 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. It's virtual this year, but we've had a lot of great interviews and just coming off the keynotes. I want to invite John Furrier in. He's been doing a lot of the keynotes and attending this thing for years. So John, first off, get your impressions of AnsibleFest 2020. Hey, Jeff, great to cover this event. It's too bad we're not in person. We're virtual, theCUBE virtual AnsibleFest is virtual. Last year was in person. It was a really intimate event last year. And again, with that theme, a similar vibe here for 2020. Again, not face-to-face, but the content has that same kind of community vibe. Just some notable things just off the keynote. And some of the news is obviously last year they launched the Ansible Automation Platform. They've grown their collections community from five supported platforms to 50, and they launched the Automation Services Catalog. So, you know, you're starting to see from the keynotes, the positioning of Red Hat and Ansible, just a series of announcements at AnsibleFest that include a lot of integrations, okay? And I think that's the key thing. You know, obviously Kubernetes we heard at VMworld continue to take center stage in cloud native and CICD pipelining. So yeah, with that, I mean, that's the vibe. Collections, collections, collections, and some new terminology, which could be confusing to where you come from, but the word content means something here and content is code and there's a collaboration aspect. So overall, you know, you're seeing that positioning of Agile, DevOps, security network automation, and obviously community. A big part of Red Hat and Ansible is the core community and this future development environment of easy to consume, easy to code, easy to troubleshoot and built in security and make it collaborative. That's the open source ethos and that's really the focus of AnsibleFest 2020 virtual. Yeah, I thought it was interesting, Richard Henshaw came out with and really reinforced the theme that automate and connect. And it's pretty interesting because he talks about Ansible being the language of collaboration and how important collaboration is. And as we know with COVID and everybody working from home, you know, kind of the traditional methods of development teams getting together in a DevOps culture and doing daily standups and having this kind of commingling of people isn't available anymore really as an option. So the pressure to collaborate is harder than ever before. So really an interesting twist for Ansible has taken that tack that they are the language of collaboration. You know, I liked his philosophy and some of his narrative around, you know, he used to be a developer, they had a different group from their network up brethren and they had different kind of silo bill work together. It was all IT back in the day, but as the things become more cloud native, they have to integrate more and work together. And so this notion of collections is a big deal at Ansible. It's the idea of having these playbooks and having people be responsible with their playbooks and share those playbooks. They have a thing called content, which is how you can share these playbooks as content to be consumed and also collaborating and built on and with. But ultimately, the theme around Ansible has always been a tool for automation. And now as a platform, the focus is making that automation platform-wide across multiple environments, not just public cloud or on-premises, it's edge, it's multi-cloud. So this idea of network automation has moved resources across the environments and security is a big part of it. The automation platform, for instance, has a new 2.10 release, which brings back a huge amount of change releases where you don't have to be tied to the local host where you have this module updates are not directly tied to release cycles. And this means that there's more availability of code. So network automation and updates, asynchronous updates are huge. They talked about the VMware collection, IBM Z collections, all these things point to integrations. And that's really the focus of this integrate, this cloud native is, can I play well with others? This is again, extension to the community theme of open source. And if you're not integrating well in cloud native, you're probably not going to be around longer. And that's a good theme for them. Yeah. So John, I wonder if you can unpack it a little bit. You know, Robin Bergeron and her keynote went through this concept of the collections. I'm checking my notes here. They actually have three different types. They've got playbooks, roles, modules, tests, docs and plugins. And she talked about, you know, this is a way to basically aggregate information and share it in a bundle that other people can take full advantage of. Yeah. And I think that's the key of these collections. And I asked each of them when I was talking to them on the camera prior to the event. And I said, what's the big theme for Ansible Fest this year? And they all said, Robin was like, collections, collections, collections. But the idea of writing code in a collection is all about integration. So the VMware, for instance, is a great example. IBM Z, which is their mainframe piece, Ansible now part of Red Hat, now Red Hat's part of IBM. You're seeing that they now have more innovation going on with, let's say, mainframes. So the IBM Z integration allows Ansible to be compatible and bring a modern error to the mainframes. And this speaks to how people are working with these new roles and can leverage code in a new way. So I think that's a real big thing about providing that last mile innovation and bringing it to other environments. Not just being on Ansible, but really integrating in with others. The other piece getting a lot of attention, John, is OpenShift and the role of OpenShift and the play of OpenShift. So how should people think about how OpenShift fits in this whole puzzle? I think OpenShift brings the Red Hat hybrid cloud automation piece to it, to Ansible, which is where the developers are playing with the CICD pipelining. So the combination of if you remember back in the days of OpenStack when we covered Red Hat and when OpenShift kind of really hit the scene, that was around private cloud. And then OpenShift adopted Kubernetes and that kind of cloud native vibe. And then since then the growth has been phenomenal. So when you take Red Hat's OpenShift, which is the cloud platform and you bring it to the automation platform of Ansible, it allows customers to have an easy to use capability to do hybrid and multi-cloud automation. And where this matters is where containers are getting traction. IDC was reporting numbers where only five to 15% of the enterprises, depending upon how you look at it, are containerized, which means there's a huge surge of opportunity in these enterprises to bring containers into the cloud model. So for lift and shift and for modern workloads. So OpenShift provides that path. So it's a nice compliment for the two together to work. So when we heard customers talking about that, GameSys was one customer we talked about using Ansible Tower and the entire cloud, private cloud environment across data centers. So it's a good fit, automation with cloud and obviously that's where the magic is. Right, right. The other piece that we keep hearing about over and over and over and there's a play here as well as the edge, right? And really moving the compute closer to the place the data is generated and closer to the place that the data is consumed. So where do you see kind of the edge play here at Ansible Fast? Well, this kind of ties into your earlier question about OpenShift and Ansible, that kind of automation meets hybrid cloud and addressing this like last mile aspect that Ansible provides in terms of load balancing, configuration, applications, applications servers pushing the apps to the edge. That's a big deal. And as 5G comes out and as edge becomes more important, you're going to need to have automation, the surface area of things to automate becomes critical. So the whole discussion is it's larger scale, more devices, more code being shipped. This is where the engineers got to get involved early, bake security in from the beginning but also have that automation capability. So it's not context switching between I ship some code, I got to troubleshoot it. They could all do it from within the Ansible platform. That's where the traction with developers is in this notion, this was a notion of sharing and collections and content become important because you have more people involved in the betterment of the collections and the crowd and the developers make sense. So edge is real and you got to have a software defined operational model and you got to have a cloud piece like OpenShift and you got to have an automation component like Ansible. So this is a critical where you're talking space or 5G or inside an office or on a person software defined operations will be the key. And that is the big trend that we're seeing right now. Yeah, so final question, John, what are you hoping to get out of this show, Ansible Fest 2020? What are there any open questions that you're hoping to get kind of answered or closed or what are you hoping to walk away with at the end of this event? Well, I'm curious to see how they handle the virtual event. Obviously the face to face is a very important intimate part of their community model. So I want to see how that goes. I want to see, I want to hear and look and squint through and connect the dots on the relationship with the Red Hat IBM acquisition because Ansible's part of Red Hat and Red Hat's now part of IBM. So I think that's going to be a huge lift for Ansible because once Ansible gets into the slipstream of IBM sales channels, that acceptance is going to be a really important factor for their growth. And then ultimately, what's the developer trend? What new things are developers doing with automation that help customers have modern applications so that more better apps can be deployed coming out of COVID and as CXOs and the ivory tower of businesses change their business models, what new things are developers doing and how does that scale? So that's my key focus. All right, well, that's great. Well, John, thanks for sharing your thoughts, your insight and enough of us talking. Let's get to the tech athletes at Ansible Fest 2020. Awesome, thanks. All right, he's John, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE with ongoing coverage of Ansible Fest 2020. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.