>> Let me check. (uptempo orchestral music) (uptempo techno music) >> Live, from San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hey welcome back everyone, we are live here with theCUBE in San Francisco, Moscone West, for Red Hat Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, with John Troyer co-host, analyst this week. the TechReckoning co-founder. Our next two guests are Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager of OpenShift Platform and Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS, interview of the week because CoreOS now part of Red Hat. Congratulations, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> You're welcome. >> So obviously this is for us, we've been covering both of you guys pretty heavily and we've been commenting very positively around the acquisition of CoreOS. Two great companies that know open-source, pure open-source. You guys got the business model nailed down, these guys got great tech. You bring it together. So the first question is how's everyone doing? How's everyone feeling? And where's the overlap, if any and where's the fix? Explain the true fit of CoreOS. >> I'm going to start Alex, you want to jump in after. We're very excited right, so when we first had interactions with CoreOS, we knew this is going to be a great fit. The conversation we had earlier, both companies delivers in open-source, delivers in the mission center to take us forward regard to Kubernetes, as the container orchestration engine, and then being able to build out value for our customers around it. I think from our perspective, the work that both CoreOS did in advancing the community forward but also the work they've done around automation or their upgrades, management metering, charge back and so on. Being able to bring all those qualities into Red Hat is incredible. So I think the fits been good. It's been three months, I'll let Alex comment some more on that but we've been doing a lot of work from integration perspective around engineering, around product management. At Red Hat Summit this week, we reveal details around some of the converged road maps, which I can talk about some more as well. So we're feeling pretty good about it. >> Alex, your reaction. >> Yes, it's been three months. If you've studied CoreOS at all, you know everything that we do really centers around this concept of automated operations. And so by being part of Red Hat, we're starting to bring that to market in a much bigger and faster way of really accelerating it. The way the acquisition are really successful is either mutually beneficial to both companies and they accelerate the adoption of technology and that's definitely happening. We had the announcement yesterday with Red Hat CoreOS around the Linux distribution. Last week, we did the operator framework. It was very central to the work that we've been doing as part of CoreOS, and then as companies in a lot of ways is being part of Red Hat for three months now. This is what our company would have looked like if we ever just another 10 years along or whatever very similar, we're like a mini Red Hat, and now we're leaped ahead in a big way. >> And you guys done a good work. We've documented on theCUBE many times, and we were in Copenhagen last week. Now covering the operating framework but I want to get your reaction. You guys did a lot of great work on the tech side obviously, you can go into more detail but we've always been saying on theCUBE. If you try to force monetization in these emerging markets, you're optimizing behavior. And this was something that's gone on, we've seen containers. It's been well documented obviously what's happened. It's certainly a beautiful thing. Got Kubernetes now on top working together with that. If as an entrepreneur out there that are building companies. If you try to force the monetization too early, you really thinking differently. You guys stay true to it. Now we've got a good home with Red Hat. Talk about that dynamic because that was something that I know you guys faced at CoreOS and you've managed through it. Tempted probably many times to do something. Talk about the mission that you had, staying true to that and just that dynamic. It's challenging. >> Yeah, as we set out to build a company in general, there are really three operating principles. There is build a great technology to solve our mission which is to secure the internet through automated operations, build a great place to spend their days which is really about the people and the culture and so on. Why are we doing this, and the third was to make it sustainable and by that I mean to build their own money fountains, building out of the middle of our campus. And so by joining Red Hat it's we have a money fountain sitting there. (laughing) It's spewing off a ton of cash flow every single quarter that allows us to continue to do those first two things in perpetuity, and that third one is something every company needs in order to continue to execute towards the mission. And the thing that's so awesome about working with Red Hat is we're very much aligned and compatible. Red Hat's mission isn't exactly the same thing we are working but it's definitely compatible. It's like Apache and GPL are compatible. It's like that type of compatible. >> You both believe in open-source in a big way. Talk about the Red Hat perspectives. Now you got like a kid in a candy store. Openshift made a big bed with Kubernetes. You see now, you have the CoreOS, how has it changed in Red Hat internally? Things moving around actually accelerates the game a bit for you guys, and you're seeing new life being pumped into OpenStack. You're seeing clear line of sight with Kubernetes on the app side. We were just at KubeCon. A lot of people are pretty excited. There's clear lines of sight on what's defacto. What people are going to build around, and also differentiate. >> Right, so I'll start off by saying I really hope our CEO, Jim Whitehurst doesn't see this interview but if it goes off in terms of money factor. I'm currently make budget request. I think I know what's going on. >> Balance sheet, cashless now. It's in the public filings. If I see a fountain of money spewing off the thing, >> The ability to reinvest. >> This is a really good fit. (laughing) The way to say this, they have a great business model. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Some of us will make money, some of us will spend the money. Some of us will spend the money, it will work out well. (laughing) >> It's a great win. It's a great win. It obviously accelerates the plans. The commercialization is already there with Red Hat. This is just a good thing for everybody but the impact of you guys accelerating, just seeing OpenShift. You can boil it down to the impact of Red Hat. What is the impact? >> So in all seriousness, I think the focus for us really has been about there is so much complimentary work that's been going on with the CoreOS team that we're bringing into OpenShift, and to Red Hat in general that accelerates everything that you're seeing. You saw some amazing announcements happen this week with regard to our partnership with Microsoft and getting OpenShift out and Azure, and joint support offering. The work we're doing with IBM to get IBM middleware as well as IBM Cloud Private support integrated with OpenShift. The work that Alex referred to around automation, being able to bring that to our customers. We see all the excitement around that front as well so we want to take all Techtonic work that has been going on at CoreOS, then move that to OpenShift. Carry forward the community that CoreOS built around Container Linux, and actually inject a lot those ideas into that Linux, our flagship technology. Bring that passion and energy to bear as well, and then carry forward a lot of the other projects that they have. For example, the Quake Container Registry, that's extremely popular. Carry that forward, support our customers to use that both stand alone integrated with the OpenShift platform. Other projects like FCB that Alex has been talking about which is the underpinnings of Kubernetes plus running worldwide. So all of those things, we can bring forward, and then all the advancements that were made in place by CoreOS as they're working towards their money fountain, just plug that right into it. >> And just as a point of reference, Brendan Burns flew in yesterday. Microsoft Build is going up so he left their own conference to come down here. >> As did Scar Guthrie, right? >> That's a great testament. This is the testament. They're coming down, really laying down support. This is a real big deal. This is not a fake deal, it's real. >> And so I want to talk a little bit about specifics of the timeline, the road maps. Sometimes with these mergers or acquisitions, it's well the technology will be incorporated at some point, and then it goes away to die and you never see it again. And then the people all leave, and then you ask what was going on. But here, you actually have, I was great. You were talking to me. You have some specific timelines and we'll start to see some of the Techtonics Stack in OpenShift fairly soon. >> Yes, absolutely so the acquisition was announced three months ago and we said at that time that by Red Hat Summit, we'll lay out for you a road map and so we're now starting to do that. We put out release of some materials around some details with regard to how that's coming out. We have detailed sessions going on at Red Hat Summit around the integration plans between Red Hat, OpenShift and CoreOS with a few specific areas with regard to OpenShift. You'll start seeing the earliest versions if you will of the work that's being done. This summer, we'll deliver the full road map to you there by the end of this calendar year. With regard to, for example pieces like the Quake Container Registry that's being made available and being sold now as we speak. Customers can go get that, and we want to make sure no customer is left behind. Right, that's a principle we put out. And with regard to supporting any existing customers on Techtonic or the Container Linux space, we're doing that as we're working to integrate them into the Red Hat portfolio. Can you talk a little bit about the decision for Red Hat's atomic coast and Container Linux? Now re-named again, CoreOS. That was one of the seminal inventions that you all made as you started the company. I think it had some brilliant ideas again about security and the operational aspects but can you talk about some of those technologies and the decisions made there? >> Yeah, like I said, the acquisition of CoreOS Red Hat was about saying look what can we take that CoreOS has been doing to accelerate both work and community but also what could be doing to deliver this technology to customers. So the goal was we'll take all the atomic and the word that's been going on there have that be superseded by the work that's coming out of CoreOS Container Linux carry the community forward. Release a version of that called Red Hat CoreOS and in its initial form make that actually an underlying environment to run OpenShift in. Okay so for customers who want the automation that Alex talked about earlier. They made that available both at the underlying platform. Make it available in OpenShift platform itself via the work that's come from Techtonic, and then ultimately, Alex will talk about this some more through operators. So trusted operations from ISP or third party software that would run on the platform. All right so now if you will, we'll have full stack automation all the way through. OpenShift also support Red Hat Linux, a traditional environment for the thousands of customers that we have globally. Over a period of time, you should expect to see much of the work that's going on Red Hat CoreOS find its way into it as well. So I think this just benefits all around for us both in the near term as well as long. >> And Red Hat Container certification, where does that fit into all this? >> Yeah, a great question, so what we announced maybe was, actually was two years ago was a Container certification program. Last year, we spent some time talking about the health of those containers, and being able to provide that to customers. And this year, we're talking about trusted operations around those containers. That carries forward, we've got hundreds of ISPs that have built certified containers around it, and now with the operator framework, we've had, I think it's four ISPs demonstrating previews of their operators working with our platform as well as 60 more that are committed to building ISP operators that will be certified again. >> So people are certified in general, pretty much. I think we're very excited. The fact that we went to KubeCon last week, announced that the operating framework have been based on the ideas that the CoreOS team has been working on for at least two years. Making that available to the community and then saying for the ISPs that want a path to market. Going back to the money fountain again for the ISP that want to pass through market which is pretty much all of them. We also have the ability to do that so give them an opportunity to make sure that as wide as possible some adoption of the software at the same time help with commercialization. >> Can you guys share your definition of operator because I saw the announcement but we we're on a broader definition when we see the DevOps movement going the next level. It's all about automation and security, you mentioned that admin roles are being automated in a way to see more of an operator function within enterprise and emerging service providers. So the role operator now takes on two meanings. It's a software developer. It also is a network operator, it's also a service, so what is that, how do you guys view that role because if this continues, you're going to have automation. More administrator is going to be self healing, all this stuff is going to go on. Potentially operations is now the developers and IT all blurring together. How do you guys define the word operator in the future state? >> Well I know the scenario of great interest to you. >> So operator is the term for the piece of software that implements the automated operations. And so automated operations, what is that? Well that's what sets apart, the way I think about it is what sets apart a cloud provider verses a hosting provider. It's a set of software that really runs the thing for you and so if we're going to get into specific Kubernetes lingo, it would be an application specific controller. That's a piece of software that's implements the automated operations. And automated operation is a software that gives you that simplicity of cloud. It's at the core of a database as a service. It's both hosting but also automated operations. Those two things together make up a cloud service and that software piece is what we're decoupling from the hosting providers for the first time and allowing any open-source project or ISP brings the simplicity of cloud but in any environment. And that's what the operator is a piece of software that actually goes and implements that. >> So a microservices framework, this fits in pretty nicely. How do you see obviously? >> Microservices, there's all these terms. Microservice is more of an architecture than anything but it's saying look, there's these basic things that every operations team has to go and do. You have to go and install something, you have to upgrade it, you have to back it up, when it crashes in the middle of the night, get it going again. A lot of these things, the best practices for how you do them are all common. There's no ingenuity in it. And for those things, we can now because of Kubernetes write software that just automates it, and this was not possible five years ago. You couldn't write those software. There were things like configuration management systems and stuff like that that would allow companies to build their own custom versions of this. But to build a generic piece of software that knows how to run application like Prometheus or a database or so on. It wasn't possible to write that and that's what the first four or five years of CoreOS was is making it possible, that's why you saw all these mat and new open-source projects being built. But once it was possible it was like let's start leveraging that. You saw the first operator come out about a year ago, and I think it was our ATD operator was the first one, and we started talking about this as a concept. And now we're releasing operator framework which is from all the learnings of building the first couple. We now made a generic, so anybody can go and do it, and as part of Red Hat, we're now bringing it to the whole ISP ecosystem. So the whole plan to make automated operations ubiquitous is still well underway. >> I'd love to extend that conversation though to the operator, the person. >> Right. I think you and your team brought the perspective of the operational excellence right to the table. A lot of cloud has been driven by the role of developer and DevOps but I've always felt like well wait a minute operators the people who use to be known as IT insisted they had a lot to bring to the table too about security and about keeping things running, and about compliance and about all that good stuff. So can you talk a little bit as you see the community emerging, and as you see all these folks here. How do you talk to people who want to understand what their role is going to be with all this automation in keeping the clouds running? >> Computers use to be people too. (laughing) But we're not going to completely automate away everything because there's still parts of this wildly complex system that justifies whole conferences of thousands of people that require a whole lot of human ingenuity. What we're doing is saying let's not like do the part that is the fire drill in the middle of the might that keeps you from making forward progress. The typical role of an operations person today is just fighting fires of mundane things that don't actually add a lot of value to the business. In fact, this guy is difficult because you only get brought up when things are on fire. You never get an praise when things are going well. And so what we want to do is help the operations folks put out those fires like the security updates. Let's just roll those out automatically. The way you do those across all organizations does not need to be special and unique but they're really critical to do right. >> Well it's just automate that stuff away and let the operations team focus on moving the business forward. The parts that require the human spirit to actually go and do, and if we get to a point where a CEO of a company is like, wow, I can not come up with a new vision for this imitative 'cause my operations team are just so fast at influencing them. Then we have to start worrying about operations people's job but I don't see that happening for a very long time. >> And no one is going to be sitting around twiddling their thumbs either. >> Let me just extend that point a little bit. The whole point of operators is to encapsulate human knowledge that ISPs have and bring that in the platform and automate it. So the challenge that we've had is an operations person is required to know a lot about a lot. So the question then really is how can we at least take some of what's already known by people and be able to replicate that and that allows for every one to move forward. I think that's just forward-- >> Well, there's a bigger picture beyond that, so I agree but there is also scale. With cloud, you have scale issues. So with scale automation is a beautiful thing 'cause the fire has also grown exponentially too so you can't be operating like this. Scale matters, super. >> The reason that this stuff was invented at Google initially was not because of Google's high career per second. Is that they were, to build the application they're building required so many servers that you couldn't hire enough operations people without writing software to automate it. So they were forced to custom design the system because they had so many servers to run to build the software that they wanted to build. And other companies are just now getting to that point because every company is going through a digital transformation. They have to have thousands of servers just to run their applications. There's no way you're just going to hire the operations staff to go and do it all by hand. You have to write software to turn the operations people into mech warriors of running servers. You need to wrap them in automation in order to scale that. >> At KubeCon, she made a comment that all those operations folks at Google are software developers. >> Brand engineers. >> Brand engineering, so they're not Ops guys just pushing buttons and provisioning gear and what not. They're actually writing code. You bring up the Google piece, the other piece that we heard at KubeCon. We hear this consistently that this is now a new way to do software development. So when a former Googler went to work for another company, left Google. She went in and she said, "Oh my God, you guys don't do. "You don't use board?" To her, she's like how do you write software? So she was like young and went out in the real world and was like wait a minute, you don't do this? So this is a new model in software development at scale with these new capabilities. >> I think so and I think what's really important is the work we're doing with regards to an ecosystem perspective to help folks. So one of the top things I hear from customers all the time is this sounds fantastic. Everyone's talking about DevOps or microservices or wanting to run Kubernetes at scale. Do I have the skills? Can I keep up with the change that's in place and how do I continue going forward around that? So we announced at Red Hat Summit Managed offerings from let's say Atos and DXC where you've got goals to integrate us helping folks, or companies like Extension T systems. The CEO came and spoke today about the work we're doing with them to help connected cars, and those applications be rolled out quick and fast. I think it's going to take a village to get us to where we want to because the rate of change is so fast around all of these areas and it's not slowing down that we'll have to ensure there's more automation and then there's more enablement that's going on for our customers. >> So some clarity, can you guys comment on your reaction to obviously we've seen OpenStack has done over the years and now with well Containers, now Kubernetes. You seeing at least two ecosystems clearly identified. Application developers, cloud native and then I would call under the hood infrastructure, you got OpenStack. Almost it clarifies where people can actually focus on real problems that the Kubernetes needs. So how has the Container, maturation of Containers with Kubernetes clarified the role of the community? If this continues with automation, you can almost argue that the clarity happens everywhere. Can you comment on how you see that happening? Is it happening or is it just observation that's misguided? >> I think we're getting better with regard to fit for a purpose or fit for use case. All right, so if you start thinking about the earliest days of OpenStack. OpenStack is going to be AWS in a box, and then you realize well that's not a practical way of thinking about what a community can do a build at scale. And so when you start thinking about a Word appropriate use case for this. Now you start betting if you will, a set of scales, you set expectations around how to make that successful. I think we'll go through the same if we haven't already or even going through it with regard to Kubernetes. So not every company in the world can run Managed World call. DYI Kubernetes, don't many companies will start with that. And so the question is how do we get to the point where there's balance around it and then be able to take advantage of the work? For example, companies like Red Hat work for us was doing to help accelerate that path 'cause to the point Alex was trying to make is the value for them being able to keep up with the core release of Kubernetes? And every time a bug shows up to go off and be able to fix and patch it, and watch that or is the value building the next set of applications set on top of platforms. >> That's great, well congratulations guys. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate the insight. Congratulations on the three months into Red Hat. Good fit, and enjoy the rest of the show. Thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. >> Thanks. >> Live from Red Hat Summit, it's theCUBE's coverage here of Red Hat and all the innovation going on out in the open. We're here in the middle of, we open the floor with Moscone West with live coverage. Stay with us for more after this short break. (uptempo techno music)