 Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and the Kube's ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone, live here in the Kube's exclusive coverage in Austin, Texas. This is at CloudNativeCon and KubeCon for Kubernetes Conference. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, the next two guests from Red Hat, Joe Brock, my senior evangelist, the next container is Red Hat and Kimberly Craven, director of portfolio, marketing at Red Hat. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you guys. Thank you, good to see you too. So, I was saying at re-invent last week that Red Hat's stamp of approval has always been in the enterprise. You guys are, you know, winning the enterprise, been there for years, but now at CloudNative, kind of things are coming together. You got a lot of customers that have been, I don't want to say quietly, going with Red Hat, with OpenShift, and now with Kubernetes. Huge bet a few years ago, only two years ago. Kind of changed the game. Yeah, we, fortunately, we made a strategic decision to re-platform our own platform on Kubernetes and it was the right decision to make. So, we've been lucky in that we've been able to, I'd say we've been able to invest in the right open source projects, Joe. Would you agree that over the years, I mean, starting with Linux, in other technologies as well. Yeah, historically, I think we've, not every, not 100% of the time, but a large enough percent of the time, pick the right course, community rise. OpenStack, now Kubernetes, Linux, kernel, obviously. When I was in, I used to work for a company called Linux Mall and we sponsored these, Linux pavilions, and I remember NetBSD guys telling me how Linux was doomed, because it wasn't as elegant. Dude, that sure didn't turn out the way that way. Certainly the community model's changed. You're starting to see Dan Cohen on his opening slide actually kind of laid out the circle of innovation, projects, products, and profit. And so now, it's okay to have profitability objectives as an outcome of great products. And so, it's not just, it's still bringing in the culture of innovation, because the business market for this is pretty large. I haven't seen a number of people coming on board. The demand's pretty strong. Not just innovation, but I think one of the important things about Kubernetes is it has been a community project where it's a community of equals contributing to the project. And it's about each company bringing the right thing for the project, not the right thing necessarily just for that company, but the right thing for the overall project, which is really important. Timing's everything, right? I mean, as they say in life. But remember, all that fun about past layers and infrastructure as a service. And again, the DevOps community was still growing. No one really talks about that anymore because people just want working software, right? So it's fun not to have those kind of conversations. Instead, the conversation is about how to orchestrate great workloads, how to onboard, accelerate more application developers. This is the narrative that we wanted a couple of years ago. Now it's here. What are you guys doing at Red Hat to take that to the next level? So I'm going to defer to Joe for that one. Okay. To take that to the next level. First, before people can get to the next level, one thing I want to point out is that while everybody here is hip deep in Kubernetes and they are, you know, they're ready. There are a lot of companies out there that are still digesting virtualization and still digesting cloud, private or public. And so one of our key roles is actually to help them consume open source software and get from point A to point B. So the role that we're really playing right now is about taking customers with their workloads today that are running on bare metal, that are running on virtualization, that are pet workloads, right? And getting those into the cloud and getting those into Kubernetes and that sort of thing. So the next level for a lot of folks is actually getting up to speed to the things that were announced today. Well, the question I want to ask you, I want to get this in the record, it's important to get the definition. What does Kubernetes mean to the enterprise? For us in cloud native, we don't understand what it is as we get it, but to the enterprise customer, what does Kubernetes mean to them? So I would say based on the customer conversations that we have, we've had, it's all about getting your workloads to the cloud and being more cloud native much more quickly. So that's the end goal for adopting containers and adopting Kubernetes. It's all about getting to be in a position where you can migrate your workloads to the cloud but also develop new on the cloud much more quickly than you could before. So it's about automating, it's about all of the processes behind that, if you will. Joe, comment? I agree with everything Kimberly said. I would also just add, I think it's really about kind of an almost in stage of software packaging, which is something that Red Hat has been doing for 20 plus years is figuring out how do we take the goodness of software, open source software and get it into a consumable format? First it was RPM, then it was yum, now it's containers, now it's orchestrated containers that are able to be worked on with ServiceMesh and all these other wonderful things about native storage. It's basically about taking that software and making it scale. Yeah, I mean you mentioned ServiceMesh. So let's take it to the next level of customer conversation. I love this stuff. I'm going to the cloud as soon as possible. I got some stuff in public cloud now. I got a lot of on-premise stuff activity. I love hybrid cloud. So I got a lot of different use cases. I got some bare metal, I got some hybrid cloud and I got some public cloud. Is this where the open shift fits in? I mean, in that environment of a customer conversation, what's the current state of the art for Red Hat to engage that customer? So organizations are, they're taking inventory of everything that they have today. So they're looking at what do they have on bare metal today? What do they have in virtualization? What different workloads do they have and where does it make sense to deploy them, both financially and from an advancement perspective? Because some workloads don't have to be, they don't have to be advanced as quickly. You don't have to make additional updates but there are other workloads that are moving much more quickly. And one of the things that Red Hat does and where we help our customers, especially with OpenShift, is we allow them to deploy those workloads across whether they're going to on-premises with a bare metal, if you say, or as well as virtualization, private cloud, potentially a mixture, a multi-cloud environment where they have some workloads going to Google, some workloads going to AWS and some going to Azure. It's being able to do that consistently that OpenShift provides. Is that a common use case right now? Is that the number one use case? So when you say the hybrid cloud, it's not, it's a combination of multiple use cases. People aren't necessarily looking just yet to take the same workload and move it such that it's spanning multiple clouds but they want to have that flexibility so that if they choose to go to a certain public cloud and it becomes, it's not cost effective for them to do so anymore, they want to be able to take that workload and move it and that's what we're working towards. Sure, I got to ask about OpenShift because we've been following you guys since the OpenStack days and now with the formation of this is seeing nice lines of sight of value proposition. What's going on with OpenShift? We're hearing a lot of good customer wins. A lot of people are using it. I heard a comment on the hallway saying that OpenShift has more customers than most of these vendors here combined. I'm not sure, I believe that might've been just kind of chatter, but is that true or can you share success because it's been on a tear? What are some of the OpenShift's success points? So is it true that more customers than all of the other ones combined? I'd like to say so, I mean, you were at Red Hat Summit this past year back in the Maytime frame and we had many OpenShift customers that were on stage. I mean it was, we had to turn sessions away from customers because we didn't have enough room for them. So one of the things we actually haven't gotten to highlight yet at this event, Red Hat does at a lot of these shows, ahead of the show, it's called OpenShift Commons. Maybe we can give our audience a little bit of what goes into that because all the container shows, the cloud native shows, OpenShift's been there. Yeah, with OpenShift Commons, it's a great way for the community to collaborate around OpenShift specifically. It's whether it be with our ISVs, working with our ISVs on different plugins to extend OpenShift as well as our customers to be able to pride us with feedback in terms of what they're looking for. And then we take that to the community. For example, Clayton was the top contributor that was announced yesterday. Yes, and I got an award for that on stage, yeah. And in essence, our customers are providing feedback to us directly in OpenShift Commons and in other forums and that allows us to steer the community more effectively for it to meet their needs. I just want to add, it's not a two-way conversation with Commons. It's also, I was there on Tuesday when we did Commons and we had Tell Us, for example, telling their story to the other customers in the room. And so they're not just telling us like, hey, this works for us, this doesn't work. They're telling each other and they're sharing successes which is part of the wonder of open source and community, right? It's not just about, you can have, I don't want to use an example. You can have a two-way conversation with any vendor that's taking your money. How many vendors are bringing you together to talk to your other customers? You have to have a lot of confidence, I think, in people being happy with your solution to build something out like that. And experience too, you guys have the experience. Right. You mentioned, we were at Redhead telling me, I've been there a number of years. I feel the open source community is a little bit better at allowing those customers to kind of come forward because not only are they using it, they're usually contributing to some of these technologies. It's supposed to, some traditional shows, getting a customer to get up on stage is pretty challenging. Any comments on that? Well, it's funny because I think it's getting much easier moving forward for customers to participate in the communities as you'll see with Netflix, for example, they were up on stage earlier and talking about the contributions that they're also making to the community. I think that it's much easier than it was even, I'd say five to 10 years ago. With that said, there are a lot of customers that want help in terms of creating additional functionality in the community where they might have something that's perhaps not quite ready, not quite good enough that we help to shepherd. Is there a profile of customer that's adopting Kubernetes? I mean, I see a lot of media companies, obviously Netflix on M's, AWS. You see HBO on stage today. I mean, is it coincidental having to be two big large media online kind of companies or? Well, it's funny you should ask that because we're conducting a research project and we've recently got some data back where we, in essence, sent out a survey to customers and non-customers to see where their adoption was. What we're finding is financial services, the media, communications, organizations, government, and even healthcare to some extent are taking a look at and adopting. I'd say that based on the adoption curve, what's funny to note is with government, government started looking on average at containers three years ago, whereas with financial services, they started to get more heavily invested. Now this is, in general, if you're looking at the median, two years ago. With that said, I think that financial services is actually adopting containers more quickly than government is. I'd love to see the data on that survey because we're always doing kind of probing and anecdotal kind of straw-pulls, friends and guests in the cube. The trend from our standpoint is that it seems that anywhere that there's this transformation opportunity, look at government, who would have thought public sector could be so fast and change. So public sector, media entertainment, people where they're modernizing seems to be where the action is. The financial service is always going to be on the IT dollar spend. But I'm really surprised at how fast public sector is evolving. And what's interesting about it too is also the industries that are predominantly concerned with security. Security and performance are very important to financial services and to government and to communications. And it's interesting how quickly this technology's being adopted with those considerations. Joe, one of the things coming into this show, I listened to some previews and they're saying, we're not even going to talk about containers at this show. Of course, there's containers kind of underneath, maybe speak a little bit of that dynamic, your red hat so heavily involved, of course, Linux's containers underneath there, compare and contrast to kind of what we're doing here in the Kubernetes and cloud native space. Yeah, so it really isn't about the individual container anymore than five years ago, it was about the individual RPM. The container runtime and the ability to spin up a container is table stakes. And so that is no longer really where the value is. Same as like hypervisors in cloud, like the real value is not in the hypervisor, it's around that, it's the ecosystem around it and the ability to do it. So yeah, I mean, we're still talking about, it's funny when I have conversation, not here, but in other places the parlance is still to say containers when they really mean, you know, like Kubernetes and orchestration and the whole smear. But yeah, it's not where the value and the action is these days. Where's the red hat situation with the people now? Because we've seen, we've noticed that you guys have really kind of continued to evolve as a company. Obviously, I mean, in the early days of red hat, open source wasn't tier one, you guys made it tier one as a culture that's well documented. But then there's a whole new red hat mojo going on now. Open shift, you're seeing, you bring that same principles. Talk about what's going on in the company now. We're seeing a lot of energy, a lot of smart people continuing to do the red hat thing. What is red hat now in the market today? Is the same old red hat, what's different, what's the same, because you guys are doing really well. What's it like there? I think I've been at red hat for about six years and I would say that the culture has continued to evolve since I joined. One of the things that first attracted me about it was that there are a lot of smart people that work at red hat and it's a very collaborative culture. It's a culture that's based on meritocracy and the best ideas truly win. So very similar to the way that open source projects are run or should be run for the good open source projects, it's very much about getting people together, hearing what everyone has to say and making sure that the right ideas are the ones that move forward. It certainly attracts great people too. To build on that, in this industry, there's so much hype, boom and bust. On the outside, you look at it, I mean, from a financial standpoint, red hat's one of the most consistent performers out there. Quarter after quarter, Jim talks about the growth. So I'm not asking you to talk about the financials, but we're at the show, nobody here can keep up with all the changes. So just when you talk about all these projects and everything, red hat, can you keep up with the changes or is it just you've got so many people and contribute so many places? We're working on it and I think, I mean, the nice thing about it is that everybody's very passionate about all of those changes that are happening and we like change oddly enough, we embrace it, it's interesting, but that's one of the parts of being at red hat and I say, I mean, I would think that that's something that's inherent to us. Our corporate mission, part of our corporate mission is to be the catalyst for change in communities and I've worked at a couple of larger companies and this is the only one where I feel like if I don't agree with something, I can send an email directly to Jim and say, I don't agree with this and I think we should do something different. And he'll respond within four hours. And Jim will respond unless he's on a plane. Yeah, he'll respond and even if they don't agree, which is impossible, everybody always agrees with me, but even if they don't agree, they engage honestly and respectfully and that's super important in this kind of industry. If you can't do that, you can't run with open source. Joe Kimberly, thanks for coming on theCUBE and continued success and thanks for all the red hat contribution. You guys are doing a great job and in the community continue to appreciate it. Red hat here on theCUBE, continuing to do the red hat thing, red hat stamp of approval and the enterprise certainly well respected and the leader inside theCUBE here at the Cloud Native Con and Cube Con for Kubernetes Con, not Cube, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more after this short break.