 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering AnsibleFest 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. Hey, welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE live coverage here in Atlanta for AnsibleFest, part of Red Hat's event around automation anywhere. I'm John Furrier with my co-student minimum. Next guest is Abraham Snell, senior IT analyst at the Southern Company, customer of Ansible. Great to have you on. Thanks for coming on. I'm glad to be here. So tell us about your company. What do you do there? Tell us about what is Southern Company and what do you do there? Yeah, Southern Company is a very large, probably one of the top three energy providers, and we're based in the Southeast. So we're an energy utility, so we do electric and gas. We also generate electric and gas, so. And your role there? And there, I am, so in infrastructure, we build systems, platforms, and so I'm kind of an OS specialist, and so we build Red Hat platforms for applications. And what's your goal here at the AnsibleFest this year? Well, a couple of things, so I submitted a talk, and so I'll be doing a talk here. But the other thing is just to learn other ways, how to increase the automation footprint at our company. Yeah, Abraham, why don't you walk us through that some? We heard in the keynote, Red Hat talked about their journey, Microsoft talked about their journey, JPMorgan did, so I'm assuming that you're undergoing some kind of journey also. Bring us a little bit, bring us back to kind of as far back as you can and where things have been going. Yeah, so I heard about Ansible during a time when we were trying to automate our patch process. So our patch process was taking about 1,900 man hours per year, so it was highly manual. And so we were looking at some other things, like Puppet was out, we would CF engine, which is incredibly complex. And then in a sales meeting, we heard about Ansible because that was the direction that Red Hat was going. So I looked it up and learned about it. And that's the other thing, the barriers to entry were so low. It's modular, you can jump in and start learning, you can write a playbook without knowing everything else about Ansible. And so that's how we got started with the journey. Okay, so the patches, you said over like 1,900 hours in a year, do you know how long it takes you now? Yeah, we reduced that to about 70 hours a year. Yeah, so it was a massive reduction in the amount of time that we spent patching. Okay, and have you been expanding Ansible and where's it going from your footprint? Yeah, so as a OS platform group, we are doing, we do deployments now with Ansible. Pretty much do everything with Ansible. Honestly, someone just asked me to deploy some files. I was like, yeah, I'm gonna write an Ansible playbook for that, or use one that we already have. So now we have other groups, the database folks are now using Ansible to patch their databases. And the network folks have been asking us questions, so maybe they'll be getting on board. But yeah, from my standpoint, I think we should expand Ansible. I don't know if that's my call, that's a little above my pay grade, but I'm definitely going to do everything I can to make sure that- Do you like the playbook concept? Yeah, oh yeah, oh, absolutely. I mean, do you guys a lot of playbooks developing, like growing everywhere, or people tend to use them? Yeah, so I learned something today that there's going to be kind of like a repository, and that will actually work. Right now, we probably have about 150 playbooks, but people aren't able to just use them, because they're just kind of stored somewhere. They're built. So what's your talk going to be? You mentioned you're going to do a talk. Oh yeah, how automation can reduce business conflict. So we're going to talk about creating automations that kind of reduce the siloed conflict. And so I'll be talking about creating an easy button for groups who, when you say, hey, I want a patch, they go, nah, you can't patch this week. And so rather than having an argument about when we're going to patch, just give them an easy button and say, hey, when you're ready, press this button, and it'll patch. And just let us know if anything turns red and we'll fix it. People who want to get rid of the conflict, they like the conflict, or I mean, talk about the culture, because this is, you know, the conflict's been there. Yeah, oh yeah. What's the culture like with the new capability? So I mean, the culture is getting better. I wouldn't say we're there. We're on that journey that he mentioned. But when you say people want conflict, I think they're used to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're just going to argue with you. The problem with that is it slows business down. So at the end of the day, what we're all, you know, therefore happens a whole lot slower because we're backing forth and we're in conflict. So what automation does is it literally speeds up what we need to be doing, but it also helps us be friends along the way. So. I want to get your thoughts on something. We did a little survey to our CUBE community and my automation, you know, the couple of key bullet points that we were reporting on earlier. Pretty much everyone's agreed, but I want to get your reaction because you're doing it. One benefit of automation is for the teams to our focus efforts on better results. You agree with that? Oh, yes. Security is a big part of it. So automating help security? Yeah, I think it does. I think anytime you can do something the same way every time you minimize the ability for human error. So I think that helps security. And so I'm not a security guy, but. Well, here's the next one. I want to get your thoughts on it. You mentioned culture. Automation drives job satisfaction. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. I love that. A few ways that just come to mind immediately. One is I have a greater opportunity for success because it's going to work the same way every time, right? The second thing is it kind of gives people options. So I talk about this in my talk. You know, we tend to want options around the when, the where, sometimes even the how. And so automation can actually do that. And the third thing is it really does free us up to do important stuff, you know? So when I'm spending my time doing tedious things like paperwork, automation helps me now to do the stuff I really want to do, the stuff I come to work to do. And there's new jobs being created on this, means new opportunities. This creates growth for people. That's right. New higher level skills. Well, one of the cultural aspects of it is people are afraid that automation is going to kill my job, right? But honestly, when you start building this stuff, we're finding out that man, it takes a village to do all this stuff. So it really does take, allow us to learn new things and probably send our careers in another direction. I hadn't seen a job that was killed yet. Yeah, well, that's always been loved to get better jobs and doing the mundane stuff. The final point on the, of our quick poll survey with our community was that infrastructure and dev ops or dev professionals, developers or dev ops, they can get re-skilling with this opportunity. Because it's kind of new things. Is re-skilling a big part of the culture and the trenches when you start looking at these new opportunities? Are people embracing that? What's the vibe there? What's your take on that? So my take on it is it's probably some kind of bell curve, right? So you got probably 10% of the folks that are gung-ho. You got probably that middle 80% that's like, yeah, either way. And then you got 10% that are like, dude, I'm about to retire. I don't want to do this anymore or whatever. Or I'm afraid or I don't think I could do it. But that opportunity is, I mean, I was actually trained in college as a developer. I never wanted to do development. So I did not been in infrastructure. But now I'm getting to do development again. And I kind of like it, right? It's kind of like, okay. You got books, you got recipes, you got little kids and stuff. Right. I mean, and I still get to be an infrastructure guy. So I think there's definitely opportunity for growth for that 90% that says, hey, we want to do this. Well, the scale and all the plumbing is going to be still running. You still need network. You still need storage and compute. Now you got these abstraction layers kind of building on top of that scale. So the question for you is, are you going to take this across the company? Am I going to take it across the company? Yeah, let's- Plasm change through Southern? Let me get that promotion. So, you know, I am definitely championing, being a champion for it because I want to share this. I mean, it just kind of makes life better. So, yes, the plan is, hey, let me share this. Automation is great. But we actually have an automation team. There's a management team and a structure around automation. And they allow me to kind of be on there, you know, come to their meetings and do some of the things with them. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to it, to it propagating through Southern. Well, you certainly nailed the use case. Abraham, does cloud, public cloud fit into this discussion at all yet from your group? So, public cloud is in the discussion and automation is a part of that discussion. But I think we're kind of early on in that process. There's not a whole lot around it. But the one thing where it really does fit is the way of thinking, right? So now to be cloud native, automation is just really a part of that. And so you have to start thinking in a cloud native fashion. And that's beginning, right? Mostly now it's in the strategy time for it. But implementation of some things are coming. And the more we do automation, the more it kind of gets you ready for this idea of cloud. Yeah, I think that's a great point. You talk about that mindset. The other thing when you talk about, you know, infrastructures, infrastructure used to be kind of the boat anchor that prevented you from responding to the business. It was okay, can you do this? Yeah, I'll get to it in the next six to 12 months, maybe if we have the budget and everything. How does automation help you respond to the business and be more a group of yes? Well, I'm glad you said that because infrastructure has often been seen as the party of no, right? You can't do it with no and don't come back. But with automation, what we're seeing is there are a lot of things that we can do because one of the things that you don't want to happen in infrastructure is create a task that I can never get rid of. Okay, I'm gonna be doing this forever and a day. But now if it becomes a push button item and I can do it consistently every time, it's like, oh yeah, why don't we do that? Why haven't we been doing that in the past? So yeah, that's exactly a great point is that now infrastructure can feel like a part of the party rather than being the people sitting in the corner. They don't want to do this, right? Yeah, and it's a critical component of the scale. Adrian, I want to ask you if my final question for you is you've had a great experience with Ansible Automation. This is the whole conference, Automation for All. What's the learnings your big takeaway over the past couple of years as you've been on this wave and it's going to be bigger behind you? You said the cloud's coming, a lot more scale, a lot more software, a lot more applications. What's your big learnings? What's your big takeaway? You know, my big takeaway, believe it or not, is really not technical. So I've been doing this 23 years or so years and I never thought that there would be a tool that could really change and affect culture the way it has. And so for me, my big takeaway is man, this automation thing helps my job in ways that's not technical. You know, it helps me work better with other teams. Now there are networks of folks that I work with who I never would have worked with before who are doing automation. We get along. It's not them over there. Yeah, it's a social network now. It's a social network. And who knew that a tool could make that happen? And you can have a more collaborative relationship to get someone's face and no one's going to get offended, have conversations, share playbooks. Yeah, because with automation, now we can all focus on the big picture. What is the corporate goal? Not what is my, you know, I just want to keep this running or I just want to keep this up. Why are we keeping it up? Why are we keeping it running? What is the corporate goal? Corporate goal. But our teamwork, probably. It sure does. Yeah, shared vision. Thank you for coming on and sharing your insights. Appreciate it. Yeah, finally, Red Hat Accelerators, maybe just explain the shirt and the hat. Oh yeah, kind of plug the accelerator. So the Accelerators are like a customer advocacy group. And so what has happened is, and I was actually a charter member of the Accelerator, so I got to plug that too, started a couple of years ago. They just call us and talk about new stuff that's coming out at Red Hat and go, what do y'all think? And we are brutally frank with them, sometimes too brutally. That's good. They want that. And they keep coming back for more. I'm thinking, really guys, we just abused you. But no, it is a great group of guys and girls. And it affords, and for us, the customers, it affords us opportunities to see new technology and get swag. And collaboration scales as well there. Oh, absolutely. And you get to see what other companies are doing. Like, you know, my peers, I go, hey, what are y'all doing in cloud? What are y'all doing in automation? And so you get to share. Yeah, Stu and I interviewed a lot of the Red Hat folks. They love the feedback. Oh yeah. They're a technical group. They want brutal honesty. Okay, well. You're feeding into the product requirements. Well, I'm your other group. This is what they want. Thanks for coming on. Yes, sir. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Here on theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Back with more coverage here at Ansible Fest, day one of two days of coverage. We'll be right back.