>> Live from Seattle, Washington, it's the Cube, covering KubeCon and Cloud Native Con North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone. We are live in Seattle for KubeCon 2018, Cloud Native Con. It's the Cube, I'm John Furrier, your host with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Ashesh Badani, who is the Vice-President and General Manager of Cloud Platforms at Red Hat. Great to see you, welcome back to the Cube. >> Thanks for having me on. Always good to be back. >> So you guys, again, we talk every year with you. It's almost like a check-in. So what's new? You got some big, obviously, the news about the IBM. We don't really want to get into that detail. I know you just a stop on that because it's already out there. But you guys had great success with platformers of service. Now you got the growth of Kubecon and Cloud Native Con, 8000 attendees and users. There's uptake. What's the update on the Red Had side? >> Yeah, we're excited. Excited to be back at Kubecon. It's bigger and better than it's ever been, I think so. That's fantastic. We've been investing in this community for over four years now, since 2014. Really, from the earliest days. Based the entire platform on it. Continue growing that, adding lots of customers across the world. And I think what's really been gratifying for us to see is just the diversity of participants. Both in user perspective as well as the wider ecosystem. So whether you're a storage player, a networking player, management, marketing, what have you. Everything sort of building around this ecosystem. I think we're creating a great amount of value and we're seeing diverse applications being built. >> So you guys have been good then on (mumbles), good timing, a lot of things are going on. This show is an open-source community, right. And that's been a great thing. This is kind of where the end users come from. But two other personas come in that we're seeing participate heavily. The IT pro, the IT expert, and then the classic developer. So you have kind of a melting pot of how this is kind of horizontally connecting. You guys have been successful in the IT side. Where is this impacting the end users?6 How is this open-source movement impacting IT, specifically, and at the end of the day, the developers who are writing code? Have to get more stuff out. What's your thoughts? >> So, we hosted OpenShift Commons yesterday. OpenShift Commons, for the the folks who don't know, is our gathering of participants within the larger OpenShift community. We had lots of end users come and talk about the reason they're adopting a Kubernetes-based platform is to get greater productivity. So for example, if you're someone like Progressive Insurance, an established organization, how do you release applications quicker? How do you make your developers more productive? How do you enable them to have more languages, tools, frameworks at their disposal? To be able to compete in this world where you've got start-ups, you've got other companies trying to compete aggressively with you. I think it's a big dent here, right? It's not just for if you work traditional IT. But it's for if you were a company of all sizes. >> When you talk about customers, every customer is different. You've got, you look at IT, everything is additive, it tends to be a bit of a heterogeneous mess when you get there. Help connect for us what are you hearing from customers? How does, not just Kubernetes, but everything going on here in the Cloud Native environment? How is it helping them? How is it changing the way that they do their business and how's Red Hat involved? >> So one thing we've been noticing is that Hybrid Cloud is here and here to stay. So we've consistently been hearing this from customers. They've invested lots of money and time and energy, skills, in their existing environments. And they want to take advantage of public clouds. But they want to do that with flexibility, with portability, to bring to bear. What we've been trying to do is focus on exactly that. How do we help solve that problem and provide an abstraction. How do you provide primitives. So, for example, we announced our support of Knative, and how we'll make that available as part of OpenShift. Why's that? Well, how can we provide Serverless primitives within the platform so folks can have the flexibility to be able to adopt next-generation technologies. But to be able to do that consistently regardless of where they deploy. >> So, I love that. Talk about meeting the customers there. One of the things that really strikes me, there's so much change going on in the industry. And that's an area that Red Hat has a couple decades of experience. Maybe help explain how Red Hat in bringing some of that enterprise, oversight. Just like they've done for Linux for a long time. >> Yeah, yeah. Stu, you're following us very closely, as are you John, and the team at the Cube. We're trying to embrace that change as it comes upon us. So, I think the last time I was here, I was here with Alex Polvi of Core OS. Red Hat acquired Core OS in January. >> Big deal. >> Yeah, big acquisition for us. And now we're starting to see the fruits of some of that labor. In terms of integrating that technology. Why did we do that? We wanted to get more automation into the platform. So, customers have said, hey, look, I want these clusters to be more self-managing, self-healing. And so we've been really focused on saying how can we take those challenges the customers have, bring that directly into a platform so they're performing more and more like the expectations that they have in the public cloud, but in these diverse, introgenous, environments. >> That speaks to the operating model of cloud. You guys have a wholistic view because you're Red Hat. You got a lot of customers. You have the Dev House model, you got the Kubernetes container orchestration, micro-services. How does that all connect together for the customer? I mean, is it Turn Key and Open Shift? You guys had that nice bet with Core OS, pays big, huge dividends. What are some of those fruits in the operating model? So the customer has to think about the systems. It's a systems model, it's an operating system, so-to-speak. But they still got to develop and build apps. So you got to have a systems-wholistic view and be able to deliver the value. Where does it all connect? What's your explanation? >> So distributed systems are complex. And we're at the point where no individual can keep track of the hundreds, the thousands, the hundred-thousand containers that are running. So, the only way, then, to do it is to be able to say, how can the system be smart? So, at the Commons yesterday we had sort of a tongue-in-cheek slide that said, the factory of the future will only have two employees, a man and a dog. The man's there to feed the dog, and the dog's in place to ensure the man doesn't go off and actually touch the equipment. And the point really being, how can we bring technology that can bring that to bare. So, one example of that is actually through our Core OS acquisition. The Core OS team was working on a technology called, operators. Which is to say, how can we take the human knowledge that exists. To take complex software that's built by third parties and bring that natively into the platform and then have the platform go and manage them on behalf of the actual customer itself. Now we've got over 60 companies building operators. And we've, in fact, taken entire open-shift platforms, put operators to work. So it's completely automated and self-managed. >> The trend of hybrid is hot. You mentioned it's here to stay. We would argue that it's going to be a gateway to multi-cloud. And as you look at the stacks that are developing and the choices, the old concept of a stack-- and Chris was on earlier, the CTO of CNCF. And I kind of agree with him. The old notion of stack is changing because if you've got a horizontal, scale-able cloud framework, you got specialty with machine learning at the top, you got a whole new type of stack model. But, multi-cloud is what the customers want choice for. Red Hat's been around long enough to know what the multi-vendor word was years ago. Multi-vendor choice, multi-cloud choice. Similar paradigms happening now. Modern version of multi-vendor is multi-cloud. How do you guys see the multi-cloud evolution? >> So we keep investing and helping to make that a reality. So, last week, we made some announcements around Open Shift dedicators. Open Shift dedicators is the Open Shift manage service, or AWS. Open Shift is available in ways where it can be self-managed directly by customers in a variety of environments. Directly run around any public cloud or open stack, or what you'd like environment. We have third-party partners. For example, DXC D-systems providing managed versions of Open Shift. And then you can have Red Hat managed Open Shift for you. For example, on AWS, or coming next year, with Microsoft. Through our partnership for Open Shift on Azure. So you as a customer now have, I think, more choice than you ever had before. In terms of adopting Dev-Ops or dealings with micro-services. But then having flexibility with regard to taking advantage of tools, services, that are coming from, pretty much, every corner of IT industry. >> You guys have a huge install base. You've been servicing customers for many, many years, decades. Highest level support. Take us through what a customer, a traditional Red Hat customer that might not be fully embracing the cloud in the past, now is on-boarding to the cloud. What's the playbook? What do you guys offer them? How do you engage with them? What's the playbook? Is it, just buy Open Shift? Is there a series of-- how do you guys bring that Red Hat core Lenux customer that's been on Prim. Maybe a little bit out of shadow IT in the cloud, saying, hey, we're doing additional transformation. What's the playbook? >> So, great question, John. So, first fall into the transformation might be an over-hyped term. Might be a peak hype at this point in time. But I think that the bigger point from my perspective is how do you move more dollars, more euros, more spend towards innovation. That's what every company is sort of trying to do. So, our focus is, how can we build on the investments that they've made? At this point in time, (mumbles) Lenux probably has 50,000 customers. So, pretty much, every customer, any size, around the world, is some kind of Lenux user. How can we then say, how can we now provide you a platform to have greater agility and be able to develop these services quicker? But, at the same time, not forget the things that enterprises care about. So, last week we had our first big security issue released on Kubernetes. The privilege escalation flaw. And so, obviously, we participate in the community. We had a bunch of folks, along with others addressing that, and then we rolled our patches. Our patch roll-out went back all the way to version 3.2, 3.2 shipped in early 2016. Now, the one hand you say, hey, everyone has Dev-Ops, why do you need to have a patch for something that's from 2016? That's because customers still aren't moving as quickly as we'd like. So, I just want to temper, there's an enthusiasm with regard to, everyone's quick, everything's lightning fast. At the same time, we often find-- and so, going back to your question, we often find some enterprises will just take a little bit longer, in reality to kind of get-- (both speaking at once) >> Work loads, they're not going to be moving overnight. >> That's right. >> So there's some legacy from those workloads. >> Right, right. And so, what we want to do is ensure, for example, the platform. So we talked about the security and lifecycle. But, is supporting these Cloud Native, next generation, stateless applications, but also established legacy stateful applications all on the same platform. And so the work we're doing is ensure we don't-- you know, it's like, leave no application behind. So, either the work that we'll do, for example, with Red Hat Innovation Labs. We help sort of move that forward. Or with GSIs, global integrated, real integrators to bring those to bare. >> Ashesh, wonder if we could drill a little bit. There's a lot of re-training that needs to happen. I've been reading lots on there. It's not, oh, I bring in this new Cloud Native team that's just going to totally re-vamp it and take my old admins and fire them all. That's not the reality. There's not enough training people to do all of this wonderful stuff. We see how many people are at this show. Explain what Red Hat's doing. Some of the training maturation, education paths. >> So we do a lot of work on the just core training aspect, learning services, get folks up to speed. There's work that happens, for example, in CNCF. But we do the same thing around certifications, around administering the systems, developing applications, and so on. So that's one aspect that needs to be learned. But then there's another aspect with regard to how do we get the actual platform, itself, to be smart enough to do things, that in the past, individual people had to do? So, for example, if we were to sort of play out the operator vision fully and through execution. In the past, perhaps you needed several database admins. But, if you had operators built for databases, which, for example couch, base, and mongo, and others, have built out. You can now run those within the platform and then that goes and manages on behalf. Now you don't need as many database admins, you free those people up now to build actual business innovation value. So, I think what we're trying to do is increasingly think about how we sort of, if you will, move value up the stack to free up resources to kind of work on building the next generation of services. And I think that's our business transformation work. >> And I think, even though digital transformation is totally over-hyped, which I agree, it actually is really relevant. Because I think the cloud wave, right now, has been certainly validated. But what's recognized is that, people have to re-imagine how they do their infrastructure. And IT is programmable. You're seeing the network. The holy trinity of IT is storage, networking, and compute. So, when you start thinking about that in a way that's cloud-based, it's going to require them to, I don't want to say re-platform, but really move to an operating-environment that's different, that they used to have. And I think that is real. We're seeing evidence of that. With that in mind, what's next? What do you guys got on the horizon? What's the momentum here? What's the most important story that you guys are telling here at Red Hat? And what's around the corner? >> Yeah, so obviously, I talked about a few announcements that we made right around Open Shift Dedicated and the upgrades around that. And things like, for example, supporting bring-your-own-cloud. So, if you got your own Amazon security credentials, we help support that. And manage that on your behalf, as well. We've talked this week about our support native, trying to introduce more server-less technologies into Open Shift. We announced the contribution of SCD to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. So, continuing re-affirming our commitment to the community I think looking ahead, going forward, our focus next year will be on Open Shift four, which will be the next release of the platform. And there, it's all about how do we give you a much better install than upgrade experience than you've had before? How do we give you these clusters that you can deploy in multiple different environments and manage that better for you? How do we introduce operators to bring more and more automation to the platform? So, for the next few months our focus is on creating greater automation in the platform and then enabling more and more services to be able to run on that. >> Pretty exciting for you guys riding the wave, the cloud wave. Pretty dynamic. A lot of action. You've guys have had great success, congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> You're fun to watch. The Cube coverage here. We're in Seattle for KubeCon 2018 and Cloud Native Con. I'm John your host. Stay with us for more coverage of day one of three days of coverage after this short break. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional Ecosystem as support. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by John Troyer. This is Silken Angle Media's production of the Cube at OpenStack Summit. We're the world wide leader in tech coverage, live tech coverage. Happy to welcome back to the program someone we've had on so many times we can't keep track. He is the creator of the term Pets versus Cattle, he is one of the OG of The Cloud Group, Randy, you know, wrote about everything before most of it was done. So good to see you, thank you for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, so Randy, coming into this show we felt that it was a bit of resetting expectations, people not understanding, you know, where infrastructure's going, a whole hybrid multi-cloud world, so, I mean you've told us all how it's going to go, so where are we today, what have people been getting wrong, what's your take coming into this week and what you've seen? >> Well, I've said it before, which is that the public clouds have done more than just deliver compute storage and networking on demand. What they've really done is they've built these massive development organizations. They're very sophisticated, that are, you know, that really come from that Webscale background and move at a velocity that's really different than anything we've seen before, and I think the hope in the early days of OpenStack was that we would achieve a similar kind of velocity and momentum, but I think the reality is is that it just hasn't really materialized; that while there are a lot of projects and there are a lot of contributors the coordination between them is very poor, and you know it's just not the, like architectural oversight that we really needed isn't there. I, a couple years ago at the Openstack Silicon Valley gave a presentation called The Lie of the Benevolent Dictator, and I chartered a course for how we could actually have more of a technical architecture oversight, and just that really fell on deaf ears. And so we continue to do the same thing and expect different results and I just, that's a little disappointing for me. >> Yeah. So what is your view of hybrid cloud? You know, no disagreement, you look at what the public cloud companies, especially the big three, the development that they can do, Amazon, a thousand new features a year, Google, what they can do with data, Microsoft has a whole lot of applications and communities around them. We're mostly talking about private cloud here, it was a term that you fought against for many years, we've had great debates on it, so how does that hybrid play out? Cause customers, they're keeping on premises. Edge fits into a lot of this too, so it's, there's not one winner, it's not a zero sum game, but how does that hybrid cloud work? >> Yeah so, I didn't fight against private cloud, I qualified it. I said if it's going to be a private cloud it's got to be built and look and smell the way that the public cloud was. Alright? If it's just VM ware with VM's on demand, that's not a private cloud. That was my position. And then in terms of hybrid cloud, you know, I don't think we're there yet. I've presented on this at many different OpenStacks, you can see it in the past, and I sort of laid out what needs to happen and that didn't happen. But I think there's hope, and I think the hope comes in the form of Kubernetes, and to a certain degree, Helm. And the reason that Kubernetes with Helm is very powerful is that Kubernetes gives us a computive traction, so that you don't care if you're on the public cloud, or you know OpenStack or Vmware or whatever, and then what Helm gives us is our charts, so ways to deploy services, not just software, and so what we could think about doing in the future is building hybrid cloud based off of Kubernetes and Helm. >> Yeah, so Randy since last time we talked you've got a new role, you're now with Juniper. Juniper had done a Contrail acquisition. You know, quite a few years back you wrote a good blueprint on one of the Juniper forums about the OpenContrail communities. So tell us a little bit about your role, your goals, in that community. >> So OpenContrail has been a primarily Juniper initiative, and we're going to press the reset button on the OpenContrail community. I'm going to do it tonight and call for people to sort of get involved in doing that reset, and when I say reset I mean, wipe the operating system, reload it from scratch, and do it really as a community, not just as a Juniper run initiative, and so people inside Juniper are very excited about this, and what we're trying to do is that we believe that the path forward for OpenContrail is ubiquitous adoption. So rather then playing for just the pieces that we have, which we've done a great job of, we want to take the world's best SDN controller and we want to make sure everybody uses it, because we think aggregate that's good for not only the entire community but also Juniper. >> So, love the idea of kind of rebooting the community in the open, right, because you have to be transparent about these sort of things. >> Randy: Yeah, that's right. >> What are the community segments that you would like to see join you here in the OpenContrail? What kind of users, what kind of companies would you like to see come in to the tent? >> Well anybody's welcome, but we want to start with all of our key stakeholders that exist today, so first one, and arguably one of the most important is our competitors, right so we're hoping to have Mirantis at the table, maybe Ericcson, Huawei, anybody. Cisco, hey come join the party. Second is that we have done really well in Sass and in gaming, and we'd like to see all of those companies come to the table as well, Workday, Symantech, and so on. The third segment is enterprises, we've done well in financial services, we think that that's a really important segment because they're leading edge of enterprises typically, and the fourth is the carrier's obviously incredibly important for Juniper, folks like AT&T, Direction Telecom, all those companies we'd love to see come to the table. And then that's really the primary focus, and then anybody else who wants to show up, anybody who wants to develop in Contrail in the future we'd love to have there. >> Well with open source communities, right, there's always a balance of the contributors and developers versus operators, and we can use the word contributors in a lot of roles. Some open source communities, much more developer focused, >> Randy: That's right. >> Others more operator focused, where do you see this OpenContrail community starting out? >> So where it's been historically is more of our end users and operators. >> I think that's interesting and an interesting twist because I think sometimes open source communities get stuck with just the people who can contribute code, and I'm from an operator community myself, >> Randy: Right. >> So I think that's really interesting. >> We still want all those people but I think what has happened is that when people have come in and they wanted to be more sort of on the developer side, the community hasn't been friendly to them. >> John: Okay. >> Randy: And so we want, that's a key thing that we want to change. You know when we were talking, to certain carriers they came and they said look, it's great you're going to do this, we want to be a part of it, and one of the things we'd like to contribute is more advanced testing around VMFs. And I just look at that and I'm just like that's what we need, right? Juniper is not, can't carry all the water on having, you know, sophisticated test suites for VMFs and more advanced networking use cases, but the carriers are deep into this and we'd love to have them come and bring that. So not just developers, but also QA, people who want to increase the code quality, the architectural quality, and the aggregate value of OpenContrail. >> Okay, Randy can you help place OpenContrail where it fits in this kind of networking spectrum, especially, there's open source things, we've talked about about VPP a couple times on theCube here. The joke for many years was SDN still does nothing, NFV solutions have grown, have been huge use case, is really where the early money for big deployments have been for OpenStack. Where does OpenContrail fit, where does it kind of compare and contrast against some of the other options out there. >> I'm going to answer that slightly differently. I've been skeptical about SDN overlays for a long time, and now I am helping with one of the world's best SDN overlays, and what's changed for me is that in the last year I've seen key customers of Contrail's, of Juniper's actually do something very interesting, right. You've got an SDN overlay, it's complex, it's hard to void, you got to wonder, why should I do this? Well I thought the same thing about virtualization, right, until I figured out, sort of what was the killer app. And what we've seen is a company, one of our customers, and several others, but one in particular I can talk about publicly, Riot Games, take containers and OpenContrail and marry them so that you have an abstraction around compute, and an abstraction around networking, so that their developers can write to that, and they don't care whether that's running on top of public cloud, private cloud, or in some partner's data center globally. And in fact they're going to talk about that today at OpenContrail days at 3:30, and are going to present a lot more details, and that's amazing to me because by abstracting a way and disintermediating the public clouds, you actually have more power, right. You can build your own framework. And if you're using Kubernetes as a baseline you can do a lot more on top of that computing network abstraction. >> You talked about OpenContrail days, again my first summit, I've actually been impressed by the foundation, acknowledging there's a huge landscape of open source and other technologies around there, OpenStack itself doesn't invent everything. Can you talk a little bit about that kind of attitude of bringing, I mean we talk about Kubernetes and that sort of thing, but all the other CNCF projects, monitoring, even components like SCD, right, we're talking about here at this conference. So, can you talk a little bit about how OpenStack can interact with the rest of the open source and cloud native at-large community? >> That's sort of a tough question John. >> John: Okay. >> I mean the reason I say that is like the origins of OpenStack are very much NIH and there has been a very disturbing tendency to sort of re-invent the wheel. A great example is Keystone, still to this day I don't know why Keystone exists and why we created a whole new authentic standard when there were dozens and dozens of battle-tested, battle-hardened protocols and bits of code that existed prior. It's great that we're getting a little bit better at that but I still sense that the origins of the community and some of the technical leadership have resistance to organizing and working with outside components and playing nice. So, it's better but it's not great, it's not where it should be. Really OpenStack needs to be broken down into a lot of different projects that can compete with each other and all run in parallel without having to be so tightly wound together. It's still disappointing to me that we aren't doing that today. >> Randy, wonder if you could give us a little bit of a personal reflection, you've been involved in cloud many years, we've talked about some of the state of it, where do you think enterprises are when they think about their IT, how IT relates to business, some of the big challenges they're facing, and kind of this rapid pace of change that's happening in our industry right now >> Yeah well the pressures just increase. The need to pick up speed and to move faster and to have a greater velocity, that's not going away, that seems to be like an incredible macro-trend that's just going to keep driving people towards the next event. But what I see is that the tension between the infra-structure IT teams and the line of business hasn't really started to get resolved. You see a lot of enterprises back into using DevOps as a way to try to fix the culture change problems but it's just not happening fast enough. I have a lot of concerns that basically private cloud or private infra-structure for enterprises will just not materialize in the way it needs to for the next generation. And that the line of business will continue to just keep moving to public cloud. All the while all the money that's being reinvested in the public cloud is increasing their capabilities in terms feature sets and security capabilities and so on. I just, I don't see the materialization of private cloud happening very well at this point in time and I don't see any trendlines that tell me it's going to change. >> Yeah, what recommendations do you give today to the OpenStack foundation? I know that you haven't been shy in the past about giving guidance as to the direction, what do you think needs to happen to be able to help customers along that journey that they need? >> I don't give any guidance to the OpenStack Foundation anymore, I'm not on the Board of Directors, and frankly I gave a lot of advice in the past that fell on deaf ears and people were unwilling to make the changes that were necessary I think to create success. And even though I was eventually proven right, there doesn't seem to be an appetite for change. I would say that the hard partition between the Board of Directors and the technical committee that was created at the outset with the founding of the Foundation has let to a big problem which is that there's simply business concerns that are technical concerns and there are technical concerns which are business concerns and the actual structure of the Foundation does not allow that to occur because that hard partition between them. So if people on Board of Directors can't actually tell the TC that they'd like to see certain technical changes because they're business concerns and Technical Committee can't tell the Board of Directors they'd like to see business changes made because they're technical concerns around them. And I think that's, it's fundamentally broken until the bylaws are fixed. >> So Randy beyond what we've talked about already what's exciting you these days, you look at like the serverless trend, is that something that you find intriguing or maybe contrary view on it, what's exciting you these days? >> Serverless is really interesting. In fact I'd like to see serverless at the edge. I think it would be fascinating if Amazon webservices could sell a serverless capability that was actually running in the mobile carriers edge. So like on the mobile towers or in essential offices. But you could do distributive computation for IOT literally at the very edge of the network, that would be incredibly powerful. So I am very interested in serverless in that regard. With Kubernetes, I think that this is the future, I think I've seen most of the other initiatives start to fail at this point. Docker Incorporated just hasn't made the progress they need to, hopefully a change in leadership will fix that. But it does mean that more and more people are gravitating towards Kubernetes and that's a thing because whereas OpenStack is historically got no opinion, Kubernetes is a much more prescriptive model and I think that actually leads to faster innovation, a greater pace of change and combined with Helm charts, I think that we're going to see an ecosystem develop around Kubernetes that actually could be a counterweight to the public clouds and really be sort of cloud agnostic. Private, public, at the edge, who cares? >> Randy Bias, always appreciated your very opinionated viewpoints on everything that are happening here. Pleasure to catch up with you as always. John and I will be back will lots more coverage here from OpenStack Summit in Boston, thanks for watching the Cube.