 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering AnsibleFest 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE. We are broadcasting live here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, my cohost. theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat AnsibleFest. This is probably one of the hottest topic areas that we've been seeing in enterprise tech emerging, along with observability. Automation and observability is the key topics here. Automation is the theme. Stu, Ansible, just finished their keynotes, keynote analysis, general availability of their new platform, the Ansible Automation platform is the big news. This is a big, I mean, it seems nuanced for the general tech practitioner out there. What's Ansible doing? Why are we here? We saw the rise of network management turned into observability as the hottest category in the cloud, cloud 2.0, companies going public, a lot of M&A activity, and observability is data-driven. Automation's this other category that is just exploding in growth and change, huge impact to all industries, and it's coming from the infrastructure scale side where the blocking and tackling of DevOps has been. This is the focus of Ansible and their show, automation for all, your analysis of the keynote, what's the most important thing going on here? Yeah, so John, as you said, automation is a super hot topic. I was just at the New Relic show talking about observability last week. We've got the PagerDuty show also going on this week. The automation is so critical. We know that IT can't keep up with things if they can't automate it, and it's not just replacing some scripting. I loved in the keynote, they talked about strategically thinking about automation. We've been watching the RPA companies talking about automation, so there's lots of different automation, there's the right way to do it, and another thing, Angle John, that we love covering is what's going on with open source. You were just at the open core summit in San Francisco, the Red Hat team, very clear, open source is not their business model. It is, they use open source, and everything that Red Hat does is 100% open source, and that was core and key to what Ansible was and how it's created. This isn't a product pitch here. It's a community. John, this is the sixth most active repository in GitHub, so out of over 100 million repositories out there, the sixth most active. That tells you that this is being used by the community. It's not a couple of companies using this, but it's a broad ecosystem. We hear Microsoft, and Cisco, F5, lots of companies that are contributing, as well as just all of the end users. We have JP Morgan in the keynote this morning, so a lot of participation there, but it is building out that suite with the platform that you talked about, and we're going to spend a lot of time in the next two days understanding this maturation and growth. Yeah, the automation platform that they announced, that's the big news, the general availability of their automation platform. And Stu, the word they're using here is scale, and this is something that you brought up the open core summit, which I attended last week was the inaugural conference. A lot of controversy, and this is a generational shift. We are seeing in the midst of our own eyes, right in front of us on the ground floor of a shift in open source community, how the platform of open source is evolving. What Amazon, now Azure, and Google, and the others are doing is, they're showing that scale has changed the game in how open source is going to not only grow and evolve, but shape application developers. And the reason why Ansible is so important right now in this conference is that we all know that when you stand up stuff, infrastructure, you got to configure the hell out of it. DevOps has always been infrastructure as code, and as more stuff gets scaled up, as more stuff gets provisioned, as more stuff gets built and created, the management and the controlling of the configurations, this has been a real hotspot. This has been an opportunity and a problem. So, you know, everyone who's here, they're active because you know what? This is a major pain point. This is a problem area that's an opportunity to take what is a blocking and tackling operational role, configuring, standing up infrastructure, enabling applications, and making it a competitive advantage. This is why the game is changing. We're starting to see platforms, not tools. Your analysis, are they positioned? Was this keynote successful? Yeah, John, you know, I really liked Robin Berger and came out and talked about the key principles of what Ansible has done. It's simplicity, it's modularity, and it's learning from open source. This project was only started in 2012, so one of the things I always look at is, in the old days, you wanted to have that experience. There's no compression algorithm for experience. Today, if I could start from day one today and build with the latest tools, heavily using DevOps, understanding all of the experience that's happened in open source, we can move forward. So, from 2012 to 2015, Red Hat acquired Ansible. To today in 2019, they're making huge growth and helping companies really leverage and mature their IT processes and move towards true business innovation, leveraging automation. Stu, this is not, and again, this is not for the faint of heart either. Again, these are Rockstar, DevOps, infrastructure folks who are evolving in, taking either network and or infrastructure development to enable a software abstraction layer for applications. And it's not a joke either. I mean, they've got some big names up on stage. There's just one tweet I want to call out and get your reaction to. JP Morgan on his presentation, the exec there. The tweet came out from Christopher Festa. 500 developers are working to automate business processes leading to, among other benefits, 98% improvement in recovery times. What used to take six to eight hours to recover now takes two to five minutes. Christopher, Festa. Stu. John, that's what we want, is how can we take these things that took hours and I had to go through this ticketing process and make that change. What I loved of what Chris from JP Morgan said is he brought us inside and he said, look, to make this change, it took us a year of sorting through the security, the cyber, the control processes. We understand there's not just, oh hey, let's sprinkle a little DevOps on everything and it's wonderful. We need to get buy-in from the team and it can spread between groups and change that culture. It's something that we've tracked in Red Hat for years in all of these environments. This is something that does require commitment because it's not just John taking, oh, I scripted something and that's good. We need to be able to really look at these changes because automation, if we just automate a bad process, that's not going to help our business. We really need to make sure we understand what we're automating, the business value and what is going to be the ramification to what we're doing. Well, one of the things I want to share with folks watching is some research that we did at SiliconANGLE, theCUBE, and Wikibon. It's part of our CUBE Insights too. I know you were part of this. We talked to a bunch of practitioners and customers and dozens of our community members and we found that observability, we've just pointed out, has been explosive category that automation has been identified and we're putting a stake in the ground right here on theCUBE as one of the next big sectors that will rise up as a small little white space will become a massive market automation. We watched that Cloud 2.0 sector called automation. Why the reasoning was this, and here's the results of our survey. Automation is quickly becoming a critical foundational element of the network as enterprises focus on multi-cloud, network being infrastructure, servers and storage, and multi-cloud rapid application development and deployment, software defined, everything's happening. Pretty much we've been covering that on theCUBE and most enterprises are just grappling with this concept and see opportunities. The benefits that people see in automation as we've discovered still are the following. Focus efforts for better results efficiency. Security is a top driver on all these things because you got to have security built into the software and then automation is creating job satisfaction for these guys. I mean they've been doing mundane tasks being automated ways so people are happier so job satisfaction and finally this is an opportunity to re-skill. Stu these are the key bullet points that we found in talking to our community, your reaction to those results. Yeah, John I love that. Ultimately when we want to be able to provide not only better value to my ultimate end user but I need to look internal. As you said John, how can I retool some of my Salesforce and get them engaged and if you want to hire the millennials they want to just not be doing the drudgery. They want to do something where they feel that they are making a difference and you laid out a lot of good reasons why it would help and why people would want to get involved. John you know the government, I've talked to a number of government agencies when they talk about we changed that 40 year old process and now we're doing things faster and better and that means I can really hire that next generation of workforce because otherwise I wouldn't be able to hire them to just do things the old way. Stu this is about Cloud 2.0 this is about modernization and you mentioned open source, open core summit that I think is a tell sign that open source is changing, the communities are changing. This is going to be a massive wave. We've been chloronicalizing this Cloud 2.0 the week we coined that term we're trying to identify those key points obviously observability, automation but look at at the end of the day you got to have a focus effort to make the job go better you heard JP Morgan pointing out minutes versus hours this is the benefits of infrastructure as code and the end of the day employee satisfaction the people that you want to hire to reskill that can be redeployed into new roles analytics, math, quantitative analysis versus the mundane tasks. Automation is going to impact all aspects of the stack. So final question Stu, what are you expecting for the next two days? We're going to be here for two days. What do you expect to hear from our guests? Yeah so John one of the things I'm going to really look at is as you mentioned infrastructure is where this all started. So you know how do I easy to play a VM? You know Ansible's there, you know VMware I've already talked to a number of people in the virtualization community they love and embrace Ansible. We saw Microsoft up on stage loving and embracing as we move towards micro service architectures containerization and all of these cloud native deployments you know how is Ansible in this community doing where the stumbling blocks to be honest from what I hear John coming into this Ansible's been doing well. Red Hat has helped them grow even more and the expectation is that IBM will help proliferate this even further the traditional competitors to Ansible you think about the chefs and puppets of the world have been struggling with that cloud native world. John I know I see Ansible when I go to the cloud shows and I hear customers talking about it so Ansible seems to be making that transition towards cloud native well but there are other threats in the cloud native world you know when I go to the serverless conference I have not yet heard you know where this fits into the environment so we always know that next generation of technology you know how will this automation move forward. As Red Hat starts to get much more proliferated into major enterprises with IBM which will take their, extend their lead even further in the enterprise it's an opportunity for Ansible and the community angle is interesting I saw a tweet still I'll get your community angle real quick on this I saw a tweet from NetApp their tagline at their booth is simplify, automate and orchestrate sounds like they're leading into the Kubernetes world containers you've got to start and thinking about software abstractions you know this ain't the you know provisioning hardware anymore whole new ball game your assessment of Ansible's community presence mentioned that was a tweet from Red Hat I mean NetApp what's your take on the community angle here? Oh John it's all about community the GitHub stats speak for themselves this is very much a community invent you know kudos to the team here a lot on the diversity inclusion effort so really pushing those things forward John something we always notice at the tech shows the ratio of you know gender is way more diverse at an event like this we know we see it in the developer communities that there's more diversity in there so you know gender and ethnicity sure there is by the way when they took over this hotel all of the bathrooms are I believe it's you know it's gender neutral so you can use whatever bathroom you know you want there I'll just make sure I'm using the right pronoun when I'm going saying a load of people Stu thanks for the commentary it's keynote analysis I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman breaking down why we are here why Ansible why is automation important we believe automation will be a killer category we're going to see a lot of growth here and again the impact is with machine learning and AI this is where it all starts automating the data, the technology and the configuration is going to empower the next generation modern enterprise more live coverage from Ansible Fest after this short break