 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. Hey, welcome back everyone. I'm here live in San Francisco at Moscone West of Cubes, exclusive coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, John Troyer, founder of Tech Reckoning Advisory and our community services firm. Our next guest is Jason O'Connell, OpenShift platform owner of Macquarie Group. Welcome to theCUBE. Is that right, Macquarie? Yeah, that's right. Well, the retail bank of Macquarie, so banking and financial services. Thanks for coming on. So obviously banking's pretty hot, big time, early adopter of all things tech. Yes. And you're doing a lot of work at Kubernetes. Tell us about what you're doing. Take a minute to explain your job, what your focus is, some of the environment, DevOps, things you're doing. Yes, so basically I'm head of the Container Platforms team at Macquarie Bank. So basically my team manages OpenShift on AWS. We do the architecture on there, but we also focus a lot on the value add on top. So we don't just give our customers for my team are the developers and the development teams. We don't just give them a blank platform. We do a lot of automation and a lot of work on top of that. Basically, because we want to make sure that the idea of a platform as a service is that we do as much as possible to make developers' lives easy. Let's talk about the journey. When did you start on this effort? Obviously Amazon's great cloud. We use it as well. Other clouds are coming on. You got Google and Microsoft and others. But when did the OpenShift conversation start happening? Where were you? What year was it? How long have you been using it? It's gone through some great changes. I want to get your experience on that OpenShift journey. I mean, we were somewhat of an earlier adopter. We started looking at this two years ago. So that was OpenShift 3.1. A lot of the basic features weren't even there. But it took us a year to both build it out as well as migrate about 40 applications to production. So it was only a year ago that we've been in production. So it's evolved like so rapidly during that time. So 40 applications migrating, right? That in of itself in a year is a pretty heavy lift. Can you talk a little bit about, are you just replatforming the applications? Obviously probably not rewriting at this point. So OpenShift has been a good home for the applications that you started out with, it sounds like. I mean, one of the reasons to choose OpenShift was Docker. And it was about that migration path. I mean, part of the migration was ensuring that developers could get everything running locally, get these legacy systems. We did a lot of microservices, running locally on Docker containers on their laptop. Then the migration was easy from there. But we deliberately didn't want to do a lift and shift. We wanted to rethink how we delivered software as part of this project. Okay. What's the biggest challenges you had in doing this? I mean, OpenShift's got some great movement. Obviously, Kubernetes is a good bet. And Kubernetes is looking like a really awesome way to move workloads around and manage containers and clusters. So what are some of the things you've learned? What are some of the complexities that you overcame? Can you share a little bit about some of the specifics? I think the newness is probably the biggest challenge. I mean, going back to two years ago, there were some very basic components that weren't there at the time when we knew we were coming. And even now, there are pieces of work which we just don't tackle. We do a very quick fix because we know it's coming later. I mean, it's just moving and evolving so quickly. I mean, we're waiting a lot for Istio, which is coming in the future. So we're holding back and investing in certain areas because of that. It's always a constant challenge. Yeah, Istio looking good. And the service mesh is hot as well. How has OpenShift helped you? What's the, if you had to kind of boil it down, what's been the impact to you guys? Where's that coming from? I mean, before we even selected OpenShift, we had, we're looking at our objectives from a business perspective, not a technology perspective. And the biggest objective we had was speed to delivery. You know, how could you get a business idea, product idea into production as fast as possible? Or even if you look at a minor fix to something, something that should be easier, developer takes a data right. Why does it take a month to release the production? So speed of delivery was one of the key objectives. And I can tell you more about how we delivered that in detail, but just going back to the objectives, we also looked at developer experience, you know? Sometimes the developers are not spending enough time coding and doing what they want. They get bogged down in a lot of other pieces of work that aren't really delivering business value. So again, we wanted the platform to handle that for them so that they could focus more on their work. And this is the promise of DevOps. I mean, the whole idea of DevOps is to automate away the hassles. I mean, my partner, Dave Vellante, they call them rock fetches. No one likes to do all that work. It's like, can someone else just handle it? And then when you got now automation, it frees it up. But this brings up the thing that I'd love to get your reaction to, because one of the things we've been covering and talking a lot about on theCUBE is this has been happening around us. It's not just what we're doing, but this new modern way to deploy software. You look at like some of the big things that are happening with cloud native, and you mentioned Istio, is to do this awesome dynamic things on the fly that are automated away. So it changes the how software is being built. How are you guys embracing that? What's the thought? Obviously, you've got a team that's got the mindset of DevOps. You know, obviously embracing this vision. And if everything else is probably substandard to you, when you look at waterfall or any kind of non-agile, what is your view of this modern era of writing code and building applications? What, I mean, for people who don't aren't getting it, how do you explain it? You know, I think it's, I mean, it's an unbelievable time that we're in at the moment. I mean, the amount of automation that we're doing is huge. And part of an open shift is that it's an automatable platform. So I've got a few junior guys in my team, like two graduates and intern, they do a lot of the automation. It's that easy. If you look at interestingly in like security and risk teams and governance teams, where we're finding, look, they can improve security risk and all this by automating. You know, they're the ones that now we've got SecOps movements and things like that. So speed to production does not prohibit better security? Not at all. And in fact, with SecOps, the amount of automation we do, you got a far greater amount of security because we now know everything that's deployed. We can continually scanning for vulnerabilities. Yeah, well, so Jason, you talked about it being new. We've talked a little bit about culture. How much of this has been a training exercise? How much has been a cultural shift within your organization as one of the leaders of it? How are you approaching it? I mean, we're lucky that within Macquarie Bank, there was a large scale culture shift towards Agile where the whole bank runs in Agile manner. So that's helped us then fit in our technology and automation. It complements that way of delivering. So we've got some very unique ways where we've done automation and delivery which completely re-thinks how we used to deliver before. So for instance, yeah, for instance, now, if you think, why were people scared of delivering something into production? Why was a small change, a scary change? And a big part of it is the blast radius if something went wrong. You know, connecting through to our APIs, we've got our own channels, we've got mobile apps, we've got a website, we've got a lot of partners. There are other companies connecting through as well. And so even if you did a small change, if it caused an issue, everyone's affected at once. So a big piece of what we did to deliver faster is allow targeted releases. You know, I could target a release and a change just to you. We could target it to a percentage of customers, monitor, roll that quickly if there's a problem, dial it up if it's looking good. You could target to any channel. It seems like there's a business benefit to that too, right? Oh, it's massive here because you also can promise stability on certain channels, if you want. You can have faster channels that are moving quickly. And in an API-driven world where you've got external companies connecting through to these APIs, you want to be able to say that we've given you a stable offering and you can upgrade when you want. And then our channels, we can move more fast. So we've got a- I mean, it's a no-brainer. I mean, really the old way is completely dead because of that. Because the thing about the blast radius, your point about the blast radius, the risk is massive. So everyone's kind of on edge. All these tests have to go in. Redundancies, the planning is ridiculous. All for the risk. All that energy you're optimizing for a potential non-event or event. Here with microservices, and you and I can go down to the granular level. The granularity is really amazing. So when you go forward, first of all, it's a recruiting opportunity to get better engineers. Like, this is the way we work. I'm going forward. I want you to comment on your opinion as an industry participant and can clarify this. Because a lot of people get confused. They hear automation. They think jobs are going away. Administration is getting automated. System admin type roles where junior people can now do more operating things. But the operating role is not going away. So talk about that ops side because now the ops are more efficient. The right things are automated. Talk about that dynamic between the right things being automated and the right things that are going to roll to operational service meshes or whatnot. Yeah, I mean, basically it's about getting people to do these higher order functions. So the people who are doing things manually and operating things manually, you look at our ops teams now morphing into like the classic SRE team, you know, the Site Reliability Engineering teams where they're spending a significant amount of their time automating things, you know, looking at alerting and monitoring and then auto-healing. I mean, it's actually more work to automate everything but with a far greater amount of quality and reliability than what we get. And the benefits are a long, but much bigger. It's worth it, basically. You do the work up front and you reap the benefits in a variety of ways like writing, rolling out software, managing workloads. Talk about multi-cloud. I see you're on Amazon. Multi-cloud is a big focus here. Hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. Honestly, we're seeing that trend. How do you look at multi-cloud as a practitioner? What are some of the things that are check boxes for you in terms of, okay, as we start looking to the next level, there might be a multiple cloud scenario. How do you think about that and how do you put that into perspective? Well, it's worth noting even two years ago when we selected OpenShift, it was with the idea that we could go multi-cloud. You know, that for the users, for the developers, they're not going to know the difference where we run it on. So we're not locked into any provider. Final question for you. If you could boil down OpenShift into kind of like a sound bite for you, what does it mean to you guys? What's been the benefit? What's been the role? What's the benefit of OpenShift as you explore the cloud journey? You know, I could say speed. I could say automation. I mean, that's huge, but really, OpenShift and Red Hat have picked the winner, which is Docker and Kubernetes. And a colleague of mine was in KubeCon in Copenhagen last week. And he's constantly messaging me saying, there's new tooling, you guys can use this, you can use that. And it means that rather than us doing the work, we're just getting tooling from the community. So it's the de facto standards. So that's probably the biggest benefit of all. All the goodness is just coming right to your front door. Exactly. And I got to do my homework every night playing around with this technology. So yeah. Great success story. And again, the great community open source projects out there, you guys can bring that in and productize it for the retail bank. Congratulations. Love open source stories like this. Tier one citizen, and again, continues to power the world open source softwares to Kube. Doing our part bringing you all the data from Red Hat Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier with John Troyer. We'll be back with more after this short break.