 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. And welcome back once again to theCUBE. We are here live and open in this open source conference, Red Hat Summit 2018, here in Moscone Center in San Francisco. My name's John Troyer. We are coming to the close to the end of the day three of Red Hat Summit. Catching all the live coverage on thecube.net. Great to have with us our two guests here from UPS. Innovation Award winners here at the show. Gentlemen welcome. So Mark Falto and Dan Severi. So welcome folks. So we're going to talk about your journey to using OpenShift, how you guys picked it, what you guys stood up. And as we were just kind of, I saw you on stage, I saw the on stage story. And as I was just talking to you now before we went live, I'm just so impressed by the time to market, time to value that you guys were able to achieve you and your teams. Which if you think about it is really, the fact that this is a real story and it's not just a marketing example, right? It's really great. We're living, and sometimes I wake up and I say we're living in wonderful times in 2018. But so Dan kind of set the stage for us. You are a principal infrastructure architect. You're one of the folks that helped bring the system in. You were already Red Hat Linux users. But like what were you looking at as you were trying to make this decision and what were some of the drivers to bring OpenShift in-house? Well we knew we wanted to go cloud. But we weren't sure whether it was public or private. So we felt that in order to start to transformation to cloud, we should really focus on private. These boundaries to get that up and running. And a way to get, modernize our applications to be cloud ready. So that was the goal when we set this up. We had a very tight timeline. We had applications that wanted to go cloud. So we made the decision. Management was knocking at the door? Management was knocking at the door, right? So it was a matter of just, what do we want to do? So like anything, we viewed a number of different private cloud solutions. And we really liked OpenShift because of its flexibility, its open source capabilities and the fact that it was quite a stock of containers which was our container strategy going forward that we wanted to use. Was this the beginning of your container strategy? Had you been using them before? No, we haven't been using them before. We just made the decision prior to making the cloud decision that we wanted to go containers and dock with the containers we wanted to use. Right. So you do some sort of evaluation. You say, this seems like something worth happening. In the olden days, we'd go off and you'd do some sort of POC and you'd spend a couple months doing that and then you'd look at it and what are we, toy projects? You guys went into action. So can you talk a little bit about that in the timeline there? All right, so we made the decision in late fall 2016 to do this. My team runs all the infrastructure architectures so we work with the applications to design new architectures for them and basically we started working with Red Hat on success criteria that we established for the product and then once we got through that, we had started having really sessions with Red Hat and using a collaborative DevOps approach with everybody in your organization who'd be affected by this private cloud we're putting in. So Mark, our InfoSec folks, our networking folks, we were on a very tight timeline. We had an application wanting to go quickly as possible and they wanted to be up and running in like the late spring, early summer timeframe. So it didn't give us much time. So a lot of work and effort into figuring out how we wanted to architect OpenShift for not only to be operationally successful for us but from an application perspective. So it was important that we do this in a collaborative manner and get everybody's input in doing that. Yeah, that's something that's going to be interesting to dip into, right? Because the speed that you can't just turn on speed like that. As I've been kind of jokingly referring to, right? You have to turn into kind of a DevOps and an agile organization even at the infrastructure layer. So Mark, so you know, within a few months you've got OpenShift up and running. Now you got to put some apps on it. These are net new apps. You have all your existing portfolios still having to run. But so, yeah, what were you looking at putting up there and kind of how did you approach that in terms of cloud native practice? Our strategy was to take net new applications. We were trying to find app teams that we thought had at least a sophisticated enough process that they could take on the automation that we really wanted to drive with the platform as well, right? It was not just containerization but the transformation in dev process that came with that, right? So it's get a pipeline in place, understand how to use Jenkins, the plugins that are necessary to make that happen. So you need the right app teams that are ready to take that on. So we had an example application as part of our Edge initiative called Cyp, which that team that we thought was ready to take this on and it was the only way we were really gonna meet their timelines too. So we worked with them for a number of weeks and not just us but we also had Red Hat partners helping us too to really build out the automation for them, pipelines, get everything, an example running for their complete automated pipeline. Right and so this kind of, this guy can you describe a little bit what it does is a little bit of a, it's a business line app to help managers do some decision making and some planning. Yeah, it's a decision assistance application for supervisors at hub facilities where we move packages. Okay, so real business impact before they had, I don't know what they were, either papers or there. Mostly it was manual processes and it wasn't like the speed to market. It was, the information wasn't real time. So Cyp was all about driving real time decisions in the field. Right, so must have had an immediate impact then. So it sounds like you were up and then also within a few months. Yes, yeah, yeah. We can, I mean we were able to get at least a pipeline going within weeks for them and that demonstrates the capacity to get yourself to production, right? And then they're in production within a number of months after that, a couple of months after that. That's, yeah, that's great. And I'm assuming you'd be able to revise it and kind of improve the functionality sense and that in some other apps. Was that a big shift for you and your developers to kind of get to this stance of frequent releases and a pipeline? Yeah, yeah, it's a huge process shift. It's a cultural shift for app teams. They have to, they have more capability from the infrastructure than they've ever had before. So they now have tools to deliver much faster than they're used to. So they change their team structures to help us facilitate that. They bring in Red Hat or other consultants to help them backfill their skill sets. So it's a big transformation, yeah. Nice, nice. Now I wanted to explore a little bit. One word you hear a lot here, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, you've been hearing that. We've been hearing that a lot this week. This particular app runs on-prem. Right? Don't talk about this. Yeah, and let's make sure we get right. On-premises. On-premises, right? It runs between two days of dissenters. I get extra bonus points for that. But as a portfolio that you have to manage your IT department and infrastructure, UPS does take advantage of different clouds and different code running in different places as well as SaaS and everything else, I'm sure. Can you talk a little bit about the portfolio? Sure, so we have both, we have a wide variety of, as companies launch UPS, you can imagine we have a lot of IT solutions. So we leverage all of them to our benefits. So we have past solutions in the cloud, a lot of analytics stuff we'll do out there. And we also have a lot of SaaS solutions that we use to do different various works across our organization. So we are using cloud in multiple ways. Our next journey is hybrid cloud. How do we do that? How do we take open shift now? Because what we have is a situation where we need a lot of processing power for what we call our peak season, Christmas of course, right? So, but when we size today on on-prem, we size for that peak season. So the challenge for us now is how can we use on-prem for say nine months out of the year, then expand into the cloud for peak season, reduce costs and then drop that environment down after we're done with peak season to really drive us really efficiently from a cost perspective. Right, right, right. And obviously, open shift is going to be a probably key element to that. It is a key element. You know, this journey was, you know, if you just look at the timeline we just talked about, really only a few months. And do you really, it seems like this was kind of a corner turn for your engineering organization. I mean, is that an accurate representation? I would say so, both from an infrastructure perspective, the biggest thing when you run a common environment, which we do in open shift in other common environments, you have no control over how the applications affect one another. With, for us, what we like about open shift, it gives us that capability. So application A doesn't step on application B. And I think for us, it just made our lives a lot easier. And from an operational perspective for that. Right, it wasn't about the tool, but the tool helped enable the processes and then that yielded the time to market, time to value. Yeah, and from an app side, I mean we, building these new architectures really requires containerization, requires the automation. So we can't, we can't attack, you know, the proper microservice patterns and practices without really, without open shift as a platform underneath. It's foundation, yeah. And I think I like the stress, the fact that it really was all of us knew we had to get something done, and we all came together. There was no, there was no, the silos were immediately broken down. We knew we had a mission to get through, we knew we had something to get done in a short period of time, and we just came together in such a strong, collaborative way of driving the solution. Well, that's great, and congratulations. Innovation Award here at the show, it's been a great week here at Red Hat Summit. So, Mark Falto, Dan Savarese from UPS, congrats and thanks for being here on theCUBE. Well thank you, John. All right, well we are here live in San Francisco, we are finishing up day three, we'll be back after a short break in all of our live coverage of Red Hat Summit on theCUBE.