 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. Welcome back everyone and welcome to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Nicholas Gerasimotos. He is a cloud computing evangelist at Red Hat. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's a pleasure. Thank you. Tell us a little bit about what you do at Red Hat. So I work with a lot of Red Hat partners, really trying to foster the ecosystem and build Red Hat products and solutions that can actually be deployable and repeatable for different customers. So, different verticals, financial, healthcare, doesn't really matter for the most part. I try and just focus on cloud computing and really just evangelizing a lot of our technologies that we have. Okay, so what are the kinds of things you're doing here at Ignite? So I've been spending a lot of time actually working with some of the partners like Accenture, IBM, we've been doing a bunch of different webinars, a little bit of hands-on workshops, kind of educating people about distributed computing, edge computing, and some of the technologies that we've been working along with Microsoft. So, the co-engineering of SQL Server, the managed service offering that we're doing with OpenShift, which is our enterprise great Kubernetes platform, along many other different things. Yeah, so Nicholas, it's been a couple of years now that we've gotten over some of the gasp weight. Microsoft has not said that we're killing the penguins off on the side. I was in Boston for Red Hat Summit, touching the dollars up on stage there. Red Hat is not hiding at the show. So, bring us inside, where customer deployments are happening, where engineering efforts are working together. We know, we've been hearing for years, Red Hat's in all of the clouds and partnering all of the Americans. So, what's different or special about the Microsoft relationship? I mean, honestly, I think the relationship is just evolving and growing because our customers are asking for it, right? They're going towards hybrid and multi-cloud type of strategies. They want to be able to take advantage of, you know, running RHEL within their own data centers or running RHEL specifically on top of, you know, Microsoft Azure. But they're also looking at other cloud service providers. I think it's going to be mandated eventually at some point in time where customers are going to start looking at diversification when it comes to running applications wherever it makes sense, taking advantage of different, you know, cloud native services and different providers. So, we've been spending a lot of time like understanding what their needs are and then trying to build the engineering to actually address those needs. I think a lot of that has really come from the co-engineering that we have going on. So, we have, you know, Red Hat engineers sitting alongside Microsoft engineers, you know, spending a lot of time building things like the Windows abstraction layer, WSL, things along those lines. All right. So, I'll be at KubeCon in a couple of weeks and Kubernetes, still a lot of people don't really understand where it fits, you know, we've been saying, you know, Kubernetes is going to be baked into every platform. Red Hat, of course, is, you know, not only a major contributor, but has a lot of customers on OpenShift. We had Microsoft, you know, this week talking about Azure Arc is in preview, but, you know, they're David Taunton who does partnership engagement says, you know, this does not mean that we will not continue to partner with OpenShift, and the best place to run OpenShift is on Azure. It's the most secure, it's the best. So, help us understand as to, you know, where this fits in the overall discussion of that multi-hybrid cloud that we were talking about earlier. I think everybody wants kind of a single paying of glass for manageability. They want the ability to actually look and see where their infrastructure is being deployed. You know, one of the pitfalls of moving to the cloud is the fact that it's so easy to spin up resources that a lot of times we lose track of where these resources are. Or individuals leave companies, and when they leave companies, they leave behind a lot of leftover items and instances, and that becomes really costly over a period of time. It may be not so bad if you have, you know, 100 or 500 instances, but when you talk to some of these enterprise customers that are running 10,000 or 100,000 instances and spending millions of dollars a month, it could get very costly. And not only that, but it could also be a security risk as well. So, let's talk about security. What kinds of conversations are you having with regard to security and data protection at this conference? So, you know, one of the biggest things that we've had a lot of customers asking is about is Red Hat Insights. So, Red Hat Insights is a way, it's a smart management application that actually ties in to looking at either workloads or configuration management. It can actually tell you if you have a drift. So, for example, let's say you install SQL Server on REL, and you misconfigure it, you leave the admin account running on it, it can actually alert you and make recommendations for remediation. Or maybe in general you're using, you know, SE Linux is disabled, there are things along those lines. So, Insights can actually look into the operating system or the applications and tell you if there's misconfigurations. All right, a lot of discussion about developers here. You know, day two keynote was all about, you know, AppDev and the like. Satya spent a lot of time talking about the citizen developer. Seems like that would be an intersection between what Red Hat's doing in Microsoft. Yep. So, I would say, you know, we're obviously very developer first focused, right? When we built things like OpenShift, we kind of were thinking about developers before we were thinking about operations. And later on, we actually had to build more of the operations aspects into it. Now, like for example, in OpenShift, there's two different portals. There's one for the developer focus and one for the IT admin focus with operations groups because they want to see what's going on. Developers don't really care specifically about seeing the abstraction of where things are. They just want to deploy their code, get it out the door as quickly as they can. And they're really just not too concerned about the infrastructure component pieces. But all of these developers, they want to be able to write their applications, write their code and deploy it essentially anywhere and everywhere and have it the easiest process. And we're really just trying to make that as simple as possible. You know, like visual studio plugins that we have for OpenShift, you know, Eclipse, Qi and other things. So really, I mean, Red Hat's always been very developer focused first. So does that seeing Microsoft and Satya Nadella up on the stage talking about this developer first attitude that Microsoft is really embracing the developer and as you said, app development for all, that does seem like a bit of a cultural shift for Microsoft, much more aligned with the Red Hat way and sort of open source. So are you talking about that with your colleagues at Red Hat about the change that you've seen, the evolution of Microsoft? Absolutely. I mean, if you look at like Microsoft, the contributions that they're putting towards like Kubernetes or even contribution towards OpenShift, it's amazing, right? I mean, it's like the company's done a complete 180 from the way that they used to be. There's so much more open, the acquisition of like GitHub, for example, all these different changes, it's amazing. He's done amazing things with the company. I can't say enough positive things about all the wonderful things that he's done, so. All right, so Nicholas, Red Hat has an interesting position in the marketplace because you do partner with all of the clouds and the environment and while IBM is now the parent owner of Red Hat and they have a cloud, your customers touch all of them. I'm not going to ask you to competitively analyze them but when you're talking to customers that are choosing Azure, is there anything that's calling out as to why they're choosing Microsoft, where they have an advantage in the marketplace or what is drawing customers to them and then of course Red Hat with that? I think Microsoft is more advanced when it comes to artificial intelligence and machine learning, AI and ML and edge computing. I think they're light years ahead of everyone else at this point in time. I think Amazon and Google are kind of playing a little bit of catch up there and it's showing, right? If you look at the power platform, for example, customers are embracing that. It's just, it's fantastic looking at a lot of the changes that they've implemented and I think it's very complimentary to the way that people are starting to build their applications, moving towards distributed infrastructures, microservices and then obviously cloud native services as well. In terms of the future, we are really just scratching the surface when it comes to the cloud. What do you see five, 10 years from now in terms of growth rates and also in terms of the ways in which companies are using the cloud? So I kind of like to equate it towards like the progression that we've had with cars. I know it sounds so simple but we went from steam engine to regular piston engines and now we've gotten to a point where we have electric cars and there's going to be self-driving cars. I think we're going to get to a point where code is going to be autonomous in a sense, right? Self-correcting, the ability to actually just write code and deploy it. Not really having to worry about that entire infrastructure layer. Everybody's calling it serverless. There's always going to be a server per se but I think we're going to have a point where, in the next five to 10 years, all of that is going to be completely abstracted away. It's just going to be focused on writing the code and machine learning is going to help us actually evolve that code and make it run faster and make it run better. We're already seeing huge benefits in when it comes to machine learning and the big data analytics and things along those lines. So it's just natural progression. All right, would love, you know, what's top of mind from the customers that you're talking to or at the event? Any new learnings that you've had or things that have kind of caught your attention? I think the biggest thing, honestly, is really been the multi-cloud, poly-cloud methodology that everybody seems to be embracing. It seems like every customer I'm talking to is looking at trying to avoid vendor lock-in per se, but still have that flexibility to deploy their applications wherever and still utilize cloud-native services without actually, you know, specifically having to, you know, go completely open-source in a sense. Yeah, one of the challenges there is every cloud, I need different skills to be able to do them. If I'm deploying it, it's the people and being able to do that, you know, we all live through that era of trying to do multi-vendor, and often it was challenges. So have we learned from what we've done in the past, can multi-cloud actually be more valuable to a company than the sum of its parts? I think so, and I think that's the reason why Microsoft is investing in art, for example. I think those methodologies, we know multi-cloud's tough. It's never going to be easy, and so these companies need to start building and developing platforms for it. It'd be great if there were standard APIs and such, right, but they're never going to do something along those lines, but I think the investments that they're putting forth now are going to make multi-cloud and poly-cloud a lot easier in the future, and I think customers are asking for it. Customers ask for it, they're going to build it. What does this mean for the workforce, though, and in terms of the kinds of candidates that companies are going to hire, because as we said, it does require different skills and different capabilities. So what's your advice to the young computer scientists coming up in terms of what they should be learning, and then also, how do you think companies are making sense of all of this? So I know from a company perspective, it's challenging. A lot of companies, especially, for example, I was talking to a very large financial institution, and they were saying that their biggest issue right now is hiring talented people to deal with microservices and Kubernetes. Anytime they hire someone, they end up getting poached by the big cloud companies. So it's one of those things where people are going to have to start diversifying their talents and look at the future. So I mean, obviously microservices are here, they're going to continue to be here. I would say people should invest in that, but also look at serverless. I definitely think serverless is towards the future, and then when it comes to learning skills of multi-cloud, I think cloud computing, that's just the number one growing thing in general. So since you're doing bring up serverless, today I hear serverless, and most customers that I talk to, that means AWS. Number two in the space probably is Microsoft, but there's efforts in to try to help give a little bit of open source and standardization there. Where's Red Hat stand on this? What do you see from Microsoft? What are you hearing from customers? I mean, we're heavily contributed to all the different projects trying to make serverless easier to use and not so much specific to vendors, right? So whether that's Apache Spark, or whatever you want to consider it to be, we're trying to invest in those different types of technologies. I think the main issue with serverless right now is we still don't really know how to utilize it effectively, and it's still kind of this gray area, in a sense, right? It's cutting edge, bleeding edge, emerging technologies, and it's just, in my opinion, it's not perfectly ready for primetime, but I think that's specific specifically because there's just not enough people that are actually invested in it at this point in time, so. So what are you going to take back with you when you head back to Phoenix from this conference? What are the things that have sparked your interest the most? Gosh, I would probably have to say really digging in deep on the ARC announcement. I think that's the thing that I'm most interested in understanding how we can actually contribute to that and maybe make that pluggable for things like OpenShift, whether it's OpenShift on-premise, OpenShift running in the cloud, and other rel architectures, things like insights being able to plug into that. I really see us trying to work with Microsoft to start building those things. Well, Nicholas, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a really fabulous conversation. Yeah, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage from Microsoft Ignite.