 Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got a great power panel here from Kendrill, who's a great company. He has spun out of IBM, IT services, great technology, great conversation. It's got Canadian director of worldwide automation. Anand, Guadalpala Krishnan, Chief Automation Architect. Love the title from Kendrill and Lisa Sevez Automation Architect from Kendrill. Guys, thanks for coming on. Appreciate the conversation. Looking forward to it. Thanks John. Thank you. We covered you guys at IBM Think 2021, the new name, everything's happening, the extreme focus, the tactical execution has been pretty much on cloud, cloud native automation. This is the conversation. Knowing how much has gone behind the new name, can you just take a minute to share and give us an update on who Kendrill is and how that's going? Yeah, I'd love to. You know, as Kendrill, we really have the privilege of being responsible for designing, building, managing and modernizing, you know, the mission critical systems that the world depends on every day. You know, our thousands of clients span every industry and our leaders in their industries, right? We're on the mission critical application environments for, you know, seven of the 10 largest airlines, 28 of the top 50 banks, right? All the largest mobile providers, you know, most of the largest retailers out there and so on and so forth, right? These companies really trust us to ensure that their business operations are really flawlessly being run and operating at our scale with the quality that these clients demand is only possible by doing enterprise strength automation, right? It's not only about reactive automation but using intelligent automation so we can predict and prevent issues before they really become a problem, right? And because of our intelligent approach to automation, our clients have a tremendous, you know, they get tremendous benefits for it, right? Retailers can open stores faster because systems and services are deployed more efficiently, right? Banks, ATMs, right? We all depend on those day to day, you know, they're working and when you need them with our automation behind the scenes, you know, healthcare systems are more robust and responsive because we monitor for potential breaks and prevent them before they occur, right? Data processing systems, right? We hear about reaches all the time, right? Our clients are more secure because their environments are checked into, checked to ensure that security exposures are quickly discovered and intermediated, right? So like automation, orchestration, intelligence, driving the world's digital economy, right? If you ask what Kindle is, you know, that's our DNA and it's really what we do well. Yeah, what's interesting, I want to get you to just quick follow up on that because the name implies kind of a fresh perspective, working together, there's a lot of shared experiences and the new normal now is obviously with hybrid and virtual continuing, people are doing things differently and I would like you, if you don't mind, take a minute to share about the automation environment that you guys are operating in because it's a different approach, but the game is still the same, right? You've got to make sure that these things are scaling and people are working again. So it's a combination of people and technology and new equities. Take a minute to talk about that. Yeah, I'd love to. You know, and you're right, right? The game is really changing and automation is really ingrained into, needs to be ingrained into why everybody's approaching what they do day to day. And if you talk about automation, you know, it's really included in what we do in our BAU delivery operations, right? And we do that at a tremendous scale, right? We have, you know, millions of infrastructure components and applications managed with automation, right? We're going to talk a little bit about CACF here in a few minutes, right? We've got over half a million devices themselves boarded onto that and we're running over 11 million automations on a month-to-month basis through the Red Hat technology that that's built on, right? We've got RPA is a key part of our environment, running millions of transactions through that on a yearly basis, right? And our automation is really covering the entire stack, right? It's not just about traditional IT, but we cover public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, you know, network components, applications and business processes, right? You talked about people, right? Helpdesk, right? We cover automation to automate a lot of the helpdesk processes that are happening behind the scenes, security and resiliency. And it's really about driving all that through, you know, not just prescriptive reactions, but, you know, us using our experience insights we have from our data lakes and AI ops technologies and really making proactive-based decisions based on that to really help drive the value back for our clients and to ensure that they're, you know, operating the way they need to, right? Yeah, that systems mindset outcome-driven focus is unique. That's awesome. Congratulations. And on Lisa, we're going to get into the architect side of it because you're seeing more and more automation at the center of all the conversations. It reminds me of the machine learning AI vibe a couple of years ago. It's like, oh yeah, everything's ML, AI. Automation, everything's automation. And now your title is Chief Automation Architect. Love that title. What do you do? Like, I mean, you're architecting more automation. Are you, can you take a minute to explain your role? I love the title and automation is really the technology driving a lot of the change. What do you do? Thank you, John. So let me first thank you for allowing us to come and speak to you and the forum here about what we have done using Ansible and other Red Hat products. So Ansible is one of the many products that we have used within Red Hat to support the solution that we have deployed called as Cloud Automation Community Framework, right? So Scott touched upon it a few minutes earlier in terms of what are we doing for our clients? How do we make sure that our client's environment is secure? How do we make sure that our client's environment is available all the time so that the infrastructure services that we're providing for our clients has a direct impact for their clients. So this is where the implementation of automation using the products that we have from Red Hat has helped us achieve and we will continue to expand on supporting that, right? So let me break this into two parts. One is from an infrastructure standpoint how we have implemented the solution and scaled it in such a way that we can support the number of devices that Scott was referring to earlier and also the number of clients that we have touched on. And the second part I'll let my colleague Lisa talk about the application architecture and the application scalability that we have, right? So first let me touch on infrastructure. So if you look at the way we needed to establish a capability to provide support to our clients is we wanted to make sure our infrastructure is available all the time, right? That's very important. So before we even basically say, hey, we're going to make sure that our clients infrastructure is available all the time or our clients infrastructure is secure. And also we're able to provide the automation services for the infrastructure service that we're providing, right? So the stack that we built was to support our solution to be truly cloud native. So we began with, of course, choosing OCP which is the OpenShift Cloud Platform that we have deployed on Red Hat Core OS which is basically enabling the automation platform to be deployed as a true cloud native application that can be scalable to not just within one country but multiple countries, supporting data privacy that we need to have, supporting the compliance posture that we need to support and scalable to support the half a billion devices that we are supporting today, right? So essentially, if you look at what we have is a capability enabled on the entire stack of the Red Hat products that we have and we are able to focus on ensuring that we're able to provide the automation by gaining efficiency, right? If you look at a lot of automations that we have is about de-risking complexities, right? So just think about the amount of risk that we're removing and the quality that we're assuring from the codified and standardized changes that we're basically implementing or just the amount of risk that we are able to eliminate by removing thousands of manual labor hours as well. So if you look at the automation need, it's not just about efficiency of the removal of labor hours but efficiency of providing standards and efficiency of providing the capabilities that support our clients to their needs. I.e., making sure that their infrastructure is compliant, their infrastructure is secure and their infrastructure is highly available all the time. So which is basically making sure that we're able to address what we call as day one and day two activities while we are able to support their day two infrastructure services activities, I.e., right from ground up, building the server which is provisioning, doing some provisioning activities and deploying applications and basically supporting the applications once they are deployed, right? So look at the scale, so we have quite a bit there. So you've got the cloud-native platform, got the cloud-native platform, let me just summarize that, cloud-native platform for scale. So that means you're aligning and targeting and working with people who want to do cloud-native applications. And they want fast speed. Yeah, they want everything go faster. By the way, the compliance piece is super important because if you can take that away from them from waiting for the answers from the compliance department or security department, then that's the flywheel. Is that what you're getting at? This is the trend? Absolutely. So I'm going to turn it over to Lisa who is going to help us out with that. Go ahead, Lisa. Lisa, weigh in on the flywheel here. Sure, sure, yeah. So one of the things that CACF allows us to do, right? And it's, again, as I'm described, it's a very robust, powerful infrastructure. It supports many, many clients. As we run a lot of applications through this infrastructure and we do things like run security health checks on all our client servers and process the data real-time and get that data out to our teams to address issues almost immediately, right? Scott touched on the fact that we are monitoring incident data real-time and taking automated actions to correct problems in the environment. These are just really, really powerful capabilities that we're able to offer. We also have other use cases. We do a lot of identity management, primary and secondary controls through the CACF infrastructure. So we're able to have one point of connectivity into our clients' environments. It's agentless, right? So you set up one connection to their servers and we can do a whole lot of management of various things through this single automation platform. So that's just to call us out. This is actually very powerful. And first of all, you mentioned CACF, that's the Cloud Automation Community Framework. Yeah, correct, yeah. Okay, so that's the platform. Mm-hmm, yeah. So now the platform's there and now talk about the advantages because the power here is this truly highlights the transformation of DevOps, infrastructure as code and microservices coming around the corner where the developers want to build security into the applications from day one and take advantage of new services as they come online. That is now one. That puts the pressure on the old IT teams, the old security teams who have been the know-ops. No, you can't do it, are slower. This is a trend. This is actually happening and this culture shift is happening. Can you guys weigh in on that? Because this is a really important part of the story. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, if you go back, you know, circa 2019 or so, right? You know, we were, back then we were recognized as a leader in the automation space by a lot of the analysts, but we kind of look at that culture change you were just talking about and look at, you know, how do we become more agile? How do we go faster in what we're doing, right? And then I'm working with Jason McCurr and the Red Hat's Ansible Automation Platform Team. We kind of defined this platform that Lisa and Anand are talking to, right? Wrapping together the OpenShift and Ansible and Threescale with, you know, our services platform with Watson and, you know, it really gave us the ability to leverage two of our core capabilities, right? The first, you know, in order for us to go faster was our community model, right? Our community experience, right? So we've got a large delivery community that's out there, really experts and a lot of, experts in a lot of technologies and industries and by putting this in place it gave us a way to really leverage them more in that community model development. So they could create and we could harvest more of the automation playbooks and, you know, a lot of the different use cases that Lisa was talking, instrument remediation, patch scanning and deployment, security compliance, checking and enforcement, you know, basically anything that needs to get done as part of our, what we'd call day one or day two operations we do for a client, right? And it gave us an approach really to do a lot of high quality automation and get to the point where we could get thousands of automation modules that our clients could, that we could use as a part of our services we delivered to the client environments. And, you know, that type of speed and agility and being able to kind of leverage that was something that wasn't there previously. You know, it also gave us a way to leverage, I guess, one of our other core capabilities, right? Which is a systems integrator, right? So we were able to focus more by having that core engine in place, we were able to focus more on our integrator experience and integrate, you know, IBM technologies, ServiceNow, ScienceLogic, VMware and many more, right? To the engine itself. So, you know, basically, you know, all the applications out there that the clients didn't depend on for their business environments, integrate directly with them so we could more seamlessly bring the automation to their environments, right? So it really gave us both the ability to change our culture, have a community model in place that we didn't before and really leverage that services integrator expertise that we bring to the table and act really fast on behalf of our clients out there. That's great stuff. Lisa, if you don't mind, could you share your thoughts on what's different about the community platform? And because automation has been around for a while, you do a couple of times, you do something repetitive, you automate it. Automate it out of way and that's efficiency. But within Kindro, we have a very strong community and we have very strong security guidelines around what the community produces that will deliver to our clients, right? So we give our teams a lot of flexibility but we also make sure that the content is very secure. We do a lot of testing. We have very strong security teams that do actual physical penetration testing, right? They actually could try and come in and break things. So, you know, we really feel good about, you know, not only do we give our teams the flexibility but we also, you know, make sure that it's safe for our clients. How's the relationship with Ansible evolving? Because as Ansible continues to do well with automation, automation is now, like automation is code, if things are discoverable, reuse is a big topic in the community model. How is Ansible factoring into your success? So, first of all, I want to break this into two discussions, right? One is the product itself and second is how we have collaborated very closely with our colleagues at Red Hat, right? So essentially it's the feedback that we get from our clients which is then fed into our solution and then from our solution, we basically say, doesn't need what our clients requirements are. If it doesn't, then we work with our Red Hat colleagues, say, hey, you know, we need some enhancements to be made and we've been lucky enough to work with our colleagues at Red Hat very closely where we've been able to make some poor product changes to support our clients requirements, right? And that's very important in terms of the collaboration with Red Hat from a client standpoint. That's number one. Number two, from a product standpoint, Ansible and the use of Ansible itself, right? Or Ansible Tower as the automation hub that we've been using. So we began this with a very base product capability which was to do what we call event automation. That was our first. Then we said, no, I think we can certainly look at expanding this to beyond event automation, i.e. can we do, when we say event, which is typically BAU activities, day two activities, but then we said, can we do day one, day two infrastructure services automation? We said, yes, why not? And then we worked again with our colleagues at Red Hat identifying opportunities to improve on those. And we basically enhanced the framework to support those additional use cases that we basically identified. And as a matter of fact, we are continually looking at improving as well in terms of not just, hey, using the base product as is, but also receiving that feedback, giving that feedback to our Red Hat colleagues and then implementing it as we go. So that's the approach we've taken. And what's the other half of this? I was putting it in two. What's the other half? Yep. So the other half is the actual implementation itself. Which is basically expanding the use cases to go from beyond event automation, to from building the server, to also patching compliance. And now we're actually looking at even what we call service request automation, right? Which is we basically want to be able to say, hey, user, you want a specific action to be performed on a particular endpoint. Can we take it to that next level as well? So that's where we are basically looking at as we progress. So we're not done. I would say it's still the beginning of expansion. Well, no, I totally agree. I think it's early days and I think a lot of it's, you mentioned day two operation, I love that. Day zero, day one, day two. Does anyone want to take a stab at defining what day two operation is? How do you want to go? Well, I got the experts here. It's good to get the definitions out there because day one, you're provisioned, right? Day zero, you provision. Day zero, you're provisioned. Yeah, so day zero, you look at what is the infrastructure? What's the hardware that's there? And then day one, you do what we call post provisioning activities, configuring everything that we need to do, like deploying the middleware applications, making sure the applications are configured properly, making sure that are, you know, the operating systems that we need to have, whether it is a base operating system or operating systems for supporting the containers that are basically going to be enabled, all those will need to be looked at, right? So that's day one. Then day two is business as you know. Brings, day two. Day one's fun, everything's good. We got everything up and running. We stood it up and day two breaks and like, you know, it's his fault, whose fault it is. So if you look at the approach that we took was, we said, let's start with the day two, then get to day zero, right? So which can, where we have lots of lessons learned as we go through, and that's the expansion of how we are looking at Ansible. Well, this is all fun aside. First of all, it's all fun to have jokes like that. But the reality is that the hardened operational discipline required to go beyond day one is critical, right? So this is where we start getting into the ops side, where security downtime, disruptive operations, it's got to be programmable. And by the way, automation's in there too. So which means that it's not humans, it's software running. So edge is going to complicate the hell out of that too. So day two becomes super important from an architecture standpoint. You guys are the architects. What's the strategy? What should people be doing? How should, because day one is fun. You get it up, stand it up, but then it starts getting benefit. People start paying attention. And then you need to scale it and harden it. What's the strategy? What should people do? Yeah, I mean, if you think about automation, right? It's not, oh, and I meant to say, John, if it breaks, it's always an Ansible. Always an Ansible. Don't ask any of that. I agree. Exactly, thank you, Lisa. But automation, a lot of conversations, people talk about it as gaining efficiency. And it's not just that. Automation is about de-risking complexities, right? Think about all the risk that's removed and quality assured from the codified and standardized changes, right? Think about all the risk removed from eliminating the tens of thousands of manual labor hours that have to be done and those various things that get done. So for talk about day two operations, what we're doing, getting more automation in there, our focus is definitely, how do we de-risk changes? How do we make it safer for the clients? How do we make it more secure for the clients? And how do we ensure that their business operations are operating at their peak efficiencies? Yeah, and as I mentioned, we really go above and beyond on the security. We have much, much, much automated testing and we also have the penetration testing I was talking about. So we take it very seriously. Yeah, I think what's interesting about what you guys are doing with the platform is it's cloud native. You start to see, not just the replatforming, but the fun parts when you start thinking about refactoring applications and benefits start to come out of nowhere, new benefits, new net new use cases. So I think the outcome side of this is interesting. A lot of people talk about, okay, let's focus on the cost, but there's now net new positive, potentially revenue impact for your customers. This is kind of where the game changes a lot. What do you guys think about that? Because that's, you know, I always have this argument with folks who are very cost-centric, repatriate every day off the cloud or let's look at the net new opportunities that are going to be enabled by rapid programming, identifying new work flows, automating them and creating value. Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, you're talking about the future, where we're going, things that we do, you know, obviously getting more closer to and being directly aligned with the DevSecOps teams that are out there. You talk about day two, you know, the closer we are to those guys, the better for us and everybody else that's going there and going forward. You know, and as, you know, businesses keep returning to their pre-COVID levels, you know, automation gives a possibility and the ones that we're doing gives a possibility for hopefully the clients do more to that revenue capture, right? Being able to, you know, I had a little bit earlier, being able to stand up retail stores faster, right? Being able to deploy business-based applications that are generating revenue for the clients at, you know, at moments notice. Things like that are really possible with automation and possible with the way we've done this solution with Red Hat and our clients, right? And I think we've got tons of benefits there. We're seeing, you know, we've got almost 900 clients boarded on it today, right? We, you know, non-hit-ons, we've got half a million plus devices that are connected to this, right? And we're seeing things where, you know, the clients that are on this are getting results, you know, things such as 61% of all tickets being resolved with no human intervention, you know, 84% of their entire service base, server base is being checked automatically for security and compliance daily and, you know, we could go through lots of those different metrics, but, you know, the fact we can do that for our clients gives, through automation, gives, you know, our engineers, our delivery community, the ability to closely, more closely work with the client to do those revenue generation activities to help them capture more revenue in the market. We'll just put that in context. And the scale and speed of what's happening with those numbers, I mean, it's significant. It's not like it's a small little test. It's like large scale. Scale is the advantage of cloud. Cloud is a scale game. The advantage is scaling and handling that scale. What's your thought? Absolutely. So if you basically, again, look, when we started this, we started small, right? In terms of the use cases that we wanted to tackle, the number of devices that we said we could basically handle, right? But then once we saw the benefits, the initial benefits of how quickly we were able to fix some of the problems from a day one, day two standpoint, or address some of the compliance and patching issues that we needed to look at, right? We quickly saw opportunities and said, how fast can we go? And in terms of, well, it's not just how fast can we go in terms of setting up our own infrastructure by saying, hey, we are cloud native. I can just pin up another container and make sure that I can have another 100 servers onboarded to support or 100 network devices to be onboarded to support and so on, right? So it was also the scale from a automation standpoint where we needed to make sure that our resources were skilled to develop the automations as well. So the scale is not in terms of just infrastructure, but the scale is also in terms of people that can do the automation in terms of providing the services for our infrastructure, right? So that's how we approached it. People and application and infrastructure. So that included providing education in Kindle today close to about 11,000 people that we have trained on Ansible, the user of Ansible, and the user of Ansible Tower and just even doing development of the playboats using Ansible, right? So if you look at, it's not just infrastructure scale, it's infrastructure scale, application to be able to scale to that infrastructure and people to be able to scale to what we're trying to do to support our clients as well. I think the people thing is huge because you have a side benefit here as harmony and the teams. You got cohesiveness that breeds peace, not war. Absolutely. That's between. If you look at the words that we said, a cloud automation community framework, if you really break it down, right? It's a framework, but for who? It's for the community. What are they doing? They're building automation. And what is the graph, right? Team wants to make the apps go faster. The apps want to be faster. They don't want to be waiting. Everything's about going faster, pass, shoot, score, as they say in sports. But okay, I love this conversation. I think it's going to be the beginning of a big wave. How do people engage? And how do I get involved if I want to use the cloud automation community framework? What's the consumption side for how do you guys push this out there and how do people engage with you? Do you want to take that one? Yeah, I mean, the easiest way is, you know, kindrel. You know, we're out there. We're coming forward with our company has spent off from IBM, come engage with our sales reps, come engage with our outsourcing, service management, service delivery organizations and, you know, happy to get them engaged, get them on board and get them using the automation framework we've got in place. That's awesome, great. Well, great stuff. Love the automation conversation. Automation and hybrid are the big, big trends that are never going to stop. It's going to be a hybrid world we live in. And the edge is exciting. Scott, you mentioned the edge. It's just more and more action. It's a distributed computing paradigm. I mean, it really is the same. We've seen this movie before and on, you know, in tech. So now it's automation. So great stuff. Lisa, thank you for coming on. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you John. Cube coverage for Ansible Fest 2021 power panel, breaking down automation with Kendrill, the importance of community, the importance of cohesiveness with teams, but more importantly, the outcome, the speed of development and security. I'm John Furrier theCUBE. Thanks for watching.