 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Brought to you by Red Hat. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our continuous coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. We're not in person this year as everybody knows, but we're back covering the event. We're excited to be here. And really our next guest, we've had him on a lot of times. He's super insightful. Coming right off the keynote, driving into some really interesting topics that we're excited to get into. And it's Chris Wright. He's the Chief Technology Officer of Red Hat. Chris, great to see you. Hey, great to see you. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. So let's jump into it. I mean, you covered so many topics in your keynote. The first one though, that just jumps off the page, right? Is automation and really rethinking automation. You know, and I remember talking to, to a product manager at a hyperscaler many moons ago. And he talked about the process of them mapping out their growth and trying to figure out how are they, we're gonna support it in their own data center. And he just basically figured out, we cannot do this at scale without automation. So I think the hyperscaler has been doing it, but really it's kind of a new approach for enterprises to incorporate new and more automation into what they do every day. It's a fundamental part of scaling. And I think we've learned over time that one, we need programming interfaces on everything. So that's a critical part of beginning the automation journey. So now you have a programmatic way to interact with all the things out there. But the other piece is just creating really confidence in knowing that when you're automating and you're taking tasks away from humans, which are actually error prone and typing on the keyboard is not always the greatest way to get things done. The confidence that those automation scripts or playbooks are gonna do the right things at the right time. And so creating really a business and a mindset around infusing automation to everything you do is a pretty big journey for the enterprise. Right. And that's one of the topics you talked about as well. And it comes up all the time with digital transformation or software development. This kind of shift the focus from kind of its destination to its journey. And you talk very specifically that you need to think about automation as a journey and as a process and even a language and really bake it into as many processes as you possibly can. I'm sure that shocks a lot of people and probably scares them. But really that's the only way to achieve the types of scales that we're seeing out there. Well, I think so. And part of what I was trying to highlight is the notion that a business is filled with people with domain expertise. So everybody brings something to the table. You're a business analyst. You understand the business part of what you're providing. You're the technologist. You really understand the technology. There's a partner ecosystem coming in with critical parts of the technology stack. And when you want to bring this all together, you need to have a common way to communicate. And what I was really trying to point out is a language for communication across all those different cross functional parts of your business is critical, number one. And number two, that language can actually be an automation language. And so choosing that language wisely, obviously we're talking to Ansible Fest so we're gonna be talking a lot about Ansible in this context. Choosing that language wisely is part of how you build the end to end sort of internalized view of what automation means to your business. Right. I mean, I wrote down a bunch of quotes that you talked about. Ansible is the language of automation and automation should be a primary communication language again, very different kind of language that we don't hear. And that it's more than a tool, but a process, a constant process and should be an embedded component of any organization. So, I mean, you're really talking about automation as a first class citizen, not kind of this last thing for the most advanced or potentially last thing for the most simple things where we can apply this process but really needs to be a fundamental core of the way you think about everything that you do. Really a very different way to think about things and probably really appropriate as we come out of 2020 in this kind of new world where everyone's like distributed teams, well now you have distributed teams. And so the forcing function on better tooling that's really wrapped in better culture has never been greater than we're seeing today. I completely agree with that and that domain expertise, I think we understand well in certain areas. So for example, application developers, they rely on one another. So you're maybe as an application developer consuming a service from somebody else in your microservices architecture. And so you're dependent on that other engineering teams domain expertise. Maybe that's even the database service and you're not a database DBA or engineer that really builds schemas for databases. So we kind of get that notion of encapsulating domain expertise in the building and delivering of applications. That notion, the CI CD pipeline, which itself is automating how you build and deliver applications, that notion of encapsulating domain expertise across a series of different functions in your business can go much broader than just building and delivering the application. It's running your business. And that's where it becomes fundamental. It becomes a process that's the journey, not the end state, but it's not the destination, it's the journey that matters. And I've seen some really interesting ways that people actually work on this and try to approach it from the, how do you change your mindset? Here's one example that I thought was really unique. I was speaking with a customer who quite literally automated their existing process. And what they did was automate everything from generating the emails to the PDFs which would then be shared as basically printed out documents for how they walked through business change when they're making a change in their product. And the reason they did that was not because that was the most efficient model at all, it was that was the way they could get the teams comfortable with automation. If it produced the same artifacts that they were already used to, then they created confidence and then they could sort of evolve the model to streamline it, because printing out a piece of paper to review it is not going to be the efficient way to change your business. Well, just to follow up on that, right? Cause I think what probably scares a lot of people about automation, one is exception handling, right? And can you get all the edge cases in the use case? So in the one you just talked about, how do they deal with that? And then I think the other one is just simply control. Do I feel confident enough that I can get the automation to a place that I'm comfortable to hand over to hand over control? And I'm just curious in that case, you just outlined, how do they deal with kind of those two factors? Well, they always enabled a human checkpoint. So, especially in the beginning. So it was sort of trust but verify that model. And over time, you can look at the things that you really understand well and start with those. And the things that have more kind of gray zones where the exceptions may be the rule or maybe the critical part of the decision-making process, those can be sort of flagged as needs real kind of human intervention. And that's a way to sort of evolve and iterate and not start off with the notion that everything has to be automated. You can do it piecemeal and grow over time and you'll build confidence and you'll understand where, how to flag those exceptions, where you actually need to change your process itself because you may have bottlenecks that don't really make sense for the business anymore and where you can incorporate the exception handling into the automation, essentially. So. That's great. Thanks for sharing that example. I wanna shift gears a little bit because another big topic that you covered in your keynote that we talk about all the time on theCUBE is edge, right? So everybody knows what a data center is. Everybody knows what a public cloud is. You know, lots of conversations around hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But this new thing is edge. And I think, you know, people talk about edge in kind of an esoteric way, but I think you just nailed it. I mean, you just nailed this. Very simply moving the compute to where the data is collected and or consumed. You know, I thought that was super elegant, but what you didn't get into on all the complexity is what that means, right? I mean, data centers are pristine environments that, you know, they're very, very controlled. The environment's controlled, the network is controlled. The security is controlled. And you have the vision of an edge device and the one everyone always likes to use is say like a wind farm, right? Those things are out in crazy harsh conditions. And then there's still this balancing act as to what information does get stored and processed and used. And then what does have to go back to the data center because it's not a substitute for the data center. It's really an extension of the data center or maybe the data center's actually an extension of the edge. Maybe that's a better way to think of it. But you know, we've had all these devices out there. Now suddenly we're connecting them and bringing them into a network and adding control. And I just thought, you know, the edge represents such a big shift in the way we're gonna see compute change probably as fundamental I would imagine as the cloud shift has been. I believe it is. I absolutely believe it's as big a change in the industry as the cloud has been. The cloud really created scale, a created automation programmatic interfaces to infrastructure and higher level services. But it also was built around a premise of centralization. I mean, clouds themselves are distributed and so you can create availability zones and resilient applications. But there's still a sense of centralization. Edge is really embracing the notion that data production is kind of only up and to the right. And the way to scale processing that data and turning that data into insights and information that's valuable for our business is to bring compute closer to data. Not really a new concept, but the scale at which it's happening is what's really changing how we think about building infrastructure and building the support behind all that processing. And it's that scale that requires automation because you're just not going to be able to manage thousands or tens of thousands or in certain scenarios, even millions of devices without putting automation at the forefront. Right, right. It's critical. Right. And we can't talk about Edge without talking about 5G and I laugh every time I'm watching football on Sundays and they have the 5G commercials on talking about my handset that I can order my food to get delivered faster at my house. Like completely missing the point, right? She's about machine to machine communication and the scale and the speed and the volume of machine to machine is so fundamentally different than humans talking voice to voice. And that's really this big drivers to instrument, as you said, all these machines, all these devices, there's been sensors on them forever, but now the ability to actually connect them and pull them into this network and start to use the data and control the machines is a huge shift in the way things are gonna happen going forward. Well, it's a couple of things that are important in there. Number one, that data production and sensors and bringing compute closer to data, what that represents is bringing the digital world and the physical world closer together. And we'll experience that at a personal level with how we communicate. We're already distributed in today's environment and the ways we can augment our human connections through a digital medium are really gonna be important to how we maintain our human connections. And then on the enterprise side, we're building this infrastructure in 5G that when you think about it from a consumer point of view and ordering your pizza faster, it really isn't the right way to think about it. It's a couple of key characteristics of 5G, greater bandwidth, so you can just push more package to the network, lower latency, so you're closer to the data and higher connection density and more reliable connections. And that kind of combination of characteristics make it really valuable for enterprise businesses. You can bring your data and compute close together. You have these highly reliable and dense connections that allow for device proliferation. And that's the piece that's really changing where the world's going. I like to think of it in a really simple way, which is 4G and the cloud and the smartphone created a world that today we take for granted. 10 years ago, we really couldn't imagine what it looked like. Right, 5G more. Device proliferation and edge computing today is building the footprint for what we can't really imagine what we will be taking for granted in 10 years from now. So we're at this great kind of change in the inflection point in the industry. Yeah, I have to always take a moment to call out Amarna's law. I think it's the most underappreciated law and it's been stolen by other people and repackaged many ways, but it's basically, we overestimate the impact of these things in the short term and we way, way, way, way underestimate the impact in the long term. And I think your story in the keynote about once you had digital phones and smartphones, we don't even think twice about looking at a map and where are we and where's a store close by and are they open and is there a review? I mean, the infrastructure to put that together, kind of an API based economy which is pulling together all these bits and pieces, the stupid rely, expectation of performance and how fast that information is gonna be delivered to me. I think we still take it for granted, as you say. I think it's like magic and we never thought of all the different applications of these interconnected apps enabled by an always on device that's always connected and knows where we are. It's a huge change. And as you say that, when we think about 5G 10 years from now, oh my goodness, where are we gonna be? So it's hard to imagine. I mean, it really is hard to imagine and I think that's okay. And what we're doing today is introducing everything that we need to help businesses evolve, take advantage of that. And that scale of the edge is, it's a fundamental characteristic of the edge. And so automating to manage that scale is the only way you're gonna be successful and extending what we've learned in the data center out to the edge, using the same tools, the things we already understand really is a great way to evolve a business. And that's where that common language and the discussions that I was trying to generate around Ansible as a great tool, but it's not just the tool, it's the whole process, the mindset, the culture change, the way you change how you operate your business that's going to allow us to take advantage of the future where my clothes are full of sensors and you can look through a video camera and tell immediately that I'm happy with this conversation. That's a very different kind of augmented reality than we have today. And maybe it's a bad example, but it's hard to imagine really what it'll be like. So Chris, I just wanna close on a slight shift, we've been talking a lot about technology, but you talk about culture all the time. And really it's about the people. And I think a number of times in the keynote, you reinforce this is about people and culture. And I just had Ina Marie Johnson on the Chief Diversity Officer from Zendesk and she said, you know, culture eats strategy for breakfast, great line. So I wonder if you can talk about the culture because it's very different. And you've seen it in open source from Red Hat for a long time, really a shifting culture around open source, the shifting culture around DevOps and continuous delivery and change is a good thing, not a bad thing. And we wanna be able to change our code frequently and push out new features. So again, as you think of automation and culture, you know, what kind of comes to mind and what should people be thinking about when they think about the people and less about the technology? Well, there's a couple of things. Some I'll reinforce what we already touched on, which is the notion of creating confidence in the automation. So there's an element of trust associated with that. And that's more maybe trusting the technology. So when you're automating something, you've already got a process, you already understand how something works. It's turning that something into an automated script or playbook in the Ansible context and trusting that it's gonna do the right thing. There's another important part of trust which is getting more to the people part. And I've learned this a lot from open source communities. Collaboration and communities are fundamentally built around trust and human trust relationships. And the change in process, trusting not only that the tools are gonna do the right job but that people are really work, you know, assuming good intent and working with the trying to build for the right outcomes for your business. I think that's a really important part of the overall picture. And then finally, that trust is extended to knowing that that change for the business isn't going to compromise your job, right? So thinking differently about what is your job? Is your job to do the repetitive task or is your job to free up your time from that repetitive task to think more creatively about value you can bring to the business. And that's where I think it's really challenging for organizations to make changes because you build a personal identity around the jobs that you do and making changes to those personal identities really gets to the core of who you are as a person. And so that's why I think it's so complicated. The tools almost are the easy part. It's the process changes and the cultural changes, the mindset changes behind that, which is difficult but more powerful in the end. Yeah, yeah, well, I think people process tools, the tech is always the easy part relative to culture and people and changing the way people do things. And as you said, who their identity is, how they get kind of wrapped into what they do and what they think their value is and who they are. So to free them up from that, and that's a really important point. Well, Chris, I always love having you on. Thank you for coming on again, Sharon, your insight, great keynote and give you a last word about AnsibleFest 2020. What are you looking forward to take away from this little show? Well, number one, my personal hope is that the conversation that I was trying to sort of ignite through the keynote is an opportunity for the community to see where Ansible fits in the edge and automation and helping really the industry at large scale. And that key part of bringing a common language to help change how we communicate internally is the message I was hoping to impart on the AnsibleFest community. And so hopefully we can take that broader and appreciate the time here to really amplify some of those messages. All right, great. Well, thanks a lot, Chris, and have a great day. Thanks, Jeff. Thank you. All right, he's Chris, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE and our ongoing coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.