>>lost myself. >>You know, one of the things that I love about the Cuba being doing it for 11 years now is that everyone that we interviewed years and years ago, they all getting promoted. So much fun to watch everyone grow and and now it's stews over there now so it's fun to get to do something. When >>are you gonna, are you gonna get to interview stew for? Way >>to put them on the hot seat? I think he's afraid actually >>throughout all the talking points. Right. 1st question. The way >>we do miss too. I will say that it is amazing. Okay, I'm ready to go. >>Red >>Hat Summit read. Pat Summitt, we're coming to you in. Hello and welcome back to the Red Hat Summit 2021 virtual coverage I'm john for is the cube coverage of Palo alto with the remote interviews for our virtual conference. You've got two great guests cube alumni's Tom Anderson VP of answerable automation platform and Robyn Bergeron who's the Senior manager and small community community architect and all the great things involved, Robyn great to see you tom. Thanks for coming back on red hat some of this year. Virtual. Good to see you. >>Thanks for having us. >>So since last summit, what's the updates on the answerable community and the automation platform? Tom we'll start with you automation platform. What's the big updates? >>Yeah. So since the last time a lot has happened in the unanswerable land. If you will also last time that we were talking about constant collections have given distribution format or the integrations that ends this close. So a lot of the content. Uh huh. As well as the commercial users we launched last year a fucking program certified contact program with our partners and including partners to certify the content collections today. Create co certify them where we work together to make sure that they're uh developed against and tested against a proper step so that both of us can provide them to our customer basis with confidence that they're going to be working informed broccoli and that we red hat and our partners co support those out in our customers 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 Ansel Galaxy or the answerable automation to go and grab these content collections. This these integrations and bring them down in their environment. They wanted a way that they wanted a methodology where there are a repository where they can curate content from different sources and then manager across the environment. The automation across their environment. Kind of leaning into a little bit of automation content as code if you will. And um, so we launched the automation of the private automation hub where that sits in our customers infrastructure, whether that's in the cloud or on premises with both, and allows them to grab content from Galaxy from the answer automation. Uh, the answer automation hub on cloud got red hat dot com as well as their internally developed content and to be able to manage and provide that across their organization governed by a set of policies. So lots of stuff is going on real advancement in the amount of content that we provide, uh, the amount of collections that we provide them certified up for customers and and the ability to manage that company 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 scale because that's the super value proposition you guys have and want to get that. But robert, I want to come back to you on the community so much has gone on, we are now into the pandemic for almost a year and a half now, um it's been a productivity boom. People, 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 has 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 gets 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, you know, everything you would install answerable, you would get all the modules, you get everything, you know, it was all all all together, which, you know, is 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. Um and But, you know, for a from a community perspective, trying to manage that level of complexity turned out to be pretty hard. So the move to collection was actually great for, you know, not just, you know, for a user perspective, but also from a community perspective. Um and we came out with the answerable to 10 that was last fall, I believe, and that was the first real release advance. Well, where we had, you know, collections were fully in stan she hated uh you know, they were available on Galaxy, but you can also get them as part of the animal community distribution. Um, fast forward to now. You know, we just had the answer to all three point oh release here in february and we're looking to answer bill ford auto 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 start and identify, you know, who are, they're interested peers in the community. So that's been a boon for us honestly. Um, you know, the pandemic otherwise is, you know, I think taught all of us, you know, certainly you john about the, the amazing things that we can do virtually. So we've had a lot of our meetups pivot to being virtual meetups and, and things like that. And it's been great to see how, how easily the community's been able to pivot around. You know, this sort of event. Um, 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 we're gonna come back and talk more about that in the future, but best practice what we all learned and stories. But I think I want to come back to you on the persona side of answerable because one of the things we talked about last time that seems to be getting a lot of traction is that multiple personas. So I want to just hold off that will come back tom back to back to you were red hat summit. You guys have an apple fest, which is your own event that you guys drill down on this. So users Washington, you know this, your own community, but now part of red hat part of IBM, which IBM thinks also happening soon as well. Red hat some, it still is unique event. How is answerable fitting into the big picture? Because the, the value proposition of unifying teams is really consistent now with red hats overall arching thing, which is operating at scale open shift Robin just mentioned, where is the automation platform going this year? What's the story here at red hat summit for the automation platform? >>Yeah, that's that's a great question. We've seen so kind of timeless, a little bit of dependent and how it has accelerated some existing trends that we already saw and one of those is really around the democratization of the application delivery teams, more people delivering infrastructure and applications independent of each other, which is right, faster and more agile, all of those other. Good, good uh, words that apply to that. But what that does bring up is the opportunity for um >>patient >>of work, replication of effort, uh not reusing necessary things that are in existence already that other things may have maybe not complying with all of the policies if you will, the configuration and compliance policies. And so it's really kind of brought danceable out into focus even more here because of the car comin back plane that provides a common language and common automation back plane across these different teams and across these different personas. The great thing about what we supply for these different personas, whether its application developers, infrastructure owners, network engineers set up teams, get ox teams, There's so many of these options out there now, All want independent access to infrastructure and deploying infrastructure. And Answerable has the kind of levers that each of those communities, whether it's API or Cli s or event based automation or uh web hooks, et cetera et cetera. You know, service catalog. He lies all of those um interfaces if you will or modalities are accessible into hands of water nations. What's really allowed us to be this sort of connective tissue or blue across these different silos or remains of the organization the time of the year? Open ship specifically one of the things that we talked about last fall and are answerable fest was our integration between Answerable to automation platform are advanced cluster management product and are open ship platform that allows native applications running on open ship. Be able to talk to a sensible automation operator that's running on that same platform to do things off platform for it that our customers are already using. Answer before. So connecting their cloud, native platforms with their existing ecosystems and infrastructures. Systems of records, network systems, uh, ticketing systems, you name it. So all of those sort of integrations and school has become the connected blew across all of these different environments time. Traditional, anti biotic native, you name it. So it's really been it's really been fun and it's been an exciting time for us inside the portfolio. And uh, >>that's a great point connective tissue is a great way to describe some of these platform benefits because you have been on this platform for a really long time and the benefits are kind of being seen in the market. Certainly as people have to move faster with the agility robert. I want to come back to you because you brought up this idea of personas. I mean we all know devops infrastructure as code has been our religion for over a decade more, but now the word DEv sec ops is more prevalent in all the conversations the securities now weaved in here. How are you seeing that play out in the community and then tom if you can give some color commentary to 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 problems You have. But def sec off as a persona, more people want more sex. Deb is great more ops and standardisation. More developers, agile standards and then security def sec ops. What's your? I >>thought it was dev net sec off. >>Okay. I've forgotten that they were putting that in their networks abstracted away, you know, As we say. Yeah. >>Well, you know, from, from my perspective, you know there are people and their jobs all over the place is 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 has 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 I. T. 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 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, a community perspective, I mean, we've seen people who have been writing, you know, playbooks and roles and you know, now collections for uh you know, all the traditional government testing, you know, is are, you know, missed standards, all of that kind of stuff. Um and you know, it's one of those, it's part of network effects and it's a great place where actually automation hub, I think, you know, for folks who are on prem or you know, any of our customers are really going to start to see lots of value is how it will be able to connect folks inside the organization organically through just the place where I'm doing my answerable 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 of answerable friends and uh danceable power users that can work together and collaborate, you know, just the same way that we do an open source >>and tom so I. T. Modernization requires security. What's your take on this? Because, you know, you got cluster a lot of cluster advanced cluster management issues, you've got to deal with the modern apps, they're coming, I. T. S got to evolve. What's your take on all >>this? Yeah, not only does I have to call but it's it's an integration like the rest of the environment and be able to respond the spirit of that song on the areas that we put a lot of effort into advanced in terms of curating and solutions around national security automation. We talked about that in the past, the idea of connecting the SEc ops teams that are doing intrusion detection or threat hunting and then responding in an automated way to those threats protections. Right? So, connecting stepped up to the bike, which is traditionally been styled operations and silo teams. And now it is curated against the security automation uh, solution that we've got a market with our partners. It connects those two teams in a single sort of way. We've done a lot of work with our friends that idea around this area because they are big and that security area, a radar and other products in their portfolio. So we've done a lot of work with them but we don't want to work with lots of our partners for their side. There are Microsoft in those areas. Traditionally Danceable has done a great job on sort of compliance around configuration enforcement, right setting and enforcing configuration. Now we moved into connecting set pops with IT security automation. And now with our acquisition of staff blocks along with our advanced custom management immigration with Danceable were starting to say, what are the things inside that sack office workflow that may require integration or automation packaged? Automate automation with other parts of the environment, bringing all of those pieces together as we move forward to security for us. >>Okay. I gotta ask you guys the number one question that I get all the time and I see in the marketplace is 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 born the cloud projects, whether it's whether and then integrating able to cloud on premises with nutritional infrastructure, how do I accelerate those two environments? How I automate accelerate the automation? >>Yeah. So it's a great story for us and this is what we're talking about, small and special as we have bringing together of our advanced cluster management product, open ship platform and it's just, you know, widespread use through all the automation of both traditional and cognitive changes. Whether it's cloud infrastructure on premise, start network, you name it, customers are using answerable user, you're using answer to do all kinds of pieces in the system infrastructure. Being able to tie that to their new collaborative initiatives without having to redo all of that work that they've already done to integrate that existing um infrastructure automation with their cognitive accelerate substantial what I call the offer operationalization to say operated operationalization, their cloud native platforms that are existing infrastructure and existing I uh, ecosystem. I believe that that's where the answer the automation and plays a key role in connecting those students is together without having to redo all that work that's been done in investment >>robert. What's your take on this? This is what people are working on the trenches, they realized cloud benefits. They got some cloud native action, and also that they got the on the traditional environment, they got to get them connected and automated. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, the beauty of answerable, you know, from an 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 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 in a it's not quite english, but it's definitely, you know, answer is quite readable, right? Um, and you know, when we looked at, you know, when we started to work on all the answerable operators, you know, one of that, one of the main pieces there was, making sure that that simplicity that we have an answerable is brought over directly into the operators. So just because it's cloud native doesn't mean you suddenly have to learn, you know, a whole set of new languages and peoples just as portable there as it is to any other part of the your mighty organization, infrastructure or 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 um is the successor and the importance of you guys having answerable collections. This has come up multiple times. Um as we talked about those personas and you've got these new contributors, you've got people contributing content. Um, as open source continues to grow and be phenomenal value proposition. Touch on this uh, concept of collections. What's the updates? Why is it important? Why should folks pay attention to it and continue to innovate with collection? >>This is from a commercial perspective of food products, questions and down has made a lot of these contributors to create an exploit, distribute content at the end, the problems mentioned earlier, these iterations announced, we'll have all of the documentation, all those collections, all within one. If you call the batteries included back at the time that day. Right. But that, that meant that contributors um, be able to deploy their content with the base, has the distribution. They have to wait for the next version. Events. Alright, that's when that content would get redistributed the next investment. He coupled content from the core engine, putting that into elections that are individual elements of related innovations closes can use at their own pace. So users and customers can get content baby a case that contributors like in public. So, uh, customers don't have to wait for the next evolution shipping products. You get a new version of the immigration is really like, you know, so again, a couple of those things that last into the different faces the engine or the platform itself is the state Department's here. It's going to be a certain website. Content itself, all the different content, the network providers ready platforms, all of those same pace. You girls have their own life cycle quite sweet. It allows us to get more functionality for customers hands like bigger and then launching our Certified can support that. Okay. Certified. Support that content tells me the values that we bring our customers with the subscription. Is that ecosystem and highest partners that we work with Certified and support the stuff that we should and support with possible superb benefits, both on the access to the technology as well as the access to the value of this. In terms of immigration testing and support >>Robin, What's your take on the community? I see custom automation with with the connector, a lot of action going on collections. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, 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 answerable 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 Lennox machine or, you know, my Windows machine or, you know, the operating system on my telephone, right? Every time one of these devices that answerable connects to or a program or whatever it is, connects to something, those things are all operating and, you know, developing themselves at their own pace is right? So when a new version of, you know, uh, uh, well, we'll call Red Hat enterprise Linux when a new version of Red Hat enterprise Lennox comes out, uh, if there are new changes or new features that, you know, we want to be able to connect to it. 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 be able to have each of these collections working in concert with, you know, like for example, in real like the Lennox subsystems that are actually making things that will be turned into collections, right? Like Sc Lennox or System D right? Like those things move at their own pace, we can update those at our own pace in 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 answerable 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, answerable relationships almost in sync and make sure that, you know, but not, I'm going to do it over here and then I'm gonna come back over here and fix everything later. It's more of a continuous >>development. So they contribute experience is better than you'd say. >>I'm sorry, >>the contributor experiences better than. Oh, >>absolutely. Yeah, 100%. I mean, it's, >>it's, >>you know, there's something to be said for. I wouldn't say it's like instant satisfaction, but, but certainly the ability to have a little bit more independence and be able to release things as as you see fit and not be gated by the entire rest of the project is amazing for those >>votes. So I put you on the spot, Robin. So if I'm a, I'm a developer bottom line, me, what's in it for me? Why? Why should I pay attention to collections? What's the bottom >>line? Well, you know, answerable as a platform and, and for benefits from network effects. Um, you know, the reason that we've gotten as big as we have sort of like the snowball rolling downhill, right, the more people that latch on to what you're doing, the more people benefit and the more, you know, additional folks want to join in. So, you know, if I, if I was working on any other product that I would consider being able to have automated with answerable, um, you know, the biggest thing that I would look at is, well, you know, what are those people also using or they automating it with an apple and I can guarantee you 99% of the time, everything else that people are using is also being automated with answerable. So you'd be crazy to not, you know, want to participate and make sure that you're providing the best, you know, and experience for your application because for every Application or device that we can connect you, there's probably 20 other competitors that also make similar applications that folks might also consider in lieu of you if you're not using your not providing ample 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 use words like connective tissue, it implies an organizational is not a mechanism. It's not just software, it's people, there's a people experience here in the automation platform. This seems to be the bottom line. What's, what's your take? What's your bottom line of you? I'm a developer. What's in it for me? Why should I pay attention to the automation platform? >>States of the public developer. What excites me is using it? Yeah, I'm just composition department and crossing those domains in silence and sort of can issue across these tools and resolve this means those contributors is developed as a great denomination come embedded in the hands of more people across the organization. Absoluteal more simple. five way by using the explanation. Sometimes they get access right. You see those out the automation of South coast for so long as they get access to existing automation faster. They have to run into the expert on their part requirement a local hotel folks and the real in terms of automation and that kind of a patient. Excellently. When I'm getting on you about the details of what it takes them, you configure the network and figure the storage elements. They rely on those automation developers and contributors that would do that for them. You must really work powers of this Children across those news process of human. Again when I got kidnapped and sent cops, the idea of connecting to the network, being able to do all of these tasks with the same language and the same. In addition, funds had some money faster and get some of the kind of quote responsibilities without worrying. Line >>Robin, you wanted to talk about something uh, in the community. Any updates? I think navigator you mentioned you wanted to mention uh, plug for that. Absolutely. >>So, you know, um, much like any other platform in the universe. You know, if you don't have really great uh, 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. I'm not part of the product yet, but you know, it's sort of in a community exploratory phrase released early release often or you know, minimum viable project I guess might be the other way to describe it currently. Uh it's a called Animal Navigator, it's a TUI 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, its a sort of interface where you can develop content, uh 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, um rather than I'm going to do something here and then I'm gonna go over here and now, I'm not sure. So now I'm gonna go over here and look at docs instead. It's all, you know, it's all in one place, um which we think will actually, but I mean, I know the folks who have seen it have already been like, but you know, it's definitely an early community stages right now. It's, you know, we can give you the link github dot com slash answer slash danceable navigator, but >>versus a gooey versus a command line interface are how do you innovate on the command line? It's a kuwaiti uh it's >>um you know, there there's so many ideas out there and I think tom can probably talk to some of this, you know, how that might relate to V. S. Code or you know, many of the other traditional developer ideas that are out there, but you know, the goal certainly to be able to integrate with some of those other pieces. Um but you know, it's one of those things where, you know, if everybody is using the same tool, we can start to enforce higher levels of quality and standards through that tool. Uh 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 religious making it as easy as possible to create things and a lot of nations. So part of that is essentially a kind of road map in the nesting table and spoke that that's not presented to the security is you don't build test deploy. So people are making a contributor that builders life job. >>Well, thanks for coming on tom and Robyn. Thanks for sharing the insight here. Redhead Summit 21 virtual. I'll see you guys do 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 a skill, 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 the queue, we are remote with Cube virtual for Reddit Summit 2021. Thanks for watching what?