 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit here in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Ashesh Badani. He is the Vice President and General Manager of OpenShift here at Red Hat. Thanks so much, Ashesh. Thanks for having me on yet again. Yes, you are a CUBE veteran, so welcome back. We're always happy to talk to you. You're also an OpenShift veteran. You've been there five years, and before the cameras are rolling, you were talking about how we really are at a tipping point here with OpenShift, and we're seeing a widespread adoption and embrace of containers. Can you share the context with us? Sure, so I think we've spent a fair amount of time in this market talking about how important containers are, the value of containers, DevOps, microservices. I think at this Red Hat Summit, we've spent a fair amount of time trying to ensure that people understand when containers are real in terms of adoption level that we're seeing, they're being run in production and at scale, and across a variety of industries. So just at this summit, we've had over 30 customers from across the world, across industries like manager services, government, transportation, tech, telco, a variety of different industries, talking about how they've been deploying in these containers. At our keynotes, we had Macquarie Bank from Australia, Barclays Bank from the UK, we had UnitedHealth slash Optum. I'm all talking about admission critical applications, thousand developers running applications, both new applications, microservices applications, but also existing legacy applications on the OpenShift platform. Ashesh, I've been watching this for a few years. We've talked to you many times, we talked about containers. Maybe I'm oversimplifying it, but let me know. It feels like OpenShift is your delivery mechanism to take some things that might be hard if I tried to do it myself and made it a lot simpler. Can I kind of give like Red Hat did for Linux? I have containers, I have Kubernetes, I have OpenStack, and all three of those, I didn't hear a ton at the show, I heard a lot about OpenShift and the OpenShift family because underneath OpenShift are those pieces. Am I getting it right or there's a little more new option? Great observation. And we're seeing that from our customers too. So when they're making strategic choice, they're talking about how can I find a container platform to run at scale. When they make that choice, they're also thinking about well, what's the existing development tools I've got? Can it integrate with the ones that I have in place? What's the underlying infrastructure they can run on? OpenStack, of course, is a great one, right? We have many customers out there, BBBA Bank are just two examples of those, but then also can I run the OpenShift infrastructure in a hybrid cloud or I guess what we're calling a multi-cloud world now? Amazon, Google, Azure, and so on. But actually interesting enough, we made some announcements with Amazon as well at the show with regard to making sure some AWS service had natively integrated into the OpenShift platform. So we find customers today finding a lot of value in the flexibility of the deployment platforms they have in place, integration with various developer tools. I think my colleague Harry Maurer was on earlier talking about OpenShift.io, again, super interesting, super exciting announcement from our perspective with regard to giving developers more choice. And in addition to that, you know, the other parts of the portfolio, right, going to your point earlier, right, we're trying to attach that increasingly as options for customers around OpenShift. Storage is a great example, so we announced some work we're doing with regard to container storage with our Glucer file system for OpenShift. So you're talking about simplification and that does seem to be a real theme here. Once you've solved that problem, what's next? What are some of the other customer issues that you need to resolve and help them overcome and make their lives easier? Yeah, so the rate of change in technology, as you well know, you've been following this now for a while, is just dramatic, right? I think it's probably faster than we've ever seen in a long, long time. I was having a conversation with a large financial service customer with regard to, you know, just as we feel like, you know, we're getting people to adopt Hadoop, everyone seems to have moved on to Spark. And now we're on Spark and people are talking about, oh, maybe Flink is next. Now that we get to Flink, now that thing AI and ML is next. So it's like, well, where does this stop? I don't think it stops. The question is, you know, at what point of time do you sort of jump in and embrace the change? That's sort of what DevOps is all about, right? Continuous change, you know, embrace it, be able to evolve with it, fail fast, figures it up, and then have the entire organization being the sort of continuous learning, the sky's end environment. Yeah, Ashash, from day one of the keynote, talked about the platforms and, you know, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was kind of the first big platform that can live a lot of environments. It seems OpenShift is a second platform and the scope of it seems to be growing. We talked to Harry about the OpenShift I.O. He alluded to the fact that, you know, we might see expansion into the family there. You know, what is, you said that innovation and change keeps growing. You know, what's the boundaries of what OpenShift's going to cover? You know, where do you see it today and where's the vision go moving forward? Yeah, so great question, a double-edged sword, right? Because on the one hand, of course, we want to make sure OpenShift is a foundation for doing a lot of stuff. But then there's also the Linux philosophy, do one thing, do it well, right? And so there's always this temptation with regard to keeping on wanting to take new things on, right? I mean, for a long time we've said, hey, why aren't we in the database business? You know, why aren't you doing more? Well, the question is, you know, how many things can we do well? Because anything we commit to, as you well know, Red Hat will invest significant amount of engineering effort upstream in the community. You can help drive it forward, right? We've done that on the Linux container front, we're doing that in Kubernetes, obviously we do that with RHEL, we've done that with JBoss technology. So we're very, very cognizant of making sure that we provide environment, and basically an ecosystem around us that can grow and be able to attach the momentum we have in place. As a result of that, we announced the Container Health Index at this conference, right? Mostly because, you know, there's just no way for one company to provide all the services that are possible, right? So to be able to grade applications that come in, be able to sort of give customers confidence that these can be certified and work in our environment, and then be able to kind of expand out that ecosystem is going to be really important. Yeah, Ashish, that's an interesting one, the Container Health Index. I'm going to play with the term there. What's the health of the container industry there? We had theCUBE at DockerCon a couple of weeks ago, had a couple of Red Haters on the program. There was kind of a reshuffling, you know, the Moby project, open source, we've got Docker CE, Docker EE, Docker actually referenced, you know, Fedora and CentOS and REL as, you know, something that they did similar to, but what's your take on the announcements there? I'll probably butcher this quote tremendously, but it wasn't Mark Twain or someone said, the rumors of my whatever are greatly exaggerated. So, you know, there's always, you know, some amount of change that sort of happens, right? Especially with new technology, right? And you've got so many players sort of jumping in, right? You know, of course there's Docker, Inc., there's Red Hat, right? But there's, you know, Google and IBM and Microsoft and Amazon and there's a lot of companies, right, that all look at this as a way of advancing number of workloads that come onto their platforms. You know, we've seen some of the challenges, if you will, that Docker, Inc. has been facing, as well as the great work it's been doing to help drive the community forward, right? So, you know, those are both interesting things and they've got a business to run. We've announced, we've seen the changes announced with regard to some of the renaming and Moby and I think there's still a lot more detail that need to be fleshed out. And so we're going to wait for the dust to settle. I think we want to make sure our customers have confidence, we've had this conversation with many customers that whatever direction that, you know, we go in, we will continue supporting that technology, we will stand behind it, we will make sure we're putting upstream engineers to help drive the community that will provide the greatest value for customers. Ashash, you're one of the judges for the Innovation Awards here. Can you tell us a little bit more about the secret sauce that you're looking for? How, first of all, how you choose these winners and what it is you're looking for? Yeah, so I'm really proud of the work I do to help support the Judging Innovation Awards. You know, I think it's a fantastic thing we do to recognize our selling still earlier. You know, we could probably have done a dozen more of those awards, right? The entries that are coming in are just fantastic. We try to change up the categories a little bit every year to kind of match with the changes in the industry, like for example, you know, DevOps, Macquarie Bank was a great example of enterprise transformation. You know, they had this great line in their keynote, right, where their ambition, I think really impressed a lot of the judges with regard to, hey, our competition is not necessarily other financial service companies, it's the last app you opened. That's a remarkable thing, right? Especially for an existing traditional financial services company, you say. So I think what we look for is scope, ambition, and vision, but also how you're executing against it and what demonstrable results do you have for that? And so you probably saw that as, you know, we talked about all the various innovation awards we gave, right, whether it's Macquarie Bank or, you know, British Columbia empowering individuals, right, so the whole notion of celebrating the impact of the individual and creating exchange for them to engage with the wider civic body. That's really important for us. Ashish, one of the Invasion Award winners often we talk to, they're an OpenShift customer. They're really excited with the AWS announcement. We've been chewing on it, talking to a lot of people. We think it's the most significant news coming out of the show. As you said, there's certain details that need to bake out when we look at some of these things. By the time we get to AWS re-invent, we'll probably understand a little bit some of the pricing and some of the other pieces and it'll be out there. But, you know, bring us from your viewpoint, from an OpenShift standpoint, what this means to kind of extension the product line in your customers? Yeah, so we've got, you know, at least at this show, we've had over 30 customers presenting about their use of OpenShift. And we typically find them deploying OpenShift with a variety of different environments, including AWS. So for example, Swiss Rail, right, obviously Switzerland is taking advantage of, you know, running it in their own data center, taking advantage of AWS as well. When they're doing that, they want to make sure that they can consume services from Amazon, just as if they were running it on Amazon, right? They like the container platform that OpenShift provides and they like the abstraction level that it puts in place. Now, of course, they have different choices, right? They can choose to run an OpenStack, they can choose to run OpenShift and some other public cloud provider. Yet, there are many services that Amazon's releasing, right, that are extremely interesting and value that they're providing to customers. By being able to have a relationship with Amazon and have an almost native experience of those services with regard to OpenShift, regardless of the underlying infrastructure OpenShift runs is a very powerful value proposition, definitely for our customers. It's a great one for Amazon because it allows for their services to be used across a multitude of environments. And we feel good about that because we're creating value for our customers and of course not precluding them from using other services as well. I wonder if you could shed a little light on the financials and how you think about things. I mean, you made this great point about the bank saying, our competition is the last app you opened. How do you think with OpenShift, which is free, how do you view your competition and how do you think about it in terms of the way companies are making their decisions about where they're putting their money in IT investments? Right, so OpenShift isn't free, so I'll just make sure. OpenShift I.O. is, oh, yeah, sorry, yeah. Okay, yeah, so consider OpenShift I.O. as a great gateway into the OpenShift experience, right? It's cloud-based, web environment, allows for development in browsers, allows for some collaboration with other developers. There's actually a really cool part of the tech I don't know if Harry talked about, right? Which is we almost have almost machine learning aspect part of it that's in play with regard to, if this is the code you're using here or other users doing with it, making recommendations and so on. So it's a really modern integrated development environment that we're introducing. That, of course, doesn't mean that customers can't use existing ones that they have in place, right? So this is just giving customers more choice. By doing that, we're basically expanding the span of options customers. I've introduced something called OpenShift application runtimes also at this conference, which is supporting existing Java languages or tool the frameworks, right? Whether it's Jbos, EAP, Vertex, Wildfly, Spring Boot, but also newer ones like Node JavaScript, right? So again, in the spirit of let's give you choices, let's have you sort of use what you most want to use, and then from our perspective, right? We will create value when it's been deployed at scale. Ashish, before the event at the beginning of it, you guys run something called OpenShift Commons, some deep education, and a lot of it's very interactive. I'm curious if there's anything that's kind of surprised you or interesting nuggets that you got from the users, either stuff that they were further ahead or further behind, or just something that's grabbing their attention that you could share with our users. Well, what I've been really happy to see with OpenShift Commons is, well, at least a couple things, right? One is we try our best to make it literally a community event, right? So we call it OpenShift Commons, but it is a community event. So in the past, and even now, we have providers of technologies, even though they might compete with Red Hat and OpenShift available to talk to customers, users of our technology, right? So we want it to be an open welcome environment for various providers. Second, we're seeing more and more customers wanting to come out and share their experiences, right? So at this OpenShift Commons, I think we had maybe over 10 customers present on how they were using OpenShift and sharing with other customers. Number three, this really attracts other customers. I just had a large financial service institution come and say, we attend OpenShift Commons for the first time, this is a fantastic community. How can we become a part of this? Get us involved. There's no cost to join, right? It's free and open, and now our numbers are pretty significant. And then when that's in place, right, the ecosystem forms around it. Now, so we have several different ISVs, global SIM integrators, who are also coalescing to provide additional services. Ashish, thanks so much for your time. We appreciate it. It's always a pleasure to have you on the program. Thanks again. See you all next time. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We'll be more from the Red Hat Summit after this.