 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2016. Brought to you by Red Hat. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back, happy to have on the program, fresh off the morning keynote, Paul Cormier, who's the president of products and technologies at Red Hat. Paul, welcome back to the program. Thank you very much. All right, so Brian and I have been looking through the announcements that are made and the line we had, it's containers, and more containers, so you've got a certain belief as to not only why Red Hat is relevant, but why Linux and containers are fully meshed and why you guys should have the pole position in this marketplace. Sure, I mean, if you look at what containers are, what the architecture is of containers, I mean containers is the Linux operating system that is just reconfigured in a different way. I mean, the host is the kernel, and the container itself is the marriage of the application and the pieces of user space that the app needs. It needs to be maintained, it needs to be life-cycled, it needs all the things that Linux and the enterprise needs today. I mean, if you look, three or four months ago, as I said in my keynote, we had a buffer overflow bug in G-Lib C, there was a huge security gap, huge security hole, virtually every, most every container on the planet had that vulnerability in it, so our normal cycle of what we do with Linux, we fixed it in 24 hours. That's what you have to do to be a container vendor, you literally have to be a commercial Linux vendor. Okay, so if I walk through the show floor, I see lots of companies that are talking about container, of course you've got companies like Docker, CoreOS, which is Linux distribution, but then even Intel, Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise all being involved, they're all partners of yours, but you're competing with them, how do you see those boundaries? Well, not necessarily, I mean, in the case of Intel, I mean, they're working upstream in container development, you talk about Docker, I mean, is Docker the project and Docker the company? We like to call it big D, little D, and we're great partners upstream with Docker, but Docker, the company, they're down a commercial path that's competitive, but it doesn't mean, we've worked with all vendors and competitors upstream, that's the way open source works, we're totally fine with that. I mean, Intel as well, Intel works upstream, but Docker, the company, with their platform, they are a commercial Linux vendor, I think they ship Alpine Linux inside of their tools, so that's what, if enterprises run on that, they will be moving to Alpine Linux. Yeah, would you mind walking us through kind of the Red Hat portfolio and where containers touch everything, some of your products got some rebranding and it looks like it touches everything? Because it's Linux, and Linux touches everything that we do, not only from a Red Hat perspective, but even as I said in my keynote, Linux has driven the innovation that we're all deploying right now, so it's all intertwined, so if you look at it, what we announced yesterday, and I talked about this morning, is really a container platform for all aspects of the development cycle all the way out. Let's face it, companies moving to the cloud, it's all about the application moving to the cloud, containers is a new way to carry an application, it's about the app, so what we did was, OpenShift is our container, both our container development and deployment platform, so it's a PaaS platform for development, we can add JBoss services on top of it for developers to build their applications with JBoss services in a PaaS environment, but also it's a deployment platform for containers. So what we announced yesterday is, for developers development, we have a developer kit, a CDK container development kit, that's OpenShift, it's free for all developers to use to develop their app. Same bits as OpenShift, same rel as rel, we then have an OpenShift platform for the lab, once they put it in a lab to test and integrate with other parts of the project, and then container enterprise, which is OpenShift today, and now we marry it with OpenStack for a hybrid cloud OpenShift environment. But I think the point of it is, it's the same exact bits and same platform in each of those steps, and so a developer can start from day one and already be integrated for the environment that they're going to need once they get all the way down into production. We want to really drive this hard, and so that's how we felt was the best way to do it was. So just take out the step of developing on one thing, testing on another thing, and then deploying on another. Start here, and by the time you get here, you're already integrated. Yeah, but we've seen some interesting things in the industry the last, even just a couple of weeks. Containers on Windows, we've seen some of the container vendors starting to embed other parts of how you run a container, I mean, because there's the container and then there's operating it, Kubernetes and Swarm. What's Red Hat's philosophy on how kind of intertwined that other stuff should be with Linux or with the container versus, it's kind of an architecture versus an endpoint discussion, but what's your philosophy on that? We are all about the OCI, Open Container Initiative, and a whole group of companies, including Docker and Google and Red Hat and others got together maybe nine months ago, a year ago or so, and developed OCI, Open Container Initiative, which we standardize on the format of the container, and really the tools for containers, it's a format of the container, the packaging of the container, we want to standardize on that so that developers don't have to learn new things as they go from one platform to the next. So that's what we standardize. What we do every day, OpenShift is our container platform. We bring various pieces from various communities together in the platform, we integrate that as products, and that's what the product is, right? And so containers itself, we're most interested in the format. As Docker, the company goes to swarm technologies or other technologies, we'll evaluate each of the technologies on their own merit. Remember, we're driving real enterprises. The technology that we put in our products has to be ready for enterprise deployment. We've, you know, in our container product of OpenShift, we've focused on Kubernetes as the orchestration engine. We work with the number two contributor in the Kubernetes community, but also it's the same thing as within that platform, as our customers need new function, it may come through the Kubernetes community and all the way down in the product. It may come from a different community. We're about what we deliver to the customer and we accomplish that by integrating various technology pieces from various communities. You talked about everything's moving towards software. I mean, networking is based in Linux, now storage. Do you find people understand that they grasp how much things have shifted from, you know, proprietary, networking, proprietary storage? I mean, obviously, Linux has been on the server side. I mean, you have to be a Linux admin, but you've got to be able to patch it. You've got to be able to do things in real time. Are people grasping how broad the Linux movement has gotten around everything? I don't think a lot of the vendors grasp it, frankly. I mean, you look at just the talk about containers. How many vendors, which you're not going to get me to name, how many vendors out there ever, you know, admit or tell you that Linux is at the heart of the container? I don't think a lot of the industry has yet woken up to that. They are starting to, now that we're seeing containers go into production, because prior to very recently, as containers were, you know, mostly in dev and test, you don't really have to worry about the life cycle and the things like that that you do once it's in production. Now that they're going into production, now customers and other vendors are realizing it's real. It's Linux inside, and I have to figure out how I'm going to maintain that. And even from a customer perspective, once they go into production, they have to figure, am I going to change my Linux environment overnight? I mean, the other thing that customers, they tell me all the time is we talk about the open hybrid cloud, the footprints of applications running on physical, virtual VMs, private clouds and public clouds. What customers really want with that, and this is where containers will come into play, they want the ability to use those four footprints as one environment. They want to manage one environment, manage it as one, they don't want an island, they don't want when their app's running in one of the cloud providers to be on one type of Linux environment and when it's running on their own private cloud on a different, they want one environment and manage it as one. I asked one of the CIOs of one of the major banks on Wall Street a couple of weeks ago, if you have an app that's running in one of the public clouds and it has a security vulnerability, is that your problem or their problem? You know the answer, it's the bank's, you know, it's the customer's problem. And that's the way they're looking at it. It's a whole different look as we're now going into production. Yeah, Paul, and you're keen of this morning, you talked about consistency of experience between whether it's bare metal, virtualized, or in the public cloud. Comes to something like security, are we there yet, how much do people, do you have to develop differently and can customers actually realize that consistency across those environments? That is all about the consistency of the, so if you look in RHEL, we have things like SC Linux and C groups and things like that to isolate processes. You can use all of those even in a container environment because it is RHEL, it's RHEL inside. So that's the type, it's not just the consistency of running the app, but people have built their tools and processes for security around things that are in the operating system. They don't want to revamp those tools and processes as they go to one of these different footprints, including containers. So that is the beauty of what we can bring to the enterprise. We can keep them consistent for the app, the processes and the tools across that entire environment, all the way out to the public cloud. Yeah, you talked a little bit this morning that there's change in sort of every dimension here. It's almost a little bit chaotic. We've never really seen every dimension changing. When you talk to customers, you talk to CIOs, talking to banks, what are they telling you? What are you hearing from them? What are the sort of three or four key things where you go, if I got to make an architectural decision that one's really important, that one's really important, the rest of them I can deal with change. Are you seeing that yet? No, I mean, they all want to, I mean, the customers that I talked to, I mean, what you heard maybe a year ago from the public cloud providers was some of the public cloud providers, was the whole world was going to the cloud tomorrow. And we all know that's impractical, right? What I hear today is just as I talked about, I want to use the public cloud as part of my environment and not necessarily the environment. And when I use it as, I may even want to use it on demand as part of my environment. And but when I do that, I need to be able to manage it with common tools. I need to be able to monitor. I need to be able to secure it, my applications, and it's all about the application. So that's what we hear all the time. What we hear is, if I'm changing my infrastructure to be hybrid cloud, it's a good time to go to containers because that's why containers are popular right now. It's a good vehicle for the app to get to the hybrid cloud. But they also have to retool their entire management infrastructure as well because now they need to manage across those footprints. So that's what we hear. They're looking at it from the whole, from the whole big architecture piece. They're taking it in pieces. They have a vision where they want to go, but they absolutely want to keep control. Yeah, absolutely. So Paul, we know Red Hat has just very strong commitment to communities and building off open source. What I'm curious about is, Red Hat's gone well beyond Linux as you go to things like Kubernetes and you talked about just how many huge amount of projects there are out there. Are there kind of subcultures in the communities? Are there different ways you often engage? Oh, absolutely. You know, if you could get some color on that. I mean, there's subcultures. I mean, the Linux kernel is an absolute meritocracy. OpenStack, for example, there's a board where you sort of pay to play. Many of these are being governed in such a way today. So we have to understand that and we play very different in each of the communities. I mean, that's the thing about us at Red Hat. It still is the best technology wins. We don't come in and customers, we don't come in and put things in our products that aren't going to be accepted in the appropriate community. But it's also why we choose very carefully of what communities we're going to base our products on and it's also why we feel very passionate about being a huge contributor to the communities that our products are dependent on. In order to do that, you have to hire the best engineers. I mean, you saw the guys giving the demo today. We have world-class people. The way they become effective in these communities is not because they have a Red Hat badge. It's because they're just good. And so those are the guys that we bring into the company for that reason. Yeah, one other thing I wonder if you can comment on, usually software companies, there's certain features they tell you about and there's certain things that they work on for a while. When you're out in open source, there can't be too many surprises and how do you stay kind of in the lead and how do you keep up with customers? A lot of times, and look, we use storage as a great example. A lot of times, these areas we feel they're important to build out our vision, right? So you look at storage. You can't have a hybrid cloud with physical storage. It's really tough to stuff an Icelon box down the wire for your Amazon applications to have access to their storage. So we knew we had to go, we went into software-defined storage, specifically with the use case of open hybrid cloud. We didn't have a lot of expertise in storage and we didn't have a lot of interaction with any of the storage communities. We bought a company. We bought Gluster and the reason why, there was not a lot of business there when we bought Gluster. The reason why we bought Gluster was the community and not to control it, but so we could invest in it because we're not going to take our shareholders' money and go invest in a community that we don't know is going to bear fruit for us down the road. So we buy a company. We did the same thing with CoomerNet when we went to KVM. We buy a company that's the leader in a community and we do that in order to invest and now it becomes part of the product portfolio. Now we can get a revenue stream going on it, invest even more. We did the same thing with Ansible, with Seth. We do the same things when we go buy. I mean, the world's changing so much and we're sort of leading that charge. The companies we buy are typically companies like that. They're leading in a community. It's a very different, I mean, trust me, going to your board of directors and saying I want to spend, you know, X hundred millions of dollars on this company that is going to be an integral part of our world, but doesn't necessarily have a lot of revenue right now and oh, by the way, it's open. Our board has come to very much support that and understand that and that's what you see in the acquisitions that we've done over the last years. Yeah, what about the public cloud players? Look, Amazon announced Elastic File System today. Microsoft has a long history of trying to build, you know, software storage products. Google has their own solutions. How do you balance their, on the one hand embracing Red Hat, but also have competing solutions? We're all about being able to bridge from on-premise to off-premise in the cloud, but also the trend we're seeing from CIOs now are starting to worry about bridging across the cloud, across the public clouds. So that's what we're all about. We can give you that consistency in anti-lock-in from on to off as well as across. So I mean, you know, people want to use the services in the public clouds, that's great. Some of these services are great, but they have to understand it's unlikely that Azure or Google are going to support Elastic Cloud from Amazon down the road. So we're all about giving our customers a platform to be, to have consistency and to be open on across all aspects of that. All right, so Paul, I want to give you the last word, lots of announcements, lots of exciting things going on. What's a key takeaway you want people to have from Red Hat Summit and what you've announced? I think the key takeaway we want is, you know, it's around containers. Containers is the next footprint of Linux, and with our announcements this week, what we've, I think laid the gauntlet down is, we're going to make this so usable and so consumed by the enterprise. We actually want to increase the rate of adoption beyond what it's been to date. All right, Paul, I really appreciate your insights here. Containers, obviously, a major important move and, you know, really interested in what Red Hat's doing here. We'll be back, lots more coverage from Red Hat Summit. You're watching theCUBE.