 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020. Of course, the event happening digitally. We're bringing in the guests from where they are around the globe. Happy to welcome back to the program. And he's one of the keynote speakers. He's also a many-time CUBE alumni. Chris Wright is the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Red Hat. Chris, it is great to see you and we've got almost matching hats. You have a real Red Hat fedora. I've got one that the Kubernetes Red Hat team, OpenShift team gives out in Europe. So in case anybody in the Red Hat community goes, yes, I've been a long-time member of the community. I got, I think my original Red Hat baseball cap probably 15 years ago, but the hat that I had is not one of the nice felt ones. It is there. Chris, great to see you. Good to see you. All right. So we've got to wait a little bit to get your keynote, but so many topics I don't want to get to with you. But of course, as I mentioned, be open and it's pretty obvious. Everyone's remote right now is kind of, special times we are living in. So bring us inside a little bit. Your organization, your group, your community, what this means and how's everybody doing? Well, I mean, it'd be hard not to sort of acknowledge that there's a major global event happening right now and COVID's really changing how we operate, how we work. From a Red Hat perspective, our number one priority is just employee safety and employee health. And so we were quick to send our folks home and have everybody to work from home. And so what's interesting from a Red Hat point of view, I think, and then even if you broaden that out to open source communities, the distributed nature of open source development and specifically the engineering teams at Red Hat are pretty distributed, kind of mirroring those open source communities that we participate in. So in the one hand, you can kind of say, well, things haven't changed substantially in the sense of how do we operate in upstream communities? But on the other hand, people working from home it's a whole new set of challenges. I mean, my kids are 12 and 14, but you know, say you have toddlers, that's a real distraction. Or you have a working environment at home that's crowded with multiple people. I mean, it can really change how you approach your daily work life. So creating that balance has been really important. And for our teams, we talk a lot about, just think empathy, think about how you're supporting one another. And again, when you broaden that out to the larger communities, I think probably a really important aspect of open source development is crossing corporate boundaries and being inclusive of such a broad set of contributors that there's a built-in resiliency associated with open source communities, which I think is fantastic. And then when you add to that sort of the enthusiasm around just doing great things, there's a lot of interesting activities that are collaborative in nature, that are community-based, that are trying to address the COVID crisis whether it's 3D printing of supplies or whether it's contact tracing applications that help people understand where they've come across COVID or anything like that. I mean, a lot of cool stuff happening that's inspired by a real challenge to the entire globe. Yeah, Chris, one of my favorite things the last few years at Summit has been talking to companies that are going through their journey of what we usually call digital transformation. What we have always said from the research side is what separates people that have successfully gone through this is that data and that they become data-driven and data is such an important piece of what they're doing. Well, I think everyone has been getting a real crash course on data because not only businesses, but governments and the entire globe now is watching the daily data, trying to understand data sources. Bring us inside as to really the importance of data and where that intersects with everything that Red Hat has been doing. Well, those are great examples. I mean, it's sometimes a little depressing, but the notion that data is a critical part of decision-making and access to quality data in real time is what helps us make better decisions, more effective decisions and more efficient decisions. And so when you look at the amount of data being produced, it just keeps growing. It's sort of on the exponential growth curve. And when you look at the commensurate amount of compute power associated with all of that data, it's also growing, which is maybe an obvious statement. What it says is we are gathering more and more data and the degree to which we can pull meaningful insights out of that data is really how much we can impact our company's value and differentiation. And in the context of something like COVID, that means vaccine discoveries and shortening times to field trials and in a more business context, it's talking about how quickly you can respond to your customer's needs. And we see a really dynamic shift in the workforce all working from home. That puts a real strain on the infrastructure. We're here supporting infrastructure builders and the amount of data that they can collect to efficiently operate infrastructure is critical at a time when people are distributed and getting access into the lab environments is challenging. And so I think there's a lot to be said for the amount of data that's being produced and then how we analyze it. We think of it in terms of bringing data to applications. And historically they kind of lived in separate, I'd call them silos, bringing the data sources and data processing and model development all into a common platform is a really powerful thing that's happening in the industry today, which is exciting. So we're bringing data to be a central actor is how I like to describe it. Yeah, well, I'm really glad how you connected that discussion of data to the applications because my background really is on the infrastructure side. And the concern I have a lot of times is infrastructure people, we talk about the bits and bytes, we talk about the infrastructure, but the only reason we have infrastructure is to run those applications and deal with that data. I'm hoping you can connect the dots for us. The keynote that Paul gave, one of the main things he's talking about is of course the open hybrid cloud. And I had a great discussion with him on theCUBE. So with that setup of applications and data, how does that intersect with what Red Hat calls the open hybrid cloud and what differentiates Red Hat's position there from some of the other discussions that we hear in the industry about cloud? Well, the open hybrid cloud is a platform. I think that's the best way to think of it. And that platform, it's a cloud platform that spans different types of infrastructures. So that's public clouds, that's on-premises, data centers, the enterprise owns themselves. And I think important increasingly out to the edge. So the notion of where you deploy isn't also coupled to, oh, what platform do I have to develop to in order to do that deployment? And when we talk about the edge, expanding out to the edge, that means you're getting closer to those data sources. So bringing the data in, doing the associated inference and making decisions close to that data where latency really can matter is a big part of what that open hybrid cloud platform brings to the market or to our customers. And when you think about an application developer, typically an application developer is trying to enable some behavior or feature or functionality. And the more we can use data to drive the behavior or drive the functionality, the more personalized an application is, the more intelligent the application is. And so the connection between data, the data sources, the data processing, the data science behind data cleansing and model generation and the associated models that can be easily accessed by applications, that's the real power, that's the real value that we're trying to help develop for our customers so that they can change their business. We actually do this internally, it's how we operate, we collect data, we use data to make decisions, we use data in our product release process and the platform that we've created is a data processing and analytics and machine learning platform that we use internally and we also make that externally available as an open source project, the open data hub. So open and data and hybrid cloud are all intertwined at this point. Yeah, one of the things that really has been highlighted to me at Summit this year is that connection. We always knew Red Hat had strong developer community out there, but you think back to Linux, Linux has ties directly into the application. You look across the portfolio and it's not the app dev team over here and the infrastructure team over here and how do we operate all of these various pieces? Ansible has a connection into all the various roles. So I want you to just comment with kind of your CTO role and you look over the entire portfolio, that discussion of how roles are changing, how organizations can make sure that they're not a bunch of various functions that aren't in sync, but we're really coming together to help respond to the business needs and move forward in the speed that is needed in today's world. Well, I think the early stages of that were well captured with the DevOps phrase. So bringing developers and operations closer together. It's not always clear what that means and in some cases that the notion of a platform and the notion of operating an application and then who operates the platform. I think there's been some question in the industry about exactly what that means. We're thinking of it today to sort of stick with the buzzwords in the dev sec ops context and even what I would call AI dev sec ops. So in data and intelligence infused dev sec ops and the idea is developers are just trying to move rapidly. So the degree to which the underlying infrastructure is just there to support application development is the operations team's need. That's what the operations team's trying to provide. Developers need at the same time access to tooling, to consistency from test environments through to production environments and also access to those data models that I was talking about earlier. So bringing that all together, I think on the dev ops side or the dev sec ops side, it's how can you build a platform that gives the right business specific guidelines and sort of guardrails that allow developers to move as quickly as possible without getting themselves into trouble and inadvertently creating a security vulnerability by pulling in an old dependency as a concrete example. So bringing these things together I think is what's really important. And it's a big part of what we're focused on so operational side being infused with intelligence as data and telemetry you're gathering from at the platform level and using models to inform how you operate the system. And then if you go up a level to the application development sort of CI CD pipeline where can you make intelligent recommendations to developers as they're pulling in dependencies or even writing code and then give easy access to the data science workflow to intersect so that what you're delivering is a well integrated model with an application that has a life cycle and a maintenance associated with it that is well understood. Yeah, so Chris, we've watched this is the seventh year we've had theCUBE at Red Hat Summit and of course Red Hat itself has a large portfolio but not only Red Hat, but the open source communities there are so many countless projects out there and you have a huge partner ecosystem. You were just talking a bunch about DevOps. I've got sitting at my desk, one of those charts that shows DevOps tooling and here's some of the platforms and here's all the various pieces and it's like, I think there's only 50 or 80 different rules on that but how's Red Hat and the community overall, how are you helping customers deal with this challenging world is, we've got the paradox of the place out there. We understand that everybody needs something a little bit different but how are we helping to give a little bit of structure and guidance in the ever changing world? Well, I think it's one of the values of pulling content together. If you think of a set of components being brought together as curation, we're helping curate the content and assembling pieces together, turns out is a lot of work, especially when you want to lifecycle manage those components together. So one basic thing that we're doing is bringing together an entire distribution of content. So it's not just a single, it's not just Linux, it's not just Kubernetes, it's Linux and Kubernetes engineered together with a set of supporting tooling for logging and monitoring and CI pipelines and all of that, we bring together in a context that we would call opinionated or prescriptive. What we also focus on is understanding that every enterprise has its own legacy and history and set of investments that they've made. So that process where we bring together an opinionated stack also needs to incorporate the flexibility. So where can we plug in a CI pipeline that your enterprise already has? Or where can we plug in your monitoring and logging tools? So that kind of flexibility allows us to bring together some best of breed components that we're finding in the open source communities with flexibility to bring a whole set of ecosystem partners. And if we go back to that open data hub conversation, there are a lot of data-centric tools that we put in the open data hub open source project. We have commercial partners that can support things like say Spark as a concrete example or TensorFlow. And so combine those, those are open source projects but they're not coming from Red Hat, they're coming from our ecosystem partners, combine that all together into something that's engineered to work together and you're taking a lot of the friction out of the system so that the developers can just move quickly. All right, so Chris, give us a little bit of preview. What are people going to see in the keynote and there's some people that are going to be watching this interview live but others will be catching it afterwards. So I believe Edge is one of the pieces we'll be touching on in the keynote but give us a little bit of what we'll be doing in fact. Well, you'll have to come to the keynote to really get the full experience but what we're trying to talk through is how data is really fundamentally changing business. And we talk through that sort of storyline starting with how it impacts Red Hats. But at one level, we're an enterprise, we have our own business needs. We use data to drive how we operate. We also see that the platforms that we're building are really helpful for our customers to harness the value of data and change their own business. And in the context of doing that, we get to take a look at some ways where those business changes have industry-wide effects. We talk about things like 5G and artificial intelligence and where these things come together, especially in edge computing, really interesting space where these things all kind of converge. And so kind of that broad storyline of data, something that we use to change how we operate something that we build is from a platform point of view of our customers change how they operate and ultimately those changes have major impacts across the industry, which is pretty exciting, pretty cool. Yeah, I'm curious, Chris. I think back a few years ago, I would have been interviewing you about like NFB and many of the themes it feels like we were talking about there. We're really setting the table for the discussion we've been having for 5G. Is that, do you agree with that? What's kind of the same indifferent from what we might have been looking at five years ago? It's very, and I love that question because it touches on something that I think is really important. It's very much an evolution. And so in the tech world, we talk so much about disruption and I think we overplay disruption. I think what's interesting is technology evolution, just consistently changing and moving forward gives rise at points in time to really interesting convergence of change that can be disrupted. So as a concrete example, NFB historically was about really improving the operational efficiencies of the service providers, building networks and helping them move more rapidly so they could introduce new services. Most of that was focused on 4G and most of that was focused on the core of the network. Today, we're introducing 5G across the industry. The discussions are moving technology-wise into where the containers fit into this new world and the discussion at the network level is not only in the core, but all the way out to the edge. And then when you look at the edge where you have a portion of the network operating as software, you have a platform like OpenShift that can also host enterprise or consumer-facing edge applications. So this is really all of those early stages of NFB are culminating in a place today where the technology supports total software infrastructure for the network and utilizing that same cloud that you're using to run the network to power enterprise or consumer-facing applications. That's pretty far away from where we were in the early days of NFB, very much in evolution. And then if you take it one step further and say 4G smart devices and cloud computing gave rise to a set of disruptive businesses. 10 years ago, those businesses did not exist. Today, we can't imagine life without them. 5G device proliferation, so not just smartphones but a whole set of new devices, and edge computing are the ingredients that give rise to that same next wave of innovation where 10 years from now, we can't really imagine what are the businesses that in 10 years we won't be able to imagine our lives without. So we're at a really interesting inflection point and it's partially through this evolution of technology. I think it's really exciting. All right, Chris, last question for you. There's always so many different pieces going on. RedHatch really striking a nice balance. There's not really as much of the hoopla and announcements but everything that RedHatch does is built on open source. So there's always things I run across that's like, oh, I need to look down the rabbit hole a little bit and what was that quarkest thing? I think I'd heard that word before where all of the projects that the CNCF where RedHatch's involved in. So in the last minute here, give us any areas where people said, hey, go Google this, go look up this project, other cool things that you and your team are working on that you want to make sure to highlight. Well, you've mentioned one, which is Quarkest and oftentimes we talk about infrastructure. I think it's a really cool project that is developer focused. It's in the Java space and it's really bringing Java from an enterprise development platform into a modern language that can be used to build cloud native applications or even serverless functions. I think serverless is a critical space. So we've been talking for quite some time about all the ways serverless can be impactful. We're at a place now where K-native as a project is maturing and the kind of world around it is getting more sophisticated. So we have a serverless offering as part of the OpenShift platform. So making sure you're paying attention to what's happening in the K-native space I think is really important. There's a whole new set of management challenges that will be in the security and multi-cluster space. We're bringing technology to bear in this space and as Red Hat, we will bring those out as open source projects. So looking for the open source communities around where you hear things like ACM or advanced container management or multi-cluster managed environments which are the norm at this point. Those are some examples of things I think are important. And then there's a world of stuff that's data focused. There's all of the data science tools. Too many to really enumerate, but that I think is an example where open source is leading the space, leading the industry in terms of where all those tools are developed and how their and access developers have to data science tools. All right, well, thank you so much, Chris Wright. Always a pleasure to catch up with you and definitely looking forward to hearing your keynote. All right, thank you. All right, lots more coverage. Check out thecube.net. You can see all the interviews after they've gone out live. They will be on demand. All those projects Chris mentioned, I've had deep dives on all of them. So also hit up Chris for myself on Twitter. If you have any follow-up, always love to hear the feedback. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.