 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, we're in Las Vegas and you're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMworld 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host, Justin Warren. And happy to welcome to the program for a first time, James Lobaki, who's a director of product management with Red Hat. And joining him is CUBE alum Rob Young, who's the lead manager of virtualization product management strategy. Also with Red Hat, wearing the Shadowman logo. Rob, James, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having us. All right, so Rob, you know, we touch base with Red Hat and a number of shows, you know, Red Hat Summit. We spoke with you last year at VMworld, gives the update, you know, Red Hat's got a nice booth here at the show, a lot of things going on. Red Hat plays in a lot of the multi-cloud environments that I hear VMware talking about. So talk about your presence here. So Red Hat has done quite a bit of growing over the course of the last year that we talked. We are focused on not only where our customers are today, but also on how our portfolio needs to evolve to where they aspire to be. And by that, I mean, you know, RHEL is still the foundation of our business. We have Red Hat virtualization. We have OpenStock platform. We have, you know, the open shift, as you know. And what we're learning from our customers and the market is that on top of RHEL, customers have not only a footprint in the virtualization world, but they have an aspiration to evolve, along with the market, to more of a containerized world that is managed, orchestrated, delivered via Kubernetes. And we feel that our portfolio is well-positioned with the pillars of our business, from infrastructure to application, middleware all the way through management, to allow them to, you know, act on those aspirations, not in the future, but right now. So that's where we are. That's our strategy is built around that vision and around that level of enablement and market dynamic right now. So we're excited, wouldn't you agree? Yeah, absolutely. So we've seen a lot of interest in open shift adoption, whether that's on the VMware platform itself, out on the public clouds, and then on our KVM-based hypervisors with Red Hat virtualization and OpenStock platform as well. Yeah, it's interesting because I've watched this, the adoption of containerization in the marketplace. What's the line I hear from Red Hat? It's like, you know, Linux is containers. Containers are Linux. You got that good. Yeah, I got the T-shirt too. So, but, you know, here at VMworld, it's, you know, some people are still trying to understand that virtualization versus containers and how do I stack things? How do I do that? What do you hear from customers? You know, where is their head at? And talk to us about, you know, kind of, it's pervasive in the product line. So how do you think about it internally too? Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, containers are absolutely Linux and Linux is fundamental to containers. So I think one of the most interesting paradigms that we're seeing, one of the interesting trends we're seeing is that as people are beginning to adopt containers, they're also beginning to realize that they're looking to simplify their environments as they do that. And so it's presenting a lot of new opportunities and reinvigoration of other technologies. So things like, you know, traditional virtualization that they have in place today, they're looking at maybe, you know, bringing along KVM and starting to orchestrate containers and virtual machines with Kubernetes in a consistent manner across both on-premise and public cloud providers. So we're really excited to be involved in projects around that, where we're helping drive the adoption of that. And with that reinvigoration of KVM as a hypervisor, based on that work, to bring a common orchestration layer, we're seeing even, you know, reinvigoration of the ecosystem around KVM with partners of ours like Trilio, Maxta, Veeam, and so on and so forth, which we've been kind of discussing. Yeah, well, sorry. Yeah. Well, I was going to just add to what James said. What we see also happening is that the Linux market 25 years ago was open source, contributor, laden. Red Hat was, you know, fully engaged there. We are seeing that very same dynamic happening in the Kubernetes environment. We actually see that as very much the equivalent of what Linux was 25 years ago. So we are contributing, you know, to upstream to the Kubernetes project. But our goal there really is not only to stabilize and build out Kubernetes, but also to bring the virtualization aspects that we have brought into KVM and to virtualization into the Kubernetes project and community so that we can get rid of an additional layer of complexity around the hypervisor allowing containers to be managed and deployed and to have the same isolation levels that you have with VMs now. So all that is in process now. We've got upstream work going on and we're leading, you know, a lot of those contributions in the Kubernetes community, specifically via the QBird project. So, anyway. Leads nicely into what I wanted to ask about, which was, Red Hat has a long history of open source and open source is a really important part of containers in general. What are you seeing from enterprises in their adoption of open source? I mean, clearly you've watched it go from something which was once verboten to now it's pretty much de facto. So what are you seeing customers using open source for in this new cloud and container world? Yeah, so I think, you know, the typical pattern we see is a lot of times, previously people would look at open sources as a way to commoditize and reduce cost. That was the beginning of open sources, right? With the Unix to Linux migrations and things of that nature. Now, you know, open source and really Linux is at the forefront of a lot of the innovation happening. So customers are using both those basically techniques inside of their environments to embrace open source. So at one point, they're using their Linux skills to commoditize things inside their environment and reduce cost. They're also looking at as the basis of containers, microservices, machine learning, you know, so on and so forth. So really this common skill set of Linux is kind of both on both sides and it's really rooted in the open source knowledge and methodologies that our customers need to be able to. You hit the nail right on the head when you mentioned that, you know, everything that has to do with the new modernization of the data center built on containers is open source. And, you know, Red Hat's participation in the community is we already have credibility in the Linux world, in the OpenStack world, in the KPM world, in the Kubernetes world as well. So, and what we're seeing on the customer side, specifically enterprise and, you know, public sector is they're embracing open source. They've actually got strategies that name open source as part of the criteria for, you know, proof of concepts and things like that. And, you know, we believe we've been preparing for this moment for the last 25 years for the market to really see this as an open opportunity, not only for, you know, open source and communities, but also to enable their development staffs to extend and participate in those projects to their advantage. So, you know, it's a really good thing. You know, for Red Hat- It's encouraging to see it, yeah. Having watched it develop, it's been really nice seeing that actually get used with enterprises and seeing that Red Hat is there the whole way through that and as a trusted partner, I'm sure it gives them a lot of confidence. One thing I would add is just, you know, it's not just about the ability to deliver open source and use it, although delivering that with a long life cycle is something that is a, you know, core, you know, core competency of Red Hat as a company, but also the ability to actually effect change in those communities and get contributions back in is really key and then even advising customers on how to do that is something that we're, you know, it's easy just to say, hey, we do open source, but actually providing that life cycle around it is a whole other story. Yeah. Red Hat has a lot of experience living in a lot of different environments. Just Linux is pervasive in the data center and in the cloud. When you talk about multi-cloud, customers need to figure out how to, you know, deal with these multi-cloud and environments and, you know, multi-cloud, multi-hypervisor. How does Red Hat help customers through this journey? So there's, we have a really good story there and a really good enablement. There are basically four footprints that you can deploy an application on. Vert, physical, virtual, public and private cloud and Red Hat portfolio deploys nicely there. RHEL, VMs, OpenStack, OpenShift, containers, you name it. So, you know, our approach is not only do we allow the deployment there, but also the management of it as well and we agree with you wholeheartedly. Workloads are portable, they're mobile. People are going to move them between clouds, on-site, they're going to burst into clouds. So our solution to that is the management console that we provide with cloud forms and our management vision going forward for software as a service and some other things that we're doing is all about that heterogeneous environments, multiple hypervisor, multiple cloud providers, multiple OSs as well. So, you know, we want people to see Red Hat as a platform to stabilize on, not a solution where they have to go out and popple together a solution. They should be able to do everything with our product in a portfolio from a single management console, including that heterogeneous environment with multiple hyperbys and multiple clouds. So, that's how we approach it and we're building on that concept, not only with cloud forms, but also with the new core OS tectonic platform that we just, you know, acquired. That'll be part of OpenShift. And then going forward, our management business unit is working on a software as a service consumption-based model that allow customers to do the same thing from their phone as an example. So, you know, it's that vision, but we've already executed on it, but it's only going to get bigger. One thing I would add is, you know, one thing that's fundamental to our vision is that we're actually delivering a consistency across all those footprints. So, it's not one version of Kubernetes for public cloud, another version for on-premise, a different automation tool here and a different automation tool there. It's consistent, right? Ansible automation across bare metal on-premise, virtualization, private, public cloud. OpenShift with the foundation of RHEL consistent across all those for one version of Kubernetes across all of them. So, I think that's a big key differentiator as opposed to some of the other visions where you have one version on public cloud, one version on private, different disparate tools for each of those. We really believe in kind of simplifying that from a complexity standpoint. Well, Robin James, really appreciate you giving us the update on Red Hat. We'll be back with lots more coverage from VMworld 2018. For Justin Moore and I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE.