 Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering Google Cloud Next 19. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. We're back at Google Cloud Next 2019. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. John Furrier is also here. There's day two of our coverage. Hashtag Google Next 19. Mike Evans is here, he's the vice president of technical business development at Red Hat. Mike, good to see you, thanks for coming back in The Cube. Great to be here. So, you know, we were talking hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, you guys have been on this open shift for half a decade, you know, we're a lot of deniers and now it's a real tailwind for you. I mean, the whole world is jumping on that bandwagon. It's got to make you feel good. Yeah, no, it's nice to see everybody echoing a similar message which we believe is what the customers demand and interest is. So that's a great validation. So, how does that tie into what's happening here? What's going on at the show? It's interesting and let me take a step back for a sec because I've been working with Google on their cloud efforts for almost 10 years now and it started back when Google, when they were about to get in the cloud business, they had to decide whether they're going to use KVM or Zen as their hypervisor. And that was the time when we had just switched and made a big bet on KVM because of its alignment with the Linux kernel, but it was controversial and we helped them do that and I looked back at my email recently and that was 2009. So that was 10 years ago and that was early stages. And then since that time, the cloud market has obviously boomed. Again, I was sort of looking back ahead of this discussion and saying, in 2006 and 2007 is when we started working with Amazon, with RHEL on their cloud and back when everyone thought there's no way booksellers going to make an impact in the world, et cetera. And then as I just play sort of forward to today and looking at 30,000 people here and what's sort of evolved, I'm just fascinated by sort of that open source is now obviously fully mainstream and there's no more doubters and it's the engine for everything. Yeah, Mike, bring us inside. So KVM's the underpinning. We know RHEL is core to the multi-cloud strategy for Red Hat and there's a lot that you've built on top of it, speak a little bit of some of the engineering relationships going on, joint customers that you have and kind of the value as opposed to, you know, Red Hat in general is your agnostic to where it lives, but there's got to be special work that gets done in a lot of places. Relative to Google, yeah, yeah. So through the years, we've really done a lot of work to make sure that RHEL at the foundation works really well on GCP. So that's been a really consistent effort in whether it's around optimization for performance, security elements, so that provides a nice base for anybody who wants to move any workload or application from on-prem over there or from another cloud and that's been great and then the other, you know, we've also worked with them, obviously the upstream community dynamics have been really productive between Red Hat and Google and Google's been one of the most productive and positive contributors and participants in open source and so we've worked together on probably 10 or 15 different projects and it's a constant interaction between our upstream developers where we share ideas and do you agree with this, that kind of stuff. So obviously Kubernetes is a big one, you know, when you see the list, it's Google and Red Hat right there. Okay, give us a couple of the examples of some of the other ones. I mean, again, KVM is also a foundational one that people kind of forget about that these days, but it still is a very pervasive technology and continuing to gain ground. You know, there's all, there's the K-native stuff, there's the Istio stuff in the AIML, which is a whole fascinating category in my mind as well. I mean, I like history. I'm kind of a student of IT industry history and so I like to talk to folks who have been there and try to get it right, but there was a sort of this gestation period from 2006 to 2009 in cloud. Where like you said, it was a bookseller and then even in the downturn, a lot of CFOs said, hey, cap-ex to op-ex, boom. And then come out of the downturn and it was shadow IT. And around that 2009 time frame, it was like you say, a hypervisor discussion. You know, are we going to put VMware in our cloud and homogeneity and you had a lot of traditional companies fumbling with their cloud strategies. And then they had the big data craze and obviously open source was a huge part of that. And then containers, which of course have been around since Lennox, you know, and I guess Docker, boom, it started to go crazy. And now it's like the curve is reshaping with AI and sort of a new era of data. Thoughts on sort of the accuracy of that little historical narrative and why that big uptick with containers. Well, so there's a couple of things there. One, the data, the whole data evolution is a fascinating one for many, many years. I mean, I've been at Red Hat for 19 years so I've seen a lot of the elements of that history. And one of the constant questions we would always get sometimes from investors, why don't you guys buy a database company, you know, years ago? And we would, you know, we did always look at it or why aren't you guys doing a Hadoop distribution when that became more spark, et cetera? And we always looked at it and said, you know, we're a platform company and if we were to pick any one database, it would only cover some percentage and there's so many and then it just kind of upsets the other. So we've decided we're going to focus not on the data layer, we're going to focus on the infrastructure and the application layer and work down from it and support the things underneath. So it's consistent now with the AI ML explosion, which, you know, where Google was a pioneer of AI ML, I think they've got some of the best services. And then we've been doing a lot of work with NVIDIA in the last two years to make sure that all the GPUs, wherever they're run, hybrid, private cloud, on, you know, multiple clouds, that those are enabled in REL and enabled in OpenShift because what we see happening in NVIDIA does also is, right now all the applications being developed for AI ML are written by extremely technical people. When you write the TensorFlow and things like that, you kind of got to be able to write a C compiler level. But so we're working with them to bring OpenShift to become the sort of more mass mainstream tool to develop AI ML-enabled apps because the value of having REL underneath OpenShift and is every piece of hardware in the world is supported, right, for one and every cloud. And then when we add that GPU enablement, OpenShift and the middleware and our storage, everything inherits it. So that's the most valuable, to me, that's the most valuable piece of real estate that we own in the industry is actually REL. And then everything builds upon that and. It's interesting what you're saying about the database. Of course, we have long discussion about that this morning. You're right though, Mike, you either have to be like really good at one thing, like a data stacks or a Cassandra or a Mongo and there's a zillion others that I'm not mentioning. Or you got to do everything. Like the cloud guys are doing. Every one of them's in operational analytics, RDS, NoSQL, I mean one of each. And then you have to partner with them. So I would imagine you looked at that as well and said, how are we going to do all that? Right, and there's so many competitive dynamics coming at us and we've always been in a mode where we've been the little guy battling against the big guys, whoever it may be, whether it was Son, IBM and HP Unixes in the early days. Oracle was our friend for a while. Then they became an enemy, or not an enemy, but a competitor on the Linux side and Amazon was early friend. And then now they did their own Linux, so there's a competitive. So that's normal operating model for us too, as to have this big competitive dynamic with a partnering dynamic. Yeah, you got to win it in the marketplace. Yeah, yeah. And then the customer say, come on guys. Right, we're figured out, yeah. We're together, right, figured out. And we talked early about hybrid cloud, we talked about multi-cloud. And to some people, those are the same thing, but I think they're actually different. You know, hybrid, you think of on-prem and public and hopefully some kind of level of integration common data plane and control plane and multi-cloud has sort of evolved from multi-vendor. How do you guys look at it? Is multi-cloud a strategy? How do you look at hybrid? Yeah, I mean, it's a simple, it's simple in my mind, but I know the words, the terms get used by a lot of different people in different ways. You know, hybrid cloud to me is just that straightforward being able to run something on-premise and being able to run something in any, in a public cloud and have it be somewhat consistent or shareable or movable, right? And then multi-cloud has been able to do that same thing with multiple public clouds. And then there's a third variation on that is, you know, wanting to do an application that runs in both and shares information, which I think the world's, you know, you saw that in the Google Anthos announcement where they are talking about their service running on the other two major public clouds. That's the first of any sizable company. I think that's going to be the norm because it's going to become more normal. Wherever the infrastructure is that a customer is using, if Google has a great service, they want to be able to tell the user to run it on their data or their app of choice, so, yeah. So, Mike, you brought up Anthos. And at the core, it's GKE, so it's the Kubernetes we've been talking about. And as you said, it works with AWS, works with Azure, but it's GKE on top of those public clouds. Maybe give us a little bit of, you know, compare contrast of that compared to OpenShift because OpenShift lives in all of these environments, too, but they're not fully compatible and how does that work? Sure, so our Anthos, which was announced yesterday, two high level comments, I guess. One is, as we talked about at the beginning, it's a validation of what our message has been. It's hybrid cloud is a value, multi-cloud is a value, so that's a productive element of that to help promote that vision and that concept. Also, macro, we talked about a little bit. It puts us in a competitive environment more with Google than it was yesterday or two days ago. But again, that's our normal world, right? We partnered with IBM and HP and competed against them on Unix. We partnered with Microsoft and compete with them, so that's normal. That said, we believe our, with OpenShift, having five plus years in market and over 1,000 customers and very wide deployments and already been running in Google, Amazon, and Microsoft Cloud, already there and solid and people doing real things with it, plus being from a position of an independent software vendor, we think is a more valuable position for multi-cloud than a single cloud vendor. So that's, you know, we welcome to the party in a sense. You know, going on-prem, I say welcome to the jungle for all these public cloud companies going on-prem. It's, you know, it's a lot of complexity when you have to deal with, you know, American Express' infrastructure, Bank of Hong Kong's infrastructure, Ford Motor's infrastructure, and it's a- Right, right, you know, Google before only had to run on Google servers in Google data centers. Everything's very clean in- In one environment, at one temperature. Right, and enterprise customers have little different demands in terms of versionality and when they upgrade and how long they let things, there's a lot of differences, but- Yeah, actually, there was one of the things, Corey Quinn was doing some analysis with us on there, and Google for the most part is if we decide to pull something, you've got kind of a one-year window to do. You know, how does Red Hat look at that? I mean, and I might guess is they'll evolve over time as they get deeper in it, or maybe they won't. Maybe they have a model where they think they'll gain enough share in theirs, but I mean, we're built on enterprise DNA, and we've evolved to cloud and hybrid multi-cloud DNA. We love, again, we love when people say I'm going to the cloud, because when they say they're going to the cloud, it means they're doing new apps or they're modifying old apps, and we have a great shot of landing that business when they say we're doing something new. Well, right, even whether it's on-prem or in the public cloud, they're saying, when they say we're going to the cloud, they're talking about the cloud experience, and that's really what your strategy is to bring that cloud experience to wherever your data lives. Exactly. So, talking about that multi-cloud or omnicloud, when we sort of look at the horses on the track, and you say, okay, you got sort of VMware going after that, you got IBM and Red Hat going after that, now Google's sort of huge cloud provider doing that. Wherever you look, there's Red Hat. Now, of course, I know you can't talk much about the IBM, certainly integration, but IBM executive once said to me, Stu, that IBM, we're like a recovering alcoholic. We learned our lesson from mainframe. We are open, we're committed to open, so we'll see, IBM's going to further. But Red Hat is everywhere, and your strategy, presumably, is to stay that sort of open, neutral posture. I give two, a couple of examples of long ago, I mean, probably even five, six years ago, when the cloud stuff was still more early, I had two CIO conference calls in one day, and one was with a big graphics, Hollywood Graphics Company, the CIO. After we explained all of our cloud stuff, we had nine people on the call explaining all our cloud, and the guy said, okay, he goes, let me just tell you right at that guy something. The biggest value you bring to me is having rel as my single point of sanity that I can move this stuff wherever I want. I just attach all my applications, I attach third-party apps and everything, and then I can move it wherever I want, so realize that you're big, and I still think that's true, and then there was another large gaming company who was trying to decide to move 40,000 servers from their own cloud to a public cloud and how they were going to do it, and they had, you know, the head of servers, the head of security, the head of databases, the head of networking, the head of nine different functions there, and they were all in disagreement at the end, and the CIO said at the end of the day, he said, Mike, I've got like a headache, I need some vodka and Tylenol now, so give me one simple piece of advice, how do I navigate this? I said, if you just write every app to rel and jboss, and this was before OpenShift, no matter where you want to run them, rel and jboss will be there, and he said, excellent advice, that's what we're doing. So there's something really beautiful about the simplicity of that, that a lot of people overlook with all the hand waving of Kubernetes and containers and 50 versions of Kubernetes certified and, you know, et cetera, so I think there's something really beautiful about that, and we see a lot of value in that single point of sanity and allowing people flexibility at, you know, it's a pretty low cost to use rel as your foundation. Obasaurus, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, omni-cloud, all tailwinds for Red Hat. Mike, we'll give you the final word, bumper sticker on Google Cloud Next, or any other final thoughts? No, to me, it's great to see 30,000 people at this event. It's great to see Google getting more and more invested in the cloud and more and more invested in the enterprise cloud. I think they've had great success in a lot of non-enterprise accounts, probably more so than the other cloud, and now they're coming this way. They've got great technology. Our engineers love working with their engineers, and now we've got a more competitive dynamic, like I said, welcome to the jungle. And we got Red Hat Summit coming up, Stu, early May, is that right? Absolutely, back in Beantown, Dave. Oh, it's nice. Okay, I'll be in London. Come to Red Hat Summit in Boston in May. All right, good deal. Mike, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to see you. All right, good to see you. All right, everybody, keep it right there. Stu and I are back. John Furrier is also in the house, watching theCUBE at Google Cloud Next 2019. We'll be right back.