 Hi, this is your host Subhan Bhati and welcome to this panel discussion and today we have with us James Faulkner, Director of Product Marketing of Hybrid Platforms Adoption at Red Hat and Reza Rahman, Principal Program Manager for Java on Azure at Microsoft. James, Reza, it's great to have you both on the show. Today we are going to talk about Red Hat, JBoss Enterprise, Application Platform and Azure. Can you start with what is this platform all about and who is it catering to? Yeah, sure. So, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform or we call it EAP for short, that's Red Hat's flagship Jakarta EE platform, it's been used for a number of years for building high performance and business critical applications, transactional apps, secured apps, traditional web apps and so we've partnered with Microsoft to bring that same platform that we've had on-prem for a number of years onto the cloud and take advantage of not only the cloud scale but also the capabilities in Azure to really enhance the value of that EAP platform on a global scale. Reza, now can you talk about that through this partnership, how is it helping your Microsoft as your customer base as well as Red Hat customer base, who is benefiting from this partnership? Well, both Red Hat and Microsoft and the customers are benefiting from it obviously. So, as you're aware, Azure is one of the premier public cloud providers out there, it's either number one or number two, however you look at it, so we have a huge install base and a lot of our install bases, the world's largest companies. So, naturally, those type of companies didn't start their Java journey and their enterprise computing journey in the last three years, they started it 10, 15 years ago, sometimes 20 years ago. So, there's a lot of mission critical applications, Java workloads that are running at these companies, they're not necessarily using the absolute bleeding edge thing out there, they're often using something that's proven and has been around for a very long time, in this case, something like JBoCAP. So, these customers do modernize their enterprise applications, major mission critical enterprise applications and they do do that on the public cloud in many cases, if not probably a majority of cases. So, we absolutely had to build a robust solution around being able to run these type of workloads without necessarily draining the ocean and completely throwing away your application and doing something funny with it. So, this is the reason why we established the particular relationship around JBoCAP and enabling it on Azure in the best possible way. And honestly, we have quite a few customers already using the solution and many more in the pipeline and as you are aware, we're more and more strengthening the offerings, making it even more compelling in all in service of our customers, our joint customers at the end of the day. These are Red Hat customers by virtue of having JBoCAP subscriptions, they're Azure customers or Microsoft customers by virtue of the fact that they're running these workloads on Azure and of course, it's a win-win for the customer as well if both of these companies are working together to make the best possible solution. If you look at the open source world, especially in the cloud space, new technologies are coming at an explosive rate. Even I cannot keep a track on what's happening in the industry, which is actually exciting. However, customers cannot keep up with these new technologies. They cannot be dipping in those tools or start embracing these technology that can become too overwhelming. They want something which is stable, reliable, mature that they can rely on. Talk a bit about the maturity of JBoCAP, of course Java doesn't need any validation there, but talk about the maturity of this market and what kind of customers are using some of these technologies and also if you can touch on what kind of challenges they face. We at Red Hat by virtue of having this product around for a number of years, we have a lot of big and small customers running these applications on these app servers and as you said, they can't necessarily dip their toe into the latest and greatest every single day. Oftentimes, they're looking at solutions that incrementally improve their situation. For example, data center consolidation, moving these apps out of the data center onto the cloud, not necessarily changing the app significantly, but really taking advantage of that scale. That's why we wanted to have this partnership with Microsoft and these offerings on Azure because we do have customers looking at things like rearchitecting, but the vast majority of customers running these workloads that they've been running successfully for a number of years, they don't want to rock the boat and burn it to the ground and start over. So this really provides that path forward for them as they modernize their business around these applications. Yep, so basically what James was saying, right? So there's many different reasons why these large customers move to the cloud. Data center exit is a primary one. They're looking to make their operations get a better bang for the bucket fuel instead of maintaining a large in-house data center presence. In many cases, operationally speaking, there's a good ROI in moving to the public cloud and we certainly try to make those things competitive. So that is one of the reasons, a lot of the reasons is globalization and probably maybe not always for big companies, but medium-sized companies when they're moving to take their operations and business to the global scale, often they do not have those kind of capacity, whereas something like Azure does have those capacities. The biggest headache for a lot of these customers is in moving to the cloud, making sure that things remain operationally stable, reasonably cost-effective, and without necessarily rewriting everything absolutely from scratch. A lot of the common challenges are upskilling. A lot of these customers, believe it or not, still are relatively new to things like containerization, things like Kubernetes, even general ways, the ways your infrastructure and data center management differs from the cloud and on-premise. So a lot of those kinds of concerns actually. So this is one of the reasons why we have our offerings. One of the sort of driving principles is to make it as easy as possible for customers that have these mission-critical workloads and they need it more reliably without big rewrites and also doing it in the most productive way possible. Right now I'm looking at two big Linux players with WSL2. Windows has kind of become one of the biggest Linux distributions out there in the consumer space. We used to joke about here on desktop, Linux is there through Windows, ironically, but jokes apart, when I look at you two folks here, I want to talk a bit about the kind of partnership between Microsoft and Red Hat that goes beyond this announcement that we are discussing today. It absolutely does go beyond that. Again, James, do you want to get stab at it and then I'll... We've been partners with Microsoft for a long time, and like you said, not just with EAP. We started with our Red Hat Enterprise Linux and then we've expanded it to much of our portfolio, including OpenShift, Ansible, and of course JBoss and our Metalware stack. We've supported our software on Azure for a long time, but several years ago we really increased this partnership because we really feel like Microsoft gets it. Especially in the middleware space, they jumped headfirst into the Java space several years ago and haven't looked back. And so with Red Hat's track record in the Java community and Microsoft's as well, we feel like it's a natural partnership where we can offer our expertise in the middleware space on top of a fantastic cloud platform with Azure. And it goes beyond just supporting the bits. It's also a partnership in terms of how we work with customers. So we oftentimes go to a customer together and that really sends a strong message to a customer who may be invested heavily in Red Hat or may be invested heavily in Microsoft and not so much on Red Hat and seeing us working together, providing that partnership and providing the integrated support offering across the portfolio really sends that strong message that Red Hat and Microsoft are here to support these customers as they go through that transition. So something as you alluded to, Microsoft is on a journey. It has been, I think, a fairly dramatic journey that has worked out well for everyone. It's no longer news for me to say it's not the same company that it used to be in the early 90s or even early 2000s. We are embracing open source in a big way on the cloud. Obviously, something like Rail is a very key part of that in enabling the Linux story and more broadly speaking, the open source story on the Azure platform and treating Azure as a platform for all, rather than a platform for some. So it's been honestly, Red Hat has been one of the key partnerships in doing that, in entering the Java space. We want to be humble. We are a new relative newcomers to the Java space. So it is absolutely important that we work with partners like Red Hat and bring the customer credibility that they have, hopefully with a very powerful public cloud and make a win-win for everyone. Now let's just go back to this announcement. Talk a bit about some of the new features and capabilities for users. So what we announced were several important updates to our offerings for EAP on Azure. The first one is support for clustering. And so when we started down this journey with Microsoft, we wanted to provide more than just a single type of solution for our customers. They're oftentimes, if they're exiting the data center, they might also want to get out of the day to day operational aspects of running an app server and really focus on the business value of the applications themselves. And so one of those services on Azure is Azure App Service. And so what we announced two years ago was support for EAP as a native runtime through Azure App Service, which is a platform as a service offering from Azure. This past month, we added clustering support. This is a really key feature for a number of our larger customers, banks, government, healthcare, retail that are doing transactional applications, which they've been doing for a number of years. And so having this support now allows them to take not just their easy web apps onto the cloud, but also their transactional distributed applications into Azure very easily and quickly. And as Reza said earlier, it's important for us to make it easy to do. So adding that kind of opens the door for those customers. We also announced a new listing for EAP on Azure Red Hat OpenShift as part of this flexibility and choice we want to give customers for customers looking to containerize, again, not necessarily burn everything to the ground, but take their applications, containerize them, and then use the services surrounding the Azure platform to manage them. We announced availability of EAP on Azure Red Hat OpenShift, which is our Kubernetes offering, a native offering on Azure. So that's the second one. And then the final one, we also have a number of customers who do have a large investment with Microsoft in Azure. They have a committed spend program. And so for those customers who have, they've already spent the money, they have the opportunity to move their applications and essentially burn down that committed spend. They can now do that with EAP in a pay-as-you-go offer as consumption-based pricing has become super popular, almost expected in many cases. And so we wanted to offer that to our customers. So that was the third leg of that announcement. As I mentioned, we do want to make sure EAP customers are successful on Azure. So there's three different primary mechanisms that we provide that, right? And three different destinations, if you will. One is a more conservative customer base, and we have quite a bit of those. They're really, when they're moving to the public cloud, they're still wanting to do things more or less the same way that they have been doing. So we offer fairly robust mechanisms to enable JVOS EAP on just Azure virtual machines. The announcement, and by the way, we're evolving. I'll talk about all three offerings in a moment. These are all actively evolving things. And maybe in a moment, we can talk about how do customers work with us and make sure we are actually going the right directions for these. But setting that aside for a moment. So conservative customers, we have VM-based offerings for them that they can run JVOS EAP1 on. And the change here is that we now have a pay-as-you-go VM-based image. And actually, that's also consumed by something else called Azure Solution Templates. And that again goes to the productivity story. So that's one specific change that we're announcing as part of this announcement. The second one is, I would say, let's not say super conservative, but somewhat more progressive customers. And a lot of those want to containerize their applications a bit. And OpenShift is a great platform for that. And we have, by the way, ARO, Azure Red Hat OpenShift. That's another sort of first class managed offering, one of the few that offer OpenShift in a managed way. And basically we have a solution template that makes it super easy, automates the provisioning process. We're taking a JVOS EAP instance and putting it on an OpenShift cluster in the most productive way possible. So that's what the solution template is about. And then again, the app service offering is relatively old. We started a little bit modest. We didn't have, we had low balancing support. So the auto-scaling and creating a set of JVOS EAP instances that form a logical load-balanced set, that has been there for some time. And really what we're doing now is adding, we're adding support for first-class JVOS EAP clustering all the way down to things like JTA transaction recovery and management, maintaining a stateful session being clustered in reliability to the max, basically. Everything that in JVOS EAP allows as a state, we now are enabling that in app service for specific cases, right? Specifically, in order to take advantage of this, you need to join your app service cluster to an existing VNet. And the moment you do that, we say, okay, now let's create a reliable high-performance sort of all the way down to complete state management type of scenario for your JVOS EAP cluster deployment. What kind of things we can expect next from this collaboration between Microsoft and Red Hat? Yeah, I'll start. And Reza, you can join in as well. Yeah, we do have a number of things on the roadmap to evolve all of these offerings. One in particular I'm really looking forward to is the ability to do free SKUs. Currently, when you use EAP on Azure, in order to kick the tires, you still have to pay. And so we want to enable this free SKU so that customers don't have to make in an upfront investment just to see what the operational mechanisms look like, how it may differ from what they currently do today and give them a sense of how easy it is to use this offering and then upgrade later on for production use to paid SKUs. So absolutely looking forward to that one. Reza, you want to add additional color? So all of those three arcs that we talked about are under active development. And frankly, I would like to turn this around. The customers, we would like for customers to take a look at what current state is for JVOS, CEP and Azure, give it a try, try it in the real migration cases. And we are there to help them. So maybe I can share a link after the fact. It's as simple as if you don't even want to talk to a salesperson, you want to talk directly to engineering, well, you fill out this nice little survey, and then it comes directly to people like me and James. And we will reach out to you and talk to you about our roadmap and capabilities and help you out with your migration cases. So all of these things and perhaps even more, we are looking to evolve all of these things. So all of these have active roadmaps. On the VM side of things, we need to do a little bit more polishing around the solution templates. And perhaps right now we're not, we don't offer a tremendous amount of version diversity for JVOS, CEP and JDK and OS versions. Maybe we were looking to add a few more of those options on the VM side of things and polish up the solution templates a little bit more. Right now there's a few hiccups, if you specifically, if you want to use things like bring your own subscription as opposed to pay as you go. So a bit of sort of maintenance type of ease of use, improvement or quality of life kind of changes on the VM side. There's one specific feature that I'm particularly keen on on the JVOS, CEP and ERO side. And that is right now you can do an initial provisioning of your app. So you have an app on a repo and you say, okay, provision that using JVOS, CEP and ERO and using a technological source to it. You may be aware of that. It's relatively common in the open shift space. So what we're looking to do is there's also open shift pipelines that's built into an ERO cluster. So we're trying to create an option where for development cases or what have you, you can say, okay, deploy my app using this GitHub repo. But also next time I do, I post something to this GitHub repo, auto redeploy my application and auto update my deployment on, you know, that's created through the solution template. So that's an interesting one I'm kind of excited about and would love to get customer feedback and maybe even active usage while we're developing these features. And yeah, definitely on the app service side, we are looking towards more of a scale out question, right? So, you know, right now we've proven it out in terms of it's a good quality service. It has, I think, most of the features that customers would expect. I think now we need to focus more on how do we scale out those customers and make it perhaps even more price competitive to use JPOS APN app service, right? Absolutely. Because this is a best solution, frankly speaking, it tends to be a little bit priceier, right? So we need to find, if you will, creative ways of making it more price competitive, right? As you just mentioned, adding a free tier is one, right? So, you know, being able to make that okay, if you're not doing ready to do a production deployment yet, what can we do for you to make it make it a little bit cheaper for you in the meanwhile? Can we waive the JPOS AP licenses? Can we waive the infrastructure fees for now, right, for trial use cases? Maybe adding more flexibility in terms of what type of horsepower you would need, you know, for your particular application. If it's an application that run on, can run on slightly lower resources, that's another way of, you know, being a little bit more creative in terms of price competitiveness. So adding like sort of dev-test scenarios. So if you're familiar with JPOS AP, you know, on-premise deployments, you don't actually, you really are only required to pay for production deployments, right, where you're going to call up support and get help. You don't necessarily pay JPOS AP subscriptions for your dev-test scenarios, right? So maybe that's another area we could think about, how do you make things more price competitive? So yeah, there's these kinds of things that we now need to explore to see how do we make it okay, you get PaaS, you get productivity, but you know, how can we also make it more price-spellable for you? Jim, anything that you would like to add before we wrap this up? No, I think that Resna actually hit a really great point, which is that flexibility and choice. So we don't just have App Service, we don't just have VMs, we don't just have containers, we have all three. And depending on how the customer wants to manage their solution going forward, we have PaaS for them. So I'm, you know, really looking forward to enhancing those PaaS with some of the features that Resna and I talked about, and just making it even easier to consume this platform, while Azure and EAP both continue to evolve. For example, EAP will have a new release, a new major release later this year, EAP-8, which brings some additional capabilities, things like Jakarta EE-10 support and a number of other new features in the platform. And seeing that, marrying that with Azure, I'm really happy to see that. I'm really excited to see how customers adopt that. The main call question for me would be, you know, if you're somewhat on the fence and you're a big Java customer and you have Java workload, maybe rethink how you think of Microsoft and, you know, rethink how you think of Azure, right? In my opinion, we're doing a lot of quality work to try to enable these Java runtimes in the best possible way on Azure. And, you know, the work we're doing with JbaCPA is a good example of that, right? So my main takeaway is, you know, maybe rethink how you thought of, you know, Azure before and, you know, pay attention to the work that we're doing here, give it a spin. And, you know, we do at least claim to be a customer driven company and obviously from my standpoint, I believe we are. So don't just, you know, try these things out. Also, try these things out and reach out to us and say, okay, this is what I like, this is what I don't like, this is what I like to see, you know, and so on, right? So that to me is a key, key message, you know, engage with us, see what we have to offer and see if it makes sense for you. Here's James. Thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about not only this partnership, but also talk about the larger open source, cloud native, landscape and your partnership together. Thanks so much for those insights and I would love to chat with you folks again. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks. Absolutely.