 The Cube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. Welcome back to HPE Discover 2022. The Cube's continuous wall-to-wall coverage, Dave Vellante with John Furrier. Keith Basil is here as the general manager for the Edge Business Unit at SUSE, Keith. Welcome to theCUBE, man, good to see you. Great to be here, it's my first time here and I've seen many shows and you guys are the best. Thank you very much. Big fans of SUSE, we've had Melissa on several times. Let's start with what you guys are doing here at Discover. Well, we're here to support our wonderful partner, HPE. As you know, SUSE's products and services are now being integrated into the GreenLake offering so that's very exciting for us. Yeah, now, tell us about your background. It's quite interesting, you've been in the mix in some really cool places. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Probably the most relevant was, I used to work at Red Hat, I was a product manager working in security for OpenStack and OpenShift, working with DOD customers in the intelligence community. Left Red Hat to go to Rancher, started out there as VP of Edge Solutions and then transitioned over to VP of Product for all of Rancher and then obviously we know SUSE acquired Rancher and as of November 1st of 2020, I think it was. Yeah, yeah, time is flying. I came over, I still remained VP of Product for Rancher for Cloud Native Infrastructure and I was working on the Edge strategy for SUSE and about four months ago, we internally built three business units, one for the Linux business, one for Enterprise Container Management, basically the Rancher business and then the newly minted business unit was the Edge business and I was offered the role to be GM for that business unit and I happily accepted it. Very cool, I mean the market dynamics since the 2018 have changed dramatically, IBM bought Red Hat, a lot of customers said, hmm, let's see what other alternatives are out there. SUSE popped its head up, Melissa's been quite forthcoming about that and then you acquire Rancher in 2020, IPO in 2021, that kind of gives you another tailwind so there's a new market when you go from 2018 to 2022, it's a completely changed dynamic. Yes, and I'm going to answer your question from the Rancher perspective first because as we were at Rancher, we had experimented with different flavors of the underlying OS underneath Kubernetes, our Kubernetes offerings and we had, as I said, different flavors, we weren't really operating system people, for example and so when post acquisition, one of my internal roles was to bring the two halves of the house together, the philosophies together where you had a Cloud Native side in the form of Rancher very progressive leading innovative products with Rancher, with K3S for example and then you had really strong enterprise routes around compliance and security, secure supply chain with the enterprise grade Linux and what we found out was SUSE had been building a version of Linux called Slee Micro and it was perfectly designed for Edge and so what we've done over that time period since the acquisition is that we've brought those two things together and now we're using Kubernetes directives and philosophies to manage all the way down to the operating system and it is a winning strategy for our customers and we're really excited about that. And what does that product look like? Is that a managed service? Is it, how are customers consuming that? It could be a managed service, it's something that our managed service providers could embrace and offer to their customers but we have some customers who are very sophisticated who want to do the whole thing themselves and so they stand up Rancher at a centralized location in the Cloud, Green Lake for example, which is why this is very relevant and then that control plane if you will manages thousands of downstream clusters that are running K3S at these Edge locations and so that's what the complete stack looks like and so when you add the Linux capability to that scenario we can now roll a new operating system and new kernels, CVE updates, build that as an OCI container image registry format, right? Put that into a registry and then have that thing cascade down through all the downstream clusters up through a rolling window upgrade of the operating system underneath Kubernetes and it is a tremendous amount of value when you talk to customers that have this massive score that we're doing. What's the impact of that? Just take us through what happens next. Is it faster? Is it more performant? Is it more reliable? Is it processing data at the Edge? What's the impact of the customer? Yes, the answer is yes today. So let's actually talk about one customer that we highlighted in our keynote which is Home Depot. So as we know, Kubernetes is on fire, right? It is the technology everybody's after. So by being in demand, the skills needed, the people shortage is real and people are commanding very high salaries and so it's hard to attract talent is the bottom line and so using our software and our solution and our approach, it allows people to scale their existing teams to preserve those precious human resources and that human capital so that now you can take a team of seven people and manage, let's say, 3,000 downstream stores. Yeah, it's like the old SRE model for DevOps. Correct. It's not servers, they're managing one to many clusters. Correct, so you've got the cluster, the lifecycle of the cluster. You already have the application lifecycle with the classic DevOps and now what we've built and added to the stack is going down one step further, clicking down, if you will, to managing the lifecycle of the operating system. So you have the SUSE Enterprise build chain, all the value, the goodness, compliance, security, again, all of that comes with that build process and now we're hooking that into a cloud-native flow that ends up downstream in our customers. So what I'm hearing is your edge strategy is not some kind of bespoke, hey, I'm going after edge, it connects to the entire value. Yes, it's a great point. We want to reuse the existing philosophies that are being used today. We don't want to create something that new because that's really the point and leverage that we get by having these teams do these things at scale. Another point I'm going to make here is that we've defined the edge in the three segments. One is the near edge, which is the realm of the telecommunications companies. So those use cases and profiles look very different. They're almost data center light, right? So you've got regional locations, central offices where they're standing up gear, classic 2U machines, right? So things you can try from HPE, for example. And then once you get on the other side of the access device, right? The cable modem, the router, whatever it is, you get into what we call the far edge. And this is where the majority of the use cases reside. This is where the diversity of use cases presents itself as well. Also security challenges. Security challenges, yes. And we can talk about that following in a moment. And then finally, if you look at that far edge as a box, right? Think of it as a layer two domain, right? A network. Inside that location, on that network, you'll have industrial IoT devices. Those devices are too small to run a full-blown operating system such as Linux and Kubernetes in the stack, but they do have software on them, right? So we need to be able to discover those devices and manage those devices and pull data from those devices and do it in a cloud-native way. So that's what we call the tiny edge. And I stole that name from the folks over at Microsoft. Kate and Edrick are leading a project upstream called AUKRY, aka RI. And we are very much heavily involved in AUKRY because it will discover the industrial IoT devices and plug those into a local Kubernetes cluster running at that location. And Home Depot would fit into the near edge, is that correct? So each Home Depot store, just to bring it home, is a far edge location. And they have over 2,600 of these locations. It's a far edge. You would put near edge. Far edge, yes, far edge. OK, near edge is like Metro. Think of Metro, yeah, Metro. Communication service providers, MSOs, multi-service operators, those guys are the near edge, yes. Don't you think there's some of, John's been asking all week about machine learning and AI. In that tiny edge, we think there's going to be a lot of AI inferencing in real time. And it actually is going to need some kind of lighter weight platform. How do you fit into that? So going in this model I just described, if you go back and look at the SUSECON 2022 demo keynote that I did, we actually on stage stood up that exact stack. So we had a single Intel Nook running Slee Micro, as we mentioned earlier, running K3S. And we plugged into that device, a USB camera, which is automatically detected. And it loaded Ocari and gave us a driver to plug it into a container. Now, to answer your question, that is the point in time where we bring in the ML and the AI, the inference and the pattern recognition. Because that camera, when you showed the SUSE plush doll, it actually recognized it and put a QR code up on the screen. So that's where it all comes together. So we tried to showcase that in a complete demo. Last week, I was here in Vegas for an event, ADEP, Amazon, and it was put on called RIMARS, Machine Learning, Automation, Robotics, and Space. But basically to me, it was an industrial edge show. The space is the ultimate. Like, glam to the edge is like, you're doing stuff in space. That's pretty edgy, so to speak, pun intended. But the industrial side of the edge we think accelerate with machine learning. And with these kinds of new portable, I won't say flash compute or just like connected power sources, software, the industrial is going to move really fast. We've been kind of in a snail's pace at the edge, in my opinion. What's your reaction to that? Do you think we're going to see a mass acceleration of growth at the edge, industrial, physical, basically physical, the physical world? Yes, first I agree with your assessment, okay? Wholeheartedly, so much so that it's my strategy to go after the tiny edge space and be a leader in the industrial IoT space from an open source perspective. So yes, so a few things to answer your question. We do have K3S in space. We have a customer partner called Hypergiant where they've launched satellites with K3S running in space. Same model, that's a far-aged location, probably the farthest edge location that we've had. Deep batch, deep space. Here at HPE Discover, we have a business unit called SUSE-RGS, Rancher Government Services, which focuses on the U.S. government and DOD and IC, right? It's a little bit of the world that I used to work in in my past career. Brandon Gulla, the CTO of that unit, gave a great presentation about what we call the tactical edge. And so the same technology that we're using on the commercial and the manufacturing side. Like the Jedi contract, the tactical and military edge. Yes, so imagine some of these military grade industrial IoT devices in a disconnected environment. The same software stack and technology would apply to that use case as well. So basically the tactical edge is life. Our livings, we're humans, we're at the edge. Or it's maintenance, right? So maybe it's pulling sensors from aircraft, Humvees, submarines, and doing predictive analysis on the maintenance for those items, those assets. All these different edges, they underscore the diversity that you were just talking about, Keith, and we also see a new hardware architecture emerging, a lot of arm-based stuff. Just take a look at what Tesla's doing at the tiny edge. Keith, Basil, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Great to have you, awesome story. Okay, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier. This is day three of HPE Discover 2022. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We'll be right back.