from around the globe it's thecube with coverage of kubecon and cloudnativecon north america 2020 virtual brought to you by red hat the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners welcome to thecube's coverage of kubecon and cloudnativecon 2020 the virtual edition i'm lisa martin i've got a couple of guests with me here today please welcome ken holtz the principal partner manager for red hat hey ken and welcome to the cube hi lisa thank you and benito lopez is also joining us senior manager of business development and the solutions provider services provider vertical excuse me f5 from f5 hi benito how are how are you i'm good you're in san francisco thank you all right yes we're all very socially distanced so guys kubecon cloudnativecon the virtual version here still the opportunity to engage with a lot of leaders in the community folks interested let's go ahead and start with you as we look at this very dynamic environment in which we are all living and working organizations are under even more pressure to deliver the information and the services and the experiences that customers demand internal customers external customers i know f5 is known for load balancing and load balancing is one of those tools that can certainly help with that but talk to us about what's kind of going on what's new in that respect from fbi's perspective we have evolved into an adaptive application services company what do i mean by adaptive application services it's the ability to scale secure and protect application applications wherever they may recite whether they're in the far edge whether in the cloud whether they're on premises and the ability to also observe the the analytics and telemetry emanating from those applications to be able to act upon what we see in that space so when we talk about service based architecture it's all about no longer being reliant on a in the on a single vendor on a monolithic application set of services or on what they call a vertical stack appliance service based architecture means you want it to be a scalable architecture whereby you can add the dock subtract um different types of network functions in 5g so the way this is going to be depend the the key enabler for a services-based architecture is going to be container based services whereby services will no longer just be applications are going to be disaggregated into micro services right in container clusters and f5's role here is to be able to scale and secure that traffic into a service provider environment more importantly our role is to turn a container-based architecture which is not service provider grade into a service provider-grade architecture which means we can actually see the services provide specific protocols into that container cluster and more importantly um scale and secure and apply the right policies within a containerized environment again containers is all about a service base is part of a service based architecture and containers today especially on kubernetes need a service provider grade platform of which we provide that market all right so kubernetes seeing a lot of activity with telco customers what are some of the challenges major we'll stick with you for another few seconds here what are some of the challenges that you're seeing that you're helping customers to work through well one is the first challenge is how do you make kubernetes telco great that's the first challenge so what f5 does is we actually um act as the ingress and egress point into kubernetes environment whereby we see telco as we were able to scale and secure telco specific protocols that kubernetes today um does not support and we work closely with red hat in that space um together with their open shift architecture to open shift platform cut we work with red hat today uh with um uh with respect to the openshift platform and that helps the service provider have a telco cloud-like platform that is um scalable that is secure and that is highly performant and low-latent all right so speaking of red hat let's bring ken into the conversation here kind of same question for you as we look at the activity uh in telco with respect to kubernetes let's talk to some of the ways that that red hat is helping customers address some of the challenges so that they can leverage that technology to to really move their businesses forward especially in such a dynamic environment right now thanks lisa so red hat has a goal of ensuring our openshift platform is ready and hardened enough to enable telco workloads for our 5g platform while we work with other partners f5 has been one of our key partners in this particular space for the first time openshift networking is natively integrating seamlessly with the commercial load balancer from f5 making it ready for telco 5g this is a co-engineered co-developed solution a new piece of software that we've implemented together oven kubernetes is enterprise and service provider ready we believe ovn will help significantly with latency overall and this is an evolution we have our first implementation of this now and we're working now on making this even more cloud-native which means making it more performant more resilient and even more capable and ready for telco grade requirements so can continuing on with you for a second in terms of how you're working together with customers to maybe customize or adapt the technologies can you talk to me a little bit about some of the customer feedback like some of those challenges that they're facing in today's environment which as we know is so dynamic and probably going to be for a while what's the customer like influence in terms of the partnership and the code development well so my focus at red hat is on partnership and the ecosystem partner management team allows red hat to meet the needs of a growing number of red hat partners the team serves as a partner's single point of contact for product questions roadmap updates engineering interlocks and general guidance for how to partner with red hat and with open source communities to achieve their business goals so uh we we're we're helping the end customers through our tight partnership imagine a lot of collaboration there so benito let's talk from your perspective from f5's perspective on the partnership and the collaboration that you have together and with your customers to help them be successful well ecosystems partnerships are going to be critical for our success as a company and more importantly as service providers today especially as i mentioned earlier around with respect to us they migrate and transform their networks from 4g to 5g um the architecture is going to horizontalize it's going to require a telcograde type of infrastructure manager a telcograde os and at the same time it's going to require a telco grade um and security platform and therefore red hat with its um them with them being what we call as a leader in open source and open and containers with their openshift platform we see them as a vital partner in working with service providers to transform their networks into a teleco great containerized environment right so as they migrate into um as they migrate from just software virtualization to containerization which is going to be critical for 5g um red hat is a key partner for us to work with to ensure that their network is their containerized network is telego-grade and highly performant and secure excellent thanks and ken back to you i know the audience would like to hear kind of some more specifics on the collaboration between you guys and also kind of beyond what they can see what's coming down the pipe in terms of open source projects or kind of beyond that yeah so some of some examples of our work together uh would include joint roadmap alignment uh we're very closely tied together on on the roadmap front early pre-pre-ga enablement early access to code and we have a goal of achieving certification here so we'd like to to achieve certification which provides assurance of compatibility and support avoids vendor lock-in and dispels any security concerns that customers may have excellent well guys anything else that you want to add here to the audience that is attending this virtual edition of kubecon cloud nativecon 2020 benito to you well i'd like to just say that as you migrate to as your network begins to transform and you are looking at the containerized architecture f5 and red hat are your best partners to have that telco grade architecture infrastructure in place i like that both statement very well put ken less thoughts from you i think benito said it best and i just wanted to say thanks a lot for having having us and this has been fun excellent guys thank you for sharing what's going on with the f5 red hat partnership how you're helping customers in telco with kubernetes the challenges there to alleviate ken bonito thanks for joining me on thecube today thank you thank you for my guests i'm lisa martin and you're watching thecube you