 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of a Red Hat Summit 2020 happening digitally. We're connecting with Red Hat executives, thought leaders, practitioners, wherever they are around the globe, bringing them remotely into this online event. Happy to welcome back to the program, Joe Fernandez who's the vice president and general manager of core cloud platforms with Red Hat. Joe, thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me, glad to be here. All right, so Joe, you know, cloud of course has been a conversation we've been having for a lot of years. When I went to Red Hat Summit last year, when I went to IBM Think last year, there was discussion of moving from kind of chapter one, if you will, to chapter two. Some of the labels that we put on things back in the early days like hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, they're coming into a little bit clearer picture. So let's just give a high level, what you're seeing from your customers, when they talk about hybrid and multi-cloud environments, what does that mean to your customers and therefore how is Red Hat meeting them where they are? Yeah, sure, so Red Hat obviously serves an enterprise customer base and what we've seen in that customer base really since the start, and it's really informed our strategy, is the fact that all their applications aren't going to run in one place, right? So they're really employing a hybrid cloud strategy, a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy that spans from their data centers out to a public cloud, typically then out to multiple public clouds as their cloud investments grow as they move more applications and now even out to the edge for many of those customers. So that's the newest footprint that we're getting asked about. So really we think of that as the open hybrid cloud and our goal is really to provide a consistent platform for applications regardless of where they run across all those environments. Yeah, let's look down a second on that because we've heard consistency for quite a while. If you look at the largest cloud provider out there, they said, hybrid environment will give you the exact same hardware that we're running in the public cloud and we'll put that in your environment. Of course, Red Hat's a software company. You've lived across lots of platforms for Red Hat's entire existence. So where is that consistency needed? How do you think about how Red Hat does things maybe the same and a little different than some of the other players that have been positioning and even repositioning their hybrid story over the last year or so? Yeah, so we're really excited to see a lot of folks in the industry including all the major public cloud providers are now talking about hybrid and talking about these types of initiatives that we've been talking about for quite some time. But it's a little bit different. When we talk about hybrid cloud and we talk about multi-cloud, we're talking about being able to run not just in one public cloud and then in an on-premise appliance mirrors that cloud. We're really talking about being able to run across multiple clouds. So having that consistency across running in, say, Amazon to Azure to Google and then carrying that into your on-premise environments whether that's on bare metal, on VMware, on OpenStack. And then like I said, out to the edge, right? And so that consistency is important for people who are concerned about how their applications are gonna operate in these different environments because otherwise they'll have to manage that those differences themselves. Speaking as part of Red Hat, right? This is what the company was built on, right? In the 20 years ago, it was all about Linux bringing consistency for enterprise applications running across X86 hardware, right? So regardless of who your OEM vendor was, as long as you were building to the X86 standard and leveraging Linux as a base, Red Hat Enterprise Linux became that same consistent operating environment for applications, which is important for software vendors but also more importantly for customers themselves as they put those apps into production. Yeah, I guess last question I have for kind of just the landscape out there, we've been talking for a number of years, when you talk to practitioners, they don't get caught up in the labels that we use in the industry. Do they have a cloud strategy? Yes, most companies have a cloud strategy and if you ask them if there's a cloud strategy to say today, same today as it was a quarter ago or a year ago, they say, of course not, everything's changed. We know in today's day and age, what I was doing a month ago is probably very different from what I am doing today. So I know you've got a survey that was done of enterprise users. I saw it when it came out a month ago and some good data in there. So where are we and what data do you have to share with us on kind of the customer adoption and where things are going? Yeah, so I think we put out a survey not too long ago and what we showed is I think over 60% of customers were adopting a hybrid cloud strategy exactly as I described, thinking about their applications in terms of an environment that spans multiple cloud infrastructures as well as on-premise footprints. And then going beyond that, we think that number will grow based on what we saw in that survey. That just mirrors the conversations that I've had with customers that many of us here at Red Hat have been having with those same customers over the years because everybody's in a different spot in terms of their transformation efforts, in terms of their adoption of cloud technologies and what it means for their business. So we need to meet customers where they're at, understand that everybody's at a different spot and then make sure that we can help them make that transition. And it's really an evolution as opposed to, I think what some people in the past might have thought of as a revolution where all the data centers are going to shut down and everything's going to move all at once. And so helping customers evolve and make that transition is really what Red Hat's all about. And so often, Joe, when I talk to some of the vendors out there and you talk about hybrid, you talk about multicloud, it's talking about something you mentioned. It's a box, it's a place, it's the infrastructure discussion. But when I've been having conversations with a lot of your peers, these interviews for Red Hat Summit, we know that it's the organization and it's the applications that are hugely important as these changes go and happen. So talk a little bit about that. What's happening to the organization? How are you helping the infrastructure team keep up and the app dev team move forward? Yeah, so first, start with that. On the technology side, one of the things that has enabled this type of consistency and portability has been sort of the advent of Linux containers as a standard packaging format that can span across all these footprints. So we know that Linux runs in all these different footprints and Linux containers as a portable packaging format enables that and then Kubernetes enables customers to orchestrate containers at scale. And so that's really what OpenShift is focused on is delivering an enterprise Kubernetes platform, again, spanning all these environments that leverages container-based packaging provides enterprise Kubernetes orchestration and management to manage in all those environments. What that then also does on the people front is bring infrastructure and operations teams together because Kubernetes containers represents agility for both sides, right? For application developers, it represents the ability to package their application and all their dependencies and know that when they run it in one environment, it'll be consistent with how it runs in other environments. So eliminating that problem of works on my machine but doesn't work in prod or what have you. So it brings consistency for developers, for infrastructure teams, it gives them the ability to basically make decisions around where the best place is to run these applications without having to think about that from a technology perspective but really from things that should matter more like cost and convenience to customers and performance and so forth. So I think we see those teams coming together. That being said, it is an evolution in people and process and culture. So we've done a lot of work, we launched a global transformation office, we had previously launched Red Hat Open Innovation Labs and have done a lot of work with our consulting services to help and our partners as well to help with some of the people in process evolutions that need to occur to adopt these types of technologies as well as to move towards a more cloud-native approach. All right, so Joe, what one of the announcements made at the show is talking about how OpenShift is working with virtualization. So I think back to the earliest container days, there was discussion of, oh, dockering containers, it kills VM or cloud, of course, some cloud services run on VMs, other run on containers, they're serverless. So there's a lot of confusion out there as to what happened? We know in IT, no technology ever dies, everything's always additive. It's figuring out the right solutions and the right fit. So help us understand what Red Hat's doing when it comes to virtualization and OpenShift and Kubernetes and how's your approach different than some of what we've already seen in the marketplace? Yeah, so definitely we've seen just explosive adoption of containers technology, right? Which has driven the OpenShift business and Red Hat's business overall. So we expect that to continue, right? More applications moving towards a container-based packaging and deployment model and leveraging Kubernetes and OpenShift to manage those environments. That being said, as you mentioned, virtualization has been around for a really long time, right? And predominantly, most applications today are running virtualized. And so some of them have made the transition to containers or were built container-native from the start, but many more are still running in VM-based environments and may never make that switch. So what we were looking at is how do we manage this sort of hybrid environment from the application perspective where you have some applications running in containers, other applications running in VMs. We have platforms like Red Hat OpenStack, Red Hat Virtualization that leverage the KVM hypervisor and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to serve apps running in a VM-based environment. What we did with Kubernetes is, you said, how could we innovate to have convergence on the orchestration and management front? And we leveraged the fact that KVM, our chosen hypervisor, is actually a Linux process that can itself be containerized. And so by running the hypervisor in a container, we can then spawn VMs that could be managed on that same platform as the containers run. So what you have in OpenShift Virtualization is the ability to use Kubernetes to manage containerized workloads, as well as standard VM-based workloads. And these are full VMs. These aren't micro VMs or things like Firecracker or Coddic container. These are standard VMs that could be full Windows guests or Linux guests running inside those VMs. And so it helps you basically manage that type of environment where you may be moving to containers and more cloud-native approach, but those containers need to interact or work with applications that are still in a VM-based deployment environment. And we think it's really exciting. We've demoed it at the last Red Hat Summit. We're going to talk about it even more here in terms of how we're going to bring those products to market and enable customers. Okay, yeah, Joe, let me make sure I understand this because as you said, it is a different approach. So number one, if I'm moving towards a container management solution, this is going to fit natively into what I'm doing. It's not taking some of my traditional management tools and saying, oh, I also get some visibility in containers. It's more, here's my Kubernetes solution and just some of those containers happen to be virtualized. Did they get that piece right? Yeah, I think it's more like, so we know that Kubernetes is going to be in the environment because we know that people are moving application workloads to standard Linux containers. But we also know that virtual machines are going to still exist in that environment. So you can think about it as, how would we enable Kubernetes to manage a virtual machine in the same way that it manages a Linux container? And what we do there is we actually put the VM inside the container, right? So because the VM specifically with KVM is just a Linux process and that's what a Linux container is. It's a Linux process, right? So you can run the hypervisor, spawn the virtual machines inside of containers, but those virtual machines are just like any other VM that would run in OpenStack or Red Hat Virtualization or what have you and you could vSphere for example. So those are traditional virtual machines that are now being managed in a Kubernetes environment. And what we're seeing is sort of this evolution of Kubernetes to take on these new types of workloads. VMs is just one example of something that you can now manage with Kubernetes. Okay, and help me understand what this means to really the app dev in my application portfolio because the original promise of virtualization was I can just stick my application in a VM and I never need to think about it ever again. And while that was super helpful when Windows NT was going into life in 2020, we do find that most companies do want to update their applications and they are talking about, do I refactor them? Do I make them microservices architecture? I don't want to have that iceberg of an application that I'm just dragging along slowly into the new world. So what is this virtualization integration with Kubernetes to mean for the app dev and the applications? Yeah, sure, so what we see customers doing, what we see their application development teams doing is modernizing a lot of their existing applications, right? So they're taking traditional monolithic applications or N tier type applications that may run in a VM-based environment and they're moving them towards more of a distributed architecture, leveraging microservices-based approach. But that doesn't happen all at once either, right? So oftentimes what you see is your microservices are still connected to VM-based applications or maybe you're breaking down a monolithic application. The core is still running in a VM but some of those business functions have now been carved out and containerized. So you're gonna end up in a hybrid environment from the application perspective in terms of how these applications are packaged and deployed. The question is, what does that mean for your deployment architecture? Does it mean you always have to run a virtualization platform and a container platform together? That's how it's done today, right? OpenShift and Kubernetes run on top of vSphere. They run on top of Amazon and Azure and Google VMs on top of OpenStack. But what if you could actually just run Kubernetes directly on bare metal and manage both types of workloads? That's really sort of the idea that our OpenShift virtualization solution was based on is let's just manage VMs natively with Kubernetes in the same way that we manage containers. And then it can facilitate for the application developer this evolution of apps that are running in one environment towards an apps that are running essentially in a hybrid environment from how they're packaged and deployed. Yeah, absolutely something I've been hearing for the last year or so, that hybrid deployment pulling apart applications. Sometimes it's even, that core piece as you said is on-premises and then I might have some of the more transactional pieces happening in the public cloud. So, really interesting. So, how long has Red Hat been working on this? My understanding of Kubevert is something I'm familiar with in the CNCF, believe it's been around for a couple of years. So, talk to us about just kind of how long it took to get here and fully support stateful applications now. What's the overall roadmap look like? Yeah, so Kubevert as an open source project was launched more than two years ago now. And as you know, Red Hat really drives all of our development upstream in the open source community. So, we launched the Kubevert project we've been collaborating with other vendors and even customers on that. But then, over time we then decide how do we bring these technologies to market which technologies make sense to bring the market. So, Kubevert is the open source project, OpenShift and OpenShift Virtualization which is what this feature is referred to commercially is the product that then we would ship and support for running these in production environments. The capabilities, right? So, I think those have been evolving as well. So, virtual machines have specific requirements in terms of not only how they're deployed and managed but how they connect to storage, how they connect networking, how do you do things like fencing and all sorts of live migration and that type of thing. We've been building out those types of capabilities. There's certainly still more to do there but it's something that we're really excited about not just from the perspective of running VMs but just even more broadly from the perspective of how Kubernetes is expanding to take on new workloads because Kubernetes has moved far beyond just running how native applications today. You can run stateful services in containers. You can run things like AI, machine learning and analytics and IoT type services. But it hasn't come for free, right? This has come through a lot of hard work in the Kubernetes community in the various associated communities, the container communities, communities like Kuvert. But it's all kind of trying to leverage that same automation, that same platform to just do more things. And the cool thing is not just, it'll not just be Red Hat talking about it but you'll see that from a lot of customers that are doing sessions at our summit this year and beyond talking about what it means to them. Yeah, that's great. I always love hearing the practitioner viewpoint. All right, Joe, I want to give you the final word when it comes to this whole space. Things kind of move pretty fast but also we remember it when we first saw it. So tell us what's with the customers who kind of walking away from Red Hat Summit 2020 should be looking at and understanding that they might not have thought about if they were looking at Kubernetes a year or two ago? Yeah, I think a couple of things. One is Kubernetes and this whole container ecosystem is continuing to evolve, continuing to add capabilities and continuing to expand the types of workloads that it can run. Red Hat is right in the center of it. It's all happening in open source. Red Hat as a leading contributor to Kubernetes and open source in general is driving a lot of this innovation. We're working with some great customers and partners, other vendors who are working side-by-side with us as well. And I think the most important thing is we understand that it's an evolution for customers. So this evolution towards moving applications to the public cloud, adopting a hybrid cloud approach, this evolution in terms of expanding the types of workloads and how you run and manage them. And that approach is something that, we've always helped customers do and we're doing that today as they move out towards embracing cloud needed. All right, well, Joe Fernandez, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on the launch of OpenShift virtualization. Definitely look forward to talking to some of the customers and finding out that's helping them along their hybrid cloud journey. All right, lots more coverage from theCUBE at Red Hat Summit. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. Thank you.