(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We're covering Red Hat Summit 2022. We're going to wrap up now, Dave Vellante, Paul Gillin. We want to introduce you to Stephanie Chan, who's our new correspondent. Stephanie, one of your first events, your very first CUBE event. So welcome. >> Thank you. >> Up from NYC. Smaller event, but intimate. You got a chance to meet some folks last night at some of the after parties. What are your overall impressions? What'd you learn this week? >> So this has been my first in-person event in over two years. And even though, like you said, is on the smaller scale, roughly around 1000 attendees, versus it's usual eight to 10,000 attendees. There's so much energy, and excitement, and openness in these events and sessions. Even before and after the sessions people have been mingling and socializing and hanging out. So, I think a lot of people appreciate these in-person events and are really excited to be here. >> Cool. So, you also sat in some of the keynotes, right? Pretty technical, right? Which is kind of new to sort of your genre, right? I mean, I know you got a financial background but, so what'd you think of the keynotes? What'd you think of the format, the theater in the round? Any impressions of that? >> So, I think there's three things that are really consistent in these Red Hat Summit keynotes. There's always a history lesson. There's always, you know, emphasis in the culture of openness. And, there's also inspirational stories about how people utilize open source. And I found a lot of those examples really compelling and interesting. For instance, people use open source in (indistinct), and even in space. So I really enjoyed, you know, learning about all these different people and stories. What about you guys? What do you think were the big takeaways and the best stories that came out of the keynotes? >> Paul, want to start? >> Clearly the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is a major rollout. They do that only about every three years. So that's a big deal to this audience. I think what they did in the area of security, with rolling out sigstore, which is a major new, I think an important new project that was sort of incubated at Red Hat. And they're trying to put in to create an open source ecosystem around that now. And the alliances. I'm usually not that much on partnerships, but the Accenture and the Microsoft partnerships do seem to be significant to the company. And, finally, the GM partnership which I think was maybe kind of the bombshell that they sort of rushed in at the last minute. But I think has the biggest potential impact on Red Hat and its partner ecosystem that is really going to anchor their edge architecture going forward. So I didn't see it so much on the product front, but the sense of Red Hat spreading its wings, and partnering with more companies, and seeing its itself as really the center of an ecosystem indicates that they are, you know, they're in a very solid position in their business. >> Yeah, and also like the pandemic has really forced us into this new normal, right? So customer demand is changing. There has been the shift to remote. There's always going to be a new normal according to Paul, and open source carries us through that. So how do you guys think Red Hat has helped its portfolio through this new normal and the shift? >> I mean, when you think of Red Hat, you think of Linux. I mean, that's where it all started. You think OpenShift which is the application development platforms. Linux is the OS. OpenShift is the application development platform for Kubernetes. And then of course, Ansible is the automation framework. And I agree with you, ecosystem is really the other piece of this. So, I mean, I think you take those three pieces and extend that into the open source community. There's a lot of innovation that's going around each of those, but ecosystems are the key. We heard from Stefanie Chiras, that fundamental, I mean, you can't do this without those gap fillers and those partnerships. And then another thing that's notable here is, you know, this was, I mean, IBM was just another brand, right? I mean, if anything it was probably a sub-brand, I mean, you didn't hear much about IBM. You certainly had no IBM presence, even though they're right across the street running Think. No Arvind present, no keynote from Arvind, no, you know, Big Blue washing. And so, I think that's a testament to Arvind himself. We heard that from Paul Cormier, he said, hey, this guy's been great, he's left us alone. And he's allowed us to continue innovating. It's good news. IBM has not polluted Red Hat. >> Yes, I think that the Red Hat was, I said at the opening, I think Red Hat is kind of the tail wagging the dog right now. And their position seems very solid in the market. Clearly the market has come to them in terms of their evangelism of open source. They've remained true to their business model. And I think that gives them credibility that, you know, a lot of other open source companies have lacked. They have stuck with the plan for over 20 years now and have really not changed it, and it's paying off. I think they're emerging as a company that you can trust to do business with. >> Now I want to throw in something else here. I thought the conversation with IDC analyst, Jim Mercer, was interesting when he said that they surveyed customers and they wanted to get the security from their platform vendor, versus having to buy these bespoke tools. And it makes a lot of sense to me. I don't think that's going to happen, right? Because you're going to have an identity specialist. You're going to have an endpoint specialist. You're going to have a threat detection specialist. And they're going to be best of breed, you know, Red Hat's never going to be all of those things. What they can do is partner with those companies through APIs, through open source integrations, they can add them in as part of the ecosystem and maybe be the steward of that. Maybe that's the answer. They're never going to be the best at all those different security disciplines. There's no way in the world, Red Hat, that's going to happen. But they could be the integration point. And that would be, that would be a simplifying layer to the equation. >> And I think it's smart. You know, they're not pretending to be an identity in access management or an anti-malware company, or even a zero trust company. They are sticking to their knitting, which is operating system and developers. Evangelizing DevSecOps, which is a good thing. And, that's what they're going to do. You know, you have to admire this company. It has never gotten outside of its swim lane. I think it's understood well really what it wants to be good at. And, you know, in the software business knowing what not to do is more important than knowing what to do. Is companies that fail are usually the ones that get overextended, this company has never overextended itself. >> What else do you want to know? >> And a term that kept popping up was multicloud, or otherwise known as metacloud. We know what the cloud is, but- >> Oh, supercloud, metacloud. >> Supercloud, yeah, here we go. We know what the cloud is but, what does metacloud mean to you guys? And why has it been so popular in these conversations? >> I'm going to boot this to Dave, because he's the expert on this. >> Well, expert or not, but I mean, again, we've coined this term supercloud. And the idea behind the supercloud or what Ashesh called metacloud, I like his name, cause it allows Web 3.0 to come into the equation. But the idea is that instead of building on each individual cloud and have compatibility with that cloud, you build a layer across clouds. So you do the hard work as a platform supplier to hide the underlying primitives and APIs from the end customer, or the end developer, they can then add value on top of that. And that abstraction layer spans on-prem, clouds, across clouds, ultimately out to the edge. And it's new, a new value layer that builds on top of the hyperscale infrastructure, or existing data center infrastructure, or emerging edge infrastructure. And the reason why that is important is because it's so damn complicated, number one. Number two, every company's becoming a software company, a technology company. They're bringing their services through digital transformation to their customers. And you've got to have a cloud to do that. You're not going to build your own data center. That's like Charles Wang says, not Charles Wang. (Paul laughing) Charles Phillips. We were just talking about CA. Charles Phillips. Friends don't let friends build data centers. So that supercloud concept, or what Ashesh calls metacloud, is this new layer that's going to be powered by ecosystems and platform companies. And I think it's real. I think it's- >> And OpenShift, OpenShift is a great, you know, key card for them or leverage for them because it is perhaps the best known Kubernetes platform. And you can see here they're really doubling down on adding features to OpenShift, security features, scalability. And they see it as potentially this metacloud, this supercloud abstraction layer. >> And what we said is, in order to have a supercloud you got to have a superpaz layer and OpenShift is that superpaz layer. >> So you had conversations with a lot of people within the past two days. Some people include companies, from Verizon, Intel, Accenture. Which conversation stood out to you the most? >> Which, I'm sorry. >> Which conversation stood out to you the most? (Paul sighs) >> The conversation with Stu Miniman was pretty interesting because we talked about culture. And really, he has a lot of credibility in that area because he's not a Red Hat. You know, he hasn't been a Red Hat forever, he's fairly new to the company. And got a sense from him that the culture there really is what they say it is. It's a culture of openness and that's, you know, that's as important as technology for a company's success. >> I mean, this was really good content. I mean, there were a lot, I mean Stefanie's awesome. Stefanie Chiras, we're talking about the ecosystem. Chris Wright, you know, digging into some of the CTO stuff. Ashesh, who coined metacloud, I love that. The whole in vehicle operating system conversation was great. The security discussion that we just had. You know, the conversations with Accenture were super thoughtful. Of course, Paul Cormier was a highlight. I think that one's going to be a well viewed interview, for sure. And, you know, I think that the customer conversations are great. Red Hat did a really good job of carrying the keynote conversations, which were abbreviated this year, to theCUBE. >> Right. >> I give 'em a lot of kudos for that. And because, theCUBE, it allows us to double click, go deeper, peel the onion a little bit, you know, all the buzz words, and cliches. But it's true. You get to clarify some of the things you heard, which were, you know, the keynotes were, were scripted, but tight. And so we had some good follow up questions. I thought it was super useful. I know I'm leaving somebody out, but- >> We're also able to interview representatives from Intel and Nvidia, which at a software conference you don't typically do. I mean, there's the assimilation, the combination of hardware and software. It's very clear that, and this came out in the keynote, that Red Hat sees hardware as matter. It matters. It's important again. And it's going to be a source of innovation in the future. That came through clearly. >> Yeah. The hardware matters theme, you know, the old days you would have an operating system and the hardware were intrinsically linked. MVS in the mainframe, VAX, VMS in the digital mini computers. DG had its own operating system. Wang had his own operating system. Prime with Prime OS. You remember these days? >> Oh my God. >> Right? (Paul laughs) And then of course Microsoft. >> And then x86, everything got abstracted. >> Right. >> Everything became x86 and now it's all atomizing again. >> Although WinTel, right? I mean, MS-DOS and Windows were intrinsically linked for many, many years with Intel x86. And it wasn't until, you know, well, and then, you know, Sun Solaris, but it wasn't until Linux kind of blew that apart. And the internet is built on the lamp stack. And of course, Linux is the fundamental foundation for Red Hat. So my point is, that the operating system and the hardware have always been very closely tied together. Whether it's security, or IO, or registries and memory management, everything controlled by the OS are very close to the hardware. And so that's why I think you've got an affinity in Red Hat to hardware. >> But Linux is breaking that bond, don't you think? >> Yes, but it still has to understand the underlying hardware. >> Right. >> You heard today, how taking advantage of Nvidia, and the AI capabilities. You're seeing that with ARM, you're seeing that with Intel. How you can optimize the operating system to take advantage of new generations of CPU, and NPU, and CPU, and PU, XPU, you know, across the board. >> Yep. >> Well, I really enjoyed this conference and it really stressed how important open source is to a lot of different industries. >> Great. Well, thanks for coming on. Paul, thank you. Great co-hosting with you. And thank you. >> Always, Dave. >> For watching theCUBE. We'll be on the road, next week we're at KubeCon in Valencia, Spain. We're at VeeamON. We got a ton of stuff going on. Check out thecube.net. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Wikibon.com. We publish there weekly, our breaking analysis series. Thanks for watching everybody. Dave Vellante, for Paul Gillin, and Stephanie Chan. Thanks to the crew. Shout out, Andrew, Alex, Sonya. Amazing job, Sonya. Steven, thanks you guys for coming out here. Mark, good job corresponding. Go to SiliconANGLE, Mark's written some great stuff. And thank you for watching. We'll see you next time. (calm music)

[Music] thecube's coverage of red hat summit 2022 thecube has been covering red hat summit for a number of years of course the last two years were virtual coverage now the red hat summit is one of the industry's most premier events and and typically red hat summits are many thousands of people i think the last one i went to was eight or nine thousand people very heavy developer conference this year red hat has taken a different approach it's a hybrid event it's kind of a vip event at the westin in boston with a lot more executives here than we would normally expect versus developers but a huge virtual audience my name is dave vellante i'm here with my co-host paul gillin paul this is a location that you and i have broadcast from many times and um of course 2019 the summer of 2019 ibm acquired red hat and um we of course we did red hat summit that year but now we're seeing a completely new red hat and a new ibm and you wouldn't know ibm owned red hat for what they've been talking about at this conference we just came out of the keynote where uh in the in the hour-long keynote ibm was not mentioned once and only appeared the logo only appeared once on the screen in fact so this is uh very much red hat being red hat not being a subsidiary at ibm and perhaps that's justified given that ibm's track record with acquisitions is that they gradually envelop the acquired company and and it becomes part of the ibm board yeah they blue wash the whole thing right it's ironic because ibm think is going on right across the street arvin krishna is here but no presence here and i think that's by design i mean it reminds me of when you know emc owned vmware you know the vmware team didn't want to publicize that they had an ecosystem of partners that they wanted to cater to and they wanted to treat everybody equally even though perhaps behind the scenes they were forced to do certain things that they might not have necessarily wanted to because they were owned by another company and i think that you know certainly ibm's done a good job of leaving the brand separate but when they talk about the con the conference calls ibm's earnings calls you certainly get a heavy dose of red hat when red hat was acquired by ibm it was just north of three billion dollars in revenue obviously ibm paid 34 billion dollars for the company actually by today's valuations probably a bargain you know despite the market sell-off in the last several months uh but now we've heard public statements from arvind kushner that that red hat is a 5 billion plus revenue company it's a little unclear what's in there of course when you listen to ibm earnings you know consulting is their big business red hat's growing at 21 but when i remember paul when red hat was acquired stu miniman and i did a session and i said this is not about cloud this is about consulting and modernizing applications and sure there's some cloud in there with openshift but from a financial standpoint ibm was able to take red hat and jam it right into its application modernization initiatives so it's hard to tell how much of that 5 billion is actually you know legacy red hat but i guess it doesn't matter anymore it's working ibm mathematics is notoriously opaque they if the business isn't going well it'll tend to be absorbed into another number in the in the earnings report that that does show some growth so we've heard uh certainly ibm talks a lot about red hat on its earnings calls it's very clear that red hat is the growth engine within ibm i'd say it's a bit of the tail wagging the dog right now where red hat really is dictating where ibm goes with its hypercloud strategy which is the foundation not only of its technology portfolio but of its consulting business and so red hat is really in the driver's seat of of hybrid cloud and that's the future for ibm and you see that very much at this conference where uh red hat is putting out its uh series of announcements today about improvements to his hybrid cloud the new release of route 9 red hat enterprise linux 9 improvements to its hybrid cloud portfolio it very much is going its own way with that and i sense that ibm is going to go along with wherever red hat chooses to go yeah i think you're absolutely right if by the way if you go to siliconangle.com paul just published a piece on red hat reds hats their roll out of their parade which of course is as you pointed out led by enterprise linux but to your point about hybrid cloud it is the linchpin of of certainly ibm strategy but many companies hybrid cloud strategies if you think about it openshift in particular it's it's the modern application development environment for kubernetes you can get kubernetes you can buy eks you can get that for free in a lot of places but you have to do dozens and dozens of things and acquire dozens of services to do what openshift does to get the reliability the recoverability the security and that's really red hat's play and they're the the thing about red hat combining with linux their linux heritage they're doing that everywhere it's going to open shift everywhere red hat everywhere whether it's on-prem in aws azure google out to the edge you heard paul cormier today saying he expects that in the next several years hardware is going to become one of the most important you know factors i agree i think we're going to enter a hardware renaissance you've seen the work that we've done on arm i think 2017 was when red hat and arm announced kind of their initial collaboration could have even been before that today we're hearing a lot about intel and nvidia and so affinity with all of these alternative processes i think they did throw in today in the keynote power and so i think i heard that that was the other ibm branding they sort of tucked that in there but the point is red hat runs everywhere so it's fundamental to building out hybrid cloud and that is fundamental to a lot of company strategies and red hat has been all over kubernetes with openshift it's i mean it's a drum beat here uh the openshift strategy is what really makes hybrid cloud possible because kubernetes is what makes it possible to shift workloads seamlessly from platform to platform you make an interesting point about hardware we have seen kind of a renaissance in hardware these last couple of years as these specific chipsets and uh and even full-scale processors have come to market we're seeing several in the ai area right now where startups are developing full-blown chipsets and and systems uh just for ai processing and nvidia of course that's that's really kind of their stock and trade these days so uh a a company that can run across all of those different platforms a platform like like rel which can run all across those different platforms is going to have a leg up on on anybody else and the implications for application development are considerable when you when you think about we talk about a lot about these alternative processes when flash replaced the spinning disk that had a huge impact on how applications are developed developers now didn't have to wait for that that disc to spin even though it's spinning very fast it's mechanical compared to electrons forget it and and the second big piece here is how memory is actually utilized the x86 you know traditional x86 you know memory everything goes through that core processor intel for years grabbed more and more function and you're seeing now that function become dispersed in fact a lot of people think we're moving from a processor-centric world to a connect centric world meaning connecting all these piece parts alternative processors memory controllers you know storage controllers io network interface cards smartnics and things like that where the communication across those resources is now where a lot of the innovation is going you see you're seeing a lot of that and now of course applications can take advantage of that especially now at the edge which is just a whole new frontier the edge certainly is part of that equation when you look at machine learning at training machine learning models the cpu actually does relatively little work most of it is happening in gpus in these parallel processes that are going on and the cpu is kind of acting as a traffic cop and you see that in the edge as well it's the same model at the edge where more of the intelligence is going to be out in discrete devices spread across the network and the cpu is going to be less of a uh you know less of a engine of intelligence at the same time though we've got cpus with we've got 100 core cpus are on the horizon and there are even 200 and 300 core cpus that we may see in the next uh in the next couple of years so cpus aren't standing still they are evolving to become really kind of super traffic cops for all of these other processors out in the network and on the edge so it's a very exciting time to be in hardware because so much innovation is happening really at the microprocessor level well we saw this you and i lived through the pc era and we saw a whole raft of applications come about as a result of the microprocessor the shift of the microprocessor-based economy we're going to see so we are seeing something similar with mobile and the edge you know just think about some of the numbers if you think about the traditional moore's law doubling a number of transistors every let's call it two years 18 to 24 months pat gelsinger at intel promises that intel is on that pace still but if you look at the apple m1 ultra they increased the transistor density 6x in the last 15 months okay so where is this another data point is the historical moore's law curve is 40 that's moderating to somewhere down you know down in the low 30s if you look at the apple a series i mean that thing is on average increasing performance at 110 a year when you add up into the combinatorial factors of the cpu the neural processing unit the gpu all the accelerators so we are seeing a new era the thing i i i wanted to bring up paul is you mentioned ai much of the ai work that's done today is modeling that's done in the cloud and when we talk about edge we think that the future of ai is ai inferencing in real time at the edge so you may not even be persisting that data but you're going to create a lot of data you're going to be operating on that data in streams and it's going to require a whole new new architectural thinking of hardware very low cost very low power very high performance to drive all that intelligence at the edge and a lot of that data is going to stay at the edge and and that's we're going to talk about some of that today with some of the ev innovations and the vehicle innovations and the intelligence in these vehicles yeah and in talking in its edge strategy which it outlined today and the announcements that are made today red hat very much uh playing to the importance of being able to run red hat enterprise linux at the edge the idea is you do these big machine learning models centrally and then you you take the you take what results from that and you move it out to smaller processors it's the only way we can cope with it with the explosion of data that will be uh that these sensors and other devices will be generating so some of the themes we're hearing in the uh announcements today that you wrote about paul obviously rel9 is huge uh red hat enterprise linux version nine uh new capabilities a lot of edge a lot of security uh new cross portfolio capabilities for the edge security in the software supply chain that's a big conversation especially post solar winds managed ansible when you think about red hat you really i think anyway about three things rel which is such as linux it powers the internet powers everything uh you think of openshift which is application development you think about ansible which is automation so itops so that's one of the announcements ansible on azure and then a lot of hybrid cloud talk and you're gonna hear a lot of talk this week about red hat's cloud services portfolio packaging red hat as services as managed services that's you know a much more popular delivery mechanism with clients because they're trying to make it easy and this is complicated stuff and it gets more complicated the more features they add and the more the more components of the red hat portfolio are are available it's it's gonna be complex to build these hybrid clouds so like many of these so thecube started doing physical events last summer by the way and so this is this is new to a lot of people uh they're here for the first time people are really excited we've definitely noticed a trend people are excited to be back together paul cormier talked about that he talked about the new normal you can define the new normal any way you want so paul cormier gave the uh the the intro keynote bidani interviewed amex stephanie cheris interviewed accenture both those firms are coming out stephanie's coming on with the in accenture as well matt hicks talked about product innovation i loved his reference to ada lovelace that was very cool he talked about uh serena uh ramyanajan a famous mathematician who nobody knew about when he was just a kid these were ignored individuals in the 1800s for years and years and years in the case of ada lovelace for a century even he asked the question what if we had discovered them earlier and acted on them and been able to iterate on them earlier and his point tied that to open source very brilliantly i thought and um keynotes which i appreciate are much shorter much shorter intimate they did a keynote in the round this time uh which i haven't seen before there's maybe a thousand people in there so a much smaller group much more intimate setting not a lot of back and forth but uh but there is there is a feeling of a more personal feel to this event than i've seen it past red hat summits yeah and i think that's a trend that we're going to see more of where the live audience is kind of the on the ground it's going to the vip audience but still catering to the virtual audience you don't want to lose them so that's why the keynotes are a lot tighter okay paul thank you for setting up red hat summit 2022 you're watching the cube's coverage we'll be right back wall-to-wall coverage for two days right after this short break [Music] you

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Boston, Massachusetts. We're here at the Seaport. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. My name is Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin is here. He's my cohost for the next day. We are going to dig in to the famous RHEL, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Gunnar Hellekson is here, he's the Vice President and General Manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Gunnar, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thanks for having me. Nice to be here, Dave, Paul. >> RHEL 9 is, wow, nine, Holy cow. It's been a lot of iterations. >> It's the highest version of RHEL we've ever shipped. >> And now we're talking edge. >> Yeah, that's right. >> And so, what's inside, tell us. to keep happy with a new RHEL release. to keep happy with a new RHEL release. The first is the hardware partners, right, because they rely on RHEL to light up all their delicious hardware that they're making, then you got application developers and the ISVs who rely on RHEL to be that kind of stable platform for innovation, and then you've got the operators, the people who are actually using the operating system itself and trying to keep it running every day. So we've got on the, I'll start with the hardware side, So we've got on the, I'll start with the hardware side, which is something, as you know, RHEL success, and I think you talked about this with Matt, just in a few sessions earlier that the success of RHEL is really, hinges on our partnerships with the hardware partners and in this case, we've got, let's see, in RHEL 9 we've got all the usual hardware suspects and we've added, just recently in January, we added support for ARM servers, as general ARM server class hardware. And so that's something customers have been asking for, delighted to be shipping that in RHEL 9. So now ARM is kind of a first-class citizen, right? Alongside x86, PowerZ and all the other usual suspects. And then of course, working with our favorite public cloud providers. So making sure that RHEL 9 is available at AWS and Azure and GCP and all our other cloud friends, right? >> Yeah, you mentioned ARM, we're seeing ARM in the enterprise. We're obviously seeing ARM at the edge. You guys have been working with ARM for a long time. You're working with Intel, you're working with NVIDIA, you've got some announcements this week. Gunnar, how do you keep Linux from becoming Franken OS with all these capabilities? >> This is a great question. First is, the most important thing is to be working closely with, I mean, the whole point of Linux and the reason why Linux works is because you have all these people working together to make the same thing, right? And so fighting that is a bad idea. Working together with everyone, leaning into that collaboration, that's an important part of making it work over time. The other one is having, just like in any good relationship, having healthy boundaries. And so making sure that we're clear about the things that we need to keep stable and the places where we're allowed to innovate and striking the right balance between those two things, that allows us to continue to ship one coherent operating system while still keeping literally thousands of platforms happy. >> So you're not trying to suck in all the full function, you're trying to accommodate that function that the ecosystem is going to develop? >> Yeah, that's right. So the idea is that what we strive for is consistency across all of the infrastructures and then allowing for kind of optimizations and we still let ourselves take advantage of whatever indigenous feature might appear on, such an ARM chip or thus in a such cloud platform. But really, we're trying to deliver a uniform platform experience to the application developers, right? Because they can't be having, like there can't be kind of one version of RHEL over here and another version of RHEL over here, the ecosystem wouldn't work. The whole point of Linux and the whole point of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is to be the same so that everything else can be different. >> And what incentives do you use to keep customers current? >> To keep customers current? Well so the best thing to do I found is to meet customers where they are. So a lot of people think we release RHEL 9 at the same time we have Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, we have Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, all these are running at the same time, and then we also have multiple minor release streams inside those. So at any given time, we're running, let's say, a dozen different versions of RHEL are being maintained and kept up-to-date, and we do this precisely to make sure that we're not force marching people into the new version and they have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, they should just be able to sit there and enjoy the minor version that they like. And we try and keep that going for as long as possible. >> Even if it's 10 years out of date? >> So, 10 years, interesting you chose that number because that's the end of life. >> That's the end of the life cycle. >> Right. And so 10 years is about, that's the natural life of a given major release, but again inside that you have several 10-year life cycles kind of cascading on each other, right? So nine is the start of the next 10-year cycle while we're still living inside the 10-year cycle of seven and eight. So lots of options for customers. >> How are you thinking about the edge? how do you define, let's not go to the definition, but at high level. (Gunnar laughing) Like I've been in a conference last week. It was Dell Tech World, I'll just say it. They were sort of the edge to them was the retail store. >> Yeah. >> Lowe's, okay, cool, I guess that's edgy, I guess, But I think space is the edge. (Gunnar chuckling) >> Right, right, right. >> Or a vehicle. How do you think about the edge? All the above or but the exciting stuff to me is that far edge, but I wonder if you can comment. >> Yeah, so there's all kinds of taxonomies out there for the edge. For me, I'm a simple country product manager at heart and so, I try to keep it simple, right? And the way I think about the edge is, here's a use case in which somebody needs a small operating system that deploys on probably a small piece of hardware, usually varying sizes, but it could be pretty small. That thing needs to be updated without any human touching it, right? And it needs to be reliably maintained without any human touching it. Usually in the edge cases, actually touching the hardware is a very expensive proposition. So we're trying to be as hands off as possible. >> No truck rolls. >> No truck rolls ever, right, exactly. (Dave chuckling) And then, now that I've got that stable base, I'm going to go take an application. I'll probably put it in a container for simplicity's sake and same thing, I want to be able to deploy that application. If something goes wrong, I need to build a roll back to a known good state and then I need to set of management tools that allow me to touch things, make sure that everything is healthy, make sure that the updates roll out correctly, maybe do some AB testing, things like that. So I think about that as, that's the, when we talk about the edge case for RHEL, that's the horizontal use case and then we can do specializations inside particular verticals or particular industries, but at bottom that's the use case we're talking about when we talk about the edge. >> And an assumption of connectivity at some point? >> Yeah. >> Right, you didn't have to always be on. >> Intermittent, latent, eventual connectivity. >> Eventual connectivity. (chuckles) That's right in some tech terms. >> Red Hat was originally a one trick pony. I mean, RHEL was it and now you've got all of these other extensions and different markets that you expanded into. What's your role in coordinating what all those different functions are doing? >> Yes, you look at all the innovations we've made, whether it's in storage, whether it's in OpenShift and elsewhere, RHEL remains the beating heart, right? It's the place where everything starts. And so a lot of what my team does is, yes, we're trying to make all the partners happy, we're also trying to make our internal partners happy, right? So the OpenShift folks need stuff out of RHEL, just like any other software vendor. And so I really think about RHEL is yes, we're a platform, yes, we're a product in our own right, but we're also a service organization for all the other parts of the portfolio. And the reason for that is we need to make sure all this stuff works together, right? Part of the whole reasoning behind the Red Hat Portfolio at large is that each of these pieces build on each other and compliment each other, right? I think that's an important part of the Red Hat mission, the RHEL mission. >> There's an article in the journal yesterday about how the tech industry was sort of pounding the drum on H-1B visas, there's a limit. I think it's been the same limit since 2005, 65,000 a year. We are facing, customers are facing, you guys, I'm sure as well, we are, real skills shortage, there's a lack of talent. How are you seeing companies deal with that? What are you advising them? What are you guys doing yourselves? >> Yeah, it's interesting, especially as everybody went through some flavor of digital transformation during the pandemic and now everybody's going through some, and kind of connected to that, everybody's making a move to the public cloud. They're making operating system choices when they're making those platform choices, right? And I think what's interesting is that, what they're coming to is, "Well, I have a Linux skills shortage and for a thousand reasons the market has not provided enough Linux admins." I mean, these are very lucrative positions, right? With command a lot of money, you would expect their supply would eventually catch up, but for whatever reason, it's not catching up. So I can't solve this by throwing bodies at it so I need to figure out a more efficient way of running my Linux operation. People are making a couple choices. The first is they're ensuring that they have consistency in their operating system choices, whether it's on premise or in the cloud, or even out on the edge, if I have to juggle three, four different operating systems, as I'm going through these three or four different infrastructures, that doesn't make any sense, 'cause the one thing is most precious to me is my Linux talent, right? And so I need to make sure that they're consistent, optimized and efficient. The other thing they're doing is tooling and automation and especially through tools like Ansible, right? Being able to take advantage of as much automation as possible and much consistency as possible so that they can make the most of the Linux talent that they do have. And so with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, in particular, you see us make a big investment in things like more automation tools for things like SAP and SQL server deployments, you'll see us make investments in things like basic stuff like the web console, right? We should now be able to go and point and click and go basic Linux administration tasks that lowers the barrier to entry and makes it easier to find people to actually administer the systems that you have. >> As you move out onto these new platforms, particularly on the edge, many of them will be much smaller, limited function. How do you make the decisions about what features you're going to keep or what you're going to keep in RHEL when you're running on a thermostat? >> Okay, so let me be clear, I don't want RHEL to run on a thermostat. (everybody laughing) >> I gave you advantage over it. >> I can't handle the margins on something like that, but at the end. >> You're running on, you're running on the GM. >> Yeah, no that's, right? And so the, so the choice at the, the most important thing we can do is give customers the tools that they need to make the choice that's appropriate for their deployment. I have learned over several years in this business that if I start choosing what content a customer decide wants on their operating system I will always guess it wrong, right? So my job is to make sure that I have a library of reliable, secure software options for them, that they can use as ingredients into their solution. And I give them tools that allow them to kind of curate the operating system that they need. So that's the tool like Image Builder, which we just announced, the image builder service lets a customer go in and point and click and kind of compose the edge operating system they need, hit a button and now they have an atomic image that they can go deploy out on the edge reliably, right? >> Gunnar can you clarify the cadence of releases? >> Oh yeah. >> You guys, the change that you made there. >> Yeah. >> Why that change occurred and what what's the standard today? >> Yeah, so back when we released RHEl 8, so we were just talking about hardware and you know, it's ARM and X86, all these different kinds of hardware, the hardware market is internally. I tell everybody the hardware market just got real weird, right? It's just got, the schedules are crazy. We got so many more entrance. Everything is kind of out of sync from where it used to be, it used to be there was a metronome, right? You mentioned Moore's law earlier. It was like a 18 month metronome. Everybody could kind of set their watch to. >> Right. >> So that's gone, and so now we have so much hardware that we need to reconcile. The only way for us to provide the kind of stability and consistency that customers were looking for was to set a set our own clock. So we said three years for every major release, six months for every minor release and that we will ship a new minor release every six months and a new major release every three years, whether we need it or not. And that has value all by itself. It means that customers can now plan ahead of time and know, okay, in 36 months, the next major release is going to come on. And now that's something I can plan my workload around, that something I can plan a data center migration around, things like that. So the consistency of this and it was a terrifying promise to make three years ago. I am now delighted to announce that we actually made good on it three years later, right? And plan two again, three years from now. >> Is it follow up, is it primarily the processor, optionality and diversity, or as I was talking to an architect, system architect the other day in his premise was that we're moving from a processor centric world to a connect centric world, not just the processor, but the memories, the IO, the controllers, the nics and it's just keeping that system in balance. Does that affect you or is it primarily the processor? >> Oh, it absolutely affects us, yeah. >> How so? >> Yeah, so the operating system is the thing that everyone relies on to hide all that stuff from everybody else, right? And so if we cannot offer that abstraction from all of these hardware choices that people need to make, then we're not doing our job. And so that means we have to encompass all the hardware configurations and all the hardware use cases that we can in order to make an application successful. So if people want to go disaggregate all of their components, we have to let 'em do that. If they want to have a kind of more traditional kind of boxed up OEM experience, they should be able to do that too. So yeah, this is what I mean is because it is RHEL responsibility and our duty to make sure that people are insulated from all this chaos underneath, that is a good chunk of the job, yeah. >> The hardware and the OS used to be inseparable right before (indistinct) Hence the importance of hardware. >> Yeah, that's right. >> I'm curious how your job changes, so you just, every 36 months you roll on a new release, which you did today, you announced a new release. You go back into the workplace two days, how is life different? >> Not at all, so the only constant is change, right? And to be honest, a major release, that's a big event for our release teams. That's a big event for our engineering teams. It's a big event for our product management teams, but all these folks have moved on and like we're now we're already planning. RHEL 9.1 and 9.2 and 8.7 and the rest of the releases. And so it's kind of like brief celebration and then right back to work. >> Okay, don't change so much. >> What can we look forward to? What's the future look like of RHEL, RHEL 10? >> Oh yeah, more bigger, stronger, faster, more optimized for those and such and you get, >> Longer lower, wider. >> Yeah, that's right, yeah, that's right, yeah. >> I am curious about CentOS Stream because there was some controversy around the end of life for CentOS and the move to CentOS Stream. >> Yeah. >> A lot of people including me are not really clear on what stream is and how it differs from CentOS, can you clarify that? >> Absolutely, so when Red Hat Enterprise Linux was first created, this was back in the days of Red Hat Linux, right? And because we couldn't balance the needs of the hobbyist market from the needs of the enterprise market, we split into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora, okay? So then for 15 years, yeah, about 15 years we had Fedora which is where we took all of our risks. That was kind of our early program where we started integrating new components, new open source projects and all the rest of it. And then eventually we would take that innovation and then feed it into the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The trick with that is that the Red Hat Enterprise Linux work that we did was largely internal to Red Hat and wasn't accessible to partners. And we've just spent a lot of time talking about how much we need to be collaborating with partners. They really had, a lot of them had to wait until like the beta came out before they actually knew what was going to be in the box, okay, well that was okay for a while but now that the market is the way that it is, things are moving so quickly. We need a better way to allow partners to work together with us further upstream from the actual product development. So that's why we created CentOS Stream. So CentOS Stream is the place where we kind of host the party and people can watch the next version of Red Hat Enterprise get developed in real time, partners can come in and help, customers can come in and help. And we've been really proud of the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is the first release that came completely out of CentOS Stream. Another way of putting that is that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is the first version of RHEL that was actually built, 80, 90% of it was built completely in the open. >> Okay, so that's the new playground. >> Yeah, that's right. >> You took a lot of negative pushback when you made the announcement, is that basically because the CentOS users didn't understand what you were doing? >> No, I think the, the CentOS Linux, when we brought CentOS Linux on, this was one of the things that we wanted to do, is we wanted to create this space where we could start collaborating with people. Here's the lesson we learned. It is very difficult to collaborate when you are downstream of the product you're trying to improve because you've already shipped the product. And so once you're for collaborating downstream, any changes you make have to go all the way up the water slide and before they can head all the way back down. So this was the real pivot that we made was moving that partnership and that collaboration activity from the downstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to putting it right in the critical path of Red Hat Enterprise Linux development. >> Great, well, thank you for that Gunnar. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, it's great to, >> Yeah, my pleasure. >> See you and have a great day tomorrow. Thanks, and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow. We start at 9:00 AM. East Coast time. I think the keynotes, we will be here right after that to break that down, Paul Gillin and myself. This is day one for theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022 from Boston. We'll see you tomorrow, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)