 Everyone, this is theCUBE live in San Francisco for the Red Hat Summit. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, founder of Silicon Angles. I'm Joe Myko, host. Stu Miniman from Wikibon, filling in for Dave Vellante. And our next guest is Paul Comear. The president of products and technologies at Red Hat, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. And we just talked before we came on. We're old school guys, we're old school, I guess we're older, older than the young guns here in the DevOps world. But man, what a world we're living in right now. 10th year of Red Hat Summit. So much is happening just in the past short five, seven years. Major shift, the sea change is happening, the transformation, whatever you want to call it. It is unearthing, massive innovation, great disruption, commoditization, yet opportunity on the business model side. So really, really amazing. So I want to get your first impression of the show here today. What is the vibe here? And what's that context to this inflection point? And talk about why this moment in time is so special. I think the reason why this is so special is the vibe here. If you look at it, this is really the first summit where on one hand we're saying that Linux has been really the driver of the innovation, but on the other hand, there's all this excitement around the open source technologies that are surrounding Linux. Where there's a lot of talk here about platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, cloud, containers. It's all driven by Linux, but it's all expanding of where open source is really going within the infrastructure. When we first started, I've been at Red Hat for going on 13 years now. When we first started, we used to have this vision of the entire infrastructure being open source. We're here. Think about that, you know? It's more than prime time, it's more than ready, it's certainly been changing. And I remember the days we were going back, talking before we came on, when I was in college, they actually couldn't use the word UNIX because it was an AT&T trademark. They actually called it Xenu, which is UNIX spelled backwards. We know all that we did to use the syntax, but the world that shifted with Linux was really a major, major point. And from there, so much has happened, but now with software, with virtualization, with all the innovations at the hardware level, with convergence, open compute, all these things, it really is a perfect source. I want to ask you, what are you looking at as a product and a technologist leading an open source company and its community, what are you looking at as the killer disruption point right now? Is it the software per se? Is it necessarily the people? All the above? What's your take on that? You know, I mentioned this morning, my keynote. I actually think we've actually gone through one of the killer disruption points. And I think when virtualization got integrated in with Linux, I think that was the inflection point. Because really, you know, when we started, when we started Linux, I'd like to say we were really revolutionary and visionary and we had this whole, we were going to get here. It was purely a commodity play. It was commoditizing the compute layer and Linux combined with x86 did that commoditization. But what happened is all the, all the, from there, all the R and D, all the innovation happened on Linux. When virtualization hit, you could now spin up an operating system in a matter of seconds. And I think that's really the inflection point when things happen. That's when really the inflection point was actually to move to the cloud and where cloud development happened. I personally think that was one of the big inflection points here. The other thing I want to ask you is, is that, you know, the old rap around open source was, hey, you know, it's a cheap alternative to X or Y or Z. Now you mentioned kind of, it's more than prime time. It's bulletproof. You guys have certainly a lifecycle that's supported out in the past decade in some cases with Red Hat. But now you have DevOps, which is essentially a software paradigm, programming infrastructure in context to deploying applications. Now that's pretty mind blowing, right? So, okay, if we believe that DevOps is important, how is that shaping some of the components in the cloud like OpenShift in context to OpenStack? And the landscape around it, you guys still got the competitors, you got alternative approaches, open core, pure plays. How do you talk to customers about that? Because they might not be following the inside baseball of that. If you really break apart DevOps a bit, I mean, Linux started on the ops side, right? So Linux really, you know, leveled the playing field for the operations department to really get a world-class operating system across commodity hardware. The reason why we acquired JBoss eight years ago was for the dev side of the equation. So our developers, you know, our developers said, you know, we started to go out to our customer base and they said, look, we've been running on the Linux platform. Now I have all these developers that have to develop applications. I'm certainly not going to do it on .NET. And so that's where we went with JBoss. And if you look at, take it one step further, you look at OpenShift, we take advantage of features and functions from the Linux operating systems, fixing things like SE Linux, C groups, as well as from the JBoss side. And what's really mind-blowing as we go on, we talk about XPass, we start to bring those enterprise class services like messaging and data caching, things like that, that have been in the software development stacks today. We start to bring those to the PaaS platform. That's what's really mind-blowing. So we're putting together the Linux world, the app server world, and then the services that go with that app server world together on one platform to really change the paradigm. So let's take that through. Let's go back a little bit of history to get to the next question, which is Red Hat, the old days, here's some, I won't say floppy, despaciti roms. Now you're really sure we're in there. So, five and a quarter, and then three and a half. So, but you had to load it, you load it up on the server, it was out in the back room, but then your business model changed to subscription. Okay, that was a genius move. Congratulations on your part to bring that over. But now the cloud offers the same alternative on the vehicle side of distribution. It might not be the younger generation guys aren't, they're not sitting there going, hey, I want to upload patches. They want version control. The modern error is upon us. So, okay, open source is now ready for prime time. So talk about that next opportunity. How do you get that next magic that Red Hat established with your business model that was so successful and certainly celebrated the game? I think what we talked about here at the summit, we're talking about a lot, containers is where that next magic happens. I look at containers as a way for the application to seamlessly get to the cloud. So you think about that. What is the container? What is the container? It's a different packaging paradigm for the application where I now bring in just the right part of the operating system that I need for that application. So I actually link in some of the user space pieces that I need for that application. But the interesting part is that's now one object. So I can now electronically transport that around wherever I want to go. So if you think about today, if you look from a user's perspective to go to one of the cloud providers to spin up a VM, and then they go spin up an ISV application and how they're, or any application and how they're going to do that, it's pretty cumbersome. But now if I have that as one object now that I can move around electronically, changes the game. I really do think, but in people say, wow, well, Linux has adopted. No, Linux has been the adoption, the driving force. We have the containers with us because that the model of the cloud. And so I really think this as big a disrupter as virtualization because it's all about getting the app to the four footprints that I talk about. Virtual, I mean physical, virtual, private and public cloud. And it's going to change a lot from here. And I think this is going to drive that the hybrid cloud even more from here on. So Paul, I want to talk a little bit about the open source ecosystem. You've been involved for a long time. You think back, IBM made a huge commitment. Companies like HP helped drive Red Haps adoption. You look at this show, Cisco gave a keynote this morning. Cisco a couple of years ago, if you told me they were going to heavily embrace open source, I would have been skeptical. Even Microsoft now has found that open source is this great new thing that they've suddenly discovered. And even Oracle is in many ways part of the open source community. How do you see this embrace of open source kind of across the entire software world impacting the community? Well first of all, I don't think you have any choice. If you're going to be in the software industry and you don't know how to traverse an open source you're not going to be in the software industry. And so, but I do think it's changing it a bit because I think as the bigger enterprises come into the open source world we have to really all adapt and we're sort of running things a little. You see them in seeing the advent of consortiums now. And that's sort of a throwback from the olden days when they had consortiums to drive multiple companies together as opposed to a true open source community where the best code wins. And so it's changing it a bit but I just think we all have to be very careful that it doesn't bring it back to where we were in the 80s. We have to be very careful about that. I mean we're still the only company that's a pure 100% open source company. Everything we do on either side of the equation always goes back to the community and that's to us, that's the best model and not everyone, not really most other people don't run that model. Okay, so cloud is under your purview. You know, we've heard a lot today you talked about there's private cloud, there's public cloud and Linux is across all the major public cloud providers and obviously in all the private environments. Is Red Hat in general just agnostic to provide the best solution to all those environments or is there any way that you want to push one vision versus another? No, we think all environments are going to make one environment. And so I think when people started first talking about the cloud there was a lot of talk of people were going to move their entire workload to the public cloud. It's just not practical, it's not practical. You know, we were just talking earlier we come from the same era almost and there's still people running bare metal and people, it's not going to go away. Virtualization as VMware brought it to the market it's almost traditional virtualization now but it's not going to go away tomorrow. And I think all the way across from private to public cloud people are going to be forced and want to run in those four footprints but they want to be able to manage it as one. Even in the public cloud, CIOs are not going to let, you know, if they have an application that's running out in someone else's public cloud and that's the hole that they get broken into CIO is still on the hook for that. They have to be able to manage it even when it's out in the public cloud. So we think it's those four footprints that just melt into one environment and I think that's really the way forward. So do you think with containers we actually have, will this deliver the portability because you know when I talk to companies moving from if I have my test environment in Amazon to get it into my private environment that's not seamless today. I think it depends on how you define portability. So, you know, I think it will really help the portability in those four types of footprints that I talked about but still what's running underneath is still very, very important to give your application a solid platform to run on. All the things we're doing today with platform as a service, infrastructure as a service we're trying to extract all the things underneath to the developer but nonetheless all the things underneath they're still very important for that stable platform. Okay, so we talked to Jim White here some about OpenStack said we have some actual customers that have played production, you know, paid dollars are doing that but a lot of proof of concepts. You know, where do you see the industry needing to mature OpenStack? What needs to be done to have this so that this is an option that we're going to see a huge inflection point in say the next 12 to 18 months? I think more iteration around deployment tools, management tools, things like that more applications getting there more of the ecosystem getting there. Look, this is exactly how Linux started. This is exactly how Linux, everybody, you know I've had a lot of comments well you guys seem to be doing a pretty good job it's pretty easy because we've done it once already and when we first started Linux it was the exact same way we'd put engineers on customer site to get the operating system tweaked just right and then the tools started to grow the packaging started to grow the same things happening with OpenStack it's just going to happen faster it's just going to happen faster because we've all been through it there's more developers on board, et cetera. Paul, I want to ask you a competition question landscape question from two perspectives one is someone leading the organization you have a lot of folks who look to you for leadership inside the organization around making the tough calls right around directions and we're in a very dynamic marketplace a lot of unification a lot of elastic a lot of agile all this all this that's the buzzword drinking game bingo people play but it's pretty serious a lot of money on the table a lot of enterprises have red hat and they want to go to the cloud they see Amazon forcing that change I know you guys have a relationship with them but they also want to look under the hood composite application you mentioned applications really the key to success there so what is the competitive mindset for you guys what do you worry about what do you focus in on to tell your team and then how do you execute that in market from a competitive standpoint a lot of stuff going on around red hat around the trends you guys are riding I think the biggest thing that personally that I worry about is that as open source has become much more mainstream it's disrupting a lot of the traditional players and I worry a bit about the traditional players starting to drag open open source back into the games of the proprietary world that's what I worry about and because we have to be very very careful about that because it's a complicated topic and so keeping it open keeping it one open development community it's really really important and we have to be careful that that's it do you mean the trickery around the proprietary lock-in or is it more market tactics around FUD or both I think it's more market tactics around FUD or both I mean if you look back in history Unix started as an open platform then everyone including the company that I started with DEC that's near and dear to my heart all the companies took it in and put their own isms in and nothing worked they were all different and I think that's what we have to be careful of we have to look at that history and make sure we don't go back to the Unix days of the age well those days are interesting those are best of breed days they all have their own silos HP and the workstation guys made a big part of that so now we seem to be busting those silos now with the environment we're in now are you worried about cloud are you not worried about cloud are you worried about something else what is your opinion? No I think cloud is great I mean I think cloud opens up the whole universe for the applications I think that model is the way to go what I'm worried about is quasi open source offerings that are billed as open source and people thinking they're open source and then getting back locked into that vertical stack that's what we have to be careful of talk about how you deal with complacency in managing this environment because you deal with a lot of new technology a lot of emerging tech you know getting complacent is a thing that could lull you into into a disaster situation the frog getting boiled in the water so to speak how do you manage that? well I can tell you we were just chatting about it I can tell you how I personally deal with it inside of Red Hat I started my career at DEC and I tell the guys in my own group all the time I said look I started at DEC we had the best operating systems the best networking the best servers the best everything and we're not here anymore and so we're not going to let that happen at Red Hat you know we will not get complacent I'm the most paranoid guy on the planet and we're always looking for new angles new opportunities and we're always most of all ensuring that it stays open and that's something we concentrate on let's talk about Microsoft okay you mentioned .NET earlier or someone mentioned .NET the developer market is really hot right now so you guys are a big winner in that with open source and have a lot of success that trajectory with that everyone wants to win the developers win the developer ecosystem constantly hearing everyone talk about you mentioned DEC DEC had VMS Windows has one letter more than that Windows NT it's not a coincidence I know that's why I brought it up it says a little trivia there VMS and one letter forwards what Microsoft wanted to be like VMS which is a great operating system so with Microsoft you're seeing new things coming from them they have seen the leadership change you got Satya Nattella Cloud Guide you see what they've done with open source they've donated reference design on Azure to open compute and some recent maneuvers around being more open at what point do these developer communities have passed like .NET and other ones maybe some say Java right need to evolve to a modern era and how do you deal with that potential change because now with persistent SSDs for instance now we have unlimited potentially persistent memory that changes the operations equation where disk used to be the winner hyperscale the web 2.0 companies so all this is going to go on but the developers are going to be the ones taking advantage of these new technologies so what is this modern developer profile look like in your mind I mean the modern developer profile today I mean and this is I think why Linux is driving a big part of if not all of where it's going because it's about the developer the developer has access to everything the developer today you know developer the past we say you will write in this language you will write in this framework the developer today wants to write what they want to write the framework they want to write in and so that's what you have to support you have to have that capability support the framework that they want to write in Node.js wasn't even around you know it might have been around in cult form five or so years ago but it wasn't anywhere near is today so you've got to be able to support that you've got to be able to have the frameworks that are flexible enough to allow the developer to write where they want to write and I mean in terms of Microsoft I mean I think Microsoft's making some good changes I think you've seen Microsoft much more open I talked about it this morning in my keynote that you know when we first started Linux you know I think Microsoft looked at us as a full frontal attack I think Microsoft has gotten to the point that Linux is in the data center it's just here and that's not a bad thing necessarily and I think I got to give Microsoft credit for that I think I think I think Satya's probably had a lot to do with that and I think that's a it's a good thing so when I say the word data center operating system what comes to your mind? Physical, virtual, public and private cloud that is the data center okay so let's talk about software defined data center so now it brings up all kinds of new software approaches like configuration, automation, orchestration those are important things that necessarily cloud that's on premise right so it could be in the cloud though when you when you go to software that means it could be even look from a storage perspective it's very tough to stuff a storage box down the wire when you want to bring up storage on the other side of that wire right so it's already interrupted No that's good but that's a challenge so as a CIO what should I be paying attention to if I'm saying you know what I have a lot of stuff I'm going to write off I have new potentially migration paths I'm looking at looking at refresh cycles what should I be thinking about what are the top of mind things around architecture and approaches around software defined data center I personally think in the CIOs I mean this is how they think you have to look at it from the application perspective what are the requirements on this application are there uptime requirements are there security requirements are there availability requirements and then you map that into that architecture and how that fits and it might even be different requirements at different times of the day, month, year, et cetera and I think that's really how you have to look at we talked a lot about that today it really is about the application and I think that's what a CIO sort of has to do that top down look So Paul you're very passionate about open source we actually did a survey about a year ago at Wikibon and asked CIOs and infrastructure heads as to how they make their buying decision and about 15% of them said I want open source there's all these battles in the industry about who's the most open is it open source, is it open interface are APIs enough where does that conversation of open fit in with the CIO discussions that you're having and you get Microsoft credit for being more open where's that line and what's open and what's not not too much credit but it's a great question because a lot of people feel that open source is just seeing the code having the code visible doesn't necessarily mean open but not having it visible is closed I mean if you really look across it it's the ability to see the code it's the ability to use the code be able to reuse the code it's the ability for APIs not to be hidden and published and not changed but it's also the ability from a company perspective to support what the customer wants so I'll take it all the way to that end for us so for example we have a management solution called CloudForms we support bare metal we support a VMware environment we support traditional virtualization and we support a Red Hat traditional virtualization we support a private cloud and we'll support multiple public clouds if people want to run VMware we're okay with that we can manage that with our product line that's part of being open as well is given the customer that choice we integrate open stack with vSphere for example if that's what the customers want that's also part of being open as well but what are you most excited about I mean you have a lot of history and I love talking with you because you have that perspective through multiple cycles of innovation ups and downs but right now given we were at today within Red Hat what are you most excited about in the show here is it RHEL 7 is it the developer community and then what are you excited about outside of Red Hat that you're watching I think inside of Red Hat is that I'm most excited about the fact that people are starting to see that the innovation is emanating from open source and so we spent a lot of time where people say oh you're just a Linux company it's just a Linux company well now Linux has driven all that innovation we're trying to kind of prove into the world that we can bring that innovation to the market I'm really excited about that because this feels like the coming out of that because in just one short year you know things like infrastructure as a service platform as a service have gone so much further that's what I'm excited about from here from an industry perspective it's sort of a similar thing because I'm really excited about it's no longer we first started the journey down the Linux path we used to have to go in and convince customers that it was secure, it was enterprise ready it was safe, it's off the table now it's not even a question anymore and now it's just a matter of what more can you bring me to help me solve my problems it's just a given that open source is in the mainstream and Linux is in the mainstream that's what's going to drive us because all that stuff about convincing the people of the world that you know all those other things I talked about secure, safe, et cetera gone, now we just bring them innovation and we know with open source we can just crush it with bringing in more innovation than anyone else I got to say, one thing that's really been intoxicating and riveting at the same time is the whole DevOps movement and watching you mentioned Node, it's been fun to watch that evolution how relevant that's been on the real time side certainly with the advances of JavaScript the client side, it's been pretty amazing but the same thing I want to talk about is the role of data so I want to get your perspective as a guy in the computer science field for many generations not many generations open source generation, it's taking a couple decades data is now, it used to be you store data on disk you put it on the wire you said pump it out to the hinterlands, the data warehouses send some reports, schemas and you've seen the cycles of data but if DevOps is to cloud as dev data, if you want to just call it a new term but the ability to program with data because companies are now becoming data-full meaning they are now dealing with massive data so it's not so much which containers I buy with this and infrastructure and software like Cloudera what not to use for the data data is now a critical asset of their business you're seeing Facebook, LinkedIn, others use their data and Twitter just bought a company today called Gnip you're seeing the analytics and the insight becoming the new plutonium value so in the architecture, where does that fit in in your mind? I mean I think it fits in we talked a lot about the app having the app have the access to that data but the data has, I think the interesting part about the data is the many sources that the data can come from so it used to be, you know the data was from you talked about it, it was on your disk the data can be somewhere out on the net right now that you want to use as part of your analysis on the particular application that you're working for so the ability to access the data in as wide a swath as you can I think that's important the ability to store the data and the ability to retrieve that data I think those are the things that are really driving it but it's about the app having the ability and the access to this data to get things done in real time I mean also that analysis is more and more about the real-time analysis the people that are going to win here are the people that can do that real-time analysis Yeah I'm still struggling I always try and this is something I think about a lot is okay, if the operating system is evolving to be distributed in the cloud and premise the four things you mentioned private, public, physical, virtual, private, public okay and across those pillars if you will, or segments data is everywhere so how does data fit into the new operating system architecture? Well that's where software-defined storage comes into play because your application now has to have access to that data wherever it lives so if data is on one side of the link or the other side of the link you have to have a common storage namespace for the app to really have access to that data no matter where it lives and that's why it's all moving to a software layer I mean, hardware's still going to be underneath but the hardware that's underneath matters less and less and less every day You know what's interesting Stu and I were talking before we came on today and certainly Dave and I, Dave Vellante and I always talk about this all the time is some companies have a lot more marketing budget than others and some have different approaches to competitive strategy in the cloud obviously you see Cloud Foundry you got IBM and HP and others out there but they all have to huddle around the water cooler and they want to call open source if they want to play so you guys are kind of like Amazon you're humble but you don't overspend on a lot of I call it frivolous marketing but most tech geeks look at marketing as frivolous so they say why don't you spend money on marketing but your competition is spending money on marketing so if you had unlimited marketing budget what would you do to get the word out for cloud? I mean, and Red Hat's Mojo the word out I would get out with unlimited marketing is I'd be wary of these quasi open source things that's the message that I would get out how I would get it out is more for the developer out there I mean, let me give you an example I know it's a little vague but let me give you an example when we first did our Paz offering OpenShift we did it out on the cloud we didn't do it as a product we actually had no intention of doing it as a product we started up as a free service for the developer because we wanted the developers and open on Red Hat technologies and after about six or nine months we just got inundated by our customer base saying I want this behind our firewall because they had seen it out in the cloud I mean, that is the way to get your word out it's not unlike open source the best solution wins, put it out there and also one that has longevity too because you see a lot of banks and stuff we're now using open source banks a lot of vertical markets are all adopting the open source so it has to kind of be supported exactly, let's talk about the quasi open source what did you mean by that when you said that you'd be wary of quasi open source can you be specific just to do a drill down on that you mean like open core, you mean just like head fake I mean, I mean, I'll take it right to the heart let's talk a little bit about Cloud Foundry, right let's talk a little bit about Cloud Foundry you got all these Yeah, we love talking about Cloud Foundry You guys are leading me there you're going to get me in trouble Okay, go ahead It's okay, we're your friend the parachute will open, don't worry You see all these big guys you see all these big guys sort of rallying around Cloud Foundry you've got a little pass layer you look at some of these companies and what I've seen is you see a little pass layer that they're all going to agree upon and then it's this big stack of proprietary stuff on top well they're each going to take that proprietary layer and they're going to bring it in and build their own stuff on top you think they're going to interoperate across all of those? Probably not that sounds a lot like the Unix days in the past to me So that's sort of what I mean by that I mean, I've said this for a long time that it's very difficult for a company to draw a line and say everything below the line is open and everything above the line is closed it confuses you, it confuses your employees your developers and your customers Yeah, so Paul I guess we've talked to IBM quite a bit and one of the reasons they joined is to try to keep that open I mean, obviously IBM was heavily involved with you guys early they've been involved in open stack and they're involved with Cloud Foundry so I mean, can't they help keep that solution open? What is the solution? Is the solution the thin layer or is the solution the thin layer that's part of the bigger stack with it? I mean, I think that's I'm not answering that question for anyone I think that's a question you just have to ask yourself It's a good rhetorical question but I'll frame it this way so there's always a line of abstraction where if you abstract away complexity and the functionality is solid, no one really cares if the value is there as long as it interoperates so the one trend we're seeing, let's say Oracle for instance is they have the multi-purpose purpose-built systems fully integrated they call it they want to be the iPhone for the enterprise some customers are buying that That's okay but that's okay if customers want to buy that then I think that's fine and customers should be able to buy that and let the market decide what the right way to go on that is Yeah, we asked Padra this morning from Cisco about her philosophy here and she was great to see her here by the way at Cisco endorsing you guys and being part of the ecosystem again another sign of a big whale like Microsoft's doing on their end Cisco's on their end I asked her, the era of communication is different the old days when the head fakes were going on and the open source community everyone knew about it but the main press wasn't getting it but now with social media everyone's watching It's on Twitter, it's trending So it's hard to pull those old tricks of slowing stuff down in the standard bodies is it? No, it's still possible I just, one of the things I want everybody to just think about that line if you're willing to open up things below the line why are you willing to open up things above the line? What's the reason in the thought process around that? Cannibalization, fear, other things a lot of varieties well, we're getting ready to get the hook from the handlers so I want to ask you one final question explain to the folks out there two things the bumper sticker for the show so the car that's leaving what's on the bumper sticker for this year's Red Hat Summit and why is this point in time so important for Red Hat Summit? I think, as I said, I think this is the coming out one of the coming out parties where open source is really driving the move to the cloud the bumper sticker will take your app to the cloud that should be the bumper sticker coming out of here Okay, Paul, the president of Red Hat technologies and platforms obviously the operating system the future is being developed in the open in the crowd, full transparency and it's going to be fun to watch we love following it on theCUBE obviously great theater for us and benefits to the users and certainly the developers to center the value proposition into the day agile, elastic, flexible whatever you want to call it this is the model that we're talking about here inside theCUBE, live in San Francisco at the Red Hat Summit this is theCUBE we'll be right back with our next guest after the short break