 Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you're hailing from, welcome to another episode of In The Clouds. Today I am joined by two fellow Red Headers, Coco, I can't say your last name, so I'm not going to. That's okay, Coco Janaki. Coco Janaki. One too many bells, I know. Yeah, it's, sorry, my, my Southern education is coming out. And then, and how are you, how are you today? I'm doing good, thanks for having us. No problem. So, please introduce yourselves, kind of tell us what you're, what you do here at Red Hat. Everybody knows that I do at Red Hat, I do this. So, I don't need to introduce myself, but feel free to introduce. All right, I'm Coco Janaki as we've just established and I occasionally do this but I am also a director of product marketing in the cloud services group. And I think we're going to be talking a little bit about the cloud today. Mm hmm. I hear the clouds big. The cloud, yeah, it's a thing. And what do you do here at a. So, I'm, I'm in the least hangering. And I work in the portfolio lifecycle management team. And that's a combination of program managers and something we call product experience engineers and the customer product managers and what the customer product managers and the product experience engineers bring to the table together with is a holistic view of cradle to grave if we look at it from a product or service perspective. So, the program managers help with launching and making releases available, and the others help with customer escalations and and making sure that life cycles etc works well. Awesome. Fantastic. So, I have a very important question to ask you. Super important is cheesecake, a cake or a pie. There's no wrong answer. That's the best part of this question. And, and Louise, what do you think. Oh, I've been debating whether this one I would, I think I have to take cake. It's in the name. Oh yeah, I think so. I'm torn. I have an engineering background so I look at the crust and the filling and high but now that I've migrated to the dark side of marketing I'm thinking of taxonomy and if it's called a cake we know it a cake I think we have to call it a cake. We have to call it a cake that's fair. And I guess it depends on if it's, you know, a certain flavor adds fruit that kind of thing so there's like I said there's no wrong answer. So thank you for that. So, cocoa, why red hat why are we offering cloud service solutions out here, right. Why do we start here what's the advantage. Let's talk about that. Absolutely. So, as we mentioned earlier, this cloud thing. You know, the cloud is big, kind of like that internet thing a few years before that. Oh yeah, yeah. Remember that. And it makes sense to move things to the cloud why manage all of your stuff host all your stuff manage infrastructure if that's not your core business people want to spend time focusing on their business, building the business applications and outsource. As much else as they can have the experts on infrastructure, manage the infrastructure I think that totally makes sense. You know it's a time saving it's a cost saving and all of that. But what we realize that I think a lot of enterprises realize it's not as simple as well what we used to do here we're now going to do there will just do this it's not that simple. You've got security you've got latency you've got G a lot of clouds out there how do they connect together. And there are many many issues and it became a very very complex world when you start looking at hybrid environments and red hat is uniquely positioned to appreciate that as a company we've always been vendor neutral. People like to say where the Switzerland of technology, and so we appreciate hybrid, pretty much everything hybrid anything including hybrid cloud. And with our background with Linux and open shift and containers and Kubernetes we really do understand the platform level of building applications. And it's a very natural thing for us to really look at what does it mean to have a platform across a hybrid cloud environment. We understand that and so we want to be able to create that experience. And we have the background in order to do that. And as we look at the platform great Linux containers that's a part of it. But as you spend a little bit more time looking at the entire application and building the application what does it mean to have services that help you build application services, have these data services to help you put business applications together. And the more we looked into this, the more we got rather opinionated. And we've actually chosen that word. I'm a taxonomy person I guess today, chosen that word very deliberately that there are right and wrong ways of doing it not wrong ways but there are efficient ways and less efficient ways of doing it. So we have started by adding to our platform portfolio, a set of data and application services that work very, very tightly with the platform that we already have to help people build and deploy. And then of course, maintain and move forward applications across hybrid cloud environments. That's awesome. I think that our expertise here are incredibly valuable, because we've seen a lot being read at, and we've seen how folks want to use their local environment, their cloud environments, all the environments that they have to the fullest extent possible. So, where are things like Apache Kafka and, and that large scale data processing heading, right like, is everybody going to stand up their own like massive data pipeline of some sort or do you see folks kind of leaning on other services and saying hey you know we're we're not the data science company we're the widget company so maybe we should get some outside help. Right. So, when you started asking that question I started feeling like well a little bit of both, but the, when you started talking about Kafka, and the importance of having fat pipes of data, I do think that everybody is going to realize that they need fat pipes of data because there is a lot of data, by the way data is also big. We just had the data scientist on earlier so yes data is huge. But then as you as you sort of got your question a little bit more sophisticated start talking about well who's going to stand this up and and who's going to make it possible. That is, as we were talking about a little bit earlier falls out of people's core competencies if they're a widget vendor, you know chances are they're not a Kafka expert. They may want a little bit of help and Kafka as I, most people probably know is the hot new shiny Bob all it's the cool cool open source project. But it's not, it's not simple it's it's a sophisticated part of moving data around and read how to spend a lot of time understanding Kafka, and not only how to use Kafka, but how to stand it up. How do you manage it how do you maintain this fat pipe of data. That's where we're experts. So we, that's why we're offering this as a service. Yes, anybody can go to the Apache Kafka site, download Kafka, do it on their own. And after you've built a built a team to do that maybe in six months you can get started building your applications. You know, I think a lot when people think of the cloud they think more of on demand what I want what I need, it's just there on a silver platter and so that's why we're offering red hat open shift streams for Apache Kafka. I know it's a mouthful, but lawyers require that. Anyway, we have the service. People can try it today actually we have a free trial running to do that for them and then build it into the application and the way we're doing it because we also have a firm belief that when you build applications. It's very important to have not just a lot of little point solutions and then you have to go build your platform is that the platform for building and delivering applications needs to be thought through. It needs to be unified it needs to have a streamlined experience so that literally you can get started tomorrow, if you want to you don't have to spend however many months, making decisions and putting it together so we have when we offer our Kafka service. It works very tightly with open shift which, by the way, is just it has support for hybrid cloud underneath just built in. And so we build off of this platform that makes it all very, very simple, and it's all glued together in advance we really think through the end to end experience every time we add a new service to the family, so that it just works. We use the word opinionated before we do that to there are many ways that you can build your platform, many ways you can configure Kafka, but also API management and your containers and there are many complicated ways of doing it, or you can let us do that for you, we just make it simpler. You know we have experience in this. We put it on a silver platter for you. So, yeah, that's my, my rather long winded answer to your. You have a service given to me on a silver platter, and then have to try and figure it out and build it myself to be honest, I mean, these days, it's, it's figuring out the next thing all the time it feels like. So, and because the transition to the cloud is complicated, we can build that in. We have experts at hybrid cloud. So, when we put together an application development platform or approach, it's got the expertise of how you deal with hybrid cloud built in that that's our, our, what that's the why red hat answer. So, and Luis, we have this concept of repeatable onboarding of multiple services, ROMs, as we call it. What is it, you know, I see repeatable and I like it because repeatable is awesome in my world. Like, things don't happen by chance. I want them to happen intentionally in my environment, especially. So what is this ROMs concept and how are we kind of pushing that along. So it's really a framework that we have created inside of products into technologies to help services, move faster into the cloud. As Coco just said, we want to be there. We are the experts in getting this to the customers, but we also want to make sure that the experts are not bogged down by teaching others how to do it as well. We want to create a framework that includes first the process steps, right? What kind of certifications do you need? What kind of help do you need? How do you build insecurity? How do you build in monitoring logging and all of these things for people have never done services before? And how do you make this in a self serve way so that other teams can come in and start building their services without having to tap the same experts again and again. And really teach the teacher, but also teach each other and create a framework of best practices, have a common place where we have all of this together. So ROMs is really an effort to crowd source and lean into the red hat collaboration and transparency and build a community of not just one or two experts, but a community of experts that help each other with services. And that way we create services that will have a good looking feel and feel like red hat, they will fit together, they will work in the hybrid cloud environment that is so important to us. And it will also lean in on reusing the on premise or like traditional product notions where we need to, but explained in you and the different things to the people who've never done it before. Yeah, I want, you know, it's, you mentioned a few things there, community, I think that's vitally important, right, like the more we can do to build a community of people that are out there all trying to do the same thing that better the whole industry will be right like working together as opposed to against each other is always going to work better in the end. It's, and this repeatable onboarding process I think is awesome because there's not an expertise level that's required, it's kind of will bring you up to that level is what it sounds like. Who created it. I mean, did we create this internally, like, who was involved in that process. So, it's really created internally and it was as I said a crowdsource that it was people who knew about services who had been doing services, or releasing products in some forms got together across the organization we had people from every function represented. It was support was there security was there development was there QE everybody program management. And together we sat down and we said that what do we need to do in order to create us a framework that we can give to people and say hey, this is how you find the best practices this is how you do a service so that when you launch it. It can be successful and it fits into our hybrid framework and as and we rinse and repeat. So, as we move forward with this, some of the people come and go, but we make sure that we have the right people involved all the time. And I think we're, we started this cup, it's probably in February and we already started working on version six of it, which means that we iterate very often, and make sure that anybody who goes through the service is integrated into the wrong team and the community of practice that we've created so we can keep tapping that feedback and the experience of going through it and making it better. The feedback loop is what I'm most interested in, to be honest with you because that's what's really going to shape the future right so how are you taking feedback in, and then applying that to the to the cloud services as we go along here. I mean is there a process to that or is it just. Hey, I'm just going to open a GitHub issue or how does that work exactly. So we're doing it multiple different ways. If you have a program manager assigned to your service then we usually work with a program manager to have that as the focal point to gather the information. We are doing services where they don't have a program manager, and we're trying to make a self serve process for them in a framework. In that case it's the people who are the needs of arms that reach out to them or a part of the community of practice that we created around this that keep asking them for information but we also of course have an issue tracker where they can log issues as they do. And as we build this out and become more mature in how we managing this process will have better tools ways of doing the feedback look for this. It's probably not the first thing you build up but because you want to have that face to face interaction or that communication with the people going through. So you build the trust and you build that the sense of community that they're not just using it, they have to give back because that's one of the senses of community for us. It's not just to take you have to give back. So, if folks were looking for this community of practice, you know, to see what they were getting into before they kind of dive in, like feet first, where would they go to find that, I guess. So it's an internal to that thing. So, this is not external. We haven't thought about making it external and maybe we should. Because anytime you pivot something it's, it's a learning experience and if you can tap into what other people succeeded with or what they can share their experience. It's, it's a gain right giving back is what read out as well. Yes, exactly. I think it might be awesome. If we open that community practice up a little to see how other folks are doing it, but, you know, there's also the red hat accelerators program. Don't forget about those folks out there. Not sure if you tapped into that resource yet or not. And if you're not familiar with that program folks, let me draw up a link for you. Type typing is hard. Really hard. So is we've talked about ROMs as a framework, it's a process, it's kind of a checklist, it's a cohesive set of things. What are the cloud services we're offering right now like across the board. I know it's more than Kafka. I can answer that. Yes. Kafka is one of the ones that we're most excited about. We also have red hat open shift API management, which is a service for this comes a big surprise managing API. Wow. And those are the two of the first services that we're launching because we consider them very foundational. The most enterprises that we work with are looking at building applications with a microservices based API first approach, and you really need API management in order to be successful we consider that foundational. We've also learned that this is a service that people like to have in the same cluster because things work a lot faster so it works very closely with open shift. Kafka is also foundational because these large types of data can be used for a lot of different things. You know, I'm sure you've heard of event driven architecture, but when you are building applications that have to talk between clouds. Connecting microservices can be a little bit hard you don't want to hard load them together tightly couple of them because then you lose the agility. That is why you went people are moving to microservices in the first place so people are using data streams and Kafka to manage those streams for event driven architecture. So again, we consider that very foundational. And we are also looking at other services that fit well to support those services so things like a service registry connectors, the BZM. These are all what we consider foundational, and it's very important to have this opinionated configuration. With with respect with how it works with the rest of the platform. So, and then we also have you're talking about data data science red hat open shift data sciences so that's an AI ML package, because people want to build intelligence into their application so again it just makes sense for us to think of it as an extension of the platform. So that's a very valid point. It's, it's all kind of there for the taking I feel like. And when you say API management, what is like, what does that service doing for customers. So managing the individual API is and so things like security usage, some depending on your identity you can access this but you can access that monitoring. Why is this API being overused and this underused things like that. And I had another point to make and I have forgotten it. That's okay, we can, we can ask more questions and maybe we'll come back to you. Okay. The, the framework itself. Well, what does that give us as red hat, right, like it gives us the capability to make things repeatable, which is great for us because we know we're kind of getting into an every situation but, you know, a lot of the work that is being done and 80% of it is kind of gluing APIs together the other 20% like actual business logic it feels like. So, we're doing this to help folks kind of tackle that 20% faster I'm assuming right. Yeah, and now I remember the point that I was making before is a lot of one of the reasons why people are working so much with API is not is also to keep the keep services loosely coupled. You know, for agility, but also to monetize technology that companies already have. I know there's sort of a quip out there that we don't make airplanes we make software we don't make cars we make software. All sorts of enterprises have pretty clever reusable technology that they want to monetize make money on it slap an API on it. You can monetize it. You know, you want to work more with partners slap an API on it manage that API. You know, you can extend your supply chain and your partner ecosystem easily and safely. So, that's what people are doing. Awesome. So, I mean, I see the benefits of this, you know, because I read the stuff that we get internally here. What's in it for the customer. I mean what is the customer experience like for them. For the cloud services. Yes, faster time to market faster time to market and faster time to market. Hey, there you go I think everybody wants that. Seriously, it does kind of lift that burden off of you right like you don't have to know what this really weird era and Kafka means right like you just surface that and exactly. Administering this stuff is not easy. And we do that and it's also it's a burden to keep things up to date. Yeah, open source projects rev frequently and who's going to make sure that you always have the latest and greatest you an enterprise can spend their precious resources and time worrying about that or they can spend their precious time and resources on their business problems and let us take care of that. So we so we not only keep things up to date but we also own the SLA so we guarantee the uptime. And that's actually a really large part of the value prop that our customers don't have to worry about keeping things up at three o'clock in the morning, we do that. Yeah. So we have a 99.95% uptime guarantee. So, okay, we make we make that our problem. And we're like, trust me, I've tried to run Kafka at scale before and I did not have that level of uptime, I promise. And it's nice that there's a solid behind it. I really appreciate that. So all these, you know, all these services are here. They're all, you know, working together well with our customers. What kind of things get you up in the morning right like are there more services to come or they're, you know, super things that you're excited about, you know, what, what gets you up in the morning and this question is for both of you so feel free and to please tap in here. I think what I get the most excited about is seeing the pieces come together. You know, Kafka is pretty neat and doing Kafka alone is a really fun exciting thing. But I think an order of magnitude more exciting is when you think of Kafka as one of many pieces in a much larger approach to building applications. And to me, that's interesting. And especially you throw in the complexities of hybrid cloud. Then things start to get interesting. You know, you may have topics, different clouds, some private some public some on the other side of the globe. How do you pull that together in a way that does not threaten any of the agility of these groups in different buildings, different organizations, all working together. It's a much more interesting part of part of the puzzle. It is a puzzle, putting the pieces together. So that's what gets me excited in the morning. And Louise, what gets me up. I say it's really participating in their arms effort has made me appreciate everything that is read and it really gets me excited because when you we used to do products we used to have different program teams and they were all sort of a little bit individual. They could all do it their own little way and they didn't really collaborate across the organization and the, the ability to work with so many different functions in creating a new way of doing things. So I think about it as shifting from waterfall to agile or maybe from a functional programming to object oriented when you make big shifts like that usually it takes a long time to do it and we're trying to do it really quickly. We're shifting from doing on premise to learning how to do service but also combining them in a hybrid environment. And the excitement when you get together and you tap as I said earlier tapping into the core pieces of what red hat really is it's a collaboration and transparency everybody's sharing everything. Everybody's willing to help other people, and it just makes you feel like you're working for a great, not an organization but a great collection of people you're not working for them you're working with them. And that excitement and the momentum you get when you try something like that it, it just makes you feel really good about the work you're doing the people you're working with and so. Yeah, it's makes me as you say very passionate. Nice. Checking the thread or the stream here for questions. Not seeing any just a lot of hello and how are you. That's very nice. Thank you everybody. I have a question sheet here to do the, what the kind of what is on the roadmap that you can talk about right now, sir. Any, any, any new features like you mentioned on version six now what's coming in version seven do we have any idea of that. Is that for and Louise to talk about one, I'm not sure about the product. I'm just curious what's next in the evolution of everything right like what what are some of the features we're looking to build in, you know, in the next version. Well for roms we're trying to just make it more self-serve, but also I got actually really triggered by your question is did we make this public. So I'm going to take that one back. Because that that means that we can, if we can find pieces that we're doing that we can share and make the community bigger, and then we can learn from others as well. We're not the only ones out in the industry doing this. So I'm sure that there's plenty of sharing and learning that we can do together. So that to me gets gets me even more excited and, but it's really, it's really getting into the fast iterations and making sure that we peel away the things that are taking time without adding value, and not just slapping things on because everybody asked for it but questioning everything we're doing all the time. So that's what we're going to continue to do to make it easier to do the same thing as we want our customers to get to market faster we want our internal services to get to market faster, which will benefit our customers to because they will get access to them faster so and it's just getting that momentum and moving things forward that's I think going forward. So, I'm out of questions. I'll just say that up front, we have 30 minutes left if we want, we can end early like I mentioned before, you know, it's no big deal. Is there anything else that you want to share about rounds cloud services anything like right folks like take advantage of these services we're offering I feel like there's a lot there's a lot of ways for you to a use the developer sandbox, add that you know, open shift streams for Apache Kafka to it and like kick the tires on it and then figure out how you want to you know implement it in your organization all that you can do for free like the tire kicking is very very possible to like manage all that for free. And then you can apply what you've learned. Directly in your environment after you know, testing those services. So, what would you encourage folks to do next from here right like let's say they just watch this you know a week from now and where should they start their journey obviously you know I just dropped the Tri Kafka link in there. I think that's, I think that's the best place to start. I think that's a wonderful place to start. It's completely cost free. Don't take a credit card or anything. You can just play. We also have a trial for our API management service it's actually built into the open shift dedicated trial. It's an option to you have to bring your own cloud so I would not say that it's free but we don't charge any extra for the licenses for our software or anything like that but certainly that's where I would start give it a try. Especially if it's bringing your own cloud because you've already got your governance and practices and everything already there so right that's a very nice feature but you don't have to bring your cloud for Kafka because that's right. You can actually play in the sandbox. Yeah. Cool. So, anything else. Anything else you want to share about what's going on out there. The management services offering. No, when should we look when should we look for something else. Is there a timeline on another managed service coming out at some point or is this where we're at and we're trying to figure out where to go next. I can just do a quick recap the API management service is out it's been GA for quite some time has a healthy roster of customers. The Kafka service which is currently available for trial, we will start selling it very shortly. Certainly you can start thinking about buying it. Buying it now. And throughout the rest of this quarter we will have be bringing the support I call them the support of services coming out to so they're all kind of rolling out one at a time and data science is going to GA. Within about a month I think so that's the timeline for the next round. Lots of things rolling out in 2021. Good things are some good things are happening in some good things are happening this year you're right absolutely awesome. Well thank you both for coming on thank you everyone for tuning in thank you for watching if you're watching this after the fact. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about the topic short at redhead.com at Chris short on Twitter my games are open. And I can get your question answered via technical via, you know, services related just let me know I can funnel that question whatever way it needs to go. Thank you so much. And Louise Coco thank you so much for joining us and thank you for having us. We'll see y'all in two weeks on the next in the clouds where we'll be talking about Ansible Fest, Katie picarelli will be coming on to discuss all the things that are fast this year, and how we're doing it in the, the new world that we're in right now. So, I'm excited for it. Ansible Fest is one of my favorite events so tune in next time. And later today on the channel will have get up sky to the galaxy. And if you are not familiar with our streaming calendar. I dropped a link to it in chat. So you can be awesome. Thank you all, and stay safe out there.