 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back, everyone. We are live in Seattle for KubeCon 2018, CloudNativeCon. It's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Ashash Badani, who's the Vice President and General Manager of Cloud Platforms at Red Hat. Great to see you. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thanks for having me on. Always good to be back. So you guys, again, we talk every year with you guys almost like a check-in. So what's new? Got some big, obviously the news is about the IBM. We don't really want to get into that detail. I know there's kind of a stop on that because it's already out there. But you guys had great success with Platform as a Service. Now you got the growth of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, 8,000 attendees, end users, there's uptake. What's the update on the Red Hat side? Yeah, so we're excited, excited to be back at KubeCon bigger and better than it's ever been, I think. So that's fantastic. We've been investing in this community for over four years now, since 2014, really, from the earliest days, based our entire platform on it, continue growing that, right? Adding lots of customers across the world, right? And I think what's really been gratifying for us to see is just the diversity of participants, both from an end user perspective, as well as a wider ecosystem, right? So whether you're a storage player, a networking player, management, monitoring, what have you, everyone's building around this ecosystem. So I think we're creating a great amount of value and we're seeing diverse applications being built. So you guys have been good bet on Kubernetes, obviously good timing, a lot of things are going on. This show is an open source community, right? And that's been a great thing. This is where the end users come from. But two other personas come in that we're seeing participate heavily, the IT pro, the IP expert, and then the classic developer. So you have kind of a melting pot of how this is kind of horizontally connecting. You guys have been successful on the IT side. Where is this impacting the end users? How is this open source movement impacting IT specifically? And at the end of the day, the developers who are writing code have to get more stuff out. What's your thoughts? Yeah, yeah, so we hosted OpenShift Commons yesterday. OpenShift Commons for the folks who don't know is our gathering of participants within the larger OpenShift community. We had lots of end users come and talk about the reason they're adopting a Kubernetes-based platform is to get greater productivity, right? So for example, if you're someone like Progressive Insurance and established organization, how do you release applications quicker? How do you make your developers more productive? How do you enable them to have more languages, tools, frameworks at the disposal to be able to compete in this world where you've got startups, you've got other companies trying to compete aggressively with you. I think it's a big dent here, right? It's not just for, if you will, traditional IT, but it's for, if you will, companies of all sizes. Ashish, when you talk about customers, every customer is different, and they've got, really, you look at IT, everything's additive, it tends to be a bit of a heterogeneous mess when you get there. Help connect for us, what are you hearing from customers? How does, not just Kubernetes, but everything going on here in the cloud-native environment, how's it helping them? How's it changing the way that they do their business and how's Red Hat involved? So one thing we've been noticing is hybrid cloud is here and here to stay, right? So we've consistently been hearing this from customers. They've invested lots of money and time, energy, skills in their existing environments, and they want to take advantage of public clouds, but they want to do that with flexibility, with portability to bring to bear. What we've been trying to do is focus on exactly that, right? How do we help solve that problem when we provide an abstraction? How do you provide your primitives, right? So for example, this week, we announced our support of Knative, and how we'll make that available as part of OpenShift. Why is that? Well, how can we provide serverless primitives within the platform? So folks can have the flexibility to be able to adopt next generation technologies, but to be able to do that consistently regardless of where they deploy it. Yeah, so I love that. Talk about meeting the customers there, one of the things that really strikes me, there's so much change going on in the industry, and that's an area actually Red Hat has a couple decades of experience. Maybe help explain how Red Hat is bringing some of that enterprise oversight and just like they've done for Linux for a long time. Yeah, yeah. Stu, so you've been following us very closely, as have you, John, and the team at theCUBE. We're trying to embrace that change as it comes upon us. So I think the last time I was here, I was here with Alex Polvi of CoreOS, at a quiet CoreOS in January. Great deal. Yeah, big, big acquisition for us. And now we're starting to see the fruits of some of that labor in terms of integrating that technology, and why did we do that? We wanted to get more automation into the platform. So customers have said, hey look, I want these clusters to be more self-managing, self-feeling. And so we've been really focused on saying, how can we take those challenges that customers have, bring that directly into a platform so they're performing more and more like the expectation that they have in the public cloud, but in these diverse heterogeneous environments. That speaks to the operating model of cloud. And you guys have a holistic view, because you're right out, you've got a lot of customers. You've got the DevOps model, you've got the Kubernetes container orchestration, microservices. How does that all connect together for the customer? I mean, is it turnkey and open shift? You guys had that nice bet with CoreOS, Payton paying huge dividends. What are some of those fruits in the operating model? So as a customer has to think about the systems. Yeah, yeah. It's a systems model, right? I mean, it's operating systems, so to speak. But they still got to develop and build apps. So you got to have a systems holistic view and be able to deliver the value. What does it all connect? What's your explanation? So distributed systems are complex, right? And we're at the point where no individual can keep track of the hundreds, that's thousands, 100,000 containers that are running. So the only way then to do it is to be able to say, how can the system be smart, right? So at the Commons yesterday, we had sort of a tongue-in-cheek slide, right? That said, the factory of the future will only have two employees, a man and a dog, right? The man's there to feed the dog, and the dog's in place to ensure the man doesn't go off and actually touch the equipment. And then the point really being, how can we bring technology that can bring that to bear? So one example of that is actually through our CoreOS acquisition. The CoreOS team was working on a technology called Operators, right? Which is to say, how can we take the human knowledge that exists to take complex ISV software that's built by third parties and bring that natively into the platform and then have the platform go and manage that on behalf of the actual customer itself. Now we've got over 60 companies building operators and we've in fact taken the entire OpenShift platform, put operators to work, right? So it's completely automated and self-managed. The sprint of hybrid is hot, and you mentioned Caterstay. We would argue that it's going to be a gateway to multi-cloud. And as you look at the stacks that are developing and the choices, the old concept of the stack and Chris was on earlier, CTO of CNCF, and I kind of agree with them. The old notion of the stack has changed because it's got a horizontally scalable cloud framework. You got specialty with machine learning at the top. You got a whole new kind of stack model. But multi-cloud is what the customers want choice for. Red Hat's been around long enough to know what the multi-vendor word was years ago. Multi-vendor choice, multi-cloud choice, similar paradigms happening now. Modern version of multi-vendor is multi-cloud. How do you guys see the multi-cloud evolution? So we keep investing in helping to make that a reality. So last week we made some announcements around OpenShift Dedicated. OpenShift Dedicated is the OpenShift Managed service on AWS. OpenShift is available in ways where it can be self-managed directly by customers in a variety of environments, right? Directly run in any public cloud or OpenStack or a virtualized environment. We have third-party partners, for example, DXC, ATOS, T-Systems providing managed version of OpenShift. And then you can have Red Hat managed OpenShift for you. For example, on AWS or coming next year with Microsoft through a partnership for OpenShift on Azure. So you as a customer now have, I think more choice than you ever had before in terms of adopting DevOps or developing these microservices. But then having flexibility with regard to taking advantage of tools and services that are coming from pretty much every corner of IT industry. You guys are a huge install base. You've been servicing customers for many, many years, decades, highest level support. Take us through what a customer, a traditional Red Hat customer that might not be fully embracing the cloud in the past, now is onboarding to the cloud. What's the playbook? What do you guys offer them? How do you engage with them? What's the playbook? Is it just by OpenShift? Is there a series of, how do you guys bring that Red Hat core Linux customer that's been on-prem? Maybe a little bit of shadow IT in the clouds saying, hey, we're doing additional transformation. What's the playbook? So great question, John. So first of all, in digital transformation, you know, it might be an overhyped term, right, or it might be a big hype. It's kind of reassuring at this point in time. But I think that the bigger point, from my perspective is how do you move more dollars, more euros, more spend towards innovation? That's what every company is sort of trying to do. So our focus is how can we build on the investments that they've made, right? In, at this point in time, RenderPrize Linux probably has 50,000 customers, right? So pretty much every customer any size around the world, right? Is some kind of, you know, Linux user. How can we then say, how can we now provide you a platform to have greater agility and be able to develop these services quicker? But at the same time, not forget the things that enterprises care about. So last week we had our first, you know, big sort of, you know, security issue released on Kubernetes, right? The privilege escalation flaw. And so, you know, obviously we participate in the community, had a bunch of folks along with others addressing that, and then we rolled out patches. Our patch rollout went back all the way to version 3.2. 3.2 shipped in early 2016. Now, on the one hand you say, hey, everyone is DevOps. Why do you need to have, you know, patch for something that's from 2016? That's because customers, you know, still aren't moving as quickly as we'd like, right? So I just want to temper, right? There's an enthusiasm with regard to everyone's quick, everything's lightning fast. At the same time, we often find, and so going back to your question, we often find, you know, some enterprises, you know, will just take a little bit longer in reality to kind of get to this. Well, there are mission critical workloads that don't kind of be moving overnight. That's right. So there's some legacy from those workloads. Right, right. And so what we want to do is ensure, for example, the platform, you know, so, you know, we talked about sort of security and lifecycle, but is supporting, you know, these cloud native, you know, next generation, stateless applications, but also established legacy, stateful applications, all on the same platform, right? And so the work we're doing, right, is to ensure we don't, you know, it's like, leave no application behind, right? So either the work that we'll do, for example, with Red Hat Innovation Labs, who helped us to move that forward, or with, you know, GSIs, Global System Integrated, Regional System Integrated, to bring those to bear. Yeah. Ashish, I wonder if we could drill a little bit that there's a lot of retraining that needs to happen. You know, I've been reading lots on there. It's not, oh, I bring in this new cloud native team that's just going to totally revamp it and, you know, take my old admins and, you know, fire them all. It's like, that's not the reality. There's not enough trained people to do all of this wonderful stuff. I mean, we see how many people are at this show. Explain what Red Hat's doing, some of the training, maturation, education paths. Yeah, so we do a lot of work on the just core trading aspect, learning services, right? Get folks up to speed, you know, there's work that happens, for example, in CNCF, but we do the same thing around, you know, certifications, around, you know, understanding the systems, developing applications, and so on. So that's one aspect, right? That sort of needs to be learned. But then there's another aspect, right? With regard to how do we get the actual platform itself to be smart enough to do things than the past that individual people had to do, right? So for example, if we were to sort of play out the operator vision, you know, fully and through execution, in the past, perhaps, you needed, you know, several database admins. But if you had operators built for databases, you know, which, for example, Couch, Base, and Mongo, and others have built out, you can now run those within the platform, and then that goes and manages on behalf. Now, you don't need as many database admins, you free those people up now to build actual business innovation value, right? So I think what we're trying to do is, you know, increasing, think about how we sort of, if you will, move value up the stack to free up resources to kind of work on building the next generation services. And I think we think that's our digital transformation work, right? And I think, you know, digital transformation is totally over height, which I agree. It actually is really relevant because I think the cloud wave right now has been certainly validated. But what's recognized is that people have to re-imagine their, how they do their infrastructure. And IT is programmable, you're seeing it, the network, I mean, look at the whole eternity of IT is storage networking and compute, right? So when you start thinking about that in a way that's cloud based, it's going to require them to, I don't want to say re-platform, but really move to an operating environment. That's different that they used to have. And I think that is real. I mean, we're seeing evidence of that. Okay, with that in mind, what's next? What do you guys got on the horizon? What's the momentum here? What's the most important story that you guys are telling here at Red Hat and what's around the corner? Yeah, so, you know, obviously I talked with a few, you know, announcements that we made right around OpenShift dedicated and, you know, the upgrades around that. You know, things like for example, supporting, bring your own cloud. So if you've got your own Amazon security credentials, you know, we help support that and manage that on your behalf as well. We've talked this week about our support of Knative, right? Trying to introduce, you know, more serverless technologies into OpenShift. We announced the contribution of SCD to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, you know, so continuing, reforming our commitment to the community. I think looking ahead, going forward, right? Our focus next year will be on OpenShift 4, which will be the next release of the platform. And there, it's all about how do we give you a much better install and upgrade experience than you've had before? How do we give you these, you know, clusters that you can deploy in multiple different environments and manage that, you know, better for you? How do we introduce operators to bring more and more automation to the platform? So for the next, you know, a few months, right? You know, our focus is on, you know, creating greater automation in the platform and then enabling more and more services to be able to run on that. Been exciting for you guys riding the wave, the cloud wave, pretty dynamic, you know? A lot of action, like I said, great success. Congratulations. Thank you very much. It's been fun to watch. It's theCUBE coverage here. We're in Seattle for a KubeCon 2018 and Cloud NativeCon. I'm John Horst, Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more coverage at day one of three days of coverage after this short break. We'll be right back.