(upbeat electronic music) >> Hello, welcome back to the Red Hat Summit, 2021 virtual coverage. I'm John Ferez, theCUBE coverage. I'm in Palo Alto with the remote interviews for our virtual conference here. We've got two great guests, CUBE alumnis, Tom Anderson, VP of Ansible Automation Platform, and Robin Bergeron, who's the Senior Manager, Ansible Community, community architect and all the great things involved. Robin, great to see you. Tom, thanks for coming back on Red Hat Summit, here, virtual. Good to see you. >> Thanks for having us. >> So since last summit, what's the updates on the Ansible Community and the Automation Platform? Tom, we'll start with you. Automation Platform, what's the big updates? >> Yeah. So since last Summit a lot has happened in Ansible land, if you will. So last time, I remember talking to you about content collections. Packing distribution format for into the sports. So we put a lot of effort into bringing all the Ansible content collections really, as well as the commercial users. And we launched last year a program certified content, working with our partners, including partners to certify the content collections that they create. Co-certify them, where we work together to make sure that the developed against, and tested against a Proctor spec, so that both of us can provide them to our customer bases with the confidence that they're going to be working and performing properly, and that we at Red Hat, and our partnership, co-support those out in our customer's production parts. That was a big deal. The other thing that we announced, late last fall, was the private automation hub. And that's the idea where our customers, obviously appreciate the idea of being able to go to Ansible galaxy or to the Ansible automation opt, to go and grab these content collections, these integrations, and bring them down in their environment. They wanted a way, they wanted a methodology, or a repository, where they can curate content from different sources, and then the manager across their environment, the automation across the environment. Kind of leaning into a little bit of automation content as code, if you will. And so we launched the automation hub, the private automation hub, where that sits in our customer's infrastructure; whether that's in the cloud, or on premise, or both, and allows them to grab content from galaxy, from the Ansible automation hub, the Ansible, automation hub on call.red hat.com, as well as their internally developed content, and be able to manage and provide that across their organization, governed by a set policies. So lots of stuff that's going on. Really advanced considering the amount of content that we provide. The amount of collections that we provide. Have certified that for our customers. And have the ability to curate and manage that content across the teams. >> I want to do a drill down on some of the unification of teams, which is a big message as well, as operating at scale, cause that's a super value proposition you guys have. And I want to get into that, but Robin, I want to come back to you on the community. So much has gone on. We're now into the pandemic for almost a year and a half now. It's been a productivity boom. Developers have been working at home for a long time, so it's not a new workflow for them, but you've seen a lot more productivity. What it's changed in the community since last summit, again, virtual to virtual again, between the windows here, event windows. You guys have a lot going on. What's new in the community? Gives us an update. >> Yeah, well, I mean, if we go back to summit, you know, this time-ish, you know, last year, we were wrapping up, more or less, the, it was, you know, we used to have everything you would install Ansible. You would get all the modules. You had everything, you know. It was all all altogether, which, you know, it was great for new users, who don't want to have to figure things out. It helps them to really get up and started running quickly. And, but, you know, from a community perspective, trying to manage that level of complexity turned out to be pretty hard. So the move to collections was actually great for, you know, not just, you know, for about user perspective, but also from a community perspective. And we came out with the Ansible 2-10. That was last fall, I believe. And that was the first real release of Ansible where we had, you know, collections were fully instantiated. We, you know, they were available on galaxy, but you could also get them as part of the Ansible community distribution. Fast forward to now, you know, we just had the Ansible 3.0 release, here in February, and we're looking to Ansible 4.0 here in early May. So, you know, there's been a lot of activity. A lot has improved, honestly, as a result of the changes that we've made. It's made it a lot easier for contributors to get in with a smaller group, that's more of their size and, you know, be able to get started and identify, you know, who are their interested peers in the community. So it's been a boom for us, honestly. You know, the pandemic otherwise is, you know, I think taught all of us, you know, certainly you, John, about the amazing things that we can do virtually. So we've had a lot of our meetups pivot to being virtual meetups, and things like that. And it's been great to see how easily the community has been able to pivot around, you know, this sort of event. I hope that we don't have to just keep practicing it for forever, but in the meantime, you know, it's enabled us to continue to get things done. Thank goodness to every video platform on Earth. >> Yeah. Well, we appreciate it. We're going to come back and talk more about that in the future; the best practice, what we all learned, and stories, but I think I want to come back to you on the persona side of Ansible, because one of the things we talked about last time that seems to be gaining a lot of traction, is that multiple personas. So I want to just hold on to that. We'll come back. Tom, back to you. We're at Red Hat summit. You guys have Ansible Fest, which is your own event that you guys drilled down on this. So users watching can know this your own community, but now we're part of Red Hat, part of IBM, which IBM Thinks, also happening soon as well. Red Hat summit still is unique event. How is Ansible fitting into the big picture? Because the value proposition of unifying teams is really consistent now with Red Hat's overall arching thing; which is operating at scale, open shift, Robin just mentioned. Where's the automation platform going this year? What's the story here at Red Hat summit for the automation platform? >> Yeah, no, that's a great question . We've seen so, we got time, just a little bit of the pandemic, and how it has accelerated some existing trends that we already saw. And one of those is really around the democratization of the application to work routines. More people delivering infrastructure and applications, independent of each other. Which is great. Faster and more agile, all those other good words that apply to that. But what that does bring up is the opportunity for patient work. Replication of effort. Not reusing necessarily things that are in existence already that other teams may have. They'd be not complying with all of the policies, if you will, the configuration and clients' policies. And so it's really kind of brought Ansible out into focus even more here. Now, because of the kind of common back lane that Ansible provides; a common language and common automation backplane across these different teams, and across these different personas. The great thing about what we supply for these different personas, whether it's outpatient developers, infrastructure honors, network engineers, SecOps teams, GetOps teams. There's so many of these obstacles out there, who now all want independent access to infrastructure, and deploying infrastructure. And Ansible has the kind of leverage that each of those communities, whether it's APIs or CLIs, or event based automation, or web hooks, et cetera, et cetera, you know? Service catalogs, utilize all of those interfaces, if you will, or modalities are accessible in Ansible automations. So it's really allowed us to be this sort of connective tissue, or glue, across these different silos or manes of the organization. Timing it opens specifically, one of the things that we talked about last fall, at our Ansible Fest, was our integration between the Ansible automation platform, our advanced cluster management product, and our OpenShift platform, that allows native applications, running on OpenShift, be able to talk to a Ansible automation operator that's running on that same platform, to do things off platform for their customers are already using Ansible. So connecting their cloud native platforms with our existing systems and infrastructures. Systems of records, network systems, ticketing systems, you name it. So all of those sorts of integrations, Ansible's become the connected glue across all of these different environments. Tying traditional IT, cloud IT, cloud native, you name it. So it's really been fun, and it's been an exciting time for us inside the portfolio and out. >> That's a great point. Connective tissue is a great way to describe some of these platform benefits, cause you guys have been on this platform for really long time. And the benefits are kind of being seen in the market, certainly as people have to move faster with the agility. Robin, I want to come back to you because he brought up this idea of personas. I mean, we all know DevOps infrastructure has code; it's been our religion for over a decade or more, but now the word DevSecOps is more prevalent in all the conversations. The security's now weaved in here. How are you seeing that play out in the community? And then, Tom, if you can give some color commentary too, on the automation platform, how security fits in? So DevOps, everything's being operationalized at scale, we get that. That's one of the value propositions you have, but DevSecOps has a persona. More people want more sec. Dev is great, more ops and standardization, more developers, agile standards, and then security. DevSecOps. What's your? >> I thought it was DevNetSecOps? (man chuckling) >> Okay. I've forgot net. Put net in there. Well, networks abstracted away, you know, as we say. >> Yeah! Well, you know, from my perspective, you know, they're people in their jobs all over the places, right? Like, they, you know, the more they can feel like they're efficient, and doing great stuff at their work, like, they're happy to bring as many people into the fold as possible. Right? And you know, normally, security's always been this, you know, it's sort of like networking, right? It's always been this sort of isolated, this special group over here, that's the traditional, you know, one of the traditional IT bottlenecks that causes us to not be able to get anything done. But, you know, on a community level, we see folks who are interested in security, you know, all the time. I know we've certainly done quite a bit of work with the some folks at IBM around one of their products; which I assume Tom will get more into here in just a moment. But from, you know, community perspective, I mean, we've seen people who've been writing, you know, playbooks and roles and, you know, now collections for, you know, all of the traditional government testing, you know, is, you know, missed standards, all of that kind of stuff. And, you know, it's one of those, it's part of network effects. And it's a great place for actually automation hub. I think, you know, for folks who were on prem or, you know, any of our customers are really going to start to see lots of value. How it will be able to connect folks inside the organization, you know, organically through just the place where I'm doing my Ansible things, allows them to find each other, really. And build those, you know, take it from being silos of automation everywhere into a really sort of networked, you know, internal network of Ansible friends and Ansible power users that, you know, can work together and collaborate, you know, just the same way that we do in open source. >> Yeah. And Tom, so IT modernization requires security. What's your take on this? Because you know, you got cluster, a lot of cluster, advanced cluster management issues. You got to deal with the modern apps that are coming. IT's got to evolve. What's your take on all this? >> Yeah. Not only does IT have to evolve, but it's the integration of IT into the rest of the environment. To be able to respond. So, one of the areas that we put a lot of effort into advancement of curating and solutions around security automation. And we've talked about that in the past, the idea of connecting SecOps teams that are doing intrusion detection, or threat hunting, and then responding in an automated way to those threat protections. Right? So connect SecOps with my team; which has traditionally been siloed operations and silo teams. And now with this curated, Ansible security automation solution that we brought to market, with our partners, that connects those two teams in a seamless sort of way. And we've got a lot of work with our friends at IBM, around this area because they are digging that security, their facility, the products in their portfolio. So we've done a lot of work with them. We've done a lot of work with lots of our partners; whether it's cyber or Microsoft, or whoever. Those areas are traditionally, Ansible's done a great job on sort of compliance around configuration enforcement, right? Setting configuration. Now we moved into connecting set-mops with IT. Security automation, now of our acquisition of SecOps, along with our advanced cluster management integration with Ansible, we're starting to say, what are the things inside that DevSecOps workflow that may require integration or automation, or package automation with other parts of the environment? So bringing all of those pieces together, as we move forward, which is really exciting for us. >> Okay, I got to ask you guys the number one question that I get all the time, and I see in the marketplace, kind of a combo question, is, how do I accelerate the automation of my cloud native development, with my traditional infrastructure? Because as people put in green, if one of the cloud projects, whether it's, and then integrating with the cloud on premises with the traditional infrastructure, how do I accelerate those two environments? How do I automate, accelerate the automation? >> It's a great short for us, as what we were talking about last Ansible Fest. We are bringing together with our advanced, cluster management product, ownership platform. Ansible is just been widespread use in all of the automation of both traditional, and cloud native, infrastructures. Whether it's cloud infrastructure, on-premise storage, compute network, you name it. Customers are using Ansible, using Ansible to do all kinds of pieces of infrastructure. Being able to tie that to their new, cloud native initiatives, without having to redo all of that work that they've already done, you integrate that, this thing, infrastructure automation, with their cloud native stuff, it accelerates substantially the, what I call, the operationalization of their cloud native platforms, with their existing IT infrastructure in the existing, IT ecosystem. I believe that that's what the Ansible automation platform plays a key role in connecting those pieces together, without having to redo all that work, that's been done and invested. >> Robin, what's your take on this? This is what people are working on in the trenches. They realize cloud benefits. They've got some cloud native action, and also then they got on the traditional environment, and they've got to get them connected and automated. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, the beauty of Ansible, you know, from a end user perspective is, you know, how easy it is to learn and how easy the languages to learn. And I think, you know, that portability, you know, it doesn't matter like, how much of a rocket scientist you are, you know? Everybody appreciates simplicity. Everybody appreciates being able to hand something simple to somebody else, and letting other people get done, and having it, be more or less, it's not quite English, but it's definitely, you know, Ansible's quite readable. Right? And you know, when we looked at, when we started to work on all the Ansible operators, you know, one of that, one of the main pieces there was making sure that that simplicity that we have in Ansible, is brought over directly into the operator. So, just because it's cloud native doesn't mean you suddenly have to learn, you know, a whole set of new languages. Ansible's just as portable there, as it is to any other part of the, your IT organization, infrastructure, whatever it is that you have going on. >> Well, there's a lot of action going on here at Red Hat summit, 2021. Things I wanted to bring up, in context of the show, is the success, and the importance, of you guys having Ansible collections. This has come up multiple times, as we talked about those personas, and you've got these new contributors. You've got people contributing content, as open-source continues to grow and be phenomenal. Value proposition. Touch on this concept of collections. What's the updates? Why is it important? Why should folks pay attention to it, and continue to innovate with collections? >> From a commercial perspective, or from a product perspective, collections have made it a lot easier for contributors to create, and deploy, and distribute content. As Robin's mentioned earlier, previous iterations of Ansible have all of that integration. All of those collections, all within one big group. We call the "batteries included" back in the time. Back in the day, right? That that meant that contributors deployed content with the base, Ansible distribution, they had to wait for the next version of Ansible to come out. That's when that content would get redistributed with the next version of Ansible. By de-coupling, on platform, or engine, putting that into collections, individual elements of related integrations, those can move that their own pace. So users, new customers, can get the content they need, based their contributors like and keep up with. So, customers will have to wait for the next version of the shipping products and get a new version of the new integration they really like now. So again, de-coupling those things, it allows them to move at different paces. The engine, or the platform itself, needs to be stable, performance secure. It's going to move at a certain lifecycle. The content itself, all the different content, hub, and network providers, platforms, all of those things can now move at their own pace. Each of those have their own life cycle. Allows us to get more functionality in our customers hands a lot quicker. And then launching our certified program, partners, when we support that content, certified support that content, helps meet the values that we bring to our customers with this subscription. It's that ecosystem of partners that we work with, who certified and support the stuff that we ship and support with our customers. Benefits both from the accessing the technology, as well as to the access to the value added in terms of integration, testing and support. >> Robin, what's your take on the community? I see custom automation with connect here. A lot of action going on with collections. >> Yeah. Absolutely. You know, it's been interesting, you know? Tom just mentioned the, you know, how everything, previously, all had to be released all at once. Right? And if you think about, you know, sure I have Ansible installed, but you know, how often do I have to, you know, just even as a regular, I'm not a system administrator these days, type person, like how often do I have to, you know, click that button to update, you know, my Mac or my Linux machine? Or, you know, my windows machine, or you know, the operating system on my telephone, right? Every time one of these devices that Ansible connects to, or program, or whatever it is, connects to something, those things are all operating and, you know, developing themselves at their own paces. Right? So when a new version of, you know, we'll call it Red Hat, Enterprise Linux. When a new version of Red Hat, Enterprise Linux comes out, if there are new changes, or new features that, you know, we want to be able to connect to, that's not really helpful when we're not releasing for another six months. Right? So it's really helped us, you know, from a community angle, to able to have each of these collections working in concert with, you know, for example, the Lennox subsystems that are actually making things that will turn be turned into collections, right? Like, SE Linux, or a system D, right? Like, those things move at their own pace. We can update those at our own pace in collections, and then people can update those collections without having to wait another six months, or eight months, or whatever it is, for a new version of Ansible to come out. It's really made it easier for all of those, you know, developers of content to work on their content and their, you know, Ansible relationships almost in sync. And make sure that, you know, not, "I'm going to do it over here. And then I'm going to come back over here and fix everything later." It's more of a, you know, continuous development process. >> So, the experience. So the contributor experience is better then? You'd say? >> I'm sorry? >> The contributor experience is better then? >> Oh, absolutely. Yeah. 100%. I mean, it's, you know, there's something to be said for, I wouldn't say it's like, instant satisfaction, but certainly the ability to have a little bit more independence, and be able to release things as you see fit, and not be gated by the entire rest of the project, is amazing for those folks. >> All right. So I'll put you on the spot, Robin. So if I'm a developer, bottom line me, what's in it for me? Why should I pay attention to collections? What's the bottom line? >> Well, you know, Ansible is a platform, and Ansible benefits from network effects. You know, the reason that we've gotten as big as we have, is sort of like the snowball rolling downhill, right? The more people that latch onto what you're doing, the more people benefit and the more, you know, additional folks want to join in. So, you know, if I was working on any other product that I would consider being able to have automated with Ansible, you know, the biggest thing that I would look at is, well, you know, what are those people also using? Are they automating it with Ansible? And I can guarantee you, 99% of the time, everything else that people are using is also being automated with Ansible. So you'd be crazy to not, you know, want to participate, and make sure that you're providing the best, Ansible experience for, you know, your application, cause for every application or, you know, device that we can connect to, there's probably 20 other competitors that also make similar applications that, you know, folks might also consider in lieu of you if you're not using, if you're not providing Ansible content for it. >> Hey, make things easier, simple to use, and you reduce the steps it takes to do things. That's a winning formula, Tom. I mean, when you make things that good, then you get the network effect. But this highlights what you mentioned earlier, about connective tissue. When you were using words like "connective tissue" it implies an organizational's, not a mechanism. It's not just software, it's people. As a people experience here in the automation platform. >> Robin: Yep. >> This seems to be the bottom line. What's your take? What's your bottom line view? I'm a developer, what's in it for me? Why should I pay attention to the automation platform? >> What Robert just said to me is, more people using. Automation platform, crossing those domains, and silos as kind of connective tissue across those teams, and its personas, means those contributors, those developers, creating automation content, getting in the hands of more people across the organization. In a more simplified way by using Ansible automation. They get access, the automation itself, those personas, they get access to the system automation faster, they can have the money quicker, local to local folks. To reinvent the wheel in terms of automation, we're trying to, (man speaking faintly) They don't want to know about the details, and what it takes to configure the network, configure the storage elements. They rely on those automation developers and contributors that review that for them. One powers of the platform. Across those teams, across those others. Okay we're going to talk about SecOps, The ITOps, in SecOps, in networkOps. And to do all of these tasks, with the same language, and same unition content, running faster, and it's monitoring core responsibilities without worrying. >> Robin, you wanted to talk about something in the community, any updates? I think navigator, you mentioned you wanted to mention a plug for that? >> Absolutely! So, you know, much like any other platform in the universe, you know, if you don't have really great tools for developing content, you're kind of, you know, dead in the water, right? Or you're leaving it to fate. So we've been working on a new project, not part of the product yet, but you know, it's sort of in a community, exploratory phrase. A release, early release often, or, you know, minimum viable product, I guess, might be the other way to describe it currently. It's called Ansible navigator. It's a Tooey, which is like a gooey, but it's got a, sort of a terminal, user interface look to it, that allows you to, you know, develop, it's a sort of interface where you can develop content, you know, all in one window. Have your, you know, documentation accessible to you. Have, you know, all of your test results available to you in one window, rather than, I'm going to do something here, And then I'm going to go over here, and now I'm not sure. So now I'm going to go over here and look at docs instead. It's all, you know, it's all in one place. Which we think will actually, but I mean, I know the folks who have seen it already been like, (woman squealing) but you know, it's definitely in early, community stages right now. It's, you know, we can give you the link. It's github.com/Ansible/Ansiblenavigator >> A tooey versus a gooey, versus a command line interface. >> Yeah! >> How do you innovate on the command line? It's a cooey, or a? >> Yeah! >> It's, you know, there are so many IDs out there and I think Tom can probably talk to some of this, you know, how that might relate to VA code or, you know, many of the other, you know, traditional developer IDs that are out there. But, you know, the goal is certainly to be able to integrate with some of those other pieces. But, you know, it's one of those things where, you know, if everybody's using the same tool and we can start to enforce higher levels, quality and standards through that tool, there's benefits for everyone. Tom, I don't know if you want to add on to that in any way? >> Yeah, it's just kind of one of our focus areas here, which is making it as easy as possible for contributors to create Ansible automation content. And so part of that is production, meaning S & K. Remember what happened to S & K for Ansible? That involved developers and contributors to use ID's, build and deploy automation content. So, I'm really focused on making that contributor life their job. >> Well, thanks for coming on Tom and Robin. Thanks for sharing the insight here at Red Hat Summit 21, virtual. So you guys continue to do a great job with the success of the platform, which has been, you know, consistently growing and having great satisfaction with developers, and now ops teams, and sec teams, and net teams. You know, unifying these teams is certainly a huge priority for enterprises because the end of the day, cloud-scale is all about operating. Which means more standards, more operations. That's what you guys are doing. So congratulations on the continued success. Thanks for sharing. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay. I'm John for here in theCUBE we are remote with CUBE virtual for Red Hat Summit, 2021. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

(slow music) >> From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back. This is the cubes coverage of a Red Hat Summit 2020. The event happening digitally this year. We are bringing in Red Hat executives, customers and partners from where they are around the globe. And happy to welcome back to the program. One of our cube alumni. Robin Bergeron is the senior principal community architect with Ansible part of Red Hat. Robin, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. So we've got the community coming together even while we're apart. >> Indeed. That's what we're good at. So, I'm glad to be back here again with you all. So, hello. >> All right. So, Robin, we caught up with you last at AnsibleFest of course Red Hat Summit. So much community activity that goes on. The Ansible, community is a big piece of summit even though they also have, the separate AnsibleFest. So just give us a little bit update what's happening in your world and in the community. >> Well. I hate to say it's a, "it's a big wide world" because it sounds very cliche, but the Ansible world is fairly big. I don't know if, let's see, we talked, lasted, AnsibleFest and that was in September in Atlanta, is that correct? >> Sounds right. Yep. >> I believe so. So right around that time was when GitHub released their annual list of, they have a report called the Octoverse they publish every year, in conjunction with their annual event. And one of their metrics they have on that list is, most active projects. So, we clocked in at the number ninth most active project on Github this past year. And that's out of, I've lost count of github, like number of projects. It's not quite the, United States national debt status, but it's a, like a hundred million repositories or something like that. So we're the number nine most active repository this year. And I believe we are one of two projects who's been on that list every year since 2016 I want to say. So, yeah, we're at 5900 contributors right now. So it's, all over the globe. A lot of people keeping us very busy. I guess that and fact it's so busy and we talked about collections a bit when we were at AnsibleFest this past year and it's been a thing that we've been talking about continuously in Ansible community and also, as part of Red Hats product line for a while and we've actually now gotten to the point of sort of splitting out the Ansible repository. Ansible is going to continue to be the, you a car and you look under the engine and there's like the things that make the car run. >> Ansible base, separate from the windshield wipers and all the ad-ons and all the cool stuff that you actually, want to get when you get a car. And that stuff is actually getting split out into Ansible collections that we'll have or repository that's actually more managed by the community, which will empower them to be able to make more decisions for us to be able to get things done, more rapidly. Cause in the past it's always been a really a tug of war between, work and github have always been very respectful about, how the balances between community and product because obviously without a community you don't have a product. And this is a obviously a method that Red Hat has sort of nailed down. I guess IBM really liked the idea. So here we are. But we're really looking forward to, right now we've got a handful of contributors who are adding new modules into this new repo. But, they're also helping us work out all the kinks in the contributor process and how it works that way. Once we opened for business, since we've got several thousand contributors, we don't say, open for business and then have everybody comes running into a glass wall like it and then all on the floor, right? We want the doors to be open. We want the, registers so to speak to be processing things. We want, all the box to be working, all of the, all of the magic to be happening just as it is, as it has in past. But, this time with a little bit more empowerment to the community, that's on a work progress for it was like forever, but, nine months, and here in the next few weeks that will be open for business and we're hoping that, by the time the AnsibleFest rolls around, that will be part of the two, part and parcel to the 2.10 release. And, we're hoping that, even though under the hood for contributors, that's changed. We believe we'll be very transparent brand eaters, which has been one of the most important things for us because, we don't like to break people. That's, >> yeah, >> {Robin] Glad yeah >> Absolutely Robin. So it was one of the key things a announced at a AnsibleFest last year. Anybody that knows the software world is the traditional release train. Get on that train. Got to make sure you get your feature in there. But for a solution like Ansible, which as you said, has a lot of partners and it's a very big ecosystem. If you have to worry about how much stuff do I get shoved into one release, it's a little bit limiting. So you break those pieces up more like the, containers, that go on the train and you can make sure that you're adding and, doing the various pieces as they go. So maybe >> Yeah >> not the perfect analogy. >> Yeah. >> But very important so, Robin, as you've been going through this, I'm wondering, what feedback are you getting from the contributors there? and how about as you said, very active community. We know if anybody you know, says something, you got, the crowd and the wisdom coming in and giving you ideas. But, how do you balance that? You're not going to have everybody be happy about every decision, but making sure that the ultimate release train, does the job and delivers the overall solution. >> Yes. What color are we going to paint? Paint our bike shed. Right? Like the yak for circling. So it's, I don't want to to say it's been mixed, it's, you know, we, I can, I compare and contrast this, one of my, previous roles was being the newer project leader, right. And, which is, as we know the upstream, for Red Hat enterprise Linux, and its some of the, Linux and, a lot of the Linux distributions have been around for forever. Back when there were like, I don't know. 10, 15 opensource projects that anybody at all, could contribute to. Now as we can see looking on, github and many other places get lab, open dev. There's a, you name it, there's a gazillion opensource projects out there. People aren't always as attached to, I don't want to say attached, coz that sounds, terrible, but open source has become such a norm people are just very used to, there's something wrong. I'm going to submit it, I'm going to hope it gets accepted, but I'm going to move on with my life because I also have all these other places that I can also contribute, right. That said, we do have, a significant number of compute of contributors who have been with us back since Ansible started. Some of those folks go back with us to Fidor days, on Linux days on and on and on. Some of them, some folks I have concerns, they do like that this is the opportunity to give them more empowerment to figure out better ways to run the, contributor process. I think the number one thing that everybody's been concerned about is what diseases your experience going to be. And I think that's a testament to, just the power of our community is that, people aren't just concerned about how am I going to get my stuff in and your stuff in and like the tug of war of like, is one person can get something else in before someone else. Everybody's very concerned about is this going to still work for the end users? Is this going to disrupt them? Because it's a change under hood. Are they going to have to change all their playbooks and all of their, rules and everything that they have. And right now the goal is, it should be transparent. Anything that you have written right now, you should continue work, you shouldn't notice. Once we get your 3.O our goal is to ramp people up into harnessing the power of collections. But first we need to get the collections, infrastructure in place, before we get in. Start giving them to artists the power of collections. You can't just flip the switch and be like, hi . So it used to be this way, now we have collections and now you've got to redo everything, right. Because that's-- you still have the opportunity because it's open source. We'll have this window where we can still find all the bugs and get that re rapid feedback, which means, once we roll out, Red Hat Ansible automation platform, the next version. I'm not going to say an AnsibleFest. That would be shocking, right? We never do announcements at events. But, whenever that product comes out, we want to make sure, that power of open source and, having that rapid feedback loop, ensures that, what we end up, we'll bring to customers, winds up being solid, but I believe it will be very, very solid for contributors because or, and, a community. There's, because, a significant number of our contributors are community users and they have that in their own interest in mind. And we've seen that not just from, I'm a community user at a university, but all of our partners are actually participating in the community as well. And there, just painting and chatting and we had a, we had planned to have a European as well contributor summit, which is a thing we normally run in combination or the day before AnsibleFest. and we had planned that for Sweden. I was so excited. I was going to go to Gothenburg. I hear it's a charming little town, except, when we are all stuck in, the a world that we are in currently. so we ran that virtually and a lot of our longterm contributors are actually from Europe. So that was really exciting except for me, cause I had to get up 8 Am but it was still nice to see them all. So we had, 50 some odd folks pop in over the course of, that day. And we talked through elections and debated and, got some demos from folks. Had some folks talk through some specific collections, folks talking about AWS and some of the networking things. So, yeah it was nice to see everyone. I was sad that it wasn't in Gothenburg. But it is what it is. I'm going to roll. >> So Robin, I think back to 2019 an automation, was right at the top of a hot topics. When I talk to practitioners out there, many conferences I went to, not just of course Ansible test, which focus on it, but many other shows and events. Well when you talk to people about key initiatives, its in a really leveraging automation, something that I've heard talked about my entire career, but really it feels like the last painful of years and people are much more serious about it. You know, you referenced the times that we live in right now, we're unprecedented global pandemics. So I'm not saying that, somebody, everybody all of a sudden woke up and say, Oh my gosh, I have to work from home and I need to be smarter. Let me finally use this automation that I've been hearing about all these years. But why don't you bring us into, what is happening today, what you are hearing customers, because automation obviously is a critical piece of what everybody is doing and probably just, shines a light on it even more. Now that we need to make sure that people are being efficient and still being able to deal with their lives while everything else is going on. >> Yeah. It's interesting because some of is, as well as used. Yeah, there's actually a, there's the dependency graph that you can look at on github and it will tell you how many other things in github are actually depending on the Ansible. It's, I can't even remember the number. It's a very large number, like tens of thousands of things as I recall. Disclaimer, my memory is terrible sometimes. I believe it was in the tens of thousands of things. Lots of people use Ansible and it's almost like probably not quite as popular as, the uses Docker container to get started, but, venture to guess it might be a number to that. Type this Ansible thing and this thing will magically come up. Right. For folks that are, in a traditional IT department, just trying to get along, day to day right now who are, they're like me. They're at home, they're with their spouse, they're sharing an office. They're also homeschooling their kids if they got out of bed. Hopefully we all have enough bandwidth. For those folks it's, I'm just glad that I continue to have this Ansible thing, they're using Ansible tower, they're glad that they can still manage to figure out how to collaborate their coworkers in that type of environment. For all the folks out there who are doing, research or trying to set up any type of infrastructure anywhere to related to this, I don't care if it's a, grocery store or you're a research laboratory, whatever it is. Last thing you want to do is spend five hours, be like, oh God okay, let me get out my manual. Where did I, it's hey, there's an Ansible. Excellent, I can type this Ansible thing in. And if for some reason it gets hung up. We have folks on IRC, we have, there's folks on stack overflow . There folks literally everywhere. You can ask a question on Twitter and It's a Pretty large, friendly, global community of people who have plenty of answers. And that's, I can't say we're like, hey, we solved everything, but we got all the >> stuff out of the way so that people can actually solve all of their, they can get down to what's actually important for them. And so that, that's always been one of the most redeeming things about Ansible that it's, for me, it's, the thing that I work on is, it's easy and it helps people solve their problems and gets all there, stuff out of the way so that they can concentrate on what's actually important to them. So I like to think, it's most important to them. And I know it is, but it's interesting seeing how things change, as people are like, are you going to teach a bunch of people Ansible now? And it's like, well, if they're in need of a job, there are a lot of online resources for that. But if they're just trying to get through their job, like everybody's sort of in a don't rock the boat position. Like if I can get a little bit ahead, that's cool. If I've already got a bunch of stuff automated Yes. That's one less thing that I have to worry about right now and that's all we can really hope for at this moment. >> Yeah, great stuff Robin. One of the high point always is seeing, the value and support of the community and as you said, it's something that we definitely see highlighted up out there. All right, Robyn Bergeron, greatest as always to catch up with you. Thank you so much. I'm sure you know so many community activities that people will be able to participate in. This week at Red Hat Summit, even though we're, all doing it remotely, >> and the >> yeah >> challenges there. >> Glad I, great uni central area city. You can come on, come on by and see all of the, various Red Hat open source communities doing their thing. >> All right, watch lots more coverage from Red Hat Summit coming at you. I'm Stu Miniman and always, thank you for watching, the cube (slow music)

live from Atlanta Georgia it's the tube covering ansible fest 2019 brought to you by Red Hat hello everyone welcome to the queue we are broadcasting live here in Atlanta Georgia I'm John force too many men my co-host the cubes coverage of Red Hat ansible Fest this is probably one of the hottest topic areas that we've been seeing in Enterprise tech emerging along with observability automation and observability is the key topics here automation is the theme stew ansible just finished their keynote keynote analysis general availability of their new platform the ansible automation platform is the big news this is a big I mean it seems nuanced for the general tech practitioner out there what's ansible doing why we here we saw the rise of network management turned into observability as the hottest category in the cloud cloud 2.0 companies going public a lot of M&A activity and observability is data-driven automations this other category that is just exploding and growth and change huge impact to all industries and it's coming from the infrastructure scale side where the blocking and tackling of DevOps has been this is the focus of ansible and their show automation for all your analysis of the keynote what's the most important thing going on here yes so John as you said automation is a super hot topic you know I was just at the New Relic show talking about observability last week we've got the Pedro Duty show also going on this week the the automation is so critical we know that IT can't keep up with things if they can't automate it and it's not just replacing some scripting I loved in the keynote they talked about strategically thinking about automation we've been watching the RP a companies talking about automation so there's lots of different automation there's the right way to do it and another thing angle John that we love covering is you know what's going on with open source you were just at the open core summit in San Francisco the Red Hat team very clear open source is not their business model it is they use open source and everything that Red Hat does is a hundred percent open source and that was core and key to what ansible was and how its created this isn't a product pitch here it's a community you know it's John this is the six most active you know repository in github so out of over a hundred million repositories out there the six most active so that tells you that this is being used by the community it's not a couple of companies using this but it's a broad ecosystem we hear Microsoft and Cisco f5 lots of companies that are contributing as well as just all of the end users we of JPMorgan in the keynote this morning so a lot of participation there but you know it is building out that suite with the platform that you talked about and we're gonna spend a lot of time in the next few days understanding this maturation and growth yeah the automation platform that they announced that's the big news the general availability of their automation platform and stew the word they're using here is scale okay and this is something that you brought up to open core summit which I attended last week was the inaugural conference a lot of controversy and this is a generational shift we are seeing in the midst of our own eyes right in front of us on the ground floor of a shift in open source community how the platform of open source is evolving what Amazon now azure and Google and the others are doing is they're showing that scale has changed the game in how open-source is going to not only grow and evolve but shape application developers and the reason why ansible is so important right now in this conference is that we all know that when you stand up stuff infrastructure you've got to configure the hell out of it DevOps has always been infrastructure is code and as more stuff gets scaled up as more stuff gets provision as more stuff gets built and created the management and the controlling of the configurations this has been a real hot spot this has been an opportunity and a problem so you know everyone who's here they're they're active because you know what this is a major pain point this is a problem area that's an opportunity to take what is a blocking and tackling operational role configurating standing up infrastructure enabling applications and making it a competitive advantage this is why the game is changing starting to see platforms not tools your analysis are they positioned was this keynote successful John and I really liked rut Robin Bergeron came out and talked about the key principles of what antal is done its simplicity its modularity and it's learning from open source this project was only started in 2012 so one of the things I always look at is in the old days you wanted you know to have that experience there's no compression algorithm for experience today if I could start from day one today and build with the latest tools you know heavily using DevOps understanding all of the experience that's happened in open source we can move forward so from 2012 to 2015 Red Hat you know acquired ansible to today in 2019 they're making huge growth and helping companies really leverage and mature their IT processes and move towards you know true business innovation with leveraging automation dude this is not and again this is not for the faint of heart either again these are Rockstar DevOps infrastructure folks who are evolving in taking either network and or infrastructure development to enable and software abstraction layer for applications and this not it's not a joke either I mean got some big names up on stage of just one tweet I want to call out and get your reaction to JP Morgan on his presentation the exact there he was tweet came out from Christopher Festa 500 developers are working to automate business processes leading to among other benefits ninety-eight percent improvement in recovery times what used to take six to eight hours to recover now takes two to five minutes Christopher Festa student so John that's what we want is how can we take these things that took you know hours and I had to go through this ticketing process and make that change what I loved of what Chris from JP Morgan said is he brought us inside he said look to make this change it took us a year of sorting through the security the cyber the the control processes we understand there's not just you know oh hey let's sprinkle a little DevOps on everything and it's wonderful we need to get you know buy-in from the team it you know and it can spread between groups and you know change that culture it's something that you know we've tracked in Red Hat for years and all of these environments this something that does require commitment because it's not just John taking oh I scripted something and and and that's good we need to be able to really look at these changes because automation if we just automate a bad process that's not gonna help our business we really need to make sure we understand what we're automating the business value and and what is going are going to be the ramification to what we're doing well one of the things I want to share with folks watching is some research that we did at Silk'n angle the cube and wiki bond it's part of our cube insights do I know you were part of this we talked to a bunch of practitioners and customers and dozens of our of our community members and we found that observability we've just pointed out has been you know explosive category that automation has been identified and we're putting a stake in the ground right here in the cube as one of the next big sectors that will rise up as a small little white space will become a massive market automation you watch that cloud 2.0 sector called automation why the reasoning was this and here's the results of our of our survey automation is quickly becoming a critical foundational element of the network as enterprises focus on multi cloud network being infrastructure servers and storage a multi cloud rapid application development and deployment software-defined everything's happening pretty much we've been covering that on the cube and most enterprises are just crap lling with this concept and see opportunities the benefits that people see in automation as we've discovered still in the following one focused on focused efforts for better results efficiency security is a top driver on all these things because you got to have security built into the software and then automation is creating job satisfaction for these guys I mean they've been doing this is mundane tasks being automated way so people are happier so job satisfaction and finally this is an opportunity to rescale do these are the key bullet points that we found in talking to our serve our community your reaction to those those results yeah John I love that we know ultimately when we want to be able to provide not only better value to my ultimate end user but I need to look internal as you said John you know how can i you know retool some of my sales force and get them engaged and if you want to hire the Millennials they want a bit just and not be doing the drudgery they want to do something where they feel that they are making a difference and you know you laid out a lot of good reasons why it would help and why people would want to get involved John you know the government I've talked to a number of government agencies when they talk about you know we changed that 40-year old process and now we're doing things faster and better and that means I can really hire that next generation of workforce because otherwise I wouldn't be able to hire them to just do things the old way this is about cloud 2 point and this is about modernization and you mention open source open core summit that I think is a tell sign that open source is changing the communities are changing this is gonna be a massive wave again we've been chronicling this cloud 2 point of the week we coined that term we're trying to identify those key points obviously observability automation but look at the end of the day you got to have a focused effort to make the job go better you heard JP Morgan pointing out minutes versus hours this is the benefits of infrastructure as code in the end of the day employee satisfaction the people that you want to hire to re-skill that can be redeployed into new roles analytics math quantitative analysis versus the mundane tasks automation is going to impact all aspects of the stack so final questions do what are you expecting for the next two days we're gonna be here for two days what do you expect to hear from our guests yeah so John one of the things I'm going to really look at is as you mentioned infrastructure is that where this all started so you know how do I easy to play a VM you know ansible is there you know VMware I've already talked to a number of people in the virtualization community they love and embrace ansible we saw Microsoft up on stage loving embrace it as we move towards micro service architectures containerization and all of these cloud native deployments you know how is ansible in this community doing where the stumbling blocks to be honest from what I hear John coming into this anta Buhl's been doing well Red Hat has helped them grow even more and the expectation is that IBM will help proliferate this in even further the traditional competitors to ansible you think about the chef's in puppet to the world have been struggling with that cloud native world John I know I see ansible when I go to the cloud shows and I hear customers talking about it so ansible seems to be making that transition towards cloud native well but other threats in the cloud native world you know if I've said you know that when I when I go to the server lists you know conference I I don't I have not yet heard you know where this fits into the environment so we always know that that next generation and technology you know how will you know this automation move forward as Red Hat starts to get much more proliferating into major enterprises with IBM which will take their extend their lead even further in the enterprise it's an opportunity for ansible and the community angle is interesting I saw our tweets don't get your community your angle real quick on this I saw a tweet from NetApp their tagline at their booth is simplify automate and orchestrate sounds like they're leading into the kubernetes world containers you got to start thinking about software abstractions and this is the st. the you know provisioning hardware anymore whole new ballgame your assessment of an Sable's community presence mentioned I was a tweet from Red Hat I mean NetApp what's your take on the community angle here John it's all about community we the github stats speak for themselves this is very much a community invent you know kudos to the team here a lot on the diversity inclusion effort so really pushing those things forward John something we always notice at the tech shows the ratio of you know gender is way to more diverse at an event like this we know we see it in the developer communities that there was more diversity in there so by the way when they took over this hotel all of the bathrooms are I believe it's you know it's gender-neutral so you can use whatever bathroom yeah you know you you want there let's make sure I'm using the right pronoun when I'm going saying a lot of people Stu thanks for commentary keynote analysis I'm John first dude minimun breaking down why we are here why ansible why is automation important we believe automation will be a killer category we want to see a lot of growth here and again the impact is with machine learning and AI this is where it all starts automating the data the technology and the configuration is going to empower the next generation modern enterprise more live coverage from ansible fests after this short break