 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next on Air 20. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Google Cloud Next on Air 20. Of course, the nine week distributed all online program that Google Cloud is doing. And going to be talking about, of course, multi-cloud. Google, of course, had a big piece in multi-cloud when they took what was originally Borg. They built Kubernetes. They made that open source and gave that to the CNCF. And one of Google's partners and a leader in that space is of course, Red Hat. Happy to welcome to the program Satish Balakrishnan. He is the Vice President of Hosted Platforms at Red Hat. Satish, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Ashutosh. Great to be here with you on Google Next. All right, so I teed it up. Of course, we talked about the hybrid multi-cloud and Open, the two companies I probably think of the most. And that I've probably said the most about the Open Cloud, or Google and Red Hat. So maybe if we could start just, you hosted platforms, help us understand what that is and what was the relationship between Red Hat and the OpenShift team and Google Cloud? Oh yeah, absolutely. Great question, right? And I think Google has been an amazing partner for us. I think we have a lot of things going on with them upstream in the community. I think, you know, we've been with Google and the Kubernetes project since the beginning. And you know, we are like the second biggest contributor to Kubernetes. So we have a great relationship upstream. We've also made Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well as OpenShift available on Google. So we have customers using both our offerings as well as our other offerings on Google Cloud as well. And more recently with hosted offerings, you know, we actually manage OpenShift on multiple clouds. We relaunched our OpenShift dedicated offering on Google Cloud back at Red Hat Summit. You know, and there's a lot of interest for that offering. We had back offered the offering in 2017 with OpenShift 3 and we just relaunched this with OpenShift 4 and we see considerable interest for the Google Cloud with the OpenShift dedicated offer. Yeah, excuse me, it makes sense if we talk about the kind of the maturation of open source solutions. Managed services has seen really tremendous growth, something we've seen especially, we're talking about in the cloud space. Maybe if you could just walk us through a little about that, you know, what are you hearing from customers? How does Red Hat, you know, think about managed solutions? Yeah, absolutely, I think it was a good question, right? I think as we see the customers are looking at, you know, multiple infrastructure footprints, be it either the public cloud or on-prem, they do start looking at, you know, if I go to the cloud, you know, there is this concept of I want something to be managed. So what OpenShift is doing is in OpenShift, as you know, it's Red Hat's hybrid cloud platform. And with OpenShift, one of the things that we strive to do is to enable the vision of the open hybrid cloud. So with open hybrid cloud, it's all about choice, right? So we want to make sure that customers have both the managed as well as the self-managed option. So if you really look at it, you know, Red Hat has, you know, multiple offerings from a managed standpoint. The one is, you know, we have OpenShift dedicated, which runs from AWS and Google. And you know, we just have, as I mentioned earlier, we relaunched our Google service at Red Hat Summit back in May. So that's actually getting a lot of traction. We also have our joint offerings with, you know, Azure that we've been announced a couple of years back. And you know, there's a lot of interest for that offering, as well as the new offering that we announced to post Summit, the Amazon Red Hat OpenShift, which basically is another native offering that we have on Amazon. If you really look at, you know, having spoken about these offerings, if you really look at, you know, Red Hat's evolution as a managed service provider in the public cloud, we've been doing this since 2011. You know, that's kind of surprising for a lot of people, but you know, we've been doing OpenShift online, which is kind of a multi-tenant pass or multi-tenant cast solutions, 2011. And we are one of the earliest providers of managed Kubernetes, you know, along with Google Kubernetes Engine, GKE, we announced our OpenShift dedicated offering back in 2015. So we've been doing Kubernetes managed since, you know, OpenShift 3.1. So that's actually, you know, we have a lot of experience with the management of Kubernetes. And you know, with the evolution of OpenShift 4, we've now made it available in pretty much all the clouds. So the customers have that exact same experience that they can get in one cloud, across all clouds as well as on-prem. And we manage services, customers now have a choice of a self-managed OpenShift or a completely managed OpenShift. Yeah, you mentioned the choice. And one of the challenges that we have right now is there's really the paradox of choice. If you look in the Kubernetes space, you know, there are dozens of offerings. Of course, every cloud provider has their offerings. You know, Google's got GKE, they have Anthos, they have management tools around there. You talked a bit about, you know, the experience and all of the customers you have. You know, there's one of the fighters talks about, you know, there's no compression algorithms for experience. So, you know, what is Red Hat OpenShift? You know, what really differentiates it in the marketplace from, you know, so many of the other offerings either from the public cloud providers, some of the new startups that we should know. I think this is an interesting question, right? I think all Kubernetes, you know, it starts with its complete open source. And, you know, we are a complete open source company. So there is no proprietary software that we put into OpenShift. So OpenShift basically, even though it has, you know, OC command, it basically has a QPCTL. So you can actually use native Kubernetes as you would choose on any Kubernetes offering that you have, be GKE, EKS, AKS or any of the other Kubernetes offerings that are out there. So that's, I think, the first thing, right? Kubernetes is Kubernetes. And Red Hat does not believe in open core. It completely believes in open source. We have everything that we do is open source. From a Red Hat standpoint, the value prop for Red Hat has always been the value of the subscription, where we actually make sure that, you know, Kubernetes is taken from an upstream product. It's basically completely productized and available for the enterprise to consume. With that, right, when we have the managed offering, we provide a lot more benefits to it, right? The benefits are, right, we actually are customer zero for OpenShift. So what does that mean, right? We will not release OpenShift if we can't run OpenShift dedicated or any of the Azure Red Hat OpenShift or the Amazon Red Hat OpenShift really, really well. So you won't get a software version out there. The second thing is we actually run a lot of workloads within Red Hat that are dependent on our managed OpenShift offering. So for example, our build systems, all of those internal things that are important for Red Hat, run on managed OpenShift. For example, Quad.io runs on managed OpenShift. So those are important services for Red Hat, and we have to make sure that those things are running really, really well. So we provide that second layer of enterprise to it, right? Then having put OpenShift online out there in public, right, we have four million applications and a million developers that use them. So that means, you know, we're putting it out there in the Internet, and you know, there's security holes that are constantly being booked that are being plugged in. So that's another benefit that you get from, you know, having a product that's a managed service, but it also is something that enterprises can now use it. From an OpenShift standpoint, the real differentiation is we had a lot of other things on top of Kubernetes, without compromising the Kubernetes API that basically helps customers not have to worry about how they're going to get the CI CD pipeline or how they have to do a build in Kubernetes as an outside, as an inside. Then you have technologies like Stormstream, which kind of really helped customers abstract away the containerization layer from that. So those are some of the benefits that we provide with OpenShift. Yeah, so Satish, as you said, there's lots of options when it comes to Kubernetes, even from a Red Hat offering, you've got different consumption models there. If I look inside your portfolio, if it's, you know, something that I want to put on my infrastructure, if I haven't read the OpenShift container platform, is that significantly different from the managed platform? Maybe, you know, give us a little compare contrast as to, you know, what do I have to do as a customer? Is the code base the same? Can I do, you know, hybrid environments between them? And, you know, what, what does that mean? A lot of smart questions, it's a really, really good question that you asked. So we actually, you know, as I said, add a lot of things on top of Kubernetes to make it really pass, or do you want to use the CAS, you can use that as well. So one of the things we've found, but you know, what we've done with our managed offering is we actually take OpenShift container platform and we manage that. So we make sure that you get like a completely managed service, even though we manage the patching of the worker nodes and other things, which is again, another difference that we have with the native Kubernetes services, we actually give cluster admin functionality to customers. That basically allows them to choose all the options that they need from an OpenShift container platform. So from a code base, it's exactly the same thing. The only thing is it's a little bit opinionated to start off when we deploy the cluster for the customer. And then the customer, if they want, they can choose how to customize it. So what this really does is it takes away any of the challenges the customer may have with like how to install or provision a cluster, which we've already simplified a lot with OpenShift 4, but with the managed OpenShift, it's actually just a click away. Great, well, Satish, I've got the trillion dollar question for you. One of the things we've been looking at for years, of course, is what do I keep in my data center? What do I move to the cloud? How do I modernize it? We understand it's a complex and nuanced solution, but you talk to a lot of customers. So here in 2020, what's the trends? What are some of the pieces that you're seeing some change in movement that might not have been the case a year ago? I think this is an interesting question and it's an evolving question, right? And it's something that if you ask like 10 people, you will get 12 answers. But I'll try to generalize, you know, what I've seen just from all the customer conversations I've been involved. I think one thing is very clear, right? I think the world is hybrid, right? As much as, you know, anybody may want to say that I'm going to go to a single cloud or I'm going to just be on-prem. It is inevitable that you're going to basically end up with multiple infrastructure footprint. It's either multi-cloud or it's on-prem versus a single cloud or on-prem versus multiple cloud. So the main things that, you know, we've been noticing is, you know, what customers are saying, you know, how do I make sure that my developers are not confused by all these different environments? How do I give them a consistent way to develop and build their applications? Not really worry about what is the infrastructure or what is the footprint that they're actually servicing? Right, so that's kind of really, really important. And in terms of, you know, things that, you know, we've seen customers, you know, I think you always start with compliance requirements and data regulation, right? You've got to figure out what compliance do I need and is the infrastructure or the platform that I'm going to go to meet the compliance requirements that I have. And what are the data regulations? You know, where is the data going to be sitting? Is it going to meet the data sovereignty rules that my country or my geo has? I got to make sure I worry about that. And then I got to figure out, you know, if I'm going to basically move it to the cloud from the data center or move it from one cloud to another cloud, am I just doing a lift or shift? Am I doing a transformation? What is it that I got to really worry about? And then in addition to transformation, they got to figure out, is it containerization? Do I need to do that? Do I not need to do that? And then, you know, we got to figure out what's your, where's your data going to sit? What's your database going to look in and do you need to connect to some legacy system that you have on-prem and how do you go? How do you have to figure that out? And given all of these complexities, right, this is really, really common for any large enterprise that has like enterprise IT footprint. That's multi-cloud, that's basically in multiple geographies that is really servicing millions of customers. So Red Hat has a lot of experience doing all these things, right? We have Open Innovation Labs, which is a really, really awesome experience for customers where they take a small project, they figure out how to change things, not only learn how to change things from a technology standpoint, but also learn things, how to culturally change things. Because a lot of these things, it's not just moving from one infrastructure to another, but also learning how to do things differently. Then we have things like the Container Adoption Program, which is like, how do you take a big legacy monolith application? How do you containerize it? How do you make it microservices? How do you make sure that, you know, you're leveraging the real benefits that you're going to get out of moving to the cloud or moving to a container platform? And then we have a bunch of other things like, you know, how do you get started with OpenShift and all of this? So we've had a lot of experience with like our 2400 plus customers doing this kind of really heavy workload migration and lifting so that customers really get the benefits that they see out of OpenShift. Yeah, Satish, if I think about Google specifically, talking about Google Cloud, one of the main reasons we hear customers using Google is to have access to the data services they have, the AI services they have. So how does that tie into what we were just talking about? If I use OpenShift and, you know, I'm living in Google Cloud, can I access all of those cloud native services? Are there any nuances or things I need to think about to be able to really unleash that innovation of the platform that I'm tying into? Yeah, absolutely not, right? I think it's a great question. And I think customers are always wondering about it. Hey, if I use OpenShift, am I going to be locked out of using the cloud services? And if anything, Red Hat is anti-lock, right? We want to make sure that you can use the best services that you need for your enterprise IT strategy as well as for your applications. So with that, right, and we've developed the operator framework, which I think Google has been a very early supporter of. They've built a lot of operators around their services so you can leverage those operators to manage the lifecycle of these services right from OpenShift. So you can actually connect to an AI ML service if you want. That's absolutely fine. You can connect to the database services as well and you can leverage all of those things while your application runs on OpenShift from Google Cloud. Also, I think what Red Hat has done is, right, we recognize that, you know, when you talk about the open hybrid cloud, you got to make sure that customers can actually leverage services that are the same across different clouds. So while you can actually leverage the Google services from on-prem as well, if you choose to have localized services, we have a large catalog of operators that we have and our operator have as well as in the Red Hat marketplace that you can actually go and leverage from third-party ISVs so that you're basically having the same consistent experience. If you choose to build based on that consistent experience that's not tied to a cloud, you can do that as well. But we would like for customers to use any service that they want right from OpenShift without any restrictions. Yeah, one of the other things we've heard a lot from Google over the last year or so has been, you know, just helping customers, especially for those mission-critical, you know, business-critical applications, things like SAP. You talked a bit about databases. What advice do you give customers these days if they're looking at, you know, increasing or moving forward in their cloud journeys? I think, you know, it's an interesting question because I think customers really have to look at, you know, what is the IT and technology strategy? What are the different initiatives they have? Is it digital transformation? Is it cloud-native development? Is it just containerization? Or, you know, do they have an overarching theme about cost savings? They got to really figure that out and I'm sure, you know, as they look at it, they know which one is the higher priority and all of them are interrelated in some ways, right? They also got to figure out, are they going to expand to new business? Because I think, as we said, right, IT is basically what is driving business software is eating the world, you know, software services are eating them well. So you got to figure out what are your business needs? Do you need to be more agile? Do you need to enter new businesses? You know, those are kind of important things. For example, you know, BMW is a great example. They used, you know, OpenShift container platform as well as they use OpenShift dedicated, you know, they are like, you know, 100 plus year old car company. Guess, you know, what they're trying to do now, right? They're actually now becoming a connected car infrastructure. That's the main thing that they're trying to build so that they can actually service their cars in any job, right? So from in one swoop, right? They became from a car manufacturing company to now focus on being a SaaS and Edge and IoT company. If you really look at the cars as like, the internal of things are an edge computer, really. And what does that use case require? That use case cannot anymore have just one data center in Munich, right? They have to basically build a global platform of, you know, data centers or they can very easily go to the cloud. And then they need to make sure that their application developers when they're starting to run on multiple clouds, multiple geographies, they have the same abstraction layer so that they can actually deploy things fast, develop things fast. They don't have to worry about the infrastructure footprint. And that's basically why they started using OpenShift and why they're big supporters of OpenShift. And I think it's the right vision for that use case. So I think it really depends on, you know, what the customer is looking for, but irrespective of what they're looking for, I think, you know, OpenShift nicely fits in because what it does is it provides you that commonality across all infrastructure footprints. It gives you all the productivity gains and it allows you to connect to any service that you want anywhere because we are agnostic to that. And as well as we bring a whole lot of services from the Red Hat marketplace so you can actually leverage the test. Well, Satish Balakrishnan, thank you so much for the updates. Great to hear about the progress you've got with your customers and thank you for joining us on the Google Cloud Next On Air event. Thank you, Shoo. It's been great talking to you and I look forward to seeing you in person one day. All right, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you as always for watching theCUBE.