 Hi and welcome to another episode of In the Clouds, I'm your host Stu Miniman and we have a special time and special place for today. Yes, we are actually in person in a physical studio not doing it remote so I'm really pleased. I'm here in Raleigh, North Carolina in the shadow of the mothership of Red Hat. Joining me is Chris Morgan, senior director of the customer and field engagement group at Red Hat. Chris, thank you so much for joining. It's great to see in person and great to be here. Yeah, no, hey, Stu, I'm excited too, you know, because, well, like you said, this is the first time this has been used and to be able to do these things live now is pretty amazing. So thanks for having me and being kind of the flagship. Also, you know, when I took the show over from Chris Short, you know, I gave him a nice shout out there. You and Chris are the ones that basically started OpenShift TV. So what, let me just give our audience a little bit, you know, your background, we don't have all time for the full history of your journey, but we're going to talk about cloud stuff a lot. But yeah, no, so, you know, we were, you know, I was super lucky in that, you know, my background, I started back at IBM many years ago as a teenager and who's that company? I had some international business machine is what I reckon they call it completely. And, you know, and so for me, it was kind of coming back after the acquisition, but I had the good fortune to, you know, I was a contributor to open source when I was in college. That's a fun story, maybe for off the stream. And so to come back to Red Hat, then I started working on our management products. And then, you know, this this OpenShift thing came up and I'm super lucky that was one of the original four or five business unit folks along with Joe Fernandes and Grant Shipley, you know, who's just returned, you know, to really be involved. And, you know, Anashesh Badani was leading that group and we worked with Matt Hicks. He was actually the lead engineer on it. So, I mean, it's been kind of a really fun journey to see that. And my first job on the team was helping grow the partner ecosystem. And so I'm hoping we can talk more about that today. Yeah, we're absolutely cloud ecosystem bit, but OpenShift TV, I mean, you know, things shut down a little bit. You know, it's not like Red Hat didn't do videos, but, you know, you and Chris put your heads together and we're like... It was actually the whole team, you know, Sully, Andrew Sullivan on the team was the one that he mentioned. He's like, well, why don't we do something on Twitch? And I was like, what is a Twitch? I mean, I knew what Twitch was, but, you know, so I did what any adult would do at my age and I spoke to my kids and they explained it all to me. And then we, you know, came back and the guys were really all into it because it was such an uncertain time. You know, we wanted a way to show that we were still humans, just like the people out there, even in isolation. And we wanted to kind of create a way for the users in particular, whether, you know, they were community users or existing customers, but people that were interested in our technologies to really connect with us and do some things. And, you know, it's just kind of great to see a girl that have a studio, right? I mean, heck, the fact that Red Hat even has a studio. The first time I went to Westford, Massachusetts, and met Paul and some of the team, I think they had just moved from like a meat shop up there or something. It's really great to see how this continues evolving. We are working on studios. Now, you know, Matt's CEO, he likes doing video. He tells everyone at Red Hat, you know, how to get the right camera and all these things. So we're working on studios in Boston. Some of the teams actually working on that, you know, as we speak. But, you know, so excited to be here. Yeah, this is great studio after, you know, I used to spend a lot of time in studios and in front of the bright lights and everything like that. But let's, you know, we have a little bit of background and the intro. But, you know, this is in the clouds. So right, you have lived, you know, you've got the scars and the history of what comes on. So, you know, we look today at this like cloud native ecosystem, right? You know, we've been going through the Cameron explosion of all the companies that are there and every subsection, there's all these startups, all the big players are heavy there. I mean, Kubernetes is everywhere, right? It wasn't a given that this would be big. We've seen plenty of technologies where the hype gets big and you sit back a couple years later and we're like, wow, how much, you know, I made that, you know, promise of a billion dollar investment. And all of a sudden, like two years later, they're like, where's that company? Oh, they fire half those people in, you know, reorg and everything like that. So bring us in a little bit, you know, we're talking cloud ecosystem. Sure. It has been a journey. So, you know, maybe talk about a few things. Like you said, at the time, I would say, and you remember this, because I think you actually interviewed some folks from there but kind of Heroku maybe was the most well known with regards to managing that user experience and making it simple for developers. And we started OpenShift as a means to show developers how they could consume the Red Hat stack easily. Now, admittedly, where did we start from? An acquisition like everyone else. And I can say that we used absolutely none of that code as you learned this week and some of our breakouts, but it did at least plant the seeds and the ideas. And from that, we grew into what is now OpenShift. But in the first few iterations, you know, an interesting thing, I always tell people, you know, while, you know, Docker made container sexy, you know, REL had been using them for a few years, right? You know, because they're fundamentally a Linux process. And so, you know, what the team did actually led by Matt Hicks, he did the coding for it. We knew we had to get some economies of scale. And so we did this first version of OpenShift that was based on REL containers and securing those as best that we could. And then we had a pluggable system we called a cartridge. You know, believe it or not, you know, for the kids out there, if you've ever used the Nintendo or your parents still have theirs, you used to use a cartridge for everything and even Atari back before that. So we kind of played off of that. And that's how the original ISV ecosystem was started. As you can imagine, the problem with that is, well, that was just a Red Hat standard. While it's an upstream project, it's still just us. And so it was exciting when what I would say Docker's contribution to what is now this Kubernetes ecosystem that we took advantage of was they made, you know, plugging things into the system and made the containers just easier to work with and deal with. And, you know, it has been a journey on that. And starting from that idea of, you know, we've been a Linux company, and will likely always be a Linux company. Our containers are Linux, Linux are containers as the t-shirts show. It's great to, you know, see where we can take that further, right? You know, I think you and I were even speaking earlier today, I've always looked at OpenShift and the way I even explained it to partners is think of it as nothing more than a better way, more easier way for you to use real. You know, I apologize to any real purists out there. But, you know, one of the first things a newbie to real does is set enforce zero to disable SE Linux. But you get the advantages of that security with OpenShift without having to do that. All right, so it's funny. I'm thinking about like the cartridge analogy. And I think back to, you know, I played on the game systems that had cartridges. And one of the problems was like, Oh, you know, I'll date myself, you know, oh, you got the Atari system. Oh, the new Atari system comes out. Oh my gosh, none of those cartridges work with the old ones. Or, you know, it's Nintendo versus Sega versus something else. None of those work across platform containers in Kubernetes. First of all, it opened up a broad platform for a lot of applications. And it changed the dynamic when it came to the ISV standpoint. Because if I look at the ecosystem now, one of the things we talked about, you know, operators, which the core rest people started, right, it's now open source. If I build an operator, you talked about making really easy, but it's it's Kubernetes there. So not just works on OpenShift, you know, you change your Tanzu, XKS, any of those other things there, I can take there there. So maybe talk to that that shift from the ecosystem, because Red Hat has played, you know, an important role not to get everybody on Red Hat, but to grow that that ecosystem. Yeah, so I think what happened, we'll start, you said a lot of things in there. So I'll kind of pick them apart a little bit if I may. The Kubernetes piece, the reason for me personally, everyone at Red Hat will have their opinion on it was, you know, Red Hat excels at taking communities that maybe already exist and making them even better. Right. If you look at we didn't invent Linux, you could argue we made it pretty good. Right. It's to say the least. We didn't invent Kubernetes. You know, that's the good folks at Google and, you know, and but they asked us to join them. And we did. Right. And our contributions as a company, and there's been so many people that have contributed to it. It was that that piece was the big change. Right. Is instead of going to the ecosystem and saying, hey, this is a Red Hat thing, we were able to truly say it was a community thing. And while we were obviously one of the most major contributors, it wasn't just us and then hoping to get people along. And so that really impacted all the different egos. And we talked about ISVs, right, your cartridges. Now, I thought you were going to talk about blowing into the cartridge when it went and load. But, you know, we, we essentially were now able to say, well, hey, this is a community. And we're using this standard that you're now used to with regards to the container runtime, right, because the original runtime was even the open source Docker version in Kubernetes. And that caused then the SI, right, solutions integrators, and then some of the regional SI's. And then, you know, we still have partners even in those cartridge days, but it was just a little tougher, you know. And I do have to, you know, point out the more successful partners we've had that they have been long term with us, you know, and they've seen that journey. And I think they've appreciated it more and they knew we didn't switch directions that quickly. You know, I think, you know, Joe Dickman at the Zuri, right. So Joe, this is for you. He, you know, he, he always likes to say he was the first open shift partner and he was right. He took a risk. And now it's paying some dividends for him because he and his company are doing quite well with even the new stuff. So yeah, no, it was great. Actually, I saw Joe down in New York City. He was there with us at the Amazon show, which, you know, you talk about things different. Remember early days, ah, you know, Kubernetes, well, it's Google's Hail Mary to make sure that multi cloud actually might become a thing. Of course, you need to be able to run multiple places because otherwise we will all live in Amazon. Now, Amazon, you know, a lot of us partner with Amazon, they're part of it. So let's talk about how things have changed. You know, I think back, you know, one of the things I've spent, you know, some time is I talked to some of those early customers in those early partners. There was a lot of, you know, chewing glass and, you know, bleeding edge things of the immaturity of the ecosystem. Boy, a lot has changed in the last, you know, I mean, we know how fast things are changing, but things have changed a lot. So maybe give us, if you could, a compare contrast of, Hey, if I looked at the space two or three years ago, what's it mean for a partner? What's it mean for a customer? So I think that's actually a great question. It actually has evolved the same way as the technology itself. I think two or three years ago, we still had to do a lot of explaining to people what even a container is, right? It's it wasn't as universal as at least we at Red Hat would like to have believed it was. You know, now I think that's a little better. You know, and so I think starting with that, that was that was a big challenge back then that if you would have looked at it. And then there was still, you know, a lot of echoes, I'll call it from, you know, the cloud foundries and even Heroku and then, you know, masos, right, was was still trying to make a plate, you know, probably closer to three or four years ago on some of this stuff. And then, you know, as but we were doing Kubernetes, right? And we'd been doing it for quite some time by then. And so it was really that was the inflection point. We no longer have to convince people Kubernetes. I mean, it won, right? Like Kubernetes is a project that is a de facto way to to manage containers at scale, right? You know, there's several, there's its own ecosystem built around it. If any of you have ever seen the cloud native compute foundation poster with all the projects now that are built off of it, it's it's awesome to see, right? So I think now the challenge, particularly for the ecosystem and even for us at Red Hat is, well, when and where do we place our bets, right? And and when I think about the ecosystem, I look for, if I'm thinking of ISVs, what are those technologies that will complement, you know, helping secure that platform, helping make it more stable, more manageable, all the pieces around it, right? We don't really look on the partner side, help us make, you know, core Kubernetes better, right? I mean, I think our track records speaks for itself there. But when we can find those partners that really can enhance the value of it and it's mutually beneficial on that way because maybe there's customer demand for it. It's great. And then on the on the services side, you know, what's really changed is the fact that they are no longer having to make as many choices either. Now, they do have to, if you consider EKS, a distro, right? They do have to decide which distros you want to bet on. But that's also going back to your cartridge analogy. To me, one of the biggest benefits of OpenShift is we're consistent. Actually, that's been always one of the the biggest benefits of Red Hat is we are literally everywhere. And we treat all the hyperscalers as first class citizens. And we can give you, as you consume our technologies, a very consistent experience. So I don't have to worry is this an Atari 2600 cartridge or an Nintendo cartridge? It's it's just OpenShift. Yeah, it's always it's always interesting when you look at the, you know, adoption trend of technology, you get a certain hype. And then there's that, you know, oh, maybe it's matured. Maybe it's gotten boring. It's good when technology still get boring. You know, we look at this space. I had Mike Barrett on the program when we had the last release and talked about like, oh, well, we went from four releases, three releases a year. Things have slowed down, right? And Mike's like, oh, my God, have you seen our roadmap? Have you seen the hundreds of things we're working on? You know, we're having debates inside. You know, we spend 90 minutes explaining what comes in a new a new release of OpenShift, and we can't even get everything in that, you know, long period because, you know, hey, can we do like, you know, the six hour marathon of it and nobody's going to watch it. So that is a great shameless plug though for OpenShift TV, right? You know, we it was always ironic to me going back to my time here that I'm like, why we're open source. Why are we hiding our roadmap? We should just do it for the world that at any time, right? You know, and so that's actually been great to see. But like you said, we have a hard time. You know, we're both involved with that. It's luckily I heard where we were when it comes to security of OpenShift. Security of OpenShift. So yeah, we will. I can tell you right now, obviously, we have the Stagrox acquisition ACS now, and we are that is matured enough where it's it's more of a complete part, if you will, of OpenShift. You know, it's been a journey as you can think before. But even before ACS, I just I hearken back to my SE Linux joke, right? But folks say the operating system doesn't matter, doesn't it? I mean, at the end of the day, we were securing things all the way down at the kernel level for years, right? You know, Dan Walsh, you know, was one of the primary engineers that created that thing and was a red hatter and then worked very closely with the NSA and other, you know, agencies that are three letters that care a little bit about security to say the least. And so for us, what ACS became was where can we extend those concepts, not only within Kubernetes, but even a little bit outside of Kubernetes and bring in other pieces to the security ecosystem as well. Right, you know, it only matters, you know, if the application, the data, you know, the business processes running on those things matter. If those things can all go away, you know, you might have some cheaper alternatives. So, yeah. Yeah. And so security is interesting. You say that that was one of the first areas that we looked at for the ecosystem, you know, was we really wanted to make sure we knew what we have. I mean, now the I have one customer tell me that they consider the new SC Linux or security context, which was contribution that we originally made that used to be only an open shift, but commitment of the source we've made it available. It's all the way upstream and could itself. And so, you know, but it what's next, right? So to Mike's point, the things in the roadmap really are about enabling all these things on top of Kubernetes and around Kubernetes, you know, and we spend a lot of time there. And I know I work closely with, you know, our partner team, you know, we have a partner team by Stephanie Churus. She was one of the first guests on this show. I'm so thankful to her from back in the day when we were trying to get up and shift TV started. And so she runs the whole ecosystem now across everything. And so it's been really great to be able to have these offerings for partners that maybe it's stuff we don't have that we should have. You know, they get to innovate. I think the sign of a good platform to me is when people start using it in ways that we never imagined. And I think we are just now scratching the surface of that. All right. So Chris, you talked a little bit about your history. You talked about the partner piece. Maybe bring it to today. So, you know, you the reason we're actually sitting here for the first time in a couple of years, you brought your whole organ which disclaimer, I report to Chris. So, you know, I know we were all first of all thrilled to like, you know, be like, oh, wait, I'm not hearing you through your super nice microphone or, you know, your mediocre lighting in the home. We're actually here in 3D meals together, having a beverage together. And we spent some time working and everything. But explain what we were talking about where, you know, your organization fits in, you know, that journey we are going on from the ecosystem standpoint. So the great thing, first of all, I agree with you, man, it just it was so nice to party like it was 2019 again, you know, to actually be able to see people. And we got a lot of work done as well, I think. But when I think about what our role in the ecosystem is, it's to continue to be that push, right? We don't sit in the organization as part of the CTO's office, right? That's really forward looking and research. But we do keep an eye, right? You know, everybody knows Burr Sutter and, you know, Burr and I try to chat at least a couple of times a month, then I pick his brain is to some things that are happening as well. And we we want to kind of bridge the gap between that and things that I would argue, and it's a product of success. We'd consider institutional knowledge now, you know, I don't have to explain to most techies and admins what a pod is anymore, right? And what, you know, any of these basics are. And so now where we want to fit is what can we do to a enable the partner ecosystem working through the other tools that mentioned Stephanie Cheers's organization, because she's got an army of people to help with some of this. But we always want to try to help be the canonical source on our team to give them the information, right? We sit with product management and we sit with engineering. And we like to take those things and, you know, make them more consumable. You had Mike Baradon. And as you're well aware, I think, Mike, I feel like I'm being prone to hyperbole here, but I feel like sometimes there's 300 product managers, right? And so bringing all of that together and understanding and prioritizing, that's really our job, right? Can we make it consumable to the masses, particularly the technical masses? Going back to the history of OpenShift TV is we wanted to give a voice potentially because it is a live stream, not a recording webinar to folks to really engage with some experts. And so as far as today, what we're really driving the ecosystem, I feel like is, hey, we're here. We've done this now for a really long time. Tell us what you have. Like, what is what is the what is your value? What do you do for your business and how are you making your business successful? Let us instead of, hey, do something with us and let's just do it together. Let's work and help make us both more successful. Like it's an actual partnership. I mean, I'll be fully transparent. There were always times that it would feel like one partner was a customer and the other the vendor, not an actual partnership. And I think now what's happening is their true partnerships going forward. Chris, I think that's a great place to leave it. We've got lots of the OpenShift TV, you know, Andrew Sullivan Sully asking OpenShift admin. I'm on your team doing some of the thought leadership executive interviews here within the cloud. So I'll give you the final, you know, final word here. Yes. For me, success will be defined. So Matt Hicks actually asked me this question randomly. I think we were in Orlando at a tech exchange internal talking about training our internal essays. And he just he asked me, said, what does success look like to you? And even the Shesh has asked me the same thing. Shesh Badani. And I give him both the same answer. It's when we actually don't have to talk about OpenShift. Just like honestly, we like to talk about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but people just presume it's there. Right. And it's there and it's making it work. And so when we think about the partner ecosystem and growing it and for mutual customers, we want to be everywhere. I mean, we're in the space station. I mean, come on, like how many companies have their software in, you know, the International Space Station? I love that is. If you check out the in the clouds playlist, you will find that Chris. Thank you so much. Awesome to be here with you in person to see everyone. We thank you, of course, for joining regularly scheduled programming every two weeks, 11 a.m. on Thursday. I'm Stu Miniman, as always. Thank you for joining us on your journey in the clouds.