 Well, hi everybody, John Walls here on theCUBE, continuing our coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 with Tom Anderson, Vice President of Product Management at Red Hat and Tom. You've been the answer man for theCUBE here over the last week, 10 days or so, third CUBE appearance. I hope we haven't worn you out. No, John, I love doing it. So it's great to have you at the event. Oh, great. And thank you for letting us be a part of that. It's been a lot of fun. Let's go and look at the event now. As far as big picture here, major takeaways that you think that have been talked about that you think you'd like people, customers to go home with, if you will, although a lot of this has been virtual, obviously, but I say go home and make that figuratively. But what do you want people to remember and then apply to their businesses? Right, so being a product guy, I want to talk about products usually, right? So the big kind of product announcements from this year's event have been the rollout of really the next generation of the Ansible Automation Platform, which is really a re-architecture turning it into a cloud-native application, an automation application itself that scales to our customer needs. So a lot of big announcements around that. And so what does that do for customers? That's really bringing them the automation platform that they can scale from the data center to the cloud, to the edge, and everywhere in between across a single platform with a single easy-to-use automation language. And then secondly on that, as automation starts to shift left, we always talk about technology shifting left towards the developer. As automation is also shifting left towards the developer and other personas in an organization, we're really happy about the developer tools and the tooling that we're providing to the customers with the new automation platform too that brings development of content, automation content. So the creation, the testing, the deployment, and the management of that content across an enterprise far easier than it's ever been. So it's really kind of, it's a little bit about the democratization of automation. We see that shifting left, if you will, and I know I've said that already, but we see that shifting left of automation into other parts of the organization beyond the domain experts, the network engineers, or the storage experts, et cetera. Pushing that automation out into the hands of other personas in the organization has been a big trend that we've seen and a lot of product announcements around that. So really excited about the product announcements in particular, but also the involvement and the engagement of our ecosystem, our upstream community, so important to our product and our success, our ecosystem partners, and obviously last but not least, our customers and our users. So you hit a lot of big topics there, but so let's talk about the edge. That seems to be a fairly significant trend at this point, right? Because trying to get the automation out toward the data besides, man, it's where the apps are, right? It's where the data is, where things are happening out there on the edge. So maybe just dive into that a little bit and about how you're trying to facilitate that need. Yeah, so a couple of trends around the edge. Obviously it's the architecture itself with lower capacity or lower capability devices and compute infrastructure at the edge and whether that's at the far edge with very low capacity to devices or even at near edge scenarios where you don't have data center IT people out there to support those environments. So being able to get at those low capability, low capacity environments remotely, Ansible is a really good fit for that because of our agentless architecture, the agentless architecture of Ansible itself allows you to drive automation out into the devices and into the environments where there isn't a high capacity infrastructure. And the other thing that we've seen is one of the commonalities that no matter where the compute is taking place and the users are, there always has to be network. So we see a lot of network automation use cases out at the edge and Ansible is, you know, the de facto network automation solution in the market. So we see a lot of our customers driving Ansible use cases out into their edge devices. You know, talk about development too and this kind of this change in relationship with Ansible and DevOps and how that has certainly been maturing and seems to be really taking off right now. Yeah, so for, you know, what we've seen a lot of is, you know, is becoming frictionless, right? How do we take the friction out of the system that frees developers up to be more productive for organizations to be more agile to roll out applications faster? How do we do that? We need to get access to the infrastructure and the resources that developers need. We need to get that access into their hands when they need it and in a frictionless sort of way, right? So, you know, all of the old school traditional ways of developers having to get infrastructure by opening a help desk ticket to get servers built for them and waiting for IT ops to build the servers and to deploy them and to send them back a message, all that is gone now. These, you know, subsystem owners whether that's compute or cloud or network or storage, their ability to use Ansible to expose their resources for consumption by other personas, developers in this case, makes developers happy and more efficient because they can just use those automation playbooks, those Ansible playbooks to deploy the infrastructure that they need to develop, test and deploy their applications on and the actual subsystem owners themselves can be assured that the usage of those environments is compliant with their standards because they've built and shared the automation with those developers to be able to consume when they want. Both sides happy, agile, efficient developers and happy infrastructure owners because they know that the governance and compliance around that system usage is on point with what they need and what they want. That's a big win-win and a very good point. I always like it when we kind of get down to the nitty gritty and talk about what are customers really doing? You know, and because we can talk about hypotheticals and trends and developing and maturing rates and all those kinds of things but in terms of actual customers, what people really are doing, what do you think have been a few of the plums that you'd like to make sure people are paying attention to? Yeah, I think from this year's event, I was really taken by the JPMorgan Chase presentation and it really kind of fits into my idea of shifting less left in the democratization of automation. They talked about, I think the number was around 7,000 people associates inside that organization that are across 22 countries. So kind of global consumption of this, building automation playbooks and sharing those across the organization. I mean, so gone are the days of, you know, very small teams of people doing, just automating the things that they do and it's grown so big and so pervasive now. And I think JPMorgan Chase really kind of brings that out, tees that out, the kind of cultural impacts that's had on their organization, the efficiencies they've been able to draw from that, their ability to bring the developers and their operations teams together to be working as one. I think their story is really fantastic. And I think this is the second year, I think this is the second year that JPMorgan Chase has been presenting at Fest and this year's session was fantastic. I really, really enjoyed that. So I would encourage anybody to go back and look at the recording in that session. And then there's GameSys groups to the other end of the spectrum, right? Financial Services, JPMorgan Chase, global company to GameSys, right? These people who are rolling out new games and need to be able to manage capacity really well. When a new game hits, right? Think about a new game hits and the type of demand and consumption there is for that game and then the underlying infrastructure to support it. GameSys did a really great presentation around being able to scale out automation, to scale up and down automation to be able to spin up clusters and deploy infrastructure to run their games on an as needed basis. So kind of that business agility and how automation is driving that, or business agility is driving the need for automation in these organizations. So that's just a couple of examples, but there was good ones from another financial services that talked about the cultural impacts of automation, their idea of extreme automation. In fact, one of the sessions I interviewed Joe Mills, a gentleman from this Card Services financial services company, and he talked about extreme automation there and how they're using automation guilds and communities of practice in their organization to get over the cultural hurdles of adopting automation and sharing automation across an organization. So a wide array, obviously, of customer uses and all very effective, I guess, in telling their own story. Somewhat related to that, and as you put it out there too, if you want to go back and look, these are really great case studies to take a look at. For those, again, who maybe couldn't attend or haven't had a chance to look at any of the sessions yet, what are some of the kinds of things that were discussed in terms of sessions to give somebody a flavor of what was discussed and maybe to tease them a little bit for next year, right? Just in case that you weren't able to participate and can't right now, there's always next year. So maybe you could give us a little bit of flavor of that too. Yeah, so we kind of break down the sessions a little bit into the more kind of technical sessions and then the sort of less technical sessions, let's put it that way. And on the technical session front, certainly a couple of the sessions were really about getting started. Those are always popular with people new to Ansible. So there's the session that aired on the 29th, which has been recorded and you can rewatch it. That's getting started Q and A with the technical Ansible experts. That's a really, really great session because you see that the types of questions that are being asked. So you know you're not alone if you're new to Ansible. The types of questions are probably the questions that you have as well. And then obviously the value of the Ansible experts who are answering those questions. So that was a great session. And then for a lot of folks who may wanna get involved in the community, the upstream community, there's a great session that was also on the 29th and it was recorded for rewatching around getting started with participation in the Ansible community and a live Q and A there. So the Ansible community for those who don't know is a large, robust, vibrant upstream community of users, of software companies, of all manners of people that are contributing and contributing upstream to the code and making Ansible a better solution for them and for everybody. So that's a great session. And then last but not least, almost always the most popular session is the roadmap sessions. And Masimo Ferrari, gentlemen on my team did a great session on the Ansible roadmap. So I do a search on roadmap in the session catalog and you can see the recording of that. So that's always a big deal. Yeah, roadmaps are great, right? Because especially for newcomers, they wanna know how, I'm down here at point zero and I've got a destination of mine. I wanna go way out there. So how do I get there? So to that point, for somebody who is beginning their journey and maybe they're automated with the ability to manually intervene, right? And now you're gonna take the hands off the wheel and you're gonna allow for full automation. So what's the message you wanna get across to those people who maybe are gonna lose that security blanket they've been hanging on to for a long time and take the wheels off and go? Now, John, that's a great question. And that's usually a big apprehension of kind of full automation, which is, that kind of turning over the reins, if you will, right, to somebody else. If I'm the person who's responsible for this storage system, if I'm the person responsible for this network elements, these routers, these firewalls, whatever it might be, I'm really kind of freaked out about giving controls or access to those things from a configuration standpoint to people outside of my organization who don't have the same level of expertise that I do. But here's the deal that in a well-implemented, well-architected, Ansible Automation Platform environment, you can control the type of automation that people do. Who does that? Against what? Managing that automation as code. So checking in, checking out, conversion control, deployment access. So there's a lot of controls that can be put in place. So it isn't just a free-for-all automated, everybody automating everything. Organizations can roll out automation and have access to different kinds of automation, can control and manage what their organizations can use and see and do with Ansible. So there's lots of controls built in for organizations to put in place and to make those subsystem owners, give them confidence that how people are accessing their subsystems using Ansible Automation can be controlled in a way that makes them comfortable and assures compliance and governance around those resources. Well, Tom, we appreciate the time once again. I know you've been a regular here on theCUBE over the course of the event. We'll give you a little bit of time off as you get back to your day job, but we do appreciate that and wish you success down the road. Thank you very much and we'll see you again next year. You bet, thank you. Tom Anderson joining us, Vice President of Product Management at Red Hat talking about AnsibleFest 2021. I'm John Walls and you're watching theCUBE.