 Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and the Kube's ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everyone. This is a special live coverage here in Austin, Texas with theCUBE, with KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. I'm John Furrier with my co-student, many of our next guests, Mike Barrett, Senior Product Manager of Red Hat, and Brian Graceley, Director of Strategy, Red Hat, guys, welcome to theCUBE. Welcome back, Brian. Thanks. Thanks to you. All right, so Red Hat, I set free event last week, and don't worry, the Red Hat stamp of approval. A lot of customers, you guys have had a huge track record in all the large enterprises. Tier one, now with CloudGain, what's going on? OpenShift's been a big momentum point for you guys. Give us the update, what's the status? How are you guys taking that Red Hat stamp of approval value with OpenShift? Well, even if we just start from where AWS was, so we were there last week, we're seeing a ton of customers who are Red Hat enterprise Linux customers, picking that up, moving into AWS, so we're seeing that footprint migrate, which is great. We had a huge announcement with AWS around extending their services back into OpenShift through what we call the open service broker. So basically, think about putting AWS services in your data center, or at least making it virtually look like your data center. So those things themselves are huge, because now customers don't have to say, is it all cloud, public cloud, or all private cloud? It's like, hybrid cloud's there today right now. Yeah, this started for us back in 2015. I remember the first five minutes of every customer conversation was, how do you pronounce Kubernetes? And 2016 was pretty much your choice of, how do I use containers? And then the tail end of 2016, it got exciting, right? People were doing big numbers on deployments. 2017 was an unbelievable year for us. I mean, just you name the market sector, we have penetrated it pretty deeply with Kubernetes technologies. So it's been a great year. You guys have been early, Brian. I mean, when we were working together, I mean, I remember, what, three, four years ago, cloud native, we were kicking it around. We were juggling LooTuck earlier. Hey, three years ago, remember in Vancouver at OpenStack when we were talking about how this could really be the land grab? And yeah, we were kind of pontificating, but I got to ask you specifically, you were early on cloud native, you guys certainly saw it coming, as you always, always do in Red Hat, but what changed in your mind? What surprised you? What happened? You kind of called it out. It kind of played out almost exactly, as you said. Are you surprised that cloud native and the whole pass folding into, what, how did it turn out in your mind? I think what it was, and it isn't, you know, it's a little bit of a surprise because you're trying to think what's going to happen in the future. I think what ended up happening, and we hear this from pretty much every customer is, we're going to change what our user experience is going to be, so if you're Hilton hotels today, your user experience is a mobile phone with a digital key, right? Those folks are using Kubernetes. We're seeing banks using Kubernetes, airlines, trains, all of them are like, I want to be mobile, I want my user experience to be better than it was before, I want to deal with spikes in demand and stuff. What's been really surprising is, you would have thought, okay, those aren't Silicon Valley companies, but all of those companies are using Kubernetes, so the technology, the communities that made it simple to use, they've adopted containers like Crazy, which has been, you know, we've seen a little bit of that with Docker, but it's accelerated. That's been the big trend we've seen. People want to change their customer experience and containers make it easier and Kubernetes makes it scalable. Mike, I got to get your take on this because he's bringing up a good point about the mobile phone. Software is now the product of the company. No one goes into a bank anymore, there's tellers around sure, but the app is the interface, the software is the product. It is. It's not IT anymore. It's actually a whole new business model. I mean, it sounds cliche, but that's actually happening. For OpenShift, it's always been about developer velocity. Even before it was about Kubernetes, it was about helping people bring new ideas to market through software. And the interesting thing about a CAS and a PAS and that debate in the industry on which would survive, our take was that you can build whatever you want if you have the right technologies and the right solution and that you shouldn't have to make that choice. If you want to just launch containers and just launch containers, if you want to develop your experience, have that developer experience, but they're not two different things. Yeah, one of the things that's been beating around for the last couple of years is customers want to have really as much of the same stack in their own data center as they have in the cloud. Talked about, Brian started talking about Linux everywhere. And of course, Linux is everywhere. It's very prevalent at the edge. How much of that stack needs to be the same? How much is it okay different? How does Kubernetes fit into that? Like maybe start with you. For Kubernetes, we had asked a lot, how do we feel about the announcements of all the cloud providers now offering a managed Kubernetes service? And we love it. I mean, there are certain like Uber and Lyft. I'm sure Uber wishes Lyft wasn't there, but in a platform technology space, you want people to gravitate towards a technology, right? And now that we have that debate over and so many people are offering Kubernetes, people are willing to move forward with their careers around that Kubernetes. They're willing to bring their whole clientele and their corporations to Kubernetes. And we are in a good early adopter, early mover position to really help them with that. Yeah, explain that a little bit more because before, if I wanted Kubernetes, well, I can go get OpenShift. I mean, that's where container platform, that's Kubernetes, but if I'm using Azure, if I'm using Google Cloud from using AWS, where do you fit? Where do they fit? How does that relationship work? So it's a container platform, right? And containers are immutable images. And the thing that people forget about is part of the trick of working with containers is how do you introduce change? We just talked about how we have to use developer velocity. You need a sort of a hook in front of it and a user experience in front of it that helps you deal with these containers, build them, deploy them, wake up when they change, connect it to the GitHub code repositories, all of these different scenarios. Kubernetes is an engine and you can put it in a truck or you can put it in a Ferrari and we just happen to put it in OpenShift. I got to ask you guys, you brought up a point about the whole industry, kinds of paths and paths and all that stuff. It's interesting, you guys didn't take debate on that debate and one of the things I said at Reinvent, and Brian, I'd like to get your thoughts on this question too, is I said at Reinvent to Andy Jassy, I said, look at, you know, all the fud around cloud and basically Amazon has been debunked. It never happened, they just kept on executing and my point was, if you pay attention to the fud and the rhetoric in the industry and not be practical about what's going on, you can lose sight of value creation. So I got to ask the question, what has been debunked about OpenShift? I'll give you a chance to say it because I've heard, over the years, we've heard many come, oh OpenShift, this side, the other thing, share your thoughts because now we have enough history to say, look at, you successful, you got great customers, what's been debunked, all that fud? So I think what it comes down to is, there's a lot of companies who get wrapped up in, our technology's going to change, the world, you need to adapt to our technology, whether it was a platform or a container thing. We got humbled, we got humbled about three or four years ago because the original OpenShift, while it was great, it was simple for developers, just wasn't getting the adoption that we wanted. We made a huge choice to say, we're going Kubernetes, that was crazy back then. It was crazy to think, you were going to partner with Google who had never done really done open source in the open before, they were a cloud, we were a software provider, but we bought into the technology hook line and sinker, and then we were really pragmatic with customers. Mike spends a huge amount of his time going out talking to customers, going, what do you want to do? I think when you do that, and Amazon's the same way, Andy says the same thing, listen to your customers, when you listen to customers, they tell you their problems, and you're not religious about the technology and you're willing to make changes, that's how you can be successful, and ultimately, that's how OpenShift's evolved, right? We embraced Kubernetes when the other thing wasn't working, and now it's given us a huge advantage. Mike talks, get some color to that, because you guys didn't get caught up with OpenShift into trying to line up with the industry rhetoric at the time, just got down in dirt. And a bet on Kubernetes was, by the way, great bet. I mean, what are customers saying? What were they asking, because when customers talk, they don't say, I want a pass layer. They don't say that, right? What do they say? How did you get there? At the end of the day, it's true that they want a application, right? They want a service, they want to deploy a service, but the nuance to that is that how you deliver the platform will dictate the application architecture that you're allowed to have. And what was happening in the market at the time, it was a very narrow scope of the types of apps that they were trying to provide. What we found was that we have a very large Greenfield environment in those customers that are revenue generating apps, and they had a different application pattern than this microservices and this pure cloud native. You always want to be able to do both. And we were the only one in the market that was helping you do both. Great, well, that's super. Well, congratulations. If I wanted to get that out, I think you guys had a great accomplishment with that good job at the Kubernetes bet and good spot. And the results obviously is what they are, but going forward, where are we today? What's next? What's happening? I heard in the keynote, I didn't hear serverless, I heard a little bit of serverless, I heard pluggable architectures, and I heard service mesh. Okay, you got my attention. What does that mean? They actually wrote down service mesh. So I've got to rethink. Has it been redefined, reimagined? So these are cool concepts. How does that relate to OpenShift? Well, so from a pluggable perspective, there was a time when people said I want to build a structured platform, make it simple to get stuff. That model's blown up. That's where Kubernetes has gone. Make everything composable. If you want to, like OpenShift brings together a lot, but it's pluggable, right? You can integrate with a ton of the people that are here for customer choice. And then what we're learning is people are saying, I'm learning how to build these distributed applications, I'm learning how to build them, but I need help, right? It's very hard to translate what you can do in Silicon Valley to what you can do in Cleveland or Austin or Boston or something. And so things like service meshes and Istio and all these things are basically saying, let me give you enough of sort of a framework to build these cool applications. Don't make your developers have to do so much, build some things into Kubernetes, build them around this distributed architecture. Make it easier so that when the business goes, hey, I want to try something new. Developers don't go, oh, I got to reinvent the wheel. It's like, oh, there's a bunch of scaffolding there. I can build a building from that. And you guys have a product there as a state of the art? We do. I mean, we obviously, you know, everything we do is going to be upstream. So we've been working very heavily with Istio. We've been working with Envoy, which is coming out of Lyft. I mean, that's the cool thing, right? Like technology coming out of Lyft is now in the open source community. We can use it to help banks. We can use it to help insurance companies. Like that's what's going on there. Mike, one of the things we were looking at coming into the show is you talk about complexity in the space. So many projects. How do you kind of balance having an opinionated solution that hopefully helps customers through some of the main things versus giving them the flexibility to meet what their business needs? Yeah, I think Brian touched on it. And that's at the essence why Kubernetes is so successful. It has an open source community. If you look at any component of it, it is layerable, it's pluggable. It has defined APIs and interfaces where you can remove stuff. And that allows different businesses to come in and be extremely successful in the ecosystem without taking out the entire platform. And that API compatibility, those hooks, are what we look for and what we're offering to our customers. If our customer is invested in, say, NSX networking, they can use NSX networking with OpenShift. There's just their ability to mix and match. Yeah, I mean, I think the last 12 months, 18 months, have told us opinionated went too far. I mean, essentially, everybody who's made an announcement around Kubernetes said, yeah, we tried opinionated, it didn't work. And that's where we are today. People have come back around to composable. And we've seen it for three or four years. I mean, that's what customers want. They want it to be simpler, yeah, but they still want some flexibility, whether it's a vendor they want to work with or just a deployment model they want to work with. You guys probably have more customers than almost anyone in this space. Any trends or data you can share as to what are the most successful customers doing? What pitfall should you avoid? There's, the leading sectors for us so far has been government, surprisingly. We provide an SE Linux layer on top that most people don't and that's very attracting to those types of customers. After that, financial services and insurance industry, in particular, pharmaceutical type. But an awesome trend right now is the energy around Kubernetes for HPC, GPU type computing. That's attracting oil and gas. That's attracting marketing analysis. There's a bunch around planes, trains and automobiles. I mean, and here's what's cool about it. So like, we'll look at BMW. BMW is working on next generation apps in their cars and then we look at Volvo and Volvo is looking at how do you modernize their existing supply chain to be able to just have a better sales experience, right? So same industry, attacking different parts of their installed base and so forth. So that for us has been really interesting. One day you'll talk to a company that wants to build a mobile app and reshape their interface and the next time they want to, the next one wants to rebuild their back office system and that's what OpenShift's been able to do and been successful. Mike Barrett, Brian Gracely. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great to have you on. Obviously Red Hat continues to be a leader in open source. I'm going to contribute across the board from day one and great success on OpenShift. Good bet on Kubernetes. Thank you. Nice to see those bets come home, isn't it? Absolutely. Absolutely. We had a lot of naysayers at the beginning. Love Kubernetes. Good job, congratulations. Live coverage here at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, live after the short break. Be right back.