 Okay, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in Palo Alto. We're remote with our great guest here, CUBE alumni, been on many times, Chris Wright, Senior Vice President and CTO of Red Hat. Chris, great to see you. Always a pleasure to have you on the screen here. Too bad we're not in person, but thanks for coming in remote. Yeah, you're back. Glad to be here. And not only we're talking about speeds and feeds, digital transformation going under the hood here, we're going to talk about Red Hat's expanded collaboration with Boston University to help fund education and research for open source projects. So you guys have a huge relationship with Boston University. Talk about this continued commitment. What's the news? What's the story? Well, we have a couple of different things going on and the relationship we have with BU is many years in. So this itself isn't brand new. One of the things that's important to highlight here is we are giving something north of $550 million worth of software to BU really in pursuit of running, powering and running scaled infrastructure that's part of the open hybrid cloud. And that's an important piece which we can touch on a little bit as we talk through this conversation. The other one is, like I said, this isn't a new relationship with BU and what we're doing now is really expanding the relationship. So we've built a great connection directly with BU. We're substantially expanding that. The original relationship we had was a $5 million relationship spread over five years. Now we're talking about a $20 million relationship spread over five years. So really a significant expansion. And of course, that expansion is connected to some of the work that we plan to do together in this open hybrid cloud infrastructure and research space. So a lot of things coming together at once to really advance the Red Hat Collaboratory at BU that combined effort in bringing cloud research and open source and all these things together. And a lot of action going on, especially in the Boston area, a lot of universities, but I love the shirt you're wearing where it says Red Hat Innovation in the Open. This is kind of one of those things. You also mentioned, obviously there's a huge subscription of software grant that's going to be just huge number of value for the Boston University. But you also have another project that's been going on, the Collaborative Research and Education Agreement called the Red Hat Collaboratory. Okay, this was in place. You mentioned that. How's that tying in now? Cause that was pre-existing. Now you got the grant, you got the funding, more and more research. Talk about how this connects into the Open Cloud Initiative because this is kind of interesting. You're now bringing hybrid cloud, kind of research and practical value in AI, ops is hot. I mean, you can't go anywhere these days without having great observability. Cloud native, more and more is more complex. And you got these young students and researchers dying to get their hands on it. Take us through the connection between the Collaboratory and Open Cloud. So the Collaboratory is a clever name that just talks about collaboration and research, you know, laboratory type research. And initially the Collaboratory focus was on the infrastructure running the cloud and some of the application workloads that can run on top of an Open Cloud infrastructure that's very data-centric. And so this is an opportunity for multidisciplinary work looking at modeling for healthcare, for example, for how you can improve imaging. And we've had great results in this collaboration. We've talked at times about the relationship with the Boston Children's Hospital and the Chris project, not related to me, but just similar acronym that spells Chris. And these things come together in part through connecting relationships to academia where academia's research is increasingly built in on and around open source software. So, you know, if you think of sort of two parallel worlds, open source software development, just the activity of building open source software, it brings so many people together and it moves so quickly that if you're not directly connected to that as an academic researcher, you risk producing academic research results that aren't relevant because it's hard for them to connect back to these large fast-moving projects, which may have invented a solution to the problem you've been focused on as an academic if you're not directly connected. So we see academia and open source coming together to build really a next generation of understanding of the scientific and depth. And these joint operations you're talking about here though, this is significant because there's dollars behind it, right? There's real money. It's not just software, it's a center, it's a joint operation. That's right. And so when you think about just the academic research of producing ideas that manifest themselves as code and software projects, we want to make sure we're first connecting the software projects to open source communities with our own engineering experience, bringing code into these open source projects to just advance the feeds and feeds and speeds, the kind of functionality, the state of the art of the actual project. We're also taking this to a new level with this expanded relationship. And that is software today, when you operate software as a cloud, a critical part of the software is the operationalization of that software. So software just sitting there on the shelf doesn't do anybody any good, even if the shelf is an open source project and it's a tar ball waiting for you to download. If you don't ever grab it and run it, it's not doing anybody any good. And if the challenge of running it is substantial enough that it stops you from using that software, you've created a barrier to the value that's locked inside that project. The focus here is how can we take that, the operations experience of running a cloud, which itself is a big complex distributed system, tie some of those experiences back into the projects that are used to build that infrastructure. So you're taking not just the output of the project, but also the understanding of what it takes to run a project and bringing that understanding and even the automation and code associated with that back into the project. So you're operationalizing this open source software and you're building deeper understanding of what it means to operate things at scale, including data and data sets that you can use to build models that show how you can create the remediation and closed loop systems with AI and machine learning sort of synthesizing all the data that you generate out of a big distributed infrastructure and feed that back into the operations of that same infrastructure. So a lot going on there at the same time, operationalization as an open source initiative, but also really the understanding and advancement of AI and data-centric operations. So AI ops and closed loop remediation. Yeah, I love, I mean, DevOps, developer and operations, you got operationalize it and certainly cloud native put an emphasis on day two operations, which leads a lot more research, a lot more student work on understanding the coding environment. So with that, I got to ask you about this Massachusetts focused or this open cloud initiative because you guys are talking about this open cloud initiative including this Massachusetts open cloud. What is that? What is the Massachusetts open cloud? Sounds like you're offering a kind of open approach, not just BU, but other institutions. That's right. So the MOC, Massachusetts open cloud is itself a cross organizational cloud collaboration bringing together five different academic institutions in New England and Massachusetts. It's BU, it's Harvard, it's MIT, it's Northeastern and it's UMass coming together to support a common set of infrastructure, which is cloud. It's a cloud that runs in a data center and then it serves a couple of different purposes. One is research on clouds directly. So what does it mean to run a cloud? What does it look like from a research point of view to understand large scale distributed systems? And then the other is more on top, when you have a cloud, you can run workloads and those workloads scaled out to do say data processing, looking at the implications of across different fields which could be natural sciences, could be medicine, could be even political science or social sciences. So really a multidisciplinary view of what it means to leverage a cloud and run data-centric workloads on top. So two different areas that are of a focus for the MOC and this becomes this sort of vehicle for collaboration between Red Hat and BU and the Red Hat Collaboratory. So I have to ask only because I'm a big fan of the area and I went to one of those schools, is there like a beanpot for technical hackathons where you get all the schools matched up against each other on the mass open cloud and compete for who gets bragging rights in the tech city there? It's a great question, not yet, but I'll jot that down here to make sure we follow up on that. Happy to sponsor. We'll do the play-by-play coverage, great. I love that. Yeah, kind of Twitch TV style. The one thing that there is, which is very practical is academic research grants themselves are competitive, right? People are vined for research dollars. So you put together proposals, bring those proposals to the agency that's giving out grants and winning those grants is certainly prestigious. It's important as part of how research institutes continue to fund the work that they're doing. Now we've been associated through the work we've done to date with BU with almost $15 million in grants to do research, which itself has published nearly 20 papers. So there's a lot of work. You can't quite call it the play-by-play. It's a scoreboard. I mean, there are numbers. You can put numbers on the board. I mean, that's one of the things you can measure. But let me ask you on those grants. So you're saying this is just the BU. You guys actually have data on the impact of the relationship in terms of grants and papers and stuff like that, academic work? That's right, that's right. And so those numbers that I'm giving you are examples of how we've worked together with BU to help their faculty generate grant dollars that then fund some of the research that's happening there together with Red Hat engineers and on the infrastructure like the Massachusetts Open Cloud. That's a good way to look at the scoreboard. It's a good point. We'll have to research that. If you don't mind me asking on this data that you have, are all those projects contributing to open source or do they have to be, that's just generic? Is that all papers around BU or is this part of the research? In other words, I'm trying to think of I'm an open source. Has this contributed to me as an open source person? It's a big and complex question because there's so much research that can happen through a research institution. And those research grants tend to be governed with agreements and some of those agreements have intellectual property rights at front and center and might require things like open source software as a result. The stuff that we're working on clearly is in that focus area of open source software and research activities that help kind of propel our understanding forward of what does it mean to do large scale distributed systems creation and then operation. So how do you develop the software that does it? How do you run the software that builds these big, large distributed systems? So we're focused in that area. Some of the work that we facilitated through that focus includes integrating non open source software that might be part of say medical imaging. So for example, work we've done with the Boston Children's Hospital that isn't 100% doesn't require us to be involved 100% in the open source pieces. All the infrastructure there to support it is. And so we're learning how we can build integrated pipelines for data analysis and image analysis and data sharing across differences institutions at the open source project level. But maybe we have a specific imaging program that is not generated from this project. And of course that's okay with us. You know, Chris, you bring up a good point with all this conversation. I can see this really connecting the dots, most computer science programs, most engineering programs haven't really traditionally focused on IT at the scale we're talking about. Because when you look at cloud scale but now scaling with hybrid, it's real engineering going on to think about the large scale. We know all the big high scalars, right? So it's not just IT provisioning network connection and doing some IT work. We're talking about large scale. So I have to ask you, as you guys look at these relationships with academics and academia like BU and others, how are the students responding to this? Are you guys seeing any specific graduate level advancements? Because you're talking about operational roles that are becoming so important whether it's cybersecurity and as cloud native because once we're data driven, you need to have all this new scale engineered up. That's right. How do you look at that? There's two different pieces that I would highlight. One is just the data science itself. So schools still need to produce data scientists and having data is a big part of being a data scientist and knowing what your goals are with that data and then experimenting with different techniques whether it's algorithms or tools, it's a big part of being a data scientist. Sort of spelunking through the data. So we're helping produce data. We're looking at data science efforts around data that's used to operationalize infrastructure which is an interesting data science endeavor by itself. The other piece is really what you highlighted which is there's an emergence of a skill set in the industry often referred to as SRE, Site Reliability Engineering. It is a engineering discipline and if you back up a little bit and you start thinking about what are the underlying principles behind large scale distributed systems, you get to some information theory and computer science. So this isn't just something that you might think of as some simple training of a few key tools and knowing how to interpret a dashboard and you're good to go. This is a much more sophisticated view of what does it mean to really operate large scale infrastructure which to date, there aren't a lot of these large scale infrastructures available to academics to research because they're commercial endeavors. And they're new too. I was talking to some young folks, my son's age and daughter's age and I was saying architecting a building, a skyscraper isn't trivial. You can't just do that overnight. There's a lot of engineering that goes on in that science but you're bringing kind of operating systems theory, systems thinking to distribute computing. I mean that's combination of a interdisciplinary shift and you got, I won't say civil engineering, but like concept is there, you got structure, you got networks, they're changing and then you got software. So again, completely new area. That's right. And there's not a lot of even curriculum that explores this space. So one of the opportunities here's a great program that really focuses on that space of site reliability engineering or operationalizing software. And then the other piece that I'm really excited about is connecting to open source community so that as we build software, we have a way to run and operationalize that software that doesn't have to be directly tied to a commercial outlet. So products running in a cloud will have a commercial SLA and commercial agreements between the user and the producer of that service. How do you do that in an open source context? How do you leverage a community, bring that community software to a community run service, learn through the running of that service how to best build architect, the service itself, and then operationalize with the tooling and automation, that service, how do you bring that into the open source community? And that's something that we've been referring to as the operate first initiative. How do you get that operationalization of software really thought of as a primary focal point in a software project where you normally think about the internals of software, the features, the capabilities, the functionality, the less about the operationalization. So important shift at the open source project level, which is something that I think will really be interesting and we'll see a lot of reaping a lot of rewards just in open source communities directly. Yeah, speed and durability certainly having that reliability is great. You know, I love talking with you guys at Red Hat because you know software, you know open source and you know operating systems because as it comes together in this modern era what a great fit, great work you're doing with Boston universities and the mass open cloud initiative. Congratulations on that. I got to ask you about this Red Hat graduate fellows program you have because this kind of speaks to what you guys are doing. You have this kind of this, this Red Hat graduate fellows network and the work that's being done. Does that translate into Red Hat at all from an engineering standpoint? How does that work together? Basically what we do is we support PhD students, we support postdocs. So there's a real direct support to the, you know, that is the Red Hat graduate fellow program and our focus there is connecting those academics, the faculty members and the students to our engineers to work together on key research initiatives that we think will help drive open source software agendas forward. This really broad can be in all different areas from security to virtualization to the operating systems to cloud distributed systems. And one of the things that we've discovered is it creates a great relationship with the university and we find students that will be excited to leave university and come into the industry workforce and work at Red Hat. So there's a direct talent relationship between the work that we do at BU and the talent that we can bring into Red Hat which is awesome. You know, we know these people, we've worked well with them, but also we're kind of expanding understanding of open source across, you know, more and more of academia which I think is really valuable and important for Red Hat when you just go out to the industry at large and helping bring a set of skills to the industry that whether they're coming, you know, whether these are students that come into Red Hat or go elsewhere into the industry, these are important skills to have in the industry. So we look at, you know, the, how do you work in open source communities? How do you operationalize software at scale? Now these are important things that days in the future. Open up to expand the territory if you will in terms of systems thinking we just talked about. Great collaboration, you guys do a great job. Chris, great to have you on. Quick final word from you on this year at Red Hat Summit. I know it's virtual again, which we could be in person, but we're starting to come out of the COVID's kind of post COVID right around the corner. What's the update? How would you describe the current state of Red Hat? Obviously you guys still got that vibe. You still pumping strong, a lot going on. What's the current bumper sticker? What's the vibe? Well, in many ways, because we're so large and distributed, the last year has been, I can't say business as usual because it's been an impact on everybody, but it hasn't required us to fundamentally change. And as we work across open source communities, there's been a lot of continuity that's come through a workforce that's gone completely distributed. People are anxious to get to the next phase, whatever back to normal means, and people at Red Hat are no different. So we're looking forward to what it can mean to spend time with colleagues in offices. We're looking forward to what it means to spend time together with our friends and families and travel and all those things. But from a business point of view, Red Hat's focus on the open hybrid cloud and that distributed view of how we work with open source communities, that's something that's only continued to grow and pick up over the course of the last year. So it's a clearly an important area for the industry and we've been busier than ever the last year. So interesting times for everybody. Well, it's great to see and I love how the culture maintains its relevance, its coolness, intersection between software, open source and systems. Great, great work and congratulations, Chris. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. All right, I'm John Furrier here with theCUBE for Red Hat Summit 2021. Thanks for watching.