 from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering VTUG's New England Winter Warmer 2017. Now, your host, Stu Miniman. And we're back. Here at the VTUG, we talk about a broad spectrum of technologies, lots of virtualization, talking about how cloud developers, DevOps, containers and all that stuff's coming together. One of the keynotes this morning was from my first time guest to the program, John Benedict, who's a tech evangelist with Red Hat. John, tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do at Red Hat, what brought you to Red Hat and what we'll go from there. Absolutely, thanks for having me, Stu. So as he said, my name's John Benedict and I've been back with Red Hat for about two and a half years now. Officially I'm a- One of those boomerangs. Yes. You worked for a while, tried greener pastures and decided that the open source great Red Hat was the one to come back to, right? Absolutely, it's time to come home. So officially I do technical marketing for Red Hat virtualization and it's a long drawn out title, a tech evangelist does just a little easier on the tongue as it comes out. So all of that in titles is making sure that all of the great work that engineering does is translated into technical value for customers and solutions architects in a much more easily consumable way. So demos, presentations, keynotes and connecting people with technology. All right, and does that mean you're not the one that comes out with these lovely four letter acronyms for everything that comes out of Red Hat? Not my fault. So is it Rev, R-H-E-V or do we just call it Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization? How do we pronounce it? So the Rev went from four to three, the extended three letter acronym, as we used to call it, it's now just a three letter acronym. That changed. Oh, it's just Red Hat Virtualization? That's right. Oh, it dropped the E, but it's still enterprise ready. Yeah, so economy we could no longer afford vowels. If you've got some storage background, we dedupe some of the letters and things like that. There's already E's in and everything that. Great, so give us the thumbnail. We don't have time to go through the whole keynote, but what are some of the key messages? There's a lot of VMware people here at this kind of show. So what resonates with them? What are they looking for from Red Hat Virtualization? So some of the things that resonated, some of the things that I was really trying to get across with all of the new technology coming out, containers, public cloud, private cloud, virtualization, very much still foundational to the modern data center. And I'm very much gung-ho, full steam ahead, right? But we need to make sure that we're still optimizing what we have today and balancing that out with what we're trying to accomplish in six, 12, 18, 24 months. And that means that tooling, processes, mindsets, all need to be set correctly. Which means also that whatever the virtualization platform is, whatever that future platform is, you can't have something that just works well on its own. Has to play well with all of the other toys in the sandbox. And so balancing today, balancing tomorrow, and that's going to be a little different for each customer, to be sure. Yeah, it's definitely, if I compare and contrast, I think of VMware, it's like, ah, well, containers, that's a real threat to VMware, the platform is a service. The way they had Cloud Foundry and that spun out and everything, you know, I look at Red Hat, it's like, well, Linux is kind of the bread and butter, but you've got the virtualization, you've got OpenShift, you've got all of these pieces, you know, Red Hats, you know, like what, the number two contributor in both Docker and Kubernetes. So, you know, we know that Red Hat does it, but it says, wait, is Red Hat virtualization, is that like the old stuff now, or how does the virtualization team fit in that? Maybe you can unpack a little bit of that interaction with all those groups. It's, we make sure that, as I just said, kind of balancing out, making sure that we optimize what's there, but also making sure that it's connecting well with what people are trying to do tomorrow. So, KVM is a core technology for both OpenStack and Red Hat virtualization. So, we're a key contributor for KVM, QA, engineering, and so there's a lot of, I don't wanna say overlap in terms of the platforms, but there is overlap in the engineering in the core KVM. So, what we can do there benefits both platforms. It's a matter of helping to shape use cases and things like that. When you look at, you know, you brought up containers. Containers, we look at it as a delivery format. We're still looking at Rev and OpenStack as infrastructure. Those containers still need to land somewhere. And depending on how you need to scale that infrastructure, scale up or scale out is a big part of how you plan that out. Great. Can you talk, what's the typical user? What brings them to Red Hat virtualization? Kind of, you know, key applications or key business drivers? Sure. So, mission critical applications. So, tier one databases, ERP systems. We also have cloud, you know, what we call cloud transition. So, you have an application that you are either trying to migrate from traditional virtualization to OpenStack or you have something that's going to take advantage of integrations between Rev and OpenStack using those neutron networking services, those glance image services so that applications can actually span both platforms simultaneously and utilize the strengths of both. Then there's also the DevTest environments, utilizing the portfolio of things like cloud forms for the self-service portals, catalogs and things like that to front Rev. And then one of the new hot use cases with the rise of the VGPU is for animation studios, oil and gas, other energy customers is the high-tech workstation. So, you know, anybody that knows Red Hat kind of understands, you know, the value proposition of kind of just if free Linux versus, you know, what I get with Red Hat, maybe you can walk us through kind of KVM, which is the core of it. You know, I could go out and do, you know, KVM and get that for free, you know, why Red Hat versus, you know, the alternative. So, there's things that the community does very well in terms of collaboration. Open source has been the heart of all of it from a cultural standpoint, from an engineering standpoint. But when you're talking about enterprise needs, enterprise requirements, there's things that the community shouldn't have to worry about in terms of providing support to a Fortune 500 company. You know, you have a deadline on Monday and the community doesn't have that deadline. At the same time, Red Hat is a trusted technical advisor that can help both Shepard, QA and engineering resources in the community and not hoard that technology or do bad things with that technology but still provide customers that have those deadlines and have those requirements and help guide requirements upstream and bring those back downstream into the products. So, John, I'm wondering if you've got some good history with Red Hat there through your two tours of duty with the company there, you know, one of the challenges for most companies is like, wow, these waves of technologies come. You know, Red Hat's one of the ones that's done a real good job. You know, when I, you know, I've watched Red Hat but even, you know, I read the financial analysts and they're like, as this cloud thing comes, I mean, Red Hat's well positioned for, you know, any private public cloud I pick, you know, Red Hat can be there. That's right. Open stack, you guys are your front and center there. So give us a little insight as to, you know, how those technology waves happen, how people keep up with things and how Red Hat looks to stay relevant as, you know, these massive waves of change keep coming. I think, for me, I think it comes down to trying to avoid jumping at things just because it's the new shiny. And yes, we're all kids in a toy store at heart. When it comes to technology and we wanna go after interesting problems and we wanna solve interesting problems with interesting technology, but at the end of the day, we're trying to solve problems for customers in a way that's gonna help them in the long term. And that means providing solutions that we can support with them long term. So that means we have to have, we have to look at technology from the standpoint of does this product have an end game? And so something might look really good on paper or in a demo, but there's risk, you know, how much risk is involved? So we can't just jump at something because it might be big. We'll investigate it, we'll play with it upstream like we always have, but we have to assume a certain amount of risk on behalf of our customers as we play with these technologies, as we look at these different waves. And so I think it's important that we look at the horizon as a means of gauging things on behalf of our customers. Great, back to your bread and butter on the virtualization piece, John, I'm curious whether, there any questions you either, you got here at the keynote this morning or in general that when you can explain it, they're like, oh, they can have that aha moment as to something they didn't understand about Red Hat virtualization. Yes, one of the things is people are still surprised that we're more than just a Linux company to this day. We have a very broad portfolio that includes Red Hat virtualization. Oh, is that new? And it's five years old at this point. 4.0 came out in August and it was the 10th product release and it represents something that goes cross portfolio. So I think when we explain it in terms of helping them understand that we're interested in making it easily consumable for them to solve problems with, it starts clicking for them. That it's not just about pushing something across the table and here, try this, here, try this, that we're truly interested in helping them solve problems. Yeah, so I've lived in the virtualization community and the Linux communities for a long time. I still find some of those skill sets, there's still some of these gaps. If you take somebody that was like VMware versus somebody that's Linux and Linux has been around longer, but when I hear about all the things that are, you go to the AWS show, you look at what's happening in containers, it seems to rhyme a lot more with what Linux. So Linux skill sets kind of have that long shelf life and people understand what's there. What do you recommend for people if they're not Linux people today or want to learn more? What kind of training do you recommend? What kind of resources do they have available? So there's a multitude of things. I would, there's all sorts of online training now, believe it or not, there's a multitude of things on YouTube for free to get them started. There's a lot of things, online courses available, not just from Red Hat, the Red Hat training is fantastic. If that's not feasible, there's a lot of other LPI, the Linux foundation provides a lot of fantastic training. So there's so much good training out there in order to get the foundational skills to get people started. All right, so John, really appreciate you joining. And for our audience here, if you like events in New England, really excited that the Red Hat Summit is coming back to Boston. They usually alternate West Coast, East Coast, and this is East Coast. And for the first time, they're going to be at what's the BCEC, the Convention Center right near the waterfront, the beautiful location, really good restaurants down at the seafront. And I'm happy to say that the cube will be there. So I'm looking forward to the event which is happening in May, I believe it is. So be sure to check that out and stay with us for more coverage here from the VTUG. You're watching the cube. Since the dawn of the cloud, the cube has been there, connected with executives, practitioners.