 Hello from Chicago. Lisa Martin here at Ansible Fest 2022 with John Furrier. John, it's great to be here. The transformation of enterprise and industry through automation. This is not only the 10th anniversary of Ansible. This was the first in-person Ansible Fest since 2019. It's awesome. It's awesome, Lisa. And I want to welcome everyone to our live performance here in Chicago. We were remote for two years. 2019 in Atlanta. Ansible Fest, part of Red Hat now. Red Hat part of IBM. So much has happened in the past couple of years. And I think one of the things that we're going to cover this week here in Chicago is the evolution of Ansible, where it fits into the new cloud-native ecosystems of emerging and also kind of what it means for developers and operators. And we're going to see a lot of that here at Ansible Fest with wall-to-wall coverage. Keynote just happened. Very interesting to see, you know, Ansible stay true to their knitting, as you say. You know, what do they do? No big announcements? Some big community news, but humble. Very humble, very, very humble, but also very excited. They, all the keynotes did a great job of addressing that community and being grateful to the community for really the evolution that we see at Ansible and, you know, 10 years later. They were talking a lot about smoothing operations for the developers, democratizing automation across the organization. They talked a little bit about that skills gap. I wanted to get your opinion, because as we know, they talked about it from a demand perspective. There was over 300,000 open positions on LinkedIn for Ansible skills. So a lot of opportunity there, a lot of opportunity for them to help democratize automation across organizations. Yeah, I mean, I think the big theme last year we heard three things, top three things at Ansible Fest 2021. Automation, automation, automation. Again, this year the same theme. Automate everywhere is what they're talking about. But I think you're right. This is a cultural shift where the entire cloud ecosystems kind of spun to the doorstep of what Ansible's ecosystem stood for for many years in the decade, which is configuration, running things at scale. That notion is now persistent across all the enterprise. And I think the key takeaway from the keynote, in my opinion, is that configuration and automation around devices and infrastructure stuff is an enterprise architecture now. It's not just a kind of a corner case or a specific use case. It's going to be native across the entire enterprise architecture. And that's why we heard a lot of cultural shift conversations and that is where the people who are running the Ansible stuff, they're going to have the keys to the kingdom. And I think you're going to see a lot more of this automation at scale. I love the introduction of Ops as code. That's a little piggyback off of infrastructure as code and infrastructure as configuration. They're saying operations now is the new software model and it's like Ops Dev, not Dev Ops. So it's really interesting to see how the operator is now a very big important role in the next level of cloud native. And it's really exciting because this is kind of what we've been reporting on theCUBE for over 12 years. So watching Ansible grow organically into a powerhouse community is very interesting. See how they operationalize this going forward. Well the operator's becoming really pivotal catalysts in this next way that you've been covering for 12 years. If we think about some of the challenges and the barriers to adopting automation that organizations have had, one of them has been skills, staff rather. The other has been, hey, we need to really determine which processes to automate that's actually going to give us the most ROI, more most bang for our buck. They talked a little bit about that today, but that's still something that Ansible is working with its customers and the community to help sort of demystify. Yeah, and I think that they were front and center around you on the room, people in the room, you make this happen. They're very much, it's not a top down corporate thing. Ansible's staying true to their roots, as I mentioned, but the thing about the skills gap is interesting. You heard Katie Pirelli talking about level up how your organization automates. Push your people, expand your scope. So the theme is the power is in the hands of this community to essentially be the new enterprise architecture for operations. At the same time, that feeds the trend around we're seeing an accelerated cloud native developer, we're seeing going to be a KubeCon next week. That cloud native developer, they want to go faster, they want self service. So you're seeing higher velocity cloud native development putting pressure on the ops teams to level up. So the theme kind of connects for me. I think Red Hat has got it right here with Ansible that the theme is shifting to ops better get their act together to level up and to the velocity of what the developers are expecting. At the same time, giving them the freedom to use infrastructure as code, infrastructure as configuration, and ultimately ops as codes. To me, I think this is like the evolution of how infrastructure as code, which was the nirvana of DevOps, now is ops as code. Which means if that's true, ops becomes much more invisible, if you will, which is what developers want. And we're going to be breaking down ops as code today. No doubt in our conversations with some of the great Ansible community folks and partners and leaders that we have on as well as tomorrow in our full two days of coverage. You talked about cultural shift. We talk about that a lot, John. It's challenging, but one of the things I think that was very palpable this morning is the power of the Ansible community. Not just those folks that are here with us in Chicago, but all the folks watching virtually online to really help drive that cultural shift that is needed for organizations to really be able to streamline cloud ops. Yeah, and I think Adam Miller who came on, I thought his portion was excellent around community. He talked about the 10 years, put a little exclamation point on that. Managing the communications within the community. He actually brought up IRC and Slack, and then we have Discord. And they introduce a new standard for communications called Matrix, which is open source based. And even in their decision making, their principles around open source stay true. Again, they checked the box there. I thought that was really cool. The other thing that's in the meat of the product, the automation platform, Matt Jones was talking about the scale, the managing at scale is one thing. But the thing that I think that jumped out at me was that this trusted automation messaging was really huge, signing, having signatures. That really hits the supply chain that we've been talking about and we're going to talk about next week at KubeCon. The software supply chain is trusting the code. And I think as you have automation, it's a really big part of the new platform. So I thought that was really the meat on the bone there. That was a very strong theme was the trust this morning. You know, another thing that was important was Walter Bentley who's coming on I believe later today talked about how organizations really need to think about the value that automation can deliver to the business and then develop an automation strategy. Really thinking at it strategically rather than what a lot of folks have done and they put automation in sort of in silos and pockets. He's really talking about how can you actually make it strategically across the organization and make sure that you really fully see and understand and can articulate the value to the business from a competitive advantage perspective that it's going to deliver. Yeah, and Stephanie Cheris was coming on too. She mentioned a lot about the multi-cloud, multi-environment layer, how Ansible can sit across all the environments and then still support the cloud native through what you called an automation loop. That's going to be really talking to what we're seeing as multi-cloud or super cloud, next-gen cloud where Ansible's role of automating is in just corner case in the enterprise. Again, if it's an enterprise-wide architecture it will be a centerpiece of multi-cloud, multiple capabilities, whether that's compatibility services or stuff running best of breed on different clouds. Because obviously Amazon was on stage here. They're talking about this big Ansible supporter. So it got Google supporting Ansible. So you got the multiple clouds and even VMware environment. So Ansible sits across all this. And so I think the big opportunity that I'm seeing come out of this is that if Ansible is in this position this could be a catalyst for them to be the multi-cloud hybrid architecture for configuration and operations. And I think the edge is going to be a really interesting conversation. We have a lot of guests coming on. We'll talk about that. But I think running distributed workloads across multiple clouds in multiple environments that's a killer app. And we'll see if they can pull it off. We're going to be drilling everyone on that topic today. So I'm looking forward to it. We're going to be dissecting that. I like how you paint that picture of Ansible really as the nucleus of that hybrid cloud strategy. So many organizations are living in a hybrid cloud world for many reasons, but for Ansible to be able to be that catalyst. And question for you, if we think about that, when we talk about multi-cloud strategically or organically or whatnot, where is automation moving in terms of the customer conversation? We know Ansible's really focused on smoothing the developer experience, but where is automation going in your vision up the C-suite stack? Well, multi-cloud is a C-suite message and they love to hear that. But you talk to anyone who's in the trenches that you hate multi-cloud. It's more complexity and there's a lot of issues around latency. So what you're seeing is you're starting to see an evolution of more about compatibility and interoperability. And this is kind of classic enterprise abstraction layers when you start getting into these inflection points. As things get better, so it gets sometimes more complex. So I think Ansible's notion of simplicity and ease of use could be the catalyst for this abstraction layer between clouds. So it's all about reducing the complexities because at the end of the day, if you want to do something on multiple clouds, whether that's run common services across, that's not making it simple. And it's going to be harder before it gets easier. So that makes any sense. So doing multi-cloud sounds great on paper, but it's really hard and that's why no one's really doing it. So you're going to start to see multi-cloud of what we call super cloud, which is more capabilities on one cloud and then having them still differentiate. The idea that some standards going to emerge is complete fantasy. I think it's going to, we still need more innovation. Amazon does a great job. Microsoft's coming up on number two position. Well, the clouds still need to differentiate, but that doesn't change Ansible's position. They can still be that shim layer or bolt-on to whatever clouds do best. If you run on machine learning on Google, that's cool. You want to use Amazon for this. How do you make those work? That's a hard problem. And again, that's where automation ends up. And with that context, do you think that Ansible has the capability of helping to dial down some of the complexity that's in this hybrid multi-cloud world? Yeah, I think the thing about what's going on great here that's unique to the history of the computer industry is open source is so powerful and it continues to power away with growth. So more code is coming. So software supply chain is a big issue. We heard that with the trusted thing, but also now how people buy now is different. You can actually try stuff out on open source and then go to Red Hat Ansible and say, hey, I'm going to get some support. So there's a lot of community collective intelligence involved in decision making, not just coding, but buyer selection and consumption. So the entire paradigm of purchasing software and using it is completely changed. So that puts Ansible in a leading position because they got a great community and now you've got open source continuing to thrive away. So if you're a customer, you don't need the big enterprise sales pitch. You can just try the code. You like it, then you go with Ansible. So it's really kind of set up nicely in this cloud market for companies like Ansible because they have the community and they got the software, it's open and it's what it is, it's transparent. Everything's above board. Yeah, you talk about the community. You mentioned Matrix earlier and one of the things that was also quite resonant during the keynote this morning was the power of collaboration and how incredibly important that is to them to stay native to their open source roots, as you said, but also really go to where the customers are. They talked about that with respect to Matrix and Discord and I thought it was an interesting, this is the community reaching out to really kind of grow upon itself. Well, being someone who's used all those tools, even IRC, I'm old, all the old folks use IRC, then the Gen X is used and the millennials use Slack. Discord, the way they mentioned Discord, it's so true. If you're a gamer, you're younger, you're using Discord. Now, Matrix is new. They're trying to introduce an open source because remember they don't control Discord and they don't control Slack. So Slack's Salesforce now and Discord is probably going to try to get bought by Microsoft, but still, it's not open. So Matrix is their open source chat service and I thought that was interesting and I think that's, that got my attention because that went against the principles of users that like Slack. So it'd be great. I mean, if Matrix, if that takes off then that's going to be a case study of going against the grain on the best of read package software like Slack or Discord. But I think the demographic shift is interesting, Discord is for younger generations. Let's see how Matrix will do. And the uptake wasn't that big. Only been around for a couple of months. We'll see almost 5,000 members, but not a failure, but not a home run either. Right, well we'll have to see how that progresses as all of the generations in the workforce today try to work together and collaborate. You know, if we think about some of the things that we're going to talk about today and tomorrow, business outcomes, increasing business agility, being able to ensure compliance with security and regulatory requirements, which are only proliferating, really also helping organizations to optimize those costs and be as competitive as they possibly can. So I'm excited to dissect the announcements that came out today, some of the things that we're going to hear today and tomorrow and really get a great view of the automation infrastructure marketplace and what's going on. It's going to be great infrastructure as code, infrastructure as config, operations as code. It's all leading to distributed computing, edge, it's hybrid. Yep, all right John, looking forward to two days of wall to wall CUBE coverage with you, coming to you live from Chicago at the first Ansible Fest in person since 2019. Lisa Martin and John Furrier with you here all day today and tomorrow, stick around, our first guest joins us. We're going to dissect Office's code, stick around.