>>Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the cube covering Ansible Fest 2019 brought to you by red hat. >>Welcome back everyone. That's the cubes live coverage for two days here in Atlanta, Georgia for Ansible Fest. I'm John fire with my cohost, stupid man. Andrew has been, Oh Kratos who's here and senior principal product manager at Ansible. Welcome to the cube. Welcome back. Thank you. Good to see you. 2017 you were last on red hat summit. It's like, Oh it was a, it was basically the introduction to the Ansible network basically. So, so much has gone on. One of the things I'm really impressed by this event and why we're here is um, configuration management and super important part of the plumbing. We all know dev ops is infrastructure as code, but as the evolution of cloud and software is changing the game, you start to see visibility into where automation's coming in. This is the whole focus of the event automation for all. It's the theme w w and this is about the core infrastructure. >>So it's not like it's just a random thing. Six most popular in get hub project out of millions. This is real. It's real. It's quite real and especially on the network side. This is something that came out organically. The birth of Ansible network was because it was agent lists, honestly, you know, simple, powerful agent lists. The agent list piece was the piece that really made it really fly for Ansible. Configuration management. By the way, on net networking side when we talked about this before is the most important because that's where it's the most static has one of those where it's been most static. I mean we all know networking, right? But as networking becomes policy base and moves up the stack, we've seen some firms like Cisco trying to figure out their dev net. It's like you starting to see the networking mindset moving up the stack. >>This is super huge change. It's a huge change. But the nice thing is that it's easy to get into. So all the network operators and network engineers, they're still used to using command and config modules with their iOS devices, their iOS devices, Juniper, all those things, right? They don't have to throw away everything they've learned for the past 10 15 years in order to get with Ansible. And then when they go beyond that, then they can start seeing the real power of the platform, which we announced today. So going from command line to programmability is kind of what's happening. Yes, absolutely. And what's the big four, the big key factors right now that are driving this? So a lot of key factors are, I mean, you saw the keynote this morning with Microsoft, that's our, that was a huge, and it'd been doing this for about two years. >>So they started from, from nothing. He chose Ansible and they quickly saw that the power of automation for the networks, but they had to grow it at scale. So that was the big problem was how do we do this at scale while still using all the knowledge that we've learned? So day zero, day one, it's extremely important and obviously we know that, but as we were going down the journey with them from a engineering standpoint, day two became extremely important. And that's what we're, we're focused on now. You know, uh, it was really interesting. Microsoft really talked about that cultural shift. Uh, you know, we've heard in the networking space forever, it was like you're all going to need to become coders. You're going to need to be able to do this to tell us how Ansible is really impacting some of those cultural shifts in a, you know, how is that discussion changed today versus what it might've been a few years ago? >>It's truly half the battle is the culture I like to call it as everyone's talking about digital transformation in a network world, this is an analog transformation in all honesty. This isn't anything about the bits and bytes. You cannot automate anything today. There are lots of point tools to automate networks today, but how are you gonna actually move that into a world where culturally you can have people buy in from the bottom up organically as well as from the top down from the it managers. It's extremely important. So on the platform announcement, the key and as was the Ansible automation platform, where can you just help us understand the relationship between network automation and the automation platform? Because I'll see an you need to move things around the network, but there's a lot of other things being configured as well and automated. What's the relationship between the two? >>So before we had the platform actually ends well network was an actual product. It was a separate skew as a separate offering and we treated it as such as a platform. We were like the first Guinea pigs I like to think of, we were the ones that said let's treat Ansible as a platform and let's move it that way. So we actually went out and built roles. We built modules, we built a network engine, which is a parser, right? Similar like text, FSM, uh, you know, those kinds of things. We put those in galaxy 22,000 downloads later. We proved it. We know that everything that we're doing in galaxy today for Ansible network proves the fact that people are using it as a platform. And we were successful in that, doing that and then telling me yours was that just track record wise, what was it, how many years? >>Oh, that was a year. So to.seven was when we released network engine for parsing, parsing CLI commands, you know, and that moves into the next generation of what we call the day two operations for networking is typically we see network configuration has been a one way street. So you would pull a configuration data from a device, you would have to parse it, you put it in SCM, it's an an SCM and now you actually have to put into a template and then you push it. Right. This has been a one way street typically, and it's an Ansible has been very good at one way streets, but now we're moving towards an Ansible two. Dot nine coming soon is making that a two way street. So integrating the fat collection from module, so when you pull facts from iOS, EOS and XLS, et cetera, treating that data consistently across the board and using that for it. >>Networking is one of the tracks here at this show. What are, what are some of the more popular things? What, what, what? Where's the focus? The focus is, it's across the board. Again, you have people that are it managers that have been doing Ansible for years and now they're saying, Hey look, they're seeing network automation is extremely pervasive. How can we get that into our pipeline? We have ticketing systems. How can we integrate ancil network with our larger business processes? And then tops like top five use cases, the typical backing up systems, uh, from, uh, you know, backup, restore a, and then doing a lot of sorts of true things there too. So making sure that you have all of your, your network configuration data off the box, right? A lot of people are fetching configurations from thousands and thousands devices. That's pretty hard to do. So let's make that easier for them. >>What's been the customer interest and the growth path for network automation? Because I'll see, that makes sense. I see a different product, but now that the automation picture's getting wider and bigger, what's the interest from customers say? The key focus area though on that? Well, we've typically focused on to date and, and from the marketing slides is the number of platforms we've supported. We can always see up to the right, right. We support 10 platforms, 2030, we're up to 65 platform supported. I think we've pretty much proven the fact that I think we can pretty much work on anything. So it's going beyond that and making lives easier for the network operators, engineers holistically. And this event here, what's going on here for you guys here? What specific tracks are doing? Right? So we're actually conversations you having. Yeah, we're talking more about the actual resource modules that are coming in two dot nine I was talking about, which is bringing fact collection and the modules together as a two way street. >>So as people start moving into this day two operations, um, we have a lot of experts here and they're hitting stumbling blocks around. They're managing ginger temp like 500 lines into templates, like on a daily basis. Nobody wants to do that. So we're getting to a place where the people that are really relying on Ansible in it, in the expert field, making it much, much easier for them to look forward. We had Greg on earlier. And um, Robin, they talk about the glue layer that Ansible provides for the folks that are not using Ansible, what's the big message that you'd like to send them? What's the, what's the real, uh, attraction from the customers and why should people be using Ansible? Well, it, yeah, I mean it's, it, it's for everything. I mean, you don't have to, you really don't. I mean, it, it speaks for itself, but it breaks down the barriers. >>If you're a server person, a restorative person or a cloud person or a windows person or a network person, you all have the same language base in Ansible and you can get things done more quickly and more efficiently that way. So one of the other things we were talking to the community about is the, the feedback loops that you have with the community to tell us a little bit about what your teams hoping to get from the users attending and barges. Oh, absolutely. On the animal network side, everything is done transparently in the community. We have weekly, we have a community meetup. We've had this for a long time. Everything's out in the open. Everything's in get hub. Everything that we've done, we've had a contributor day. I don't know if you were here on Monday, it was focused on network. We're pitching this idea around resource modules in the, in the forward strategy of, of the platform as it relates to network, everyone including the contributors, developers, the partners, all of the people that you could see that half the off half the vendors here on the floor, our network partners. >>So they're invested as well. They want this to succeed. So we're extremely proud and happy that they're along for the ride as well. Alright. Maybe explain to our audience what an angry potato is. Uh, it's a, was it a tater, it's an angry tater. Uh, yeah, it's a, the mascot for AWX I believe. And um, yeah, they're fun. The stickers and little plushes. So we're going back to keep sticking appreciation. What's the coolest thing that you're, you've seen this year that you think people should know about? Oh, wow. Um, I think a lot of, a lot of focus around testing and development. So a lot of developers are now writing code. They're rebuilding the wheel themselves. So developers are writing the same stuff over and over and over again. So how can we scale that to say, Hey, why don't we all get together and write the same code and then about testing. >>So once you actually have the code, you have a lot of vendors here on CIC, D testing quality. So we at its Ansible, um, we can talk, and this was Greg, I don't know if you mentioned earlier, but Greg to go into Sprig said, you know, we're really good at making sure, um, playbooks and roles and modules are correct, but we want to make sure that the vendors and the developers like focused on the functionality. We can give them guidance around, um, syntax and correctness, but we want to make sure that the innovation really comes from them. Andrea, talk about this annual Fest this year, 2019 as we run into 2020 coming up towards the end of the year, fall here. Why is this year different? What's important about this year? Um, this seems to be, this almost seems to be an inflection point this year. Why? Why is it so important as what's what's going on right now that makes this event so popular? >>You're seeing convergence in a lot of different activities. The, the silos around you typically say, I'm a, I'm a, you know, I'm, I do Kubernetes or I do network or I do cloud. You're starting to see a lot of these people like, okay, well I have to do a cloud. I have to do a cloud VPN connection using containers and automate the network. So you're starting to see a lot of these different traditional people having to think outside of their traditional areas and have to start thinking about other areas to their, whatever that whatever their technology silo is in their head, they have to start learning or they're being forced to learn around a lot of different things. It's a systems architecture. Absolutely. System says consequences. You can't just dig in the silo. That's the issue. Absolutely. That seems to be the core issue. And also culturally it's collaborative. I mean, who would have thought configuration management be the next social network for enterprises at turning it out to be, yeah, absolutely. Not social network. Literally like Facebook, but you know, thanks to come on. Thank you so much for having said, we're bringing all the action down here at Asheville Fest where dev ops is being operationalized cultural change within organizations, but keep abilities much more of a systems view now. So the networking is a key part of it. I'm John for a stupid man back after this short break.