 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage Google Next here in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Dustin Kirkland here. We've got the team coverage, Rob Stretchy, Lisa Martin and our team blogging away and getting all the stories, getting all that data and sharing with you Google Next huge action packed event from infrastructure to new platforms around AI, all making it happen, solving solutions, hitting the developers and of course a growing ecosystem. We've got a great interview here. We've got Red Hat and Google. We've got Dan Love Global Alliance Executive for Google, works for Red Hat and Venkit got a many product leader at Google Cloud. General thanks for coming to theCUBE and I appreciate your time. Thanks for your time and thanks for giving us a chance. You know, I love Red Hat's story. I've been a fan since day one. Obviously I'm open source, old enough to remember those days when it started and this is a success you guys had over the years in open source and serving the enterprise. And now as cloud continues to grow, your relationship with Google is notable here as partner of the year award you guys got. You success partnering. So congratulations, you guys are here in theCUBE. Partner of the year, give us an update on the relationship. Obviously good enough to get the award. What's new, explain the Google relationship with Red Hat. Why the award, what's the notable? Well, I'll let Venkit start out there and see what's up. I can begin and Dan can sort of chime in. So yeah, we've been a partner with Red Hat for a number of years now. We have a lot of customers together. And frankly in the last year, year and a half, our work has been about making sure that the customer experience on the platform is top notch. That frankly is on the product side. It means that we have all the right products for customers and the right product experiences for customers. We have RHEL on the platform. These are bits that we work closely with Red Hat to make sure that they're customized for Google Cloud. We have RHEL for SAP and SAP is a very big workload and a solution for us. So even that is customized on Google Cloud by Red Hat and Google Engineers. On the commercial side, we've come a long way in making sure that whether you're a Pace, you go customer on the platform, whether you're doing a bring your own subscription type deal, all of those are well supported. Many of these things did not work maybe two years ago or so. Thanks to all the good collaboration between the companies, all of that is happening now. Beyond that, I'll let Dan chime in on the specifics on some of the commercial details and the product details. We've been able to make sure that customers have benefit to use on the platform. Yeah, what are you most proud of, Dan? Well, that's what I think why we're part of the year. If you would look a year ago, you would see our product suite. We were basically a RHEL shop on, right? We were OS, totally, with GCP. But we were multi-cloud. If you look at the other hyperscalers, we have a larger product suite. It was our job to come in and work and the Google team and the Red Hat team have been phenomenal working together. In one year, we went from just having RHEL, we have RHEL for SAP. We brought our Ansible product. We have our OCP product. At the end of the year, we're going to bring our managed OCP, which is OSD, our OpenShift dedicated. And then we're in conversations for our middleware product. So where we've been in a year, where we're at now, the customers that we had, the shared customer, enterprise customers we had a year, and you look now, it's phenomenal. The huge change that the teams have made in just one year. So those enterprise customers, probably traditionally some of them are on-prem customers. That's correct, that's correct. Maybe in other clouds as well. Draw lines between all those. Tell us about how that customer experience works from the on-prem, maybe another hyperscaler cloud, and then especially in the Google Cloud here. So I think that's one thing that Red Hat brings to the cloud journey is that we're multi-cloud. Some customers want that multi-cloud experience. We have the ability to tool sets. We have the migration strategies to take them off on-premises into the cloud of their choice. When they're all in on Google, then we have that option as well. That we can be, you know, I like to say sometimes a customer is a Red Hat customer and they just happen to be using a specific cloud. Other times they're all in on the cloud and they just happen to be using Red Hat. And what we've done together as teams, we've made sure that both of those customer sets have the ability to come in to the partner of their choice. It's either Google or it's Red Hat, and we have that journey button for them. We can bring them from on-premise, we can bring that seamlessly onto the cloud and make sure that their cloud experience and their on-premise experience, there's no degradation, right? REL is REL, and with the teams working together, we've been able to maintain that. Trust comes up a lot when we're having conversations with Red Hat and Google. The customer enterprise customers you guys serve, they got expectations, right? And they want to have a consistent platform, experience, cross environments. Trust is huge. Absolutely. When you guys talk to customers, what does that transit them? Because they're trying to do a lot of things right now and the infrastructure side. They got to get multiple environments going, consistent interface, they got developers, they try to get these apps out there. They try to move a lot of the things together, especially now with cloud-native services. You talk about all the time. And now with the whole data thing coming on, it's a whole nother level. What's the customer view when it comes to relationship, trust? Share some perspective with the customer. Thank you, Kat. Yeah, I think from my perspective at least, the way I see it is when customers come over, they want to make sure that the experience that they've been getting on premises is the same that they get on Google Cloud. And that's the key aspect of trust. They want to make sure that every time we launch a new instance family, for example, from day one, well and well for SAP is top notch. The support is there, right? So that's part of trust too. And of course, there's security dimension to trust also. And Dan can definitely talk to how they're hardening the rail operating system. It's really about the infrastructure level security. And I think in the keynote yesterday, there was a lot that was talked about and how we do it in infrastructure foundation layer. Of course, then at the OS layer, the same thing has to be there. And of course, the application layer, things that customers manage, we provide a number of services on top. An example would be VM manager, right? We provide VM manager to make sure that you get good control of your patch for all the different operating systems. And well is part of that. So that's what customers expect and that's what we're frankly delivering together. The other thing also I may point out is on the experience side is customers support experience expectations are also the same. So today when someone comes over to Google Cloud and runs well, they can call either Red Hat or Google for their support needs. And we take care of in the background to make sure that we pass the support through to Red Hat and vice versa. So that's another way of like ensuring that when customers are coming in with their workloads that run on well, we got them covered. And that's the key element of trust, right? So at least that's my perspective Dan. Yeah, I'm glad you touched on the security angle. I didn't know if that was... So I've got a great tagline for that. Marketing won't let me say it. Come on, say it. Say it best. Come on. We're not marketing department here, let's go. So all of Red Hat products build off of REL, or excuse me, REL or REL technologies, right? Sure. And so we started at that level. That's just secure, right? We want that experience. If it's REL in the cloud, it's REL on premises, REL on the edge, it's REL. And we have to maintain that and we test. When we bring it in through GCP, not only are we testing, the GCP team is testing as well. Yeah. Right? And so for me, the amount of, Google has that same type of energy and same type of desire for security in their cloud. Right. And it's baked in, they're proud of it. They want to be established as one of the most trusted, safest clouds. When you take the safest products, because of course I'm talking from a Red Hat standpoint, right? And we're based off REL. You take that base of safety and security and you add it to the security of going to the cloud. There's no better place for our customers to land that journey, that business journey from on premises to the cloud. Right. And taking their Red Hat products and putting them on to Google Cloud. So I'm glad you use the word energy. I think that's, you know, I think one of the themes of what we're seeing here at this show is the energy that Google brings. Today's keynote, which is about to happen here shortly is dedicated to developers. Let's bridge this conversation, switch gears a little bit and talk about Red Hat, and Google for developers. Talk to us a little bit about CentOS, some of the changes in the CentOS and Fedora ecosystem and how that all comes together with Red Hat. Do you want to start or do you want me to jump in? Yeah, I mean, you go ahead actually, talk about the CentOS and I can add on top of what we're doing. Yeah, if a CentOS is going to come up. Let's get that out there. You know, it's going to continue. And the free distros are going to have their space. And so, you know, what I'll just give you a personal story of what I'm seeing right now. You know, there's, when we move CentOS in front of and we produce CentOS Stream, what we're finding is that it's causing redeployments. But we're seeing customers that are coming in and now they're reassessing themselves and they're saying, geez, we didn't even realize we had CentOS running. So we have rail shops that are production rail shops and they're looking deeper into what they're doing and they're finding they've got CentOS they didn't even know existed, right? And so, I think those customers now are, once you have to redeploy, now's the perfect time for customers to start assessing where are they going to go, right? Some of the CentOS customers are finding that by going to CentOS Stream, they're actually getting more upstream faster back into rail and that was the intent. And so they're finding two benefits. One, they didn't realize by using CentOS on the other side of rail, it was taking a very long time for their changes to get upstream and then come down into rail. Now that path is a lot faster for them. The second thing is they're starting to recognize, well, we didn't realize that we had two branches. We had a CentOS Ranch and we had a rail ranch. Maybe it's time to start looking at just bringing all that cattle into one ranch, right? And that's where we're really looking at that space. We've got, working with Google, we have our classic 1P console. We're looking at bringing in offers into their 3P marketplace to that and then we're looking at self-serve type of skew. So what we're looking at is a way in which, depending on where the customer is, how we can, of course, I want them to go to rail, right? But we're looking and we're working with tooling. We're looking at that experience in back to Venkat, which he keeps going back to and it's proper. Whatever they're going to do, we need to make sure that they're a good experience for them. And if that customer has got a redeploy and they're going to go from CentOS, of course I think the easiest is to go to CentOS Stream or preferably to go to rail. This is the time to look at it and we're making offers available in every size and shape and segment for those customers to make that move seamlessly. So Venkat, maybe you can link that to the developer story at Google and within Google Cloud. Yeah, so I mean, our perspective, by the way, just to add to what Diane is saying, right? On the CentOS, we got a lot of customers who are using CentOS today on the platform, right? In each of these customers, right now is scratching their heads on what their plan should be post the EOL date and majority of these customers are on CentOS 7. We see a 90% of customer base still on CentOS 7. We're just going to go end of life, middle of next year. You said 90, 90. 90, that's right. It's a huge number of folks on that particular distro. A segment of these customers are definitely looking at rail as their destination and they got, frankly, less than a year to kind of get there. We see two friction points for these customers. On the product side, how do we make it very easy for them to flip the bit, so to speak, and get that CentOS into rail? So that's one product friction. The second is on the commercial side because you are going from free to maybe a paid version. And we're working with Red Hat to make sure that on both those dimensions, we remove the friction. So from a product point of view, create the right tooling, et cetera, so that it's a seamless move. On the commercial side, wherever they are offering to end customers to kind of ease the path, we put that in front of customers in a very seamless fashion. That's where the marketplace offerings, et cetera, all come in. I think the developer point is interesting because at the end of the day, because it is the same code base between CentOS and rail, there should be really no difference from whether applications work or whether there's retesting required, et cetera. So we do think that it's more or less a seamless move as long as we can figure out both the product dimension and the commercial dimension, right? And to kind of remove that friction from a customer's sort of path. That's what the work is really about. Yeah, and on the developer, that's a great path. We have the rail for developer skew. In fact, I was just at the booth, I was genuine walked up, he said, hey, I've got this development team, what do I do? And I'm like, you've got tons of options here. You're CentOS, you could go CentOS Stream. You've got five developers, we've got a developer skew, right? The experience on GCP is going to be the same. By using that developer skew, you also have the ability to get access to rail type of tooling. Does it ease the migration? Yeah, can you talk maybe a little bit about that, the migration from developer skews to production? And I think that's a great story is the sense that once, if you're using the rail for developer skew, there's a low cost free for sizing. We have sizing on that, right? So if we have the ability with these customers on GCP with rail to grow, they come to the cloud or they want to stay on premise, they want to stay on premise until they get big enough and they want to take options, that migration is really, really easy. So we talked about that. By going to rail for developer, now you get access to some incredible tools. You get access to our insights product. Our insights product becomes available to let them know what's wrong or what's inside their images that they need to be aware of. That also ties into our satellite products and our Ansible products to help migrate and or keep that day two up to date for them. So we've got the Ansible products plugging in there. We got the developer skews. And then once they've graduated to a production run, well, they've been using rail and now the movement of developer to production is seamless. Talk about the migration and optimization on Google Cloud, real quick question. As people look to migrate and have operators, what's the optimization? I love the consistent experience. That's check and hit that box good. Now I want to optimize. I want to start getting in and cranking up the cloud. What's the, what have developers have for choices, options, we still get the rail support. You know, you guys have always have a great track record of what's a million years of support for rail. I mean, you guys keep the support going, but how do I often show the cloud and maintain that trust? Well, I think from an optimization perspective, like Dan mentioned, the, the bits that we have already come pre-tuned for the use case. What we see most often is customers don't really need to do any more fine tuning or performance tuning or what have you because they come in with the right drivers, everything just works. Like we got GVNIC, for example. The drivers are in the bits already. It just works out of the box. So, and most enterprise customers, they're not looking to kind of fine tune beyond that. And the good thing is that because SAP SKU is so optimized for SAP HANA databases and such, again, even those don't need further optimizing. So that's, that's the beauty of the work that we're already doing behind the scenes that I don't see actually, frankly, a lot of optimization going on. We internally use a lot of rail for SAP, and I know there's a lot of SAP workloads that we see now. So I don't know if you guys see anything else or different on your end of the day. We tune our kernel for the cloud. We tune our kernel, you know. So the one thing I want to plug here is the fact that it's not an optimization, but we have a tool called ImageBuilder, and it allows customers to pick the cloud that they want to go to, and we will build the image for them that they just have to import in. We test all that. I think that is, I think the optimization story is the amount of testing that both teams do. We test it, Google tests it. So when it lands there, you're sure that it doesn't need optimize because we're running those performance numbers and security numbers behind you. When you get there, you should be comfortable with what you're executing. Dan and Venkat, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing the update on the story. Ashley Redd, how you're leaning into GCP cloud and getting the recognition. That's a good sign. Congratulations on the momentum you guys have. Absolutely. And the ecosystem's buzzing. I think it's nice to see you guys getting that all together. It was really beautiful that partners coming in and we interviewed a bunch of them, so it's been fun. We're excited and thank you so much for having us, yeah. We'll see you guys at KubeCon. Yeah, thanks for having us. And you know, it is my pleasure to be here, but I want to be back here. You see the products that we're bringing. You see the things that we're going to continue doing. I have every expectation we're going to be partnered with you next year too. Well, we'll see you guys next year. And again, congratulations on the award and congratulations on all the optimization of cloud goodness continues here in the Kube. We're getting all the data for you, Sharon, after you. We're tuning up the Kube. We've got that image idea. We're bringing the Kube and we've got some image updates for the Kube. Love that idea. We're bringing you coverage. Dustin Kirkland's here with me, John Furrier, Lisa Martin, Rob Strecce, team coverage of the Kube here in San Francisco for Google Next. We'll be right back after the keynotes, after this short break.