 Welcome back to Chicago guys and gals. Lisa Martin here with John Farrier. We have been covering Ansible Fest 22 for the last two days. This is our show wrap. We're going to leave you with some great insights into the things that we were able to dissect over the last two days. John, this has been an action-packed two days. A lot of excitement, a lot of momentum. Good to be back in person. It's great to be back in person. It was the first time for you to do Ansible Fest. Yes. My first one was 2019 in person. That's the last time they had an event in person. Again, it's a very chill environment here but it's content-packed, great, active, loyal community and it's growing, it's changing. Ansible now owned by Red Hat and now Red Hat owned by IBM. Kind of see some game-changing movements here on the chessboard, so to speak, in the industry. Ansible has always been a great product. It started in open source. It evolved configuration management, configuring servers, networks. Really the nuts and bolts of IT and became a fan favorite, mainly because it was built by the fans. And I think that never stopped and I think you start to see an opportunity for Ansible to be not only just a, I won't say niche product or niche kind of use case to being the overall capabilities for large-scale enterprise system architectures to management, so it's very interesting. I mean, I find it fascinating how it stays relevant and cool and continues to power through a massive shift. They've done a great job though, since the inception and through the acquisition of being still community-first. You know, we talked a lot yesterday and today about helping organizations become automation-first. But Ansible has really stayed true to its roots and being community-first, community-driven and really that community flywheel was something that was very obvious the last couple of days. Yeah, I mean, the community thing is their production system. I mean, if you look at Red Hat, their open source, Ansible started open source, good that they're together. But what people may or may not know about Ansible is that they build their product from the community. So the community actually makes the suggestions. They're kind of, Ansible's just in listening mode. So when you have a system that's that efficient where you have direct working backwards from the customer like that, it's very efficient. Now, you know, as a product manager, you might want to worry about scope creep, but at the end of the day, they do a good job of democratizing that process. So, again, very strong product production system with open source, very relevant, solves the right problems. But this year, the big story to me is the cultural shift of Ansible's relevance. And I think with multi-cloud on the horizon, operations is the new kind of developer kind of ground. DevOps has been around for a while. That's now shifted up to the developer themselves, the cloud native developer. But at cloud scale and hybrid computing, it's about the operations, it's about the data and the security. All of it's about the data. So to me, this is a new ops kind of configuration, operating model that you're seeing, people use SRE and DevOps, that's a new culture. And the personas changing, the operator of a large scale enterprise is going to be a lot different than it was past five, 10 years. So major cultural shift, and I think this community is going to step up to that position and fill that role. They seem to be having a lot of success meeting people where they are, meeting the demographics, delivering on how their community wants to work, how they want to collaborate. But yesterday, you talked about operations. We talked a lot about Opsis code. Talk about what does that mean from your perspective and what did you hear from our guests on the program with respect to that being viable? It's a great point. Opsis code is kind of their next layer of progression. Infrastructure is code, configuration is code, operation is code. To me, that means running the company as software. So software operates, influencing how operators, usually hardware in the past, now it's infrastructure and software going to run things. So Opsis code is the next progression in how people are going to manage it. And I think most people think of that as enterprises get larger when they hear words like SRE which stands for site reliable engineer that came out of Google and Google had all these servers that ran the search engine at scale. And so one person managed boatload of servers and that was efficient. There was like a multiple 10X engineer they used to call it. So that was unique to Google. But not everyone's Google. So it became language or parlance for someone who's running infrastructure. But not everyone's at scale. So scale is a big issue. Opsis code is about scale and having that programmability as an operator. That's what Opsis code is. And that to me is a sign of where the scale meets the automation. Large scale is hard to do. Automating at large scale is even harder. So that's where Ansible fits in with their new automation platform and you're seeing new things like signing code and making sure it's trusted and verified. So that's the software supply chain issue. So they're getting into the world where software, open source automation are all happening at scale. So to me that's a huge concept of Opsis code. It's going to be very relevant. Kind of the next gen positioning. Let's switch gears and talk about the partner ecosystem. We had Stephanie Cheris on yesterday, one of our longtime CUBE alumni talking about what they're doing with AWS in the marketplace. What was your take on that and what's in it for me for both Red Hat Ansible and AWS? So the big news on the automation platform was one. The other big news I thought was really like kind of, I won't say watered down, but it seems small, but it's not. It's the Amazon web services relationship with Red Hat. Now Ansible, where Ansible is now a product in AWS's marketplace. AWS marketplace is kind of hanging around us. The catalog right now is not the most advanced technical system in the world. And it does over two billion plus revenue transactions. So even it's just sitting there as a large marketplace that's already doing massive amounts of disruption in the procurement of how software is bought. So we've interviewed them in the past and they're innovating on that. They're going to make that a real great platform. But the fact that Ansible's in the marketplace means that their sales are going to go up. Number one. Number two, that means customers can consume it simply by clicking a button on their Amazon bill. That means they don't have to do anything. It's like getting a P.O. for free. It's like, hey, I'm buying Ansible. Click, click, click. And then, by the way, draw that down from their commitment to AWS. So that means Amazon's going into business with Ansible and that is a huge revenue thing for Ansible, but also an operational efficiency thing that gives them more advantage over the competition. Talk about what's in it for me as a customer. You know, at Red Hat some of it a few months ago they announced similar partnership with Azure. Now we're talking about AWS. Customers are living in this hybrid cloud world often by default. We're going to see that proliferate. What is that? What do you think this means for customers in terms of being able to- You mean the marketplace deal? No, yeah, the marketplace deal, but also what Red Hat and Ansible are doing with the hyperscalers to enable customers to live successfully in the hybrid cloud world. It's just in the roots of the company they give them the choice to consume the product on clouds that they like. So we're seeing a lot of clients that have standardized on AWS with their dev teams but also have productivity software on Azure. So you have the large enterprises, they sit on both clouds. So Ansible then the customer wants to use Ansible anyway. They didn't want that to happen. So it's a natural thing for them to work anywhere. I call that the Switzerland strategy. They'll play with all the clouds. Even though the clouds are fighting against each other and they have to to differentiate, there's still going to be some common services. I think Ansible fits this shim layer between clouds but also a bolt-on. So that's a really double, double win for them. They can bolt-on to the cloud, Azure, and bolt-on daters and Google and also be a shim layer technically in clouds as well. So there's two technical advantages to that strategy. Can Ansible be a facilitator of hybrid cloud infrastructure for organizations or a catalyst? I think it's going to be a gateway or on ramp or gateway to multicloud or super cloud as we call it because Ansible's in that configuration layer. It's interesting to hear the IBM research story which we can get to in a second around how they're doing the AI for Ansible with that wisdom project. But the idea of configuring stuff on the fly is really a concept that's needed for multicloud because programs don't want to have to configure anything. So standing up an application to run on Azure that's on AWS that spans both cloud. You're going to need to have that automation. And I think this is an opportunity, whether they can get it or not, we'll see, I think Red Hat is probably angling on that hard and I can see them kind of go in there and some of the commentary kind of connects the dots for that. Let's stick into some of the news that came out today. You just alluded to this. IBM research we had on with Red Hat talk about what they call project wisdom, the value in that. What it also means for Red Hat and IBM working together very synergistically. I mean, I think the project wisdom is an interesting interesting dynamic because you got the confluence of the organic community of Ansible partnering with a research institution of IBM research. And I think that combination of practitioners and research groups is going to map itself out to academic. And then you're going to see this kind of collaboration going forward. So I think it's a very nuanced story but the impact to me is very clear that this is the new power brokers in the tech industry because researchers have a lot of muscle in terms of deep research in the academic area and the practitioners are the ones who are actually doing it. So when you bring those two forces together that pretty much trumps any kind of standards bodies or anything like that. So I think that's a huge, huge signaling benefit to Ansible and Red Hat. I think that's an influence of Red Hat being bought by IBM but the project itself is really amazing. It's taking AI and bringing it to Ansible so you can do automated configurations of people who don't know how to code. They can actually just automate stuff and know the process. It don't need to be coder. I can just use the AI to do that. That's a low code, no code dynamic. That kind of helps with skill gaps because I need to hire someone to do that. Today if I want to automate something and I don't know how to code, I got to get someone who codes it. Here I can just do it and automate it. So if that continues to progress the way they want it to, that could literally be a game changer because now you have software configuring machines and that's pretty badass in my opinion. So that thought that was pretty cool. And again, this is an evolution of how AI is becoming more relevant and I think it's directionally correct and we'll see how it goes. And they also talked about we're nearing an inflection point in AI, you agree? I think AI is an inflection point because it just falls short on the scale side. You see it with chatbots, NLP. You're seeing what Amazon is doing. They're building these models. I think we're one step away from model scaling. I think the building the models is going to be one of the things we're going to start to see marketplace of models. You can start to see composability of AI. That's where it's going to get very interesting to see which cloud is the best AI scale. So I think AI at scales coming and that's going to be something to watch really closely. Something exciting. Another thing that was big news today was the event driven Ansible. Talk about that was that, and that's something that they've been working on in conjunction with the community for quite a while. They were very proud of that release and what that's going to enable organizations to do. Well, I think that's more meat on the bone on the AI side because in the big trend right now is ML, AI ops. You hear that a lot, data ops or AI ops. What event driven automation does is allows you to take things that are going on in your world infrastructure, triggers, alarms, notifications, data pipelining flows. Things that go on in the plumbing of infrastructure are being monitored and observed. So when events happen, they trigger events. You want to stream something, you send a trigger and things happen. These are called events. Events are wide, wide ranging number of events. Kafka streaming for data. You got anything that produces data is an event. So harnessing that data into a pipeline is huge. So doing that at scale, that's where I think that product's a home run and I think that's going to be a very valuable product because once you understand what the event triggers are, you then can automate that and then no humans involved. So that will save a lot of time for people in the higher pay grade of ML, AI ops, automate some of that low level plumbing. They move their skill set to something more valuable or more impactful. And we talked about speaking of impact. We talked about a lot of the business impact that organizations across industries are going to be able to likely achieve by using that. Yeah, I mean, I think that you're going to see the community fill the gap on that. I mean, the big part about all this is that their community builds the product and they have the playbooks and they're shareable and they're reusable. So, you know, we produce content as a media company. They talk about content as a playbooks and documentation for people to use. So, reuse and reusing these playbooks is a huge part of it. So, as they build up these catalogs and these playbooks and rules, it gets better by the community. So, you can see the adoption. That's going to be a big tell sign for what's going to happen. Yeah, we definitely got to be watching that space. And the last thing, we got to talk to a couple of customers. We talked to Wells Fargo who says, you know, we are a tech company that does banking, which I loved. We got to talk with Rockwell Automation. What are some of your takeaways from how the customers are leveraging Ansible and the technology to drive their businesses forward to meet demanding customers where they are? I think you're seeing the script flipping a little bit here where the folks that used to use Ansible for configuration are flipping to be on the front edge of the innovation strategy where what process to automate is going to drive the profitability and scale because you're talking about things like skill gaps, workflows, these are business constructs and people. These are assets, so they have economic value. So before it was just kind of IT serve the business, configure some servers, do some stuff. When you start getting into automation where you have expertise around what this means, that's economic value. So I think you're going to see the personas change significantly in this community where they're in the front lines, kind of like developers are. That's why Opsas Code is, to me, a developer kind of vibe. That's going to completely change operations runs in IT. I think that's going to be a very interesting cultural shift and some will make it, some won't. That's going to be a big thing. Some people say, you know, I'm going to retire, I'm old school storage server person, or no, I'm the new guard, I'm going to be the new team, I'm going to be on the right side of history here. So they're clearly going down that right path, in my opinion. What's your overall summary in the last minute of what this event delivered the last couple of days in terms of really talking about the transformation of enterprises and industries through automation? I think the big takeaway for me in listening and reading the tea leaves was the Ansible company and staff and the community together, it was really a call for arms, like, hey, we've had it right from the beginning, we're on the right wave and the wave's getting bigger. So expand your scope, up level your skills, they're on the right side of history. And I think the message was engage more, bring more people in because it is open source. And if they are on that track, you're going to see more of like, hey, we got it right, let's continue. So they got platform release, they got the key products coming out after years of work. So, you know, they're doing their work. And the message I heard was, it's bigger than we thought. So I think that's interesting, we'll see what that means. We're going to unpack that after the event and series of showcases. But yeah, it was more, it was very positive, I thought, very positive. Yeah, I think there was definitely some surprises in there for them. John, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure co-hosting with you to allow a couple of days uncovering what Ansible is doing, what they're enabling customers in every industry to achieve. Been fun. Yes. All right, for my co-host, John Ferrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE's coverage of Ansible Fest 2022, live from Chicago. We hope you take good care and we'll see you soon.