to face is a very important intimate part of their community model. So I want to see how that goes. I want to see, I want to hear and look and squint through and connect the dots on the relationship with the Red Hat IBM acquisition, because Ansible is part of Red Hat and Red Hat is now (chuckles) part of IBM. So I think that's going to be a huge lift for Ansible, because once Ansible gets into the slipstream of IBM sales channels, that acceptance is going to be a really important factor for their growth. And then ultimately what's the developer trend? What new things are developers doing with automation that help customers have modern applications so that more, better apps can be deployed coming out of COVID, and as CXO's and the ivory tower of businesses change their business models, what new things are developers doing and how did that scale? So that's my, my key focus. >> All right, well that's great. Well, John, thanks for sharing your thoughts, your insight. And enough of us talking. Let's get to the tech athletes at AnsibleFest 2020. >> Awesome, thanks. >> Alright, he's John I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE with ongoing coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (melodic music)

>>live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the Q covering Answerable Fest 2019. Brought to you by >>Red Hat. >>Okay, welcome back. It runs two cubes. Live coverage of Ansel Fest here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm John for a host of the Cube with stewed Minutemen. Analysts were looking angle. The Cube are next to guest Tom Anderson and most product owner. Red Hat is part of the sensible platform automation properly announced. And Richard Henshaw, product manager. Guys, welcome to the Cube Way had all the execs on yesterday and some customers all pretty jazzed up about this year, mainly around just the timing of how automation is really hitting the scene and some of the scale that's going on. You guys had big news with the answerable automation platform. New addition to the portfolio. What's the feedback? >>So far, I think the feedback has been super positive. We have customers have come to us. A lot of the last little one said, Hey, we're maturing. We're moving along the automation maturity curve, right, and we have multiple teams coming to us and saying, Hey, can you help us connect this other team? We've had a lot of success doing cloud provisioning or doing network automation were doing security automation. What have you and they're coming to us and saying, Help us give us kind of the story if you will, to be able to connect these other teams in our organization. And so that way I kind of feel the pole for this thing to move from a tool that automates this or that. This task for that task. Too much more of a platform center. >>It seems to be scaling out in terms of what automation is touching these days. And look at the numbers six million plus activations on get Hub versus other projects. So activities high in the community. But this seems to be much more broader. Scope now. Bring more things together. What's the rationale behind? What's the reasoning? What's the strategy? But the main thing is, >>automation is got to that point where it's becoming the skill set that we do. So it was always the focus. You know, I'm a database administrator. I'm assists out, man. I'm a middle where I'm a nap deaf on those people, then would do task inside their job. But now we're going to the point off, actually, anybody that can see apiece. Technology can automate piece technology in the clouds have shown This is the way to go forward with the things what we had. We bring that not just in places where it's being created from scratch, a new How do you bring that into what's existing? Because a lot of our customers have 20 or 30 years like a heritage in the I T estate. How do you do with all of that? You can't just rebuild everything into new as well. So you gotta be ableto automate across both of those areas and try and keep. You know, we say it's administrative efficiency versus organization effectiveness. Now how do I get to the point of the organization? Could be effective, supposed just doing things that make my job easier. And that's what we're gonna bring with applying automation capability that anybody can take advantage of. >>Richard. I actually felt the keynote demo this morning did a nice job of that line that they set it up with is this is this is tools that that all the various roles and teams just get it, and it's not the old traditional okay, I do my piece and set it up and then throw it over the wall. There was that, you know? Oh, I've got the notification and then some feedback loops and, you know, we huddled for something and it gets done rather fast, not magic. It's still when I get a certain piece done. Okay, I need to wait for it's actually be up and running, but you know, you're getting everybody into really a enterprise collaboration, almost with the tool driving those activities together >>on that. And that's why yesterday said that focus on collaboration is the great thing. All teams need to do that to be more successful because you get Maur inclusivity, Maurin puts. But organizations also need to coordinate what activities they're doing because they have rules, regulations, structures and standards they have to apply. Make sure that those people can do things in a way that's guided for them so that they're they're effective at what they're trying to do. >>Okay, I think I'm going to explain what's in the platform first because an engine and tower and there, what else is in there, what's new? What's what our customers is going to see. That's new. That's different >>it's the new components are automation Hope Collections, which is a technology inside answer ball itself. On also Automation Analytics and the casing is that engine and terrorist of the beating heart of the platform. But it's about building the body around the outside. So automation is about discover abilities like, What can we find out? What automation can I do that I'm allowed to do? Um, and let six is about the post activity. So I've automated all these things. I've done all this work well, How did it go? Who did what, who did? How much of what? How well did it work? How much did it failed? Succeeds and then, once you build on that, you don't start to expand out into other areas. So what? KP eyes, How much of what I do is automated versus no automated? You can start to instigate other aspects of business change, then Gamification amongst teams. Who's the Who's the boat? The closest motive here into the strategy input source toe How? >>Find out what's working right, essentially and sharing mechanism to for other groups in terms of knowing what's happening >>and how is my platform performing which areas are performing well, which airs might not be performing well. And then, as we move down the road, kind of how my performing against my peers are other organizations that are automating using the ants will automation platform doing? And am I keeping up on my doing better? That kind of stuff. >>So, Tom, there's a robust community as we was talking about. Their platform feels like it builds on yet to change the dynamic a little bit. When you talk about the automation hub and collections, you've already got a long list of the ecosystem vendors that are participating here. Bring us two through a little bit. What led Thio. You know all these announcements and where you expect, you know, how would this change the dynamics of >>the body? And maybe we'll split up that question. I'll talk a little bit about partners because it's both partners and customers in community here that's been driving us this way. I'll talk a little bit about partners and Rich talk about the customer piece here, which is partners have been traditionally distributing their content there. Ansel automation content through our engine capability. So our engine release cycle, or cadence, has been sort of the limiting factor to how fast they can get content out to their users and what what the collections does is part of the platforms allows us to separate those things. Rich talked about it yesterday in his keynote, having that stable platform. But you having yet having content be able to read fast. And our partners love that idea because they can content. They can develop content, create content, get into their users hands faster. So partners like at five and Microsoft you've seen on stage here are both huge contributors. And they've been part of the pole for us to get to the platform >>from a customer perspective. And the thing I love most about doing this job with the gas of customers is because I was a customer on Guy was danceable customer, and then I came over to this side on Dhe. I now go and see customers. I see what they've done, and I know what that's what I want to do. Or that's what I was trying to do. And she started to see those what people wanted to achieve, and I was said yesterday it is moving away from should I automate. How would we automate Maura? What should I automate? And so we'll start to see how customers are building their capabilities. And there's no there's many different ways people do. This is about different customers, >>you know. What's interesting is you guys have such a great success formula first. Well, congratulations. It's great to see how this is turning into such a wider market, because is not just the niche configuration management. More automation become with cloud to point a whole new wider category. So congratulations. The formula we see with success is good product, community customers adopting and then ecosystem that seems to be the successful former in these kinds of growth growth waves you guys experiencing? What is the partnering with you mentioned? S five Microsoft? Because that, to me, is gonna be a tipping point in a tel sign for you guys because you got the community. You got the customers that check check ecosystem. What's the partner angle? How do they involve? Take us through that. What's going on? They're >>so you're absolutely so you know, kind of platform velocity will be driven by partner adoption and how many things customers can automate on that platform or through that platform and for us I mean, the example was in the demo this morning where they went to the automation hub and they pulled down the F five collection, plugged it into a workflow, and they were automating. What are partners? Experience through their customers is Look, if I'm a customer, I have a multi cloud environment or hybrid cloud environment. I've got automation from AWS. I've got azure automation via more automation. Five. Got Sisko. I've got Palo Alto. I've got all these different automation tools to try and string them together, and the customers are coming and telling those vendors Look, we don't want to use your automation to end this automation tooling that one we want to use Ansel is the common substrate if you will automation substrate across this platform. So that's motivating the partners to come to us and say, Hey, I had I was out five Aspire last week, and they're all in a natural. I mean, it's really impressive to see just how much there in unanswerable and how much they're being driven by their customers when they do Ansell workshops without five, they say the attendance is amazing so they're being pulled by their customers and therefore the partners are coming to us. And that's driving our platform kind of usability across the across the scale. >>Another angle we'll see when we talk to the engineers of the partners that are actually doing the work to work with danceable is that they're seeing is ah, change also in how they it's no longer like an individual customer side individual day center because everything is so much more open and so much more visible. You know there's value in there, making it appealing and easy for their customers to gain advantage of what they're doing. And also the fact that the scales across those customers as well because they have their internal team's doing it, saying the same things and so bringing them to an automation capable, like Ansel have to push. That means that they also gained some of the customers appreciation for them, making it easier to do their tasking collaboration with us and you know, the best collaborations. We've got some more partners, all initiated by customers, saying Hey, I want you to go and get danceable content, >>the customer driving a lot of behavior, the guest system. Correct. On the just another point, we've been hearing a lot of security side separate sector, but cyber security. A lot of customers are building teams internally, Dev teams building their own stacks and then telling the suppliers a support my AP eyes. So now you start to see more of a P I integration point. Is that something that is gonna be something that you guys gonna be doubling down on? What's that? What's the approach there? How does that partner connected scale with the customers? So we've >>been eso Ansel security automation, which is the automation connecting I. P. S. C. P. S that kind of stuff. It is almost a replay of what we did the network automation space. So we saw a need in the network automation space. We feel that we became a catalyst in the community with our partners and our customers and our and our contributors. And after about three years now, Ansel Network automation is a huge piece of our business and adoption curve. We're doing the exactly see the exact same thing in the security automation space compliance. The side over here, we're talking about kind of automating the connections between your firewalls, your threat detection systems and all that kind of stuff. So we're working with a set of partners, whether it's Cisco, whether it's Palo Alto, whether it's whether it's resilient by the EMS, resilient and being able to connect and automate the connections between the threat and the response and and all of that kind of >>the same trajectory as the network automation >>Zach. Same trajectory, just runnin the same play and it's working out right now. We're on that kind of early part of that curve, that adoption curve, and we have partners jumping in with us. >>You're talking to customers. We've heard certain stories. You know how I got, you know, 1000 hours of work down to a dozen hours of work there. Is there anything built into the tool today that allows them to kind of generate those those hero stats O. R. Any anything along those lines? >>Talk about analytic committee from yes, >>well, again without any analytic side. I mean, those things starts become possible that one of the things we've been doing is turning on Maur more metrics. And it's actually about mining the data for the customer because Tower gives this great focal point for all the automation that's going on. It's somewhere that everything comes through. So when we export that and then we can we can do that work for all the customers rather than have to duel themselves. Then you start to build those pictures and we start with a few different areas. But as we advance with those and start, see how people use them and start having that conversation customers about what data they want to use and how they want to use it, I think that's gonna be very possible. You know, it's so >>important. E think was laid out here nicely. That automation goes from a tactical solution to more strategic, but more and more how customers can leverage that data and be data driven. That's that's gonna drive them for it. And any good customer examples you have of the outcomes. No, you're talking to a lot of >>PS one from this morning. Yeah, >>so I mean, I'll be Esther up this morning, and I think that the numbers they used in the demo that she's like, you know, last year they did 100,000 from launch to the end of the year. 100,000 changes through their platform on this year so far that in a 1,000,000. So now you know, from my recollection, that's about the same time frame on either side of the year. So that's a pretty impressive acceleration. Side of things. We've had other ones where people have said, You know how many times you were telling some customers yesterday? What used to take eight hours to a D R test with 20 or 30 people in for the weekend now takes 12 minutes for two People on the base is just pushing a few buttons just as they go through and confirm everything worked that that type of you can't get away from that type of change. >>J. P. Morgan example yesterday was pretty compelling. I mean, time savings and people are, I mean, this legit times. I mean, we're talking serious order of magnitude, time savings. So that's awesome. Then I want to ask you guys, Next is we're seeing another pattern in the market where amongst your customer base, where it's the same problem being automated, allover the place so playbooks become kind of key as that starts to happen is that where the insights kind of comes in? Can you help us kind of tie that together? Because if I'm a large enterprise with its I'm decentralized or centralized, are organized problem getting more gear? I'm getting more clouds, game or operations. There's more surface area of stuff and certainly five g I ot is coming around the corner. Mention security. All this is expanding to be much more touchpoints. Automation seems to be the killer app for this automation, those mundane task, but also identifying new things, right? Can you guys comment on that? >>Yeah, so maybe I'll start rich. You could jump in, which is a little bit around, uh, particularly those large accounts where you have these different disparate teams taking a approach to automate something, using Ansel and then be able to repeat or reuse that somewhere else. The organization. So that idea of being for them to be able to curate they're automation content that they've created. Maybe they pulled something down from galaxy. Maybe they've got something from our automation husband. They've made it their own, and now they want to curate that and spread it across the organization to either obviously become more efficient, but also in four standards. That's where automation hub is going to come into play here. Not only will it be a repo for certify content from us and our partners, but it will also be an opportunity for them to curate their own content and share it across the organization. >>Yeah, I think when you tie those two things together and you've got that call discover abilities, I had away go and find what I want. And then the next day, the next day, after you've run the automation, you then got the nerve to say, Well, who's who's using the right corporate approved rolls? Who's using the same set of rolls from the team that builds the standards to make sure you're gonna compliant build again, showing the demo That's just admin has his way of doing it, puts the security baseline application on top and you go, Oh, okay, who's running that security baseline continuously every time. So you can both imposed the the security standards in the way the build works. But you can also validate that everybody is actually doing the security standards. >>You what I find fascinating about what you guys are doing, and I think this is came out clearly yesterday and you guys are talking about it. And some of the community conversations is a social construct here. Going on is that there's a cultural shift where the benefits that you guys are throwing off with the automation is creating a network effect within the companies. So it's not just having a slack channel on texting. The servers are up or down. It's much more of a tighter bond between the stakeholders inside the company's. Because you have people from different geography is you have champions driving change. And there's some solidarity happening between the groups of people, whether they're silo door decentralized. So there's a whole new social network, almost a cultural shift that's happening with the standardization of the substrate. Can you guys comment on this dynamic? Did you see this coming? You planning forward? Are you doubling down on it? >>I think so. And we talk about community right on how important that is. But how did you create that community internally and so ask balls like the catalyst so most teams don't actually need to understand in their current day jobs. Get on all the Dev ops, focus tools or the next generation. Then you bring answer because they want to automate, and suddenly they go. Okay, Now I need to understand source control, and it's honest and version. I need to understand how to get pulls a full request on this and so on and so forth on it changes that provides this off. The catalyst for them to focus on what changed they have to make about how they work, because what they wanted to do was something that requires them to do you no good disciplines and good behaviors that previously there was no motivation or need to do. I think >>Bart for Microsoft hit on that yesterday. You know, if you saw Bart Session but their network engineers having to get familiar with concepts of using automation almost like software development, life cycles right and starting to manage those things in repose. And think of it that way, which is intimidating at first for people who are not used to. But once they're over that kind of humping understand that the answer language itself is simple, and our operations person admin can use it. No problem, >>he said himself. Didn't my network engineers have become network developers. >>It's funny watching and talking to a bunch of customers. They all have their automation journey that they're going through. And I hear the Gamification I'm like, Okay, what if I have certain levels I have to reach in it unlocked capabilities, you know, in the community along the way. Maybe that could build a built in the future. >>Maybe it's swag based, you know, you >>get level C shows that nice work environment when you're not talking about the server's down on some slack channel when you're actually focusing on work. Yeah, so that mean that's the shift. That's what I'm saying, going >>firefighting to being able to >>do for throwing bombs. Yeah, wars. And the guy was going through this >>myself. Now you start a lot of the different team to the deaf teams and the ops teams. And I say it would be nice if these teams don't have to talk to complain about something that hadn't worked. It was Mexican figured it was just like I just like to talk to you because you're my friend. My colleague and I'd like to have a chat because everything's working because it's all automated, so it's consistent. It's repeatable. That's a nice, nice way. It can change the way that people get to interact because it's no longer only phoned me up when something's wrong. I think that absent an interesting dynamic >>on our survey, our customer base in our community before things one of the four things that came up was happier employees. Because if they're getting stuff done and more efficient, they have more time to actually self actualizing their job. That becomes an interesting It's not just a checkbox in some HR manual actually really impact. >>And I kind of think the customers we've heard talk rvs, gentlemen, this morning gave me a lot of the fear initially is, well, I automate myself out of a job, and what we've heard from everybody is that's not absolutely That's not actually true at all. It just allows them to do higher value things that, um or pro >>after that big data, that automation thing. That's ridiculous. >>I didn't use it yesterday. My little Joe Comet with that is when I tried to explain to my father what I do. Andi just said Well, in the 19 seventies, they said that computers you mean we'll do a two day week on? That hasn't come >>true. Trade your beeper and for a phone full of pots. But Richard, Thanks for coming on. Thanks for unpacking the ants. Full automation platforms with features. Congratulations. Great to see the progress. Thank you, Jonah. Everybody will be following you guys to Cuba. Coverage here in Atlanta, First Amendment Stevens for day two of cube coverage after this short break.