 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Brought to you by Red Hat. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. I'm your host with theCUBE, John Furrier. And we've got two great guests, CUBE alumni, Robin Bergeron, Senior Manager Ansible Community Team. Welcome back, she's with Ansible and Red Hat. Good to see you. And Matt Jones, Chief Architect for the Ansible Automation Platform. Again, both with Red Hat. Ansible was acquired by Red Hat. Robin used to work for Red Hat, then went to Ansible. Ansible got bought by Red Hat. Robin, great to see you. Matt, great to see you. Thanks for having me back again, it's good to see you. We're not in person, it's the virtual event. Thanks for coming on remotely to our CUBE virtual. Really appreciate it. I want to talk about the, and I brought that Red Hat kind of journey, Robin, we talked about it last year, but it really is an important point. The roots of Ansible and kind of where it's come from and what it's turned into and where it is today is an interesting journey because the mission is still the same. I want to like to get your perspectives because Red Hat was acquired by IBM. Ansible's under Red Hat, all part of one big happy family. A lot's going on around the platform. Matt, you're the Chief Architect. Robin, you're on the community team. Collections, collections, collections is the message. Content, content, content, community, a lot going on. So take a minute, both of you explain the Ansible roots, where it is today, and the mission. Right, so the beginning of Ansible was really, there was a small team of folks and they'd actually been through an iteration before that didn't use SSH called FUNG. But let's make a piece of software that is open source that allows people to automate other things. And we knew at the time that based on a piece of research that we had seen out of Harvard that having a piece of software be architected in a modular fashion wasn't just great for the software but it was also great for developing pathways and connections for the community to actually contribute stuff, right? If you have a car, this is always my analogy, if you have a car, you don't have to know how the engine works in order to swap out the windshield wipers or invent new windshield wipers, things like that. The nice thing about modular architectures is that it doesn't just mean that things can plug in, it means you can actually separate them into different spots to enable them to be plugged in. And that's sort of where we are today with collections, right? We've always had this sense of modules but everything, except for a couple of points in time, all of the modules, the ways that you connect Ansible to the vast array of technologies that you can use it with, all of those have always been in the full Ansible repository. Now we've separated out most of, nearly everything that is not absolutely essential to having a very minimal Ansible installation broken them out into separate repositories that are usually grouped by function, right? So there's probably like a VMware something and a cloud something and a IBM ZOS something, things like that, right? Each in their own individual groups. So now not only can contributors find what they want to contribute to in much smaller spots that are not a C of 5,000 plus folks doing work, but now you can also choose to use your Ansible collections, update them, run them independently of just the singular release of Ansible where you got everything, all the batteries included in one spot. Matt, this brings up the point about, she's bringing in more advanced functionality, she's talking about collections. This has been kind of the Ansible formula from the beginning and it's startup days, ease of use, easy, fast, automation. Talk about the, you know, you back in 2013 was a startup, now it's part of Red Hat. The game is still the same. Can you just share kind of what's the current guiding principles around Ansible this year? Because lots going on, like I said, faster, bigger, a lot going on. Share your perspective, you've been there. Yeah, you know, what we're working on now is we're taking this great tool that has changed the way that automation works for a lot of people and we want to make it faster and bigger and better. We want it to scale better. We want it to automate more and be easier to automate all the things that people want it to do. And so we're really focusing on that scalability and flexibility. Robin talked about content and collections, right? And what we want to enable is people to bring the content collections, the collections, the roles, the models, and use them in the way that they feel works best for them, leaving aside some of the things that they maybe aren't quite as interested in and put it together in a way that scales for them and scales for global automation, automation everywhere. Yeah, I want to dig into the collections later, Robin, for sure, and Matt. So let's, we'll put that on pause for a minute. I want to get into the event, the virtual event. I'm sure not face to face, because of your virtual, you guys are both keynoting. Matt, we'll start with you. If you can each give 60 seconds, kind of a rundown of your keynote talk, give us the quick summary this year on the keynotes. Matt, we'll start with you. Yeah, that's 60 seconds is tough. Okay, give me a minute and a half. We'll give you more. He's fine for me. We'll give you 90 seconds, Robin. That's gonna be tough. Matt, we'll go up to the top of you. I'll try. So this year, and I mentioned the focus on scalability and flexibility. You know, we, on the product and on the platform, on the Ansible Automation platform, the goal here is to bring content and flexibility of that content into the platform for you. We focused a lot on how you execute, how you run automation and how you manage your automation. And so bringing that content management automation into the system for you, it's really important to us. But what we're also noticing is that we, people are managing automation at a much larger scale. So we are updating the Ansible Tower, Ansible AWX, the automation platform. We're updating it to be more flexible and how it runs content and where it can run content. We're making it so that execution of automation doesn't just have to happen in your data center, in one data center. We recognize that automation occurs globally and we want to expand that automation execution capability to be able to run globally and all report back into your central business. We're also expanding over the next six months a year, how well Ansible integrates with OpenShift and Kubernetes. This is a huge focus for us. We want, we want that experience for automation to feel the same whether you're automating at the edge and devices and virtual machines and data centers, as well as clusters and Kubernetes clusters anywhere in the world. That's awesome. That's why I brought that up earlier. I wanted to get that out there because it's worth calling out that the Ansible mission from the beginning was similar scope, easy to do and simplify again, but now it's larger scale. Again, it's everywhere harder to do, so hence complexity being abstracted away. So thank you for sharing. We'll dig into that in a second. Okay, Robin, 60 seconds or more if you need it. Your keynote this year at Ansible Fest, give us the quick rundown. All right. Well, I think we probably know at this point, one of the main themes this year is called automate to connect. The purpose of the community keynote is really to highlight the achievements of the community. So we are talking about, well, we are talking about collections, going through some of the very broad highlights of that and also how that has contributed or not contributed, how that is included as part of the recent release of Ansible 2.10, which is really the first release where we've got very easy for people to actually start using collections and getting familiar with what that brings to them. A good portion of the keynote is also just about innovation, right? Like how we do things in open source and why we do things in certain ways in open source to accelerate us and how that compares with the Red Hat traditional product model, which is, we do a lot of innovation upstream, we move quickly so that if something is maybe not the right idea, we can move on. And then in our products, that's sort of the thing that we give to our customers that is tried, tested and true, all of that kind of jazz. We also talk about, right, I guess I also talk about, all of our initiatives that we're doing around diversity and inclusiveness, including some of the code changes that we've made for better, more inclusive language in our projects and our downstream products, our diversity and inclusion working group that we have in the community land, which is, just looking to embrace more and more people. You know, it's a lot about connect connectivity, right? You know, to one of Matt's points about all the things that we're trying to achieve and how it's similar to the original principles. The third one was, it's always, we need to have it to be easy to contribute to. That doesn't necessarily just mean in our community, right? Like we see in all of these workplaces, which is one of the reasons why we brought in Automation Hub that folks inside like large organizations, companies, government, whatever it is, are using Ansible and there's more and more and there's one person, they tell their friend, and next thing you know it's the whole department and then you find people in other departments and then you've got a ton of people doing stuff and we all know that, you know, you can do a bunch of stuff by yourself, but you can accomplish a lot more together. And so, you know, making it easy to contribute inside your organization is not much different than being able to contribute inside the community. So this is just, you know, a further recognition, I think of what we see is just a natural extension of open source. I think the community angle is super important because you have the community as in terms of people contributing, we also have multiple vendors now, multiple clouds, multiple integrations, the stakeholders of collaboration have increased, it was just like, oh, here's the upstream and et cetera, we're done and have meetings, do all that stuff. And Matt, that brings me to my next question. Can you talk about some of the recent releases that have changed the content experience for the Ansible users in the upstream and within the automation platform? Well, so last year, you know, we released collections and we've really been moving towards that over the 2.9, 2.10 timeframe. And now I think you're starting to see sort of the realization of that, right? This year, we've released Automation Hub on cloud.redhat.com so that we can concentrate that vendor and partner content that Red Hat supports and certifies. And Ansible Fest, you'll hear us talk about Private Automation Hub. This is bringing that content experience to the customer, to the user of this content, sort of helping you curate and manage that content yourself, like Robin said, like we want to build communities around the content that you've developed. That's the whole reason that we've done this with collections is we don't want to bind it to Ansible core releases. We don't want to block content releases. All of this great functionality that the community is building. This is what collections mean. It's you should be able to, you should be free to use the collections that you want when you want it, regardless of when Ansible core itself is releasing. Can you just take a minute real quick and just explain what is collections for folks out there who are rich? Because that's the big theme here, collections. Collections, collections, that's what I'm hearing resonate throughout the virtual hallways, if you will, Twitter and beyond. That's a good question. Like what is a collection itself? Like so we've talked a lot in the past about reusable content for Ansible. We talk a lot about roles and modules. And we sort of put those off to the side a little bit and say, these are your reusable components. You can put them anywhere you want. You can put them in source control, distribute them through email. It doesn't matter. And then your playbooks, that's what you write and that's your sort of blessed content. Collections are really about taking the modules and roles and plugins, the things that make automation possible and bundling those up together in groups of content, groups of modules and roles or standing by themselves so that you can decide how that's distributed and how you consume that, right? Like you might have the Azure, VMware or Red Hat satellite collection that you're using and you're happy with that. But you want a new version of Ansible. You're not bound to using one and the same. You can stick with the content that matters to you, the roles, the modules, the plugins that work for you and you decide when to update those and what the actual modules and plugins you're using are. So I got to ask the content question. Now I'm a content producer. We do videos. Content, blog posts content. When you talk about content, it's code, clarify that role for us because you got, you're enabling developers with content and helping them find experts. This is a concept. Robin, talk about this and Matt, you can weigh in too. Define what does content mean? It means different things. There's a word out there. I'm like, again, content could be. It is one of those words. It's right up there with developers, you know? So many different things that that can mean, especially when you have a- Explain content and the importance of that. Explain it. It's important that people understand the semantics of the word content with respect to what's going on with Ansible. And Matt and I actually had a conversation about the murkiness of this word. I believe that was yesterday. So when I think about content, and I try to put myself in the mind, my first job was a sysadmin. So I try to put myself in the mind of someone who might be using this content that I'm about to attempt to explain. Like Matt just explained, we've always had these modules, which were included in Ansible. People have pieces of code that show very basic things, right? If I get one of the AWS modules, it would, I am able to do things like, I would like to create a new user. So you might make a role that actually describes the steps in Ansible that you would have to create a new user that is able to access AWS services at your company. There may be a number of administrators who want to use that piece of stuff, that piece of code over and over and over again, because hopefully most companies are getting bigger and not smaller, right? They wanna have more people accessing all sorts of pieces of technology. So making some of these chunks accessible to lots of folks is really important, right? Because what good is automation if sure we've taken care of half of it, but if you still have to come up with your own bits of code from scratch every time you want to invoke it, you're still not really leveraging the full power of collaboration. So when we talk about content, to me it really is things that are constantly reusable, that are accessible, that you tie together with modules that you're getting from collections. And I think it's that bundle you can keep those pits of reusable content in the collections or keep them separate, but it's stuff that is baked for you or that maybe somebody inside your organization bakes, but they only have to bake it once. They don't have to bake it in 25 silos over and over and over again. Matt, the reason we're talking about this is interesting because what this points out in my opinion, this is my opinion, this points out that we're talking about content as a word means that you guys are on the cutting edge of new paradigms, which is content is essentially code, but it's addressable, it's community, it's being shared, someone wrote the code, it's a whole nother level of thinking. This is kind of the platform automation, I get it. So give us your thoughts because this is a critical component because the origination of the content, the code, I mean, I love it. Content is, I've always said content, our content should be code, it's all data, but this is interesting. This is the cutting edge concept. Could you explain what it means from your perspective? This is about building communities around that content. Like it's that sharing that didn't exist before, like Robin mentioned, you shouldn't have to build the same thing dozen times or a hundred times. You should be able to leverage the capabilities of experts and people who understand that section of automation the best. Like, I might be an expert in one field or Robin's an expert in another field. We're automating in the same space. We should be able to bring our own expertise and resources together. And so this is what that content is, like I'm an expert in one, you're an expert in another. Let's bring them together as part of our automation community and share them so that we can use them and iterate on them and build on them and just constantly make them better. And the concepts are consumption, there's consumption of the content, there's the collaboration of the content, there's the sharing, all this in this reputation, this expertise, I mean, it's a multi-sided marketplace here, isn't it? Yeah, I read an article, I don't know, a year or two ago that said, we've always evolved in the technology industry around if you have access to this, first it was the mainframes, then it was whatever, personal computers, the cloud, now it's containers, all this. Once everybody buys that mainframe or once everybody levels up their skills to whatever the next thing is that you can just buy, there's not much left that actually can help you to differentiate from your competitors other than your ability to actually leverage all of those tools. And if you can actually have better collaboration I think than other folks, then that is one of those points that actually will get you ahead in your digital transformation curve. I've been harping on this for a while, I think that cloud native finally has gone, when I say mainstream, I mean, on everyone's mind, you look at the container uptake, you're looking at containers we had IDC on, five to 10% of the enterprises are containerizing, that's huge growth opportunity, the IPO of say Snowflakes on Amazon, I mean, how does this happen? That's the company that went public, it's the most valuable IPO in the history of IPOs on Wall Street and it's built on Amazon, doesn't have its own cloud. So it's like, I mean, this is just points to the new value that's being created on top of these new cloud native architectures. So I really think you guys are onto something big here and I think you're starting to see this new notions of how things are being rethought and re-imagined. So let's keep it up. Well, I got you guys here real quick, Ansible 2.1 community release, tell us more about the updates there. 2.10, because yeah, oh, it's fine. I know some, I too have had, I'm like, why do we do that? But it's a semantic versioning. So I am more accustomed to this now, it's a slightly different world from when I worked on Fedora. I think the big highlight there is really collections. I mean, it's collections, collections, collections, that is all the work that we did, it's under the hood, over the hood and really how we went from being all in one repo to breaking things out. It's a big line for where we're advancing both the tool and also advancing the community's ability to actually collaborate together. And as folks start to actually use it, it's a big change for them potentially in how they can actually work together in their organizations using Ansible. One of the things we did so far was ensuring that their ease of use, that their experience did not change. So if they have existing Ansible stuff that they're running, playbooks, mod, roles, et cetera, they should be able to use 2.10 and not see any discernible change, right? That's all of the under the hood, that was a lot of surgery, wasn't it, Matt? Like serious amounts of work. So Matt, 2.10, does that impact the release piece of it for the developers and the customers out there? What has it changed? It's a good point. Like at least for the longer term, this means that we can focus on the Ansible core experience and this is the part that, you know, we didn't touch on much before now with the collections pieces that now when we're fixing bugs, when we're iterating and making Ansible as an engine of automation better, we can do that without negatively impacting the automation that people actually use. We can focus on sort of the core, yeah, we can focus on the core experience of actually automating itself. Execution environments, take, let's talk about that. What are they, are they being used in the community today? What do you guys react to that? We're actually, we're sort of in the middle of building this right now. Like one of the things that we've struggled with when you need to automate, you need this content that we've talked about before, but beyond that, you know, you have the system that sits underneath the version of Linux, the kernel that you're using. Going even further, you need Python dependencies, you need library dependencies. These are hard and complicated things. Like in the Ansible Tower space, we have virtual environments which lets you install those things right alongside the Ansible Tower control plane. This can cause a lot of problems. So execution environments, they take those dependencies, the unit that is the environment that you need to run your automation in. And we're going to containerize it. You were, you're just talking about this from the containerization perspective, right? We're gonna build more easily isolated, easy to use, distinct units of environments that will let you run your automation. This is great, this lets you, the person who's building the content for your organization, he can develop it and test it and send it through the CI process all the way up through production. It's the exact same environment. You could feel confident that the automation that you're running against the libraries and the modules, the version of Ansible that you're using is the same when you're developing the content as when you're running it in production for your business, for your users, for your customers. And that's the nirvana. And this is really where you talk about pushing it to new limits real quick, just to kind of end it out here for Ansible 2020, Ansible Fest 2020. Actually, we're not virtual. People aren't there in person, which is really the intimate event. Last year was awesome. Had theCUBE set right there, great event. People were intimate. What's going on for you, what you guys have for people? Obviously we've got the videos and we've got the content, media content. What's the main theme, Robin and Matt, and what's going on for resources that might be available for folks who want to learn more? What's going on in the community? Can you just take a minute each to talk about some of the exciting things that are going on at the event that they should pay attention to? And I'll see and say synchronous so they can go anywhere anytime they want. It's the internet. Where can they go to hang out? Is there a hang space? Just give the quick two second commercial. Robin, we'll start with you. All right. Well, of course you can catch the keynotes early in the morning. I look forward to everybody's super exciting, highly polite comments because I hear there's a couple of people coming to this event, at least a few. I know within the event platform itself, there are sort of chat rooms for each track. I myself will be probably hanging out in some of the diversity and inclusion spaces. Honestly, and this is part of my keynote, one of the great things about Ansible Fest is for me. And I was at the original Ansible Fest that had like 20 people in Boston in 2013 and it happened directly across the street from Red Hat Summit, which is why I was able to just ditch my job and go across the street to my future job, so to speak. We were, well, I just lost my whole train of thought and ruined everything. Geez. Okay, well, you're in the chat rooms for the diversity and community piece. Off-platform, is there a Slack? Is there like a site? Anything else, because when the event's over, they're going to come back and consume on demand, but also the community, is there discords? I mean, all kinds of stuff's going on popping up with these virtual spaces. One thing I should highlight is we do have the Ansible Contributor Summit that goes on the day before Ansible Fest and the day after Ansible Fest. Now, normally this is a pretty intimate event with the large outreach that we've gotten with this fest, which is much bigger than the original one, much, much, much bigger. We've been, you know, signing up for the Contributor Summit is part of the registration process for Ansible Fest. So we've actually geared our first day of that event to be towards new or aspiring contributors rather than the traditional format that we've had, which is where we have a lot of engineers and community members sit down physically or in a virtual room and really talk about, you know, all of the things going on under the hood, which is, you know, can be intimidating for new people. Like, I just wanted to learn about how to contribute, not how to do surgery. So the first day is really geared towards making everything accessible to new people because there turns out there's a lot of new people who are very excited about Ansible and we want to make sure that we're giving them the context. I mean, about architects, I mean, SREs are jumping in, Matt, you talked about large scale, you're the chief architect, new blood's coming in. So give us an update on your perspective, what people should pay attention to at the event, after the event, communities that could be involved in. Certainly people want to tap into you or an expert and find out what's going on. What's your comment? Yeah, you know, we have a whole new session track this year on architects, specifically for SREs and automation architects. We really want to highlight that. We want to give that sort of empowerment to the personas of people who, you know, maybe you're not a developer, maybe you're not, you know, operations or a VP of your company. And you're looking at the architecture of automation, how you can make our automation better for you and your organization. You know, everybody suffered a lot and struggled with the COVID-19. We're no different, right? We want to show how automation can empower you and power your organization and your company. Just like it, you know, we've struggled also. And we're excited about the things that we want to deliver in the next six months to a year. We want you to hear about those. We want you to hear about content and collections. We want you to hear about scalability, execution environments. We're really excited about what we're doing. You know, use the tools that we've provided in the AnsibleFest event experience to communicate with us, to talk to us. You can always find us on IRC via email, GitHub. We want people to continue to engage with us. Our community, our open source community, to engage with us in the same ways that they have. And now we just want to share the things that we're working on so that we can all collaborate on it and automate better. I'm really glad you said that. I mean, again, people are impacted by COVID-19. I got to, it sounds like all channels are open. I got to say of all the communities that are having to work from home and are impacted by digital developers probably are less impacted. They got more time to game. They don't have to travel. They could hang out. They're used to some of these tools. So I think, I guess the strategy is turn on all the channels and engage in new ways. And that seems to be the message, right? Yeah, exactly. All right, Robin, Bergeron, great to see you again. Matt Jones, great to chat with you. Chief architect for Ansible Automation Platform. And of course, Robin, senior manager for the community team. Thanks so much for joining me today. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Good to see you. Okay, it's theCUBE's coverage. I'm John for your host. We're here in the studio in Palo Alto, we're virtual. This is theCUBE virtual with Ansible Fest virtual. We're not face to face. Thank you for watching.