 Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening wherever you're handling from welcome to another edition of in the clouds I am Chris short executive producer of OpenShift TV. I am joined by The one and only Stu Miniman Stu. How are you doing today? Chris? I'm doing fantastic I have not been getting up quite as early as everybody for the European cube con show so You know, I'll probably look a little bit more bright-eyed than you do right now But now thank you for joining having me on and great my inaugural You know guest slot on OpenShift TV. So yeah, this is your first time It's really surprising like given your experience and background, right? Like if you don't mind Before we you know get into all that I have to ask you a very important question. Okay. Are you ready for this? Yeah Is cheesecake a cake or a pie? Oh, so it's one of those kind of shows is it Chris? My baby All right, so look, you know, we love to have these debates in our industry. I personally Try not to you know, I live through the great cloud wars. I have the scars to do it So I do hate arguing semantics and everything that being said I am a fan of the Oxford comma if you want to you know, if you say on premise I will you know, I'll correct you They are so look, you know, we have to understand what defines these things So, you know cake is one of these, you know stupid words like cloud It doesn't mean a whole lot right is a crab cake a cake, you know So is cheesecake a cake? Well, it's in the name So it's one of those funny things like you know everything that I you know for a while And I would grow in my garden and I say oh look at these wonderful vegetables and you go look up the ontology And you're like what the heck cucumbers tomatoes and all these things are are all fruits And did you know a strawberry isn't actually a berry? So, you know, it's these things that you look at and you say, okay So it's cheesecake a cake not by the classic definition. There's there's really not, you know It doesn't have the composition of the cake. Right. Is it a pie? Well pie is traditionally Really related to the crust And it really kind of fails some of those things. Oh, yeah, it might actually be a tart You know, oh, uh, you know tart let it lost all meanings to me And of course you kind of look at the overall consistency of it. What kind of cheesecake are we talking? Is it this some no bake thing that that's kind of faux or or is it actually like Is it, you know, probably it could be argued. It's a custard So I will say my wife makes a wonderful new york style cheesecake. It is deadly Um, I'm a fan of cheesecake. I'm okay with fruit or, you know, chocolate in it And if I go to the cheesecake factory, I will be happy to share a slice When we are back allowed to be in places and sharing food like I mean In 2021 it's one of those things that you're like, oh my god, we used to do that all the time I go out with friends and share nachos and right. I can't eat a dessert by myself. So, um, the answer is Cheesecake is delicious. Call it whatever you want. There you go. I think that's perfect Especially for the topic that we're talking about today, you know, so Oh my god, are you saying it's a hybrid dessert, chris? It is a hybrid dessert indeed. Yes Um, because I like to think of it as a cake, but I actually looked it up And it is officially a pie. Um But if I'm sure you could find contradicting articles to that so Yeah, so you're these two minimum Most widely known for not being at red hat surprisingly Uh, you have a history on the cube and I'm curious, you know The cube star joins red hat. What are you up to these days? Yeah, so, you know, right I I I joined red hat a little over six months ago after 10 years being with the cube So in case any of the audience doesn't know the cube is known as the espn of tech Started back in 2010. It was how do we take kind of a live mobile video? Two events and we did we've done hundreds of shows the cube is still going the cube We're supporting cube con europe this week. It was at red hat summit with us last week And I was one of the hosts so um, it was a crazy wild ride. It's one of those things, you know I'm an engineer by training I I I'm a technologist at heart how I ended up in front of a camera Talking about those kind of things. Um, it must have been the hair. I think but uh, no Chris, I don't know about you, but I never thought in my career that like, you know Talking on video and doing this kind of thing is something that I would be doing. Um, I loved Pulling in guests. I actually helped recruit like, you know hosts and guest hosts And love doing it had a great time John dave the whole team there had a ton of fun And yeah, just in 2020, uh, like so many other people A lot of things change. I reevaluated some things and Just was time for me to make a move. So that that's what brought me over to red hat Well, it's a good place to be and I don't say that just because I work here I say that because I believe it and that's why I work here Um, so thank you for joining us that your your expertise is very much welcome. Um So What is your job title? I mean you're not like stew minimum, you know TV host or star? No, you're right and it's interesting because you know, have I done some videos since I've been over? Yeah, hopefully some of the audience caught red hat summit. I moderated a couple of panels with a bunch of the, you know, general managers I've I've done some other videos internally and some externally My title is I'm the director of market insights and what does that mean? It's a product marketing manager role Where I meet with customers. I talk to press an analyst And I also internally I do still wear some of that kind of analyst hat So, you know, what was nice is, you know joining any new company. It's like, okay how can I contribute immediately and everybody was like, hey this paper this presentation this thing Can you tear it apart? You know, what do customers really think what's actually happening out in the world? You know, how do we make sure that we're not in our own little echo chamber? So I've done a lot of that and you know living in the community. How do we make sure that we're You know participating moving things forward and and doing what's right out there for for everyone No, that that brings us right into the next question Right like that community that mark that market landscape for kubernetes, especially as an ever-evolving picture these days How do you even go about assessing like open shift against these like Hundreds of other potential like container orchestrators, right? Like there's so many now Yeah, um, you're right. It is a vast landscape. It has become beyond a meme You look at the cncf landscape and you say hundreds of projects. There's no way I can figure it out It is more complicated Than you know going to the grocery store and trying to figure out what pasta sauce you want. Oh, yeah and You know, here's what I'd say um I watched this space. I I'd been you know Been in the open source community for a long time. I did the open stack shows for years I did cube con for a bunch of years and you know, there's a You know, I even said a few years ago, you know this kubernetes thing It's just going to kind of get baked in there and you know, will it matter so much You know, I listened to uh, clayton gave in his keynote at cube colon He said, you know, we've been talking for a couple of years, you know kubernetes. Hopefully is getting boring um, and that's good But boring does not mean that it's completely undifferentiated So what I saw out there is yes, there's kubernetes everywhere every cloud every platform every Vendor in the environment, you know supports or integrates in kubernetes But that's often where they stop Right, you know, one of the sins back in the open stack world was you know, things like okay every storage vendor supports it But they supported a little bit and they didn't really do that much. How do we actually go cloud native? How do we take advantage of these opportunities? What does that even mean? right And you know, it's not just about okay. Hey containers are really cool. And of course, you know Linux has a very strong play when it comes to containers But you know, how am I really architecting? environments To do what to build applications, you know, this is really where my applications not only live But I build new ones I modernize what i'm doing on top of it and what I had seen from the outside is Red Hat was really in a class of its own It was very difficult actually to compare what red hat was doing with open shift and everyone else because Everyone else you had to say oh, well, I take a bunch of these pieces and they're working on it and let me You know build services around it But they didn't have the the the focus and the practice That red hat had built and it was really, you know One of the things that brought me over is I the opportunity to talk to a lot of customers That are in this space and so many technologies Can even get a customer to talk to you and red hat can Bear you with all the customer references and not only will you get them from red hat? But you know, you go to the conferences or you read blog sites and you go on social They're all talking about what they're doing and talking about how red hat Pieces especially like open shift fits into their environments I mean I saw it on the outside and even I love on the inside it was like Oh, hey, there's you know a cio in india talking about hey I'm doing this wonderful stuff with amazon and vmware cloud and you know, what do I do for my application? I run open shift on top of it and our team was like, oh cool We've got a public reference that you know, wasn't our reference team putting it in Walking publicly about like I'm super excited and doing it and You know, that that's the kind of thing that you know excited me and brought me over to be like How can I work with those customers? How can I help the community along those journeys? So speaking of those journeys, right? Like what are some of the challenges that you see folks having? Adopting these cloud native environments or building their cloud native environments out to, you know, full production grade Oh boy Sorry, I didn't mean to I mean you got as long as you want on the show You have you have entire regularly running series on your program to talk about this so Look, I guess one of the things that you know, I wanted to share With the audience here We're doing the the soft launch of of an ebook that I've been working on for a number of months with the team And it's about hybrid cloud and kubernetes and the architectural decisions you need to make Fundamentally we talk about three pillars And got those Joe Fernandez Who who I report to has been talking about this for a while First of all, you know, it's about your applications. Yeah line I've used for years chris is I'm an infrastructure guide by background my background Networking virtualization the only reason we have these technologies is to support your applications, right? You go talk to the c-suite. I don't care about software to find networking I don't care about how many cores and how many things you've got on and everything What do I care? I care about my business my business runs on application My data is super important in my people. So, you know, the but the applications are so what's important So that's where it starts and so one of the big changes. What are the challenges here? Chris the average enterprise it has hundreds if not thousands of applications And the average application it's too old and it probably sucks So, you know, if you talk to people that use applications, you know Here's an example I use my mother Retired relatively recently. Um, she worked in hospice care And she would talk to me about the application that she had to use for her You know the people that she was giving service and she's like I have to manually enter the same thing three times and even, you know The it wasn't this the the laptop or anything like that It was just the architecture of what she's doing was very manual It wasn't built to help you get your job done It was helped to, you know, you need to fill out all this paperwork and follow all of this compliance Um, and you know when I talk to analysts that work on applications It's just like well, you know, we squeeze more life out of our applications than we can Um, I I think the the the greatest thing about virtualization was I could shove An application into vm and never touch it again But that's the greatest sin problem Is you know when I started working with you know, virtualization, you know, over 15 years ago It was my operating systems going into life the servers going into support. Um, hey, should we You know update that, you know horrible application and somebody who's like, well Hey, no, we can stick it in a vm and leave it there for another five years It's real happy, but the users of the application are miserable So we know that in today's world not only am I building new applications, but Constantly we're changing. We're adjusting. We're tweaking. We're making it more modular So that journey of applications is a huge challenge The infrastructure is the second pillar and the third one is the people the processes and the tooling Chris, unfortunately, all of those are super challenging. So Especially that culture piece, right? Like right. I mean, you know, it goes without saying that often the technology part Is the easy one and it's the culture one that's tough But you know, I tell you the applications could give it a run for its money because if I look at my, you know application portfolio and say, okay Modernize all of that. There are some out there that would like, hey, yeah Give us a week or two and we will just make that happen. And when I hear those stories, it's like You know, the narrator comes on and says Unfortunately, we know how this story is going to end It's like, you know, it is not going to go make some a couple weeks to even scope it All right. Yeah, and you know, yes, there are certain things that we can move There are certain things we can modernize But there's oftentimes where it's like, oh, yeah, you know database migration Modernization those kind of things. Um, it's one of those things, you know It gets to the 80 complete and then it stops and it will take you the next six months to figure out how to get that last 20 percent So it is, you know, yes culture, but, you know, oh my gosh applications understanding You know, what do you build new? What do you sassify? What do you, you know, modernize? What do you lift and shift and which things are you just like, hey We're just going to run this thing into the ground until we absolutely don't need it and replace it and things like that Off as best as you can just let it go. Yeah, there, you know There's certain things that it's like, you know, the finance department says leave that in the dark corner You know that there's a spider guarding it and you don't want to mess with it, you know, so You open the door giant tarantula falls down. Are you sure you want to be here right now? So, I mean I know from my experience, you know in ops and in dev ops and Just as a consumer, right? Like I can tell if I go to your website and I'm buying something What's on your back yet? Like I can tell that nowadays I can tell if you've adopted an agile process or dev ops or anything like that I can do that just by going to your website nowadays and I know I'm not the only one that can do that So when we when we're talking about Transformation of applications transformation of infrastructure and then that last piece people process and culture Where do you start right like this is this paper that we're putting out open shift.com slash hybrid Does that help there? I mean does that give people a good place to say? Okay, if I start here, I'm going to end up have a better outcome than if I started here So it's a beginning of what are some of those architectural and you know organizational things that I need to consider It's only about 25 pages. So obviously it's not a blueprint. It's not a business everything But you know Here's here's I guess the starting point of it Often we when we think of something we think of when we first heard of it and it is very difficult to change our mind on it so The first thing of the paper is starting with let's start with hybrid hybrid cloud I go back to the you know We talked about the great cloud wars and things like that and it was public cloud will rule everything Private cloud is garbage and it doesn't do anything hybrid cloud was kind of this you know Halfway house of what the heck is it? It's the mix of the crap you had and the things you hope you do And if that is your mindset of hybrid and oh, what was the nist use case? Oh, well, let's follow the sun and burst and do all these You know wacky things that you look at and you say like a gravity problem That's happening right out of the door I mean chris, you know if anyone is going to change the laws of physics I expected our friends over an IBM research That are working on quantum computing and all that stuff to find some way to bend You know those rules or anything but for us mere mortals Yeah, there's certain, you know data gravity you talked about, you know locality There's there's certain, you know fundamental laws that we need to follow So what we wanted to do is first of all, let's all agree what hybrid is because hybrid is you've got your data center You've got your hosted environments. You've got public cloud And oh by the way in every survey you see is do you have a cloud? Even when they say yes, I have a cloud. Well, I forgot about the one group over doing there And the new cloud comes up with something else That company we acquired over here that's using digital ocean, you know, it's it's everywhere It is there and oh, let's you know throw the curve ball into the whole mix That everybody's talking about hey edge computing Are you are you doing that or are you moving that and doing anything? So the the the first piece of the paper is really hybrid is you're going to have lots of pieces and That's only going to continue. That's for right. You're at hybrid today You will be at hybrid tomorrow And our hybrid definition will be more of an umbrella that will embrace more of what's happening in that world Not a delineation of this is what I do and what I don't do Because when the next new thing comes out Hybrid needs to be able to do it and that's what you know Kubecon week you talk about like oh my gosh the explosion of the number of new projects The new innovation coming from lots of end users and vendors in this space What I don't want to do is adopt an architecture that When hey something comes out and you're like, hey that'll actually help me move faster Answer the business questions I have you don't want to say oh, well, I can't do that So it's not easy to do But you know, that's that's one of the things that really excited me too about You know what we do with open shift how we work with the ecosystem with you know the hyperscalers the other clouds in a lots of environments edge and all those things is It takes a lot of work and there's a lot of nuance in I don't just work with a little but I actually like integrate with it deeply And I can take advantage of those kind of kind of technologies and that's what hybrid done right means right and You know right if you talk to you know, lots of companies out there Most companies today if you ask them their cloud strategy, they're not going to say Yes, I choose hybrid But when you look at what they have yes, they're doing hybrid so that's a big piece of the paper is Okay step one is Understand what you've got and number two is what do you have to do a little bit different? As an analyst for years. I've been saying to do hybrid or multicod right It would be really nice if it wasn't just a collection of pieces But how do I get my arms around it? How do I coordinate across it that consistency? Which is what open shift has really focused on and heck before that rel has had decades of Working in all of those environments. You know, that's what got me excited to to to work in this space and You know this paper specifically You know builds on you know that that history and experience that we've had And and having read a draft of the paper early on there's one Line in it that I think or one topic Or are talking about transforming infrastructure pulling apart the app and the infrastructure pieces and making those separate, you know immutable or consumable units of tooling essentially to Put together in kind of dev ops get ops kind of way right like it It leads you into these methodologies of the future without Actually saying like embrace more agile Kind of flows and dev ops and get ops right like but it's definitely pointing at certain things and saying like you definitely have to like Your os and your app can't be dependent upon each other right like that java app running and rel 4 Can't rely on those packages anymore, right? Like you've got to have Modern os is modern containers essentially or equivalence of those things Living inside this new hybrid environment that you're working at. Yeah, so so we talked earlier How like on-premise, you know makes me shake my head and think less of whoever said it The other one that just gets thrown around a lot that that you know sends chills through me is Oh, just just lift and shift and it's like god right most money burning operation ever Right. It was like right, you know, what there's that uh, is it from spongebob or something? It's the people like just shoveling money. Yeah And things like that because look are there times where You know lifting and moving it into a new environment is something you need to do Sure There must be some modernization Something you know take advantage of that because the the the challenge we all have is If you do and if you do a new thing the old way Oh That's not good. Uh, what's the biggest challenge? I I tell you, uh, you know chris We all have certain things. Well, there's certain tools There's the certain processes and the way that I do things It's like it's why I love talking to when we have interns in and I love it the red hat culture is You are not doing your job if you don't speak up and say Hey, have we considered this or have you looked at this? Have you done this because what I love is when somebody says Oh, hey Here's this new way of doing things and I'll look at be like you just saved me 20 minutes a day or A couple hours a week. Oh my god. I can't believe I didn't know about when did that come out? And they're like, oh, I've been using that for the last 18 months. I'm like, oh my gosh I wish I'd known Well, there's things that we've been doing for five or 10 more years that you're like, why are we doing this? It's like my last job. We had a we had a line that we used it was, you know friends Don't let friends build data centers And it's like because you as an enterprise you suck at Pouring concrete doing power and cooling. There's very few companies in the world that are good on that if you suck at it You know, you should move away Well, unfortunately if you built a data center, you're often in that for 25 to 35 years If not more, you know, we talked about how long people, you know, keep things running so It is, you know, how do I make sure That I'm thinking of new things without having to also Constantly course correct and change what's going on. So, you know, there's that balance There's a line I've used a bunch of times, which said Chris, do you know the best time to do something? It's like a growing a tree, right? You should have done it yesterday. Well, so right So the problem we have is with the pace of change It used to be the best time to do something was a year ago because now you'd have a year of experience today If I could wait another six to 12 months, will there be something better cheaper faster or wonderful? Possibly So it'd be awesome if I could wait another year But reality is if you don't start now, you're never going to get there and you can't constantly Push off the future. So the answer is You go to battle with the technology and the tools that you have today But make sure that you're being educated and understanding because the challenge we have I talked about there's this this gap for most people The technologies that I understand and I'm comfortable with You're usually not on today's technology. As a matter of fact, we know Talk to the typical enterprise and you say, okay product gets announced today Am I ready for that today? No, I'm running the thing n minus two So that's where my point of view is and if I look at the roadmap I look at these things and you're like The roadmap looks like some kind of alien magic that I don't understand because I'm at something You're showing me something a year or so out and I'm running something a couple years behind a You know, think about how much technology has changed in the last three years Look at kubernetes, right you asked me about kubernetes three years ago We were having a very different conversation very different conversation. Yeah So that is, you know, we change things change so fast that we do need to update In things at least hey kubernetes, you know, we're only gonna have three updates a year, which That that is just for like the the people right like we realized in the community You know, I'm a cnc f ambassador. I can talk to this You know, we realized in the community that doing four releases a year Under the conditions of coveted was actually detrimental to our community So pushing it back to three a year. I think is just a brilliant idea, but not only that It allows everybody else to kind of consume the latest thing a little bit better, right like Your immediate update to the next kubernetes version Will take a little bit longer and it does give you a little bit more time But how many people are actually running cube 121 right now? Very few Which is scary because the best security advice for kubernetes is run the latest version, right? So Um, well that I tell you that was, you know Chorus of course was acquired by red hat a couple of years ago That was one of the promises that one of the things exciting when they first came out is We should treat our os the way that you think about chrome You know, it should be updated right all my my friends in the security world is that's the biggest problem is That you're not on the latest you need to be on the latest you need to get that fixed You know, whether that's on your you know, your mobile phone or you know, whatever it is data center and the promise of cloud was It's funny, you know, I used to say, you know, you don't ask what version of azure or aws you're running on you're running on the latest version The funny thing is if you look at the kubernetes offering that they have They've got a few different versions. So, you know, I go in and I actually went into azure yesterday and was like Oh, hey, I want to choose, you know, I can choose the you know, of course azure red hat open shift or I can choose aks From azure and it's like hey in what version of kubernetes. Do you want to choose and it's like, oh great So now the cloud isn't by default up on the latest because we know as we said before enterprises We need to have our upgrade cycles and testing and manage all that but it is Unfortunately, Chris wasn't cloud supposed to be just cheap easy and fix all these problems, right? Like cloud was supposed to be the the industry like consumerization You know as i'm holding my iphone cloud was supposed to be the iphone of tech and it didn't work out that way Yeah, it's almost like there's still computers underneath it and stuff. It's crazy. Like there's still silicon there. It's amazing Software is eating the world, but it still needs to chew and swallow. I guess so right exactly Yeah, they can't eat the world in one bite. Um So Let's you know, let's dive into the third part of this paper a little bit, you know talking about transforming people process and culture, right? Like Culture's the hardest part Let's just set that up right there, right? Like i've been in organizations where the entire it department has got up and walked out before and i'm the guy that comes in It has to try and clean it up Not a good place to be in your career. Just let me tell you that right up front but That culture change As hard as it is it is necessary, right? Like you have to start thinking about your applications and your infrastructure in different ways as advantages that you can create for yourself not as burdens that you're saddled with Yeah, you know, I look at you know the last 20 years in my career talked about like silos And you know 20 years ago, you know, I my networking background I worked at you know, a large storage company for a bunch of years and the storage team and the network team It was one of those, you know, hey at the company picnic you better separate these two and definitely don't have them You know playing flag football because it might get dirty, uh, you know, so uh and part of it was Do you have a general understanding and can you build empathy between the teams? Right, you know You know, what is dev ops a lot of what dev ops is isn't a tool set It is a cultural mindset and you add dev sec ops into it. Hey, how do we get security? Into the entire discussion have everyone thinking about it overall Not something that is bolted on at the end or thrown over the wall To the security team to handle so right the more we can have an understanding between our groups The better things can be. I'll tell you one of the ones I loved Two years ago. I think it was I went to ansible fest Back when we had it in person right and one of the one of the kind of light bulbs that went off for me is Who uses ansible and it wasn't one group it was the you know, the product owner The developer and you know in the executive engineer all had their way to look into the tooling and While they all spoke their own language If I had a common tool that I can see what I need and there's communication between You know slack isn't going to get everybody working together Now github does get people working together a lot more So it's you know, nothing wrong with slack and it's a useful and everything like that But when we think about collaboration, we need to think of it as to the right. How do I do my job? What are the things I need and you know software can actually be a unifying You know factor between those environments and there's lots of examples We've seen I've seen lots of companies when they're building more software It pulls their teams together because they have to have they have to have common apis They have to have common user interfaces common experiences We see that when we make acquisitions as to you know, how do you pull that software in is You know part of the same thing you're doing when you go through the cultural You know onboarding of all the people involved right and you know, we've We hear red hat. We've had two interesting, you know add-ons You know acquisitions, whatever you want to call them, right? Like we just acquired stack rocks We we brought over the acm team from ibm and you know, we've integrated both of those things into open shift now and There's a bright future in both of those but we've also open sourced them And we've gotten better open sourcing things we being red hat because I remember when the ansible acquisition happened It took a year and a half almost two years to get ansible tower open sourced And and now it's just like we can do it so quickly because we're so used to doing it, right? Like it's it's this too can happen for your organization when it comes to your infrastructure and your challenges You just got to let everybody have a seat at the table, right? Like not exclude anyone be more inclusive That's and you know, it's funny someone mentioned Emily Freeman's DevOps for dummies book was more about getting people talking to each other and working with each other than it was about technology That's true, right? Like the idea of you know, me throwing something over the wall to the security team And they're going to pull out their checklist and make sure Oh us top ten is check and oh the nist standards check and oh this is checked that doesn't actually make this Application more secure. It's just compliant, right? So you want to make sure that those people have spots in the pipeline, but also spots at the table to discuss Not only at the end where everybody gets together and does things Which then inevitably ends to a weekend release taking the whole weekend You don't you don't really want that So how do you take that? Pillar of automation that red hat is kind of uniquely situated to give you and Make hybrid cloud or making hybrid in general an advantage for you, right? Yeah Is there a silver bullet to this? No, but there are some different ways to do well And and it's funny because you know, we talked about like the cncf landscape Yeah, it's a mess and you know share with our audience a little bit. It's it makes me smile a little bit because You know when I'm in some of these meetings with some of the pms and hearing some of the And they're like, ah, this doesn't work the way I want and there's all these challenges and things like that It's like take a deep breath Look at how far we've come Yes, there are challenges that we need to have but we've got the best solution in the marketplace We get great feedback. We have lots of our customers working with us and Lots of our partners working with us. Here's the good news is we've got lots of work to do for many years There's no shortage of things to do You know, it's a shame there. There's certain technologies that you're like, okay, I reached a certain point Let's put it into steady state and let's move on to the next cool thing. Um, we've got work for years I mean to do so, um, it is It's good to know, uh, you know, what a strong focus there is by the whole team and It's it's been, you know, I I've loved the comment I've made in six months is, you know, have there been any surprises at red hat I said, not really really red hat is more red hat on the inside than it was on the outside when you see some of the You know, you know robust discussions and conversations and things going on inside. You're like, wow, you know, that is It's amazing, you know, sometimes a little scary, but you know, uh, usually usually good, uh in a good way And it's been so nice. Like, you know, this paper, uh, it's got, you know, my signature and my name on the inside But so many people, uh, that helped work on it Obviously when it got to some of the product pieces there, but you know, really value all the feedback Not to mention, you know, I mean actual editors, you know, that can help and make things, you know Even better in designers that can make it look pretty and the customer references that can make the quotes and the analysts You know, there's so many pieces that are involved that it was like, hey, it's so nice to You know, have those resources and work on those things. Uh, and everything, you know, very collaborative in nature. Obviously, uh, red hat Yeah, the amount of collaboration right not not just even within like my own team, but like people You know, I'm in this unique position where I'm running this channel and everything else So I have to reach out across different lines, right across different business units and everything and everyone is so collaborative It is really refreshing, right? Like this is the environment. I've wanted to be in for years and now I'm finally here gonna deal Chris, you know, you bring a point. So it's funny, you know I first worked with red hat It's scary for me to say it was 21 years ago. I think the first time I started working with red hat and over my career, I've worked with so many companies And you have good interactions. You have bad interactions. You have things in between But you know, the culture of red hat does come through it is, you know, as we said, I think a Differentiator of the company and it is one of the top things that brought me here because that first interaction back in the Oh my god wild wild west of linux. I mean, you remember va and turbo and oh, yeah Like susa or any of those came out it was, you know, I was working at emc And as like the young product manager, they're like, well, we've got all these unique stuff And we've got the microsoft relationship and oracle and cisco and intel and all these things There's this mess of stuff in linux You've probably got a few spare cycles. Why don't you figure that out and figure out how we should do it and Wait, the day that red hat called us up and said, hey, so We think we're going to put out this thing called red hat advanced server And we're going to target it towards being a package that has all the patches and all the things we need And we just come from the 2.4 to the 2.6 kernel and all this stuff It was like, wait, wait, wait, so I can tell companies You use this one and it's going to work and we tested it and it did and like literally we had like, you know This multi page document as to all the way to way make linux work and all the vendor we might work to to it Was like, um, yeah, so you're going to use red hat and that's going to be the default And if you really need something else you need better have a good reason because We just didn't have enough resources, right, you know at emc public company, you know doing doing a lot in that things um, and you know that led me through a certain environment and then When I was doing the cube, you know, I interacted a lot with uh, you know, what was going on in the cloud space specifically You know interviewed a shesh like god seven eight years ago the first time back before kubernetes and that that environment but you know, watch the the growth of the cloud piece And that's what excited me to yeah, the the the growth of cloud I think is It's an order of magnitude every year, right like looking at you know earnings reports and such but the The amount that you can cover your cloud in red hat is almost equal Which is great. I feel like right like you can manage your cloud with red hat You can put your applications On systems that are you know designed to work across all clouds Because they are running the same you know the same software underneath the hood kind of deal And you don't have to worry about oh over here we're version one point something and over here we're version one point not something and You know this one feature we can't put in this cluster But we can put in that cluster and you don't have to worry about that. It's a consistent operating environment and you know because of operators themselves It it becomes a more manageable situation and you're kind of you know treating your applications or not your applications, but your Your infrastructure and your tooling as a real advantage as opposed to Something that's you know holding you back. Yeah. Well that that was that was one of the lines The question is You know is hybrid a whole bunch of pieces that becomes a boat anchor You know to it slows you down Um, we all know you talked about chris how you can look at somebody's website and realize that they're not You know moving fast. Um, if you read the you know the the big uh dev op survey that that happens every year There are certain companies that are like well, we're gonna take our 12 to 18 month release cycle And we're just gonna go faster and you know, we're not gonna really change But yeah, we're not going to get it on you know a a a nine month cadence And it's the train's going off the tracks. It's not, you know, happening fast versus the ones that are like Yeah, we we push code, you know, whenever we want and push multiple times a day And can do all of these things. It's you know, looking at what differentiates, you know, the leaders is It's completely re-architected. We try to take away some of those dependencies so that I can make changes You know, it's loosely coupled. Um, you know Two pizza teams which I still struggle with but maybe it's just because I have, you know, a teenage boy in the household And given it, you know, he yeah, you know, most of two pizzas themselves I mean, I remember when I was 18, I could put some pizza away. Yeah I unfortunately will still eat too much pizza given the chance. Uh, but uh It's right the the way that you do things and move forward. So right can Hybrid architected right from your apps your infrastructure and your in your people You know really could be a booster rocket. It can help. I loved I was listening in in red hat summit, uh, the uh speaker we add on from fema And he talked about, you know, immutable architectures and I build something, you know, it's the right ones do it anywhere Um, and right, it's not like he's moving things everywhere, but it's you know, if we make a decision Where does an application live? I can figure that out later because I can build it wherever I need I can use the, you know, uh, the CRCs and have this environment where I build it and then deployment Is something that's separate and I can take care of that and if things change in the future No problem. Uh, and there's some cool new thing that I want to take advantage of Often I can get my environment there much faster We we want to lower those barriers to entry, you know Frictionless is something that we were talking about for years in cloud And I don't hear it as much anymore because we've reached a certain point where We've we've done the low-hanging fruit and some of it is a little bit harder. Um, yeah We're still, you know, it's crazy to me how early we are still in cloud because most of us We've been in it and talking about it for more than a decade But when you look at, you know, you know the over trillion dollars of the market and where, you know I mean amazon and microsoft and google and you know alibaba and everything are growing gangbusters, but We're still a small slice of the overall picture there. So, um, yeah exciting time lots of opportunities there and You know working with those customers because uh, you know, if thing we've said often is strategy Um, isn't something that you make a, you know, three to five year strategy It is something that you set a direction and you need to revisit often because You know a quarter from now things might be a little different Um, I think 2020 put that in sharp focus for all of us. I think when we all went into 2020 We had slightly different plans. Uh, then by the time, you know, we hit the spring That is definitely for sure. Uh Yes, I remember my last trip. Uh, it was actually to las vegas of all places. Uh, yeah So chris, were you going to be in amsterdam? I was I was I was planning on going. I think I even had the most wonderful trip to I had a conference in dublin The conference in amsterdam and in between was going to go see a buddy in prog which i've never been to and it was like You know two weeks of like seeing some lovely sights in europe and you know really enjoying some flavors and everything And you know since then I've only had takeout from places within a 15 mile radiance of my house. So I don't even think I've gotten that far out yet to be honest with you Maybe eight nine miles maybe but yeah, it's it's it's The world has changed right for Better or worse the world has changed And we're now realizing that Your technology can actually hold you up, right like having everybody vp into one thing That is a single point of failure, right like you need to spread everything kind of consistently distributed across multiple environments why because well Guess what things break and when they break you don't want them to take down your whole company You want the the meantime to recovery to be minimal and the best way to do that is to often have Multiple paths running in a kubernetes cluster, right and a single deployment. So the the The leaps and bounds you can make In a hybrid environment where you're taking advantage of not only kubernetes Or you know open shift or ansible, but you're taking advantage of cloud services where you Consider yourselves to be weaker in right like me for example Like I would take storage from someplace else all day long because i'm not a storage person But when it comes to compute i'm a little picky, you know, I like certain things um So the the the whole transformation in just the past year has been amazing to watch But what do you think is like Coming up on the horizon that's like Just over the edge That's going to change things anything in particular or is it just this reckoning of We're in this world now and we've got to adjust um Yeah, so so we know the only constant in our industry is change So, you know, how do we make that? Easier so, you know, I You know, we touched on it briefly in the paper and it was one of the topics for kubecon this week You know something like get ops. So we are early, you know, let us see You know the promise of that immutability. Let me you know, you want to make any changes It has to go through get Um, there are things about that that are super attractive But is it too regimented for most customers? I can imagine certain government agencies that are like this is perfect um, but the the average company the problem we have is You know, we're used to well, I you know, I want to be able to adjust things ourselves um The thing that you know, the the funny thing is is I said the misconception of cloud for the longest time was Uh, you know building, you know, your stack in your data center You had all these knobs and things that you did and everything Cloud is much simpler. You talked about compute. Hey, chris if I went to favorite vendor in the data center for a server versus Amazon or azure I think amazon and azure actually have more different choices and decisions you have to make Oh, yeah, able to roll out a compute node. So it's one of those. I'm like, oh my god Yeah, I wrote a I wrote an article years ago when we first dug into amazon and you know I wish I could go see a data center But got to listen like james hannelton speak and got to interview him and totally geeked out on it. Um, and it was You know amazon is not Off the shelf, you know generic white box stuff. They are what I called hyper optimized It's like when he's like, oh, yeah, we have two phds Working on the power supplies on these machines because if I can crank out one percent of cost or save one percent of energy Yeah Those two people paid for their own salaries by an order of magnitude, you know so it is crazy to think about, you know that that, you know, just Not my handful of servers or hundreds of servers But you know the tens of thousands of servers for each Environment that break they have so that's You know, very different. So the the problem, right? Cory Quinn's written some great things is, you know, amazon you got too many features You know, nobody needs all of it, you know, nobody Other than like, you know, Werner and Andy Jassy have any clue how all of this stuff all works Um, and so, you know, it's always we need to need to have ways to simplify things and make things easier. So Well, all right, we're coming up on the end of our time here, I believe so I'm going to ask you this last question And it's a good one for you especially what gets you up in the morning? Yeah, I mean what what really motivates you to get out of bed and be like I'm doing this today Yeah, so, you know, it might sound a little bit corny, but you know part of it It's the mission when I look at, you know, what brought me to red hat I felt like I could help make an impact here But the community activity and the good that the technology that we do helps the world So, you know, I don't say that lightly when I talk to certain companies and like, you know, I know our teams are all super proud when they're like How much is helping health organizations to track and fight COVID right now Uh, the work that goes into like sustainability, uh, the things that have been done You know, not only red hat, but you know, hey that even that parent company, you know, IBM who you know Helps certain things. I watch, you know, Jim Whitehurst talking about like sustainability initiatives Being part of that overall mission And getting to work with customers help work through their challenges and hopefully make the world a better place You know that that's one of the things that brought me over and has been super exciting to dig into And I can't wait until it will just be, you know team zoom You know, WebEx and things there but actually get to, you know, talk in person to, you know, more of these people Yeah, no, I can't wait for those days either to be honest with you because You know, talking to people through here is one thing But it's it's vastly different when you can like sit down and have a meal with somebody Just talk and just be like where are your real challenges? You know, and nine times out of 10 is like, well I've got this one thing that's really bugging me and That's when you get into the the meat of the discussion is actually after the meeting Yeah, because it is those Those interesting collisions or side comments or, you know, right over a meal or, you know Out in the hallway after where sometimes some of the most meaningful conversations can happen That's why yeah, I mean, we're all trying to reproduce the hallway tracks At the virtual events and finding ways to have meaningful connections with people You know, I I still love, you know, people that reach out and, you know, we have, you know Let's still grab time to have a conversation sometimes Whether it's about work careers or just the catch up because yeah, I I I miss people No, but you know, I do miss people people are a huge part of technology nowadays, right? Like you can't deny that anymore. So yeah, being a people person is vastly important and nowadays because You have to show some folks value, right? Like what are you doing to improve things and making things more sustainable or more flexible? Someone just commented. I hope some summit will be in person again next year as do I Yeah, so hopefully we've got a lot of work to do before we all know we all know there'll be some hybrid involved So chris This is also it was star wars week this week So did you get to do any special shows or do you have any favorite star wars movies or shows that uh I get to ask you a question before we wrap I mean, you know star wars is a huge multiverse, right? And and then you have you throw in the addition of disney plus with the mandalorian and everything I guess it's really getting hard to be like No, I like the prequels or the sequels or the main trilogy or the tv stuff It's like there's so much of it now But to be honest with you, I still think some of those you know Obi-Wan Kenobi references are still valid today, right? Like You know Trusts and patience and those kinds of things still apply, right? Like if you don't give yourself enough leeway to learn You're never going to get ahead. You're going to constantly be behind. So you have to give Your teams your people the the patience that is needed to get them to where they need to be So that's that's kind of the mantra that you know, I've taken away from the star wars universe lately is that that Jedi kind of focus of Patience well, you must be like me super excited for the Obi-Wan Kenobi series that that's coming out like Let's get this thing on the road. All right. Yeah, you know have to have to say huge you and mcgregor fan boy So, uh, you know, wow, okay, you know excited to see him. We had they had Kamal Nagyani, right? Yeah, you're in red hat summit and he talked about being part of that. So, yeah It's I do love that, you know, right that there's there's new things happening What I've loved recently in star wars is them going beyond the main pieces, you know I'm huge fan of the original series Yeah, and if you ask me my favorite movie, it's probably empire so There's some fun stuff from the prequels, uh, you know love the memes especially talking with my teens You know, there's there's lots of mean from that the sequels There are parts of them. I liked but you know, I would be like, you know Thank god for like Mandalorian because you know that that brought everything around so yeah, Mandalorian was surprisingly good and um The kind of throwing out of the old multiverse and saying we're gonna kind of go our own way with the disney acquisition of the Star Wars, I think Well, it might have ticked off a lot of people. It's probably the smartest thing you ever did Well, they're just annoyed because Kylo said it first is like you you must kill all the old and and everything like that But yeah, it's look, um, even the bad star wars I'll take and uh, because exactly love to debate it and have fun with it and uh, Yeah, you saw during commons. I had fun with it I mean, you know, I I knew it was kind of fate eventually that I'd end up at red hat since they had Uh, it was red hat summit 2017 in boston They gave out may the fourth shirts and they had a jedi fat fat fight on stage And I was just like that's the type of company. I want to work for and here I am so it's been a blast Awesome. Well, stew has been great. It's been great having you here. Uh, really appreciate your time today Thank you everyone for watching Thank you everybody out there just doing the work of making the world a better place and adopting these technologies and bringing them Bringing them to bear for you know, all the purposes that have come out in distributed computing and hybrid cloud So thank you all very much for the work you've done And stew, I'm sure we'll see each other again very soon. So thank you again for coming on today Any any other parting statements before we go? Uh, no, I'm not taking over your job. Chris. Thank you for doing it You know, I love the conversations. Definitely. Um, you know There definitely will be some times that you and I will be collaborating on stuff. So I will be doing some more video Um, yeah, you know, it was nice. We got through almost an hour and we didn't even mention like my twitter handle I'm like the easiest guy to find on twitter if they really need back I'm just stew stu on twitter. So if you watch this far, please reach out. Um, you know, happy to connect You know, let me know your questions and Definitely, uh, great to you know, always be engaged with the community and uh, by the way red hat we're hiring So go check out the job boards. Yeah a lot of hiring there and we need so if you love geeking out you love The technology space, uh, we it's a fun place to work and yeah super excited that we've got more hiring to do Absolutely. Yeah red hat.com slash jobs. Go get those go get those applications and folks. We really need you So good point. Thank you for mentioning that stew and with that, I think we'll say goodbye Uh, we'll see y'all on the air tomorrow for our kubecon office hours that are still continuing starting at 7 a.m. Eastern tomorrow 1300 1315 central european standard time because why not? Let's take it easy out there. Stay safe and we will see y'all next time