 Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's theCUBE, covering AnsibleFest 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back, this is theCUBE's live coverage of AnsibleFest 2019 here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host is John Furrier, and happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Payalsing, who's a principal solutions engineer with F5. Of course, F5's a partner of Ansible in the keynote this morning when they were laying out how to use all of these pieces. Oh, I need a load balancer. Great, here's F5 to the rescue. So Payal, tell us a little bit about your role inside of F5 and kind of F5's activities here at the show. Sure, sure. So thank you for the introduction. Yeah, my name is Payalsing, principal solution engineer. So I work a lot with different Alliance partners and Ansible being one of them, of course. So I developed technical integrated joint solutions with Ansible. We've had a great, great working relationship with Ansible. They've been absolutely wonderful to work with. And at this summit, we have various activities. We had a workshop at the contributor summit. We had a session yesterday. We have another workshop on Thursday. So we're really busy, the booth's been flowing, and so far it's been an awesome experience. The people at the show here, they really dig into what they're doing. Even on the bus ride to the party last night, people are talking about their configurations at lunchtime, everybody's talking about it. Bring us inside a little bit. So are the new collections what people are asking you about? Are there other deployment ways? What are some of the things that are bringing people to talk to F5? Yeah, so people are kind of talking on a broad spectrum. There are some people who are just starting out with Ansible, they just want to know how do I write a playbook with F5? How do I get it running? Others are a little more advanced. Let's get into roles, what are we doing with roles? And then now, collections is coming on top of mind. How are you guys doing with collections? So of course, we are in lockstep. We have the first collections out. We're going to bundle playbooks and a lot of workflows and roles that's going to be easy for customers to just download, use these workflows out of the box and get started with F5. But we've had different use cases, different questions around day zero deployment versus day two management, versus monitoring, versus backup restores, all sorts of questions. One of the things that's come up is, hit the low hanging fruit and then go to the workflows end to end as more of the bigger opportunities. But we've been talking about DevOps for 10 years and this to me has always been the area that's been ripe for DevOps. Configuration management, a lot of the plumbing, but now that it's 10 years later, you're starting to see this glue layer, this integration layer come out and the ecosystem of partners is growing very rapidly for Ansible. And so there's been a very nice evolution. This is kind of a nice add on to great community, great customers for these guys. What's the integration like as you work with Ansible? Because as more people come on and share and connect in, what's it take? What are some of the challenges? What are some of the things that you guys need to do or partners need to do with Ansible? Right, so contributing is, it's been a little slow, I would say, because firstly, they got to kind of learn Ansible, then they got to learn what's Ansible Galaxy, how can I work around it? And then there's the networking piece, right? How do I now make it work with F5? Is this role good enough? Should I be contributing or not? So we're working very closely with NetOps engineers as well as DevOps engineers to kind of say, whatever you think is a good workflow is good enough to go there. So get your role, upload it on Galaxy and show us what you're doing. It doesn't have to be the best, but just get it out there. So we have a lot of workshops. We also have this training on F5 called Super NetOps, which is kind of targeting DevOps and NetOps engineers. So we are trying to educate people so that everybody is on board with us. One of the conversations we've been having a lot this week has been about the collaboration between teams. And historically, that's been a challenge for networking. It's, all right, networking's going to sit in the corner. Tell me what you need. Oh wait, you need those things changes? Nope, I'm not going to do it for you or, you know, okay, wait, get me a budget in 12 months and we'll get back to you. So how are things changing or are they changing enough in your customer's environments? That's a good question. So it is changing, but it's changing slowly. There's still a lot of silos. NetOps guys are doing their stuff. DevOps guys are doing their stuff. But with automation, it's kind of tying it in together because the NetOps engineers have their domain expertise. DevOps have theirs. But we are able to get them in the same room because we talk F5 and then we talk automation and then they connect. They're like, oh, you guys are doing what we've already done. So it's happening, but it's slow. But it's definitely getting there. It's Net DevOps. Net DevOps, new terms. This is a term that we've been covering a lot of and we've had a lot of events. We've talked about programmable infrastructure. You know, infrastructure as code is kind of in the ethos. But when you start getting into the networking side, it becomes very interesting when you can program things. This is a nice future headroom for enterprises as their apps start to think about microservices. What's your take on the programmability of networking? How do you guys see that? What's your view? So programmability in the networking space, it's catching up. Like just F5 as a company, we started with just REST API calls. Now we're kind of moving to Ansible. So F5 is also coming out with this API called declarative API. We have this F5 automation tool chain where we're kind of abstracting more and more of how much a user needs to know about the device but be able to configure it really easily. So we're definitely moving towards that and I see other networking vendors also kind of, you know, moving towards that programmability for sure. Do you have any specific customer stories you might be able to share? I understand you might not be able to give the name of the company, but it's always helped to illustrate. Yeah, sure, definitely. So we had one customer who, you know, they had an older, or not an older, a different load balancer and they wanted to migrate over to the F5. So they had a lot of firewall rules and a lot of policies that they wanted to move over. So they used to have these maintenance windows and move one application at a time. So they started, came across Ansible, started using Ansible and they were able to migrate like five to 10 applications per maintenance window and they were, you know, they loved it. They've been using Ansible. They've been great proponents of what goes into our modules, you know, really helping us, guiding us as well as to what they need. So they were a great, you know, customer story. Another customer we had was, you know, we get a lot of use cases for F5 that we want to be able to change an application or the network without incurring any downtime, you know, failovers. It could be as simple as, as broad as between data centers or, you know, something simple. But this company did want to shift between, you know, failover between data centers. They got into Ansible. They were able to do it in minutes versus hours and, you know, they loved it. I got to ask you about, as an engineer, you think about the data center, cloud, we get that, the spin around, networking's been great, getting better. As 5G and IoT edge kind of comes into the picture, how routing and networking works with compute and edge devices starts to be an opportunity for these kinds of automation. How do you guys view this future state of edge and as the surface area of the network gets larger and the edge is really part of the equation now as a need for automation is a great need for, we're seeing observabilities, super hot area with microservices, now you got automation. Kind of a nice area to expand on. What's your thoughts on beyond the data center? So beyond the data center, so F5 is in different clouds, right? It sits in AWS, Azure, GCP, it's out there. We also have, like, you know, we've recently collaborated with, not collaborated, you know, Nginx has become a part of F5. So, you know, we are out there and definitely with IoT and, you know, non data center specific, there is a boom of applications and, you know, we want to not be a hindrance to anyone who's trying to automate applications anywhere. So, our goal is also F5 is everywhere and anywhere and securing apps, making them available. And security is a big driver of automation. Yeah. I'm glad you brought up Nginx. So, you know, we've been very familiar with seeing Nginx at a lot of the cloud shows. How's Nginx kind of changing the conversations you're having with customers? So, we are having a lot of conversations with DevOps engineers about Nginx. You know, some of them are already using it in their day-to-day activity. And, you know, they do want to see how F5 and Nginx are kind of going to come together and, you know, what kind of solutions we can offer. So, F5, we're working on that strategy, but, you know, definitely there is a link between us and Nginx and customers are happy to know that, you know, we are kind of now on the same path. So, if they're in the cloud or on-prem, you know, they can choose which one they want and they're going to get the same, you know, support and backing of F5. Great. We're getting towards the end of Ansible Fest. Give us what you want kind of some of the key takeaways people to have about F5 here at the show. Sure, you know, if you haven't started automating F5 with Ansible, my key takeaway is, you know, get started, it's really simple. We have sessions and now we have a workshop on Thursday. Look that up. A great resource for us is just ansible.com slash F5. We have great resources. Our Ansible modules are supported. We are certified by Red Hat Ansible. So, you know, just dive in and start automating. Payalsing, thank you so much for the update. I really appreciate it and congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much. Thank you. For John Furrier, I'm Stu Miniman. Getting towards the end of two days, wall-to-wall coverage here. Thanks as always for watching theCUBE.