 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2021 virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon 2021, CloudNativeCon Europe virtual. John Furrier hosts preview with Brian Gracely from Red Hat, Senior Director of Product Strategy, Cloud Business Unit, Brian Gracely. Great to see you, former Kube host, Kube alumni, big time strategist at Red Hat. Great to see you. Always great. And also the founder of Cloudcast, which is an amazing podcast on cloud, part of the Cloud of Roddy. Great to see you, Brian. Hope it's all right. Great to see you, great to see you too. It's, for years, the Kube was always sort of the ESPN of tech. I feel like ESPN has become nothing but highlights. This is where all the good conversation is. The Kube has become sort of the clubhouse of tech which you will. I know that's an area you're focused on. So yeah, I'm excited to be back on and good to talk to you. It's funny, with all the events going away, that was our love going out and extracting the signal from the noise, game day kind of vibe. Kube Virtual has really expanded. So it's been so much more fun because we can get more people. Easy to dial in. So we're going to keep that feature post COVID. You're going to hear more about the Kube Virtual. Hybrid events are going to be a big part of it, which is great because as you know, and we've talked about communities and ecosystems are huge advantage right now. It's been a big part of the Red Hat story. Now part of IBM bringing that mojo to the table. The role of ecosystems with hybrid cloud is so critical. Can you share your thoughts on this? Because I know you study it, you have podcasts, you have one for many years. You understand the democratization and this new direct to audience kind of concept. Share your thoughts on this new ecosystem. Yeah, I think so. You know, we're sort of putting this in the context of what we all sort of familiarly called KubeCon. But if we think about it, it started as KubeCon. It was sort of about this one technology, but it's always been cloud native con and we sort of downplayed the cloud native part of it. But if we think about it now, Kubernetes to a certain extent has kind of, there's this feeling around the community that that piece of the puzzle is kind of boring. It's 21 releases in and there's lots of lots of different offerings that you can get access to. There's still a lot of innovation, but the rest of the ecosystem has just exploded. So there are ecosystem partners and companies that are working on edge and miniaturization. We're seeing things like Kubernetes now getting into outer space and it's in the space station. We're seeing Linux get on Mars, but we're also seeing stuff on the other side of the spectrum, which we're seeing awesome people doing database work and streaming and AI and ML on top of Kubernetes. So the ecosystem is doing what you'd expected to do once one part of it gets stable, the innovation sort of builds on top of it. And even though we're virtual, we're still seeing just tons and tons of contributions, different companies, different people stepping up and leading. So it's been really cool to watch the last few years. It's interesting point about the cloud native con. That's an interesting insight. And I totally agree with you. And I think it's worth double clicking on. Let me just ask you because when you look at like, say Kubernetes, okay, it's enabled a lot. Okay, it's been called the dial tone of the cloud native. I think Pat Gelsinger of VMware use that term. We call it the kind of interoperability layer that enables more large scale deployments. So you're seeing a lot more Kubernetes enablement on clusters, which is causing more hybrid cloud, which means more cloud native. So it actually is creating a network effect in and of itself with more cloud native components and it's changing the development cycle. So the question I want to ask you is one, how does a customer deal with that? Because people are saying, I like hybrid. I agree. Multi-cloud is coming around the corner. And of course, multi-cloud is just a subsystem of resource underneath hybrid. How do I connect it all? Now I have multiple vendors. I have multiple clusters. I'm cross cloud. I'm connecting multiple clouds, multiple services, Kubernetes clusters, some gets stood up, some gets stood down. It's very dynamic. It is, yeah, it's very dynamic. It's actually just coincidentally, our lead architect, a guy named Clayton Coleman, who was one of the Kubernetes founders, is going to give a talk on sort of Kubernetes as this hybrid control plane. So we're already starting to see the tentacles come out of it. So how we do cross cloud networking, how we do cross cloud provisioning of services. So like, how do I go discover what's in other clouds? And I think, like you said, it took people a few years to figure out, like how do I use this new thing, this Kubernetes thing, how do I harness it? And but the demand has since become, I have to do multi-cloud. And that means, hey, our company acquires company. So we don't necessarily know where that next company we acquire is going to run. Are they going to run on AWS? Are they going to run on Azure? I've got to be able to run in multiple places. We're seeing banking industries say, hey, look, cloud's now a viable target for you to put your applications, but you have to treat multiple clouds as if they're your backup domains. And so we're seeing both, the way business operates, whether it's acquisitions or new things driving it, we're seeing regulations driving hybrid and multi-cloud. And even the stalwarts who said for a long time, well, the world's only going to be public cloud and sort of legacy data centers, even those folks are now coming around to, I've got to bring hybrid to these places. So it's been more than just technology, it's been industries pushing it, regulations pushing it, a lot of stuff. So, but like I said, we're going to be talking about kind of our future, our vision on that, our future on that. And you know, Red Hat, everything we end up doing is a community activity. So we expect a lot of people will get on board with it. You know, for all the old timers out there that can relate to this, but I remember in the 80s, the OSI Open Systems Interconnect, and I was chatting with Paul Comrie about this because we kind of grew up through that generation was, that disrupted network protocols that were proprietary. And that opened the door for massive, massive growth, massive innovation around just getting that interoperability with TCPIP. And then everything else happened. So Kubernetes does that. That's a phenomenal impact. So cloud native to me is at that stage where it's totally next gen and it's happening really fast. And a lot of people are getting caught off guard, Brian. So, you know, I got to ask you as a product strategist, what's your, how would you give them the navigation of where that North Star is? If I'm a customer, okay, I got to figure out where I got to navigate now. I know it's super volatile, changing, super fast. Yeah. What's your advice? I think it's a couple of pieces, you know, we're seeing more and more that, you know, the technology decisions don't get driven out of sort of central IT as much anymore, right? We sort of talk all the time that every business opportunity, every business project has a technology component to it. And I think what we're seeing is the companies that tend to be successful with it have built up the muscle, built up the skill set to say, okay, when this line of business says, I need to do something new and innovative, I've got the capabilities to sort of stand behind that, right? They're not out trying to learn it new, they're not chasing it. So that's a big piece of it, is letting the business drive your technology decisions as opposed to what happened for a long time, which was we built out technology, we hope they would come. You know, the other piece of it is I think because we're seeing so much push from different directions, so we're seeing, you know, people put technology out of the edge, we're able to do some unique scalable things in the cloud and so forth, that more and more companies are having to say, hey, look, I'm not in the pharmaceutical business, I'm not in the automotive business, I'm in software. And so the companies that realize that faster, and then once they sort of come to those realizations, they realize that's my new normal, those are the ones that are investing in software skills and they're not afraid to say, look, even if my existing staff is 30 years of sort of history, I'm not afraid to bring in some folks that'll break a few eggs and use them as a lighthouse within their organization to retrain and sort of reset what's possible. So it's business doesn't move, that's the thing that drives all of them. And if you embrace it, we see a lot of success, it's the ones that push back on it really hard. The market tends to sort of push back on them as well. Well, we're previewing KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, we'll amplify that, it's CloudNativeCon as well. You guys bought StackRocks, okay? So, interesting company, not an open source company, they have, I mean, soon to be, I'm ensuring, but Advanced Cluster Security, ACS as is known, it's really been a key part of Red Hat. Can you give us the strategy behind that deal? What is that product? How does it fit in? That's a lot of people are really talking about this acquisition. Yeah, so here's the way we looked at it, is we've learned a couple of things over the last, say, five years that we've been really head down in Kubernetes, right? One is we've always embedded a lot of security capabilities in the platform. So OpenShift being our core Kubernetes platform. And then what's happened over time is customers have said to us, that's great, you've made the platform very secure, but the reality is our software supply chain, so the way that we build applications, that we need to secure that better, we need to deal with these more dynamic environments. And then once the applications are deployed, they interact with various types of networks, I need to better secure those environments too. So we realized that we needed to expand our functionality beyond the core platform of OpenShift. And then the second thing that we've learned over the last number of years is to be successful in this space, it's really hard to take technology that wasn't designed for containers or wasn't designed for Kubernetes and retrofit it back into that. And so when we were looking at potential acquisition targets, we really narrowed down to companies whose fundamental technologies were Kubernetes centric, hadn't had to modify something to get to Kubernetes and StackRocks was really the leader in that space. They really have been the leader in enterprise Kubernetes security. And the great thing about them was, not only did they have this Kubernetes expertise, but on top of that, probably half of their customers were already OpenShift customers and about three quarters of their customers were using native Kubernetes services and other clouds. So when we went and talked to them and said, hey, we believe in Kubernetes, we believe in multi-cloud, we believe in an open source, they said, yeah, those are all the foundational things for us. And to your point about it, maybe not being an open source company, they actually had a number of sort of ancillary projects that were open source. So they weren't unfamiliar to it. And then now that the acquisitions closed, we will do what we do with every piece of Red Hat technology, we'll make sure that within a reasonable period of time that it's made open source. And so, it's good for the community. It allows them to keep focusing on their innovation. Yeah, I got to get that code out there. Cool. What's Brian, I'm hearing about Platform Plus, what is that about? Take us through that. Yeah, so one of the things that our customers have come to us over time is it's, it's like I've been saying kind of throughout this discussion, right? Kubernetes is foundational, but it's, you know, it's become pretty stable. The things that people are solving for now are, like you highlighted, lots and lots of clusters, they're all over the place. That was something that our advanced cluster management capabilities were able to solve for people. Once you start getting into lots of places, you've got to be able to secure things everywhere you go. And so OpenShift Plus really allows us to bundle together, you know, sort of the complete set of the portfolio. So the platform, security management, and it also gives us the foundational pieces or allows our customers to buy the foundational pieces that are going to help them do multi and hybrid cloud. And, you know, when we bundle that, we can, you know, we can save them probably 25% in terms of sort of product acquisition. And then obviously the integration we work, work we do, you know, saves a ton on the operational side. So it's a new way for us to not only bundle the platform and the technologies, but it gets customers in a mindset that says, hey, we've moved past sort of single environments to hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Awesome, well thanks for the update on that. Appreciate it. One of the things going into KubeCon and that we're watching closely is this cloud native developer action. Certainly end users, we want to get that in the separate section with you, but have the end user contribution, which is like exploding. But on the developer side, there's a real trend towards adding stronger consistency, programmability, support for more use cases. Okay, where it's becoming more of a data platform as a requirement. Right, right. So how that, and so that's a trend. So I'm kind of think there's no disagreement on that. Okay, sounds good. No, no, absolutely. What does that mean? Like I'm a customer, that sounds good. How do I make that happen? Cause that's the critical discussion right now in the DevOps, DevSecOps, Day2 operations, so what do you want to call it? This is the number one concern for developers and that solution architect. Existency, programmability, more use cases with data as a platform. Yeah, I think, the way I kind of frame this up was for any organization, the last thing you want to do is sort of keep investing in lots of platforms. So platforms are great on their surface, but once you're having to manage five and six and 10 or however many you're managing, the economy's a scale go away. And so what's been really interesting to watch with Kubernetes is, when we first got started, everything was cloud native application, but that really was sort of shorthand for stateless applications. We quickly saw a move to people that said, hey, I can modernize something, a stateful application and we added that into Kubernetes. The community added the ability to do stateful applications and that got people a certain amount of the way and they sort of started saying, okay, maybe Kubernetes can help me peel off some things of an existing platform so I can peel off Java workloads or I can peel off. What's been this explosion is the data community, if you will, so the TensorFlow, the PyTorches, the Apache community with things like Couchbase and Kafka, TensorFlow, all these things that maybe in the past didn't necessarily, had their own sort of underlying system are now defaulting to Kubernetes. And what we see because of that is people now can say, okay, these data workloads, these AI and ML workloads are so important to my business, right? Like I can directly point to cost savings, I can point to driving innovation. And because Kubernetes is now their default sort of way of running, we're seeing just sort of what used to be small islands of clusters become these enormous footprints, whether they're in the cloud or in their data center. And that's almost become the most prevalent, most widely used use case. And again, it makes total sense. It's exactly the trends that we've seen in our industry, even before Kubernetes. And now people are saying, okay, I can consolidate a lot of stuff on Kubernetes, I can get away from all those silos. So that's been a huge thing over the last probably year plus. And the cool thing is we've also seen the hardware vendor. So whether it's Intel or Nvidia, especially around GPUs, really getting on board and trying to make that simpler. So it's not just the software ecosystem, it's also the hardware ecosystem really getting on board. Awesome, Brian, let me get your thoughts on the cloud versus the power dynamics between the cloud players and the open source software vendors. So what's the red hat relationship with the cloud players with the hybrid architecture? Because you want to set up the modern day developer environment, we get that, it's hybrid. What's the relationship with the cloud players? You know, I think, so we've always had two philosophies that haven't really changed. One is, you know, we believe in open source and open licensing. So you haven't seen us look at the cloud as a competitive threat, right? We didn't want to make our business and the way we compete in business, you know, change our philosophy and software. So we've always sort of maintained open licenses, permissive licenses. But the second piece is, you know, we've looked at the cloud providers as very much partners and mostly because our customers look at them as partners. So, you know, if a Delta Airlines or Deutsche Bank or somebody says, hey, that cloud provider is going to be our partner and we want you to, you know, be part of that journey, you know, we need to be partners with that cloud as well. And you've seen that sort of manifest itself in terms of, you know, we haven't gone and set up new SaaS offerings that are Red Hat offerings. We've actually taken a different approach than a lot of the open source companies. And we've said, we're going to embed our capabilities, especially, you know, OpenShift into AWS, into Azure, into IBM cloud, working with Google Cloud. So we look at them very much as a partner. I think it aligns to how Red Hat's done things in the past. And, you know, we think, you know, even though it may be easy to sort of see a way of monetizing things, you know, changing licensing, you know, we've always found that, you know, you've got to allow the ecosystem to compete. You've got to allow customers to go where they want to go and we try and be, you know, there is in the most consumable way possible. So that's worked out really well for us. So I got to bring up the end-user participation component that's a big theme here at KubeCon going into it and around the event is, and we've seen this trend happen. I mean, Envoy, Lyft, the only examples are out there. And but they're getting more and more end-use enterprises coming in. So the enterprise class, I call classic enterprise, end-user participation is an all-time high in open source. You guys have the biggest portfolio of enterprises in the business. What's the trend that you're seeing? It used to be limited to the hyperscalers, the Lyfts and the Facebooks and the big guys now. Now you have, you know, enterprises coming in. The business model is working. Can you just share your thoughts on the cloud native cons participation for end-users? Yeah, I think we're definitely seeing a blurring of lines between what used to be the Silicon Valley companies for the ones that would create innovation. So like you mentioned Lyft or, you know, LinkedIn doing Kafka or Twitter doing, you know, whatever. As we've seen more and more, especially enterprises, look at themselves as software companies, right? So, you know, if you talk about, you know, Ford or Volkswagen, they think of themselves as a software company, almost more than they think about themselves as a car company, right? They're a sort of mobile transportation company, you know, something like that. And so they look at themselves as I've got to, I've got to have software as an expertise. I've got to compete for the best talent, no matter where that talent is, right? So it doesn't have to be in Detroit or in Germany or wherever, I can go get that anywhere. And I think what they really, they look for us to do is, you know, they've got great technology chops, but they don't always understand kind of the nuances and the dynamics of open source, right? They're used to having, you know, their own proprietary internal stuff. And so a lot of times they'll come to us, not, you know, hey, how do we work with a project? But, you know, like here's new technology, but they'll come to us and they'll say, how do we be good stewards in this community? How do we make sure that we can set up our own internal open source office and have that group, you know, work with communities? And so the dynamics have really changed. I think a lot of them have, you know, they've looked at Silicon Valley for years and now they're modeling it. But it's, you know, for us, it's great because now we're talking the same language, you know, we're able to share sort of experiences, we're able to share best practices. So it is really, really interesting in terms of, you know, how far that whole sort of software is eating the world thing is materialized in sort of every industry. Yeah, and it's the workloads of expanding cloud native everywhere, edges blowing up big time. Brian, final question for you before we break. Thanks for coming on. It's always great to chat with you. It's always riffing and getting the data out too. What's your, what's your expectation for KubeCon cloud native con this year? What are you expecting to see? What highlights do you expect will come out of cloud native con KubeCon this year? Yeah, I think, you know, like I said, I think it's going to be, it's going to be much more on the cloud native side. You know, we're seeing a ton of new communities come out. I think that's going to be the big headline is the number of new communities that are, you know, have sort of built up a following. So whether it's cross-plane or whether it's, you know, get ops or whether it's, you know, expanding around the work that's going on in operators, we're going to see a whole bunch of projects around, you know, developer sort of frameworks and developer experience and so forth. So I think the big thing we're going to see is sort of this next stage of, you know, a thousand flowers are blooming and we're going to see probably a half dozen or so new communities come out of this one really strong and you know, the trends around those are going to accelerate. So I think that'll probably be the biggest takeaway. And then I think just the fact that the community is going to come out stronger, you know, after the pandemic and then maybe it did before because we're learning new ways to work remotely and that brings in a ton of new companies and contributors. So I think those two big things will be the headlines and you know, the community is, the state of the community is strong as they like to say. Yeah, love the ecosystem. I think the value is going to be network effect, ecosystems, integration standards, evolving very quickly out in the open. Great to see Brian Graceley, senior director of product strategy at Red Hat for the cloud business unit. Also, podcasts are over a million episode downloads for the cloudcast, the podcast, the cloudcast.net. What's it Brian? What's the stats now? What, that means a million? Yeah, I think we've done over 500 shows. We're, you know, about a million and a half listeners a year. So it's, you know, again, it's great to have community followings and you know, and meet people from around the world. So, you know, so many of these things intersect. It's a real pleasure to work with everybody. You're in the creator culture, well done. We're all been there, done that. Great job. Check out the cloudcast. Of course, Red Hat's got the great open shift mojo going on into KubeCon. Brian, thanks for coming on. Thanks John. Okay, so Kube coverage of KubeCon, cloud native con Europe 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier with the Kube virtual. Thanks for watching.