>>Good morning live from Chicago. It's the cube on the floor at Ansible Fast 2022. This is day two of our wall to wall coverage. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, we're gonna be talking next in the segment with two alumni about what Red Hat and IBM are doing to give Ansible users AI superpowers. As one of our alumni guests said, just off the keynote stage, we're nearing an inflection point in ai. >>The power of AI with Ansible is really gonna be an innovative, I think an inflection point for a long time because Ansible does such great things. This segment's gonna explore that innovation, bringing AI and making people more productive and more importantly, you know, this whole low code, no code, kind of right in the sweet spot of the skills gap. So should be a great segment. >>Great segment. Please welcome back two of our alumni. Perry is here, the Chief scientist, IBM Research and IBM Fellow. And Tom Anderson joins us once again, VP and general manager at Red Hat. Gentlemen, great to have you on the program. We're gonna have you back. >>Thank you for having >>Us and thanks for joining us. Fresh off the keynote stage. Really enjoyed your keynote this morning. Very exciting news. You have a project called Project Wisdom. We're talking about this inflection point in ai. Tell the audience, the viewers, what is Project Wisdom And Wisdom differs from intelligence. How >>I think Project Wisdom is really about, as I said, sort of combining two major forces that are in many ways disrupting and, and really constructing many a aspects of our society, which are software and AI together. Yeah. And I truly believe it's gonna result in a se shift on how not just enterprises, but society carries forefront. And as I said, intelligence is, is, I would argue at least artificial intelligence is more, in some ways mechanical, if I may say it, it's about algorithms, it's about data, it's about compute. Wisdom is all about what is truly important to bring out. It's not just about when you bring out a, a insight, when you bring out a decision to be able to explain that decision as well. It's almost like humans have wisdom. Machines have intelligence and, and it's about project wisdom. That's why we called it wisdom. >>Because it is about being a, a assistant augmenting humans. Just like be there with the humans and, and almost think of it as behave and interact with them as another colleague will versus intelligence, which is, you know, as I said, more mechanical is about data. Computer algorithms crunch together and, and we wanna bring the power of project wisdom and artificial intelligence to developers to, as you said, close the skills gap to be able to really make them more productive and have wisdom for Ansible be their assistant. Yeah. To be able to get things for them that they would find many ways mundane, many ways hard to find and again, be an assistant and augmented, >>You know, you know what's interesting, I want to get into the origin, how it all happened, but interesting IBM research, well known for the deep tech, big engineering. And you guys have been doing this for a long time, so congratulations. But it's interesting here at this event, even on stage here event, you're starting to see the automation come in. So the question comes up, scale. So what happens, IBM buys Red Hat, you go raid the, the raid, the ip, Trevor Treasure trove of ai. I mean this cuz this is kind of like bringing two killer apps together. The Ansible configuration automation layer with ai just kind of a, >>Yeah, it's an amazing relationship. I was gonna say marriage, but I don't wanna say marriage cause I may be >>Last. I didn't mean say raid the Treasure Trobe, but the kind of >>Like, oh my God. An amazing relationship where we bring all this expertise around automation, obviously around IP and application infrastructure automation and IBM research, Richie and his team bring this amazing capacity and experience around ai. Bring those two things together and applying AI to automation for our teams is so incredibly fantastic. I just can't contain my enthusiasm about it. And you could feel it in the keynote this morning that Richie was doing the energy in the room and when folks saw that, it's just amazing. >>The geeks are gonna love it for sure. But here I wanna get into the whole evolution. Computers on computers, remember the old days thinking machines was a company generations ago that I think they've sold or went outta business, but self-learning, learning machines, computers, programming, computers was actually on your slide you kind of piece out this next wave of AI and machine learning, starting with expert systems really kind of, I'm almost say static, but like okay programs. Yeah, yeah. And then now with machine learning and that big debate was unsupervised, supervised, which is not really perfect. Deep learning, which now explores some things, but now we're at another wave. Take, take us through the thought there explaining what this transition looks like and why. >>I think we are, as I said, we are really at an inflection point in the journey of ai. And if ai, I think it's fair to say data is the pain of ai without data, AI doesn't exist. But if I were to train AI with what is known as supervised learning or or data that is labeled, you are almost sort of limited because there are only so many people who have that expertise. And interestingly, they all have day jobs. So they're not just gonna sit around and label this for you. Some people may be available, but you know, this is not, again, as I as Tom said, we are really trying to apply it to some very sort of key domains which require subject matter expertise. This is not like labeling cats and dogs that everybody else in the board knows there are, the community's very large, but still the skills to go around are not that many. >>And I truly believe to apply AI to the, to the word of, you know, enterprises information technology automation, you have to have unsupervised learning and that's the only way to skate. Yeah. And these two trends really about, you know, information technology percolating across every enterprise and unsupervised learning, which is learning on this very large amount of data with of course know very large compute with some very powerful algorithms like transformer architectures and others which have been disrupting the, the domain of natural language as well are coming together with what I described as foundation models. Yeah. Which anybody who plays with it, you'll be blown away. That's literally blown away. >>And you call that self supervision at scale, which is kind of the foundation. So I have to ask you, cuz this comes up a lot with cloud, cloud scale, everyone tells horizontally scalable cloud, but vertically specialized applications where domain expertise and data plays. So the better the data, the better the self supervision, better the learning. But if it's horizontally scalable is a lot to learn. So how do you create that data ops where it's where the machines are gonna be peaked to maximize what's addressable, but what's also in the domain too, you gotta have that kind of diversity. Can you share your thoughts on that? >>Absolutely. So in, in the domain of foundation models, there are two main stages I would say. One is what I'll describe as pre-training, which is think of it as the, the machine in this particular case is knowledgeable about the domain of code in general. It knows syntax of Python, Java script know, go see Java and so, so on actually, and, and also Yammel as well, which is obviously one would argue is the domain of information technology. And once you get to that level, it's a, it's almost like having a developer who knows all of this but may not be an expert at Ansible just yet. He or she can be an expert at Ansible but is not there yet. That's what I'll call background knowledge. And also in the, in the case of foundation models, they are very adept at natural language as well. So they can connect natural language to code, but they are not yet expert at the domain of Ansible. >>Now there's something called, the second stage of learning is called fine tuning, which is about this data ops where I take data, which is sort of the SME data in this particular case. And it's curated. So this is not just generic data, you pick off GitHub, you don't know what exists out there. This is the data which is governed, which we know is of high quality as well. And you think of it as you specialize the generic AI with pre-trained AI with that data. And those two stages, including the governance of that data that goes into it results in this sort of really breakthrough technology that we've been calling Project Wisdom for. Our first application is Ansible, but just watch out that area. There are many more to come and, and we are gonna really, I'm really excited about this partnership with Red Hat because across IBM and research, I think where wherever we, if there is one place where we can find excited, open source, open developer community, it is Right. That's, >>Yeah. >>Tom, talk about the, the role of open source and Project Wisdom, the involvement of the community and maybe Richard, any feedback that you've gotten since coming off stage? I'm sure you were mobbed. >>Yeah, so for us this is, it's called Project Wisdom, not Product Wisdom. Right? Sorry. Right. And so, no, you didn't say that but I wanna just emphasize that it is a project and for us that is a key word in the upstream community that this is where we're inviting the community to jump on board with us and bring their expertise. All these people that are here will start to participate. They're excited in it. They'll bring their expertise and experience and that fine tuning of the model will just get better and better. So we're really excited about introducing this now and involving the community because it's super nuts. Everything that Red Hat does is around the community and this is no different. And so we're really excited about Project Wisdom. >>That's interesting. The project piece because if you see in today's world the innovation strategy before where we are now, go back to say 15 years ago it was of standard, it's gotta have standard bodies. You can still innovate and differentiate, but yet with open source and community, it's a blending of research and practitioners. I think that to me is a big story here is that what you guys are demonstrating is the combination of research and practitioners in the project. Yes. So how does this play out? Cuz this is kind of like how things are gonna get done in the cloud cuz Amazon's not gonna just standardize their stack at at higher level services, nor is Azure and they might get some plumbing commonalities below, but for Project Project Wisdom to be successful, they can, it doesn't need to have standards. If I get this right, if I can my on point here, what do you guys think about that? React to that? Yeah, >>So I definitely, I think standardization in terms of what we will call ML ops pipeline for models to be deployed and managed and operated. It's like models, like any other code, there's standardization on DevOps ops pipeline, there's standardization on machine learning pipeline. And these models will be deployed in the cloud because they need to scale. The only way to scale to, you know, thousands of users is through cloud. And there is, there are standard pipelines that we are working and architecting together with the Red Hat community leveraging open source packages. Yeah. Is really to, to help scale out the AI models of wisdom together. And another point I wanted to pick up on just what Tom said, I've been sort of in the area of productizing AI for for long now having experience with Watson as well. The only scenario where I've seen AI being successful is in this scenario where, what I describe as it meets the criteria of flywheel of ai. >>What do I mean by flywheel of ai? It cannot be some research people build a model. It may be wowing, but you roll it out and there's no feedback. Yeah, exactly. Okay. We are duh. So what actually, the only way the more people use these models, the more they give you feedback, the better it gets because it knows what is right and what is not right. It will never be right the first time. Actually, you know, the data it is trained on is a depiction of reality. Yeah. It is not a reality in itself. Yeah. The reality is a constantly moving target and the only way to make AI successful is to close that loop with the community. And that's why I just wanted to reemphasize the point on why community is that important >>Actually. And what's interesting Tom is this is a difference between standards bodies, old school and communities. Because developers are very efficient in their feedback. Yes. They jump to patterns that serve their needs, whether it's self-service or whatever. You can kind of see what's going on. Yeah. It's either working or not. Yeah, yeah, >>Yeah. We get immediate feedback from the community and we know real fast when something isn't working, when something is working, there are no problems with the flow of data between the members of the community and, and the developers themselves. So yeah, it's, I'm it's great. It's gonna be fantastic. The energy around Project Wisdom already. I bet. We're gonna go down to the Project Wisdom session, the breakout session, and I bet you the room will be overflowed. >>How do people get involved real quick? Get, get a take a minute to explain how I would get involved. I'm a community member. Yep. I'm watching this video, I'm intrigued. This has got me enthusiastic. How do I get more confident with this opportunity? >>So you go to, first of all, you go to red hat.com/project Wisdom and you register your interests and you wanna participate. We're gonna start growing this process, bringing people in, getting ready to make the service available to people to start using and to experiment with. Start getting their feedback. So this is the beginning of, of a journey. This isn't the, you know, this isn't the midpoint of a journey, this is the begin. You know, even though the work has been going on for a year, this is the beginning of the community journey now. And so we're gonna start working together through channels like Discord and whatnot to be able to exchange information and bring people in. >>What are some of the key use cases, maybe Richie are starting with you that, that you think maybe dream use cases that you think the community will help to really uncover as we're looking at Project Wisdom really helping in this transformation of ai. >>So if I focus on let's say Ansible itself, there are much wider use cases, but Ansible itself and you know, I, I would say I had not realized, I've been working on AI for Good for long, but I had not realized the excitement and the power of Ansible community itself. It's very large, it's very bottom sum, which I love actually. But as I went to lot of like CTOs and CIOs of lot of our customers as well, it was becoming clear the use cases of, you know, I've got thousand Ansible developers or IT or automation experts. They write code all the time. I don't know what all of this code is about. So the, the system administrators, managers, they're trying to figure out sort of how to organize all of this together and think of it as Google for finding all of these automation code automation content. >>And I'm very excited about not just the use cases that we demonstrated today, that is beginning of the journey, but to be able to help enterprises in finding the right code through natural language interfaces, generating the code, helping Del us debug their code as well. Giving them predictive insights into this may happen. Just watch out for it when you deploy this. Something like that happened before, just watch out for it as well. So I'm, I'm excited about the entire life cycle of IT automation, Not just about at the build time, but also at the time of deployment. At the time of management. This is just a start of a journey, but there are many exciting use cases abound for Ansible and beyond. >>It's gonna be great to watch this as it unfolds. Obviously just announcing this today. We thank you both so much for joining us on the program, talking about Project wisdom and, and sharing how the community can get involved. So you're gonna have to come back next year. We're gonna have to talk about what's going on. Cause I imagine with the excitement of the community and the volume of the community, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Absolutely. >>This is absolutely exactly. You're excited about. >>Excellent. And you should be. Congratulations. Thank, thanks again for joining us. We really appreciate your insights. Thank you. Thank >>You for having >>Us. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Barton and you're watching The Cube Lie from Chicago at Ansible Fest 22. This is day two of wall to wall coverage on the cube. Stick around. Our next guest joins us in just a minute.

>>Good morning, everyone from Chicago Live. The Cube is live at Ansible Fast 2022. Lisa Martin and John Ferer are here for two days of multiple coverage on the cube. Very excited to be back in person. Ansible's 10th anniversary, the first in-person event. John, since 2019. Yeah, great to be perfect. One of the nuggets dropped this morning and I know you was Opss code. >>Yeah, we're gonna hear about that OPSIS code here in this segment. We're gonna get in, but the leader of the, the business unit at Ansible, part of Red Hat. So look forward >>To this. Exactly. Tom Anderson joins us, one of our alumni. Welcome back to the program. Thank you. The VP and general manager of Red Hat. First of all, how great is it to be back in person with live guests and an engaged audience and then robust community? >>It is amazing. It really is. I kind of question whether this day was ever gonna come again after three years of being apart, but to see the crowd here and to see, like you said, the energy in the room this morning and the keynotes, it's fantastic. So it's fa I just couldn't be happier. >>So opsis code nugget drop this morning. Yep. We wanna dissect that with you as, as that was mentioned in the keynote this morning. As Ansible is pushing into the cloud and and into the edge, what does OPSIS code mean for end users and how is it gonna help them to use a term that was used a lot in the keynote level up their automation? >>Yeah, so what we see is, look, the day zero, day one provisioning of infrastructure. There's lots of tools, there's lots of ways to do that. Again, it's just the company's ambition and dedication to doing it. The tools are there, they can do that. We see the next big opportunity for automation is in day two operations. And what's happening right now in ops is that you have multiple clouds, you've got multiple data centers and now you've got edge environments. The number of things to manage on a day-to-day basis is only increasing. The complexity is only increasing this idea of a couple years ago where we're gonna do shift everything left onto the developer. It's nice idea, but you still have to operate these environments on a day two basis. So we see this opportunity as opsis code, just like we did infrastructures code, just like we did configuration as code. We see the next frontier as operations code. >>Yeah, and this is really a big trend as you know with cube reporting a lot on the cloud native velocity of the modern application developer these days, they're under, they're, it's a great time to be a software developer because all the open source goodness is happening, but they're going faster. They want self-service, they want it built in secure, They need guardrails, they need, they need faster ops. So that seems to be the pressure point. Is ops as code going to be that solution? Because you have a lot of people talking about multi-cloud, multiple environments, which sounds great on paper, but when you try to execute it, Yeah, there's complexity. So you know, the goal of complexity management has really been one of the key things around ops. How do I keep speed up and how do I reduce the complexities? These are big. How does, how does ops code fit into that? >>Yeah, so look, we, we see Ansible as this common automation back plane, if you will, that goes across all of these environments. It provides a common abstraction layer so that whether you're running on Azure, whether you're a GCP or whether you're AWS or whether you're, you know, a PLC out on a shop industrial edge floor with a plc, each of those things need to be automated. If we can abstract that into a common automation language, then that allows these domain experts to be able to offer their services to developers in a way that promotes the acceleration, if you will, of those developers tasks. And that developer doesn't have to know about the underlying complexities of storage or database or cloud or edge. They can just do their >>Job. You know, Tom, one of the things I observed in Keynote, and it comes across every time I, we have an event and in person it's more amplified. Cause you see it, the loyalty of the customer base. You have great community. It's very not corporate like here. It's very no big flashy news. But there's some news, hard news, It's very community driven. Check the box there. So continuing on the roots, I wanna get your thoughts on how now the modern era we're in, in this world, the purchasing power, again, I mentioned multicloud looks good on paper, which every CX I wanna be multiple clouds. I want choice now. Now you talk to the people running things like, whoa, hold on, boss. Yeah, the bottoms up is big part of the selection process of how people select and buying consume technology with open source, you don't need to like do a full buy. You can use open source and then get Ansible. Yeah. This is gonna be a big part of how the future of buying product is and implementing it. So I think it's gonna be a groundswell, bottoms up market in this new cloud native with O in the ops world. What's your reaction to that? What's your thoughts? >>So here, here's my thoughts. The bulk of the people here are practitioners. They love Ansible, they use Ansible in their day to day job. It's how it helped, makes 'em successful. Almost every executive that I go out and talk to and our customers, they tell me one of their number one pro or their number one problem is attracting you talent and retaining the talent that they have. And so how can they do that? They can give them the tools to do their job, the tools that they actually like. So not a top down, you know, old fashioned systems management. You're gonna use this tool whether you like it or not. But that bottoms up swell of people adopting open source tools like Ansible to do their job and enjoy it. So I see it as a way of the bottoms up addressing the top down initiative of the organization, which is skills retention, skills enhancement. And that's what we focus on here at this event. Are the practitioners, >>Is that the biggest customer conversation topic these days? Is this the skills gap, retention, attraction talent? Would you say it's more expansive as the organizations are so different? >>Well, so a lot of the folks that I meet are, you know, maybe not sea level, but they're executives in the organization, right? So they're struggling with attract, you know, pretty much everywhere I go, I was in Europe this summer, conversation was always the same. We got two problems. Tracking people. We can't find people, people we find we can't afford. So we need to automate what they would do. And, and then the second piece is the complexity of our environment is growing, right? I'm being asked to do more and I can't find more people to do it. What's my solution? It's automation, you know, at the end of the day, that's what it comes down to. >>It's interesting, the people who are gonna be involved in the scaling horizontally with automation are gonna have the keys to the kingdom. The old joke when it was, you know, they run everything. They power the business now the business is digital. You gotta be hybrid. So we see hybrids a steady state right now, hybrid cloud. When you bring the edge into the equation, how do you see that developing? Because we think it's gonna be continually be hybrid and that's gonna extend out on the edge. What is the ansible's view on how the edge evolves? What's, what's going on there? Can you share your thoughts on the expansion to the edge? >>There's a, our experience is there's a rapid modernization happening out at the edge, industrial edge, you know, oil and gas platforms, retail locations, industrial floors, all that kind of stuff. We see this convergence of OT and IT happening right now where some of the disciplines that enterprises have used in the IT area are gonna expand out into ot. But some of the requirements of ot of not having skilled IT resources, you know, in the store, in the fast food restaurant, on the oil platform, needing to have the tools to be able to automate those changes remotely. We're seeing a real acceleration of that right now. And frankly, Ansible's playing a big role in that. And it's connecting a lot of the connective tissue is around network. What is the key piece that connects all of this environment as network and those number of endpoints that need to be managed. Ansible is, you know, >>It's way use case for Ansible because Ansible built their business on configuration automation, which was don't send someone out to that branch office back in the old days. Exactly. Do it. Manual versus automation. Hey, automation every time. Yes. This is at large scale. I mean the scale magnitude, can you scope the scale of what's different? I mean go even go back 10 years, okay, where we were and how we got here, where we are today. Scope the size of the scale that's happening here. >>You know, hundreds of thousands of endpoints and things. That's not even the API points, but that's the kind of compute points, the network points, the servers it's in. It's, it's, you know what we would've never thought, you know, 10 years ago, a thousand endpoints was a lot or 10,000 endpoints was a lot of things to manage when you start talking about network devices. Yeah, yeah. Home network devices for employees that are remote employees that need to be in a secured network. Just the order of magnitude, maybe two orders of magnitude larger than it has been in the past. And so again, coming home to the automation world, >>The world's spun in your front, your front door right now. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, >>Absolutely. Talk about, you talked about the acceleration. If we think of about the proliferation of, of devices online, especially the last two years, when, to your point, so many people shifted to remote and are still there. What are some of the, the changes in automation that we've seen as businesses have had to pivot and change so frequently and so many times to be successful? >>Yeah, so here's what we've seen, which is it's no longer acceptable for the owner of the network team or the ownership of the database or of the storage facility to, you can't wait for them to offer their service to people. Self-service is now the rule of thumb, right? So how can those infrastructure owners be able to offer their services to non IT people in a way that manages their compliance and makes them feel that they can get those resources without having to come and ask. And they do that by automating with Ansible and then offering those as package services out to their developers, to their QE teams, to their end users, to be able to consume and subscribe to that infrastructure knowing that they are the ones who are controlling how it's being provisioned, how it's being used. >>What are some of the, there were some great customers mentioned this morning in the keynote, but do you have a favorite example of a customer, regardless of industry that you think really shows the value and, and the evolution of the Ansible platform in its first 10 years and that really articulates the business value that automation delivers to a company? >>Yeah, no, it's a great question. I would think that, you know, if you wound the clock back 10 years, Ansible was all about server configuration management, right? That's what it was about was per provisioning, provisioning, you know, VMware infrastructure, vSphere, and then loading on VMs on top of that as it's expanded into network, into security and to storage and to database into cloud. It's become a much broader platform, if you will. And a good example is we have a customer, large oil and gas customer who is modernizing their oil platforms. I can imagine I not, I've not been on one, but I imagine the people that are out working on that oil platforms have greasy hands that are pushing on things. And they had this platform that the technology modernization included Azure. So connecting to data on Azure, rolling out new application updates, has to have a firewall, has to have network capabilities, has to have underlying OS to be able to do that. And Ansible was the glue that brought all that together to be able to modernize that oil platform. And so for me, that's the kind of thing where it sort of makes it real. You know, the actual businesses, >>The common set of services, this is, this is where we're seeing multi-cloud. Yeah. You start to have that conversation where, okay, I got this edge, it kind of looks the same, I gotta make it work. I'm a developer, I want some compute, I want to put this together. I have containers and orchestration behind it and kind of seeing the same kind of pattern. Yeah. Evolving at scale. So you guys have the platform, okay, I'm an open source. I love the open source. I got the platform 2.3, I see supply chain management in there. You got trusted signatures. That's a supply chain. We've been hearing a lot about security in the code. What else is in the platform that's updated? Can you share the, the, the new things that people should pay attention to in the platform? >>Yeah, we're gonna talk about a couple of things smaller around event driven Ansible, which is bringing Ansible into that really day two ops world where it's sort of hands free automation and, and, and operations where rather than someone pushing a button to trigger or initiate a piece of, of automation, an event will take place. I've detected an outta space condition, I've detected a security violation, I've detected something. Go to a rule book. That rule book will kick off in automation close that remediate that problem and close the thing without anyone ever having to do anything with that. So that's kind of one big area. And we're gonna talk tomorrow. We've got a real special announcement tomorrow with our friends from IBM research that I'm gonna, >>We'll have you on 10 30 Martha Calendars. >>But there's some really great stuff going on on the platform as we start to expand these use cases in multiple directions and how we take Ansible out to more and more people, automation out to more and more people from the inside, experts out to the consumers of automation, make it easier to create automation. >>Yeah. And one of the things I wanted to follow up on that and the skill gap, tying that together is you seeing heard in the keynote today around Stephanie was talking about enterprise architecture. It's not, I won't say corner case answer. I mean it's not one niche or narrow focus. Expanding the scope was mentioned by Katie, expand your scope grow, you got a lot of openings. People are hire now, Now Ansible is part of the enterprise architecture. It's not just one thing, it's, it's a complete, Explain what that means for the folks out there. Yeah. >>So when you start to connect what I call the technology domains, so the network team uses Ansible to automate their network infrastructure and configure all their systems. And the compute team uses it to deploy new servers on aws. And the security ops team use it to go out and gather facts when they have a threat detection happening and the storage team is using it to provision storage. When you start to then say, Okay, we have all these different domains and we want to connect those together into a set of workflows that goes across all of those domains. You have this common language and we're saying, okay, so it's not just the language, it's also the underlying platform that has to be scalable. It's gotta be secure. We talked about signing content. I mean, people don't understand the risk of an automation gone wild. You can, you can do a lot of damage to your infrastructure real fast with automation, just like you can do repair, right? So is what's running in my environment secure? Is it performant and is it scalable? I mean, those are the two, those are the three areas that we're really looking at with the platform right >>Now. Automation gone wild, it sounds like the next reality TV show. Yeah, I >>May, I may regret saying that. >>Sounds >>Like great. Especially on live tv. Great, >>Great podcast title right there. I made a mental note. Automation Gone Wild episode one. Here we are >>Talk about Ansible as is really being the, the catalyst to allow organizations to truly democratize automation. Okay. You, you talked about the different domains there and it seems to me like it's, it's positioned to really be the catalyst that's the driver of that democratization, which is where a lot of people wanna get to. >>Yeah. I mean for us, and you'll see in our sessions at Ansible Fest, we talk a lot about the culture, the culture of automation, right? And saying, okay, how do you include more and more people in your organization in this process? How can you get them to participate? So we talk about these ideas of communities of practice. So we bring the open source, the concepts of open source communities down into enterprises to build their own internal communities of practice around Ansible, where they're sharing best practices, skills, reusable content. That is one of the kind of key factors that we see as a success in inside organizations is the scales, is sort of bringing everybody into that culture of automation and not being afraid of automation saying, Look, it's not gonna take my job, it's gonna help me do my job better. >>Exactly. That automation argument always went, went to me crazy. Oh yeah, automating is gonna take my job away. You know, bank teller example, there's more bank tellers now than ever before. More atm. So the, the job shifts, I mean the value shifts. Yeah. This is kind of where the, where the automation helps. What's real quick, final minute we have left. Where does that value shift? I'm the person being automated away or job. Yeah. Where do you see the value job? Cause it's still tons of openings for people's skills, >>You know? So we see the shift from, particularly in operations from, here's my job, I look at a ticket queue, I grab a ticket, it's got a problem, I go look at a log, I look for a string and a log, I find out the air and I go, configuration change that. That's not a really, I wouldn't call that a fund existence for eight or 10 hours a day, but the idea, if I can use automation to do that for me and then focus on innovating, creating new capabilities in my environment, then you start to attract a new, you know, the next generation of operations people into a much more exciting role. >>Yeah. Architects too, they turned into architects that turned into the multiple jobs scope. It's like multi-tool player. It's like >>A, you know, Yeah, yeah. The five tool player, >>Five tool player in baseball is the best of the best. But, but kind of that's what's >>Happening. That's exactly what's happening, right? That's exactly what's happening. And it helps address that skills challenge. Yeah. And the talent challenge that organizations have as well. >>And everybody wants to be able to focus on delivering value to the organization. I have to get the end of the day. That's a human component that we all want. So it sounds like Ansible is well on its way to helping more and more organizations across industries achieve just that. Tom, it's great to have you back on the program. Sounds like you're coming back tomorrow, so we get day two of Tom. All right, excellent. Look forward to it. Congratulations on the first in-person event in three years and we look forward to talking to you >>Tomorrow. Thank you so much. >>All right, for our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, Day one of our coverage of Ansible Fest 2022. Stick around. John and I welcome back another Cube alumni next.

(cheerful music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021, with Red Hat. Topic of this power panel is the future of automation, we've got a great lineup of CUBE alumni, Joe Fitzgerald, vice president, general manager of the Red Hat business unit, thanks for coming on, Tom Anderson, vice president, product manager of Red Hat, and Alessandro Perilli, the senior director of product market at Red, all good CUBE alumni. Distinct power panel, Joe we'll start out with you, what have you seen in automation game right now, 'cause it continues to evolve. I mean you can't go to an event, a virtual event, or read anything online without hearing AI automation, automation hybrid, automation hybrid hybrid hybrid hybrid, I mean automation is the top conversation in almost all verticals. What do you see happening right now? >> Yeah, it's sort of amazing, you know? Automation is quite fashionable these days, as you pointed out. Automation's always been on the radar of a lot of enterprises, and I think it was always perceived as sort of like that, an efficiency, a task model thing, that people did. Now automation is, if you believe some of the analysts, it's up to a board room imperative in some cases. So we are seeing with our customers that the level of complexity they're dealing with, particularly exaggerated by what's gone past year and a half in the world, is putting a tremendous amount of pressure, attention and importance on automation. So automation's definitely one of the busiest places to be right now. >> What's the big change this year, though? I mean we love the automation conversation, we had it last year a lot too, as well. What's the change, what's the trend right now that's driving this next level automation conversation with customers? >> Well, I'll ask my colleagues to comment on that in a second, but, the challenges here with automation, is people are constrained now, they can't access facilities as easy as they used to be able to. They still need to go fast, some businesses have had to expand dramatically, and introduce new services to handle all sorts of new scenarios, they've had to deploy things faster. Security, not a week goes by you don't read about something going on regarding security and breaches and hacking and things like that, so they're trying to secure things as fast as possible, right, and deploy critical fixes and patches and things like that. So there's just tremendous amount of activity, that's really been exaggerated by what's gone on over the past year. >> And all of this is being compounded with a nature of increasing complexity, that we're seeing in the architecture, explosion microservices, the adoption en masse of containers, and the adoption of multiple clouds for most customers around the world. So really, the extension of the IT environment, especially for large enterprises, enormous for any team, no matter how big it is, so how scale it is, to really go after and look for all the systems, and then the complexity of the architectures, is enormous within that IT environment. It is impossible to scale the applications and to scale the infrastructure, and not scale the IT operations. And so automation becomes really a way to scale IT operations, rather than just keep repeating the same steps over and over, in an attempt to simplify, or to reduce costs. It's well beyond that at this point. >> That's a great point. Tom, what's your reaction to this, because Alessandro brings up a good point, developers are going faster than ever before. The changes of speed and complexity have gone up, so the demand for the IT and/or security groups, or anyone, to be faster, not weeks, minutes. We're talking about a complete time shift here. >> Yeah, so I talk to a lot of customers, and what I keep hearing again and again from them is kind of two things, which is, a need for skills, and reskilling existing staff. When Alessandro talks about the complexity and the scale, think about all the different new tools, new environments, new platforms that these employees and these associates are being exposed to and expected to be able to handle. So, a real, not a skill shortage, but a stress on the skills of the organization. And then secondly, really, our customers are talking to us about the culture in the environment itself, the culture of collaboration, the culture of automation, and the kind of impact that has in our organization, the way teams are now expected to work together, to share information, to share automation, to push, you know, we talk about shifting left in a lot of things now in IT, automation is now shifting left, pushing automation and access to subsystems, IT subsystems and resources, into the hands of people who traditionally haven't had direct access to those resources. So really kind of shift in skills, and a shift in culture I see. >> Ah, the culture. (indistinct), I want to come back to that culture thing, but I want to ask you specifically on that point, do you think automation users still view automation as just repeating and simplifying processes that they already are doing? You've heard the term, "Done it three times, automate it." Is that definition changing and evolving, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, IT is really changing, going from the traditional, "I'm a network engineer and I use a command line to update my devices I'm responsible for, the config devices, and then I decide to write a playbook using a really cool product like Ansible to drive automation into my daily tasks." And then it comes up to exposing, again, exposing that subsystem I'm responsible for, whatever it is, storage, network, compute, whatever it is, exposing that op so other people can consume it without me being involved, right? So that's a real change in a mindset, and tooling, and approach, that I'm going to expose that op to a set of workflows, business workflows, that drive automation throughout an organization. So that's a real kind of evolution of automation, (indistinct) first, and that's usually focused mostly on day zero, provisioning of a new service. Now we see a lot more focus, or a lot of additional focus on day two operations. How do I automate my day two operations to make them a lot more efficient, as my scale and complexity grows? How do I take the human element out of operating this on a day to day basis? >> So you're saying basically, if I understand you correctly, the system's architecture view, or mindset, around automation, it moves from "Hey, I'm going to use," and Ansible by the way is great for "Hey, I want to automate something, I'm doing a lot," that's cool. But you're looking at it differently. If I understand you correctly, you're saying the automation has to be a system view, meaning you create the rules of the road so that automation can happen at the front lines of the CICD pipeline. You mentioned shift left, is that the difference, is that kind of what's happening here, that's beyond just doing automation, because you can automate it, so you've done that, this is like the next level, is that what you're getting at? >> It is, and we joke about it a little bit, crushing silos, right? Breaking down silos, and again, I keep talking about culture, it really is important, tools are important and technology's important, but the culture's super important, and trying to think of that thing from a systems mindset, of sort of workflows and orchestration of a business process that touches IT components, and how do I automate that and expose that to that workflow, without a human having to touch it, right? Yet still enforce my security protocols, my performance expectations, my compliance stuff, all of that stuff still needs to be enforced, and that's where repeatable automation comes in, of being able to expose this stuff up into these system-level workflows. >> And then there is another element to this (indistinct), I think it's really important to attach to this, the element of speed. We talk about complexity, we talk about scale, but then there is this emerging third dimension, as I call it, that is the speed. And the speed has a number of different articulation, it's the speed when you're thinking about how quickly you need to deliver the application. If you're in a very competitive environment, think about web scale startups for example, or companies in an emerging market, and then you have the speed in terms of reacting to a cybersecurity attack, which Tom just mentioned. And then you have the third kind of speed I'm thinking about right now, which is the increasing amount of artificial intelligence, so an algorithmic kind of operation that is taking place in the organization. For now it's still very limited, but it's not unthinkable that going forward, the operations will be driven, or at least assisted by artificial intelligence. This speed, just like the scale and the complexity we mentioned before, are impossible to be addressed by a single team, and so automation becomes indispensable. >> Yeah, that's a great point, I want to just double click on that, I mean both Tom and Joe were just talking about system, they used the word system. In a subsystem, if one is going faster than the other, to your point, there's a bottleneck there. So if the IT group or security groups are going to take time to approve things, they're not putting rules to the road together to automate and help developers be faster, because look, it's clear, we've been reporting on this in theCUBE, cloud developers are fast. They're moving really fast with code. And so what happens is, if they're going to shift left, that means they're going to be at the point of coding to set policies on security. So, that's going to put pressure on the other subsystems to go faster, so they have to then expose rules of the road, or I'm just making that up, but policy base, or have some systems thinking. They can't just be the old way of saying "No, slow it down." So this is a cultural thing, I think Joe, you brought up culture, Alessandro, you brought up culture. Is that still there? That speed, fast team here and a slow team here? Is that still around, or people getting faster on both sides? And I'm kind of talking about IT, generally speaking, they tend to be slower than the developers. >> Well, just a couple comments, first of all, you heard silos, you heard complexity, you heard speed, talked about shift left. Let me sort of maybe tie those together, right? What's happened to date is every silo has their own set of tooling, right? And so one silo might move very fast, with a very private set of tools, or network management, or security, or whatever, right? And if you think about it, one of the number one skills gaps right now is for automation people. But if an automation person has to learn 17 different tools, 'cause I'm running on three public clouds, I'm on-premise, edge, and I'm doing things to move network storage, compute, security, all sorts of different systems, the tooling is so complicated, right, that I end up with a bunch of specialists. Which can only do one or two things, because they don't know the other domains and they don't know the skills. One of the things we've seen from our customers, I think this is a fundamental shift in automation, is that what we've done with Ansible in particular is, we actually adopted Ansible because of its simplicity. It's actually human-readable, you don't have to be a hardcore programmer to write automation. So that allows the emergence of citizen creators of automation. There's not like a group in some ivory tower that now can make automation and they do it for the masses. Individuals can now use Ansible to create automation. Going cross-domain, Ansible automation touches networks, security, storage, compute, cloud, edge, Linux, Windows, containers, traditional, ITSM, it touches so many systems, that basically what you have is you have a set of power tooling, in Ansible, that allows you now to share automation across teams, 'cause they speak the same language, right? And that's how you go faster. If every silo is fast, but when you have to go inter-silo you slow down, or have to open a ticket, or have some (indistinct) mismatch, it causes delays, errors, and exposures. >> I think that is a very key point, I mean that delay of opening up tickets, not being responsive, Alessandro, you put up machine learning and AI, I mean if you think about what that could do from an automation standpoint, if you can publish the HIPAA rules for your healthcare, you can just traverse that with a bot, right? I mean this is the new... This just saves so much time, why even open up a ticket? So if you can shift left and do the security, and there's kind of rules there, this is a trend, how do you make that happen, how do you bust the silos, and I guess that's the question I'd love to get everyone to react to, because that implies some sort of horizontally scalable control plane. How does someone do that in an architectural way, that doesn't really kind of, maybe break everything, or make the (indistinct) go into a cultural sideways situation? >> Maybe I can jump in, and grab this one, and then maybe ask Alessandro to weigh in afterwards, but, what we've seen and what you'll see some of the speakers at AnsibleFest this year talk about, from a cultural perspective is bringing teams together across automation guilds, JPMC calls it a community of practice, where they're bringing hundreds and thousands of individuals in the organization together virtually, into these teams that share best practices, and processes and automation that they've created. Secondly, and this is a little bit of a shameless plug for Ansible, which is having a common language, a common automation language across these teams, so that sharing becomes obviously a lot easier when you're using the same language. And then thirdly, what we see a lot now is people treating automation as code. Storing that, and get version managing and version controlling and checking in, checking out, really thinking of automation differently from an individual writing a script, to this being infrastructure or whatever my subsystem is, managed it and automated it as code, and thinking of themselves as people responsible for code. >> These are all great points. I think that on top of all these things, there is an additional element which is change management. You cannot count on technology alone to change something that is purely cultural, as we kept saying during this video right now. So, I believe that a key element to win, to succeed in an automation project, is to couple the technology, great technology, easy to understand, able to become the common language as Tom just said, with an effort in change management that starts from the top. It's something you don't see very often because a technology vendor rarely works with a more consulting firm, but it's definitely an area that I think would be very interesting to explore for our customers. >> That's a great point on the change management, but let me ask you, what do you think it needs to make automation more frictionless for users, what do you see that needs to happen, Alessandro? >> I think there are at least a couple of elements that need to change. The first one is that, the effort that we're seeing right now in the industry, to further democratize the capability to automate has to go one notch further. And by that I mean, implementing cell service provisioning portals and ways for automatically execute an automation workflow that already exists, so that an end user, somebody that works in the line of business, and doesn't understand necessarily what the automation workflow, the script is doing, still able to use it, to consume it when it, she or he needs to use it. This is the first element, and then the second element that is definitely more ambitious, is about the language, about how do I actually write the automation workflow? This is a key problem. It's true that some automation engines and some workflows have done, historically speaking, a better job than others, in simplifying the way we write automation workflows, and definitely this is much simpler than writing code with a programming language, and it's simpler than writing automation compared to a tool that we use 10, 15 years ago. But still, there is a certain amount of complexity, because you need to understand how to write in a way that the automation framework understands, and you need even before that, you need to express what you want to achieve, and in a way that the automation engine understands. So, I'm thinking that going forward we'll start to see artificial intelligence being applied to this problem, in a way that's very similar to what OpenAI Microsoft are doing with Codex, the capability that is a model that allows a person to write in plain English through a comment in code, to translate that comment into actual code, taken from GitHub or through the machine learning process that's been done. I'm really thinking that going forward, we will start to see some effort in the same direction, but applied to automation. What if the AI could assist us, not replace us, in writing the automation workflow so that more people are capable to translating what they want to achieve, in a way that is automatable? >> So you're saying the language, making it easy to program, or write, or create. Being a creator of automation. And then having that be available as code, with other code, so there's kind of this new paradigm of automating the automation. >> In a sense, this is absolutely true, yes. >> In addition to that, John, I think there's another dimension here which is often overlooked, which we do spend a lot of time on. It's one thing to have things like Alessandro mentioned, that are front edge in terms of helping you write code, but you want to know something? In big organizations, a lot of times what we find is, someone's already written the code that you need. You know what the problem is? You don't know about it, you can't find it, you can't share it and you can't collaborate on it, so the best code is something that somebody's already invested the time to write, test, burn in, certify, what if they could share it, and what if people could find it, and then reuse it? Right, everybody's talking about low code, no code, well, reuse is the best, right? Because you've already invested expertise into doing it. So we've spent a lot of time working with our customers based on their feedback, on building the tools necessary for them to share automation, to collaborate on it, certify it, and also to create that supply chain from partners who create integrations and interfaces to their systems, and to be able to share that content through the supply chain out to our customers and have them be able to share automation across very large globally distributed organizations. Very powerful. >> That's a powerful point, I mean reuse, leverage there, is phenomenal. Discovery engine's got to be built. You got to know, I mean someone's got to build a search engine for the code. "Hey code, who's written some code?" But just a whole 'nother mindset, so this brings up my next question for you guys, 'cause this is really, we're teasing out the biggest things coming next in automation. These are all great points, they're all about the future, where will the puck be, let's skate to where the puck will be, but it's computer science and automation that's being democratized and opened up more, so it's, what do you guys think is the biggest thing coming next for automation? >> Joe, you want to go next? >> Sure. Sure. Yeah, I'll take it. So we're getting a glimpse of that with a number of customers right now that we're working with that are doing things around concepts like self-healing infrastructures. Well what the heck is that? Basically, it's tying event systems, and AI, which is looking at what's going on in an environment, and deciding that something is broken, sub-optimal, spending too much, there's some issue that needs to be dealt with. In the old days, it was, that system would stop with opening a ticket, dispatch some people who were either manually or semi-automated go fix their whatever. Now people are connecting these systems and saying "Wait a minute. I've got all this rich data coming through my eventing systems. I can make some sense out of it with AI or machine learning. Then I can drive automation, I just eliminated a whole bunch of people, time, exposure, cost, everything else." So I think that, sort of a ventureman automation is going to be huge. I'm going to argue that every single system in the world that uses AI, the result of that's going to be, I want to go do something, I want to change, optimize my move, secure, stop, start, relocate, how's that going to get done? It's going to get done with automation. >> And what Joe just said is really highly successful in the consumer space. If you think about solutions like If This Then That, or Zapier for example, those are examples of event-driven automation. They've been in the consumer space for a long time, and they are wildly popular to the point that there are dozens of clones and competitors. The enterprise space, it didn't adopt the same approach so far, but we start to see event bridges, and event hubs that can really help with this. And this really connects to the previous point, at this point I'm a broken record, which is about the speed and the complexity. If the environment is so spread out, so complex, and it goes all the way to the edge, and all these events take place at a neck-breaking pace, the only way for you is to tie the automation workflows that you have written, to a trigger, an event that takes place at some point, according to your logic. >> Tom, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, last but not least on that kind of thread, which is sort of the architectures as we get out to the edge, what does it take to automate things at the edge? We thought there was a big jump from data center to cloud, and now when you start extending that out to the edge, am I going to need a new automation platform to handle those edge devices? Will I need a new language, will I need a new team, or can I connect these things together using a common platform to develop the automate at the edge? And I think that's where we see some of our customers moving now, which is automating those edge environments which have become critical to their business. >> Awesome, I want to ask one final question while I've got you guys here in this power panel, great insights here. Operational complexity was mentioned, skills gap was mentioned earlier, I want to ask you guys about the organizational behavior and dynamic going on with this change. Automation, hybrid, multi-cloud, all happening. When you start getting into speed of application development for the modern app, opensource where things are opening up and things are going to be democratized with automation and code and writing automation, and scaling that, you're going to have a cultural battle that's happening, and we're kind of seeing it play out in real time. DevOps has kind of gone and been successful, and we're seeing cloud-native bring new innovation, people are refactoring their business models with cloud technologies, now the edge is here, so this idea of speed, shifting left, from a developer standpoint, is putting pressure on the old, incumbent systems, like the security group, or the IT group that's still holding onto their ticketing system, and they're slower, they're getting requests, and the developer's like "Okay, go faster, I want this done faster." So we're seeing departments reorganizing. What do you guys see, 'cause Red Hat, you guys have been in there, all these big accounts for the generation of this modern era. What's the cultural dynamics happening, and what can companies do to be successful, to get to the next level? >> So I think for us, John, we certainly see it and we experience it, across thousands of customers, and what we've done as an organization is put together adoption journeys, a consulting engagement for our customers around an automation adoption journey, and that isn't just about the technology, it's all throughout that technology, it's about those cultural things, thinking differently about the way I automate and the way I share, and the way I do these tasks. So it's as much about cultural and process as it is about technology. And our customers are asking us for that help. Red Hat, you have thousands of customers that are using this product, surely you can come and tell us how we can achieve more with automation, how can we break down these silos, how can we move faster, and so we've put together these offerings, both directly as well as with our partners, to try and help these customers kind of get over that cultural hump. >> Awesome. Anyone else want to react to the cultural shift and dynamics and how it can play out in a positive way? >> Yeah, I think that it's a huge issue. We always talk about people, processes, and technology. Well the people issue's a really big deal here. We're seeing customers, huge organizations, with really capable teams building apps and services and infrastructures, saying "Help me think about automation in a new way." The old days, it was "Hey, I'm thinking about it as a cost savings thing." Yeah, there's still cost savings in there. To your point, John, now they're talking about speed, and security, and things like that. How fast, zero day exploits, now it's like zero hour exploits. How fast can I think about securing something? You know, time to heal, time to secure, time to optimize, so people are asking us, "What are the best practices? What is the best way to look at what I've got, my automation deficits," used to have tech deficits, now you got automation deficits, right? "What do I need to do culturally?" It's very similar to what happened with DevOps, right? Getting teams to get together and think about it differently and holistically, that same sort of transition is happening, and we're helping customers do that, 'cause we're talking to a lot of them where you've got the scholars have been through it. >> Awesome. Alessandro, your thoughts on this issue. >> I think that what Tom and Joe just said is going to further aggravate, it's going to happen more and more going forward, and there is a reason for that. And this connects back with the skill problem, that we discussed before. In the last 10 years, I've seen growing demand for developers to become experts in a lot of areas that have nothing to do with development, code development. They had to become experts in cloud infrastructures, they had to become experts in security because, you've probably heard this many times, security's everybody's responsibility. Now they've been asked to become experts in artificial intelligence, transforming their title into something like ML engineer. The amount of skills and disciplines that they need to master, alone, by themself, would require a lifetime of work. And we're asking human beings to get better and better at all of these things, and all of the best practice. It's absolutely impossible. And so the only way for them, yeah, five jobs in one, six jobs in one, right? Probably for the same seller, and the only way that these people can execute the best practice, enforce the best practice, if the best practices are encoded in automation workflow, not necessarily written by them, but by somebody else, and execute them at the right time, the right context, and for the right reason. >> It's like the five tool player in baseball, you got to do five different things, I mean this is, you got to do AI, you got to do machine learning, you got to have access to all the data, you got to do all these different things. This is the future of automation, and automation's critical. I've never heard that term, automation deficit or automation debt, we used to talk about tech debt, but I think automation is so important because the only way to go fast is to have automation, kind of at the center of it. This is a huge, huge topic. Thank you very much for coming on, power panel on the future of automation, Joe, Tom, Alessandro from Red Hat, thanks for coming on, everyone, really appreciate the insight, great conversation. >> Thanks, John. >> 'Kay, this is theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 virtual. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (calm music)

(bright music) >> Well, hi everybody. John Walls here on theCUBE, continuing our coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 with Tom Anderson, the Vice President of Product Management at Red Hat. And Tom, you've been the answer, man, for theCUBE here over the last a week, 10 days or so. Third cube appearance, I hope we haven't worn you out. >> No, you haven't John, I love it, I love doing it. So that's great to have you have you at the event. >> Thank you for letting us be a part of that. It's been a lot of fun. Let's let's go and look at the event now. As far as big picture here, major takeaways that you think that have been talked about, that you think you'd like people, customers to go home with. If you will, though, a lot of this has been virtual obviously, but when I say go home, I made that figuratively, but what, what do you want people to remember and then apply to their businesses? >> Right. So being a product guy, I want to talk about products usually, right? So the big kind of product announcements from this year's event have been the rollout, and really, the next generation of the Ansible automation platform, which is really a rearchitecture turning it into a cloud native application an automation application itself that scales to our customer needs. So a lot of big announcements around that. And so what does that do for customers? That's really bringing them the automation platform that they can scale from the data center, to the cloud, to the Edge and everywhere in between, across a single platform with a single easy to use automation language. And then secondly, on that, as automation starts to shift left, we always talk about technology shifting left towards the developer, as automation is also shifting left towards the developer and other personas in an organization we're really happy about the developer tools and the tooling that we're providing to the customers with the new automation platform too, that brings development of content automation content. So the creation, the testing, the deployment and the management of that content across an enterprise far easier than it's ever been. So it's really kind of, it's a little bit about the democratization of automation. We see that shifting left, if you will. And I know I've said that already, but we see that shifting left of automation into other parts of the organization, beyond the domain experts, the network engineers or the storage experts, et cetera, pushing that automation out into the hands of other personas in the organization has been a big trend that we've seen and a lot of product announcements around that. So really excited about the product announcements in particular, but also the involvement and the engagement of our ecosystem, our upstream community. So important to our product and our success, our ecosystem partners, and obviously last but not least our customers and our users. >> So you hit a lot of big topics there. So let's talk about the Edge. You know, that seems to be a, you know, a fairly significant trend at this point, right? 'Cause trying to get the automation out there where the data besides, and that's where the apps are. Right? So where the data is, that's where things are happening out there on the Edge. So maybe just dive into that a little bit and about how you're trying to facilitate that need. >> Yeah. So a couple of trends around the Edge, obviously it's the architecture itself with lower capacity or lower capability devices and compute infrastructure at the Edge. And whether that's at the far edge with very low capacity devices, or even at near edge scenarios where you don't have, you know, data center, IT people out there to support those environments. So being able to get at those low capability, low capacity environments remotely Ansible is a really good fit for that because of our agentless architecture, the agentless architecture of Ansible itself allows you to drive automation out into the devices and into the environments where there isn't a high capacity infrastructure. And the other thing that the other theme that we've seen is one of the commonalities that no matter where the compute is taking place and the users are, there always has to be network. So we see a lot of network automation use cases out at the Edge and Ansible is, you know, the defacto network automation solution in the market. So we see a lot of our customers driving Ansible use cases out into their Edge devices. >> You know, you talk about development too, and just kind of this changing relationship between Ansible and DevOps and how that has certainly been maturing and seems to be really taking off right now. >> Yeah. So for, you know, what we've seen a lot of, as you know, is becoming frictionless, right? How do we take the friction out of the system that frees developers up to be more productive for organizations to be more agile, to roll out applications faster? How do we do that? We need to get access to the infrastructure and the resources that developers need. We need to get that access into their hands when they need it. And in our frictionless sort of way, right? So, you know, all of the old school, traditional ways of developers having to get infrastructure by opening a help desk ticket to get servers built for them and waiting for IT ops to build the servers and to deploy them and to send them back a message, all that is gone now. These, you know, subsystem owners, whether that's compute or cloud or network or storage, their ability to use Ansible to expose their resources for consumption by other personas, developers in this case, makes developers happy and more efficient because they can just use those automation playbooks, those Ansible playbooks to deploy the infrastructure that they need to develop, test and deploy their applications on. And the actual subsystem owners themselves can be assured that the usage of those environments is compliant with their standards because they've built and shared the automation with those developers to be able to consume when they want. So we're making both sides happy, agile, efficient developers and happy infrastructure owners, because they know that the governance and compliance around that system usage is on point with what they need and what they want. >> Yeah. It's a big win-win and a very good point. I always like it when we kind of get down to the nitty-gritty and talk about what a customer is really doing. Yeah. And because if we could talk about hypotheticals and trends and developing and maturity rates and all those kinds of things, but in terms of actual customers, you know, what people really are doing, what do you think have been a few of the plums that you'd like to make sure people were paying attention to? >> Yeah. I think from this year's event, I was really taken by the JP Morgan Chase presentation. And it really kind of fits into my idea of shifting left in the democratization of automation. They talked about, I think the number was around 7,000 people, associates inside that organization that are across 22 countries. So kind of global consumption of this. Building automation playbooks and sharing those across the organization. I mean, so gone are the days of, you know, very small teams of people doing, just automating the things that they do and it's grown so big. And, so pervasive now, I think JP Morgan Chase really kind of brings that out, tease that out, that kind of cultural impacts that's had on their organization, the efficiencies that have been able to draw off from that their ability to bring the developers and their operations teams together to be working as one. I think their story is really fantastic. And I think this is the second year. I think this is the second year that JP Morgan Chase has been presenting at Fest and this years session was fantastic. I really, really enjoyed that. So I would encourage, I would encourage anybody to go back and look at the recording of that session and there's game six groups, total other end of the spectrum, right? Financial services, JP Morgan Chase, global company to Gamesis, right? These people who are rolling out new games and need to be able to manage capacity really well. When a new game hits, right? Think about a new game hits and the type of demand and consumption there is for that game. And then the underlying infrastructure to support it. And Gamesis did a really great presentation around being able to scale out automation to scale up and down automation, to be able to spin up clusters and deploy infrastructure, to run their games on an as-needed basis. So kind of that business agility and how automation is driving that, or business agility is driving the need for automation in these organizations. So that that's just a couple of examples, but there was a good ones from another financial services that talked about the cultural impacts of automation, their idea of extreme automation. In fact, one of the sessions I interviewed Joe Mills, a gentlemen from this card services, financial services company, and he talked about extreme automation there and how they're using automation guilds in communities of practice in their organization to get over the cultural hurdles of adopting automation and sharing automation across an organization. >> Hm. So a wide array obviously of customer uses and all very effective, I guess, and, you know, and telling their own story. Somewhat related to that, and you, as you put it out there too, if you want to go back and look, these are really great case studies to take a look at. For those who, again, who maybe couldn't attend, or haven't had a chance to look at any of the sessions yet, what are some of the kinds of things that were discussed in terms of sessions to give somebody a flavor of what was discussed and maybe to tease them a little bit for next year, right? And just in case that you weren't able to participate and can't right now, there's always next year. So maybe if you could give us a little bit of flavor of that, too. >> Yeah. So we kind of break down the sessions a little bit into the more kind of technical sessions and then the sort of less technical sessions, let's put it that way. And on the technical session front, certainly a couple of sessions were really about getting started. Those are always popular with people new to Ansible. So there's the session that aired on the 29th, which has been recorded and you can rewatch it. That's getting started Q and A with the technical Ansible experts. That's a really, really great session 'cause you see that the types of questions that are being asked. So you know, you're not alone. If you're new to Ansible, the types of questions are probably the questions that you have as well. And then the, obviously the value of the tech Ansible experts who are answering this question. So that was a great session. And then for a lot of folks who may want to get involved in the community, the upstream community, there's a great session that was also on the 29th. And it was recorded for rewatching, around getting started with participation in the Ansible community and a live Q and A there. So the Ansible community, for those who don't know is a large, robust, vibrant, upstream community of users, of software companies, of all manners of people that are contributing and contributing upstream to the code and making Ansible a better solution for them and for everybody. So that's a great session. And then last but not least, almost always the most popular session is the roadmap sessions and Massimo Ferrari, gentleman on my team did a great session on the Ansible roadmap. So I do a search on roadmap in the session catalog, and you can see the recording of that. So that's always a big deal. >> Yeah, roadmaps were great, right? Because especially for newcomers, they want to know how I'm down here at 0.0. And, I've got a destination in mind, I want to go way out there. So how do I get there? So, to that point for somebody who is beginning their journey, and maybe they have, you know, they're automated with the ability to manually intervene, right? And now you've got to take the hands off the wheel and you're going to allow for full automation. So how, what's the message you want to get across to those people who maybe are going to lose that security blanket they've been hanging on to, you know, for a long time and you take the wheels off and go. >> No John, that's a great question. And that's usually a big apprehension of kind of full automation, which is, you know, that kind of turning over the reins, if you will, right to somebody else. If I'm the person who's responsible for this storage system, if I'm the person responsible for this network elements, these routers, these firewalls, whatever it might be, I'm really kind of freaked out about giving controls or access to those things, from a configuration standpoint, to people outside of my organization, who don't have the same level of expertise that I do, but here's the deal that in a well implemented well architected Ansible automation platform environment, you can control the type of automation that people do. Who does that against what managing that automation as code. So checking in, checking out, version control, deployment access. So there's a lot of controls that can be put in place. So it isn't just a free-for-all automated. Everybody automating everything. Organizations can roll out automation and have access to different kinds of automation, can control and manage what their organizations can use and see and do with Ansible. So there's lots of controls built-in for organizations to put in place and to make those subsystem owners give them confidence that how people are accessing their subsystems using Ansible automation can be controlled in a way that makes them comfortable and assures compliance and governance around those resources. >> Well, Tom, we appreciate the time. Once again, I know you've been a regular here on theCUBE over the course of the event. We'll give you a little bit of time off and let you get back to your day job, but we do appreciate that and I wish you success down the road. >> Thank you very much. And we'll see you again next year. >> You bet. Thank you, Tom Anderson, joining us Vice President of Product Management at Red Hat, talking about AnsibleFest, 2021. I'm John Walls, and you're watching theCUBE. (lively instrumental music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. We're not face-to-face this year, we're in virtual remote mode. This is theCUBE virtual and obviously it's AnsibleFest 2020 virtual. We've got a great panel of experts and leaders at Red Hat and Ansible. I want to introduce them. Dave Lindquist, general manager and vice president of engineering of hybrid cloud management at Red Hat. Joe Fernandes, vice president and general manager of the Core Cloud platforms at Red Hat. And Tom Anderson, vice President at Red Hat, Ansible Automation Platform, the big news and feature of this event. Tom, great to see you, Joe and David, thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here. >> Every year I love talking about Red Hat because I remember going back a few years ago, Arvind from IBM was on at Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, and you can see the twinkle in his eye. This was three, four years ago. Cloud native was really gearing up and now it's kind of mainstream. Last year at AnsibleFest, all the buzz was collaboration, collections, and you can start to see that integration piece kicking in, and this year at the event, the big story is the same. More collections, more integrations, a lot of collaboration around code. Content equals code. So it really points to the trend with Kubernetes of multi-cloud, multi-cluster. So the first question for you guys is, why would anyone want to deploy multiple clusters simultaneously and why is multi-cluster such a big deal? Tom, we'll start with you. >> Great, okay, yeah. So why is multi-cluster such a big deal? Basically, Kubernetes and our OpenShift container platform have now become a strategic part of our customers' environments, of their infrastructure for building and deploying cloud native applications on. And as becoming a strategic part of that, when you're deploying production applications you're going to need all kinds of things like scale out, redundancy, cloud location for access to different cloud provider locations for application requirements and whatnot. So there are a bunch of requirements for why customers would deploy OpenShift in a multi-cluster way. And maybe I'll turn it over to Joe Fernandes a little bit 'cause he's got a lot of background on the OpenShift side of this. >> Joe, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, thanks, Tom. Yeah, so I mean, as Tom mentions, a number of reasons why customers may deploy or need to deploy more than one Kubernetes cluster. So within a cluster, you can certainly have multiple applications, multiple developers, multiple teams work, but as you start to scale your usage you may want additional clusters. It could be because you want to separate your production environments from your dev and test environments. It could be for capacity, right? You have more development teams or more production environments than you want to sort of tie to a single cluster. Then you start expanding out into locations, right? Maybe you started in the data center, then you started doing deployments to one public cloud, then to other public clouds, and then that's only going to grow. We see more and more customers deploying multi-cloud strategies. And then the new thing right now that everybody wants to talk to us about is edge, and as you get into edge deployments, now those, the number of clusters could really explode into the hundreds or thousands. And so it all points back to you need a sane way to manage across all these clusters regardless of where they run and regardless of how many you have, and that's really what we've been working on with the Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes. >> What's the big draw? What's drawing the customers in with multi-cluster and multi-cloud? Obviously, the multi-cloud makes a lot of sense, you have multiple clouds. Sounds easier just saying it than doing it. But what is it about multi-cluster and multi-cloud that's drawing customers and people into this concept? >> Yes, I can start. I think what's drawing customers in is the need, the desire to have sort of a common abstraction for the applications that's consistent regardless of where they happen to run, right? So making sure that the developers don't have to worry about what infrastructure the applications are landing on, and they have that consistent experience that it's, abstracts their applications away from that infrastructure. So that gives the developers more flexibility, but it's also about flexibility and agility for those infrastructure owners, right, because they too want to make decisions on where stuff runs. Not because they're particularly tied to an infrastructure, but based on things like cost or security or other concerns. And so these are all drivers for multi-cluster and multi-cloud strategies and I think our hybrid cloud strategy at Red Hat really hits the mark to address those needs. >> Well, you guys had great performance. We've been following the past few years just the OpenShift and beyond, kind of the whole Red Hat, and Ansible specifically too, is doing real well in the marketplace so congratulations. David, I want to ask you about the management piece. This comes up over and over again. It's all good having the abstraction layer, you got all kinds of new sets of services, but multi-cluster management is not, (laughs) is not trivial. There's challenges for ops and automation teams. Could you share your perspective on how you guys are looking at the multi-cluster management? >> Sure, sure. The first thing we saw, and this kind of follows on the points that Joe and Tom are making, is that as customers start embracing the development with containers and leveraging Kubernetes, you start finding that they're putting up clusters across their data centers, across cloud, to support different parts of the life cycle of development, or supporting their own production environment or distributed workloads across clouds, across the data centers. And so the challenges that operations and management run into, and security in particular, is how do you start managing the clusters, their life cycle. It's easy to put 'em up, to provision 'em quickly, but how do you update and upgrade those? How do you make sure they're compliant with your various regulatory compliance like PCI, HIPAA, or the various federal standards? How do you make sure that compliance is adhered to across, and security across those clusters, as well as the applications themselves? How do you manage the applications through their life cycle? How do you have deployment policies? So the challenges for ops and automation and security are to have a consistent policy-driven way to take care of the clusters across these hybrid environments, and making sure they adhere to the compliance and security of the enterprise. >> Tom, multi-cluster deployments is a big part of this integration. We heard a little bit, obviously, compliance and governance is huge. IT's been living this world of policies and governance, but when we start moving fast into these new cutting edge services that are providing a lot of value, integration into existing IT infrastructure is important with clusters. How do you view that because this is where I think maybe collections are other things are, is this an indicator of what's happening? Can you give your thoughts on the customers out there who want to do multiple clusters for all the benefits, but then go, "Oh, I got to integrate it into existing IT infrastructure"? >> Yeah, absolutely. So that's what's happening right now. As Kubernetes and as OpenShift has become a strategic platform for our customers, the idea of, I'm going to say, kind of normalizing the operations of that platform as part of a greater IT ecosystem has become a challenge for them. And for the most part, they've already automated security, network, provisioning, app deployment, application updates, using the Ansible Automation Platform, and so it only makes sense that as Kubernetes and as OpenShift becomes a strategic platform for them, they want to use that same language, that same tool set, that same automation fabric, if you will, to integrate the applications that are running on OpenShift with the rest of the environment. So, for example, when I add a new node to a cluster or more capacity to a cluster or to clusters, I probably want to update my systems of record, right? My CMDBs or my ITSM systems. When I deploy a new app or make an update to an app on a cluster or across clusters, I'm probably going to want to update my load balancer to be able to direct traffic correctly to that, and that load balancer probably isn't running, my enterprise load balancer is kind of platform independent, so I'd need to be able to update that load balancer to properly direct traffic. Well, IT has already automated that function using Ansible. So by creating the collections that we have created for OpenShift and for Kubernetes, it makes it much easier for our customers to be able to just plug that in and adapt that to their existing automation infrastructure. So now it just becomes part of their overall IT environment. >> So just a follow-up real quick, if you don't mind. What are some of the challenges you're hearing from your customers around containerization and that growing space? I just talked to the IDC research analyst earlier at another virtual CUBE session where she says, roughly their estimate is 5 to 10% of enterprises are containerized, which is huge growth opportunities. The headroom in containers is massive, so what are some of the challenges? Is it easy to get started? This seems to be a nice opportunity for you guys. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, I think that the way of looking at it with all that growth space, it's also the speed at which Kubernetes adoption and containerized application adoption is happening. And so, IT organizations are having to respond faster than they ever have before as this environment grows, and it is a multi-cloud environment. They have Kubernetes, OpenShift running on-prem, in the cloud, multiple data centers, as both Joe and Dave have said, and it becomes critical that they automate that correctly and accurately to ensure security, consistency, performance, availability. All of the other things that drive the requirement for automation standardization, all of those things that drive the requirements for automation are applicable to Kubernetes environments and containerized environments as well except they're moving and expanding faster, so teams have to respond quicker to the need. >> Joe, what's your take on this? I mean, to me, I'm the glass half full. I think I've seen containers be great and that maybe I'm looking at the early adopters, but those numbers seem a little bit low to me. What does that mean to you? More people are now getting up to speed. Is it a tipping point? It just seems a little bit low, and David, if you want to comment too, I think this an important number there. Joe, what's your take? >> Yeah, I mean, I think the rate represents an opportunity, but I see the growth as having been tremendous even in just the first few years. But to get to that broader market we did continue making it easier for customers to bring their applications to this new environment, to ride on existing infrastructure, and ultimately for our customers that means an evolution, right? An evolution of how they are going to manage those applications, how they're going to build and deploy them. And so with the integration of OpenShift and our advanced container management platforms with Ansible we can bring that automation to the mix to sort of tie those together, right? So to tie in the existing compute infrastructure, to tie in storage and networking and configure those as needed. And then as Tom mentioned, all those other systems, whether it's an IT service management system, something like a ServiceNow or other ticketing systems or other enterprise systems that exist that you just can't ignore. Because the more you try to go against the grain and do something different, the even harder it'll be. So we need to help customers evolve to take advantage of cloud and cloud native approaches, and the solutions that we're bringing to market are all about enterprise Kubernetes, enterprise container platforms. The combination of those technologies with something like Ansible really helps pave the path for the next phase of growth that we're expecting. >> So, ready for prime time right now. >> Right. >> David, your thoughts real quick on this. Containerization upside. >> Yeah, real quick, the development organizations, development teams, have picked up on containers very rapidly. Everybody is leveraging containers when they develop new applications or modernize the existing applications. So what we found is that a lot of the folks that pushed out very quickly, some greenfield apps, that's the 5, 10, 15, 20% that you're seeing occur. What started getting complex is how you really scale this to your enterprise. How do you really run this at scale from management operations and security perspective? OpenShift is critical, that gives a consistent platform across the hybrid cloud environments. What we're doing with ACM and the Advanced Cluster Management brings in the security and compliance. And what you'll see through AnsibleFest, what we're doing with Ansible is then, how do we then hook these environments right into all the existing IT environments? That's, to me, what's critical to really bring this to scale to the enterprise. >> Yeah, I think this, to me, the number points to exactly what you guys said. Ready for prime time, scale's there, and the demand's there. And I think, Tom and Joe, I want to ask you specifically the relationship between OpenShift and Ansible, but before that, I remember, forget what year it was, we were doing a CUBE event at, I think it might've been OpenStack, going back to the day, but I remember OpenShift and it was a moment where OpenShift adopted containers and then next year Kubernetes. And I remember talking to the team, them saying, "This is going to be a big bet for OpenShift." Looks like it was a good bet. (laughs) It paid out real well, congratulations. And it was good, you guys stayed the course. But you made it easier, and one of the things was is that the complaint at the time was they didn't want Kubernetes to be the next Hadoop. Easy to use but gets out of control. Not that I meant they're comparable, but Hadoop had that problem of it was easy open source but then it was hard to manage. So OpenShift really took advantage of that. You guys, I think, did a good job on that. But now you got Ansible winning the game on developers, on easy to deploy, so as that scales up, automation's there. So I'd like to hear you guys talk about the connection between OpenShift and Ansible and how that expands the scope of what both products can do for customers. >> Yeah, maybe I'll give it a shot first and then let Joe go after me, which is, look, here's what we have, is we have lots and lots and lots of customers, Red Hat customers that are OpenShift users and that are Ansible users, right? So we have this two large pools. They also represent two very large and vibrant open source community projects. The Ansible project and the Kubernetes project are two hugely popular, vibrant communities, and so it just made sense to kind of be a catalyst in those communities, to bring those two things together, to work together, to the benefit of our customers and to kind of capture the innovation that's going on upstream in the communities. So we decided to get really kind of serious about the integration of these two platforms and integrated Ansible in a native way on Kubernetes so that OpenShift and Kubernetes operators, as well as application developers, could take advantage of that integration without having to learn something new or foreign in order to be able to do it. So it was a native integration using operators, which is the right way to integrate with the Kubernetes platform, with OpenShift in particular. And so that's the way we kind of brought it together to the benefit of our customers. Our customers are, like I said, normalizing the operations of OpenShift as a strategic part of their infrastructure, deploying production applications, and want to be able to tie that into their other systems and other parts of their infrastructure, both from an app deployment process as well as from an infrastructure deployment and management process. So it only made sense that it actually, our customers have been asking us for this and talking to us about this, so it only kind of made perfect sense to kind of get out there and do that, get the communities together innovating, and then take that innovation out for our customer. >> Joe. >> Yeah, the only thing I'd add to that, there's really two specific personas at play here, right? When you think of, there's the IT operations and infrastructure teams. They own those clusters, the provisioning, the configuration, the management of those clusters. And with ACM, with Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, we have now an interface that they can use to see and manage the life cycle of all their clusters. So through that we can integrate Ansible as another automation tool in their portfolio to do things that need to happen when those clusters first get configured or when those clusters get updated and so forth. So if they need to update an ITSM system or configure a network or do whatever it needs to, you have Ansible automation scripts that can be plugged in at the appropriate time in that cluster's life cycle to do that. On the other side, you have the developer and DevOps teams that are consumers of these platforms, right? And what they care about is the applications that they're building, but there's a lot that goes into building it, right? There's the source code management systems, there's the CI systems, the CD systems, there's the test environments and stage and prod. And so there's a lot of moving parts, and again, and then there's the services themselves that they're configuring so you have, or building, not configuring, you have Ansible again ready to sort of take on some of those tasks, automation tasks that go beyond what Kubernetes is focused on or what you're trying to do with OpenShift. And again, doing it at the appropriate time in the life cycle, all tied in through Advanced Cluster Management which can actually see out to all those clusters and be in that sort of application deployment workflow across those clusters. So those are sort of some of the specific areas and how they pertain to those specific personas that are driving the activity. >> What's interesting, this automation piece really is key across multiple environments, and we've heard that from some of your customers. 'Cause you got now private clouds out there, you got large scale. But, Dave, I want to ask you, what makes Advanced Cluster Management a natural fit with OpenShift and Ansible? What's your take? >> Yeah, good question, John. First, ACM is purpose-built for the Kubernetes environment. It's a cloud native management system, and as we said earlier, we really focused on managing the cluster life cycles, managing the security compliance, and managing applications deployed into these environments. So it was a very natural extension of OpenShift, to be able to manage OpenShift, multiple clusters of OpenShift in hybrid environments. Within your data center, across data centers, across clouds, and the combination. So, very natural fit with OpenShift. As we've been all talking about, as we looked at how did we then bring OpenShift and these resources closer through automation to many of the other parts of your IT environment, that made it natural from ACM to call out into the playbooks of Ansible. So just a simple example, and I think we circled around this a few times. You're deploying a cluster or you're deploying, say, an application to that cluster. You need to configure that into a firewall. Maybe configure it into a load balancer. Maybe register it with a service management system. That, all those calls, they come out through policy from ACM over into Ansible to take advantage of the wealth of playbooks that are available in Ansible to perform those operations. Whether it's security, network, service management, storage, et cetera. >> Real quick follow-up for you is, how has bringing your ACM team and product into Red Hat changed the scope and approach of what you're trying to do? >> Yeah, well, let me say first of all it's been a great experience bringing the team into Red Hat. The environment, the open culture, it's really been invigorating for the whole team. Also, getting much, much closer into the open communities and open sourcing ACM and doing development in the open has really brought us closer really to users, the ecosystem, the communities, accelerating our delivery quality, as well as really getting much more closer insights, getting insights into what's happening in the community, what's happening with the users. So it's really, it's been a great experience all the way around. >> Joe and Tom, quick comment, what do you think people should pay attention to this year at AnsibleFest 2020? What's the big story? Obviously we're in a pandemic. We're going to come out of the pandemic. People want to have a growth strategy that has the right projects on the right rails. They want to either maybe downplay some of the projects that maybe not be a fit, that were exposed during the pandemic. Best practices that are emerging, shifting left for security is one. You're seeing remote workers. People have kind of had a wake-up call on cloud native being relevant for the modern app. Now they're running as fast as they can to build the infrastructure, and guess what? People are not actually in the workplaces. The workforce, the workplace has all changed. Can you guys share your expertise over the years on what is the best practice and approach to take? Because the clock's ticking. >> Yeah, from my perspective and from an Ansible perspective here, we had always been about kind of automate everything, right? Automate every task that is automatable, right? A repeatable task, automate it. Repeatable task, automate it. And over the past couple of years we've really been focused on automation across teams by using Ansible content, the actual automation code, if you will, itself to bring teams together and to cross teams and cross functions. So not just focused on what a network operations person or a network engineer needs to do in their day-to-day job, but connect that to what a security operations person is doing day-to-day in their job in terms of threat detection and intrusion response, or intrusion detection and threat response, and connecting those two teams together via automation to make both of them more responsive and more effective. So we've been on this bandwagon for the past couple of years around Ansible content, and now Ansible collections and Automation Hub, to try and accelerate the way these teams can collaborate together. The pandemic and the pressures that put on the system with remote users and having to do things in a different way only exacerbated, it only kind of enhanced the requirement for that collaboration, that automation across teams. So in a lot of ways, the past six, seven months, both for our Ansible business as well as for the way our customers have been using the technology, has really been an accelerator for that kind of cross-team collaboration, our subscription business, and our Ansible consumption. >> Yeah, well, I said it last year in-person when we were in Atlanta for AnsibleFest 2019, a platform approach is a great way to go. You start out as a tool, you become a platform. You guys are doin' the work over there. I really appreciate it and I want to call that out 'cause I think it's worth calling out. Joe, cloud platforms. Cloud is certainly an enabler. Red Hat and OpenShift has been a great success and can, only has got more work to do. People still got to build out these platforms, and you're seeing private cloud not going away. I mean, we just had a conversation at OpenStack and you guys got customers with a lot of private cloud everywhere. (laughs) So you got private, you got hybrid, you got multi, and you got public. It's pretty crazy. What's your thoughts on what people should take away from AnsibleFest and then going forward post-pandemic? >> Yeah, so, first Tom hit on a number of key points there, right? COVID-19 and everything going on in the world has really just accelerated a lot of these transformations that were already in the works at many of our enterprise customer accounts, right? And now when we're all working remotely, we're all meeting virtually, we're educating our children remotely, it just exacerbates the need to scale our networks, to extend security out to remote workforces, and to do all of these things at much larger scales than we ever envisioned before, and you can't do that without automation. And I would argue, without taking advantage of some of these modern cloud native platforms and cloud native development approaches. And we always say Red Hat's been a big proponent of hybrid cloud, of our open hybrid cloud strategy. We've been talking about that for years, and what we always say is even if that's a strategy that you aren't specifically looking for, it's something that, everybody ends up there, right? Because nobody's running everything in the data center anymore, but as they move out to public cloud they're not completely shutting those data centers off either. As they expand their consumption of public cloud, they tend to start exploring multi-cloud strategies, and now that hybrid cloud is extending out to the edge. So the hybrid cloud is sort of where everybody is, right? And the ability to sort of manage consistently, to run consistently across all those environments, to be able to secure all those environments and scale those environments, and that's what we're all about here at Red Hat and that's sort of the key to our open hybrid cloud strategy and what we're really trying to do with our entire portfolio. >> Awesome, David, final word. We're in a systems world now. The cloud is one big distributed computer. We got the edge, we heard that. Developers just want to code, they want infrastructure as code, you guys got to help 'em get there. What's your take on the importance of AnsibleFest and this systems world we live in? >> Well, there's probably not a more critical time. We've all been saying this and seeing this the last 10 months now. The transformation digitally that's been going on for years, the development transformations, it's all hit a fever pitch. It's been accelerated through COVID. In particular, how quickly can I adjust to a digital transformation? How quickly can I adjust my business processes? How quickly can I really become a very agile DevOps SRE organization? That is so critical. So at AnsibleFest what we're doing is bringing together platforms with automation with the ability to manage it at scale with security. That's what's going on from Red Hat in a open environment, open world, with communities and huge ecosystems. That, to me, is the critical rallying points, and really necessary to drive this accelerated transformation. >> Yeah, and again, open source continues to power it. One thing I'm impressed with is this concept of content, not content as in a video, but content as code. It's collaboration. It's what people are sharing their playbooks and they're sharing their, are opening things up. I think there's going to be a whole 'nother level of developer collaboration that's going to emerge and you guys are on the front end of all of this. I think it's going to be pretty powerful. I don't think yet clearly understood yet by most folks, but when you start seeing the automation benefits, Tom, I'm sure your team will be like, "Yeah, see, automation platform." Thank you so much for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot. >> Thanks. >> I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, hosting theCUBE virtual for AnsibleFest 2020 virtual. Thanks for watching. (relaxing music)

>>live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the Q covering Answerable Fest 2019. Brought to you by >>Red Hat. >>Okay, welcome back. It runs two cubes. Live coverage of Ansel Fest here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm John for a host of the Cube with stewed Minutemen. Analysts were looking angle. The Cube are next to guest Tom Anderson and most product owner. Red Hat is part of the sensible platform automation properly announced. And Richard Henshaw, product manager. Guys, welcome to the Cube Way had all the execs on yesterday and some customers all pretty jazzed up about this year, mainly around just the timing of how automation is really hitting the scene and some of the scale that's going on. You guys had big news with the answerable automation platform. New addition to the portfolio. What's the feedback? >>So far, I think the feedback has been super positive. We have customers have come to us. A lot of the last little one said, Hey, we're maturing. We're moving along the automation maturity curve, right, and we have multiple teams coming to us and saying, Hey, can you help us connect this other team? We've had a lot of success doing cloud provisioning or doing network automation were doing security automation. What have you and they're coming to us and saying, Help us give us kind of the story if you will, to be able to connect these other teams in our organization. And so that way I kind of feel the pole for this thing to move from a tool that automates this or that. This task for that task. Too much more of a platform center. >>It seems to be scaling out in terms of what automation is touching these days. And look at the numbers six million plus activations on get Hub versus other projects. So activities high in the community. But this seems to be much more broader. Scope now. Bring more things together. What's the rationale behind? What's the reasoning? What's the strategy? But the main thing is, >>automation is got to that point where it's becoming the skill set that we do. So it was always the focus. You know, I'm a database administrator. I'm assists out, man. I'm a middle where I'm a nap deaf on those people, then would do task inside their job. But now we're going to the point off, actually, anybody that can see apiece. Technology can automate piece technology in the clouds have shown This is the way to go forward with the things what we had. We bring that not just in places where it's being created from scratch, a new How do you bring that into what's existing? Because a lot of our customers have 20 or 30 years like a heritage in the I T estate. How do you do with all of that? You can't just rebuild everything into new as well. So you gotta be ableto automate across both of those areas and try and keep. You know, we say it's administrative efficiency versus organization effectiveness. Now how do I get to the point of the organization? Could be effective, supposed just doing things that make my job easier. And that's what we're gonna bring with applying automation capability that anybody can take advantage of. >>Richard. I actually felt the keynote demo this morning did a nice job of that line that they set it up with is this is this is tools that that all the various roles and teams just get it, and it's not the old traditional okay, I do my piece and set it up and then throw it over the wall. There was that, you know? Oh, I've got the notification and then some feedback loops and, you know, we huddled for something and it gets done rather fast, not magic. It's still when I get a certain piece done. Okay, I need to wait for it's actually be up and running, but you know, you're getting everybody into really a enterprise collaboration, almost with the tool driving those activities together >>on that. And that's why yesterday said that focus on collaboration is the great thing. All teams need to do that to be more successful because you get Maur inclusivity, Maurin puts. But organizations also need to coordinate what activities they're doing because they have rules, regulations, structures and standards they have to apply. Make sure that those people can do things in a way that's guided for them so that they're they're effective at what they're trying to do. >>Okay, I think I'm going to explain what's in the platform first because an engine and tower and there, what else is in there, what's new? What's what our customers is going to see. That's new. That's different >>it's the new components are automation Hope Collections, which is a technology inside answer ball itself. On also Automation Analytics and the casing is that engine and terrorist of the beating heart of the platform. But it's about building the body around the outside. So automation is about discover abilities like, What can we find out? What automation can I do that I'm allowed to do? Um, and let six is about the post activity. So I've automated all these things. I've done all this work well, How did it go? Who did what, who did? How much of what? How well did it work? How much did it failed? Succeeds and then, once you build on that, you don't start to expand out into other areas. So what? KP eyes, How much of what I do is automated versus no automated? You can start to instigate other aspects of business change, then Gamification amongst teams. Who's the Who's the boat? The closest motive here into the strategy input source toe How? >>Find out what's working right, essentially and sharing mechanism to for other groups in terms of knowing what's happening >>and how is my platform performing which areas are performing well, which airs might not be performing well. And then, as we move down the road, kind of how my performing against my peers are other organizations that are automating using the ants will automation platform doing? And am I keeping up on my doing better? That kind of stuff. >>So, Tom, there's a robust community as we was talking about. Their platform feels like it builds on yet to change the dynamic a little bit. When you talk about the automation hub and collections, you've already got a long list of the ecosystem vendors that are participating here. Bring us two through a little bit. What led Thio. You know all these announcements and where you expect, you know, how would this change the dynamics of >>the body? And maybe we'll split up that question. I'll talk a little bit about partners because it's both partners and customers in community here that's been driving us this way. I'll talk a little bit about partners and Rich talk about the customer piece here, which is partners have been traditionally distributing their content there. Ansel automation content through our engine capability. So our engine release cycle, or cadence, has been sort of the limiting factor to how fast they can get content out to their users and what what the collections does is part of the platforms allows us to separate those things. Rich talked about it yesterday in his keynote, having that stable platform. But you having yet having content be able to read fast. And our partners love that idea because they can content. They can develop content, create content, get into their users hands faster. So partners like at five and Microsoft you've seen on stage here are both huge contributors. And they've been part of the pole for us to get to the platform >>from a customer perspective. And the thing I love most about doing this job with the gas of customers is because I was a customer on Guy was danceable customer, and then I came over to this side on Dhe. I now go and see customers. I see what they've done, and I know what that's what I want to do. Or that's what I was trying to do. And she started to see those what people wanted to achieve, and I was said yesterday it is moving away from should I automate. How would we automate Maura? What should I automate? And so we'll start to see how customers are building their capabilities. And there's no there's many different ways people do. This is about different customers, >>you know. What's interesting is you guys have such a great success formula first. Well, congratulations. It's great to see how this is turning into such a wider market, because is not just the niche configuration management. More automation become with cloud to point a whole new wider category. So congratulations. The formula we see with success is good product, community customers adopting and then ecosystem that seems to be the successful former in these kinds of growth growth waves you guys experiencing? What is the partnering with you mentioned? S five Microsoft? Because that, to me, is gonna be a tipping point in a tel sign for you guys because you got the community. You got the customers that check check ecosystem. What's the partner angle? How do they involve? Take us through that. What's going on? They're >>so you're absolutely so you know, kind of platform velocity will be driven by partner adoption and how many things customers can automate on that platform or through that platform and for us I mean, the example was in the demo this morning where they went to the automation hub and they pulled down the F five collection, plugged it into a workflow, and they were automating. What are partners? Experience through their customers is Look, if I'm a customer, I have a multi cloud environment or hybrid cloud environment. I've got automation from AWS. I've got azure automation via more automation. Five. Got Sisko. I've got Palo Alto. I've got all these different automation tools to try and string them together, and the customers are coming and telling those vendors Look, we don't want to use your automation to end this automation tooling that one we want to use Ansel is the common substrate if you will automation substrate across this platform. So that's motivating the partners to come to us and say, Hey, I had I was out five Aspire last week, and they're all in a natural. I mean, it's really impressive to see just how much there in unanswerable and how much they're being driven by their customers when they do Ansell workshops without five, they say the attendance is amazing so they're being pulled by their customers and therefore the partners are coming to us. And that's driving our platform kind of usability across the across the scale. >>Another angle we'll see when we talk to the engineers of the partners that are actually doing the work to work with danceable is that they're seeing is ah, change also in how they it's no longer like an individual customer side individual day center because everything is so much more open and so much more visible. You know there's value in there, making it appealing and easy for their customers to gain advantage of what they're doing. And also the fact that the scales across those customers as well because they have their internal team's doing it, saying the same things and so bringing them to an automation capable, like Ansel have to push. That means that they also gained some of the customers appreciation for them, making it easier to do their tasking collaboration with us and you know, the best collaborations. We've got some more partners, all initiated by customers, saying Hey, I want you to go and get danceable content, >>the customer driving a lot of behavior, the guest system. Correct. On the just another point, we've been hearing a lot of security side separate sector, but cyber security. A lot of customers are building teams internally, Dev teams building their own stacks and then telling the suppliers a support my AP eyes. So now you start to see more of a P I integration point. Is that something that is gonna be something that you guys gonna be doubling down on? What's that? What's the approach there? How does that partner connected scale with the customers? So we've >>been eso Ansel security automation, which is the automation connecting I. P. S. C. P. S that kind of stuff. It is almost a replay of what we did the network automation space. So we saw a need in the network automation space. We feel that we became a catalyst in the community with our partners and our customers and our and our contributors. And after about three years now, Ansel Network automation is a huge piece of our business and adoption curve. We're doing the exactly see the exact same thing in the security automation space compliance. The side over here, we're talking about kind of automating the connections between your firewalls, your threat detection systems and all that kind of stuff. So we're working with a set of partners, whether it's Cisco, whether it's Palo Alto, whether it's whether it's resilient by the EMS, resilient and being able to connect and automate the connections between the threat and the response and and all of that kind of >>the same trajectory as the network automation >>Zach. Same trajectory, just runnin the same play and it's working out right now. We're on that kind of early part of that curve, that adoption curve, and we have partners jumping in with us. >>You're talking to customers. We've heard certain stories. You know how I got, you know, 1000 hours of work down to a dozen hours of work there. Is there anything built into the tool today that allows them to kind of generate those those hero stats O. R. Any anything along those lines? >>Talk about analytic committee from yes, >>well, again without any analytic side. I mean, those things starts become possible that one of the things we've been doing is turning on Maur more metrics. And it's actually about mining the data for the customer because Tower gives this great focal point for all the automation that's going on. It's somewhere that everything comes through. So when we export that and then we can we can do that work for all the customers rather than have to duel themselves. Then you start to build those pictures and we start with a few different areas. But as we advance with those and start, see how people use them and start having that conversation customers about what data they want to use and how they want to use it, I think that's gonna be very possible. You know, it's so >>important. E think was laid out here nicely. That automation goes from a tactical solution to more strategic, but more and more how customers can leverage that data and be data driven. That's that's gonna drive them for it. And any good customer examples you have of the outcomes. No, you're talking to a lot of >>PS one from this morning. Yeah, >>so I mean, I'll be Esther up this morning, and I think that the numbers they used in the demo that she's like, you know, last year they did 100,000 from launch to the end of the year. 100,000 changes through their platform on this year so far that in a 1,000,000. So now you know, from my recollection, that's about the same time frame on either side of the year. So that's a pretty impressive acceleration. Side of things. We've had other ones where people have said, You know how many times you were telling some customers yesterday? What used to take eight hours to a D R test with 20 or 30 people in for the weekend now takes 12 minutes for two People on the base is just pushing a few buttons just as they go through and confirm everything worked that that type of you can't get away from that type of change. >>J. P. Morgan example yesterday was pretty compelling. I mean, time savings and people are, I mean, this legit times. I mean, we're talking serious order of magnitude, time savings. So that's awesome. Then I want to ask you guys, Next is we're seeing another pattern in the market where amongst your customer base, where it's the same problem being automated, allover the place so playbooks become kind of key as that starts to happen is that where the insights kind of comes in? Can you help us kind of tie that together? Because if I'm a large enterprise with its I'm decentralized or centralized, are organized problem getting more gear? I'm getting more clouds, game or operations. There's more surface area of stuff and certainly five g I ot is coming around the corner. Mention security. All this is expanding to be much more touchpoints. Automation seems to be the killer app for this automation, those mundane task, but also identifying new things, right? Can you guys comment on that? >>Yeah, so maybe I'll start rich. You could jump in, which is a little bit around, uh, particularly those large accounts where you have these different disparate teams taking a approach to automate something, using Ansel and then be able to repeat or reuse that somewhere else. The organization. So that idea of being for them to be able to curate they're automation content that they've created. Maybe they pulled something down from galaxy. Maybe they've got something from our automation husband. They've made it their own, and now they want to curate that and spread it across the organization to either obviously become more efficient, but also in four standards. That's where automation hub is going to come into play here. Not only will it be a repo for certify content from us and our partners, but it will also be an opportunity for them to curate their own content and share it across the organization. >>Yeah, I think when you tie those two things together and you've got that call discover abilities, I had away go and find what I want. And then the next day, the next day, after you've run the automation, you then got the nerve to say, Well, who's who's using the right corporate approved rolls? Who's using the same set of rolls from the team that builds the standards to make sure you're gonna compliant build again, showing the demo That's just admin has his way of doing it, puts the security baseline application on top and you go, Oh, okay, who's running that security baseline continuously every time. So you can both imposed the the security standards in the way the build works. But you can also validate that everybody is actually doing the security standards. >>You what I find fascinating about what you guys are doing, and I think this is came out clearly yesterday and you guys are talking about it. And some of the community conversations is a social construct here. Going on is that there's a cultural shift where the benefits that you guys are throwing off with the automation is creating a network effect within the companies. So it's not just having a slack channel on texting. The servers are up or down. It's much more of a tighter bond between the stakeholders inside the company's. Because you have people from different geography is you have champions driving change. And there's some solidarity happening between the groups of people, whether they're silo door decentralized. So there's a whole new social network, almost a cultural shift that's happening with the standardization of the substrate. Can you guys comment on this dynamic? Did you see this coming? You planning forward? Are you doubling down on it? >>I think so. And we talk about community right on how important that is. But how did you create that community internally and so ask balls like the catalyst so most teams don't actually need to understand in their current day jobs. Get on all the Dev ops, focus tools or the next generation. Then you bring answer because they want to automate, and suddenly they go. Okay, Now I need to understand source control, and it's honest and version. I need to understand how to get pulls a full request on this and so on and so forth on it changes that provides this off. The catalyst for them to focus on what changed they have to make about how they work, because what they wanted to do was something that requires them to do you no good disciplines and good behaviors that previously there was no motivation or need to do. I think >>Bart for Microsoft hit on that yesterday. You know, if you saw Bart Session but their network engineers having to get familiar with concepts of using automation almost like software development, life cycles right and starting to manage those things in repose. And think of it that way, which is intimidating at first for people who are not used to. But once they're over that kind of humping understand that the answer language itself is simple, and our operations person admin can use it. No problem, >>he said himself. Didn't my network engineers have become network developers. >>It's funny watching and talking to a bunch of customers. They all have their automation journey that they're going through. And I hear the Gamification I'm like, Okay, what if I have certain levels I have to reach in it unlocked capabilities, you know, in the community along the way. Maybe that could build a built in the future. >>Maybe it's swag based, you know, you >>get level C shows that nice work environment when you're not talking about the server's down on some slack channel when you're actually focusing on work. Yeah, so that mean that's the shift. That's what I'm saying, going >>firefighting to being able to >>do for throwing bombs. Yeah, wars. And the guy was going through this >>myself. Now you start a lot of the different team to the deaf teams and the ops teams. And I say it would be nice if these teams don't have to talk to complain about something that hadn't worked. It was Mexican figured it was just like I just like to talk to you because you're my friend. My colleague and I'd like to have a chat because everything's working because it's all automated, so it's consistent. It's repeatable. That's a nice, nice way. It can change the way that people get to interact because it's no longer only phoned me up when something's wrong. I think that absent an interesting dynamic >>on our survey, our customer base in our community before things one of the four things that came up was happier employees. Because if they're getting stuff done and more efficient, they have more time to actually self actualizing their job. That becomes an interesting It's not just a checkbox in some HR manual actually really impact. >>And I kind of think the customers we've heard talk rvs, gentlemen, this morning gave me a lot of the fear initially is, well, I automate myself out of a job, and what we've heard from everybody is that's not absolutely That's not actually true at all. It just allows them to do higher value things that, um or pro >>after that big data, that automation thing. That's ridiculous. >>I didn't use it yesterday. My little Joe Comet with that is when I tried to explain to my father what I do. Andi just said Well, in the 19 seventies, they said that computers you mean we'll do a two day week on? That hasn't come >>true. Trade your beeper and for a phone full of pots. But Richard, Thanks for coming on. Thanks for unpacking the ants. Full automation platforms with features. Congratulations. Great to see the progress. Thank you, Jonah. Everybody will be following you guys to Cuba. Coverage here in Atlanta, First Amendment Stevens for day two of cube coverage after this short break.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Ansible Fest 2022. We are live in Chicago. This is day two of Waldo Wall coverage on the cube. John Fhrer here with me. Lisa Martin. John, today's a big news day. Yeah, >>Big time. I mean, we got the chief architect on this segments to be great. We have the lead product management. All the new stuff coming out really is a game changer. It's very cool and relevant. Very key to be relevant. And then, and being a part of the future. This is a changeover you see in the NextGen Cloud developer environment. Open source all coming together. So Ansible we've been covering for many, many years. We've always said they're in the middle of all the action and you're starting to see the picture. Yes. For me. So we're looking forward to a great segment. >>Yes. We've got two alumni back with us to unpack the news and all the great stuff that's going on here. Richard Hensel joins us Senior manager, Ansible Product Management, and Matthew Jones here, fresh from the keynote stage, Chief architect of Ansible Automation. Guys, great to have you on the program. Thanks >>For having us. Good to be here. >>So this morning was all about event driven Ansible. Unpack that. Talk about the impact that this is gonna have, The excitement, the buzz that you've heard on the show floor today. >>Yeah. You know, it's, it's exciting. We've been working on this for a while. We've been really excited to show this off because it's something that feels like the natural evolution of the platform and where it's going. Really being able to connect the automation with the sources of data and the actions that we know people want to use. We, we came into this knowing everybody here at this conference, this is something that everybody will be able to use. >>Talk about the innovations strategy. Cause we've always had these great conversations with Ansible. Oh yeah. The, the practitioners, they're, they're building the product with you. You guys are very hardcore on that. No secret. This is different. This is like a whole nother level of opportunity that's gonna take the, the community to new heights in terms of what they do in their job and free them up to do more creative development. >>Yeah, you're exactly right. You know, we, we know that people need to bring that sort of reactive and active automation to it. We've, we've done a lot of work to bring automation to everybody, to the masses. Now we need to meet them at the place where they are, where the, the where, where they have to do the most work and, and act in the most strategic and specific ways. >>All right. So now before we get into some of the deep dive, cause a ton of questions. This is really exciting product. Take a minute to explain what was the key announcement? Why, what specifically does this mean for the audience, watching customers and future customers? What's the big deal? To take a minute to explain what was announced. >>So this is about the, the evolution and the maturity of the automation that our users are doing. So, you know, you think about provisioning servers, you know, configuring networks, all that sort of, the stuff that we've established and everybody's been doing for a number of years. And then you go, Well, I've invested in that. I've done the heavy lifting, I've done the things that cost me agility. I think that cost me time. Well now I need to go further. So what can I go further into? And you move further at the stacks. You move away from the infrastructure, please. You move away from infrastructure as code. You move towards through configures code, up to officer's code. And you start to get into, well, I've got, I've got road tasks, I've got repetitive actions that I'm doing. I've got investigations, I've got remediations, I've got responses. >>Well, there's work that I do on a daily basis that is toil. Right. It's not efficient work. Right. Actually, we doing valuable work in the operation space as much as you were doing in, in the build space. And how do we move them up into that space? And it's, this is all based off observation. You can do this today, but how do we make it easier? We've gonna make it easier for them to do that and get, it's all about success. It's about the outcomes we're gonna drive users towards. They need to be successful as quickly as possible. How do we make that >>Happen? And Matt, I remember we talked in 2019 with Ansible, the word platform where we say, Hey, you know, platforms are super important. It's not a tool, tools and platforms as distinctions. You mentioned platform. This is now platform. A lot of people put a lot of work in into this Yeah. Claim what went on behind the scenes. So >>You're exactly right. And we've spent the last couple of years really taking that disparate set of tools that, that we've invested a lot of time in building that platform. It's been exciting to see it come together. We always knew that we wanted to capture more of, more of where people find automation and find they need automation, not just out on the edge, on the end of the, of the, of the actions and tasks that they need to do. They've got a lot of things coming in, a lot of things that they need to take care of. And the community is really what drives this for us. People who have been doing this for years and they've been asking us, Meet me halfway. Give me something. Give me a part of this platform and a capability that enables me to do this. So I I feel like we've done that and you did >>It. Yeah, exactly. For step one. >>And that must feel pretty good too, to be able to deliver what, you know, the masses are looking for and why they're looking >>For it. Yeah. This was, there was no question that we knew this was gonna deliver the kind of real value that people were looking for. >>Take us through the building blocks real quick. I know on stage you went through it in detail. What should people know about the core building blocks of, of this particular event driven >>Piece? Yeah. You know, I think the most important thing to understand at the, at the outset is the sources of data and events that come in. It's really easy to get lost in the details. Like, what do you mean a source? But, you know, we've shown examples using Kafka, but it's not just Kafka, right? It's, it's, it's web hooks, it's CI systems, it's any, any place that you can imagine an evict coming from your monitoring platforms. You can bring those together under the same umbrella. We're not requiring you to pick one or choose or what's your favorite one. You can bring, you can use them all and and condense them down into the, into the same place. >>There's a lot of data events everywhere now. There's more events. Yeah. Is there a standard interface? Is what's the, is there any kind of hook in there? Is what's, what's gonna limit? Or is there any limits? >>I I don't think there is a limit. I, you know, it's, and we can't even imagine where events and data are gonna come from, but we know we need to get them into the system in a way that makes the most sense for the, the customers. And then that, that drives through into the rule books. Like, okay, we have the data now, but what do we do with that data? How do we translate that into, into the action? What are the rules that need to follow? It's giving the, the, the person who is automating, who understands the data that's coming in and understands the task that they need to take. The, the rules are where they map those into it. And then the last part, of course is the playbook, the automation itself, which they already know. They're already experts in the system. So we've, we've, we've built this like eight lane highway. They get some right end of those actions. >>Let's talk about Richard, let's unpack those actions and the really kind of double click on the business outcomes that this is actually gonna enable organizations and any industry to achieve. >>Yeah, so >>I mean, it's, it, like Matt said, it's really hard to encapsulate everything that we see as possible. But if you just think about what happens when a system goes down, right? At that point in time, I'm potentially not making money, right? I'd say it's costing me time, it's costing me, that's a business impact. If I can speed up how quick I can resolve that problem, if I can reduce time in there, that's customer improvement, that's custom satisfaction. That's bottom line money for businesses, right? But it's also, it's also satisfaction for the users. You know, they're not involved in having the stressful get online, get quickly, activate whatever accounts you need to do, go and start doing discovery. You can detect a lot of that information for the discovery use case that we see, respond to an event, scan the system for that same logic that you would normally do as a user, as a human. >>And that's why the rules are important to add into ed. It's like, how do I take that human, that brain part that I would say, well, if I see this bit, oh, I'll go and have a look in this other log file. If I see this piece, I'll go and do something different. How do we translate that into Ansible so that you've got that conditional logic just to be able to say, if this do that, or if I see these three things, it means a certain outcome has happened. And then again, that defined, that's what's gonna help people like choose where it becomes useful. And that's how we, that's how we take that process >>Forward. I'm sure people are gonna get excited by this. I'm not sure the community already knows that, but as it's gonna attract more potential customers, what's different about it? Can you share the differentiation? Like wait minute, I already have that already. Do they have it already? What's different? What makes this different? What's, what's in it for them? >>Yeah. When we step up into a customer situation, an enterprise, an organization, what's really important becomes the, the ability to control where you do some of that work. So the control and the trust, You know, would you trust an automatic system to go and start making changes to hundreds of thousands of devices? And the answer is often not, not straight away. So how do we put this sort of sep the same separation of duties we have between dev and ops and all the nice structures we've done over the last number of years, and actually apply that to that programmatic access of automation that other systems do. So let's say a AIML systems that are detecting what's going on, observability platforms are, are much more intru or intrusive is the wrong word. They're much more observable of what's going on in the systems, right? But at the same time you go, I wanna make sure that I know that any point in time I can decide what, what is there and what can be run and who can run it and when they can run it. And that becomes an important dimension. >>The versatility seems like a big deal too. They can, Yeah. Any team could get >>Involved. And, and that's the, the same flexibility and the same extensibility of Ansible exists in this use case, right? The, the, the ability to take any of those tasks you wanna do in action, string them together, but what the way that it works for you, not the way that it works that we see, but the way that you see and you convert your operational DNA into how you do that automation and how that gets triggered as you see fit. >>Talk about this both of you. I'd like to get your perspectives on event driven Ansible as part of the automation journey that businesses are on. Obviously you can look at different industries and different businesses are, are at different places along that journey, but where does this fit in and kind of plugin to accelerating that journey? That's, >>That's a good question. You know, sometimes this ends up being like that last mile of we've adopted this automation, we've learned how to write automation. We even understand the things that we would need to automate, but how do we carry it over that last topic and connect it to our, our knowledge systems, our data stores, our data lakes, and how do we combine the expertise of the systems that we're managing with this automation that we've learned? Like you, you mentioned the, the, the community and the, the coalescing of data and information, the, the definition of the event rules and, and the event driven architecture. It lives alongside the automation that you've developed in the exact same place where you can feel that trust and ubiquity that we keep talking about. Right? It's there, it's certified. And we've talked a lot about secure supply chain recently. This gives you the ability to sign and certify that the rules and actions that we're taking and the sources that we're communicating with works exactly the same way. Yeah. And >>There's something we didn't, we didn't correlate this when we first started doing the work. We were, we were, we observe teams doing self-healing and you know, extending Ansible. And then over the last 18 months, what we've also seen is this movement, this platform engineering movement, the SRE teams becoming much more prominent. And this just nicely sits in as a type of use case for that type of transformation. You know, we've gotta remember that Ansible at is heart is also a transformative tool. Is like, how do you teach this behavior to a bunch of people? How do you upscale a larger base of engineers with what you want to be able to do? And I think this is such an important part that we, we just one say we stumbled into it, but it was a very, very nice, >>It was a natural progression. >>Exactly. >>Yeah. Yeah. Tom, Tom, when we were talking about Tom yesterday, Tom Anderson and he said, You guys bring up the SRE to you guys when you come on the cube. This is exactly a culture shift that we're talking about. I mean, SRE is really his legacy with Google. We all know that. Everyone kind of knows that, but it's become like a job title. Well they kind of, what does that even mean now if you're not Google, it means you're running stuff. DevOps has become a title. Yeah. So what that means is that's a cultural shift, not so much semantics Yeah. On title. This is kind of what you guys are targeting here, enabling people to run platforms, engineer them. Yeah. Like an architect and enable more co composability coding. >>And, and it's, so that's, that distinction is so important because one of the, you know, we see many customers come from different places. Many users from, you know, all the legacy or heritage of tools that have existed. And so often those processes are defined by the way that tool worked. Right? You had no other way that, that, and the, and it's, it happened 10 years ago, somebody implemented it, that's how it now works. And then they come and try and take something new and you go, well, you can't let the tool define your process. Now your culture and your objective has to define the process. So this is really, you know, how do we make sure we match that ability by giving them a flexible tool that let's say, Well what are you trying to achieve? I wanna achieve this outcome. That's the way you can do it. I >>Mean, that's how we match basically means my mind to get your reaction. It means I'm running stuff at scale. Yep. Engineer, I'm engineering and infrastructure at scale to enable, >>I'm responsible for it. And it's, it's my, it's my baby. It's my responsibility to do that. And how do we, how do we allow people to do that better? And you know, it, it's about, it's about freeing people up to focus on things that are really important and transformative. We can be transformative. And we do that by taking away the complexity and making things work fast. >>And that's what people want. People in their daily jobs want to be able to deliver value to the organization. You wanna feel that. But something Richard that you were talking about that struck me a couple minutes ago is, was a venture of an Ansible. There's employee benefits, there's customer benefits, Those two are ex inextricably linked. But I liked how you were talking about what it facilitates for both Yes. And all the way to the customer satisfaction, brand reputation. That's an important Yeah. Element for any brand to >>Consider. And that, I mean, you know, think about what digital transformation was all about. I mean, as we evolve past all these initial terms that come about, you know, we actually start getting to the meat of what these things are. And that is it connecting what you do with actually what is the purpose of what your business is trying to achieve. And you can't, you can't almost put money on that. That's, that's the, that's the holy grail of what you're trying to get to. So how, you know, and again, it just comes back to how do we facilitate, how do we make it easy? If we don't make it easier, we're not doing it right. We've gotta make it easier. >>Right. Well, exciting news. I want to get your guys' reaction and if you don't mind sharing your opinion or your commentary on what's different now with Ansible this year than just a few years ago in terms of the scope of what's out there, what's been built, what you guys are doing for the, for the customer base and the community. What's changed? Obviously the people's roles looked that they're gonna expand and have more, I say more power, you know, more keys to the kingdom, however you wanna look at it. But things have changed. What's changed now from a few years >>Ago. It's, you know, it, it's funny because we've spent a lot of time over the last couple years setting up the capabilities that you're seeing us deliver right now. Right. We, we look back two or three years ago and we knew where we wanted to be. We wanted to build things like eda. We wanted to invest in systems like Project Wisdom and the, the types of content, the cloud journey that, that now we're on and we're enabling for folks. But we had to make some really big changes. And those changes take time and, and take investment. The move into last year, John, we talked about execution environments. Yeah. And separating the control plane from the execution plane. All of that work that we did and the investment into the platform and stability of the platform leads us now into what >>Cap. And that's architectural decision. That's the long game in mind. Exactly. Making things more cohesive, but decoupled, that's an operating system kind of thinking. >>It, it totally is. It's a systems engineering and system architecture thinking. And now we can start building on top of these things like what comes after ed, what does ED allow us to do within the platform? All of the dev tools that we focused on that we haven't spent a lot of time talking about that from the product side. But being, coming in with prescriptive and opinionated dev tools, now we can show you how to build it. We can show you how to use it and connect it to your systems. Where can we go next? I'm really excited. >>Yeah. Your customer base two has also been part of from the beginning and they solve their own problems and they rolled it up, grow with it, and now it's a full on platform. The question I then ask is, okay, you believe it's a platform, which it is, it's enabling. What do you guys see as that possible dots that could connect that might come on top of this from a creativity standpoint, from an ecosystem standpoint, from an Ansible standpoint, from maybe Red Hat. I mean, wisdom shows that you can go into the treasure trove of IBM's research, pull out some AI and some machine learning. Both that in or shim layered in whatever you do. >>I mean, what I'm starting to see much more, especially as I, the nice thing about being here is actually getting face to face with customers again and you know, actually hearing what they're talking about. But you know, we've moved away from a Ansible specific story where I'm talking about how I, I was always, I was looking to automate, I was looking to go to Ansible. Well now I've got the automation capability. Now we've enhanced the automation. Capabil wisdom enhances the automation capability further. What about all those, those broader set of management solutions that I've got that I would like to start connecting to each other. So we're starting to take the same like, you know, you mentioned as then software architecture, software design principles. We'll apply those same application design principles, apply them to your IT management because we've got data center with the pressures on there. We've got the expansion into cloud, we've got the expansion to the edge, right? Each adding a new layer of complexity and a new layer of, you know, more that you have to then look after. But there's still the same >>Number of people. So a thousand flower blooms kind of situation. >>Exactly. And so how do I, how do I constrain, how do I tame it, right? How do I sit there and go, I, I can control that now I can look after that. I contain that. I can, I can deal with what I wanna do. So I'm focusing on what's important and we are getting stuff done. >>We, we've been quoting Andy Grove on the cube lately. Let chaos, rain and then rain in the chaos. Yes. Right? I mean that's kind of every inflection point has complexity before it gets simpler. >>Yeah, that's right. >>Yeah. You can't, there's answer that one. That's >>Perfectly. >>Yeah. Yeah. What do you expect to see chief ar you gotta have the vision. What's gonna pop out? What's that low, low hanging fruit? What's gonna bloom first? What do you think's gonna come? >>I, you know, my overarching vision is that I just want to be able to automate more. Where, where can we bring back, So edge cloud, right? That's obvious, but what things run in the cloud and and on the edge, right? Devices, you heard Chad in the keynote this morning talk about programmable logic controllers, sensors, fans, motors, things like that. This is the, the sort of, this is the next frontier of automation is that connecting your data centers and your systems, your applications and needs all the way out to where your customers are. Gas stations, point of sale systems. >>It's instant. It's instant. It is what it is. It's like just add, Just >>Add faster and bigger. Yeah. >>But what happens if, I'll give you a tease. What I think is, is what happens if this happens? So I've got much more rich feature, rich diverse set of tools looking after my systems, observing what's going on. And they go through a whole filtering process and they say such and such has happened, right? Wisdom picks that up and decides from that natural language statement that comes outta the back of that system. That's the task I think is now appropriate to run. Where do you run that? You need a secure execution capability. Pass that to an support, that single task. And now we run inside the automation platform at any of those locations that you just mentioned, right? Stitching those things together and having that sequence of events all the way through where you, you predefine what's possible. You know, you start to bias the system towards what is your accepted standard and then let those clever systems do what you are investing in them for, which is to run your IT and make it >>Easier. Rich here was on earlier, I said, hey, about voice activated it. Provision the cluster. Yeah. >>Last question guys, before we run out of time for this. For customers who take advantage of this new frontier, how can they get started with the bench of an what's? >>That's a good question. You know, we, we've engaged our community because they trust us and we trust them to build really good products. ansible.com/events. Oh man, >>I did have the, I >>Had the cup, the landing page. >>Find somebody find that. >>Well it's on GitHub, right? GitHub It is. >>Yeah it >>Is. Absolutely ansible.com. It's probably a link somewhere if I on the front page. Exactly. On GitHub. The good code too. >>Right? Exactly. And so look at there, you can see where we're going on our roadmap, what we're capable of today. Examples, we're gonna be doing labs and blogs and demonstrations of it over the next day, week, month. Right. You'll be able to see this evolve. You get to be the, the sort of vanguard of support and actions on this and >>Cause we really want, we really want users to play with it, right? Of course. We've been doing this for a while. We've seen what we think is right. We want users to play with it. Tell us whether the syntax works, whether it makes sense, how does it run, how does it work? That's the exciting part. But at the same time, we want the partners, you know, we, we don't know all the technologies, right? We want the partners that we have that work with us already in the community to go and sort of, you know, do those integrations, do those triggers to their systems, define rules for their stuff cuz they'll talk to their customers about it as >>Well. Right? Right. It'll be exciting to see what unfolds over the next six to nine months or so with the partners getting involved, the community getting involved. Guys, congratulations on the big announcements. Sounds like a lot of work. I can tell. We can tell. Your excitement level is huge and job well done. Thank you so much for joining us on the Cube. Thank you very much. Thank you. Our pleasure. Just All right, for our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, Ansible Fest 22. John and I will be right back with our next guest of Stay tuned.

(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 music) >> Hello, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, here in Palo Alto, California. We're part of the ongoing coverage of AnsibleFest 2021, virtual this year like all years. We're covering it virtually. In-person events soon will be back, and we'll be back in person when that happens this year. Year two of virtual coverage of AnsibleFest 2021. And just like last year, a great lineup of virtual interviews. We have the ability to pull people in remotely, which gives us more access to more people. So we've got a lot more content, a lot more content and stories to report. The big theme this year coming up is going to be automation, automation, automation, and hybrid environments. So automation, hybrid, and now the emergence of the democratization of AI. You're seeing AI being driven by automation. You're seeing automation going from repeating tasks that need to be automated to being programmatic in cloud-development life cycle. So a lot of changes going on. We had some great guests. Tom Anderson, Richard Henshall has been there. We had a lot of community updates. Carol Chen was on. Joe Fitzgerald, and Tom Anderson, and Alessandra Perelli were on. Great lineup there. The thought leadership there was all about how Red Hat Ansible are bringing the next generation automation platform to the community and making it easy for new people to come in. We heard from Kentrell, IBM, Scott Kinane, and Anand Gopalakrishnan, and Lisa Chavez. So great, great content there. Again, more and more community. The constant theme of open source and community continues to reign true for Red Hat AnsibleFest 2021. And the big surprise to me was they had great customer attraction, okay? Sapphire Health came on talking about migration. Enterprise customers are taking automation mainstream, powering programmatic, cloud-native solutions. So you're starting to see evidence, not just the hardcore automation folks that Ansible's been servicing in the enterprise and the developer community, but mainstream developers in the enterprises are adopting Ansible. This is the real deal . We heard from the chief architect of Ansible, Matthew Jones, going into great detail on how the enablement of the system is going to be creating more headroom for future growth. All in all, great content from theCUBE. Great guests as usual. And of course, check out Twitter and LinkedIn and all the social networks for CUBE highlights, and of course content and the guests themselves are awesome. So take a listen, and watch those videos, and enjoy the show. (upbeat music playing)

(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?