 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, virtual, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. Hi and welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2020, the Europe Virtual Edition. Of course, Kubernetes won the container wars as we went from managing just a few containers to managing clusters to today, many customers managing multiple clusters and that can get more complicated. So to help understand those challenges and how solutions are being put out to solve them, have a welcome back to the program. One of our CUBE alumni, Joe Fitzgerald, he is the vice president and general manager of the management business unit at Red Hat. Joe, good to see you again. Thanks so much for joining us. Stu, thanks for having me back. All right, so at Red Hat Summit, one of the interesting conversations you and I had was talking about advanced cluster management or ACM. Of course, that was some people and some technology that came over to Red Hat from IBM post acquisition. So it was tech preview, give us the update, what's the news and just level set for the audience, what advanced cluster management is. Sure, so advanced cluster manager or ACM, as we affectionately call it, basically is a way to manage multiple clusters across even different environments, right? As people have adopted Kubernetes and we now have several thousand customers running OpenShift, they're starting to push it in some very, very big ways. And so what they run into is as they scale, they need better ways to manage and automate those environments. And ACM is a huge way to help them manage those environments. It was early availability back at Summit at the end of April and in just a few months now it's generally available and we're super excited about that. Well, congratulations on moving that from technical preview to general availability so fast. What can you tell us? How many customers have you had use this? What have you learned in talking to them about the solution? So first of all, we were really pleasantly surprised by the amount of people that were interested in the tech preview. The tech preview is not a product that's ready to use in production yet. So a lot of times accounts are not interested and they want to wait for the production version. We had over a hundred customers in our tech preview across not only geographies all over the world in Asia, Latin America, Europe and the US across all different verticals. There's a tremendous amount of interest in it. I think that just shows how applicable it is to these environments that people are trying to manage. So a tremendous amount of uptake. We got some great feedback up from that. And in just a few months we incorporated that feedback into the now generally available product. So great uptake during the tech preview period. Excellent, but bring us inside a little bit. When would I use this solution? If I just have a single cluster, does it make sense for me? Is it only for multi clusters? What's the applicability of the offering? Yeah, so even for single clusters, the things that ACM really does fall into three major areas, right? It allows cluster life cycle management, of course, that would mean that you have more than one cluster. And as people grow, they do for a number of reasons. Also policy based management, the ability to enforce, config policies and enforce compliance across even your single cluster to make sure that it stays perfect in terms of settings and configuration and things like that. And the other is application life cycle management. The ability to deploy applications in more advanced way, even if you're on a single cluster, gets even better if you're multi cluster, because you can deploy your apps to just the clusters that are tagged a certain way, but lots of capabilities even for application deployment, even in a single cluster. So we find even people that are running a single cluster need it. As you deploy more and more clusters, you're definitely going to need it. That's great. You mentioned you had feedback from customers. What are the things that, I guess would be the biggest pain points that this solves for them that they were struggling with in the past? Well, first of all, being able to sort of federate management, multiple clusters, right? As opposed to having to manage each cluster individually, the ability to do policy based configuration management to just express the way you want things to stay and have them stay that way, to adopt more of a GitOps methodology in terms of how they're managing their OpenShift environments. There was lots more feedback, but those were some of the ones that seemed to be fairly common and repetitive across the customer base. Yeah, and Joe, you've also got automation in the management suite. How do I think about this? How does this fit into the broader management automation that customers are using? I think as people deploy these environments, I know there's a lot of conversation about the platform, right? But there's a lot of things that have to go with the platform and Red Hat's actually been very good about that in terms of providing all the things that you would find necessary to make the platform successful in your environment, right? So obviously you need the platform, but you need the storage and the development environments, management, the automation, the ability to train on it. We have our open innovation labs. There's lots of things that are beyond the platform that people require in order to be successful. In the case of management automation, ACM is a huge advancement in terms of how to manage these environments, but we're not done. We're going to continue to add more automation, integration with things like Ansible, more integration with observability and analytics. So we're far from done, but we want to make sure that OpenShift stays the best managed environment that's out there. I also do want to make a call out to the fact that this team has been working on this technology for the past couple of years. And so even though it's only been at Red Hat for five months, this technology is actually very mature, but it is quite an accomplishment for any company to take a new team and a new technology and in five months do what Red Hat does to it in terms of making it consumable for the enterprise. So big kudos to the team. They really knocked it out of the park. Well, and I know a piece of that is, moving that along to be open source. So where are we with the solution now that is BA? How does that fit into being open source? Yeah, so parts of it are open source to Red Hat and we're in the process of open sourcing the rest of it. As you've seen over time, Red Hat has a perfect record here of acquiring technologies that were either completely closed source, open core in some cases where part of it was open, part of it was closed. That was the case with Ansible a few years ago, but basically our strategy is everything has to be open source. That takes time. We're in the process of going through all of the processes necessary to open source the parts of ACM. And we think that we'll find lots of interest in the community around the different projects inside of ACM. Yeah, how about one of the bigger concerns talking to customers in general about Kubernetes and even more in 2020 is, what about security? How does ACM help customers make sure that their environments are secure? Yeah, so, you know, configuration policies and enforcing, you can actually set with ACM that you want things to be a certain way. If somebody changes them, they will automatically either warn you about them or enforce them, in other words, set them back. So it's got some very strong security chops in terms of keeping the configurations just the way you want. That gets harder as you get more and more clusters. Imagine trying to keep everything with the same levels of settings, the software and all the parts and pieces. So the fact that you have ACM that can do this across any and all of your clusters really takes the burden off. People trying to maintain secure environments. Okay, and so generally available now, anything you can share about how this solution is priced, how it fits into kind of the broader OpenShift offerings? Yeah, so it's an add-on for OpenShift. It's priced very similarly to OpenShift in terms of the core pricing. One thing I do want to mention about ACM, which maybe doesn't come out, you know, just by description of the product, is the fact that ACM was built from scratch for Kubernetes environments and optimized for OpenShift. We're seeing a lot of competition out there that's taking products that were built for other environments and trying to sort of bend them or coerce them into managing Kubernetes environments. We don't think people are going to be successful at that. They haven't been successful to date. So one of the things that we find as sort of a competitive differentiator for ACM in the market is the fact that it was built from scratch designed for Kubernetes environments. So it is really well designed for the environment it's trying to manage. And we think that's going to keep a competitive edge. Well, always, Joe, when you have a newer architecture, you can take advantage of things. Any examples that you have as to what a new architecture like this can do that an older architecture might struggle with or not fully be able to do, even though when you look at the product sheet, the words sound similar, but when you get underneath the covers, it's just not a good architectural fit. Yeah, so it's very similar to sort of the shift from physical to virtual. You can't have a paradigm shift in the infrastructure and not have a sort of a corresponding paradigm shift in the management tooling. So the way you monitor these environments, the way you secure them, the way they scale and expand, the way you do resource management, security, all those things are vastly different in this environment compared to let's say a virtual environment or physical environment. So this has improved many times in the past. Paradigm shift in the infrastructure or the application environment will drive a commensurate paradigm shift in management. And that's what you're seeing here. So that's why we thought it was super important to have management that was built for these environments by design. So it's not trying to do sort of unnatural things in order to manage the environment. Yeah, I'm wondering, Joe, I'd love to hear just a little bit your philosophy as to what's needed in this space. I look back to previous generations, look at virtualization. Microsoft did very well at managing their environment. VMware did the same for their environments. But we've had generations of times where solutions have tried to be management of everything and that can be challenging. So what's Red Hat and ACM's position and what do we need in the Kubernetes space today and for the next couple of years? So Kubernetes itself is an automation platform. You talked about it early on in the segment. So Kubernetes itself provides a lot of automation around container management. What ACM does is build on top of that and then capture data and events and configuration items in the environment and then allows you to define policies. People want to move away from manual processes certainly, but they want to be able to get to a more stateful expression of the way things should be. They want to be able to use more of a sort of a get-ups kind of philosophy where they can say, this is how I want things today. I want to check the version in. I want to keep it at that level. If it changes, put it back, tell me about it. But sort of the era of chasing, you know, management with people is changing. You're seeing a huge premium now on automation. So automation at all levels. And I think this is where ACM's automation on top of OpenShift automation down the road combined with things like Ansible will provide the most automated environment you can have for these container platforms. So it's definitely changing. You're seeing observability, AI ops, get-ups type of philosophies coming in. These are very different in the management in the past. So you're seeing innovation across the whole management landscape in the Kubernetes environment because they are so different. The physics of them are different than the previous environments. We think with ACM, Ansible, our insights product and some of our analytics that we've got the right thing for this environment. Can you give us a little bit of a look forward? You know, how often should we expect to see updates on this? Of course, you mentioned getting feedback from the community, from the technical preview to GA's. So give us a little bit of a look, you know, what should we be expecting to see from ACM down the line? So the ACM team is far from done, right? So they're going to continue to rev, you know, just like we rev OpenShift at a very, very fast pace. We're going to be revving ACM at a fast pace. Also, you're going to see a lot of integration between ACM and a lot of the partners we're already working with in the application monitoring space and in the analytics space, security, automation. I would expect to see in the Ansible Fest timeframe, which is mid-October, you'll see some integration with Ansible and ACM around the things that Ansible does very well combined with what ACM does. ACM will continue to push out on more, you know, cluster management, more policy-based management and certainly advancing the application life cycles that people are very interested in moving faster. They want to move faster with a higher degree of certainty in their application deployments and ACM is great there. I guess final question for you, Joe, is, you know, just in the broader space looking at management in this kind of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon ecosystem, final words you want customers to understand where we are today and where we need to go down the road. So I think the market and industry has decided Kubernetes is the platform of the future, right? And certainly, you know, we were one of the earliest to invest in container management platforms with OpenShift. We were one of the first to invest in Kubernetes. We have thousands of customers running OpenShift right across all industries and geographies. So we've been on that a long time ago. Now we're betting on the management automation of those environments and bringing them to scale. And the other thing I think that Redhead is unique on is that, you know, we think that people are going to want to run their Kubernetes environments across all different kinds of environments, whether it's on-premise, physical and virtual, multiple public clouds where we have offerings as well as at the edge, right? So this is going to be an environment that's going to be very, very ubiquitous, pervasive, decoyed at scale. And so the management automation is going to become a necessity. And so Redhead is investing in the right areas to make sure that enterprises can use Kubernetes, particularly OpenShift in all the environments that they want, at the scale they want. All right, excellent. Well, Joe, I know we'll be catching up with you and your team for Antelope Fest coming in the fall. Thanks so much for the updates. Congratulations to you and the team on the rapid progression of ACM now being GA. Thanks to appreciate it. We'll see you soon. All right, and stay tuned for more coverage from KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2020 in Europe, the virtual edition. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks as always for watching theCUBE.