(gentle music) >> We're back at the Seaport in Boston. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Paul Gillin. Tracie Zenti is here. She's the Director of Global Partner Management at Microsoft, and Tom Anderson is the Vice President of Ansible at Red Hat. Guys, welcome to theCube. >> Hi, thank you. >> Yep. >> Ansible on Azure, we're going to talk about that. Why do I need Ansible? Why do I need that kind of automation in Azure? What's the problem you're solving there? >> Yeah, so automation itself is connecting customers' infrastructure to their end resources, so whether that infrastructure's in the cloud, whether it's in the data center, or whether it's at the edge. Ansible is the common automation platform that allows customers to reuse automation across all of those platforms. >> And so, Tracie, I mean, Microsoft does everything. Why do you need Red Hat to do Ansible? >> We want that automation, right? We want our customers to have that ease of use so they can be innovative and bring their workloads to Azure. So that's exactly why we want Ansible. >> Yeah, so kind of loaded questions here, right, as we were sort of talking offline. The nature of partnerships is changing. It's about co-creating, adding value together, getting those effects of momentum, but maybe talk about how the relationship started and how it's evolving and I'd love to have your perspective on the evolving nature of ecosystems. >> Yeah, I think the partnership with Red Hat has been strong for a number of years. I think my predecessor was in the role for five years. There was a person in there for a couple years before that. So I think seven or eight years, we've been working together and co-engineering. Red Hat enterprised Linux. It's co-engineered. Ansible was co-engineered. We work together, right? So we want it to run perfectly on our platform. We want it to be a good customer experience. I think the evolution that we're seeing is in how customers buy, right? They want us to be one company, right? They want it to be easy. They want be able to buy their software where they run it on the cloud. They don't want to have to call Red Hat to buy and then call us to buy and then deploy. And we can do all that now with Ansible's the first one we're doing this together and we'll grow that on our marketplace so that it's easy to buy, easy to deploy, easy to keep track of. >> This is not just Ansible in the marketplace. This is actually a fully managed service. >> That's right. >> What is the value you've added on top of that? >> So it runs in the customer account, but it acts kind of like SaaS. So Red Hat gets to manage it, right? And it's in their own tenant. So they get in the customer's own tenant, right? So with a service principle, Red Hat's able to do that management. Tom, do you want to add anything to that? >> Yeah, the customers don't have to worry about managing Ansible. They just worry about using Ansible to automate their infrastructure. So it's a kind of a win-win situation for us and for our customers. We manage the infrastructure for them and the customer's resources themselves and they get to just focus on automating their business. >> Now, if they want to do cross-cloud automation or automation to their hybrid cloud, will you support that as well? >> 100%. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> We're totally fine with that, right? I mean, it's unrealistic to think customers run everything in one place. That isn't enterprise. That's not reality. So yeah, I'm fine with that. >> Well, that's not every cloud provider. >> No (laughing) that's true. >> You guys over here, at Amazon, you can't even say multicloud or you'll get thrown off the stage. >> Of course we'd love it to all run on Azure, but we want our customers to be happy and have choice, yeah. >> You guys have all, I mean, you've been around a long time. So you had a huge on-prem state, brought that to the cloud, and Azure Stack, I mean, it's been around forever and it's evolved. So you've always believed in, whatever you call it, Hybrid IT, and of course, you guys, that's your call of mission. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So how do you each see hybrid? Where's the points of agreement? It sounds like there's more overlap than gaps, but maybe you could talk about your perspective. >> Yeah, I don't think there are any points of disagreement. I think for us, it's meeting our customers where their center of gravity is, where they see their center of management gravity. If it's on Azure, great. If it's on their data center, that's okay, too. So they can manage to or from. So if Azure is their center of gravity, they can use automation, Ansible automation, to manage all the things on Azure, things on other cloud providers, things in their data center, all the way out to their edge. So they have the choice of what makes the most sense to them. >> And Azure Arc is obviously, that's how Azure Stack is evolving, right? >> Yeah, and we have Azure Arc integration with Ansible. >> Yeah. >> So yeah, absolutely. And I mean, we also have Rell on our marketplace, right? So you can buy the basement and you could buy the roof and everything in between. So we're growing the estate on marketplace as well to all the other products that we have in common. So absolutely. >> How much of an opportunity, just go if we go inside? Give us a little peak inside Microsoft. How much of an opportunity does Microsoft think about multi-cloud specifically? I'm not crazy about the term multicloud, 'cause to me, multicloud, runs an Azure, runs an AWS, runs on Google, maybe runs somewhere else. But multicloud meaning that common experience, your version of hybrid, if you will. How serious is Microsoft about that as a business opportunity? A lot of people would say, well, Microsoft really doesn't want. They want everything in their cloud. But I'd love to hear from you if that is good. >> Well, we have Azure Red Hat OpenShift, which is a Microsoft branded version of OpenShift. We have Ansible now on our marketplace. We also, of course, we have AKS. So I mean, container strategy runs anywhere. But we also obviously have services that enhance all these things. So I think, our marketplace is a third party marketplace. It is designed to let customers buy and run easily on Azure and we'd want to make that experience good. So I don't know that it's... I can't speak to our strategy on multicloud, but what I can speak to is when businesses need to do innovation, we want it to be easy to do that, right? We want it to be easy to buy, defined, buy, deploy, manage, and that's what we're trying to accomplish. >> Fair to say, you're not trying to stop it. >> No, yeah, yeah. >> Whether or not it evolves into something that you heavily lean into or see. >> When we were talking before the cameras turned on, you said that you think marketplaces are the future. Why do you say that? And how will marketplaces be differentiated from each other in the future? >> Well, our marketplace is really, first of all, I think, as you said off camera, they're now. You can buy now, right? There's nothing that stops you. But to me, it's an extension of consumerization of IT. I've been in IT and manageability for about 23 years and full automation is what we and IT used to always talk about, that single pane of glass. How do you keep track of everything? How do you make it easy? How do you support? And IT is always eeking out that last little bit of funding to do innovation, right? So what we can do with consumerization of IT is make it easier to innovate. Make it cheaper to innovate, right? So I think marketplaces do that, right? They've got gold images you can deploy. You're also able to deploy custom images. So I think the future is as particularly with ours, like we support, I don't remember the exact number, but over a hundred countries of tax calculation. We've got like 17 currencies. So as we progress and customers can run from anywhere in the world and buy from anywhere in the world and make it simple to do those things that used to take maybe two months to spin up services for innovation and Ansible helps with that, that's going to help enterprises innovate faster. And I think that's what marketplaces are really going to bring to the forefront is that innovation. >> Tom, why did Ansible, I'm going to say one, I mean, you're never done. But it was unclear a few years ago, which automation platform was going to win in the marketplace and clearly, Ansible has taken a leading position. Why? What were the factors that led to that? >> Honestly, it was the strength of the community, right? And Red Hat leaning into that community to support that community. When you look out at the upstream community for Ansible and the number of participants, active participants that are contributing to the community just increases its value to everybody. So the number of integrations, the number of things that you can automate with Ansible is in the thousands and thousands, and that's not because a group of Red Hat engineers wrote it. That's because our community partners, like Microsoft wrote the user integrations for Ansible. F5 does theirs. Customers take those and expand on them. So the number of use cases that we can address through the community and through our partners is immense. >> But that doesn't just happen. I mean, what have you done to cultivate that community? >> Well, it's in Red Hat's DNA, right? To be the catalyst in a community, to bring partners and users together, to share their knowledge and their expertise and their skills, and to make the code open. So anybody can go grab Ansible from upstream and start doing stuff with it, if they want. If they want to mature on it and management for it and support all the other things that Red Hat provides, then they come to us for a subscription. So it's really been about sort of catalyzing and supporting that community, and Red Hat is a good steward of these upstream communities. >> Is Azure putting Ansible to use actually within your own platform as opposed to being a managed service? Are you adopting Ansible for automation of the Azure Platform? >> I'll let you answer that. >> So two years ago, Microsoft presented at AnsibleFest, our fall conference, Budd Warrack, I'm butchering his last name, but he came on and told how the networking team at Microsoft supports about 35,000 access points across hundreds of buildings, all the Microsoft campuses using Ansible to do that. Fantastic story if you want to go on YouTube and look up that use case. So Microsoft is an avid user of the Ansible technology in their environment. >> Azure is kind of this really, I mean, incredible strategic platform for Microsoft. I wonder if you could talk about Azure as a honeypot for partners. I mean, it seems, I mean, the momentum is unbelievable. I mean, I pay attention to their earnings calls every quarter of Azure growth, even though I don't know what the exact number is, 'cause they won't give it to me but they give me the growth rates and it's actually accelerating. >> No lie. (Tracie laughing) >> I've got my number. It's in the tens of billions. I mean, I'm north of 35 billion, but growing at the high 30%. I mean, it's remarkable. So talk about the importance of that to the ecosystem as a honey pot. >> Paul Satia said it right. Many times partners are essential to our strategy. But if you think about it, software solves problems. We have software that solves problems. They have software that solves problems, right? So when IT and customers are thinking of solving a problem, they're thinking software, right? And we want that software to run on Azure. So partners have to be essential to our strategy. Absolutely. It's again, we're one team to the customer. They want to see that as working together seamlessly. They don't want it to be hardware Azure plus software. So that's absolutely critical to our success. >> And if I could add for us, the partners are super important. So some of our launch partners are like F5 and CyberArk who have certified Ansible content for Ansible on Azure. We have service provider partners like Accenture and Kindra that are launching with us and providing our joint customers with help to get up to speed. So it really is a partner play. >> Absolutely. >> Where are you guys taking this? Where do you want to see it go? What are some of the things that observers should pay attention to as marketers of success and evolution? >> Well, certainly for us, it's obviously customer adoption, but it is providing them with patterns. So out of the box patterns that makes it easy for them to get up and running and solve the use cases and problems that they run into most frequently. Problems ain't the right word. Challenges or opportunities on Azure to be able to automate the things. So we're really leaning into the different use cases, whether it's edge, whether it's cloud, whether it's cloud to edge, all of those things. We want to provide users with out of the box Ansible content that allows 'em to just get up and automating super fast, and doing that on Azure makes it way easier for us because we don't have to focus on the install and the setting up and configuring it. It's all just part of the experience >> And Tracie, for Microsoft, it's world domination with a smile. (all laughing) >> Of course. No, of course not. No, I think it's to continue to grow the co-engineering we do across all of the Red Hat products. I can't even tell you the number of things we work on together, but to look forward strategically at what opportunities we have across our products and theirs to integrate like Arc and Ansible, and then making it all easy to buy, making it available so that customers have choice and they can buy how they want to and simplify. So we're just going to continue to do that and we're at that infancy right now and as we grow, it'll just get easier and easier with more and more products. >> Well, bringing the edge into the equation is going to be really interesting. Microsoft with its gaming, vector is amazing, and recent, awesome acquisitions. All the gamers are excited about that and that's a huge edge play. >> You'll have to bring my son on for that interview. >> Yeah. >> My son will interview. >> He knows more than all of us, I'm sure. What about Ansible? What's ahead for Ansible? >> Edge, so part of the Red Hat play at the Edge. We've getting a lot of customer pull for both industrial Edge use cases in the energy sector. We've had a joint customer with Azure that has a combined Edge platform. Certainly, the cloud stuff that we're announcing today is a huge growth area. And then just general enterprise automation. There's lots of room to run there for Ansible. >> And lots of industries, right? >> Yeah. >> Telco, manufacturing. >> Retail. >> Retail. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. There's so many places to go, yeah, that need the help. >> The market's just, how you going to count it anymore? It's just enormous. >> Yeah. >> It's the entire GDP the world. But guys, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Yeah. >> Great story. Congratulations on the partnership and the announcements and look forward to speaking with you in the future. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. And keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for Paul Gillin. This is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. We'll be right back at Seaport in Boston. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to AnsibleFest, 2021, the virtual version. This is The Cube and my name is Dave Volante. We're going to dig into automation and its continuing evolution. Tom Anderson is here. He's the vice president of Red Hat Ansible, the automation platform. And Richard Henshall is also here, Senior Manager of Ansible Product Management, of course, at Red Hat. Guys, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us Dave. You're welcome, so Rich with this latest release of the Ansible Automation Platform, AAP, we'll get the acronyms out of the way. The focus seems to be an expanding the reach of automation and its potential use cases. I mean, I'll say automation everywhere, not to be confused with the RPA vendor, but the point is, you're trying to make it easier to automate things like provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, throw in orchestration and all these other IT processes. Now, you've talked about this theme in previous releases of AAP. So what's new in this release? What can customers do now that they couldn't do before? >> Yeah, it's a good question thank you. So, we look at this in two dimensions. So, the first dimension we have is like where automation can happen, right? So, you know, we always have traditional data center, clouds being been very prevalent for us for the last, you know, sort of five, 10 years in most people's view. But now we have the Edge, right? So now we have Edge computing, which is sometimes a lot more of the same, but also it comes with a different dynamic of how it has to be sort of used and utilized by different use cases, different industry segments. But then, while you expand the use cases to make sure that people can do automation where they need to do it and make sure if we don't close to the Edge or close to the data center, based on where the technology needs to be run, you also have to think about who's now using automation. So, the second dimension is making sure that different users can take access. You mentioned like application deployment, or infrastructure, or network configuration. We expand the number of different users we have that are starting to take advantage of Ansible. So how do we get more developers? How do we get into the developer workflow, into the development workflow, for how Ansible is created, as well as how we help with the operational, the posts deployment stage that people do operating automation, as well as then the running of Ansible Automation Platform itself. >> Excellent, okay. So, in thinking about some of those various roles or personas, I mean, I think about product leads. I would see developers, obviously you're going to be in there. Managers I would think want that view. You know the thrust seems to be, you're trying to continue to enhance the experience, for these personas and others, I suppose, with new tooling. Maybe you could add some color to that and what's happening in the market Tom if you take this and Rich chime in, what's happening in the market that makes this so important? Who are the key roles and personas that you're targeting? >> Yeah. So, there's a couple of things happening here. I mean, traditionally the people that had been using Ansible to automate their subsystems were the domain expert for that subsystem, right? I'm the storage operations team. I'm the network operations team. I'm using this tool to automate the tasks that I do day to day to operate my piece of the sub system. Now, what they're being asked to do is to expose that subsystem to other constituencies in the organization, right? So they had not, they're not waiting for a call to come in to say, can I have a network segment? Can I have this storage allocated to me? Can I deploy these servers so I can start testing or building or deploying my application. Those subsystems need to be exposed to those different audiences. And so the type of automation that is required is different. Now, we need to expose those subsystems in a way that makes those domain owners comfortable. So they're okay with another audience having access to their subsystem. But at the same time, they're able to ensure the governance and compliance around that, and then give that third-party that developer, that QE person, that man, that business, that line of business manager, whoever it might be, that's accessing that resource, a interface that is friendly and easy enough for them to do. It's kind of the democratization. I know it's a cliche, but the democratization of automated automation within organizations, giving them roles, specific experiences, of how they can access these different subsystems and speed their access to these systems and deploy applications. >> So if we could stay on that for a second, cause that's a complicated situation. You're now opening this up. You Richard mentioned the Edge. So you got to make sure that the person that's getting access has access, but then you also have to make sure that that individual can't screw it up, do things that you don't want that individual to do. And it's probably a whole other set of compliance issues and policy things that you have to bake in. Is that, am I getting that right? >> Yeah. And then that's the aspect of it. When you start to think, you know, Tom listed off there, you know, 10, you can just keep adding different sort of personas that individuals that work in roles, identify with as themselves. I'm a network person, I'm a storage person. To us they're all just Ansible users, right? There may be using a slightly different way, maybe using it slightly different places, but they're just an Ansible user, right? And so as you have, like those people that just like become organically, you've now got thousands potentially of Ansible users inside a large enterprise organization, or if you know, a couple of hundred if your smaller. But you're then go, well, what do I do with Ansible, right? And so at that point, you then start to say, now we try to look at it as what's their use of Ansible itself, because it's not just a command line tool. It's got a management interface, it's got analytics, we've got content management, we've got operational runtime, we've got responsiveness to, you know, disaster recovery scenarios for when, you know, when you need to be able to do certain actions, you may use it in different ways at different places. So we start, try and break out, what is the person doing with Ansible Automation Platform at this part of their workflow? Are they creating content, right? Are they consuming content, or are they operating that automation content for those other constituent users that Tom referred to. >> Yeah, that's really helpful because there's context, there are different roles, different personas need different contexts, you know, trying to do different things. Sometimes somebody just wants to see the analytics to make sure it's, you know, hey, everything's green, Oh, we got a yellow, versus, hey actually want to make some changes and I'm authorized to do so. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about containers. I want to understand how containers are driving change for customers. Maybe what new tools you're providing to support this space? What about the Edge? Yeah, how real is that in terms of tangible pockets or patterns that you can identify that require new types of capabilities that you're delivering? Maybe you can help us unpack that a little bit. >> Okay so, I think there's two ways to look at containers, right? So the first is how are we utilizing the container technology itself, right? So containers are a package, right? So the amount of work we've been doing as Ansible's become more successful in the last couple of years, separating content out with Ansible collections. The ability to bring back manage, control a containerized runtime of Ansible so that you can lifecycle it, you can deploy it, it becomes portable. Edge is important there. How do I make sure I have the same automation running in the data center as the same automation running out on the Edge, if I'm looking at something that needs to be identical. The portability that the packaging of the container gives us, is a fantastic advantage, given you need to bring together just that automation you want. Smaller footprint, more refined footprint, lifecycle manage footprint. But at the same time, containers are also a very useful way of scaling the operation, right? And so as red hat puts things like Open Shift out in all these different locations, how can we leverage those platforms, to push the runtime of Ansible, the execution component, the execution plane of Ansible. How into anywhere that's hospitable for it to run? And as you move out towards Edge, as you move further away from the data center, you need a more ubiquitous sort of like run-time plane that you can put these things on. So they can just spin up when as, and when you need to. Potentially even at the end, actually being on the device, because at the same time with Edge, you also have different limits around how Edge works. It's not just about, hey I'm wifi points in an NFL stadium, actually, you're talking about I'm at the end of a 2000 mile, you know, piece of cable on an oil pipeline or potentially I'm a refinery out in the Gulf of Mexico. You know, you've got a very different dynamic to how you interact with that end point, than you do when it's a nice big controlled network, you know, powered location, which is well-governed and well-orchestrated. >> That's good. Thank you Rich. So Tom, think about automation, you know, back in the day, seems like a long time ago, but it really wasn't, automation used to scare some IT folks, because you know, sometimes it created unintended consequences or maybe it was a cultural thing and that you didn't want to automate themselves out of a job, but regardless. The cloud has changed that mindset, you know, showing us what's possible. You guys obviously had a big role in that, and the pandemic and digital initiatives, they really have made I call it the automation mandate. It was like the fourth March to digital, at least that's how I see it. I wonder if you could talk about, how you see your users approaching automation in as it relates to their business goals. Do you think automation is still being treated sometimes with trepidation or as a side project for some organizations or is it really continuing to evolve as a mainstream business imperative? >> Yes, so Dave we see it continuing to evolve as a strategic imperative for our customers. I mean, you'll, hear some of the keynote folks that are speaking here today. I've done an interview or doing an interview with Joe Mills from Discover, talking about extreme automation throughout Discovers organization. You'll hear representatives from JPMC talk about 22,000 JPMC employees contributing automation content in their environment, across 20 or 22 countries. I mean, just think about that scale, and the number of people that are involved in automation now and their tasks. So I think it's, I think we are, we have moved beyond or are moving beyond that idea that automation is just there to replace people's jobs. And it's much more about automation replacing the mundane, increasing consistency, increasing security, increasing agility, and giving people an opportunity to do more and more interesting stuff. So that's what we hear from our customers, this idea of them building. And it's not just the technology piece, but it's the cultural piece inside organizations where they're building these guilds or communities of practice, bringing people together to share best practices and experience with automation, so that they can feel comfortable learning from others and sharing with others and driving the organization forward. So we see a lot of that, and you'll hear a lot of that, at some of the Ansible Fest sessions this week. >> Well, I mean though I think that's a really important point. The last point you made about the skills, because I think you're right. I think we have moved beyond it's just job replacement. I don't know anybody who loves provisioning LUNs and say, oh, I'm the best in the world at that. It's just kind of something that was maybe important 10, 15, 20 years ago, but today, he should let the machines do that. So that's the whole skills transformation, is obviously a big part of digital transformation. Isn't it? >> It absolutely is. And frankly, we still hear, it's an impediment, that skills shortages are still an impediment to our customer success. They are still skilling up. I mean, honestly, that's one of the differentiators, for Ansible, as a language, a human readable language, that is easy to learn, easy to use, easy to share across an organization. So that's why you see job boards, and whatnot with so many opportunities that require or, or ask for Ansible skills out there. It's just a, it's become sort of a ubiquitous automation language in organizations, because it can be shared across lots of different roles. You don't have to be a Ruby software developer or a Python software developer to create automation with Ansible. You can be Tom Anderson or Rich Henshall. You don't have to, you don't have to be the, you know, the, the sharpest software developer in the world to take advantage of it. So anyway, that's one of the things that kind of overcoming some of the skills apprehension and bringing people into this, into the kind of new environment, of thinking about automation as code, not software code, but thinking of it like code. >> Got it. Guys we've got to leave it there, but Rich, how about you bring us home. We'll give you the last word. >> I mean, I think, you know what Tom just said there I think, about the skills side of things, is I think that the part that made it resonates the most. I mean I was a customer before I joined Red Hat, and trying to get large numbers of people, onto a same path, to try and achieve that outbound objective, that an organization has. The objective of an organization is not to automate, it's to achieve what is needed by what the automation facilitates. So how do we get those different groups to go from, Hey, this is about me, to this is actually about what we're trying to achieve as a business what we're trying to facilitate as a business, and how do we get those people easier access, a reduced barrier of entry to the skills they need to help make that successful, that compliments what they do, in their primary role, with a really strong secondary skill set that helps them do all the bits and pieces they need to do to make that job work. >> That's great, I mean you guys have done a great job, I mean it wasn't clear, you know, decade ago, or maybe half a decade ago, who was going to win this battle. Ansible clearly has market momentum and has become the leader. So guys congratulations on that and good job. Keep it going. I really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Thanks. >> Okay. This is the cubes, continuous coverage of Ansible Fest, 2021. Keep it right there for more content that educates and inspires. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

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

>>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?