 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, of course, this year's event happening digitally. So we're talking to Red Hat executives, partners, customers, where they are around the globe bringing them remotely into this digital event. And really important topic of course has been automation for a long time. I think back to my career, automation, something we've been talking about for decades, but even more important in today's age. Happy to welcome back to the program, Tim Kramer with Red Hat, Vice President of Engineering is the title we're have listed to you here, but since we last talked to him at AnsibleFest there's been a little expansion in the scope of what you're working on. So first of all, welcome back and tell us what's new in your world. All right, well, thanks a lot. So, yeah, there's been a rather substantial change in roles. So I'm now in charge actually of all of the engineering within Red Hat, all the development engineering. So that includes the middleware teams, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, course management and automation and the newly, the new team that we just brought over from IBM doing advanced container management. So I'm basically running the whole thing now and OpenShift of course. Excellent. Well, just a few things to keep you busy, Tim. Congratulations on that and love your sport in the Boston Hello World Rella 8 shirt that of course we saw last year at Summit. I know one of the things being digital is people do miss some of the t-shirts. I know my family was quite fond of the May the 4th be with you shirts that Red Hat did one year at Summit. Of course, celebrating Star Wars Day, highly celebrated in the Minnowman household. But, Tim, let's talk about Ansible. So just bring your audience up to speed, what's happening, some of the latest pieces and of course it's been one of the great success stories. Ansible was a lot of adoption before the acquisition but really accelerated over the last few years. Yeah, so at Ansible Fest, we talked a lot about technology to come and showed a few demos of the possibilities. What we have done since then is actually bring all of that technology to life and to expand it. One thing that Red Hat has really done is continue to invest heavily in Ansible to make sure that we can bring new capabilities and new value to the subscription for everyone. So some of the things that have been happening since Summit, and since Ansible Fest since we last talked was that the community continues to scale at a really rapid rate. It's almost hard to keep up. And the number of modules that we have had has grown just tremendously. So we have well over 3,000 modules now that are available. And as customers and partners and also just casual users are looking through that, it's difficult to figure out what's really supported, what's really rock solid, what can I count on and what is maybe sort of that Wild West community I'm just trying out some stuff with Ansible and see how it goes. So what we've been focusing on a lot is a place that you can come to the Ansible Automation Platform and the Hub where you can now get this content and you can rely on the fact that it's going to be certified by partners, tested by partners, they're always keeping up with the latest updates. A great example of this is, let's just take NetApp or F5 or Cisco as good examples across the various spaces. We absolutely in the Ansible engineering team are not experts on all of the latest changes, the new hardware coming out, the new software upgrades that they're making and our ability to keep up with that is pretty difficult. We just can't do it, but they sure can and their customers and our customers are both demanding that we give them more content, better content and we need to be able to do it at the rate that our partners want to be able to provide that content. So as an example, normally we were kind of slowing Ansible down and trying to do one release every six months but if a new piece of software or a new switch or a new disk array or anything comes out in the meantime, all of our customers had to wait for that next six months release. That was not very convenient and having an expectation that our partners were going to line up on our schedule is, well, that didn't work out so well for them. So we've created this certified content and we now have the goals to have 50 certified partners back at Fest, I think we had three or four, we're now up to 30, our goals to hit 50. We had about a hundred modules that we showed at Fest that were certified. We now have over 1200 modules that are certified content and these are our partners creating this content and making it stable and secure for everyone to use. So that, I think, how far that was the coolest thing that we've done. Yeah, it's great to see that progress. Congratulations on the momentum since Ansible Fest. One of the other things I talked about back at that show, we talked about how analytics and automation, how those are going together. So, how's adoption been since last we met? Yeah, so adoption on the analytics side has been taking off. It was pretty nascent, so I mean, I could tell you that we've grown by about 5x there, but we started a little bit small. So we had a few customers that signed up early on to do it. I think probably the more impressive thing is that we have a couple of customers in markets that you would traditionally think we're not going to get their data, they're more concerned about what we're sharing, but we have a major bank, we have a major manufacturer that have well over 10,000 systems providing data back into Red Hat that allows us then to analyze and provide a bunch of analytics back on their running estate. And I think that that's amazing, right? Seeing the big customers that are coming in from markets that you might think, we're probably not going to get a lot of uptake has been really exciting to me. All right, so you talked a bit about how Ansible fits into the ecosystem. Of course, being at Summit, want to understand a bit more how Ansible, the latest of how it's fitting into the rest of the Red Hat portfolios. So, I've got interviews with Stephanie Shiris talking about you, Raell and Joe Fitzgerald talking about ACM, your group I know is heavily involved working on a lot of those pieces. So help us understand how this is kind of a seamless portfolio. Yeah, I think that's one of the most important things that we do within the Red Hat team is that we have to share this efficiency across all of the product groups, make them better and provide an additional enhanced value there. We've done a lot on the Raell side. Probably one of the maybe lesser known thing is that we've been working really closely on OpenShift and actually we have a lot of customers now that really want the Ansible Automation Hub available on OpenShift as a first class application. So we're doing things, we're writing operators for those so that we can automate the updates and upgrades and backup and all of that important functionality so that it's really easy than to manage your Ansible Automation Hub running on OpenShift. So that's one big thing. And then we're going to integrate that really well into the advanced container management that the team from IBM that came over is working towards. So a really close partnership with ACM team to make sure that we can start to not only gather lists of affected systems but then take that list and do a bunch of automations against it. So that's one. On the Raell side, we've done a lot. So we introduced at the last summit Raell-8 and we talked about having insights as part of that. Since then, we've been adding more and more capabilities into insights to enhance that value of the subscription of Raell. So we're looking at, we looked at adding in, well, Advisor is now what we used to call Insights. It's just something that advises you about problems or issues that may be occurring in your Raell instances that are running on Chrome. We've also added in a drift service. So you can tell if your configurations are sort of drifting apart. We've added in a compliance checker. So you can define some kind of a policy or compliance that you want to enforce on all of your running instances and we make sure that you're still compliant. We also have a vulnerability detector which you'd kind of expect. So any nasty security issues that come along, we can pop those up and show you right away. And probably some of the, one of the newer things is we allow you to do patching and you can do that patching right from cloud.redhat.com. We also have another new, very exciting feature which is subscription watch also on cloud.redhat.com. And what this allows you to do is to see and manage all of your subscriptions across your entire hybrid estate. So from what you're running on-prem to what you're running in any of the public clouds, we can actually track that for you. You can see what kind of usage you have and then make better economic decisions for yourself and then be able to easily expand that usage if you want to. It used to be a little bit more difficult to do that. So we're trying to make the subscriptions just as much in the background as possible to make it easier for our customers to make. Yeah, so Tim, one of the big changes customers have to go through is moving from their environment and their data centers to the leverage of SaaS and managing things that are outside of their control in the public cloud. You've got an engineering development team and you've got software that went from mostly going in customers data centers to you've got SaaS offerings, you're living in the public cloud. So you want to understand what's changing in your world? What advice would you give to other people as to the learnings that Red Hat has had going through those pieces? It's actually kind of a neat story because after we changed to start making a lot of our services that we had just only shipping products on-prem into cloud-based services, we had to develop this platform to be able to host all of these services. We started with the Insights platform because we already had that running out in the public cloud. So that was the obvious first thing to base everything on. But we had to build out that platform so that it could support all these services. The ones I just talked about that are with RHEL are really good examples. So between a policy, compliance, drift, all of these different kinds of services that we're offering, we had to build out that set of capabilities and services in what we're calling sort of the cloud.redhat.com platform. What I'm seeing is that a lot of customers are going through some of these same kinds of thoughts. Like they have a myriad, let's say, of applications that are running that they're trying to provide back into their own company. So different divisions of a company, they have things that are running in the cloud, some things that are running on-prem, and they want to start to be able to offer a more cohesive set of services, consolidate some of this, share some of the engineering effort that they have across their various teams. This is exactly the journey that we went through to get to cloud.redhat.com. I'm finding a surprising number of customers that are actually really interested just in that story about how we did that. One of the things that we've found is we've been working with the folks at the Open Innovation Lamps within Redhat. And this is one of the transformation stories that they see constantly as well. So we've worked with them and shared this. They're a great resource to help customers kind of think through that problem and get them into a new kind of a platform. But it's been quite a journey, right? I mean, we've been really focused on the infrastructure and on-prem. So moving to the cloud was a big deal, but I'll tell you, engineering can move so much faster in a SaaS service than it can with on-prem software delivery. It's been remarkable how quickly we could get there. Yeah, Tim, one other thing, if I look at Redhat, your global company, most development organizations are highly distributed to begin with. So many companies today are now having to rapidly figure out, how do I manage people that are working from home? How do I live in these environments? From an automation tooling, I would love to hear any advice you have there, as well as just anything else from your engineering experience and your teams that other people might be able to learn from as they're dealing with today's landscape. Well, I mean, to be honest, right? This is a, we've never seen anything like this in our history with this kind of pandemic that's happening worldwide. So it's shifting everything about business. And it has been challenging just within Redhat engineering for how we can manage the engineers and their expectations and how difficult it can be to work from home. I have amazing stories from my own engineers. I had an engineer who's in Spain and his wife as a nurse. She's on like 18-hour shifts. The hospital comes back, they have to separate. He's got the kids because they don't want them to get infected. It's a really, really difficult working situation for a lot of families out there to try to make it through this. So one of the things at Redhat is we just have to recognize that it's okay to slow things down a little bit, let our engineers not feel the pressure that they have to do, both childcare and school at home and caring for sick relatives or sick family as well as meet all of your deadlines. It's kind of too much. So we've been really, we're trying to be very compassionate with our folks letting them know that we have their back and it's gonna be okay as we try to get ourselves through this ridiculously different time. I mean, we've never seen anything like this, like I said. From an engineering perspective, I think work from home has been, it's okay for some people. If you have a larger home, I think it's a little easier maybe to find a room that you can go into and do your work. For some though, if you're in an apartment or you're sharing with a bunch of friends, it's not your workplace. And it can be really challenging to figure out how to work for eight hours a day with sort of a lot of distractions or just feeling confined. And it just being really difficult for anybody that wants to try to get out. You go a little stir crazy, right? So the good thing, I guess, is that engineering naturally lends itself to being able to be remote and work from home. So we have an advantage that way than other industries which is great, but it's definitely been really challenging for our teams to be able to cope with this. And all we can do is just be really understanding. All right, well, Tim, appreciate the stories there. Definitely everyone's working through some challenging times. I want to give you the final word as to really takeaways as to what should people be watching? What things should people be going back and looking at from an automation standpoint as they leave Red Hat Summit 2020? Well, we're just going to continue to work with the community, work with our partners, get more certified content and continue to scale the best way that we can for all of our users and our customers. That is the key focus. We want to continue automating and providing all of that flexibility. If you want all 4,000 modules and a big download, we certainly are going to continue to give you that option. But if you want to be able to start customizing what you download, maybe only relying on certified content instead of community content, we're going to give you that option now as well so that you know what you're running. And with the analytics, we're just scratching the surface here. We're getting some great data. It's helping us to develop new ways of insights into how your systems are running and that'll get very exciting as we go forward. I know that we've seen like a 4x increase already in the amount of insights attached to REL, which is really great. And we're now at least in the hundreds of customers that are using the AI, I think as we show more value there, we'll get a lot more customers to provide some of their data, which will allow us then collectively to come up with some really great analytics to help people become more efficient with their automating. Well, Tim Kramer, thank you so much for the updates and thank you to everything your team's doing. And just a reminder to the audience, of course, these communities not only are important technical resources, but many of them you've made friends with over the years. So if you need help, reach out to the community, there are so many good stories that can be found amongst these communities, helping each other through these challenging times. So, lots more coverage from Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you as always for watching theCUBE.