>>from around the globe. >>It's the Cube with >>coverage of Coop Khan and Cloud Native Con Europe 2020 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat Cloud, >>Native Computing Foundation and >>Ecosystem Partners. Hi. And welcome back. I'm stew Minuteman. And this is the cube coverage of que con cognitive con 2020. The Europe virtual addition Course kubernetes won the container wars as we went from managing a few containers that managing clusters, too many customers managing multiple clusters and that and get more complicated. So to help understand those challenges and how solutions are being put out to solve them, having a welcome back to the from one of our cube alumni do if it Gerald is the vice president and general manager of the management business unit at Red Hat. Joe, good to see you again. Thanks so much for joining us >>two. Thanks for having me back. >>All right, so at Red Hat Summit, one of the interesting conversation do you and I add, was talking about advanced cluster management or a CME course. That was some people and some technology that came over to Red hat from IBM post acquisition. So it was tech preview give us the update. What's the news? And, you know, just level set for the audience. You know what cluster management is? >>Sure, So advanced Cluster manager or a CMS, We actually falling, basically, is a way to manage multiple clusters. Ross, even different environments, right? As people have adopted communities and you know, we have at several 1000 customers running open shift on their starting to push it in some very, very big ways. And so what they run into is a stay scale. They need better ways to manage. It would make those environments, and a CMS is a huge way to help manage those environments. It was early availability back at Summit end of April, and in just a few months now it's generally available. We're super excited about that. >>Well, that that Congratulations on moving that from technical preview to general availability so fast. What can you tell us? How many customers have you had used this? What have you learned in talking to them about this solution? >>So, first of all, we're really pleasantly surprised by the amount of people that were interested in the tech preview. Integrity is not a product that's ready to use in production yet so a lot of times accounts are not interested in. They want to wait for the production version. We had over 100 customers in our tech review across. Not only geography is all over the world Asia, America, Europe, us across all different verticals. There's a tremendous amount of interest in it. I think that just shows you know, how applicable it is to these environments of people trying to manage. So tremendous had update. We got great feedback from that. And in just a few months, we incorporate that feedback into the now generally available product. So great uptick during the tech created >>Excellent Bring assigned side a little bit, you know, When would I use this solution? If I just have a single cluster, Does it make sense for May eyes? Is it only for multi clusters? You know, what's the applicability of the offering? Yes, sir, even for >>single clusters that the things that ACM really does fall into three major areas right allows closer lifecycle management. Of course, that would mean that you have more than one cluster ondas people grow. They do for a number of reasons. Also, policy based management the ability to enforced and fig policies and enforce compliance across even your single cluster to make sure that stays perfect in terms of settings and configuration and things like that. Any other application. Lifecycle management The ability to deploy applications in more advanced way, even if you're on a single cluster, gets even better for multi cluster. But you can deploy your APS to just the clusters that are tagged a certainly, but lots of capabilities, even for application, even a single cluster. So we find even people that are running a single cluster need it askew, deployed more more clusters. You're definitely >>that's great. Any you mentioned you had feedback from customers. What are the things that I guess would be the biggest pain points that this solves for them that they were struggling with in the past? Well, >>first of being able to sort of Federated Management multiple clusters, right, as opposed to having to manage each cluster individually, but the ability to do policy based configuration management to just express the way you want things to stay, have them stay that way to adopt a more of a getups ethnology in terms of how they're managing their your open ships environments. There's lots more feedback, but those were some of the ones that seem to be fairly common, repetitive across the country. >>Yeah, and you know, Joe, you've also gotten automation in the management suite. How do I think about this? How does this fit into the broader management automation that customers were using? Well, >>I think as people in employees environments. And it was a long conversation about platform right? But there's a lot of things that have to go with the platform and red hats actually in very good about that, in terms of providing all the things you necessary that you would find necessary to make the five form successful in your environment. Right? So I was seen by four. We need storage, then development environments management, the automation ability to train on it. We have our open innovation labs. There's lots of things that are beyond the platform that people acquire in order to be successful. In the case of management automation, ACM was a huge advancement. Terms had managed these environments, but we're not done. We're gonna continue to ADM or automation integration with things like answerable mawr, integration with observe ability and analytics so far from done. But we want to make sure that open ship stays the best managed environment that's out there. I also do want to make a call out to the fact that you know, this team has been working on this technology for the past couple of years. And so, you know, it's only been a red hat for five months. This technology is actually very mature, but it is quite an accomplishment for any company to take a new team in a new technology. And in five months, do what Red Hat does to it in terms of making it consumable for the enterprise. So then kudos continue. Really not >>well. And I know a piece of that is, you know, moving that along to be open source. So, you know, where are we with the solution? Now that is be a How does that fit in tow being open? Source. >>Eso supports that are open source Already. When the process of open sourcing the rest of it, as you've seen over time read, it has a perfect record here of acquiring technologies that were either completely closed Source Open core in some cases where part it was open. It was closed. But that was the case with Ansell a few years ago. But basically our strategy is everything has to be open source. That takes time in the process of going through all of the processes necessary to open source parts of ACM on. We think that will find lots of interest in the community around the different projects inside of >>Yeah. How about what? One of the bigger concerns talking to customers in general about kubernetes even Mawr in 2020 is. What about security? How does a CME help customers make sure that their environment to secure? >>Yeah, so you know, configuration policies and forcing you can actually sent with ACM that you want things to be a certain way that somebody changes them that automatically either warn you about them or enforcement would set them back. So it's got some very strong security chops in terms of keeping the configurations just the way you want. That gets harder as you get more and more clusters. Imagine trying to keep everything but the same levels, settings, software, all the parts and pieces so affected you have ACM that can do this across any and all of your clusters really took the burden off people trying to maintain secure environments, >>okay, and so generally available. Now, anything you can share about how this solution is priced, how it fits in tow. The broader open shift offerings, >>Yes. Oh, so it's an add on for open shift is priced very similarly to open shift in terms of the, you know, core pricing. One thing I do want to mention about ACM, which maybe doesn't come out just by a description product is the fact that a scene was built from scratch for communities, environments and optimize for open shift. We're seeing a lot of competition out there that's taking products that were built for other environments, trying to sort of been member coerce them into managing kubernetes environments. We don't think people are going to be successful at that. Haven't been successful to date. So one things that we find as sort of a competitive differentiator for ACM and market is the fact that it was built from scratch designed for communities environments. So it is really well designed for the environment it's trying to manage, and we think that's gonna keep your competitive edge? >>Well, always. Joe. When you have a new architecture, you advantage of things. Any examples that you have is what, what a new architecture like this can do that that an older architecture might struggle with or not believe. Be able to do even though when you look at the product sheet, the words sound similar. But when you get underneath the covers, it's just not a good architect well fit. >>Yeah, so it's very similar sort of the shift from physical to virtual. You can't have a paradigm shift in the infrastructure and not have a sort of a corresponding paradigm shift in management tool. So the way you monitor these environments, where you secure them the way they scale and expand, we do resource management, security. All those things are vastly different in this environment compared to, let's say, a virtual more physical environment. So this has improved many times in the past. You know, paradigm shift in the infrastructure or the application environment will drive a commensurate paradigm shift in management. That's what you're seeing here. So that's why we thought it was super important to have management that was built for these environments. by design. So it's not trying to do sort of unnatural things north manage the environment. >>Yeah, I wondered. I love to hear just a little bit your philosophy as to what's needed in this space. You know, I look back to previous generations, look at virtualization. You know, Microsoft did very well at managing their environment, the M where did the same for their environments. But, you know, we've had generations of times where solutions have tried to be management of everything, and that could be challenging. So, you know, what's Red Hat in a CM's position and what do we need in the community space, you know, today and for the next couple of years. >>So kubernetes itself is the automation platform you talked about, you know, early on in the second. So you know, Cooper navies itself provides, you know, a lot of automation around container management. What a CME does is build a top it out and then capture, you know, data and events and configuration items in the environment and then allows you to define policies. People want to move away from manual processes. Certainly, but they wanna be able to get to a more state full expression of the way things should be. You want to be able to use more about, you know, sort of get up, you know, kind of philosophy where they say, this is how I want things today. Check the version in, keep it at that level. If it changes, put it back. Tell me about it. But sort of the era of chasing. You know, management with people is changing. You're seeing a huge premium now on probation. So automation at all levels. And I think this is where a cm's automation on top of open shift automation on down the road, combined with things like ansell, will provide the most automated environment you can have for these container platforms. Um, so it's definitely changing your seeing observe ability, ai ops getups type of philosophies Coming in these air very different manager in the past helps you seeing innovation across the whole management landscape in the communities environment because they are so different. The physics of them are different than the previous environments. We think with ACM answerable or insights product and some over analytics that we've got the right thing for this environment >>and can give us a little bit of a look forward, you know? How often should we expect to see updates on this? Of course. You mentioned getting feedback from the community from the technical preview to G A. So give us a little bit. Look, you know, what should we be expecting to see from a CME down the right the So >>the ACM team is far from done, right? So they're going to continue to rev, you know, just like we read open shift, that very, very fast base we're gonna be reading ACM and fast face. Also, you see a lot of integration between ACM. A lot of the partners were already working with in the application monitoring space and the analytics space security automation I would expect to see in the uncivil fest time frame, which is mid October, will cease, um, integration with danceable on ACM around things. That insult does very well combined with what ACM does. A sand will continue to push out on Mawr cluster management, more policy based management and certainly advancing the application life cycles that people are very interested in ruined faster. They want to move faster with a higher degree of certainty in their application. Employments on ACM is right there. >>It just final question for you, Joe, is, you know, just in the broader space, looking at management in this kind of cube con cloud, native con ecosystem final words, you want customers to understand where we are today and where we need to go down the road. >>So I think the you know, the market and industry has decided communities is the platform of future right? And certainly we were one of the earliest to invest in container management platforms with open shift were one of the first to invest in communities. We have thousands of customers running open shift back Russell Industries on geography is so we bet on that a long time ago. Now we're betting on the management automation of those environments and bringing them to scale. And the other thing I think that redhead is unique on is that we think that people gonna want to run their kubernetes environments across all different kinds of environments, whether it's on premise visible in virtual multiple public clouds, where we have offerings as well as at the edge. Right. So this is gonna be an environment that's going to be very, very ubiquitous. Pervasive, deported scale. And so the management of a nation has become a necessity. And so but had investing in the right areas to make sure that enterprises continues communities particularly open shift in all the environments that they want at the scale. >>All right. Excellent. Well, Joe, I know we'll be catching up with you and your team for answerable fest. Ah, coming in the fall. Thanks so much for the update. Congratulations to you in the team on the rapid progression of ACM now being G A. >>Thanks to appreciate it, we'll see you soon. >>All right, Stay tuned for more coverage from que con club native con 2020 in Europe, the virtual addition on still minimum and thanks, as always, for watching the Cube.