 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE on the ground, covering KubeCon 2016, brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. Here's your host, John Furrier. Hello and welcome to theCUBE on the ground here in Seattle for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Kubernetes conference. I'm John Furrier, you're watching theCUBE on the ground. Our next guest is Chris Wright, Vice President Chief Technologist, Office of Technology at Red Hat. Thanks for joining me today. You bet. So you had a keynote up there, OpenShift is enterprise Kubernetes ready. Really talking about the momentum that's certainly OpenShift as a past layer, platform as a service has been around for a while, leading one. I think you guys have the biggest contribution, I think, on OpenStack, if I last checked. But it's been around for a while, it's been iterating. But Kubernetes really talks about this next wave of dealing with the interests from application developers. That's right. How to move quickly to write software to drive new applications and business value. That's right. So you can orchestrate, but yet there's still a lot of stuff that needs to go on under the covers. What does it mean? What does this Kubernetes enterprise ready mean and is it truly ready in the enterprise? Well, from our point of view, our customer base is an enterprise customer base. So making something accessible to the enterprise is a huge part of what we're doing. Kubernetes is a new technology. So anytime you have a new technology, there's going to be, you know, the standard road bumps of just polishing, making sure it's accessible, usable, and then helping the enterprise really take advantage of net new technology without abandoning the investment that they have from the last two decades into their entire IT infrastructure and applications that they're already supporting that actually run their business. You make a good point about, you know, you guys have been, you guys are a tier one provider of open source. It wasn't the case when you first started open source in tier two, so to say, but now it's clearly of SLAs that are what, 17 years or something. It's ridiculous amount of support. But this event and the, you know, the cube likes to go to these events. We see that are going to be game changing. We see containers and Kubernetes as a game changer accelerating the cloud native architecture for cloud apps. Clearly, and you know, we do our best to get here. So this will be big. So you have kind of this industry change over this new community developing here where there's a lot of rah rah in the hallways. Yeah. But your customers, they don't want rah rah. They want rah rah and it works. So stability. Stability. Talk about that because this is where the transitions fail on new technologies where everyone's cheerleading it to hell and high water and then they go cross over and then they don't get it to the next chasm across and land properly. Your thoughts, this is what you guys think about your thoughts. Well, we're always paying attention to the hype cycle. So we wanna make sure we're investing in real technology. So it's not just enthusiasm, boundless enthusiasm without being grounded in some real technical and maybe more importantly, community reality where people are actually collaborating and building good technology. Kubernetes from a technology point of view is an awesome way to manage applications at scale across the distributed set of infrastructure, a data center or a cloud. And our customers are looking for the ability to operate at that scale. They're looking for the platform independence or the low level platform independence so that when you build your application, you can move it to your virtualization infrastructure, your private cloud, multiple public cloud providers without having to fundamentally change your process and your development methodologies just because- How do you see the adoption of containers and Kubernetes in the enterprise over the next year or so? And what are some of the drivers and some of the inhibitors that customers see? The adoption rate is accelerating. So what we see is actually earlier this summer there was a good bit of data from an analyst showing adoption rates for containers were sort of teen percentage in production in the enterprise, which doesn't sound huge but what was important to note was the trajectory. So it was doubled over the year before. And so it's really in this high acceleration period. The challenges are, we just did a study on this and we found that the challenges were concerns about performance, concerns about scalability, concerns about stability, concerns about orchestration and integration. So it's really kind of all the basic things you need in your IT group. Those are top concerns for the CIOs and IT leaders and what that means is it's a new technology. There's a lot of uncertainty about how to deploy it into your IT group and wanting to be sure that the investment required to bring that into your organization brings value. It's not just we built some really cool new thing but we could actually realize real value business value. You know, I always see the companies over the years market going back to me when I was breaking into the business even just in the past seven years with theCUBE. A lot of marketing campaigns. Be the superhero of your organization. You can be the, this is the IT narrative, right? But reality now is that with DevOps and with this cloud native concept, the developers are truly now actually leading the charge and are have to become more business minded. So is this DevOps a bridge between the IT business? Cause you know, developers are more and more, not all of them, but a good chunk of them have to deal with business conversations like OPEX, CAPEX, value, how do I, you know? Kind of like an MBA if you're, but none of them really want to get an MBA, but they have to kind of get savvy and be faster. I think part of what you see to enable that is bring together different parts of the organization so that a line of business owner, a product manager is sitting directly with a set of developers who are sitting directly with the kind of QE teams and the operations team. So the, you know, kind of the microservices model, the small pizza team says you can develop rapidly if you have narrow focus and a cross-functional team. And so I think it's not necessarily the individual developers needing to have all the insights into the business as much as having direct lines of communication and really sitting together to build applications to meet the business needs. I call it the developer MBA without going to school for an MBA. This organizational behavior, formation issues, you mentioned the pizza team, communications, and also linguistic relevance around words. I got to know what stuff means. So that brings up a whole another discussion. So the container story with that enables those developers. So at a high level, where does Red Hat fit in here? Because up the stack, the value is very clear. New things are being invented, new processes are being automated, so I can see the containers really enabling that. Going down the stack, there's still a lot of stuff under the covers like DNS and security that people are concerned about. That's right. The survey that we looked at, security was at the top of the list. And so we think of it in terms of, first and foremost, for us, the foundation is going to be Linux and it's Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And that's something that we feel very confident about our customers are deploying that in mission critical areas of their infrastructure. And we understand the security story there. But it goes beyond that. So you're building applications. You need to make sure that as you build the application, you're leveraging secure content, signed content. You understand when and where the code came from, the image that you're pulling from some registry. Where did that come from? What's the code provenance? What's the update model? And you find vulnerability in that image. What's the security policy around connecting the different components of your application together? So there's a lot of important questions and that's where a lot of the work is happening today in communities like Kubernetes, including enabling onboarding of more traditional applications or stateful applications. So you don't necessarily have to build your cloud native app 100% stateless. And when you get to where you're storing your data in the database, you're back in some bare metal system that doesn't have the automation around it to improve your cycle. You know, Red Hat has such a great developer traction over the years. With Linux, you just seen again, my generation was kind of first generation, what I call first generation. That probably not exactly first year, but first generation where open source really became a viable option, certainly as a rebel, but then as it goes tier one and you guys have done that, you've had great success with communities, certainly in the enterprise. Now, Amazon Web Services has a unique go-to-market and 10 years ago when they targeted the full stack developer concept that became cloud, that obviously is what it is today. Now with hybrid cloud, there's an enterprise developer category that's evolving and changing. How does the container story from Red Hat change your appeal for developers? Has it changed their interest, their orientation, their excitement? Can you share your thoughts to the developers that have either worked with Red Hat in the past or haven't, and how containers can make their life great and has that appeal to them? And what's in it for them? Yeah, well I think the cool thing for us is this kind of container movement and container orchestration platforms, it's the first time in the industry where really different layers in the stack come together. So we're appealing to the operations teams as well as the developer teams because we're providing a platform that allows the developer to move quickly. So you grab an image, you just add your code and its direct dependencies as part of the application. That code may, in an enterprise environment, may be written in Java. We have a rich set of middleware tools that many of our enterprise customers are already deploying and we're doing a lot of work to ensure that those same tools and services are part of the OpenShift platform. So it's sort of a seamless experience moving from a traditional environment to this cloud native environment. In addition, we're trying to ensure that the actual application server itself can be small footprint, fits well in a container, works well in the kind of microservices model and focusing on all of the messaging and interconnection between the different components and the ways that we have historically for a long time SOA to microservices is not such a leap of faith. It's really just an evolution of the same concepts. You guys have a great ask the kind of cultural question. In a way, you're kind of an incumbent. You've been around for a while, been successful, but also you're an innovator because it's a software world now. So there must be internal conversations within Red Hat that they're like, we have to disrupt ourselves. We have to constantly be innovating because that's the big critique right now from customers. I have existing relationships with the oracles and the IBMs and there's known things that are inside the enterprise that aren't gonna go away. You guys are one of them. At the same time, there's pressure to innovate. That's right. Your thoughts on Red Hat's innovation and what it means to the developers. First of all, I do internally when I'm speaking, I use a phrase disrupt yourself or be disrupted. So it is very much about a mindset, being open to try new ideas, being open to the learnings that come with failed experiments, but- That's a culture at Red Hat. That's a culture at Red Hat and it's important to keep innovation alive. The other thing that we stress is we don't need to be the authoritative source of all innovation on the planet. In fact, we never will be, we're just not capable of that. We can add to communities, we can come up with our own new ideas, but a big part of what we do is work in the communities to identify the emerging trends and the emerging communities that really are the disruptive technologies and then sort of tame that and stabilize that and bring that to our enterprise customers. So it's being at the forefront of technology, identifying where innovation is happening, where appropriate, where we're capable, we'll throw in our- You guys always say, you don't tout your horn enough in my opinion and that's probably from the community approach where communities fail when there's always the smartest guy in the room trying to own it all. It's really a collective body of work, open source. And we do have a sort of a humble style and that is actions speak louder than words. We really are focused on not just a bunch of loud marketing but real practical- Well, you guys also have great SLAs. You get 10 plus years, 17 years on some of the rail stuff, but obviously you have the community, you have the track record performance and then the innovation. And by the way, being humble is not a bad thing. Look at AWS, Andy Jassy, he's probably one of the most humble guys in the world and he just knows to the grindstone, look at them, they're lapping the field on the public cloud. Yeah, they're doing a great job. So congrats, good formula. Chris, thanks for sharing your thoughts. Final comment on this show, KubernetesCon or KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, what's the hallway conversations? Could you summarize the vibe here for the folks watching? It's just raw enthusiasm. A lot of exciting work is going on here. A ton of really talented developers building an amazing platform and I think people really recognize that. So it's just raw enthusiasm, a lot of excitement. Awesome, Chris Wright, Vice President, Chief Technologist at Red Hat. This is the Kube on the ground here, not live, but we're recording in the room. We do whatever it takes to get the stories. This will be a big community. This will be a big conference again on the ground floor, bringing it to you. I'm John Furrier on the ground here in Seattle. Thanks for watching.