 Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon EU 2024, live from Paris, France. Join hosts Savannah Peterson, Dustin Kirkland, and Rob Stratche as they interview some of the brightest minds in cloud native computing. Coverage of KubeCon cloud native con is brought to you by Red Hat, CNCF, and its ecosystem partners. The CUBE's coverage of KubeCon EU 2024 begins right now. Good afternoon, cloud community, and welcome back to Spectacular Paris. We are so thrilled to be broadcasting live here from KubeCon cloud native con. Rob Stratche, my co-host. My gosh, what a magical day. This is awesome. I mean, it's been so great. The energy has been wonderful. It's buzzing here. It's totally buzzing. And I think that, you know, AI and everything and automation and how you're going to simplify operations and I think this is a great way. Interesting lead and you just did there for me. Just segue into our great guests here. We have two fabulous guests from ABB. We have Anders and Vikas. Thank you so much for being here. How are you guys doing? We are good, enjoying here. Yeah, you've got, I can feel your energy. It's buzzing off the floor. I can imagine. Is this a big show for you? Yes, I would say it's quite a big event. We are here more or less like the first time. So that's also very exciting. First time. And in KubeCon, Paris. Oh my gosh, wow, that's exciting. Well, welcome. We're happy you're here and you came all the way from India. Sorry? You came all the way from India. Yes. Yeah, wow, it's quite a journey. So, topic of the conversation, process automation. Give us a rundown on ABB just in case the audience doesn't know what's going on here. Okay, so we are ABB. So we are an industrial automation company and we particularly serve into process automation area. So which is basically industries like all in gas, like power generation, like chem and ref, pulp and paper mining. These are the typical industries we serve from ABB. And we provide automation. So we have a technology which we call DCS, distributed control system. And that is what is kind of core of all the automation solutions, digital solutions we provide to all these companies. How does that compare to the world of IT automation? And what are the similarities or differences? Yeah, so IT and OT. So we are dealing with operation technology, right? And IT is something which is a little bit creeping into it. And but the challenges we face in OT is really different. I would say it's not similar to IT. We have automation systems which serves to the critical infrastructure of our customers. And their reliability, safety and efficiency is there been the key of it, right? So we've always been ensuring that there's a 24 by seven reliable operation which continue to be there. We cannot stop the plants. It needs to run 24 by seven and reliability. That is very, very important. That's what we have offered so far. IT, we do not see the similar kind of pattern. We also deal into kind of an environment which is more, I would say, resource constraint. It is also in a harsh environment. That means we deploy our solutions and systems into conditions which is environmentally not very, I would say, conducive. So we have high temperatures sometimes and we build PCs which is like industrial grade PCs. So you don't get similar kind of resources. You typically see an IT for deploying our software stack or things like this. And also we have regulatory compliances, I would say, which is we have to follow because we are serving to a critical infrastructure. And this is, I mean, as I said, like energy industries if you pick like water or you pick oil and gas, they have regulatory compliances which we have to ensure our systems follow. And IT, you will not see it more or less in the same way, right? So that's something we have to really operate and ensure this is not... No, I mean, I think it's funny because I started my career in IT a long time ago and I actually, one of my first places I was was actually, I worked in an oil, on an oil refinery. So to your point about it's funny, that never went down. You could not have it go down unless there was big plant maintenance and then you're losing money and all of that. And that critical, and like you said, critical infrastructure for this country was the country of Trinidad's oil refinery. That was how their entire economy operated. So, and are those the main kind of, you were saying critical infrastructure and things of that nature? So water, power, things like that? Yes, that's the kind of critical infrastructure we're talking about. Of course we have other industry verticals as well but I say not all are same but there's a criticality in all the verticals for sure. Like transportation and stuff like that as well. A lot of the work that you're doing is at the edge. And there are some, I mean you talked about these harsh environments. How do you approach that Anders? How do you help your customers solve that problem? Yeah, I mean one of the things that are different also with like IT and OT, in IT you can kind of undo, rewind, redo, right? In OT you have changed like the real world. Like you change the physical environment and there's no undo in that world. So that is kind of a undo. Yeah, no commands, no commands on that. Yeah, controls it, yeah. So the way to approach this is rather that we try to bit separate like the, this more kind of edge computing environment from the core OT so that we can handle more IT like things and still interact with the OT to make a separation here. And that's kind of the, let's say the idea on how to bring this in here. Yeah, I think, so when, how is it challenging to, I guess, okay, let me ask a better question. When customers come to you, because you're dealing with legacy brands a lot of the time, right? Older and deep entrenched industry. Do they know what they're challenged? Do they know what problem they're solving for? Or do they just want things to be more efficient? Yeah, so maybe I can. Yeah, go for it. So I mean as I said the foundational requirements which every customer have or which we serve is reliability, safety, and efficiency. But we are seeing the industry, the space is also a little bit dynamic and also becoming demanding because we are looking about sustainability. They want solutions which can also optimize their plant, can run more energy efficient. And I think this is where we are getting some new kind of requirements. We are expected to provide kind of solutions which can innovate fast, right? And we need to, that's where we are trying to kind of get it through, trying to get something which can help for our future systems to enable that kind of possibilities, right? So that's where, I would say, the new agile innovation kind of thing which is more a demand coming through by ensuring, still ensuring that the previous requirements which we have served till date is untempered. We should not be touching that or compromising on that but we still want this to happen. Those are kind of a little bit opposing requirements. I was going to say competing priorities there a bit. Colliding, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's really right, that's what's going on. That's the tricky thing we are trying to deal with. Yeah, you're almost like moderators in that space. I bet, yeah. We kind of are like the interface to the data. We are the interface to the OT. And by being that, we can enable this innovation if we can get the right environment there. So that's what the Edge brings to us, that we can bring in the, say, a modern cloud native platform where you can have access to data and access to new technology and marry this together to run at the Edge. That's kind of our little bit mission here to bring this into the OT world. Is that where the ABB ability, a genius comes in that I pronounce that right? Exactly, exactly. So that's where we are converging the OT and IT more or less in the middle. And the goal we have is to kind of keep the core process control, which provides these foundational requirements on left side, leave them within us. Life cycle, release cycle, update cycles, which is much slower as it was there in the past. But then we extract the data from this, DCS data, process data from this space safely and securely to a kind of borderline where a genius is coming into, getting the data safely out of this and bring at the Edge. And then we start the whole kind of monitoring and optimization kind of space where we bring application solutions, we can optimize the plan. So a genius is somewhat sitting in the middle and trying to be a platform for enabling innovation at speed. That's what we are kind of trying to achieve. We are using Edge technology, cloud technology, trying to build in a whole app ecosystem where we can get these apps coming seamlessly, faster. And that's where the IT infrastructure is going to be the key for us to kind of build on. And that's where we are using open source, we are partnering with Red Hat, we're trying to get stuff into it. Yeah, let's talk about the open source piece. We're here, it's the biggest open source conference in Europe, obviously matters. How does open source software help enable your innovation? Andrew's going to give you on that, yeah. If you want to be innovative, we have to use latest technologies, that's where innovation happens. And of course that happens in the open source world here. So what we need to do is to bring that into the industrial OT world, but at the Edge. And to do so, we need to bring the whole technology stack in there, including operating system, like Linux operating system, Kubernetes, all of the plugins that goes with that, all of the extensions, we make that more like an embedded operating system for applications at the Edge. We kind of think as Kubernetes is really the operating system in a way, because that's where our applications run, provides all the infrastructure. So we package that up, and of course open source has challenges too, like there's lots of different developers and communities. And when we ship something embedded in our product, we have to also take responsibility for that. We have a kind of warranties, we have to support our customers. That's where Red Hat comes in as a kind of a supplier that we can say like, we don't know really how to fix bugs in all the plugins. That's kind of their job. Our job is to put this together and bring it into the space where we can add applications. Yeah, so go for it. So I mean, you're using some of the specific technology from Red Hat as well, like MicroShift and their device Edge. And how is that playing a role in what you're doing as well? Yeah, so we realized quite early that what Kubernetes is the way to go, but that was a big thing in the cloud back then. And we need something where we can scale to where we deploy. We deploy from data center in the plant, like small servers into kind of maybe single computers and then industrial PCs in the field and they are not very powerful. So that means that there is no one size fits all. So to deal with that, we needed something which could be Kubernetes at the small range, but can also move up in the stack and become bigger. That's where we've worked with Red Hat to use the Red Hat device Edge and get MicroShift. That's like kind of a, I'd say more lightweight kind of embedded Kubernetes that we can use. Today we are down, we can build an embedded version of this. We can install from bare metal to running Kubernetes in five minutes, which is kind of awesome. Whoa! Five minutes, yeah, that's good. Now a casual data drop there. That's impressive. That's the micro shift. That's, as I said, we have a resource constraint environment. We cannot blow up with multi node clusters in this space. So we needed really something which is low footprint and that's what we worked with Red Hat to get and we have MicroShift Red Hat devices now. We're happy working with that and it's what we are trying to go to the market with. And I would expect another piece of it is the fact that the security aspects of it and the fact that it's, you can have it at the edge and disconnected in a disconnected manner. It's scalable, depending on what happens. Yeah, we did that option as well. We have offering which is completely disconnected as well. That means if customer has very much concern to not have an internet connectivity reaching up to that level, then we have to operate this disconnected, locally managed and it has its own cost, of course. But it's something we have to do for the kind of market we serve. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, so lots of exciting stuff happening working on some of the biggest projects on the planet, literally, with some of the scale that you have, which is amazing. What's next? I mean, we hear here what they talk about, AI, AI and... We haven't said that, we have not said that yet in this interview, I know it was coming. But yeah, keep going. So, I mean, that just, I guess proves that if we want innovation and we have a platform like this and AI comes in as a way to just use it on the edge. We have GPUs that we can attach, we can have models containerized, we can have serving APIs on the edge. We have the data. So, of course, we put this together and we will, I guess, find out what comes next. I hope a lot of cool stuff. Yeah. Sure, I mean, that's the kind of next step. Once we get this edge out, which is a platform which allows the application to run and the application is not just like plain application. You can have this AI models running on the edge as well. And that means that we can enable use cases which can predict stuff. And we are working on one of such use cases for our control system, like augmented operator. We can assist operators. Operator can have a prediction that, okay, the plant is going to fail or certain equipment is going to blow in six months, three months, looking at the patterns. So, those kind of use cases also we will enable on the edge as the next step, for sure. Which we, everybody, that's the old school ML type of AI, which again, it's not the gen AI that everybody talks about. But that seems like it has more value to your customers, especially, because if a plant has to go down, that's huge cost to them. So, it would seem that bringing that to the edge could help massively. Yeah, I think we haven't seen all the use cases yet, you know, like, what can be done with this, but it looks very promising and just kind of bringing it into the environment where we can use that without having to bother with everything else around. Like, that also makes these use cases easier to implement, it's faster to realize. Yeah, one of the challenges which we want to solve, we want to bring the app ecosystem, as we said, right? And how easy to bring the application. Because we are a very huge company operating in more than 100 countries. There are business units which is selling it to customers. They have ideas. They know what they can do for their customer to solve certain pain points, but they do not have ability to convert their ideas into an application and deploy on something, right? That is what we want to empower them to, let's say, you get an idea. We have an app ecosystem here. You just build your app so easily, deploy it on the edge, and you are there, and you deliver the value for your customer. That's it, so that's what we want to bring. That's also why we went again to Kubernetes, like, if you want to go to something like mobile phones with apps, you can basically click install and then it works. You need to have a very well-defined way to package an application, move it somewhere and apply it and update it. That's also what we get with this cloud-native world, that enables these things to happen, makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense, and it's so important, and everyone's looking for that easy button. And especially, I love that we talked about it so much, they want it where they are, not just in the data center, it's such a different. The data is sensitive, like in our industry, they ship it somewhere else, it will depend on something else. That is not really desired. No, and it slows down the latency. We're not going to be able to make the real-time decision-making, which is where you need it. We have seen these constraints clearly, the latency and security, which does not allow or let customer does not allow the customer's data to leave the plant, but then we do more stuff on the edge. But the use cases where certain data can come to the cloud, we can deploy in a hybrid situation, you have high latency requirement, low latency requirement applications running on the edge, and the things which we need to have the fleet-level monitoring and all those things, which is just simple dashboards and all can run on the cloud. It's something customer by customer looking at their use case application needs, that's how we decide and try to serve our use cases. All right, wow. We could talk about this all day. I have one final question for you. I'm now, my mind's going in a ton of different directions. What do you hope when we have your fabulous selves back at the next KubeCon, when you're here for the second time, what do you hope you can say then that you can't say today? Anders, I'm going to start with you. Oh, yeah, that's a hard question. I hope you can say that this is not in the field, and here's what we are running, and here's what we can do with this, and here's how you can do this. If you're like an application developer want to run on the industrial edge, here's how you do that. We want to open up this ecosystem as well for not just ourselves. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we would like to, okay, demonstrate maybe that how our app ecosystem is working on this low footprint red hat device edge, how we are able to kind of deploy this to our customer. It's a good story and also show this how easy it is, because that is the part which is critical for us as well. I mean, it's so complex to do it and it doesn't fly, right? So we need to make it as easy as possible to bring an app on the edge, and I'm hoping to use as much of open source Kubernetes, whatever we get out of here, and to enable that to our, I would say, development teams or customers who can do that. That's really what it's all about. I mean, with Kubernetes, it was all about decreasing complexity with AI, it's the same thing and at the edge, it's even more imperative given the constraints. You were both fantastic guests. I am so grateful that you joined us and that ABB is at the show, great partner of Red Hat. Rob, it's always a pleasure sitting on the desk with you. It doesn't even feel like work. And thank all of you from tuning in, wherever you are around the world. My name is Savannah Peterson. We're here in Paris at KubeCon, cloud native con, live from the fabulous country of France. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.