 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Las Vegas for AWS re-invent 2017, Amazon Web Services, annual conference. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE, and I'm here with Keith Townsend, my co-host. We've got our next guest, Mike Ferris, who's the Vice President of Business Architecture and Technical Business Development. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So Red Hat has got the new hat. It's called the new school. It's called Cloud. You guys have been there for a long time. Red Hat's been pioneering open source and that's growing exponentially. That combined with the Cloud was seeing developers really at the heart of the conversation of value creation. So what's the update? I mean, you're here at AWS. You got some things to announce, things to share. No, it's been awesome. So I've been with Red Hat a long time and it's been an amazing transition to see us go from a company that really innovated the business models around open source, taking Linux from being really a hobbyist activity into production workloads, and really addressing system administrators and IT administrators in the early days. What's really happened, especially since Amazon started to innovate in the public cloud, is this, as you were saying, this innovative focus around what happens with developers in this space and how can you provide more tools, capabilities, and services for them so they can really accelerate the applications and the capabilities of the customers that they serve. And so what we've been doing very aggressively is looking at what's been happening in the open source community, helping innovate in the technologies that both Amazon, Red Hat, and everybody else has been maturing, and help building out a new framework for developers to do that. And that's really centered around first, the base that we built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and now more aggressively into OpenShift and container application platforms. So certainly the hot topics being Kubernetes and everything's happening there, we've been really focused on that next generation of applications for developers. Everyone who watches Kube knows I'm a huge Red Hat fan. I always give you guys props because you guys were the progressives. Back in the day, you weren't tier one, you were getting in there to give the freedom of coding back on the old days, and that was really the beginning of this massive wave. And if you look at the open source and what you guys have done with open source and connected that to business value, has really been well documented. Amazon's done the same with the cloud. They were laughed at for years. Oh, there's a developer cloud, and they're winning all these enterprise deals. So the thread here is you're starting to see that, really if you have great software and you have great value creation, you can connect the business dots with developer dots. So that being said, the rage now is serverless. The idea that you could tie containers and orchestrate workloads. This is kind of a little bit OpenShift connects there. What is the Red Hat value there? Because more open source, more community. What is all this Kubernetes containerization and serverless, where does it all come together? So there's multiple levels and kind of the core one that I always go back to is the core principles that enterprises need in making sure that they have secure platforms they can maintain over a long period of time, and they have a robust ecosystem that surrounds that. Those are the things that customers will always value regardless of what level of a stack that they're investing in. And so by starting at the open source level and helping innovate in the technologies there, but bringing that in a way that customers can consume, that our partners can work with, and also gives them the extra value of what's happening in the new generation technologies like containers and like Kubernetes, where we're actively participating, leading a lot of the development projects in the community around. Our focus is very much on taking those same core principles and making them applicable to anything new that gets developed. So Mike, talk to us about these core principles a little bit more. Red Hat Developer Driven Organization. You guys are deep in open source from Linux to Kubernetes to projects people have never heard of. Talk about the value that you bring to businesses, being able to have that developer driven focus internally and starting to shift the conversation from just infrastructure, Linux, traditional, just keeping the lights on types of technologies to these new technologies like OpenShift. How has the conversations changed? So certainly the developers now are actively engaged in the design of the systems and the products, not just the application of the develop, but the tools that they need. In our experience in working in the Linux community where we were dealing with certainly open source developers on the kernel and all the surrounding infrastructure, the thousands of projects that are there, we're taking that and applying it to what's happening in this application and contain our application space. So being able to engage those developers say what frameworks do you need? What tools do you need? What reliability levels do you need in these types of frameworks? Certainly provides a mechanism for them to engage both with the community, but come to Red Hat for working with a company that can actually make that something that we will support for a longer period of time that they can build their applications for and also trust that they will have a strong support path through Red Hat that works upstream in the community to take any innovations that they need and be able to put them into the community as well as the supported products that we provide. So guys. So developer driven organization talking to developers. Where's the grownups in the room? The infrastructure of guys. So Red Hat has been known to take open source projects that can move extremely fast. Linux kernel is an example of it and make them enterprise ready, enterprise stable. How are you guys doing that with these developer tools such as Kubernetes that I frankly can't keep up with all the innovation happening in that space? How do you guys make something like Kubernetes enterprise ready? So this is kind of the beauty of a lot of what we do, right? So we work with and we hire the best developers we can find in the market to own projects to be key contributors to those. Kubernetes is a great example. It was the kernel in the early days for Linux. Now it's in the community space. But just as importantly being able to say you continue that innovative work in the community but also make sure that we have reliable products that are fully tested and backed by our support staff that customers can when they purchase into this ecosystem can absolutely rely on. And if you look at what we've done starting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux we learned how to move in that bifurcated market where you're dealing with open source innovation but also having to answer to customers that want to make sure that things are always up always secure and always stable. And it's that bifurcated model that we've relied on and this is why when we look at open source we consider our development model we don't consider our business model. And that's very important. Mike I want to get your thoughts on business architecture and technical architecture. We were, I was having a debate last night at the analyst happy hour with a couple of aunts I won't say their names to protect the innocent. We made a joke I said if you had to pick a parachute in 10 seconds Amazon, Microsoft or Google which one would you grab? And of course this one analyst said well it depends. So of course it depends. It's just a thought exercise I mean no one's going to pick a cloud in 10 seconds but it makes you think. But the depends conversation does matter legacy whether it's either open source software or pre-existing conditions of the data center cloud plays into it but cloud is a new architecture there are no walls, there's no perimeter. So how are you guys advising your customers to lay out the business architecture the technical architecture. What's the playbook? Because a lot of CXOs are like scratching their head I need a parachute I need to open when I need it I need the cloud now. Our core message to all of our customers in the market at large is really around hybrid. And that applies to both on-premise and off-premise but it also means multiple clouds. And certainly when we partner with somebody like Amazon we're focused on how can we build the best possible relationship and the best possible technical and business environment for customers to engage with that partner. And we did this back in May we announced working with Amazon on OpenShift and we just launched I think it was last week OpenShift 3.7 that has service brokers integrated into OpenShift container platform so customers can actually deploy on-premise, OpenShift and use Amazon service remotely through their OpenShift applications. But our focus in that is to make sure that they have an open environment just like we did at the beginning with RHEL to say it works on all OEMs. Now our focus is RHEL OpenShift it's available on all public clouds we have over 500 CCSPs, our certified cloud and service providers and make sure that all works together very well and the customers have choice in the end and that's really what our focus is. And also I talked to Andy Jassy last week for exclusive interview he said the ecosystem is very robust but even though they might come out with something people are standing on their own with value and it's not like they're trying to compete with the ecosystem which people have concerns about. So that's kind of cool I get that way why he's saying that but I got to ask you the question Elastic Container Service has been doing well containers are obviously great architecture, great. We're expecting to hear Elastic Kubernetes Service, EKS coming out this week. Some are speculating I'm not sure if that's going to be announced but you can almost imagine a Kubernetes version coming out from Amazon. Well Google's got their hand in it so is Kubernetes going to become a political hot potato or is it going to maintain its stability? We certainly believe that it was and certainly is being validated now as the standard orchestration platform for containers. That's a general sentiment across the whole community. Absolutely you see Docker added support for Kubernetes in the last couple of months and so Amazon if they choose to do so, great. We welcome that and engage just like when we were doing Linux as our primary product platform. We welcomed Intel, IBM, everyone else to engage in the community, mature the technologies and frankly we welcome competition when it comes down to it because that's really what makes things better for customers and choice is very important to us. You would agree that Kubernetes had a flash point. It's all good right now, don't meddle with it. So what do we have to look for to make sure no one tinkers it with it too much to take it off the rails? Well I certainly hope they do tinker with it. In a good way. In a good way but the community and what happens in the open source development realm are really the bad stuff gets weeded out over time and we work with customers in the community, we make sure that where the community is going we can reflect that to our customer base. So as Kubernetes matures, as the surrounding technologies for orchestration matures, sorry for containers matures, we want to make sure we're engaged in those projects and working with the customers. So competition is good for innovation. Absolutely. Yeah absolutely. I would agree with that. So let's talk up stack a little bit. Okay. Linux kernel is Linux kernel ARM x86. My Linux experience is Linux no matter the platform. Kubernetes I just heard the same thing. AWS, Google compute, in my own data center, Kubernetes, Kubernetes OpenShift helps us to do that. Let's talk about the rest of my applications. My monolithic applications that are not designed for traditional, funny I'm saying this term, traditional Kubernetes. Okay. How does Red Hat help with this abundant choice in market across cloud providers outside of Kubernetes? Well, so one I think you need to understand that Linux is not Linux is not Linux, right? Anytime you deploy a platform, whether it's Linux or whether it's Kubernetes, you are committing to something that is on a specific release cycle that may have specific support statements that may follow specific open source paths. And you need to be aware what you're buying into. And I don't mean that from a financial perspective as much as what are you committing your infrastructure to? Yeah, what's my support model, right? So absolutely, Kubernetes is the de facto technology in the same way that Linux is the de facto technology, but you have to make sure that the thing that you're buying is something that you're going to be able to support and support your customers for a long term. And so that's why when, just as you were saying earlier, you know, we look at what's happening upstream, we absolutely follow that path, but we also want to make sure that customers have a long-term support model that and we can maintain that in a fiscally responsible way over a period of likely a decade as we do with RHEL. Right, so when customers buy into that, they're buying into not just the core technologies, but they're buying into everything that surrounds it. And so when you look at- And you guys vetted it too, there's a lot of vetting goes on. Oh yeah, so the release engineering that we do, the working with partners on the releases themselves all surround that. So we test, you know, OpenShift on public clouds, we test it on hardware, on virtualization. We're going to have stamp of approval mean something. Yeah, and it is- That's the bottom line. Yeah, it's not lightweight and having been there so long, I can tell you it takes a lot of people and effort to make sure that that's there. But surrounding Kubernetes, right, all the DevOps capabilities, all of the integration with partners like Amazon, those are the things that make the platform sing and allow a developer to come into the platform and immediately start deploying applications, developing and deploying applications, but also with the knowledge that when they develop for one, it's actually deployed everywhere. And one of the lines that we've actually matured because we believe it strongly is that, you know, containers are Linux and Linux is RHEL, right? So when you go down this path, you're not just looking at which Kubernetes or, you know, or which platform I'm going to get into, you're actually looking at what Linux am I going to choose? Because it's all one in the same. And our focus has been, how do we maintain those core principles of security, reliability, scalability across this for decades? My congratulations, you guys have been a great, great company to watch over the years, going back decades. Now even more, they're right at, stamp of approval means something. Final question for you, I want to ask a personal question. Put your personal industry tech key cat on. Your friends, the CIO, CXO, the company, the friend runs development shop for the same company. They're your best friends. They ask you, what's going on with this Amazon thing? It's scale, all this stuff. How do I make sense of it? What's your answer? So Amazon has, I've been working with Amazon since 2007. And the innovation is not just in the technology. It's in how they do business, the business models that surround it. And to me, that means they're building an entire IT environment, right? It's not just about the software or the service they provide. It's how do you interact with your partners, with your customers? So when you look at Amazon, you're looking at the whole environment about how can I best serve my customers through this entire ecosystem? Sounds like an operating system to me. You know, cloud operating system, multiple levels can really come in here. But- It's a holistic picture. Yeah. Basically what you're saying. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, Mike, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Red Hat here inside theCUBE here for day one of live coverage of three days of AWS re-invent. I'm John with Keith Townsend, your host on set one here. Two sets, so much action, so many announcements, so much to talk about. So many great people here at re-invent 2017. We'll bring it more after this short break.