 Hello and welcome to the Cube and this Red Hat Summit 2024 preview where we're also going to be talking about AnsibleFest, OpenShift Commons and really what you can expect as you get out to Denver in May. Today we're going to explore some of the key themes that will drive content at Red Hat Summit in Denver on May 5th through the 9th. Red Hat Summit will once again also include AnsibleFest as an company summit really co-located going across the whole week. The Cube will be there and will be unpacking all the announcements and bringing you insight from partners, customers and of course some of the key Red Hatters that are out there really working with this technology. Today I have the pleasure of being joined by Ashesh Badani, SVP Chief Product Officer for Red Hat. Welcome on board Ashesh. Hey Rob, thanks for having me on. Well this is really excited, I'm so excited to be there again this year, getting to interview so many great people. You always have such a great lineup that comes to the Cube, not to mention the keynotes are killer. I'm very excited but I don't want people to get there too late because again there's some training. On the 5th that starts on Sunday there's OpenShift Commons which again you know really the hallway conversations are key where people and partners interact with those on the dev side, on the infrastructure side, it's really about the commons and coming together which is fantastic. That'll be on Monday and then things really kick into high gear with Ansible and Red Shift or Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Summit really taking off on Tuesday and for the rest of the week. I think it's really going to be an exciting time and I'm just going to start in here because I think one of the things that we saw coming out of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon a couple weeks ago was the fact that people are really excited about AI. I think one of the things and it kind of ties into what's going on in Red Hat is that you know bringing Ansible Fest and co-locating it with Summit really is key because a lot of people to get value out of AI you really need to automate things and automate and really bring those playbooks so that you can do it in a repeatable manner, you understand how things you know tie together. What are some of the things that organizations should be looking for out of Ansible Fest as they attend? Yeah so thanks Rob for those kind words, we're excited too right? So it's a great mix I think of both community activity as well as sessions of interest to our commercial customers, government organizations, the world over. Ansible Fest is indeed co-located with Red Hat Summit. We did that last year to great success during that same this year welcoming community members as well as our enterprise users from around the world and you're absolutely spot on. Automation plays a huge role for AI in fact we've seen automation actually play a key role just in bridging this sort of world of hybrid cloud right between installations that customers have in their own data center in their own private cloud and taking advantage of what they put up in the public cloud and using something like Ansible we've seen has been extremely popular and there's a huge amount of Ansible usage across our customer base. So being able to talk about that being able to tie those together, talk about the opportunities for Ansible at the edge, specific use case for Ansible whether it's networking or security and then ultimately the time to AI I think should be really powerful so we're excited to showcase that. Yeah I think you hit on it the community I think also again just the people sharing the different customers coming together not only the ones that will be on stage but it's great and I think while we're on the AI topic you know I think it seems like there's a good number of sessions by the way the catalogs up I went and perused through it just yesterday and there's a lot of really good topics in there especially around things like OpenShift AI what should organizations be thinking about as they attend summit around AI and things like OpenShift AI? Yeah so lots of different ways to think about it right so we announced OpenShift AI at Summit last year you know think of that as an opportunity for us to serve you know what analysts like yourselves and others are calling the MLOps market the ability to say customers are going to have a wide variety of you know models that they use some that will be open some perhaps proprietary closed-in nature variety of different you know tools and languages and frameworks being able to deploy them run them serve these models that you'll define tune them in short there's a life cycle around them right and so OpenShift AI really provides that that platform do you do that in a consistent passion and of course it's open source it's built on the foundations of OpenShift and is our right advice the next platform as well right so take all the products that you already know or familiar with and then use that to be able to run your AI scale right so that's the OpenShift AI you know part of our portfolio we'll talk about but then we're also infusing AI into our portfolio right so last year Summit we also talked about Ansible Lightspeed the ability to be able to say I can use English language and natural language prompt to ask a question with regard to perhaps some tasks that you want to do and you type that in and out comes YAML that you can then go and paste into into a playbook up and be able to run that right and sort of bringing that as well to OpenShift and the rest of our portfolio up to something we'll talk about as well so at the application of AI being able to actually run these models as well as some other areas that we're working on that we'd love to preview at Summit as well right so I'll hold that part back as some excitement that you and the rest of the viewers can take advantage of when you engage with us at Summit. Yeah I can't wait I think it's it's super exciting I think again this is really at the nexus of what's going on with AI in that AI infrastructure and how it's really playing out and I think you kind of brought up the advancements with AI built into Ansible last that we were announced last year I think there's also really where some key security pieces to that and how AI was you know safe and transparent I think that's another key that Red Hat has definitely been pushing on but you know we'd be remiss if we didn't bring up security in general there also seems to be a big theme of security especially in secure software supply chains and trusted supply chain which is the Red Hat product set around that tell us what should people be really interested in and from a security perspective as they come to Ansible Fest and Summit. Yeah so security compliance governance these are themes are coming up and Rob you're you're spot on in bringing up the importance of that we've heard of the recent challenges on the XZ front that several folks are trying to deal with as well I think the Red Hat solution is one that spans the different environments customers running it's on the one hand for example we hear a lot about governance compliance concerns privacy issues that are coming up there's regulations for example in Europe the Digital Operational Residency Act right is you know getting a lot of customers think about exactly when these applications running how they can make sure they're portable across environments there's sovereignty that's coming up in Europe but also in some of our customers in Asia Pacific with regard to the actual data and where that's that's residing and so those important considerations then there's the actual work customers do right with regard to if they're using software packages you know what's the source of them what's the provenance around them have those packets been signed appropriately can we make sure that you know as these binaries are being used that they aren't compromised in somewhere right there's no backdoor you know in them how can we make sure we can do that in a way that you know we can audit that how can you make sure that you know we can do that for folks who are actually allowed to access it right so so this notion of authentication but then the folks authorized around it a lot of these areas are being covered by our portfolio right so software supply chain like you referred to be something we'll talk about we'll talk about you know that the parts of it that are not generally available for folks to use but then also the investments in security that we have into our specific products right so whether it's RAPS Linux and some of the capabilities within our insights part of the strategy open shift with inbuilt security as well as advanced loss of security that as part of that as well as the work we're doing on the open shift day out front so that's again some areas that you know we'd love to spend some more time talking about at Red Hat summit and of course there'll be a series of sessions that go through that more detail yeah now I think that's really key and I think a great place for people to wrap their hands around how cloud native applications and AI being part of a cloud native application as they integrate that in really can be secured and how you do it in a way so you can meet things like Dora which is not the explorer but that the act the digital resiliency act over in Europe and also the AI act that just passed just a month ago over in Europe as well and I think one of the big themes coming out of Europe out of KubeCon cloud native con was also developer productivity which was just a huge theme and I think I would expect that Red Hat would have a place to have a discussion about that as well as you have Red Hat developer hub and other pieces that go along with that it what are organizations going to get excited about or what should they stay tuned to as they approach summit around developer productivity and experience so look I just came out visiting with customers in Europe met a large financial services organization very very interested in developer hub and developer activity right and they're dealing with some of the same things that we've seen customers deal with across the world right you know you had you know the COVID days teams became more distributed and they wanted a more standardized way to be able to ensure that customers or developers specifically within those customers were having access to the appropriate tools you know having golden pads and templates to be more productive and in the work they do we see interest in that in financial services but then also in government organizations as well as just any organizations that are just large distributed teams we're interested in that but the advantage of the work that's happening in the backstage project right that's the one that was kicked off by Spotify that would be what's upstream to our productized offering and then of course we're doing a bunch of work to ensure that we're helping make it much more enterprise ready so whether it's add-ons that are specific to some other red hat products that customers can use whether it's support for things like our backroll based access control whether it's the ability to be much more dynamic with regard to how you can use the different components within it without necessarily having to rebuild your environment these are all the attributes that we're adding into our offering around red so again excited to talk about that in more detail actually show demonstrations of that you know through sessions as well as on the show. Yeah I love that how you join in your demonstrations with the keynotes as well and I'm looking forward to that because again that to me as the geek side of me always gets me excited to see it in action which was great because I got to talk to one of your customers over at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, I talked to ABB who was doing something really interesting with OpenShift and MicroShift they were really using it at the edge edge really play is going to play a role from an AI perspective because a lot of times data can't really you can't bring all the data back you have to do inference and other things at the edge what should organizations be thinking about as they come to summit around edge technologies and edge use cases? Yes we really something called red hat device edge right and that's really a combination of ensuring customers can have an optimized Linux environment for edge as well as an optimized OpenShift right so that's the MicroShift project you're referring to and we again ensure that the constraints that exist on the edge right so whether it's compute whether it's storage or whether it's network and being in a sort of disconnected or intermittently connected environment is important we also ensure that an Ansible can help support that with regard to managing so many remote devices in stages they are and help them update as needed the key part is that all of these technologies that customers are using in their data center the optimized version of that the edge version of that you know also have the same core APIs right so you're consistent with regard to whether you're in the data center or using it out to the edge but of course the form factor is appropriate for the requirements the constraints that you have there. ABB is a good example they're doing some really interesting work with us but we have other customers as well right we have you know use cases for example such as customers using it on an oil rig out in the middle of the ocean or customers that you know like ABB that are out on the factory floor we are also working closely with some telcos or service providers again have different requirements right and there you've got the notion of the near-edge versus the far-edge and the 5G buildout that's going on so so we'll also talk about you know how they can be deployed for example in in telco based environments so we're seeing interest in manufacturing for sure on the telco front as well as you know several government organizations as well right with regard to you know how they have distributed environments that helping support so yeah so the edge areas is fundamentally interesting exciting to us taking advantage of our core technologies and making sure that we make them consistently available essentially taking what edge as an extension of our hybrid cloud we think is an interesting value proposition yeah totally agree I think that cloud is really an operating model not a place and I think edge and you know you're in all the hyperscalers as well as many of the different co-location facilities and people's on-prem data centers and I think that's all cloud at this point it's just how you operate it which is I think a lot of things that people can pick up as they come to summit but I think some of the most interesting stuff always comes out of the customers I went through again and looked and you have just a ton of customers coming up on the main stage on some of the smaller stages on the cube really red hat always gets great organizations to come on across the board you know what should organizations coming to summit really think about as they are picking their tracks and picking which other organizations they go and listen to what are some of the things you know because they got to make choices so what are some of the things you would tell them and when they're trying to make the choices about what sessions to go in its end yeah great great question Rob so yes so we are excited we're always excited about the customers that come and and talk about the success story so number one I would highly encourage customers to take advantage of interacting with others right in some cases you'll meet users who directly you know if you're financial services you'll meet someone you know financial services right perhaps you're from New York you might meet someone from you know Australia or London you know who are facing maybe similar challenges you can learn from each other right so there'll be opportunities for that you know within sessions and you know hearing from each other there's always a hallway track there'll be opportunities for networking as well so being able to see and learn from that you know you know I think I think is a super important and critical part of you know what we do number one number two being able to also customize based on you know where you are right so we have sessions appropriate for developers sessions appropriate for whether you're a system administrator if you're a deep open shit user if you want to learn more about AI if you want to have sessions with regard to how to deploy technologies out at the edge you know we've got focus sessions you know depending on your audience in your level of interest right so you know customize a path for yourself for that but while you do that I guess my one big sort of you know ask will be you know open yourself up to some other new areas as well right so see what else you can learn you know that you might will take back one might just be of interest to you but you know two you might have colleagues back you know in your office or your organization who might want to learn more about that when you tell them about you know what's going on and number three are partners right we have a wide ecosystem of partners right you know Rob you mentioned the hyperscalers right but but you know there's hardware providers right based on for example of the AI and interested in GPUs variety of different providers there's ISV partners there's also partners that are helping build solutions out so engaging with them seeing demonstrations of our technology as well as you know things that they're doing to integrate you know with our portfolio I think yeah it's going to be really important so yeah I'm excited I'm excited for our users to be exposed to each other be exposed to some of the technology goodness that you know we want to share as well as you know give them a preview of the roadmap to come and then also learn from our luxury ecosystem yeah I think it's just a great week it's very valuable time spent like you said I think I like that hey attend something that maybe you didn't think was in your core and bring that back think of the other people who maybe didn't get to attend or attending virtually and go and see some other things that you can bring back to your company because I think that's hearing from these other organizations hearing from the people who are out there including the partners is so key so you know again Ashish thanks for coming on board today this has been great I'm real excited and I can tell you are so it's gonna be a lot of fun thank you for the opportunity Rob and look forward to seeing you in person in just sort of month yeah yeah it's flying by it's gonna be here before we know it and I want to thank you all for tuning in to this preview of Red Hat Summit 2024 and Ansible Fest co-located in Denver which the cube will be broadcasting live May 6th through the 8th stay tuned to the cube the leader in technology analysis and news