 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. We're not face-to-face this year, we're in virtual remote mode. This is theCUBE virtual, obviously it's AnsibleFest 2020 virtual. We had a great panel of experts and leaders at Red Hat and Ansible. I want to introduce them, Dave Lindquist, General Manager and Vice President of Engineering of Hybrid Cloud Management at Red Hat. Joe Fernandez, Vice President and General Manager of the Core Cloud Platforms at Red Hat and Tom Anderson, Vice President at Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, the big news and feature of this event. Tom, great to see you, Joe and David, thanks for coming on. Great to be here. You know, every year I love talking about Red Hat because I remember going back a few years ago, Arvin was from IBM, was on at Red Hat Summit in San Francisco and you can see the twinkle in his eye. This was three, four years ago. Cloud Native was really gearing up and now it's kind of mainstream. Last year at AnsibleFest, all the buzz was collaboration, collections, and you start to see that integration piece kicking in. And this year at the event, the big story is the same. More collections, more integrations, a lot of collaboration around code. Content equals code. So it really points to the trend with Kubernetes of multi-cloud, multi-cluster. So the first question for you guys is, why would anyone want to deploy multiple clusters simultaneously and why is multi-cluster such a big deal? Tom, we'll start with you. Great, okay. Yeah, so why is multi-cluster such a big deal? Basically, Kubernetes and our OpenShift container platform have now become a strategic part of our customers' environments. Their infrastructure for building and deploying Cloud Native applications on. And as that, as becoming a strategic part of that, when you're deploying production applications, you're going to need all kinds of things like scale-out, redundancy, cloud location for access to different cloud provider locations for application requirements and whatnot. So there are a bunch of requirements for why customers would deploy OpenShift in a multi-cluster way. And maybe I'll turn it over to Joe Fernandez a little bit because he's got a lot of background on the OpenShift side of this. Yeah, thanks Tom. Yeah, so I mean, you know, as Tom mentioned, a number of reasons why customers may deploy or need to deploy more than one Kubernetes cluster. So within a cluster, you can certainly have multiple applications, multiple developers, multiple teams work. But as you start to scale your usage, you know, you may want additional clusters. It could be because you want to separate your production environments from your Dev and test environments. It could be for capacity, right? You have more development teams or more production environments than you want to sort of tie to a single cluster. Then you start expanding out into locations, right? Maybe you started in the data center, then you started doing deployments to one public cloud than to other public clouds. And then that's only going to grow. We see more and more customers deploying multi-cloud strategies. And then the new thing right now that everybody wants to talk to us about is edge. And as you get into edge deployments, now those, the number of clusters could really explode into the hundreds or thousands. And so it all points back to, you need a sane way to manage across all of these clusters regardless of where they run and regardless of how many you have. And that's really what we've been working on with the Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes. What's the big draw? What's drawing the customers in with multi-cluster and multi-cloud? Honestly, the multi-cloud makes a lot of sense. You have multiple clouds. Sounds easier just saying it than doing it. But what is it about multi-cluster and multi-cloud that's drawing customers and people into this concept? Yes, I can start. I mean, I think what's drawing customers in is the need, you know, the desire to have sort of a common abstraction for the applications that's consistent regardless of where they happen to run, right? So making sure that the developers don't have to worry about what infrastructure the applications are landing on and they have that consistent experience that abstracts their applications away from that infrastructure. So that gives the developers more flexibility, but it's also about flexibility and agility for those infrastructure owners, right? Because they too want to make decisions on where stuff runs, you know, not because they're particularly tied to an infrastructure, but based on things like cost or security or other concerns. And so these are all drivers for multi-cluster, multi-cloud strategies. And, you know, I think our hybrid cloud strategy at Red Hat really hits the mark to address those needs. Well, you guys had great performance. We've been following the past few years, just the open shift and beyond kind of the whole Red Hat and Ansible specifically too is doing well in the marketplace. So congratulations. David, I want to ask you about the management piece. This comes up over and over again. You know, it's all good. You have the abstraction layer. You got all kinds of new sets of services, but multi-cluster management is not trivial. There's challenges for ops and automation teams. Could you share your perspective on how you guys are looking at the multi-cluster management? Sure, sure. The first thing we saw, and this kind of follows on the points that Joe and Tom are making, is that as customers start embracing the development with containers and leveraging Kubernetes, you start finding that they're putting up clusters across their data centers, across cloud, to support different parts of the lifecycle of development or supporting their own production environments or distributed workloads across clouds, across the data centers itself. The challenge is that operations and management run into insecurity in particular is how do you start managing the clusters to their lifecycle? It's easy to put them up to provision them quickly, but how do you update and upgrade those? How do you make sure they're compliant with your various regulatory compliance like PCI, HIPAA or the various federal standards? How do you make sure that compliance is adhered to across and security across those clusters as well as the applications themselves? How do you manage the applications to their lifecycle? How do you have deployment policies? So the challenges for ops and automation and security are to have a consistent policy-driven way to take care of the clusters across these hybrid environments and making sure they adhere to the compliance and security of the enterprise. Tom, multi-cluster deployments is a big part of this integration, we heard a little bit of obviously compliance and governance is huge. You know, IT's been living this world of policies and governance, but when you start moving fast on these new cutting edge services that are providing a lot of value, integration into existing IT infrastructure is important with clusters. How do you view that? Because this is where I think maybe collections and other things are, because it's an indicator of what's happening. Can you give your thoughts on the customers out there who want to do multiple clusters for all the benefits, but then go look at it integrated into existing IT infrastructure? Yeah, absolutely. So that's what's happening right now as Kubernetes and as OpenShift has become a strategic platform for our customers. The idea of, I'm going to say kind of normalizing the operations of that platform as part of a greater IT ecosystem has become a challenge for them. And for the most part, they've already automated security, network, provisioning, deployment, application updates using the Ansible Automation Platform. And so it only makes sense that as Kubernetes and as OpenShift becomes a strategic platform for them, they want to use that same language, that same toolset, that same automation fabric, if you will, to integrate the applications that are running on OpenShift with the rest of the environment. So for example, when I add a new node to a cluster or more capacity to a cluster or to clusters, I probably want to update my systems of record, right? My CMDBs or my ITSM systems, when I deploy a new app or make an update to an app on a cluster or across clusters, I'm probably going to want to update my load balancer to be able to direct traffic correctly to that. And that load balancer probably isn't running. My enterprise load balancer is kind of platform independent. So I need to be able to update that load balancer to properly direct traffic while IT has already automated that function using Ansible. So by creating the collections that we have created for OpenShift and for Kubernetes, it makes it much easier for our customers to be able to just plug that in and adapt that to their existing automation infrastructure. So now it just becomes part of their overall IT environment. What are some of the, just a follow-up real quick if you don't mind, what are some of the challenges your customers are, you're hearing from your customers around containerization and that growing space. I just talked to the IDC research analyst earlier in another virtual cube session where she says, roughly their estimate is five to 10% of enterprises are containerized, which is huge growth opportunities. The headroom in containers is massive. So what are some of the challenges? Is it easy to get started? This seems to be a nice opportunity for you guys. What's your take on that? Yeah, I think the way of looking at it with all that growth space, it's also the speed at which Kubernetes adoption and containerized application adoption is happening. And so IT organizations are having to respond faster than they ever have before as this environment grows and it is a multi-cloud environment. They have Kubernetes OpenShift running on-prem in the cloud, multiple data centers as both Joe and Dave have said, and it becomes critical that they automate that correctly and accurately to ensure security, consistency, performance, availability, all of the other things that drive the requirement for automation, standardization, all of those things that drive the requirements for automation are applicable to Kubernetes environments and containerized environments as well, except they're moving and expanding faster. So teams have to respond quicker to the need. Joe, what's your take on this? I mean, to me, I'm in the glass half full. I think I've seen containers be great and maybe I'm looking at the early adopters, but those numbers seem a little bit low to me. What does that mean to you? I mean, more people are now getting up to speed. Is it a tipping point? It just seems a little bit low. And David, if you want to comment too, I think this is an important number there. Joe, what's your take? Yeah, I mean, I think the rate represents an opportunity but I see the growth as having been tremendous even in just the first few years. But to get to that broader market, we need to continue making it easier for customers to bring their applications to this new environment, to run it on existing infrastructure. And ultimately for our customers, that means an evolution, right? An evolution of how they are going to manage those applications, how they're going to build and deploy them. And so with the integration of OpenShift and our advanced container management platforms with Ansible, we can bring that automation to the mix to sort of tie those together, right? So to tie in the existing compute infrastructure, to tie in storage and networking and configure those as needed. And then as Tom mentioned, all those other systems, whether it's an IT service management system, something like a ServiceNow or other ticketing systems or other enterprise systems that exist, that you just can't ignore, right? Because the more you try to go against the grain and do something different, that even harder it'll be, right? So we need to help customers evolve to take advantage of cloud and cloud native approaches. And the solutions that we're bringing to market are all about enterprise Kubernetes, enterprise container platforms. The combination of those technologies with something like Ansible really helps pave the path for the next phase of growth that we're expecting. So ready for prime time right now. Right. David, your thoughts real quick on this containerization upside. Yeah, real quick. The development organizations, development teams have picked up on containers very rapidly. Everybody is leveraging containers when they develop new applications or modernize the existing applications. So what we found is that a lot of the folks that pushed out very quickly, some greenfield apps, that's the 5, 10, 15, 20% that you're seeing occur. What started getting complex is how you really scale this to your enterprise. How do you really run this at scale from management operations and security perspective? OpenShift is critical. That gives a consistent platform across hybrid cloud environments. What we're doing with ACM and the advanced cluster management brings in the security and compliance. And what you'll see through AnsibleFest, what we're doing with Ansible is then how do we then hook these environments right into all the existing IT environments? That's to me what's critical to really bring this to scale to the enterprise. Yeah, and I think this really, to me the number points to exactly what you guys said. Ready for prime time, scales there, and the demands there. And I think Tom and Joe, I want to ask you specifically the relationship between OpenShift and Ansible. But before that, I remember what year it was, we were doing a CUBE event at, I think it might have been OpenStack all the way back to the day. But I remember OpenShift, and there was a moment where OpenShift adopted containers and then next year, Kubernetes. And I remember talking to the team that's saying, this is going to be a big bet for OpenShift. Looked like it was a good bet. Paid out real well, congratulations. And it was good, you guys stayed the course, but you made it easier. One of the things was that the complaint at the time was they didn't want Kubernetes to be the next Hadoop. Easy to use, but gets out of control. Not to mention they're comparable, but Hadoop had that problem of it was easy to open source but then it was hard to manage. So OpenShift really took advantage of that. You guys, I think did a good job on that. But now you got Ansible winning the game on developers on easy to deploy. So as that scales up, automation's there. So I'd like to hear you guys talk about the connection between OpenShift and Ansible and how that expands the scope of what both products can do for customers. Yeah, maybe I'll give it a shot first and then let Joe go after me, which is, look, here's what we have is we have lots and lots and lots of customers. Red Hat customers that are OpenShift users and that are Ansible users, right? So we have this two large pools. They also represent two very large and vibrant open source community projects. The Ansible project and the Kubernetes project are two hugely popular vibrant communities. And so it just made sense to kind of be a catalyst in those communities to bring those two things together to work together to the benefit of our customers and to kind of capture the innovation that's going on upstream in the communities. So we decided to get really kind of serious about the integration of these two platforms and integrated Ansible in a native way on Kubernetes so that OpenShift and Kubernetes operators as well as application developers could take advantage of that integration without having to learn something new or foreign in order to be able to do it. So it was a native integration using operators which is the right way to integrate with the Kubernetes platform with OpenShift in particular. And so that's the way we kind of brought it together to the benefit of our customers. Our customers are, like I said, normalizing the operations of OpenShift as a strategic part of their infrastructure, deploying production applications and want to be able to tie that into their other systems and other parts of their infrastructure both from an app deployment process as well as from an infrastructure deployment and management process. So it only made sense that actually, our customers have been asking us for this and talking to us about this. So it only kind of made perfect sense to kind of get out there and do that, get the communities together innovating and then then take that innovation out for our customer. Joe? Yeah, the only thing I'd add to that, there's really two specific personas out here, right? When you think of, there's the IT operations and infrastructure teams, they own those clusters, the provisioning, the configuration, the management of those clusters and with ACM, with Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, we have now an interface that they can use to see and manage the life cycle of all their clusters. So through that, we can integrate Ansible as another tool, automation tool in their portfolio to do things that need to happen when those clusters first get configured or when those clusters get updated and so forth. So that they need to update an ITSM system or configure a network or do whatever it needs. So you have Ansible automation scripts that can be plugged in at the appropriate time in that cluster's life cycle to do that. On the other side, you have the developer and DevOps teams that are consumers of these platforms, right? And what they care about is the applications that they're building, but there's a lot that goes into building it, right? There's the source code management systems, there's the CI systems, there's the CD systems, there's the test environments and stage and prod. And so there's a lot of moving parts. And again, and then there's the services themselves that they're configuring. So you have, or building configuring, you have Ansible again, ready to sort of take on some of those tasks, automation tasks that go beyond, what Kubernetes is focused on or what you're trying to do with OpenShift. And again, doing it at the appropriate time in the life cycle, all tied in through advanced cluster management, which can actually see out to all those clusters and be in that sort of application, a deployment workflow across those clusters. So those are sort of some of the specific areas and how they pertain to those specific personas that are driving the activity. What's interesting, that's automation piece really is key across multiple environments. That's, we've heard that from some of your customers because you got now private clouds out there, you got large scale. But Dave, I want to ask you, what makes advanced cluster management a natural fit with OpenShift and Ansible? What's your take? Yeah, good question, John. First, ACM is purpose built for the Kubernetes environment. It's a cloud native management system. And as we said earlier, we really focused on managing the cluster life cycles, managing the security compliance and managing applications deployed into these environments. So it's a very natural extension of OpenShift to be able to manage OpenShift, multiple clusters of OpenShift in hybrid environments within your data center, cross data centers, cross clouds and the combination. So very natural fit with OpenShift. As we've been all talking about, as we looked at how did we then bring OpenShift and these resources into closer through automation to many of the other parts of your IT environment, that made it natural from ACM to call out into the playbooks of Ansible. So just a simple example, and I think we circled around this a few times. You're deploying a cluster or you're deploying say an application to that cluster. You need to configure that into a firewall maybe, configure it into a load balancer, maybe register it with a service management system. That all those calls, they come out through policy from ACM over into Ansible to take advantage of the wealth of playbooks that are available in Ansible to perform those operations for the security, network, service management, storage, et cetera. Real quick follow up for you is how was bringing your ACM team and product into Red Hat changed the scope and approach of what you're trying to do? Yeah, well, let me say first of all, it's been a great experience bringing the team into Red Hat. The environment, the open culture, it's really been invigorating for the whole team. Also getting much, much closer into the open communities and open sourcing ACM and doing development in the open has really brought us closer really to users, the ecosystem, the communities accelerating our delivery quality, as well as really getting much more closer insights, getting insights into what's happening in the community, what's happening with the users. So it's really, it's been a great experience all the way around. Joe and Tom, a quick comment. What do you think people should pay attention to this year at Ansible Fest 2020? What's the big story? Obviously we're in a pandemic, we're going to come out of the pandemic. People want to have a growth strategy that has the right projects on the right rails. They want to either maybe downplay some of the projects that maybe not be a fit that were exposed during the pandemic, best practices that are emerging, shifting left for security as one, seeing remote workers. People have kind of had a wake up call on cloud native being relevant for the modern app. Now they're running as fast as they can to build the infrastructure. And guess what? People are not actually in the workplaces. The workforce, the workplace has all changed. Can you guys share your expertise over the years on what is the best practice and approach to take? Because still the clock's ticking. Yeah, from my perspective and from an Ansible perspective here, we had always been about kind of automate everything, right? Automate every task that is automatable, right? A repeatable task, automate it. A repeatable task, automate it. And over the past couple of years, we've really been focused on automation across teams by using Ansible content, the actual automation code, if you will, itself to bring teams together and to cross teams and cross functions. To not just focused on what a network operations person or a network engineer needs to do in their day-to-day job, but connect that to what a security operations person is doing day-to-day in their job in terms of threat detection and intrusion response or intrusion detection and threat response and connecting those two teams together via automation to make both of them more responsive and more effective, right? So we've been on this bandwagon for the past couple of years around Ansible content and now Ansible Collections and Automation Hub to try and accelerate the way these teams can collaborate together. The pandemic and the pressures that put on the system with remote users and having to do things in a different way only exacerbated or only kind of enhanced the requirement for that collaboration at Automation Across Teams. So in a lot of ways, the past six, seven months both for our Ansible business, as well as for the way our customers have been using the technology, has really been an accelerator for that kind of cross-team collaboration, our subscription business, and our Ansible consumption. Yeah, well, I said it last year in person when we were in Atlanta for Ansible Fest 2019. A platform approach is a great way to go. You start out as a tool, you become a platform, you guys are doing the work over there. I really appreciate it and I want to call that out because I think it's worth calling out. Joe, you know, cloud platforms. Cloud is certainly an enabler, Red Hat and OpenShift has been a great success and only has got more work to do. People still got to build out these platforms and you're seeing private cloud not going away. I mean, we just had a conversation with OpenStack and you guys got customers with a lot of private cloud everywhere. You got private, you got hybrid, you got multi and you got public. It's pretty crazy. What's your thoughts on what people should take away from Ansible Fest and then going forward post pandemic? Yeah, so, you know, first time hit on a number of key points there, right? COVID-19 and everything going on in the world has really just accelerated a lot of these transformations that were already in the works at many of our enterprise customer accounts, right? And now when we're all working remotely, we're all meeting virtually, we're educating our children remotely, it just exacerbates the need to scale our networks, to extend security out to remote workforces and to do all of these things at much larger scales than we ever envisioned before, right? And you can't do that without automation. And I would argue, you know, without taking advantage of some of these, you know, modern cloud-native platforms and cloud-native development approaches, right? And we always say, you know, Red Hat's been a big proponent of hybrid cloud of our open hybrid cloud strategy. We've been talking about that for years. And what we always say is, even if that's a strategy that you aren't specifically looking for, it's something that everybody ends up there, right? Because nobody's running everything in the data center anymore. But as they move out to public cloud, they're not completely shutting those data centers off either. As they expand their consumption of cloud, they tend to start exploring multi-cloud strategies. And now that hybrid cloud is extending out to the edge, right? So the hybrid cloud is sort of where everybody is, right? And the ability to sort of manage consistently, to run consistently across all those environments, to be able to secure all those environments and scale those environments. And that's what we're all about here at Red Hat. And that's sort of the key to our open hybrid cloud strategy and what we're really trying to do with our entire portfolio. Awesome, David, final word. We're in a systems world now. The cloud is one big distributed computer. Got the edge, we heard that. Developers just want a code. They want infrastructure as code. You guys got to help them get there. What's your take on the importance of Ansible Fest and the systems world we live in? Well, it's probably not a more critical time. We've all been saying this and seeing this the last, oh, 10 months now. The transformation digitally that's been going on for years, the development transformations, it's all hit a fever pitch. It's been accelerated through COVID. In particular, how quickly can I adjust to a digital transformation? How quickly can I adjust my business processes? How quickly can I really become a very agile DevOps SRE organization? That is so critical. So at Ansible Fest, what we're doing is bringing together platforms with automation with the ability to manage it at scale with security. That's what's going on from Red Hat in a open environment, open world with communities and huge ecosystems. That to me is a critical rallying points and really necessary to drive this accelerated transformation. Yeah, and again, open source continues to power. One thing I'm impressed with is this concept of content, not content as in a video, but like content as code, it's collaboration. It's what people are sharing their playbooks and they're sharing their opening things up. I think there's going to be a whole nother level of developer collaboration that's going to emerge. I think you guys are on the front end of all this. I think it's going to be pretty powerful. I don't think yet clearly understood yet by most folks, but I think when you start seeing the automation benefits, Tom, I'm sure your team will be like, yep, see, automation platform. Thank you so much for coming on, appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, hosting theCUBE Virtual for Ansible Fest 2020 Virtual. Thanks for watching.