 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE here in San Diego for KubeCon, CloudNativeCon with John Troyer. I'm Stu Miniman and happy to welcome to the program two guests, first time guests I believe, Julio Tapia, who's the director of CloudBU Partner and Community with Red Hat and Guru Rao, who's the founder and CTO at Portworx. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Happy to be here. All right, let's start with community ecosystem. It's a big theme we have here at the show. Tell us kind of your main focus, what the team's doing here. Sure, so I'm part of a product team. We're responsible for OpenShift, OpenStack and Red Hat virtualization. And my responsibility is to build the partner ecosystem and to do our community development. On the partner front, we work with a lot of different partners. We work with ISVs, we work with OEMs, SIs, pod providers, telco partners. And my role is to help evangelize, to help on integrations, a lot of joint solutions and then do a little bit of go to market as well. And on the community side, it's to evangelize with upstream projects, with customers, with developers and so forth. All right, so Guru, actually, it's not luck, but I had a chance to catch up with the Red Hat storage team. One, back when I was on the vendor side, I partnered with them. Red Hat doesn't sell gear, they are a software company and everything open source. And when it comes to data and storage, obviously they're working with partners. So pull partworks into the mix and tell us about the relationship and what you both do together. Sure, yeah, we're a Red Hat OpenShift partner. We've been working with them for quite some time now. Partner with IBM as well. But yeah, Portworks, we focus on enabling cloud native storage, right? So we compliment the OpenShift ecosystem. Essentially, we enable people to run stateful services in OpenShift with a lot of agility and we bring DR backup functionality to OpenShift. I'm sure you're familiar with this, but people, when they deploy OpenShift, they're running fleets of OpenShift clusters. So multi-cluster management and data accessibility across clusters is a big topic. Yeah, actually, if you could, and I hear the term cloud native storage, what does that really mean? Back a few years ago, containers were stateless. I didn't have my persistent storage. It was super challenging as to how we deal with this. And now we have some options, but what is the goal of what we're doing here? You know, there really is no notion of a stateless application, right? Especially when it comes to enterprise applications. What cloud native storage means is, to us at least, it signifies a couple of things. First of all, the consumer of storage is not a machine anymore, right? Typical storage systems are designed to provide storage to either a virtual machine or a hardware server. The consumer of storage is now a container that's running inside of a machine. And in fact, an application is never just one container. It's many containers running on different systems. So it's a distributed problem. So what cloud native storage means is the following things. Providing container granular data services, being application aware, meaning that you're providing services to many containers that are running on different systems and facilitating the data lifecycle management of those applications from a Kubernetes way, right? The user experience is now driven through Kubernetes as opposed to a storage admin driving that functionality. So it's these three things that make a platform cloud native. I want to dig into the operator concept for a little bit here as it applies to storage. So you now have, so first operators. I first heard of this a couple of years back with the CoreOS folks who are now part of Red Hat and it's a piece of technology that came into the Kubernetes ecosystem. Seems to be very well adopted. They talked about it today on the keynote and I'd love to hear a little bit more about the ecosystem. But first I want to figure out what it is. And I was in my head, I didn't quite understand it. And I'm like, well, okay, automation and lifecycle, I get it, there's a bunch of things, you know, puppet and chef and Ansible and you know, all sorts of things there. There's also things that know about cloud like Terraform or CloudForms or you know, Pulumi, all these sort of things here. But this seems like it's a little bit, this is a framework around lifecycle. It might be a little higher in the semantic level or knows a little bit more about what's going on inside Kubernetes. I'll just touch on it. So operators is a way to codify business logic into the application. So how to manage, how to install, how to manage the lifecycle of the application on top of the Kubernetes cluster. So it's a way of automating. Okay, right. And just to add to that, right? You mentioned Ansible, right? So as engineers we're always trying to make our lives easier, right? And so infrastructure automation certainly is a concept here where what operators does is it elevates those same needs to more of an application construct level, right? So it's a piece of intelligent software that is watching the entire runtime of an application as opposed to provisioning infrastructure and stepping out of the way. Think of it as a living being. It is constantly running and reacting to what the application is doing and what its needs are. So on one hand you have automation that sets things up and then the job is done. Here the job is never done. You're sort of the, you know, right there as a sidecar along with the application. Nice, nice. But for any sort of lifecycle or sort of project like this you have to have co-chairing and contributing, right? And so Julia can you tell us a little bit about that? What we do is we're obviously all in on operators and so we've invested a great deal in terms of documentation and training and workshops. We have certification programs. We're really helping create the ecosystem and facilitate the whole process. You may be familiar, we announced Operator Framework a few years ago. It includes Operator SDKs. So we have Operator SDK for Helm, for Ansible, for Go. We also have announced Operator Lifecycle Manager which does the install, the maintenance and the whole life cycle management process. And then earlier this year we did introduce also operatorhub.io which is a community of our operators. We have about 150 operators as part of that. How does the Operator Framework relate to OpenShift and versus kind of upstream Kubernetes? Is it an OpenShift and Red Hat specific thing or? Yeah, so Operatorhub.io is a listing of operators that includes community operators. And then we also have certified operators and those operators, the community operators run on any Kubernetes instance. The certified operators make sure that we run on OpenShift specifically. So that's kind of the distinction between those two. Yeah, I remember at Red Hat Summit we talked about it some bit. So give us a little kind of walk around the show with some of the highlights from operators. The ecosystem obviously we've got Portworx here but there's a broad ecosystem. Yeah, so we have a huge, huge ecosystem. The ISVs play a big part of this. So we've got operators, database partners, security partners, app monitoring partners, storage partners. Yesterday we had an OpenShift Commons event and we showcased five of our big operator partnerships with CouchBase, with MongoDB, with Portworx obviously, with StorageOS and with Dynatrace. But we have a lot of partners in a lot of different areas that are creating these operators, they're certifying them, and they're starting to get a lot of use with customers. So it's pretty exciting stuff. Cool, I'd love to your viewpoint on this because of course Portworx, good Red Hat partner, but you need to work with all the Kubernetes options out there. So what's the important of operators to your business? Yeah, OpenShift obviously, it's one of the leading platforms for Kubernetes out there. And so, the reason that is it's because it's sort of the expectations that it sets to an enterprise customer. It's that Red Hat experience behind it. And so the notion of having an operator that's certified by Red Hat, and a Red Hat going through the vetting process and making sure that all of the components that it is recommending from its ecosystem that you're putting it into, putting it on to OpenShift, that whole process gives a whole new level of enterprise experience. So for us, that's been really good, right? Working with Red Hat, going through the process with them and making sure that, and they're actually double clicking on everything we submit, and there's a real, you know, we iterate with them. So the quality of the product that's put out there within OpenShift is very high. So, we've deployed these operators now, the operator that Porek just announced, right? We've had it, we have it running in customers' hands. So these are real end users. You'll be talking to Ford later on today, Harbroot, for example. And so the level of automation that it has provided to them in their platform is quite high. I was kind of curious to shift maybe to the conference here, that you all have a long history, both organizations and both of you personally in the Kubernetes world and the Cloud Native world. We're here at KubeCon, Cloud NativeCon North America 2019. It's pretty big. And you know, I see a lot of folks here, a lot of vendors, a lot of engineers, a huge conference, 12,000 people. I mean, any company's perspective? So I've been at Red Hat a little over six years and I was at the very first KubeCon many years ago in San Francisco. I think we had about 200 people there. So this show has really grown over the years. And we're obviously big supporters. We've participated in KubeCon in Shanghai and Barcelona. We're obviously here. We've just super excited about seeing the ecosystem and the whole community grow and expand. So very exciting. You? Yeah, I mean, like Julio mentioned, right? So all the way from DockerCon to, you know, where we are today. And I think last year was 8,000 people in Seattle. And I think there are probably, I've heard numbers like 12. So it's also equally interesting to see the maturity of the products around Kubernetes and that level of consistency and lack of fracture, right? From mainstream Kubernetes, there's to how it's being adopted in OpenShift, there's consistency across the different Kubernetes platforms. Also, it's very interesting to see how on-prem and public cloud Kubernetes are coexisting. So that's been, four years ago, we were kind of worried on how that would turn out. But I think it's enabling those hybrid cloud workflows. And I think today in this KubeCon, we see a lot of people talking about that and having interest around it. It's a really great point there. Julio, I want to give you the final word for people that aren't yet engaged in the ecosystem of operators. You know, how can they learn more and get involved? Yeah, so we're excited to work with everybody. Our ecosystem includes customers, partners, contributors. So as long as you're all in on operators, we're ready to help. And we've got tools, we've got documentation. We have workshops, we have training. We have certification programs. And we also can help you with go-to-market. We're very fortunate to have a huge customer footprint. And so for those partners that have solutions, databases, storage solutions, there's a lot of joint opportunities out there that we can participate in. So we're really excited to do that. Julio Kube, thank you so much. You have a final word for you. I was just going to say, again, so to follow up on the operator comment, on the certification that Julio had mentioned earlier. So the operator that we have, we were able to achieve level five certification, which the level five signifies just the amount of automation that's built into it. So the concept of having operators help people deploy these complex applications, that's a very important concept in Kubernetes itself. So glad to be a Red Hat partner. Yeah, that's actually a really good point. We have an operator maturity model, level one, two, three, four, five, level one and two are more your installations and upgrades, but the really highly capable ones, the fours and fives are really to be commended and Portworx is one of those partners. So we're excited to be here with them. That is a powerful statement. When we talk about the complexity and how many pieces are in there, everybody's looking for to really help cross that chasm and get the vast majority of people. We need to allow environments to be, have more automation, more simplicity. Story I heard loud and clear at Ansible Fest earlier this year and through the partner ecosystem and it's good to see progress. So congratulations and thank you both for joining. Thank you. Thank you. All right, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more here from KubeCon, Cloud NativeCon 2019. Thanks for watching the Kube.