 Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Ansible Fest 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. Got two great guests here. Dave Lindquist, vice president of software engineering at Red Hat and Matthew Jones, chief architect and Ansible engineer, architect of the automation platform. Matthew, great to see you. Dave, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on for this CUBE conversation. Great to see you, John. Thank you. So the big theme here is automation. We've been talking about it for a while, Dave. I think last year we hit this point a couple of times hard. This year it's kind of going mainstream and it's really exciting because like, this is stuff that's been kind of going around. So it's been growing rapidly. So building on the themes from last year throughout this year and cloud-nated with the edge right around the corner, automation is going rapidly, okay? So what arenas do you guys think we're in too hard, too easy, you know, comments like, yeah, repetitive tasks are good, but it's more complicated than that now. Are there areas that your customers think are better for automation than others? Can you guys introduce where the action is? Sure, well, I'll get started, John. We are clearly seeing an acceleration of how to apply automation across full life cycles, across domains. If you step back and think about the journey many customers are on with their development environments, continuous delivery into cloud, hybrid cloud, the challenges are how to accelerate the use of automation across the full life cycle, across your workloads, across security compliance, across networking, across storage, how to remediate situations. So it's just an acceleration of how do you apply automation into all of these different domains? Is there areas specifically you think customers thought, no, we're never going to get there, that they're getting there now. Is there specific things you're seeing low hanging fruit or is there a clear path? What do you guys see about that? Because, you know, this is now, we're seeing things now that certainly with the pandemic, a lot more visibility into automation with cloud scale. Is there areas where your customers are saying, I didn't think I can get that. Now we can get it, now we can automate that. Yeah, I think a couple of areas jumped to mind quickly. One is sometimes referred to as a shift left, but how do you start bringing automation earlier, earlier into the life cycle? One of the things we talked about last year that we've been building on is with advanced cluster management and containers and Kubernetes. And how do you insert automation from Ansible into all the different life cycles, whether it's setting up clusters, it's deploying applications, it's remediating from security events, compliance activities, that's what we're starting to see where customers are really starting to push the envelope on their use automation across those life cycles. Matt, how is Ansible evolving to address the demands we've heard in previous interviews with customers specifically to grow past their traditional management and automation environments because that's the real action here. What are you guys doing to address those demands? Yeah, you're exactly right. Are the way that we're evolving is and you know, right? Like where we've started is with basic command line tools, really basic integration with systems that developers have been familiar with for years, decades. Where we want to grow into is the native automation that makes up the cloud, that makes up the services and infrastructure that not just developers interface with, but administrators, DevOps, SRE, common users, normal people who are just trying to get things done. We want to meet them at the systems and at the footprints that they expect. And that's what we want to do. And the systems and the tools that we're introducing this year, next year that we've been working on through the pandemic, it's about moving the ball forward into those areas. What's been along those lines, what's been the thought around footprint expansion? Cause that's become a big topic, right? I want to expand my automation space. I want to hire more people. Good luck with that. It is hard to hire people in this market. But again, automation is a human machine and software perspective. So you still need humans. So footprint automation and team scale. Can you talk about that? Matthew, what do you think about that? Yeah, absolutely. We've spent a lot of time focusing on automation in the system space and how these tools connect to those systems. And a big theme this year of Ansible Fest has been how do we get back to the tools and the processes that people are using and people are building to do that? We've created a whole developer focus space within the automation platform, a suite of tools that integrate into their development environments, their own automation workflows, making it easier to share and collaborate on automation, building communities within their organizations and among their internal stakeholders. And I think you'll see that represented here at Ansible Fest and the dedication to those tools and the integration of workflows and not just the tools that they've had before but the tools that they're learning and gaining experience with right now, the container based workloads and how do we share automation and verify and validate, feel good about that automation that it's going to work when we go to production with it. Those are the kinds of tools and processes that we're developing and delivering for our customers, for the community and for their stakeholders in their community also. What's the big updates this year at Ansible Fest for those people who want to jump in and have it be easier for teams to use Ansible and experience Ansible and also for the newbies, people coming in who are new to automation, that could be savvy developers. I mean, people are shifting left for security and everyone's bolting on automation and or planning it in from the beginning on architecture. So you're seeing a new user base come into Ansible. That's what I hear. What happens typically that you guys announcing? And those new people, they need to be able to come into an organization's process and get up to speed on what their automation, they're working on and learn the ropes, be able to share and collaborate with people who are automating in the space already. We need to be able to give them access to documentation and tooling. It helps them get started right away rather than having to fumble around the documentation, have meetings and learn the ropes. We want to make this smooth and we want the pipeline of automation to go from the developer and their team into the content publishing and management of Automation Hub using collections and execution environments that we're introducing here. The same things that they work on and build and produce as automation developers or what they'll use in the automation platform to actually run the automation. And that feels really good, right? The things that you're seeing on your developer workspace that you share with your team and your internal community, you can follow it right through your editor, your IDE, through to Automation Hub and improving the content, right out through Automation Controller and the automation platform through running that automation. Yeah, I think this is a huge point. I mean, Matthew nailed it. I think you have to have the ability to go from newbie, accelerate quickly to expert because this is the cloud, this cloud scale, this the lifecycle of software development is changing. It's very agile, it's very integrated and newbies can come in quickly and be awesome fast. It's not, you don't need to go to the training, old school kind of training modules and get ramped up. You could be instantly running hard. So I think that's a huge point and we're hearing that, so congratulations. Dave, I want to bring you in and talk about how other Ansible adjacent systems that you oversee come together with this release of Ansible. So what does it mean for the products that are working together in the management space? Because you now have Ansible, great track record. Now you have a system in these distributed systems now in a surprising cloud environments or systems working together. What's the impact? Yeah, great question, John. Maybe just to start to follow on some of the areas that Matthew was going through, some of the advances in Ansible Automation Platform are really to ease the deployment and then be able to grow that deployment with scale and distribution, putting execution nodes wherever those nodes need to be, the ability to simplify creating content, access to content, collections, so that the automation maturity and the use automation can grow. So that couples very nice with many of the investments we have in the broader space of management around advanced cluster management for Kubernetes with ACM around our insights, around our edge management initiatives across the board. So what I'm seeing, what we're all seeing is how many of the solutions are looking, how you bring many of these disciplines together. For example, how do we start realizing the promise of event-driven architectures? From insights, how can we understand what's happening with workloads or infrastructure or compliance issues? And then from the management systems, we can pick up the inventory and the workload and all the specifics about that workload. And then with Ansible, we can then automate and remediate, either scale that workload, address your service management processes or hook into even remediations they have a compliance issue. So you're basically bringing together insights with policy-driven mechanisms with the automation capabilities of Ansible, which is fascinating and how we start building much more robust automation solutions, which are required for everything's headed in this hybrid cloud environment. I mean, what are some of the challenges that your customers have on that point? There's robust solutions or whatever one wants. It's a natural extension. I mean, you can see what you just laid out. What are some of the customer challenges day that you're seeing there? Because this is a path everyone's going down. I'm hearing people discuss this in the hallways and virtual hallways these days. But for the most part, like, okay, I know what I know, I love what I have. I got to start connecting these other adjacent systems together and make them work and automate together. What's the biggest challenges? Is it cultures, is it blockers, or what's the evolution? You can weigh in too, if you want. This is a key question that everyone's asking. Yeah, it's a key question. And these challenges have been around for some time. One of the more complex things always in maturing the use of automation is the interaction with a lot of the existing processes that teams use, which are usually focused on particular domains. So many of the areas that we've been talking about, automating the fuller life cycle, is you're actually cutting across the domains and intersecting, integrating with many of the processes. So how do you allow a customer to incrementally evolve the automation of these processes across the domains, which brings in identity and access and authorization. It brings invisibility into the resources and the applications and the dependencies. And then of course, the wealth of automation, the collections and the playbooks, essentially the content. How do you bring the content together? So the challenges are, how do you allow the collaboration across the processes? How do you accelerate access to the content? And then how do you have a level of control to your identity and access and authentication systems? That's awesome. Matthew, what's your reaction on this? You architected the system and you have to envision it working in the future. There's a lot of headroom involved in this area about automation. What's the blockers and what's the customer challenges right now that you see that can be easily turned into opportunities? Yeah, the culture of automation is so different between the different parts of the community. Developers expect something completely different than DevOps and network administrators, systems administrators, they just have different expectations on how automation should work. I've been writing software for a long time and the tension and conflicts between the teams can be extreme sometimes. We wanna build and design automation capability that works in the domains that each of those people work in so that they can meet in the middle with a common set of tools. Dave mentioned identity and event-based automation. We all know that there are common things that are needed but we also know that there are different ways to kind of achieve that depending on the space that you're in. And so a lot of that has to do with these teams being able to meet in the middle, collaborate on the automation, use content in the way that they expect and then still provide that governance and reassurance that it's gonna work and do the things that they wanna do. Everything that we're doing here is about enabling that and supporting that. That's a great point and I would say that now more than ever this cultural, I won't say collision, there's always been tension, as long as I can remember, going back to my career in the 80s when I started coding back in the day in the systems revolution, it was always tension between these groups because they had their own different worlds and they had to lock down. But now with automation, there's almost like a peace treaty evolving where the speed game on cloud development becomes the unifying factor. If you can enable systems that can go faster because what pisses people off when someone's slower than they are? Where's that update? But now we had harmony. This is real, it's not touchy-feely, Matthew. This is kind of what's going on right now and David, love your reaction because this is like state-of-the-art issue. This is state-of-the-art, particularly when we push the envelope on event-driven automation which leads right into AI ops and edge management and fleet management being able to do this automation at scale, at tremendous scale, hundreds of thousands of millions of endpoints. But what's also, what we also have to keep in mind is behind all this is how do you control the environment? How do you really lock down the security? How do you lock down the full supply chain in this automation from the content creation to the execution to what's being authorized to the policies? So these are all the pieces that we're investing in to start pulling together so that we can really push the envelope where automation is taking businesses and their ability to react to change and opportunities and challenges but also in a controlled manner. Give me infrastructure as code, give me network security and transit and all that good stuff that goes on the network layer and let me push code what I want and automate the stuff that pisses people off and we all get along, right Matthew? That's the future. That's right, none of it's optional anymore, right? There's a lot of people out there. We see that with vulnerabilities and security issues that have cropped up over the last year. It's got to be one of the most important things that every organization is thinking about. Yeah, I think this whole unification benefit is one of the most beautiful things that comes out of the technical benefits, the speed and the advantages of the time to value with the enablement there. So I think that this is a really cutting edge issue and thanks for bringing that up and discussing it. We're going to continue to talk more about it because we're seeing very positive outcomes come from this with when you have a lot of these operational things automating away and then enabling more faster development for modernization. So thanks for sharing that. So I just want to close out, Matthew, with you on saying congratulations. I know you've been involved in a lot of history with Ansible. But I got to ask you, what are you looking forward to most with this release? Oh, that's such a good question because the engineering team working on some of the core features that we're bringing this time around. We have something that we've been working on for years now and it's all coming together with this release and we're really excited about it. And we've talked a little bit before about collections and execution environments. That goes back to Ansible Fest last year. It's like, who are we bringing this year? What are we giving you a window into our minds? And we talked about developer tools, but one of the things we've spent the most time on is how can we give you that window into your automation worldwide, planet scale, data centers, clouds, it doesn't matter. You should be able to run automation anywhere that you need automation to run. The Ansible Automation Platforms Automation Mesh lands in this release. And it's the thing I'm most excited about because it gets that automation out to where you need it to run. If you're defining and governing your automation on the East Coast of the US and deploying it on the West Coast in Asia, in Europe, now you can do that and feel really good that it's gonna work, it's survivable, it's reliable and it's fast. And the automation mesh brings that to the production side of Ansible Automation. And it works with the collections and the execution environments and the developer tools that we built around that to make sort of one seamless system for worldwide automation. And we'll spend the next year building on top of these technologies that we've mentioned. The Dave's mentioned event-based automation, compliance, governance. Now we have the foundation that we can build on to really sort of take it into the future next. You feel there's a lot of headroom there for innovation. Funds of heaven. Right. It's something we're really excited about. It's kind of like, it's like, when's the air condition going to come out? I think all these new features coming out, I kind of have a great stuff there. Congratulations, Dave will end it with you. I want to get your thoughts as AnsibleFest continues to have success with the community. The larger cross-domain point you brought up was key. We'll be at KubeCon, open sources continue to be a tailwind for developers and AI ops. Now you got the edge exploding with value, new architectures, distributed computing, Red Hat's in the middle of it at many levels. What's your take on this revolution in software engineering as open source continues to drive and this new agile on automation kicks in? What's the impact? How do you see that this impacting the software careers and outcomes of producing software? Well, the impact of open communities, the ecosystems is incredible. It has been for years and it just continues to accelerate. What I look forward to, John, with Fest and through this year and next year is how we help bring together the wealth and capabilities of automation to enterprises to scale it to the enterprise across all the areas that they're driving towards and you rattled off quite a few of them, including edge and security and how we bring the open communities, the open ecosystems, the content creation together with to deliver this value with customers. The growth has been incredible in this space. I don't see it slowing down. I just see it accelerating as the demands on businesses to really accelerate their delivery of new capabilities into market in new regions with edge in a secure manner. So being able to pull the open communities together and scaling this across enterprises, that's the impact we're having and it's great. It's really like, it's really so almost a pinch me moment where you go, hey, a lot of the stuff we used to worry about is actually being solved. People are getting along. Scale is the new competitive advantage, modern applications driving business value. This is kind of like Nirvana coming around the corner. It's happening. Matthew, this is like what we talked about decades ago, like technology will evolve to a point where it's faster and contributing more to humans. Yes, exactly, exactly. Great stuff. Okay, Matthew, thank you so much for coming on, Dave. Thank you for sharing. Congratulations, great event. Stay right there for more continued coverage of AnsibleFest 2021. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.