 Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 21 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got two great guests here, returning back. Cube alumni is here to give us their perspective. Dave Lundquist, GM, VP of Engineering, Hybrid Cloud Management at Red Hat, Joe Fitzgerald, General Manager, VP of the Management Business Unit at Red Hat. Guys, welcome back to theCUBE. Congratulations, Red Hat Summit's ongoing virtual. Great to see you. Thank you, John. Thanks, John. So I'd love to get the low down. A lot going on, the productivity this year, looking back from last year, a lot's been done. And we've been in the pandemic now, now circling back a full year. A lot's happened, a lot of productivity, a lot of clear visibility on what's working, what's not. You guys got some great news. Let's just jump right into it. What's the big announcement? So one of the things that we announced here at Summit, John, is an expansion of our Red Hat Insights brand. Basically, we announced Red Hat Insights for our REL platform back in 2015. Over the years, we've increased the amount of data and visibility into those systems. Here at Summit, we've now announced Red Hat Insights for both OpenShift and for the Red Hat Ansible platforms. So it's a pretty significant increase in the visibility that we have to the platforms. Buss, can you repeat that one more time? So the expansion is through which platform style specifically? So Red Hat Insights is a way that we connect up to different platforms that Red Hat provides. Historically, it was for Red Hat Enterprise Linux or REL. We've now expanded it to the Red Hat OpenShift family, the platforms. As well as the Red Hat Ansible automation platform as well. So a nice broad expansion. People want that data. What was the motivation behind it? Was it customer demand? Was it more access to the data? Just was it on the roadmap? What's the motivation? Where is this going? What's the purpose of all this? Well, I don't think customers say, hey, please take more data. I think it's customers say, can you keep me more secure? Can you keep my systems more optimized? Can you help me set more things to automatic? And that requires that you get data from these systems so that you can auto-tune, auto-secure, auto-optimize. Right, so it's really all those benefits that we get by connecting to these systems, bringing in the telemetry, the data, the config, different kinds of information and using that on the customer behalf to optimize, secure, and tune those systems. You know, one of the biggest trends I think now for multiple years has been observability. With Cloud Native, more services are being turned on and off. Enterprises are getting a lot of pressure to be modern in their application development processes. Why is data more important than ever now? Can you guys take a minute and expand on that? Because this idea of telemetry across the platform is a very interesting announcement because you're turning that data into value, but can you guys expand? Where's that value coming, turning into? What is the value proposition? Where are people seeing the key value points? Well, a couple of points, John, as you started out, is in a hybrid cloud environment with Cloud Native applications and a lot of application modernization and the current progressiveness of DevOps and SRE teams, you're seeing a lot of dynamics in workloads and continuous delivery and deployments that are in public environments and private environments, distributed models. And so consequently, there's a lot of change in dynamics in the environment. So to sustain these high levels of service levels, to sustain the security of the compliance, the ability to gather data from all these different points to be able to get visibility into that data, to be able to process that with various analytics and understand when something's gone wrong or when an update is needed or when a configuration is drifted is increasingly critical in a hybrid cloud environment. So on the telemetry piece, is that in OpenShift as well? Is that supporting that in there? How does that work? It's in OpenShift, as Joe mentioned. It's in REL, it's in have feeds from Ansible. In the OpenShift space, we have an offering advanced cluster management that understands fleets of deployments, clusters, wherever they're deployed, however they're running infrastructure, public, private, hybrid environments. And it also collects in the context of the workloads that are deployed on those clusters, the multi-question part. I want to ask you guys a question. I get this all the time on theCUBE. Hey, I need more data, I have multiple systems. I need to pull that data into one kind of control plane, but I'm being pushed more and more to keep scaling operations. And this becomes a huge question mark for the enterprises because they have to turn up more scale. So this becomes a data problem. Does this solve it here? How do you guys answer that? And what would be your response of that trend? Well, I think the thirst for data, right? There's a lot of things you can do with more data. There is a point where you can't ship all the data everywhere, right? If you think about logs and metrics and all the data, it's too heavy a way to move everything everywhere, right? So part of it is selecting the kind of data that you're going to get from these systems and the purpose you're going to use it for. And in the case of Red Hat, we take data from these different systems, regardless of where they're deployed, bringing in, and then we do predictive analytics against that data. And we use that telemetry that can take that health data, right, to do everything from optimized for performance, security, cost, things like that. But we're not moving, you know, huge quantities of data from every system to Red Hat in order to, you know, pour through it. We are very selectively moving, you know, certain kinds of data for very specific purposes. Dave, what's your take on that? Because, you know, you got to engineer these systems. What's the optimized path for data? Do you keep it in the silo? Do you bring it together? What's the customer's view on how to deal with the data? Yeah, it's a complex problem, no doubt. You don't want to be pulling all the data and trying to transmit all that data back into your analytics system. So you end up curating some data, some of it will be poured on, often it's done under, it'll be done under control of policy so that data that is sensitive that should stay within the environment that it's in will stay. But curated or alerts or information is particularly relevant, say, to configurations, updates, any of that type of information will go up into the analytics, into the insights, and then in turn the alerts will come back down in a manner that are presented to the users. They understand what actions need to be taken place whether it's automated actions or they have to get approvals to maybe make an update to a certain environment. All right, you got telemetry, data, power, the advanced cluster manager or ACM. What's the overlap of the visibility and automation here? Can you guys talk about that? Well, it's a great question, John. And what we like to do is we like to sort of separate the different areas. There's the seeing, right, of what's going on in these environments, of getting the data, analyzing it and determining what needs to be done. And then either the recommendation or the automation, as Dave said, in a lot of environments, there's a process of either approvals or checkpoints or evaluation of the changes being made to the system, right, so separating the data and the analysis from the, what do you want to do with this and making that configurable, I think is really powerful. I mean, I think that's the number one thing. It's like, everyone always asks, what do you optimize for? Do you optimize for the automation or the visibility? I think there's always a trade-off and that's always an interesting question, David, love to get your thoughts. If someone asks you, hey, I have a team of people, what do I optimize for? The visibility or the automation or both? Is there a rule of thumb or is there a playbook? How would you answer that question? Well, there's a couple of things. First, I think the ability to pull the data together to get visibility across the environment is critical. And then what becomes often complex is how the different disciplines, how the different parts of the system are able to work together and common understanding of the resources, common understanding of the applications. That's usually where systems start falling down and so it's too siloed. So one of the key things we have with our systems, particularly with OpenShift and RHEL and with ACM and Ansible, is the ability to have a common backplane and the ability to have a common understanding of the resources and the applications. And then you can start integrating the data around those common data models and take appropriate actions on that. So that's how you end up getting the visibility integrated with the automation. When you think about this, Joe, about the security aspect of it and the edge of the network, which has been a big theme this year and going into next year, a lot more discussion, just the industrial edge. That's important. You got to take all this into account. How would you talk about folks who are thinking about embedding security and thinking about now the distributed edge, specifically? Right, so we thought it was complicated before, right? It goes up a notch here, right? As you have more and more edge applications. I think at the edge, you're going to want automated policies and automated configurations enforced. So that when the device connects up to a network or is analyzed, that there's a set of policies and set of configurations and versions that need to be applied to that device. These devices aren't always connected. There's not always high bandwidth. So you basically want a high degree of automation in that case. And to get back to your early point, there are certain things you can set, like policies about security or configuration. You say, I always want it to be like this, make it so. And there's other things where they're more complicated, right, to address or have regulatory requirements or oversight issues. And those things you want to tell somebody, I think this should be done. Is this the right thing to do? Is it okay? Do it. But at the edge, you're going to have a lot more sort of lights out of automation to keep these things secured and configured, right? It's fun to have some of the Ansible guys that are talking about code for code, changing code all the time and dynamic nature of some of the emerging tech coming out of the Red Hat teams. It's pretty interesting, you guys have going on there, but you can bring it down to the average enterprise and main street enterprise out there. They're looking at, okay, I got some public cloud. Now I got hybrid. I'm going 100% hybrid. That's pretty much the general consensus of all the enterprises. Okay, so now you say, okay, if I understand this correctly, you got insights on RHEL OpenShift and Ansible platform. So am I set up for an open hybrid cloud? That's the question I want to ask you guys. Does that give me the foundation to allow me to start the cloud adoption with in a true distributed open way? I'll open to go first. I think there's a couple of things you need in order to run across cyber clouds. And I think Red Hat, from a platform point of view, the fact that Red Hat platforms run across all those different environments from the public cloud to on-premise, physical vert to edge devices. Now you have consistency of those platforms, whether it's your traditional workloads on RHEL, your container-based workloads on OpenShift, or automation that's being driven by Ansible. Those are consistent across all these different hybrid cloud environments. So it reduces the complexity by standardizing those platforms across any and all of those different substrates. Then when you can take the data from those systems, bring them centrally and use it to manage those things to a higher degree of automation, now you've taken another chunk of complexity out of the problem, consistency of getting data from all those different systems, being able to set policies and enforce things across all those distributed environments is huge. Yeah, and then it fills in the gaps when you start thinking about the silo teams. I think one of the messages that I've been hearing out of Red Hat Summit and the industry that's consistent is the unification trend that's going on, unifying development teams. And a way that creates more of an exponential value curve rather than just linear progressions in traditional IT. Are you guys seeing that as well? I mean, what's your take on this, that piece of the story? Well, I think the shift that we've seen for the last few years, actually quite a few years, with DevOps and SRE, it started to bring a lot of the disciplines together that you mentioned that are traditionally silos. And you'll find the effectiveness of that is really around many of the areas that we've been discussing here, which is open platforms that can run consistently across a hybrid environment, the ability to get data invisibility out of those platforms so you can see across the distributed environment across the hybrid environment. And then the ability to take actions enforce or update environments through automation is really what's critical to bring things to bring it all together. Yeah, I think that's such an important point, Joe. You know, I was talking with Chris right around, and we've covered this in the past, Red Hat's success with academics and the young people coming into the universities with computer science. It's not just computer science anymore. Now you have engineering degrees kind of cross-disciplinary with SREs as SRE movement because you're looking at cloud operations at scale. That's not an IT problem anymore. It's actually an IT next-gen problem. This is kind of what, there's no real degree. There's no real credential for, you know, large-scale hybrid cloud environments. You just have the mass open cloud initiative. I saw that going on. That's some really pretty big things. This is a change in talent. What's your view on this? Because I think people want to learn what do I need to be in the future? What position? So, John, it's a great question. I think Ansible actually addresses a number of the issues you brought up, which is, you know, historically, there've been different tools for each of the different groups. So, you know, developers had their favorite set of tools and different IT areas had their favorite set of tools and technologies, and it was sort of like a tower of babble. People did not share the same, you know, sort of languages and tools. Ansible crosses both your development test and operational teams. So it creates a common language now that can be used across different teams. It's easy to understand. So it sort of democratizes automation. You don't have to be deeply skilled in some, you know, bespoke language or technology in order to be able to do some level of automation. So I think sort of sharing the same technology and tools like Ansible, democratizing it so that more people can get involved in automating, sharing that automation across teams and unifying those worlds is huge, right? So I think that's a game changer as well in terms of getting these teams to work holistically and integrate it in the future. Yeah, and there's also a better together panel on Ansible and advanced cluster management session. Folks watching should check it out on the virtual event platform on that point. While I got you here on that point, let's talk about the portfolio updates for advanced cluster management for Kubernetes. What's new since the Ansible Fest announcements? There's quite a bit that's been new since Ansible Fest. That Ansible Fest, well, actually going back to Summit last year, we introduced advanced cluster management. We, for years, we've been seeing the growth of Kubernetes with cloud native and clusters. And what ACM really allows enterprises to do is scale out their deployments of OpenShift. One of the things we found is that as you're deploying workloads or clusters or trying to take care of the compliance, the importance of integrating that environment with the breadth of capabilities that Ansible has in automation. So that's what we announced at Ansible Fest following last year's summit. What we've done is put a lot more focus on that integration with Ansible. So when you bring up provision of cluster, maybe you need to make some storage or security configurations on behalf of that cluster or if you're taking care of the compliance, how do you remediate any issues with Ansible? Or one of the things that gets shown a lot, demonstrated a lot, what customers like is when you're deploying applications in the production, how do you configure the network, do the network configurations like a load balancer, maybe a ticket into your service management system, along with say a threat detection on your security. So a lot of advances with ACM and the integration with the broader ecosystem of IT, in particular with Ansible. What's the ecosystem update for partners? And this just comes up all the time. I want to make sure I get this in there. I missed it last time we chatted. You know, the partner impact to this, you mentioned the ecosystem and you got native Kubernetes, non-native. What's native to OpenShift? You guys got a lot of native things and sometimes it's just support for other clouds. So you start to get into the integration questions, partners are very interested in what you guys are doing. Can you share the partner update on how they play and what impacts them the most here? Yeah, on the advanced cluster management, ACM front, first with this integration with Ansible, that actually allows us to integrate with the wealth of partner ecosystem that Ansible has, which is huge. So that's one space. And then the way ACM works, this policy desire of state model is we've been able to integrate with a large number of partners around, particularly the security space of the service management space where we can enforce the use of certain security tools on the clusters themselves. So it's really opened up how quickly partner offerings can be integrated into the OpenShift environment at scale across all the clusters that you want, that you need to support it on, with the appropriate configurations and policies. Joe, I got to ask you on the insight side, you mentioned the expansion across the platforms. Now, if you go out and take out to the ecosystem, there's guardrails around governance. How far can partners push their data in terms of sharing? That's something that might come up. Can you comment on that? Sure. So Red Hat takes our customer data very seriously, more a trusted partner to our customers. So the data that we get from systems, we make sure that we are following all of the governance and oversight necessary to protect that data. So far, we have basically been collecting that data and using that data at Red Hat. Our plan really is to allow partners with the right degree of governance and control to be able to use some of that data in the future under the right conditions, whether it's anonymized or aggregated, things like that, to be able to take that data and to add value to customers. If they can enrich customers or help customers by getting some access to that data without every vendor or partner having to go out to systems and having to connect and pull data back, that's a pretty tough situation for customers to live with. I think that fact that Red Hat is trusted, we've been doing this for a while, we know how to handle the data, we know how to provide the governance, but our plan really is to enable partners to use that data ecosystem. I will say that in addition to what Dave said about ACM and partners, Ansible has been working with partners on the automation side at a very large scale. So if you look at the amount of partners that are doing automation work with us, we have some pretty strong depth there in terms of working with partners. Our plan is to take the data ecosystem and expand that as well. It's really a nice mix between Ansible, OpenShift and then REL, do you guys have great insights across now? I think the open innovation just continues to be, every year, I say the same thing, it's almost like a broken record, but every year it just gets better and better, innovation out in the open, you guys doing a great job and continuing, and now certainly as the pandemic looks like it's coming to an end soon post pandemic, a lot more projects are being worked on, a lot more productivity as we said at the top. So to end the segment out, I'd love to get you guys to weigh in on what happens next as we come out of the pandemic, either the table's been set, the foundation's there, cloud native is continuing to accelerate rapidly when the open, open source going to almost another level. What's next? What's next for customers? Are they going to continue to double down on the wins? Are they going to shut down certain projects? What happens after this pandemic? How do people grow? Dave, we'll start with you. Well, I think, yes, we all see the light at the end of the tunnel, John, that is great. And I think if a positive is really throughout this, we've been accelerating the digitization and app modernization across the board, across industries, okay? And that is really teaching all of us a lot about the importance of how do you start managing and running this at scale and securing this at scale. So I think what we'll see coming out of this is just that much more effort and open ecosystems, how you really bring together data across insights, how you bring an increasing amount of analytics AI to now do something, turn that data into information that you can respond with and that in turn closing the loop with automation against your hybrid cloud environment. We're just going to see acceleration of that occurring. Awesome, great insights there. Open data insights, automation, all kind of coming together AI. If you don't have AI in your plans, someone with Wall Street was joking, that's going to be the future stable stakes that get listed on Wall Street. You got to have some sort of AI piece. Dave, great insight. Joe, your take on what's next, what's going to happen as we come out of the pandemic? Yeah, we've definitely seen people advance their digital transformation and I don't think it's going to stop, right? So the speed scale and complexity are just going to put more pressure on teams, right? To be able to support these environments that are evolving at light speed. So I think Red Hat is really well positioned and is a great partner for folks. We're trying to get more digital faster, trying to leverage these technologies from the hybrid cloud to the edge. They're going to need lots of help. Red Hat is in a great position to help them. You guys doing great work. Dave Lundquist, Joe Fitzgerald, great to have you back on. Again, open always wins. And as end users become much more participants in the open source ecosystem, end user contributions, end user interactions, software at scale. It's just now a new next generation commercial environment. You guys doing a great job. Thank you for sharing. Appreciate it. Thank you, John. Thanks, John. Okay, Red Hat Summit 21 Cube Coverage. I'm John Furrier. Getting all the action from the experts have been there, done that, living through it, being more productive and bringing benefits to you being open source. Thanks for watching.