>> From around the globe, it's theCube with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the cubes coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020. Of course, this year's event happening digitally, we're talking to Red Hat executives, partners, customers, where they are around the globe, bringing them remotely into this digital event. And really important topic, of course, has been Automation for a long time, I think back to my career automation is something we've been talking about for decades, but even more important in today's age. Happy to welcome back to the program, Tim Kramer with Red Hat, Vice President of Engineering is that I don't have listed view here. But since we last talked to him at Ansible Fest, has been a little expansion in the scope of what you're working on. First of all, welcome back, and tell us what's new in your world? >> All right, thanks a lot. Yeah, there's been rather substantial change in roles. I'm now in charge actually, of all of the engineering within Red Hat. All the development engineering site includes: the middleware teams, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, of course management and automation, the new team that we just brought over from IBM doing Advanced Container Management. I'm basically running the whole thing and OpenShift of course. >> Excellent. Just a few things to keep you busy. Congratulations on that and love your support in the the Boston "Hello World" rella eight shirt that of course we saw last year at summit. I know one of the things being digital is people do miss some of the t-shirts. I know my family was quite fond of the "May The Fourth Be With You" shirts, that Red Hat did one year at summit. Of course, celebrating Star Wars Day, highly celebrated in in the Miniman household. But Tim, let's talk about Ansible. This brings our audience up to speed, what's happening that some of the latest pieces, and of course, it's been one of the great success stories. Ansible was a lot of adoption before the acquisition, but really accelerated over the last few years? >> At Ansible Fest, we talked a lot about technology to come and showed a few demos of the possibilities. What we have done since then is actually bring all of that technology to life and to expand it. One thing that Red Hat has really done is continue to invest heavily in Ansible, to make sure that we can bring new capabilities and new value to the subscription for everyone. Some of the things that have been happening since summit, which of course we are in, and since Ansible Fest, since we last talked was it, the community continues to scale at a really rapid rate. It's almost hard to keep up. And the number of modules that we have had is grown just tremendously. We have well over 3000 modules now that are available, and as customers and partners and also just casual users are looking through that, it's difficult to figure out: what's really supported? What's really rock solid? What can I count on? And what is, maybe sort of that Wild West community, I'm just trying out some stuff with Ansible and see how it goes. We've been focusing on a lot, is a place that you can come to the Ansible automation platform and the hub where you can now get this content and you can rely on the fact that it's going to be certified by partners, tested by partners, they're always keeping up with the latest updates. A great example of this is, let's just take NetApp or F5, or Cisco as good examples, across the various spaces, we absolutely in the Ansible engineering team are not experts on all of the latest changes, the new hardware coming out, the new software upgrades that they're making. And our ability to keep up with that is pretty difficult. We just can't do it, but they sure can. And their customers, and our customers are both demanding that we give them more content, better content, and we need to be able to do it at the rate that our partners want to be able to provide that kind. As an example, normally we were kind of slowing Ansible down and trying to do one release every six months. But if a new piece of software, a new switch or a new disk array or anything comes out in the meantime, all of our customers had to wait for that next six months release, that was not very convenient. And having an expectation that our partners are going to line up on our schedule is, well, That didn't work out so well for them. We've created the certified content. And we now have the goals to have 50 certified partners. Back at first, I think we had three or four. We're now up to 30, our goal is to hit 50. We had about 100 modules that we showed at fest that were certified, we now have over 1200 modules that are certified content. And these are our partners, creating this content and making it stable and secure for everyone to use. >>So that, I think, by far   >> That was the coolest thing that we've done. >> Yeah, it's great to see that progress. Congratulations on the momentum since Ansible Fest. One of the other things talked about that back at that show, we talked about how analytics and automation, how those are going together, how's adoption been? Is this impossibly met? >> Adoption on the analytic side has been... It's been taking off. It was pretty nascent. I can tell you that, that we've grown by about five X there, but we started a little bit small. We had a few customers that signed up early on to do it. I think probably the more impressive thing is that, we have a couple of customers in markets that you would traditionally think, we're not going to get their data, they're more concerned about what we're sharing, but we have a major bank, we have a major manufacturer that have well over 10,000 systems providing data back into Red Hat that allows us then to analyze and provide a bunch of analytics back on their running estate. And I think that's amazing, seeing the big customers that are coming in from Marcus that you might think, we're probably not going to get a lot of uptake has been really exciting to me. >> All right, you talked a bit about how Ansible fits into the ecosystem, of course being at summit, want to understand a bit more how Ansible the latest of how it's fitting into the rest of the Red Hat portfolio. I've got interviews with Stephanie Shiraz, talking about you, Raul and Joe Fitzgerald, talking about ACM, your group I know is heavily involved working on a lot of those pieces. Help us understand how this is kind of a seamless portfolio. >> I think that's one of the most important things that we do within Red Hat team, is that we have to share the sufficiency across all the product groups and make them better and provide an additional enhanced value there. We've done a lot on the RHEL side, probably one of the maybe lesser known thing is that, we've been working really closely on OpenShift. And actually, we have a lot of customers now that really want the Ansible automation hub available on OpenShift as a first-class application. We're doing things, we're writing operators for those so that we can automate the updates and upgrades and back up and all of that important functionality, so that it's really easy, than to manage your Ansible automation hub, running on OpenShift, that's one big thing. And then we're going to integrate that really well into the advanced container management, that the team from IBM that came over is working towards. I have a really close partnership with ACM team to make sure that we can start to not only gather lists of affected systems, but then take that list and do a bunch of automations against it. >> That's one. On the RHEL side, we've done a lot. We introduced at last summit rally, and we talked about having insights as part of that. Since then, we've been adding more and more capabilities into insights, and to enhance that value of the subscription route. We looked at adding in, well, advisor is now what we used to call insights. It's just something that advises you about problems or issues that may be occurring in your URL instances that are running on prem. We've also added in a drift service, so you can tell if your configurations are sort of drifting apart. We've added in a compliance checker, so you can define some kind of a policy or compliance that you want to enforce on all of your running instances, and we make sure that you're still compliant. We also have a vulnerability detector, which you'd kind of expect, so any nasty security issues that come along, we can pop those up and show you right away. And probably some of the... One of the newer things is, we allow you to do patching. And you can do that patching, right from cloud@redhat.com. We also have another new very exciting feature, which is Subscription Watch, also on cloud@redhat.com. And what this allows you to do is to see and manage all of your subscriptions across your entire hybrid estate. From what you're running on prem, to what you're running in any of the public clouds, we can actually track that for you. You can see what kind of usage you have. And then, make better economic decisions for yourself, and then be able to easily expand that usage if you want to, it used to be a little bit more difficult to do that. We're trying to make subscriptions just like as much in the background as possible to make it easier for our customers. >> Tim, one of one of the big changes customers have to go through is moving from, their environment in their data centers, to the leverage of SaaS and managing things that are outside of their control and the public cloud. You've got an engineering development team, and you've got software that went from, mostly going in customers data centers too, you've got SaaS offerings, you're living in the public cloud. Want to understand, what's changing in your world? What advice would you give to other people as to kind of the learnings that Red Hat has had going through those pieces? >> It's actually a kind of a neat story, because after we change to start making a lot of our services that we had just only shipping products on prem into cloud based services, we had to develop this platform to be able to host all of these services. We started with the insights platform, because we already had that running out in the public cloud. So that was the obvious first thing to base everything on. But we had to build out that platform so that it could support all these services, the ones I just talked about, that are with REL are really good examples. Between a policy, compliance drift, all of these different kinds of services that we're offering, we had to build out that set of capabilities and services in what we're calling sort of the cloud@redhat.com platform. What I'm seeing is that a lot of customers are going through some of these same kinds of thoughts. Like they have a myriad, let's say of applications that are running that they're trying to provide back into their their own company. Different divisions of a company, they have things that are running in the cloud, some things that are running on prem, and they want to start to be able to offer a more cohesive set of services, consolidate some of these, share some of the engineering effort that they have across their various teams. This is exactly the journey that we went through to get to cloud@redhat.com. Finding a surprising number of customers that are actually really interested just in that story, about how we did that. One of the things that we've found is, we've been working with the folks at the open innovation labs within Red Hat. And this is one of the transformation stories that they see constantly as well. We've worked with them and shared this, they're a great resource to help customers kind of think through that problem and get them into a new kind of a platform. But it's quite a journey. We've been really focused on the infrastructure and on prem. Moving to the cloud was a big. But I'll tell you it engineering can move so much faster in a SaaS service than it can with on prem software delivery. It's been remarkable how quickly we could get there. >> Tim, one other thing, if I look at Red Hat, you're a global company, most development organizations are highly distributed to begin with. So many companies today are now having to rapidly figure out how do I manage people that are working from home? How do I live in these environments? From an automation tooling, we'd love to hear any advice you have there, as well as just anything else from your engineering experience in your teams that other people might be able to learn from, as they're dealing with today's landscape. >> To be honest, this is a... We have never seen anything like this in our history, with this kind of pandemic that's happening worldwide. It's shifting everything about business. And it has been challenging just within Red Hat engineering for how we can manage the engineers and their expectations and how difficult it can be to work from home. I have amazing stories from my own engineers. I had an engineer who's in Spain and his wife is a nurse. She's on like 18-hour shifts, the hospital comes back, they have to separate, he's got the kids. And because they don't want them to get infected, it's a really, really difficult working situation for a lot of families out there to try to make it through this. One of the things at Red Hat is, we just have to recognize that it's okay to slow things down a little bit. Let our engineers not feel the pressure that they have to do both childcare and school-at-home and caring for sick relatives or sick family, as well as meet all of your deadlines, it's kind of too much. We've been really... We're trying to be very compassionate with our folks letting them know that we have their back, and it's going to be okay as we try to get ourselves through this ridiculously different time that we've never seen anything like this, like I said. From an engineering perspective, I think work-from-home has been, it's okay for some people. If you have a larger home, I think it's a little easier maybe to find a room that you can go into and do your work. For some, no, if they're in an apartment, or you're sharing with a bunch of friends, it's not your workplace. And it can be really challenging to figure out how to work for eight hours a day with sort of a lot of distractions or just feeling confined and it's just been really difficult for anybody that wants to try to get out, you go a little stir-crazy. The good thing I guess is that engineering is naturally lends itself to being able to be remote and work from home. We have an advantage that way, than other industries, which is great. But it's definitely been really challenging for our teams to be able to cope with this and all we can do is just be really understanding. >> Tim, we appreciate the stories, they're definitely everyone's working through some challenging times. Want to give you the final word as to really takeaways as to what should people be watching? What things should people be going back and looking at from an automation standpoint as they leave Red Hat Summit 2020? >> We're just going to continue to work with the community, work with our partners, get more certified content and continue to scale, the best way that we can for all of our users and our customers. That is the key focus. We want to continue automating and providing all of that flexibility. If you want all 4000 modules and a big download, we certainly are... We're going to continue to give you that option. But if you want to be able to start customizing what you download, maybe only relying on certified content, instead of community content, we're going to give you that option now as well, so that you know what you're running. And with the analytics, we're just scratching the surface here. We're getting some great data. It's helping us to develop new ways of insights into how your systems are running. And that'll get very exciting as we go forward. I know that we've seen like a Forex increase already in the amount of insights attached to REL, which is really great, and for now, at least in the hundreds of customers that are using the AI, I think as we show more value there, you'll get a lot more customers to provide some of their data which will allow us then collectively to come up with some really great analytics to help people become more efficient with your automation. >> Well, Tim Kramer, thank you so much for the updates. And thank you to everything your team's doing. And just a reminder to the audience, of course, these communities not only are important technical resources, but many of them you've made friends with over the years. If you need help, reach out to the community. There are so many good stories that can be found amongst these communities helping each other through these challenging times. Much more coverage from Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you as always for watching theCube. (gentle upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCube with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the cubes coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020. Of course, this year's event happening digitally, we're talking to Red Hat executives, partners, customers, where they are around the globe, bringing them remotely into this digital event. And really important topic, of course, has been Automation for a long time, I think back to my career automation is something we've been talking about for decades, but even more important in today's age. Happy to welcome back to the program, Tim Kramer with Red Hat, Vice President of Engineering is that I don't have listed view here. But since we last talked to him at Ansible Fest, has been a little expansion in the scope of what you're working on. First of all, welcome back, and tell us what's new in your world? >> All right, thanks a lot. Yeah, there's been rather substantial change in roles. I'm now in charge actually, of all of the engineering within Red Hat. All the development engineering site includes: the middleware teams, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, of course management and automation, the new team that we just brought over from IBM doing Advanced Container Management. I'm basically running the whole thing and openShift of course. >> Excellent. Just a few things to keep you busy. Congratulations on that and love your support in the the Boston "Hello World" rella eight shirt that of course we saw last year at summit. I know one of the things being digital is people do miss some of the t-shirts. I know my family was quite fond of the "May The Fourth Be With You" shirts, that Red Hat did one year at summit. Of course, celebrating Star Wars Day, highly celebrated in in the Middleman household. But Tim, let's talk about Ansible. This brings our audience up to speed, what's happening that some of the latest pieces, and of course, it's been one of the great success stories. Ansible was a lot of adoption before the acquisition, but really accelerated over the last few years? >> I think it's been very exciting. We talked a lot about some of the cool things that we're going to be working on it Ansible Fest, and we showed a lot of demos. We're actually now bringing a lot of those technologies to light. And the main thing that we've been focused on really, is let's make sure that we're continuing to add really great value to the Ansible subscription. And especially for our customers, and any users actually, we want to make sure that we can continue to scale with the community and partners that are part of Ansible. And we are also um, (mumbles) Freezing. We just start that question again, fix that one in post? Sorry. >> Just stay in. It's okay, we'll pick it up there. They can do a trend, though. Tim, I'll start the question again? >> Okay. >> We'll start this. I'll reframe the question again. Then I'll cut your screen and you'll go, and... Tim, let's focus specifically on the updates on what's happening in Ansible. >> At Ansible Fest, we talked a lot about technology to come and showed a few demos of the possibilities. What we have done since then is actually bring all of that technology to life and to expand it. One thing that Red Hat has really done is continue to invest heavily in Ansible, to make sure that we can bring new capabilities and new value to the subscription for everyone. Some of the things that have been happening since summit, which of course we are in, and since Ansible Fest, since we last talked was it, the community continues to scale at a really rapid rate. It's almost hard to keep up. And the number of modules that we have had is grown just tremendously. We have well over 3000 modules now that are available, and as customers and partners and also just casual users are looking through that, it's difficult to figure out: what's really supported? What's really rock solid? What can I count on? And what is, maybe sort of that Wild West community, I'm just trying out some stuff with Ansible and see how it goes. We've been focusing on a lot, is a place that you can come to the Ansible automation platform and the hub where you can now get this content and you can rely on the fact that it's going to be certified by partners, tested by partners, they're always keeping up with the latest updates. A great example of this is, let's just take NetApp or F5, or Cisco as good examples, across the various spaces, we absolutely in the Ansible engineering team are not experts on all of the latest changes, the new hardware coming out, the new software upgrades that they're making. And our ability to keep up with that is pretty difficult. We just can't do it, but they sure can. And their customers, and our customers are both demanding that we give them more content, better content, and we need to be able to do it at the rate that our partners want to be able to provide that kind. As an example, normally we were kind of slowing Ansible down and trying to do one release every six months. But if a new piece of software, a new switch or a new disk array or anything comes out in the meantime, all of our customers had to wait for that next six months release, that was not very convenient. And having an expectation that our partners are going to line up on our schedule is, oh! That didn't work out so well for them. We've created the certified content. And we now have the goals to have 50 certified partners. Back at first, I think we had three or four. We're now up to 30, our goal is to hit 50. We had about 100 modules that we showed at fest that were certified, we now have over 1200 modules that are certified content. And these are our partners, creating this content and making it stable and secure for everyone to use. So that, I think, far >> (mumbles) >> That was the coolest thing that we've done. >> Yeah, it's great to see that progress. Congratulations on the momentum since Ansible Fest. One of the other things talked about that back at that show, we talked about how analytics and automation, how those are going together, how's adoption been? Is this impossibly met? >> Adoption on the analytic side has been... It's been taking off. It was pretty nascent. I can tell you that, that we've grown by about five X there, but we started a little bit small. We had a few customers that signed up early on to do it. I think probably the more impressive thing is that, we have a couple of customers in markets that you would traditionally think, we're not going to get their data, they're more concerned about what we're sharing, but we have a major bank, we have a major manufacturer that have well over 10,000 systems providing data back into Red Hat that allows us then to analyze and provide a bunch of analytics back on their running estate. And I think that's amazing, seeing the big customers that are coming in from Marcus that you might think, we're probably not going to get a lot of uptake has been really exciting to me. >> All right, you talked a bit about how Ansible fits into the ecosystem, of course being at summit, want to understand a bit more how Ansible the latest of how it's fitting into the rest of the Red Hat portfolio. I've got interviews with Stephanie Shiraz, talking about you, Raul and Joe Fitzgerald, talking about ACM, your group I know is heavily involved working on a lot of those pieces. Help us understand how this is kind of a seamless portfolio. >> I think that's one of the most important things that we do within Red Hat team, is that we have to share the sufficiency across all the product groups and make them better and provide an additional enhanced value there. We've done a lot on the rail side, probably one of the maybe lesser known thing is that, we've been working really closely on openShift. And actually, we have a lot of customers now that really want the Ansible automation hub available on openShift as a first-class application. We're doing things, we're writing operators for those so that we can automate the updates and upgrades and back up and all of that important functionality, so that it's really easy, than to manage your Ansible automation hub, running on openShift, that's one big thing. And then we're going to integrate that really well into the advanced container management, that the team from IBM that came over is working towards. I have a really close partnership with ACM team to make sure that we can start to not only gather lists of affected systems, but then take that list and do a bunch of automations against it. >> (mumbles) >> That's one. On the real side, we've done a lot. We introduced at last summit rally, and we talked about having insights as part of that. Since then, we've been adding more and more capabilities into insights, and to enhance that value of the subscription route. We looked at adding in, well, advisor is now what we used to call insights. It's just something that advises you about problems or issues that may be occurring in your URL instances that are running on prem. We've also added in a drift service, so you can tell if your configurations are sort of drifting apart. We've added in a compliance checker, so you can define some kind of a policy or compliance that you want to enforce on all of your running instances, and we make sure that you're still compliant. We also have a vulnerability detector, which you'd kind of expect, so any nasty security issues that come along, we can pop those up and show you right away. And probably some of the... One of the newer things is, we allow you to do patching. And you can do that patching, right from cloud@redhat.com. We also have another new very exciting feature, which is Subscription Watch, also on cloud@redhat.com. And what this allows you to do is to see and manage all of your subscriptions across your entire hybrid estate. From what you're running on prem, to what you're running in any of the public clouds, we can actually track that for you. You can see what kind of usage you have. And then, make better economic decisions for yourself, and then be able to easily expand that usage if you want to, it used to be a little bit more difficult to do that. We're trying to make subscriptions just like as much in the background as possible to make it easier for our customers. >> Tim, one of one of the big changes customers have to go through is moving from, their environment in their data centers, to the leverage of SaaS and managing things that are outside of their control and the public cloud. You've got an engineering development team, and you've got software that went from, mostly going in customers data centers too, you've got SaaS offerings, you're living in the public cloud. Want to understand, what's changing in your world? What advice would you give to other people as to kind of the learnings that Red Hat has had going through those pieces? >> It's actually a kind of a neat story, because after we change to start making a lot of our services that we had just only shipping products on prem into cloud based services, we had to develop this platform to be able to host all of these services. We started with the insights platform, because we already had that running out in the public cloud. So that was the obvious first thing to base everything on. But we had to build out that platform so that it could support all these services, the ones I just talked about, that are with REL are really good examples. Between a policy, compliance drift, all of these different kinds of services that we're offering, we had to build out that set of capabilities and services in what we're calling sort of the cloud@redhat.com platform. What I'm seeing is that a lot of customers are going through some of these same kinds of thoughts. Like they have a myriad, let's say of applications that are running that they're trying to provide back into their their own company. Different divisions of a company, they have things that are running in the cloud, some things that are running on prem, and they want to start to be able to offer a more cohesive set of services, consolidate some of these, share some of the engineering effort that they have across their various teams. This is exactly the journey that we went through to get to cloud@redhat.com. Finding a surprising number of customers that are actually really interested just in that story, about how we did that. One of the things that we've found is, we've been working with the folks at the open innovation labs within Red Hat. And this is one of the transformation stories that they see constantly as well. We've worked with them and shared this, they're a great resource to help customers kind of think through that problem and get them into a new kind of a platform. But it's quite a journey. We've been really focused on the infrastructure and on prem. Moving to the cloud was a big. But I'll tell you it engineering can move so much faster in a SaaS service than it can with on prem software delivery. It's been remarkable how quickly we could get there. >> Tim, one other thing, if I look at Red Hat, you're a global company, most development organizations are highly distributed to begin with. So many companies today are now having to rapidly figure out how do I manage people that are working from home? How do I live in these environments? From an automation tooling, we'd love to hear any advice you have there, as well as just anything else from your engineering experience in your teams that other people might be able to learn from, as they're dealing with today's landscape. >> To be honest, this is a... We have never seen anything like this in our history, with this kind of pandemic that's happening worldwide. It's shifting everything about business. And it has been challenging just within Red Hat engineering for how we can manage the engineers and their expectations and how difficult it can be to work from home. I have amazing stories from my own engineers. I had an engineer who's in Spain and his wife is a nurse. She's on like 18-hour shifts, the hospital comes back, they have to separate, he's got the kids. And because they don't want them to get infected, it's a really, really difficult working situation for a lot of families out there to try to make it through this. One of the things at Red Hat is, we just have to recognize that it's okay to slow things down a little bit. Let our engineers not feel the pressure that they have to do both childcare and school-at-home and caring for sick relatives or sick family, as well as meet all of your deadlines, it's kind of too much. We've been really... We're trying to be very compassionate with our folks letting them know that we have their back, and it's going to be okay as we try to get ourselves through this ridiculously different time that we've never seen anything like this, like I said. From an engineering perspective, I think work-from-home has been, it's okay for some people. If you have a larger home, I think it's a little easier maybe to find a room that you can go into and do your work. For some, no, if they're in an apartment, or you're sharing with a bunch of friends, it's not your workplace. And it can be really challenging to figure out how to work for eight hours a day with sort of a lot of distractions or just feeling confined and it's just been really difficult for anybody that wants to try to get out, you go a little stir-crazy. The good thing I guess is that engineering is naturally lends itself to being able to be remote and work from home. We have an advantage that way, than other industries, which is great. But it's definitely been really challenging for our teams to be able to cope with this and all we can do is just be really understanding. >> Tim, we appreciate the stories, they're definitely everyone's working through some challenging times. Want to give you the final word as to really takeaways as to what should people be watching? What things should people be going back and looking at from an automation standpoint as they leave Red Hat Summit 2020? >> We're just going to continue to work with the community, work with our partners, get more certified content and continue to scale, the best way that we can for all of our users and our customers. That is the key focus. We want to continue automating and providing all of that flexibility. If you want all 4000 modules and a big download, we certainly are... We're going to continue to give you that option. But if you want to be able to start customizing what you download, maybe only relying on certified content, instead of community content, we're going to give you that option now as well, so that you know what you're running. And with the analytics, we're just scratching the surface here. We're getting some great data. It's helping us to develop new ways of insights into how your systems are running. And that'll get very exciting as we go forward. I know that we've seen like a Forex increase already in the amount of insights attached to REL, which is really great, and for now, at least in the hundreds of customers that are using the AI, I think as we show more value there, you'll get a lot more customers to provide some of their data which will allow us then collectively to come up with some really great analytics to help people become more efficient with your automation. >> Well, Tim Kramer, thank you so much for the updates. And thank you to everything your team's doing. And just a reminder to the audience, of course, these communities not only are important technical resources, but many of them you've made friends with over the years. If you need help, reach out to the community. There are so many good stories that can be found amongst these communities helping each other through these challenging times. Much more coverage from Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you as always for watching theCube. (gentle upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering AnsibleFest 2019. Brought to you by, Red Hat. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's live coverage of AnsibleFest2019, two days of wall to wall coverage, I'm Stu, and my cohost for the week is John Furrier. And happy to welcome back to the program, one of our CUBE alumni, Tim Cramer, Vice President of Engineering for Management and Automation in Red Hat. >> That's right. >> Stu: Tim, thanks so much for joining us. >> Absolutely, it's a pleasure. >> All right, so Tim it's been about four years since the acquisition. There were, some of the undercurrent here, is you know, Red Hat didn't mess things up. As a matter of fact, the community is growing quite a bit. The ecosystem is definitely robust. You know, networking and security expanding really the footprint of Ansible. So, you know, give us a little bit of the engineering side as to the big announcement, Red Hat and Ansible automation platform, you hear customers always talk about, oh I took a thousand hours and brought it down to you know, minutes of my time. Well, I think there were probably a lot of engineering hours on your team's side to get this rolling. >> Yeah, sure. With the Red Hat acquisition, the first thing that really happened when we came in was they wanted to make sure that we kept the community and that culture moving forward the way it was. We had a really good start at it, but it needed a lot of growth, and obviously that worked out pretty well. Red Hat immediately invested pretty heavily in Ansible and in the ecosystem and really helped us pop it out, right? Because that was the one thing that Red Hat's really really good at, that Ansible needed a little bit of help with. So, we saw the community just take off. We had the right kind of investment on the engineering side so that we could build up the processes and then also build that core engine really well and invest on the tower side to make that all work. The other thing that happened sort of as a byproduct, was we started getting Ansible integrated into a bunch of the other Red Hat products. And we started out with some of the other management products, right? And, I think one of the most interesting integrations that we did was on the Insight side, so Insight is our artificial intelligence automation. And what it does, is it goes out and works with RHEL especially, but it goes and does daily dumps of a bunch of information about your RHEL system, does a bunch of analysis on that and then tries to find problems or issues and then practically tell you about them. What we did then, is instead of just sending you an article telling you how to fix the problem, we thought, why don't we combine that with Ansible and then just ship you a playbook and fix the thing automatically? And then we took those two concepts, brought those together, put it with tower and with satellite and then started just, the complete cycle that would allow you to do self-fueling software. So now, we can, just by daily dumps of things, figure out what kind of problems you're having, issues, CVEs, performance problems, other things, match that in our database, figure our what our support organization has figured out in the past, then proactively give you a playbook and fix it all in one stop. >> What's the impact of customers on that feature? What's the impact of those guys? >> Well, so if you're managing a really large fleet of machines, one of the things you want to do is, you want to make sure you're staying up to date, maybe you have compliance issues, you're worried about CVEs that are coming in, or perhaps you just want to make sure that you know, you got the latest and greatest, you're tuned well, whatever it is, right? If you're managing that number of machines, you're going to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to resolve those issues manually, right? Even if you could use Ansible to do the automation, you got to know that you have the problem to begin with. So, it really connects the two sides. So it's like automating your support experience is really- >> And so what does self-healing mean in that context? It means it heals the? >> Yeah so here's an example. I can give you an example. So an example would be, there happens to be a CVE that's recently come out, you want to scan your twenty thousand machines and you want to figure out if that CVE is hitting you. So Insights would upload the information about your system, we'd know that that CVE had not been applied, that you needed to do it, it would automatically generate a playbook that would then patch your system. That would come down into satellite, satellite would then, let's say, go on and patch those systems for you. Or you could do it with tower as well. >> No human involvement? >> No human necessary, yeah, but a lot of people don't like to just let automation take over. So you still get the, I really want to do this button, that you can push. But it makes it a lot faster, so then you can- >> And the alternative is to just manually manage it? Take it in? >> Yeah, in the, I guess, pre-Ansible days, what you would do is, even if you had Insights, that was still a big win because you get the support organization's knowledge that's being automatically, a report given to you, but you get a knowledge-based article that would tell you how to go about fixing the problem. So you'd take that manually, do it yourself. Now, we just generate that playbook and (whistles) everything happens right away. >> So Tim, over the last four years or so, we've seen some massive changes in the IT landscape. So, when we go to Red Hat summit, you know, containerization had a huge impact, multi-cloud, now we understand how RHEL fits into all of these environments. The people that are managing environments, most of what they're managing isn't something that they can go touch. So how's that impacting the Ansible marketplace? >> Well, I think the biggest thing is that because there are so many various systems that you need to be able to manage, the fact that we have the ecosystem available within the Ansible community, is just, that has been the biggest part. There's no, I shouldn't say there's no way, but it would take an incredible amount of investment if we were going to take the three thousand modules we had and write those all ourselves and try to maintain those all ourselves. The community coming in and the ISVs who are the experts in those areas are actually building up all of this content and this gives then the users and customers of Ansible that capability of manage across all of those various kind of, ecosystems and hardware and VMs and containers and everything. >> Yeah, help explain how collections are going to change that relationship with the ecosystem, especially, you know, I look the cloud providers, you can't keep up with the deluge of announcements and new solutions that they're pushing out, and therefore, it would have been tough for Ansible to kind of maintain that on their own. >> Yeah, no, that's great. So really what, the way collections came about was that we had attention, between the core platform which was changing as rapidly as the modules were, and we had a desire from our customers and users, that the core platform was pretty solid. We didn't have to keep modifying that as quickly as we were. But the module and the content developers, they wanted things coming out faster. So, this was a way for us to basically give some relief in that area where we are slowing down the core engine releases and we're speeding up then, or we're allowing the people that would own the collections, to get those changes and capabilities out much more quickly. >> What are some of the priorities on the road map that you have on engineering, obviously given that feedback from the community, you got customers in the community. And now you got an ecosystem developing, at F5, you've got Native, you've got Cisco, you've got IBM, a variety of other vendors are all here and growing. Kind of new stakeholder, not a new stakeholder, still a glue layer, an integrational layer is going to attract partners. >> Right. >> What's the roadmap? What's your focus? >> Yeah, so our focus is really just now expanding that ecosystem, providing that value, giving more advanced analytics back in to Ansible. So we really have to grow out now, the automation hub itself and the analytics. >> And when you hear people say, glue layer, integration layer, it feels like a control plane, nice, security, a network as you mentioned, are areas that have been plugging in nicely and growing on the security side. What does that mean to you when you hear, integration layer, as the head of engineering, you got to build that. What does that mean? (laughs) >> Well, what it really means is having an extremely well-defined set of APIs that are really stable that you can integrate into the- and that really is a big part of our focus, and then making it very performant. >> And the feedback from the partners is, I want to control it, you want to control it, where's the win? What's the trade off with partners, because people tend to get, you know, pretty dogmatic, well I'm going to own my data, and the problem with safe security is that a lot of these tools aren't sharing date quickly enough. Real time is important, so glue layer's pretty important. >> Yeah, so, I say with the glue layer, we don't really have much conflict as with any partners or any of the other users, really. Because it is pretty solid, I would say, at this point. And we have such a great decoupling of the module development and roles, other content that's on Galaxy, from the core engine itself, right? So, for us it means that we have to allow the experts that understand those modules, the capability of being able to manage, deliver those things on their own cadence, that make sense, as long as it continues to work well with the core engine. So that's really where our focus is. >> In the architecture used and the APIs are critical. Make sure they're rock solid and get tested properly. >> Yeah, and don't change and shift on you so that you know, if you're on older versions, it ends up messing you up. >> So, I love this show, this show is really kind of a chill show, we love this show, it's kind of one of our wheelhouse shows in terms of community, we love going to the community shows, because you can get down and dirty and talk about tech, do deep dives, hallway conversations are very cool. What are some of the things you're seeing? What's the show focus this year? What should people know about AnsibleFest this year? Why is it so important? >> Well, to me, AnsibleFest is honestly my favorite event. I've been doing these for years. The first one was in New York City in 2015 and that was my first one. I think we only had about a hundred fifty, two hundred people at that. It was a pretty small show. It's just been rapidly growing ever since. And the thing I've always loved about AnsibleFest is the community of people that are here. It really is a user community. And they are in love with Ansible. They love what it can do for them. And they just want to learn more. I also have a lot of customer meetings while I'm here. And from a customer standpoint, usually the kind of feedback we get, is how can I get more Ansible usage within my organization? They'll have a pocket of it that has come up and they're really excited about it and they want to expand that to other groups. So, instead of maybe other conferences, where you're getting a lot of concerns and people want to yell at you, right? It's more of a love fest, really. >> All right, Tim can you comment on the dynamics of an engineering organization working on a product that is open source and what that project means? 'Cause, you know, we heard some feedback from the contributor summit, a lot of engagement, really good attendance from, you know, real diverse ecosystems, so give us your commentary on that. >> Yeah, I mean to be perfectly honest, right, one of the things that we are really trying to focus on is enabling the community to do more with less help from us. All right, so one of the things that's really important is you have to make sure that, as a user, you know what the rules are so that you can get your contributions in as quickly and as easily without any questions or concerns as possible. So, we've spent a lot of time on making sure that contributions can be as easily accepted as possible. And a lot of that really honestly is more process than it is anything technical. You have to know what testing levels are required in and what kind of stability do I need in my modules, and what kind of support am I expected to give on that. So, once you know what those rules are, it's easier for you to figure out how to contribute, as opposed to you think you're done, and then it gets rejected. You get frustrated, and you give up. >> Give us what you can, the nice thing about an open source project is, people know when things are coming. So, platforms announced, it's going to be GA, come November, what directionally, should we be looking for by the time we come to AnsibleFest 2020? >> AnsibleFest 2020, what I would hope to see is that we're going to have much better advanced analytics about how your organization is using Ansible internally. And even being able to compare that against other organizations and other companies that are also running. So you can see how you're doing against, let's say, your peers in the industry. That's a big one. The other one of course, is we really want to get more engagement with our partners and others that want to provide collections of content that you can trust. >> All right, any nuggets from customer discussions, either something that might not have gotten talked about on the main stage or just general feedback that you'd share? >> I think that one of the things that we hear a lot is really around the scale and what we're seeing customers do is scale Ansible out to very large levels. So I would say some of the number one requests we have are around making sure that we can scale well, having sort of high availability solutions. I think those are the main things that we get. >> All right well, Tim Cramer, thank you so much for all the updates, look forward to you know, seeing some of those enhancements that you talk about as the platform continues to mature. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from AnsibleFest 2019, for John Furrier, I'm Stu Miniman, thank you always for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2017 brought to you by Red Hat. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to the Red Hat Summit here in Boston, Massachusetts, I'm Rebecca Knight, your host, my cohost, Stu Miniman, we are joined by Tim Cramer, he is the engineering director at Ansible Red Hat. Thanks so much for joining us, Tim. >> Hey, great to be here. >> So, you've been at Ansible a couple of years now, talk a little bit about your role, what you do, and new projects you're working on. >> All right, yeah, so I came over with the acquisition of Ansible into Red Hat, I manage the Ansible engineering team and I now have the Insights engineering team as well. We have many cool projects that we've been working on, one that's really exciting was Networking, but I know that you've talked to other people about that one. Another one is Ansible Container, which I'm also really excited about. What we've done is we noticed the Dockerfile sure did look convoluted, so we thought, it kind of looked like a bad shell script, and we thought well since we take bad shell scripts and we turn them into playbooks, into something very human readable, wouldn't it be great if we did the same thing for Dockerfile? So that's what Ansible Container really is. It's for companies that have really invested in Ansible, and they have a lot of Ansible content, take that content and be able to basically onboard it into OpenShift really easily with the Ansible container project. >> I actually, it was interesting, we were talking about kind of the history and things like the old Solaris Containers versus Docker, I read an interesting article talking about you know, containers aren't a thing it's more like a collection of things because I mean, you've got Linux Namespaces, Cgroups, and all those pieces, so it sounds like that's one of things that you guys are trying to help like Red Hat has always done, bring some supervision to some of these open source pieces. >> Yeah, a big thing about Ansible the thing that we try to do, over and over again is just make things as simple as possible, we're all about simplicity, and that's what we're trying to do on the Docker, sort of lifecycle. Between Dockerfile becoming easier, we also try to make it easier for you to be able to compose those into some kind of running set of microservices. >> Tim, since you came over with the acquisition, one thing that we've noted is, you know, Ansible's everywhere this week, it's been 18 months since the acquisition, we talked to Joe Fitzgerald, we talked to Andreas and it's getting it's pieces all over the place and sounds like more, could you give us a little bit of the insider view as to, you know, how that progression went, you know, what you're seeing, any challenges, I mean, we know it's all open source, but what do you have to navigate and how do you get that one plus one equals three once you put all this stuff together? >> Yeah, so I think that the acquisition itself was a really great move, right? It was great for Ansible, it was great for Red Hat. It filled a gap that they needed on the automation side and to make their products easier to install, configure especially, so what we noticed is that right after the acquisition Red Hat really just tried to let us keep going and run the business as is. They didn't try to force us into any specific model that they had for running things at Red Hat. What naturally happened was, because of the acquisition a lot of teams just started using it, playing with it, we were there as a consulting team to help a bunch of teams through whatever questions they had, but it took off virally just like it seems to take off virally with a lot of our customers. It is in literally every product that Red Hat ships today and then we have deeper integrations with some of the products. I know you've talked probably about CloudForms and Ansible Inside and we have a better integration with Satellite and Insights is the other one that's really good. >> In terms of the acquisition, what about the cultures? Before the cameras were rolling we were talking about how deep the Red Hat culture runs, really that's sort of brought down by Jim Whitehurst. Ansible had its own culture, how has the blending of the cultures been from your perspective? >> Yeah, one thing that I was really excited about coming in was, I've been in several large enterprises and I've been acquired now, this will be the third time that I've been acquired, and it's definitely the best one. This is a software company and that in itself is very exciting, because we're not trying to placate the hardware teams or you know, with some software add on stuff that I had in other acquisitions. The culture at Red Hat is one of really cooperation and everybody helping each other out, working together in communities, especially upstream communities, it's really upstream community first oriented, and that really helps teams integrate better at Red Hat because we can just work in our upstream community, we work in other people's upstream communities and get everything to tie together, it's a really nice collaborative model. So that culture of collaboration, and everybody's trying to get things done, do the right thing, it's fascinating. >> In a previous interview, you described your management philosophy as one of trust and enablement and that is something we've heard a lot at this conference is really empowering the individual, trusting the individual, it sounds wonderful, and it's the kind of boss I would want to work for, but how do you do it, what are some of the practices that you do to ensure that your engineers feel supported? And that you trust them? >> Well first, we do have a few job openings, so if you want to apply. >> (laughs) Okay, good to know. >> I guess some of the practices that I have when it comes to trust and enablement is I give my, there's an unending amount of work to do, right? So it's actually kind of an easy philosophy to employ. I just make sure that my team has a set of directives that are really clear, that they need to perform and you do sort of trust but verify, right? So you give them a bunch of actions to perform and make sure that you're checking in regularly and let them solve problems the way they want to. If they have an issue, or a question, or they're confused about something, we just cover it in a one on one or in a group meeting. The other thing that I do a lot of is, I tend to do a lot of group meetings. So I have my entire staff, like an all hands event, we do those every two weeks to make sure everybody's on the same page about what's going on in the greater Red Hat and within our own projects and I think that keeps people really tied in. >> Tim, management is something that gets pulled out, you know, pulled out from every vendor in the environment. The cloud guys are trying to build more into it, those infrastructure guys you mentioned that do hardware are all, you know, trying to do that pieces. Talk to us a little bit about your customers, why they turn to Red Hat and Ansible rather than to some of the other alternatives that are out there. >> Sure, so again, I think that one of the things that's given us a huge advantage is that Ansible is just so simple and we appeal to a very broad range of users. So I think that's why it took off so quickly and is used by so many people. So a system that anybody that can write a shell script can start using Ansible and writing playbook and we've got tons of examples out there so you can cargo cult things. So it's number one, really, really easy to get going. I just lost my train of thought, and the question was? >> Customers, why they're choosing it. >> Oh, customers, yeah. On the customer side, I'll give you an example. So there's a large technology company in Silicon Valley that uses us, and I can't say their name, but one of the problems that they had was utilizing, well, they were having problems communicating between development and production, okay? So the development guys would go off and they'd come up with a product and they'd know how they would deploy it in development, but when it came to production they needed you know, a different way of deploying it. So they used to create these giant documents, requirements documents and they'd pass them back and forth and they would speak different languages, it really wouldn't work, it'd take a long time to get something into prod. Now they're using Ansible Playbooks as that definition. Since it's so readable, the production guys can understand what they're trying to do, the development guys can easily write that in. So it's a great communication mechanism between those teams, it really helps create a real DevOps environment for them. So that's one good example. >> Look at management, it usually has a different pricing structure than some of the rest of Red Hat, some of the cloud models, how do you guys look at pricing? How are you trying to make sure that you make it as you know, affordable as possible for customers? >> Wow, yeah, that's not my area (laughs). >> Fair enough, you want to talk a little bit about some other customers, you know, you're here at the show, what are they asking you about, what are they excited about, I'd love to get some of the customer viewpoints that you're hearing this week. >> It's been fascinating, I've done mostly customer interviews the whole time and what I get is a lot of positivity. They're excited about Ansible, they're excited about the integrations that we're having with the other Red Hat products, it's taking off everywhere and yeah, they're generally just really happy with the product. We have a lot of interest in Tower as well which helps manage your Ansible environment. It's been super positive. >> As you look forward, what do we expect to see going forward? We understand Ansible will keep growing across the portfolios and environments, but what excites you and what should we look for going forward? >> So I think within the community one thing that I'm excited about is the number of contributors we have, right? We have over 2,600 contributors to Ansible and even like in our Windows practice, we've got 83 people that are working actively on helping our Windows modules. I want to see that continue to accelerate, I want to be able to make sure that our contributors are able to get changes in quickly and easily and that's something that we've been focusing on a lot. One thing about a really large community, it's great because you get a lot of attention, but the difficult part is that you can't accept all the contributions that people want to give you without just letting anything in, so we've come up with some techniques now, we have some bots that we wrote that help people formulate their pull requests and what I see going forward is we'll get more and more contributions in. >> And you'll continue that, creating more bots to let more people in, or let more people contribute? >> Yeah, we're also doing some tagging, so we're making it really clear what things are really managed by the core team itself, right? All the basic stuff and the engine of Ansible, then we have vendor modules, that's another thing that's pretty exciting, a lot of vendors are coming in and contributing publicly which is fantastic, especially on the networking side. And then we'll have those things that are curated so they have an active maintainer within the community, and they go through review from our core team to make sure that they're up to the right standards, but those are modules you know you can count on and then we'll have more of that wild west, you know, experimental modules. >> Rebecca: I like it. >> People are really trying some things out. That's one way that we can really help, if we can get a lot more of those wild west and let those settle a little bit, get some community leadership and kind of take off, and then they go into the curated pile. >> Rebecca: It's the open source way. >> Tim: It is. >> Tim, thanks so much for joining us. >> Right, yeah, it's great being here. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will continue with more of Red Hat in Boston, Massachusetts after this. (electronic music)