 Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2023 and AnsibleFest. Paul Gillan here with Rob Stretch A. And it's all about cloud at this conference. And I can tell you that as a journalist for years, when I have had a cloud-related topic to cover, one of the first people I call is our next guest. And that's David Lenthigam, who is the Chief Cloud Strategy Officer at Deloitte. Columnist for InfoWorld, author of several books about cloud computing, including the new one, The Insider's Guide to Cloud Computing. And let's start today. First of all, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. No, I'm happy to spend some time with you here today. It's a exciting place here at Red Hat Summit. I mean, lots of new innovations going on and really just excited to be back at conferences. I really missed doing this stuff over the years virtually. So love going here, meeting the people, understanding what their issues are, and really kind of getting down to what the essence and the pragmatic essence is for leveraging this technology. We've been hearing that a lot about just being glad to be here. Tell us about the new book. What does The Insider's Guide to Cloud Computing about? Well, basically, it's like the InfoWorld blog I do, talking about very pragmatic uses of technology and how to use it successfully. But, you know, taking a very candid approach in how you do it and how you look at cloud providers and leverage multi-cloud and how you do security and how you think about sustainability, even how you think about hiring people. So what I tried to do is kind of give a soup to nuts, I guess, before I check off the planet, as to what everybody needs to know to be successful with cloud computing, because I just want people to be successful with it. I think it's really interesting that you use the word multi-cloud because, you know, in full disclosure, I was at Amazon for a little bit. So when I was there, I was told by, I won't say who, one of the executives, not to use the word hybrid or multi-cloud, for that matter. I think when you start to look at it since leaving and starting to look around the industry, there is this, I'm going to use the right cloud and the right service for the right thing and, you know, whatever that level of effort. One other thing that we've been seeing, and I think there's a little bit, a theme is simplicity. It's still pretty hard. The stack is hard. How do you see that developing and what you're working, when you're building solutions with Red Hat and how does that work when you're trying to make it simple, I guess you could say? Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, complexity is what's limiting movement into cloud, including multi-cloud. The reality is people are either going to do multi-cloud by accident or on purpose, normally by accident because they're going to leverage best of breed technologies, leveraging different cloud providers to allow them to implement the best, more optimized solution. So, complexity is going to be an outcome of that. So what you do is figure out how you simplify complexity, how to remove some of the redundancy, even if you can't physically remove it, how you abstract it by creating a logical layer above the complexity and manage it through those areas. I mean, you guys have talked about super cloud, you know, metacloud really kind of as a concept as everybody's looking out to do that, but the ability to put lots of stuff in a stack that will simplify how we manage the underlying infrastructure. And by the way, it doesn't matter if it's in a public cloud or private cloud or on legacy data centers. We should use the same cross cloud, cross technology, cross platform features to make it happen. How good a job are the third party vendors doing at creating those abstraction layers? I think they're doing a fair job right now. If you think about it, you know, cloud kind of showed up and morphed everything else. Everybody was, you know, thinking about the different public cloud providers out there and companies were looking for the role that they play. That's the role that they play. And so the ability to have this connected tissue and in between these different cloud providers, different technology providers, make them work and play well together really is the problem to solve. And so they're investing in it and they're putting time and money into it like Red Hat. Yeah, I think it's interesting also is that, and you know, leading up to this and we were just chatting, you know, repatriation comes up a lot when I'm talking to people and different customers out there. And one of the things is that a lot of times they're looking to repatriate, to just take out to another cloud. And you said that, again, one of your most read articles of the year was your repatriation one. What are you seeing in your position around repatriation and the reasons why? People are looking to optimize their architecture. As 2022, we saw survey after survey with CIOs and CEOs complaining about the ROI that they were supposed to get from cloud computing and didn't see. So they're looking to optimize those systems or gathering cost metrics from it with BenOpps programs, things like that. So we know how much we're spending. We also know how much the alternatives cost, the ability to kind of move things on premise or even move things to another cloud platform, you know, private cloud platform, edge cloud, micro cloud, those sorts of things are all options to us. So repatriation is not about moving everything back where we found it. It's about finding other platforms that are going to be more cost optimized to meet the needs of the business. And it's fairly simple. And if you look at it, you know, we should have been doing this all along. Instead of making emotional decisions and moving into the cloud, because it seemed like to be the hype thing to do, everybody was doing it, the ability to kind of look at this stuff skeptically and then figure out where the workloads and the data should reside, which is going to bring the most value back to the business. And that's my job as an IT leader. We're seeing companies like Dell and HPE sort of bring the best of the cloud to on-premise infrastructure. What impact do you think that's having on customer decisions now vis-a-vis moving to the cloud? It gives them another alternative. And so in other words, people are going to look around for the best platforms and people are not necessarily biased in moving things to the cloud. We certainly don't recommend that as an IT consultant. In other words, we're trying to find the best platform. It doesn't matter if it runs on this watch or runs on that computer or runs on-premise. The best platform is the best platform. And it's going to provide the most optimized value that able to return again. Most value back to the business. And if that's going to be something that's going to be a hyper-converge infrastructure or some unique data center system that they're moving forward, a co-low provider, a managed service provider, then that's the right answer. We just have to ask the question. Yeah, I think it's interesting that people are still, I think it was, again, go there. It's almost like you have to pass the bill to know what's in the bill kind of concept with everybody going, war all in on cloud. What are, you know, you wrote a blog, I guess on Deloitte's site recently talking about three different points. What were kind of those three points that you were trying to drive across or three themes, I guess you could say? Well, it's about value at the end of the day. And I've written about this many times. It never was about OPEX versus CAPEX or even operational savings as a core metric. It's about the ability for using technology, whatever technology that is to return the most value back to the business. We just recently did a survey and looked at lots of organizations that have moved to the cloud and done digital transformations. And what we found that almost per a company that we can define huge value that was created in making these moves. And that's kind of the way in which we should evaluate it. So number one, instead of modernization, it's about ability about, you know, leveraging innovative technology. Number two, it's really kind of making investment in the technology with different metrics that return investment. We're going by quarter on quarter growth and cost savings by that. We're missing the mark. We're about creating innovative value within the organization. And number three, it's about changing the culture within the organization around innovation. And so they kind of move toward the value of creativity and innovative platforms versus this, we got to do something fairly quickly in these fire drill to fire drill things which got us in trouble, I think. And I think we got to stop doing it systemically as a business. You've worked with Red Hat for over a decade now. Yeah, yeah. And Red Hat, of course, is in somewhat of a unique position because they have partnerships with all the major hyperscalers. What, and they have this strong emphasis on openness, what impact do you think they've had, if any, on the behavior of the big three cloud providers? Well, I think they enable the cloud providers. In other words, the cloud providers to the point you just made, they don't necessarily go to the fringes. They focus on the walled garden that they provide, which is fine. You know, I would do that if I owned a cloud. I would focus on basically just providing the services I'm able to provide. So Red Hat and other companies like Red Hat has a connective tissue, like I mentioned earlier, to enable those clouds to reach out and communicate and work better with other cloud providers. Again, a multi-cloud configuration or even existing on-premise systems. So if you look at what Red Hat does, I mean, they fill in all the spaces that need to be filled in and they should be applauded for that. And by the way, they do so with open source technology and they work with a hugely passionate community like you see here, a hugely passionate community of developers and users. And I think that's really kind of the winning formula. So we're working with Red Hat for the last 10 years because we view them as having some hugely innovative technology that are going to be more valuable as time progresses. So interesting topic that's come up and obviously with chat GPT and everything like that. One of the things that I found interesting and I'm wondering if you're running into it is that the cost of running these LLMs and to train them to get them up and running and just even keep them running is pretty big for people like open AI. And I mean, they have the investment from Microsoft so it makes it a little bit easier. How are you seeing the questions that are coming from your customers back to that? And because I know Red Hat talked about their OpenShift AI earlier today. Yeah, the questions are, how can I run generative AI and not go bankrupt? And so if I'm going to run it on the cloud those are hugely hog-ish things. They consume a lot of processing power and petabytes of data. If I have to pay for that infrastructure whether it's on-premise or in the cloud how do I do that in the most cost efficient cost effective way? And the big thing I tell them is number one we need to find valid use cases for this stuff. We just can't throw it out because it's cool. I love using chat TTP too as well writing thank you notes and birthday cards and things like that. But if you put it into a real business scenario it's going to cost real money and it's going to come back. So it's the pragmatic use of the technology and also the pragmatic platforming of the technology. So it's going to cost the least and provide the most value. And I think that's the interesting thing that people, and you mentioned FinOps as well and I think it's a how do you understand and having built out a SaaS delivered service we went into, we happened to be on for this particular part of it on Amazon and we were using Cost Explorer and I had to explain how to actually look at that because it's so confusing. Are you finding that that is one of the reasons why people are looking towards platforms like a Red Hat is that it's more simplistic in how you're getting it versus some of the complexity of all the cloud providers for that matter. That's a huge issue to it. It's more simplistic. Many instances it's going to be near free and leveraging the stuff and your ability to use it wisely isn't necessarily going to come back on these huge licensing fees that come in with some of these other providers and those things are worth paying if they're going to provide the value back. But I like the idea that we're making simple things simple and if you look at what Red Hat stuff they get down to the functionality I think businesses are looking for. And so if you look at the pragmatic function of what something like a middleware layer would do you know they provide all aspects of it but you know it's putting all the other cushy things that may not be needed by the enterprise which people may not be looking for anymore they just want something that's going to compensate the job it's abstracted, it's hidden behind the scenes we don't want it we don't see it anyway and if we never hear from it again that's perfect because it's doing its job. Makes total sense. I just asked Chapit GPT for some good questions for David Lenthig. He gave me 15 of them. Oh cool. What are the best practices for designing and implementing a scalable and resilient cloud architecture? Yeah I could tell that Chapit GP wrote that mile wide and an inch deep. Yeah the best practices would be number one make sure you're implementing just the minimal viable hardware software that you need. You provide scalability through the elasticity of cloud computing scalability and elasticity as needed and that's probably the best answer to that question. Yeah I think it's interesting to see we saw this again we were at a open source summit out in Vancouver two weeks ago and before that we were at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon over in the EU. I think it's really open source, it has won. I mean it has won. I mean even we had Jeremy Winters from Azure on earlier today and I mean he's been there and I can't even remember how many decades now at Microsoft but in the last 10 years even there with Satya has changed. Are you seeing that customers are prioritizing open source now more so than ever? They've always liked open source and it's been kind of a growing love affair I think for the last 15 years and for the reasons that we've just discussed. I know the value of it and it's the ability to have control and have a work with a consortium of people who are invested in owning the stuff. So I think that's going to be fine. The cloud providers are going to make bank whether people moved to open source proprietary technology because they're going to run it and get fees for running the infrastructure. But enterprises seem to trust it more. Enterprises seem to be more comfortable with implementing it and it even can cause some issues because if you're only considering open source solutions there may be some other viable solutions that are not open source that should be considered as well. I always put those on everybody's radar screen but it's something that many enterprises are just using as a core effect to how they're picking technology. We go on for another hour but we do have, we are out of time. David Lintekum always a straight shooter always something smart to say. Thanks so much for joining us here on theCUBE. Well it's my pleasure inviting me back. We sure will. We'll be back from Red Hat Summit 2023. Paul Gillin with Rob Stretch A. See you in a minute on theCUBE.