 Good morning, everyone. From Chicago, live, theCUBE is live at Ansible Fest 2022. Lisa Martin and John Furrier here for two days of wall-to-wall coverage on theCUBE. Very excited to be back in person. Ansible's 10th anniversary, the first in-person event, John, since 2019. One of the nuggets dropped this morning, and I know you, was Opsas Code. We're going to hear about that Opsas Code here in this segment. We're going to get into the leader of the business unit at Ansible, part of Red Hat, so look forward to this. Exactly, Tom Anderson joins us. One of our alumni, welcome back to the program. The VP and general manager of Red Hat. First of all, how great is it to be back in person with live guests and engaged audience and then a robust community? It is amazing. It really is. I kind of question whether this day was ever going to come again after three years of being apart, but to see the crowd here and to see, like you said, the energy in the room this morning and the keynotes, it's fantastic, so I just couldn't be happier. So Opsas Code, nugget dropped this morning. We want to dissect that with you, as that was mentioned in the keynot this morning, as Ansible is pushing into the cloud and into the edge. What does Opsas Code mean for end users and how is it going to help them to use a term that was used a lot in the keynot, level up their automation? Yeah, so what we see is, look, the day zero, day one provisioning of infrastructure, there's lots of tools, there's lots of ways to do that. Again, it's just the company's ambition and dedication to doing it. The tools are there, they can do that. We see the next big opportunity for automation is in day two operations. And what's happening right now in Ops is that you have multiple clouds, you've got multiple data centers, and now you've got edge environments. The number of things to manage on a day-to-day basis is only increasing, the complexity is only increasing. This idea of a couple of years ago where we're going to do shift everything left onto the developer, it's a nice idea, but you still have to operate these environments on a day-to-basis. So we see this opportunity as Opsas Code, just like we did infrastructure as code, just like we did configuration as code, we see the next frontier as operations as code. Yeah, and this is really a big trend. As you know with Qube, I'm reporting a lot on the cloud-native velocity of the modern application developer these days. It's a great time to be a software developer because all the open source goodness is happening, but they're going fast, they want self-service, they need guardrails, they need faster Ops, so that seems to be the pressure point. Is Opsas Code going to be that solution? Because you have a lot of people talking about multi-cloud, multiple environments, which sounds great on paper, but when you try to execute it, there's complexity. So the goal of complexity management has really been one of the key things around Ops. How do I keep speed up? And how do I reduce the complexities? These are big, how does Opsas Code fit into that? Yeah, so look, we see Ansible as this common automation backplane, if you will, that goes across all of these environments. It provides a common abstraction layer so that whether you're running on Azure, whether you're GCP, or whether you're AWS, or whether you're a PLC out on a shop industrial-edge floor with a PLC, each of those things need to be automated. If we can abstract that into a common automation language, then that allows these domain experts to be able to offer their services to developers in a way that promotes the acceleration, if you will, of those developers' tasks. And that developer doesn't have to know about the underlying complexities of storage, or database, or cloud, or Edge. They can just do their job. You know, Tom, one of the things I observed in Kino, and this comes across every time we have an event, and in person it's more amplified, because you see it. The loyalty of the customer base, you have a great community. It's very not corporate-like here. It's very, no big flashy news, but there's some news, hard news. It's very community-driven. Check the box there, so continue on the roots. I want to get your thoughts on how now the modern era we're in, in this world, the purchasing power, again, I mentioned, multi-cloud looks good on paper, which every CXO, I want to be multiple-clouds, I want choice. Now, when you talk to the people running things, they're like, whoa, hold on, boss. The bottoms up is a big part of the selection process, of how people select and buy and consume technology. With open source, you don't need to do a full buy. You can use open source and then get Ansible. This is going to be a big part of how the future of buying product is, and implementing it. So I think it's going to be a groundswell, bottoms up market in this new cloud native in the ops world. What's your reaction to that? What's your thoughts? So here's my thoughts. The bulk of the people here are practitioners. They love Ansible. They use Ansible in their day-to-day job. It's how it helps make them successful. Almost every executive that I go out and talk to and our customers, they tell me one of their number one problem is attracting new talent and retaining the talent that they have. And so how can they do that? They can give them the tools to do their job, the tools that they actually like. So not a top-down, old-fashioned systems management, you're going to use this tool whether you like it or not, but that bottoms up swell of people adopting open source tools like Ansible to do their job and enjoy it. So I see it as a way of the bottoms up, addressing the top-down initiative of the organization, which is skills retention, skills enhancement, and that's what we focus on here at this event are the practitioners. Is that the biggest customer conversation topic these days? Is this the skills gap? Retention, attraction, talent, or would you say it's more expansive as the organizations are so different? Well, so a lot of the folks that I meet are maybe not C-level, but they're executives in the organization, right? So they're struggling with attracting, pretty much everywhere I go. I was in Europe this summer. Conversation was always the same. We got two problems, attracting people. We can't find people. People we find we can't afford. So we need to automate what they would do. And then the second piece is the complexity of our environment is growing, right? I'm being asked to do more and I can't find more people to do it. What's my solution? It's automation. You know, at the end of the day, that's what it comes down to. It's interesting. The people who are going to be involved in the scaling horizontally with automation are going to have the keys to the kingdom. The old joke when IT was, you know, they run everything, they power the business. Now the business is digital. You got to be hybrid. So we see hybrid as a steady state right now, hybrid cloud. When you bring the edge into the equation, how do you see that developing? Because we think it's going to be continually hybrid and that's going to extend out on the edge. What is the Ansible's view on how the edge evolves? What's going on there? Can you share your thoughts on the expansion to the edge? There's a, our experience is there's a rapid modernization happening out at the edge. Industrial edge, oil and gas platforms, retail locations, industrial floors, all that kind of stuff. We see this convergence of OT and IT happening right now. Where some of the disciplines that enterprises have used in the IT area are going to expand out into OT, but some of the requirements of OT of not having skilled IT resources, you know, in the store, in the fast food restaurant, on the oil platform, needing to have the tools to be able to automate those changes remotely. We're seeing a real acceleration of that right now. And frankly Ansible's playing a big role in that and it's connecting a lot of the connective tissue is around network. What is the key piece that connects all of this environment is network? And those number of end points that need to be managed, Ansible is, you know, far and wide. It's a perfect use case for Ansible because Ansible's built their business on configuration automation, which was don't send someone out to that branch office back in the old days. Exactly. Do it manual versus automation, hey, automation every time. This is at large scale. I mean, the scale magnitude, can you scope the scale of what's different? I mean, even go back 10 years, okay, where we were and how we got here. Where we are today, scope the size of the scale that's happening here. You know, hundreds of thousands of end points and things. That's not even the API points, but that's the kind of compute points, the network points, the servers. It's, you know, what we would have never thought, you know, 10 years ago, 1,000 end points was a lot or 10,000 end points was a lot of things to manage. When you start talking about network devices, home network devices for employees that are remote employees that need to be in a secured network. Just the order of magnitude, maybe two orders of magnitude larger than it has been in the past. And so again, coming home to the automation world. It's fun in your front door right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Talk about, you talked about the acceleration. If we think about the proliferation of devices online, especially the last two years, when to your point, so many people shifted to remote and are still there. What are some of the changes in automation that we've seen as businesses have had to pivot and change so frequently in so many times to be successful? Yeah, so here's what we've seen, which is it's no longer acceptable for the owner of the network team or the ownership of the database or of the storage facility. You can't wait for them to offer their service to people. Self-service is now the rule of thumb, right? So how can those infrastructure owners be able to offer their services to non-IT people in a way that manages their compliance and makes them feel that they can get those resources without having to come and ask? And they do that by automating with Ansible and then offering those as package services out to their developers, to their QE teams, to their end users to be able to consume and subscribe to that infrastructure knowing that they are the ones who are controlling how it's being provisioned, how it's being used. What are some of the, some great customers mentioned this morning in the keynote but do you have a favorite example of a customer, regardless of industry, they think really shows the value and the evolution of the Ansible platform in its first 10 years and that really articulates the business value that automation delivers to a company. Yeah, I know it's a great question. I would think that if you were on the clock back 10 years, Ansible was all about server configuration management, right? That's what it was about, was provisioning VMware infrastructure vSphere and then loading on VMs on top of that as it's expanded into network, into security and to storage and to database and to cloud. It's become a much broader platform, if you will. And a good example is we have a customer, large oil and gas customer who is modernizing their oil platforms. I can imagine, I have not been on one but I imagine the people that are out working on that oil platforms have greasy hands that are pushed on things and they had this platform that the technology modernization included Azure. So connecting to data on Azure, rolling out new application updates, has to have a firewall, has to have network capabilities, has to have an underlying OS to be able to do that. And Ansible was the glue that brought all that together to be able to modernize that oil platform. And so for me, that's the kind of thing where it sort of makes it real, the actual business. The common set of services, this is where we're seeing multi-cloud start to have that conversation where, okay, I got this edge, it kind of looks the same, I got to make it work, I'm a developer, I want some compute, I want to put this together, I'm going to have containers and orchestration behind it. You're kind of seeing the same kind of pattern evolving at scale. So you guys have the platform, okay, I'm in open source, I love the open source, I got the platform 2.3, I see supply chain management in there, you got trusted signatures, that's the supply chain, we've been hearing a lot about security in the code. What else is in the platform that's updated? Can you share the new things that people should pay attention to in the platform? Yes, we're going to talk about a couple of things tomorrow around event-driven Ansible, which is bringing Ansible into that really day two ops world where it's sort of hands-free automation and operations where rather than someone pushing a button to trigger or initiate a piece of automation, an event will take place. I've detected that out of space condition, I've detected a security violation, I've detected something. Go to a rule book, that rule book will kick off an automation, close that, remediate that problem and close the thing without anyone ever having to do anything with that, so that's kind of one big area. And we're going to talk tomorrow, we've got a real special announcement tomorrow with our friends from IBM Research that I'm going to, we'll have you on a 10-30 before I mark their calendars. But there's some really great stuff going on on the platform as we start to expand these use cases in multiple directions and how we take Ansible out to more and more people, automation out to more and more people from the inside experts out to the consumers of automation, make it easier to create automation. Yeah and one of the things I wanted to follow up on that and the skilled gap tying that together is, you're seeing, heard in the keynote today around, Stephanie was talking about enterprise architecture. It's not, I won't say corner case, Ansible. I mean, it's not one niche or narrow focus. Expanding the scope was mentioned by Katie. Expanding your scope, grow. You got a lot of openings, people are higher. Now Ansible is part of the enterprise architecture. It's not just one thing. It's a complete, explain what that means for the folks out there. Yeah, so when you start to connect what I call the technology domains. So the network team uses Ansible to automate their network infrastructure and configure all their systems. And the compute team uses it to deploy new servers on AWS. And the security ops team uses it to go out and gather facts when they have a threat detection happening and the storage team is using it to provision storage. When you start to then say, okay, we have all these different domains and we want to connect those together into a set of workflows that goes across all of those domains. You have this common language and we're saying, okay. So it's not just the language. It's also the underlying platform that has to be scalable. It's got to be secure. We talked about signing content. I mean, people don't understand the risk of an automation gone wild. You can do a lot of damage to your infrastructure real fast with automation, just like you can do a repair, right? So is what's running in my environment secure? Is it performant and is it scalable? I mean, those are the two, those are the three areas that we're really looking at with the platform right now. Automation Gone Wild. It sounds like the next reality TV show. Yeah, I may regret saying that. It sounds like a great song. Especially on live TV. Great podcast title right there. I made a mental note. Automation Gone Wild, episode one. Here we are. Talk about Ansible as really being the catalyst to allow organizations to truly democratize automation. Okay, you talked about the different domains there and it seems to me like it's positioned to really be the catalyst. That's the driver of that democratization, which is where a lot of people want to get to. Yeah, I mean, for us, and you'll see in our sessions at Ansible Fest, we talk a lot about the culture, the culture of automation, right? And saying, okay, how do you include more and more people in your organization in this process? How can you get them to participate? We talk about these ideas of communities of practice. So we bring the open source, the concepts of open source communities down into enterprises to build their own internal communities of practice around Ansible where they're sharing best practices, skills, reusable content. That is one of the kind of key factors that we see as a success in inside organizations is the scales. It's sort of bringing everybody into that culture of automation and not being afraid of automation, saying, look, it's not going to take my job. It's going to help me do my job better. Exactly. That automation argument always went to me crazy, oh yeah, automating is going to take my job away. Bank teller example, there's more bank tellers now than ever before, more ATMs. So the job shifts. I mean the value shifts. This is kind of where the automation helps. So real quick, a final minute we have left, where does that value shift? I'm the person being automated away or job. Where do you see the value job? Because there's still tons of openings for people's skills. So we see the shift from, particularly in operations, from here's my job, I look at a ticket queue, I grab a ticket, it's got a problem, I go look at a log, I look for a string and a log, I find out the error and I go configuration change that. That's not a really, I didn't call that a fund existence for eight or 10 hours a day. But the idea, if I can use automation to do that for me and then focus on innovating, creating new capabilities in my environment, then you start to attract a new, the next generation of operations people into a much more exciting role. You know, architects too, they turn into architects, they turn into multiple jobs, just go, it's like multi-tool player. It's like a, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What is it, five-tool player? Five-tool player in baseball is the best of the best. But kind of, that's what's happening. That's exactly what's happening, right? That's exactly what's happening. And it helps address that skills challenge and the talent challenge that organizations have as well. And everybody wants to be able to focus on delivering value to the organization. I think at the end of the day, that's a human component that we all want. So it sounds like Ansible is well on its way to helping more and more organizations across industries achieve just that. Tom, it's great to have you back on the program. Sounds like you're coming back tomorrow, so we get day two of talk. Excellent, look forward to it. Congratulations on the first, in person event in three years. And we look forward to talking to you tomorrow. Thank you so much. All right, for our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Chicago, day one of our coverage of Ansible Fest 2022. Stick around, John and I welcome back another CUBE alumni next.