 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering AnsibleFest 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back everyone, this is theCUBE's live coverage for two days here in Atlanta, Georgia for AnsibleFest. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Stu Miniman, Andreas Benokratis, who's here and Senior Principal Product Manager at Ansible. Welcome to theCUBE, welcome back. Thank you. Good to see you. How was the 2019, you were last on? Red Hat Summit? It was basically the introduction to Ansible Network, basically, so. So much has gone on, one of the things I'm really impressed by this event and why we're here is configuration management and super important, part of the plumbing. We all know DevOps as infrastructure as code, but as the evolution of cloud and software has changed in the game, you start to see visibility into where automation's coming in. This is the whole focus of the event, automation for all, that's the theme. And this is about the core infrastructure, so it's not like it's just a random thing. Sixth most popular GitHub project out of millions. This is real. It's real, it's quite real. And especially on the network side, this is something that came out organically. The birth of Ansible Network was, because it was agentless, honestly. You know, simple, powerful agentless. The agentless piece was the piece that really made it really fly for Ansible. And configuration management, by the way, on networking side, when we talked about this before, is the most important, because that's where it's the most static, has been the most, where it's been the most static. I mean, we all know networking, right? But as networking becomes policy based and moves up the stack, we've seen something like Cisco trying to figure out their DevNet. It's like, you're starting to see the networking mindset moving up the stack. This is super huge change. It's a huge change, but the nice thing is that it's easy to get into. So all the network operators and network engineers, they're still used to using command and config modules with their iOS devices, their EOS devices, Juniper, all those things, right? They don't have to throw away everything they've learned for the past 10, 15 years in order to get with Ansible. And then when they go beyond that, then they can start seeing the real power of the Ansible platform, which we announced today. So going from command line to programmability is kind of what's happening. Yes, absolutely. And what's the big, what are the big key factors right now that are driving this? So a lot of key factors are, I mean, you saw the keynote this morning with Microsoft. That's our, that was a huge, and they've been doing this for about two years. So they started from nothing. It shows Ansible. And they quickly saw that the power of automation for the networks, but they had to grow at scale. So that was the big problem was, how do we do this at scale while still using all the knowledge that we've learned? So day zero, day one, it's extremely important. And obviously we know that, but as we were going on the journey with them from an engineering standpoint, day two became extremely important. And that's what we're focused on now. Yeah, it was really interesting. Microsoft really talked about that cultural shift. You know, we've heard in the networking space and in the team forever, it was like, you're all going to need to become coders. You're going to need to be able to do this. To tell us how Ansible is really impacting some of those cultural shifts and how has that discussion changed today versus what it might have been a few years ago? That's truly half the battle is the culture. What I like to call it is, everyone's talking about digital transformation. In the network world, this is an analog transformation in all honesty. This isn't anything about the bits and bytes. You can automate anything today. There are lots of point tools to automate networks today, but how are you going to actually move that into a world where culturally you can have people buy in from the bottom up organically as well as from the top down from the IT managers? It's extremely important. So on the platform announcement, the key announcement was the Ansible Automation Platform. Where can you just help us understand the relationship between network automation and the automation platform? Because obviously you need to move things around the network, but there's a lot of other things being configured as well and automated. What's the relationship between the two? So before we had the platform, actually Ansible Network was an actual product. It was a separate SKU, it was a separate offering, and we treated it as such as a platform. We were like the first guinea pigs I like to think of. We were the ones that said, let's treat Ansible as a platform and let's move it that way. So we actually went out and built roles, we built modules, we built a network engine, which is a parser, similar to like TextFSM, those kind of things. We put those in Galaxy, 22,000 downloads later. We proved it. We know that everything that we're doing in Galaxy today for Ansible Network proves the fact that people are using it as a platform and we were successful in doing that. And then how many years is that just track record-wise? What was it, how many years? Oh, that was a year. So 2.7 was when we released Network Engine for parsing CLI commands. And that moves into the next generation of what we call the day two operations for networking is typically we see network configuration as been a one-way street. So you would pull configuration data from a device, you would have to parse it, you put it in an SCM, it's in an SCM, and now you actually have to put it into a template and then you push it, right? This has been a one-way street typically. And Ansible is very good at one-way streets, but we're moving towards an Ansible 2.9 coming soon is making that a two-way street. So integrating the fact collection from modules, so when you pull facts from iOS, EOS, NXOS, et cetera, treating that data consistently across the board and using that for it. Networking's one of the tracks here at the show. What are some of the more popular things? What, where's the focus? The focus is, well, it's across the board. Again, you have people that are IT managers that have been doing Ansible for years and now they're saying, hey, look, they're seeing network automation is extremely pervasive. How can we get that into our pipeline? We have ticketing systems. How can we integrate Ansible Network with our larger business processes? And then top, like top five use cases, the typical backing up systems from backup, restore, and then doing a lot of sorts of truth things there too. So making sure that you have all of your network configuration data off the box. A lot of people are fetching configurations from thousands and thousands of devices. That's pretty hard to do. So let's make that easier for them. What's been the customer interest on the growth path for network automation? Because obviously that makes sense. I see the different product, but now that the automation picture's getting wider and bigger, what's the interest from customer? What's the key focus area down on that? Well, we've typically focused on to date and from the marketing slides is the number of platforms we've supported. You can always see up to the right, right? We support 10 platforms, 20, 30, we're up to 65 platforms supported. I think we've pretty much proven the fact that I think we can pretty much work on anything. So it's going beyond that making lives easier for the network operators and engineers holistically. And this event here, what's going on here for you guys here? What specific tracks you're doing? Right, so we're actually- What conversations are you having? Yeah, we're talking more about the actual resource modules that are coming in 2.9 that I was talking about, which is bringing fact collection and the modules together as a two-way street. So as people start moving at these day-to-operations, we have a lot of experts here and they're hitting stumbling blocks around. They're managing five underlined ginger templates like on a daily basis. Nobody wants to do that. So we're getting to a place where the people that are really relying on Ansible in the expert field making it much, much easier for them to go forward. We had Greg on earlier and Robin, we'll talk about the glue layer that Ansible provides. For the folks that are not using Ansible, what's the big message that you'd like to send them? What's the real attraction from the customers and why should people be using Ansible? Well, yeah, I mean, it's for everything. I mean, you don't have to, you really don't. I mean, it speaks for itself, but it breaks down the barriers. If you're a server person or a storage person or a cloud person or a Windows person or a network person, you all have the same language based on Ansible. And you can get things done more quickly and more efficiently that way, so. One of the other things we were talking to the community about is the feedback loops that you have with the community. Tell us a little bit about what your team's hoping to get from the users attending and participating here. Oh, absolutely. On the Ansible network side, everything is done transparently in the community. We have a community meetup. We've had this for a long time. Everything's out in the open. Everything's in GitHub. Everything that we've done, we've had a contributor day. I don't know if you were here on Monday. It was focused on network. We're pitching this idea around resource modules and the forward strategy of the platform as it relates to network. Everyone, including the contributors, developers, the partners, all of the people that you could see that half the vendors here on the floor are network partners, so they're invested as well. They want this to succeed. So we're extremely proud and happy that we're there along for the ride as well. All right, maybe explain to our audience what an angry potato is. Was it a tater? It's an angry tater. Yeah, it's the mascot for AWX, I believe, and yeah, they're fun. The sticker isn't a little plushies. So we're going back to our plushie rules. Get our stickers, help yourself. Keep stickers. I appreciate it. What's the coolest thing that you've seen this year that you think people should know about? Oh, wow. I think a lot of focus around testing and development, so a lot of developers are writing code, they're re-vending the wheel themselves, so developers are writing the same stuff over and over and over again. So how can we scale that to say, hey, why don't we all get together and write the same code, and then about testing? So once you actually have the code, you have a lot of vendors here on CICD testing quality, so we at its Ansible, we can talk, and this was Greg, I don't know if you mentioned earlier, but Greg DeGonisburg said, we're really good at making sure playbooks and roles and modules are correct, but we want to make sure that the vendors and the developers like focus on the functionality. We can give them guidance around syntax and correctness, but we want to make sure that the innovation really comes from them. Andreas, talk about this Ansible Fest this year, 2019. As we were on into 2020 coming up towards the end of the year, fall here, why is this year different? What's important about this year? This almost seems to be an inflection point this year. Why is it so important this year? What's going on right now that makes this event so popular? You're seeing convergence in a lot of different activities. The silos around you typically say, I'm a, I'm a, you know, I do Kubernetes or I do network or I do cloud. You're starting to see a lot of these people like, okay, well I have to do a cloud, I have to do a cloud VPN connection using containers and automate the network. So you're starting to see a lot of these different traditional people having to think outside of their traditional areas and have to start thinking about other areas to, like whatever their technology silo is in their head, they have to start learning or they're being forced to learn around a lot of different things. It's a systems architecture. Absolutely. Systems has consequences. You can't just think in a silo, that's the issue. Absolutely. That seems to be the core issue and also culturally, it's collaborative. I mean, who would have thought configuration management will be the next social network for enterprises? Turning it out to be. Yeah, absolutely. And not social network, literally, like Facebook, but you know. Okay. Thanks for coming on. Thanks so much for having me. We're breaking all the action down here at Ansible Fest where DevOps is being operationalized, cultural change within organizations, but capabilities much more of a systems view. Now obviously the networking is a key part of it. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back after this short break.