>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of next level network experience event brought to you by info blocks. >>Welcome back to our coverage. The Cube. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here with a virtual event with info blocks on next level networking. It's a virtual event hosted with the Cube of great guests Kenya Asuni, who is the EVP of products and corporate development with info blocks today. Thank you for coming on. Appreciate it. You guys are the theme of this is next level networking, which I love. Next level, it really kind of illustrates we are going to the next level with Cove in 19. We're seeing it everywhere security DNS topic that most people aren't familiar with. An i t. You know all about it. You guys are leading and reinventing d I for the folks that I want to know what that is. It's DNS de HCP and I p address management for the hybrid cloud and borderless enterprise, which is basically everything. Now, um, this is super super important. As we see every single company living this right now, which is workforce is working from home workplaces that are transforming the surface area is huge. You still got to connect to the Internet. You still need to go to a website and you still do. E commerce needs to run your business. This is a huge, huge problem that's been highlighted. Secure access there you guys are in the forefront for next gen or networking. Tell us what you define as next level. >>So, John, I think one of the things you'll see is if you, if you look at the train, is happening in our business, that is, there's an increasing adoption of SAS services, whether it's infrastructures of service being consumed from AWS, azure, Google or all the idea applications moving into SAS, you're already seeing a shift away from this data center. Being the center of the university in the Enterprise, I t infrastructure to more of a cloud edge world where a lot of the applications now sit in the cloud some in your private cloud still but a lot in the public cloud. And then you have your enterprise edge from where you want to get to these applications directly instead of back calling all the traffic into your traditional data center. We're also seeing a big push into the number of devices coming into the infrastructure, whether it be by Odie Iot G five GS or more devices coming into the infrastructure. As you said, that perimeter and the surface area of the enterprise has exploded. So you have to You have to start to think about security from a different standpoint. So all of these trends are starting to play out in the market. I think what you're going to see is over the next couple of years that the the network inside the Enterprise is gonna look very different from ordered yesterday. Today, everything gets back to the data center, and that's where all the action's. I think what you're going to see is a big shift towards what we call a hybrid multi cloud enterprise, where you may have some workloads sitting in your data center. Some workloads sitting in public clouds, some in your private cloud, and then you want the ability to move these workloads around and you're utilizing everything all your applications. You're actually continue rising all your applications, and you want all this stuff to move around so it poses a very interesting challenge. And that's why we say you need a next level network experience to deal with all the changes that you, their enterprises, are going to it. >>That's a great point. This is our top story that we've been reporting for a long time but rose recently with code 19. This notion of multiple networks, multiple environments, multiple clouds. Certainly hybrid cloud has been ratified. Everyone pretty much acknowledges that cloud operations on premises to the cloud of their. But you got to still move packets from A to B moving around, and now you're storing them and all kinds of things are happening. But I want to get your thoughts on a trend that even makes what you just said even more complex because the complexity is crazy. Right now, there's a trend of managed services. Cloud explosion comes on. You mentioned SAS more coming or deploying a managed services, sometimes multi tenant, sometimes pure instances in the cloud or on premises and data center that's causing access. I still want to integrate that into a Web presence. So, you know, I gotta integrate all these things. It's not that easy. Now. Again, DNS has been a big part of the Web presence But now you have a new dimension of hosted applications. You have managed services that that are easy to stand up. But now I gotta integrate them. This is one of the hardest challenge is that we're here, and I want to get your thoughts in reaction to that. Yeah, >>and I think Google has certainly accelerated the shift that we talked about. So I think a good point there in terms of your school reacting is there is a big accelerant in terms of the shift of the cloud. I think one of the the key role that we play as the enterprise gets much more dynamic is you need three elements you need the element to be to get visibility into everything that's going on in your cluster, you need to provide a layer of security of foundational security in your infrastructure and you need automation because then you have workloads moving around. You need to automate all your idea. Simple flows around allocating. I p address system is VMS or containers on moving as containers. Moving our retaining I P addresses assigning your i P addresses managing DNS records for them. So the work we do that dd I there really becomes the life blood of how this hybrid multi cloud enterprise comes along. And as you get to a much more distributed I T infrastructure, you are not going to be able to manage this entire infrastructure yourself the traditional. So if you have an enterprise idea administrator, you cannot sit there and say, Look, I'm gonna do the traditional model of deploying software on premise or appliances on premise, and I love my guys going out there and managing the administration of that software every six months after do a software upgrade and I'll do all that. What you need, because the enterprise has become so distributed in dynamic, is you need a cloud managed or a managed services. In either case, basically, what you see what you're looking at is a centralized management more and the ability to spin up and down the services Dynamically. We are strong believers in sass or a cloud managed approach and a cloud native architecture being the right architecture for the next level network. And that is something from a delivery standpoint and MSP can use. A managed service provider can leverage this flower manage architecture that we have to offer the services to enterprise customers and take away the whole headache off, managing and administering their own infrastructure. >>I like how you said dd I layer because there's an abstraction you can create the take away that complexity that was pretty straight forward. The best yet. DNS dhc p I p I p addresses. Okay, you manage those cases? No problem Naming whatnot. Now. You have a dynamic environment. That's key. I want to get back to and follow up what you said about the I t folks, your customers in the Enterprise. They're sitting there saying, Hey, I'm used to the on premises world and I have cloud What's the difference in your mind between on premises and cloud managed d D I and why does it matter? >>Look, I think in the traditional world, all the i t infrastructure it again was sitting in one or more regional or or regional or centralized data centers and that it was easy to manage. You could appliances from info blocks and now and it was easy. You had the folks sitting in these data centers and they could manage the entire infrastructure using someone premise management tools and things of that nature. But now I think about it. If you're if you're Walmart and you have 4500 stores right now, if you want to push DNS d A T v i p address management software into all these 5500 locations, it is very difficult to do that by deploying individual appliances or by deploying sort of shrink wrap software that has to sit in every every one of these locations. It's just from an idea administration standpoint. It's a it's a much heavier lift. But if I could take all the management and all the policy management that the policy framework and pull that up into a SAS lower that you can access from anywhere on the planet and I'll leave the protocol serving engines, if you will, on premise. So you have a container that gets spun up that can sit on any third party hardware that's sitting at your infrastructure. But it is all managed through the cloud it zero touch provisioning Andi, completely orchestrator. Now you're sitting at us at a central dashboard, and if you're in a corporate environment, you're sitting at home and just accessing our SAS service and managing your entire infrastructure from from from your from your home from your our checked at your home. Right? So it just becomes so much easier for idea administrators to operate. And I >>have so much free time on their hands to be the Watches virtual event. So be fun. There certainly >>do Stash stash. That's a great >>point. I want to get your thoughts because I like how you know I love the term next level. Anything going, the next level has been something that you talk about, whether you're a technical person and an entrepreneur or a business person. Let's go the next level. It means go the next level. But you add the word experience in there, and I want to get your thoughts on that because it is about the user experience. What >>do you >>guys do to provide that what info blocks provide specifically to provide that next level experience? >>Yeah, that's a great question. We are formed believers again that the future of networking and security in I T. Is going to shift to a cloud managed cloud native paradigm, which means you should be able to just like the hyper skaters. AWS is the Googles and Amazons of the world, right? If you look at how they build out their cloud infrastructure, it's all about separating the infrastructure layers of the compute layer from the applications that sit on top of them. So the compute nodes can scale at a difference at a different pace from that from the applications. That same mindset needs to come into into managing networking and security services as well. So if you have 1000 different educations, lets you can decide through a centralized policy framework what services you want to spin up a lease 1000 locations. Today you would have to buy a box, a small medium large box from info blocks or any one of the networking guys out there, and you would have to deploy that. And most likely, you will end up over provisioning each site because you don't want to run out of capacity. The next level experience would say, Just tell me what side you're deploying. The sites will call home. They will download the number of services needed based on some centralized policy that was defined, and you would get a right size deployment off services at that particular site. You need more services because, say, the user profile, that the profile of the users at that site change, which means you need to spend a Let's, say, a couple of additional security services. Well, that gets automatically imported from the cloud and gets incense created in that particular site. If you need more capacity because it's end of the quarter and you're doing a whole bunch of peer some financial contractions for closing the books, you need more capacity for some of the security applications. Those additional containers with those security applications can can get spun up, so you're starting to scale out as you need and scale back when you don't need the capacity. But this whole thing becomes a very dynamic experience in terms of how services get spun up. They get on down, and it's all driven by. There's this whole notion off the users that are sitting in a location, the context of the users of what devices they're trying to access these applications from what, what is the time of the day? How is the security profile of that device you bring all that know how into the house services get provisioned and how services get operationalized at any particular site in any particular enterprise. Rights are very simple experience when it comes to networking and security, and how do you deploy it at scale? >>And the thing that that sets up is what you're saying really about automation, because once you're in this mode in this experience, the environment lends itself well to automation because it is downloading the right services you need. But since it's dynamic and it needs to be ready, how does automation fit into that piece? >>Absolutely, if you disaster management is already automated for you now if you want to drive further automation and orchestration through integration with your Dev ops, SEC ops, Net ops tools, we have public FBI's through which this this can be driven. There's two ways to manage this right. We have a Cloud Services portals. If somebody wanted to go in and leverage our porter to manage their infrastructure, they can't do that. If they wanted this to be completely programmatic and driven through their their dev ops SEC ops tools, then through the public AP guys, we will tightly integrated into all the tools they have, whether it's sensible data forms some of the Dev ops tools or on the security side. If you want to integrate us into your store platform security orchestration, platforms, you can do that. And your entire workflow for networking as well as security can be completely, completely automated. >>That's awesome. I want to get as we get limited time left and you got to go. We have to hard stop with segment here. Customer example. I'll see customers have a need for this. You're in business to do this. Can you give an example of a customer? That kind of illustrates the next level networking >>we have. We have 6000 plus active customers. We have over 50% share when it comes to this DNS DCP eye Pam market. So you will see has deployed and have you deployed in 95. Out of the Fortune 100 enterprises in four blocks is some someone you will see in any customer that you that you go through. We have some public references such as Adobe, a great customer of ours on our website. They, their entire global network, runs on the foundational layer of D. I. We have some very large customers that are not as comfortable being public references, but we have again. If you have 95 of the Fortune 100 enterprises want you, you can imagine how sticky VR how broadly deployed we are. Typically, what happens is we would go in and we would go in as the FBI there for them to control and manage that I p address space and their DNS infrastructure. Then they take on more off. They take on a security lens at this and say, Look through the http and eye Pam, I know everything that is sitting in my infested toe, DNS. I have full visibility into all the communication happening from that employer. So that's a great data source for me to leverage as a first layer of defense from a security stand. So then they start to bring in security into the into the mix in terms of how they leverage our products and then through our SAS platforms and SAS offerings. They take that and extended as they're driving this edge transformation. So they push these services now to the edge of the infrastructure so and that the new infant, the new offerings are blocks one platform is our SAS platform and blocks one based applications on our new offerings that integrates very nicely with some of our traditional offerings. So you get a very comprehensive single pane of glass in terms of how you can manage your entire enterprise footprint, whether it's it's on prim at the edge, in the public cloud at the cloud edge, right? >>You know, having a good business model that puts abstractions and reduces complexity is is a great one. We've seen the innovation with DNS and anything that needs an Internet address. You got to connect, and I o. T only creates more need for connection. This is the key enterprises know DNS. They know it differently that it's the plumbing we all know. But every time there's an innovation inflection point, a new abstraction layer emerges for simplicity, ease of use. >>DNS is the phone book of the end of off the Internet. Right, So you want to call anywhere you have to first, your DNS. Look up and you brought up I o t. That's a great example. You're not going to be able to put in these eye ot sensors. You're not going to be able to put endpoint security software, but they're going to call home so you can leverage DNS and do some behavioral analysis of the DNS. Traffic coming out of those Iot. The sensors are I ot endpoints and say, Hey, look, is there something militias going on? Why is my thermostat talking to a server in China? You can detect that to a DNS based security earlier that this foundational >>and to your point, whether it's a light bulb or anything untested device, they're being turned on and turned off all the time at massive scale. There's no other way to handle it, but having abstraction and automation. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you very much for your time. Great segment. We're here at the info blocks. Virtual event. This is the cube coverage. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Thank you, John. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform >> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube Covering Red Hat Summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage, I'm Rebecca Knight your host, here with Stu Miniman. Our guest now is Andrius Benokraitis, he is the Principle Product Manager at Ansible Red Hat Network Automation, thanks so much Andrius. >> Thanks for having me I appreciate it. >> This is your first time on the program. >> Andrius: First time. >> We're nice, >> Really nervous, so, okay. we don't bite. >> Start a little bit with your new to the company relatively >> Andrius: Relatively. >> networking guy by background, can you give us a little bit about your background. >> Sure, I mean, I actually started at Red Hat in 2003. And then did about four five jobs there for about 11 years. And then jumped, went to a startup named Cumulus Networks for about two years. Great crew, and then, now I'm at Ansible, been there since about December, so working on the Network Automation Use Case for Ansible. >> Alright, so networking, has a little bit of coverage here, I remember, you know, something like the Open Daylight stuff and I have, actually there are a couple of Red Hatters that I interviewed at one show ended up forming a company that got bought by Dockers, so you know, there's definitely networking people, but maybe give us a broad view of where networking fits into this stuff that you're working on specifically. >> Yeah, sure thing. I think it's interesting to point out that as everything started in the compute side, and everything started to get disaggregated, the networking side has come along for the ride per se. It's been a little bit behind. When we talk about networking a lot of people just think automatically that's the end. And we're actually trying to think a little bit lower level, so layer one, layer two, layer three, so switching, routing, firewalls, load balancers, all those things are still required in the data center. And when people started using Ansible, it started five years ago on the compute side, a lot of the people started saying, I need to run the whole rec, and I'm not a CCIE, and I don't really know what to do there but I've been thrown in to do something, I'm a cloud admin, the new title right. I have to run the network, so what do I do. I don't know anything about networking, I'm just trying to be good enough, well, I know Ansible, so why don't I just treat switches like servers, and just treat them like, like what I know, they just have a lot more interfaces, but they just treat it that way. So a lot of the expertise came from the ground up with the opensource model and said this is the new use case. >> Well, Jay Rivers, the founder of Cumulus, it's like networking will just be a Linux operating model, you know, extended to the network, which is always like, hey, sounds like a company like Red Hat should be doing that kind of stuff. >> Exactly, it's interesting to see a Bash prompt in the networking right, it's familiar to a lot of people, in the devop space, absolutely. >> So it's a very rapidly changing time, as we know, in this digital computing age, the theme of this conference is the power of the individual, celebrating that individual, the developer, empowering the developers to take risks, be able to fail, make changes, modify. You're not a developer, but you manage developers, you lead developers, how do you work on creating that context, that Jim Whitehurst talked about today. >> I think it starts with, the true empowerment, you have the majority of the networking platforms are still proprietary and walled off, walled off gardens, they're black boxes you can't really do much with them, but you still have the ability to SSH into them, you have familiar terms and concepts from the server side in the networking side. So as long as you have SSH in the box and you know your CLI commands to make changes, you can utilize that in part of Ansible to generate larger abstractions to use the play books in order to build out your data center, with the terms and the Lexicon of YAML, the language of Ansible, things that you already know and utilizing that and going further. >> Can you speak to us a little bit about customers, you know, what's holding them back, how are you guys moving them forward to the more agile development space? >> Our customers are mostly brownfield, they're trying to extend what they already have. They have all their gear, they have everything they have that they need but they're trying to do things better. >> I don't find greenfield customers when it comes to the network side of the house, I mean we've all got what I have and we knew that IT's always additive, so, I mean that's got to be a challenge. >> It's a huge challenge. >> Something you can help with right? >> It's a huge challenge, and I think from the network operators and network engineers, a lot of them are saying, again, they're looking at their friends on the compute side, and they can spin up VMs and provision hardware instantaneously, but why does it have to take four to six weeks to provision a VLAN or get a VLAN added to a network switch? That sounds ridiculous, so a lot of the network engineers and operators are saying, well I think I can be as agile as you, so we can actually work together, using a common framework, common language with Ansible, and we can get things done, and we can get all of this stuff I hate doing, and we don't have to do that anymore, we can worry about more important things in our network, like designing the next big thing, if you want to do BGP, design your BGP infrastructure, you want to move from a layer two to a layer three or an SDN solution. >> I love that you talk about everybody, kind of the software wave and breaking down silos, network and storage people are like, oh my God, you're taking my job away. >> Exactly, completely, no, we're not taking your job. We are augmenting what you already have. We're giving you more tools in your tool belt to do better at your job, and that's truly it, we don't have to, people can be smarter so, if you want to add a VLAN, that can be a code snippet created by the sys admin, it can be in Git, and then the network engineer can say, oh yeah, that looks good, and then I just say, submit. What we see today with some of the customers is, yeah, I want to automate, I really want to automate, and you say, great, let's automate. But then you start getting, you peel back the onion, and you start seeing that, well, how are you managing your inventory, how are you managing your endpoints. And they're like, I have a spreadsheet? And you're like, as a networking guy I guess you, (excited clamoring) >> Networking is scary for a lot, >> It's super scary, yeah. >> So how, do you break that down? >> You do what you can, you do it in small pieces, we're not trying to change the world, we're not trying to say, you're going to go 100% devops in the network. Start small, start with something, like again, you really hate doing, if you want to change, something really low risk, things you really hate doing, just start small, low risk things. And then you can propagate that, and as you start getting confidence, and you start getting the knowledge, and the teams, and every one starts, everyone has to be bought in by the way. This is not something you just go in and say, go do it. You have to have everyone on board, the entire organization, it can't be bottom up, it can't be top down, everyone has to be on board. >> And Andrius, when I talk to people in the networking space, risk is the number one thing they're worried about. They buy on risk, they build on risk, and the problem we have with the networks, they're too many things that are manual. So if I'm typing in some you know, 16 digit hexadecimal code >> From notepad, manually you're copying and pasting >> from like a spreadsheet. Copying and pasting, or gosh, so things like that, the room for error is too high. So there's the things that we need to be able to automate, so that we don't have somebody that's tired or just, wait, was that a one or an L or an I. I don't know, so we understand that it actually should be able to reduce risk, increase security, all the things that the business is telling you. >> All these network vendors have virtual instances. You can do all your testing and deployment, all your testing and your infrastructure, and you can do everything in Jenkins and have all your networking switches, virtually, you can have your whole data center in a virtual environment if you want. So if you talk about lower risk, instead of just copying and pasting, and oh was that a slash 24 or a slash 16, oops, I mean that looked right, but it was wrong, but did it go through test, it probably didn't. And then someone's going to get paged at three in the morning, and a router's down, an edge router's down and your toast. So enabling the full devops cycle of continuous integration. So bringing in the same concepts that you have on the compute side, testing, changes, in a full cycle, and then doing that. >> You talked about the importance of buy in and also the difficulties of getting buy in. How much of that is an impediment to the innovation process, but one of the things we've been talking about, is can big companies innovate? What are the challenges that you see, and how do you overcome them? >> That is the number one, that is the biggest issue right now in the network space, is getting buy in. Whether it's someone who has done it on their own, someone can just install Ansible and do something, and then deploy a switch, but if they leave the company and there's no remediation, if it's not in the MOP, if it's not in the Method of Procedure, no one knows about it. So it has to be part of your, you want to keep all the things you have, all the good things you have today with your checks and balances in the networking, and the CIOs and the people at the top have to understand, you can keep all that stuff, but you have to buy in to the automation framework, and everyone has to be onboard to understand how it fits in in order to go from where you are today to where you want to be. >> At the show here what's exciting your customers? You know, give us a little bit of a viewpoint for people that are checking out your stuff, what to expect. >> Well I think the one thing is they're not used to seeing, they think it's black magic, they think it's just magic. They're like, I can use the same things for everything? I say, yeah, you can. The development processes, the innovation in the community, you know for example, if you want to assist, go ACI Module, it's in GitHub, it's in Cisco's GitHub, you can just go ahead and do that. Now we're trying, starting to migrate those things into core. So the more that we get innovation in the community, and that we have the vendors and the partners driving it, and you're seeing that today, you know, we have F5 here we have Cisco, we have Juniper we have Avi, all those people, you know, they have certified platforms with Ansible, Ansible Core, which is going to be integrated with Ansible Tower, we have full buy in from them. They want to meet with us and say how can we do better. How can we innovate with you to drive the nexgen data centers with our products. >> You talked about yourself as a boomerang employee, what is the value in that, and are you seeing a lot of colleagues who are bouncing around and then coming back from ... >> Absolutely, I think pre acquisition Ansible, the vast majority of the people, I believe were ex-Red Hatters that went to Ansible. So what's really nice to come back home and understand the people that left, that came back to understand already what the, >> And people feel that way, it's a coming home? >> Yeah, it's a coming home, it really is. They understand, you know, they came back, they understood the values of opensource and the culture, again, I started Red Hat in 2003, I see the great things, I see new people getting hired and I see the same things I saw back then, 2003, 2004, with all the great things that people are doing, and the culture. You know, Jim's done a great job at keeping the culture how it is, even way back then when there was only 400 people when I started. >> Andrius, extend that culture, I think about the network community and opensource and you know, you talk about, there's risk there, and you know, you think about, I grew up with kind of enterprise, infrastructure mentality, it's like, don't touch it, don't play with it. We always joked, I got every thing there, really don't walk by it and definitely, you know, some zip tie or duct tape's going to come apart. Are we getting better, is networking embracing this? >> Yes, for sure. I think the nice thing is you start seeing these communities pop up. You're starting to see network operators and engineers, they've been historically, if they don't know the answer, they won't go find it. They kind of may be shy, shy to ask for help, per se. >> If it wasn't on their certification, >> Exactly. >> They weren't going to do it. >> If it wasn't there I'm not going to go, we're bringing them into, so we have, whether there's slack instance, there are networking communities, networking automation, communities, just for network automation. And there's one, there's an Ansible channel, on the network decode, select channel, has almost 800 people on it. So they're coming and now they have a place, they have a safe place to ask questions. They don't have to kind of guess or say, you know what, I'm not going to do that. And know they have a safe place for network engineers, for network engineers to get into the net devop space. >> Another one of the sort of sub themes of this summit is people's data strategy, and customers and vendors, how they're dealing with the massive amounts of data that they're customers are generating. What is your data strategy, and how are you using data? >> So there's two aspects here. So the data can be the actual playbooks themselves, the actual, the golden master images, so you can pull configs from switches, and you can store them and you can use them for continuous compliance. You can say, you know, a rogue engineer might make a change, you know, configuration drift happens. But you need to be able to make those comparisons to the other versions. So we're utilizing things like Git, so you're data strategy can be in the cloud, it can be similar on your side, you can do Stash locally. For part of the operations piece, you can use that. A second piece is, log aggregation is a big piece of the Ansible. So when you actually want to make sure that a change happens, that it's been successful, and that you want to ensure continuous compliance, all that data has to go somewhere, right? So you can utilize Ansible Tower as an aggregator, you can go off using the integrations like Splunk and some other log aggregation connectors with Ansible Tower to help utilize your data strategy with the partners that are really the driving, the people that know data and data structures, so we can use them. >> And one of the other issues is the building the confidence to make decisions with all the data, are you working on that too with your team? >> Yes, we are working with that, and that's part of the larger tower organization, so it goes beyond networking. So, whatever networking gets, everyone else gets. When we started developing Ansible Core and the community and Ansible Tower in-house, we think about networking and we think about Windows, that's a huge opportunity there, you know, we're talking about AWS in the cloud. So cloud instances, these are all endpoints that Ansible can manage, and it's not just networking, so we have to make sure that all of the pieces, all of the endpoints can be managed directly. Everyone benefits from that. >> Andrius thank you so much for your time we appreciate it. >> Thanks again for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, thank you very much for joining us. We'll be back after this.