 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. Well good morning, welcome back to our live coverage here in Boston with the BCEC and we're at Red Hat Summit 2019. You're watching exclusive coverage here on theCUBE. This is day three of three great days here at the summit. Stu Miniman, John Walls, and we're joined now by Paul Cormier who is the president of Products and Technologies at Red Hat. Good morning Paul. Good morning guys, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Great, so are we. Wonderful job on the keynote stage yesterday and we're going to jump into that a little bit. But I wanted to run something by you here. A great man once said, every great achievement begins with a bold goal. I heard that somewhere. I'm looking at that man, yeah. One of the many statements that I thought really jumped out yesterday. Let's talk about that in terms of just the Red Hat philosophy, what's happened with RHEL 8 where you've gone with OpenShift 4 and just how that is embedded in your mind to how Red Hat goes about its business. Well you know, we've been in the enterprise space for 17 plus years and prior to that Red Hat, you know, we were basically through the retail channel. But first and foremost, Red Hat started as an open source company. That's where they started, not as an enterprise company. Once we decided with the bold goal that we're going to get this into the enterprise, that's where we really set, you know, really transformed into what you've maybe heard before out of my mouth is we're not an open source company, although everything we do is open source. We're an enterprise software company with an open source development model. That was kind of the beginning of the first bold goal. Let's get Linux to the enterprise. And so that's sort of how we've thought about it from day one is let's take it one step at a time. You know, as I said, get Linux in the enterprise. Make RHEL the operating system of the enterprise. Now let's take on virtualization versus N, then KVM. And then as that all happened, so much innovation happened around Linux that all these other pieces came. You know, Hadoop, Kubernetes, all the other pieces. So we just kept growing with that because it's all intertwined with Linux. That's one step at a time. So Paul, before we get off this place, I want you to put a fine point on it for our audience because you look out there, open source is not a community, it's lots of communities. And it's not one thing, it's many things out there. And today people will look at, there's certain companies, how do I create IP and monetize what we're doing and where the project and the company are sometimes intertwined and licensing models changing. Red Hat has a very simple philosophy on it and it's not something that's necessarily easily replicatable. Yeah, I mean the simple philosophy is it's upstream first. That's our philosophy. Yes, we are a business and certainly making our product successful is important, number one goal. Number zero goal before that is make the project successful. Our products can't be successful unless we're built on a successful project. And it's not something that we even think about because it's just ingrained, it's in our DNA. So I mean, I'll give you examples, you know, even Kubernetes, we didn't start the project, Google started the project, but we knew in order, if we were going to incorporate that in a big way into our products that we had to be prominent in the community. So that's what we did first and then it rolled out into the products. It's just ingrained, it's in the DNA. Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about Kubernetes. OpenShift, you've now got over a thousand customers, congratulations on that. And OpenShift four, we've spent a bunch of time talking with the team, but let's start a little bit higher level because there's dozens of Kubernetes options out there. People look at is there interoperability between them? In the early days, customers would just spin their own pieces and today every cloud provider has at least one option, if not multiple options and there's all the independent. How does this play out? Where are we along the maturity and how do all these pieces fit together or do they? Well, I mean, if you look at Kubernetes, I mean, the thing, here's the good news. The good news is OpenSource has become so prominent in everywhere, we're now, ourselves included, we make this mistake ourselves, we've confused projects with products. So Kubernetes is a project, it's a development project and we all talk about that like it's a product. It's the same thing with Linux. So I'll give you an example, the Linux kernel. We're all a commercial vendors and everyone else is in that same upstream development tree with the Linux kernel. But when the commercial guys like ourselves, when we go to build a product, we make choices of which file systems we're going to support, which installers we're going to support, what we're going to do for management, what we're going to support for storage and for many reasons we all make different decisions. So that's why at the end of the day when we come down to our products, even though they're all completely open, REL is different from SUSE, which is different from Ubuntu, which is different from all the others. It's the same exact thing with Kubernetes. We all develop here, but now we bring that down into a platform like OpenShift. That Kubernetes touches user space APIs, it touches kernel APIs, and so unless you integrate those and they all move forward in the life cycle of that platform at the same time, we get out of sync with each other and that's one of the reasons why it's a product and they don't necessarily work across each other with all the other products. It's the same exact principle that made REL and the same exact principle how Linux works. Right, so what advice do you give to customers as to how they look at this because they're like, oh wait, there's now Azure and OpenShift, this jointly offered solution, but do I use that or do you use the native, AKS solution out there? You've got partnership with AWS. Where does OpenShift versus Anthos on Google Fit? It definitely is a little bit fragmented. The other thing that's happened around the cloud, one of the things that happened in early in the cloud, a lot of the cloud providers said every application's going to the cloud tomorrow. I think that was 10 years ago. And the last number, I thought, sorry, we're about 20% there. And that's great, we think that's great, but customers still have on-premise applications and they're running on-premise either bare metal, virtual machines, they have their own private clouds in many cases and now they want to go across clouds. Every customer I talk to, and it's not just for lock-in, that's definitely an issue. They want to go across clouds because this cloud provider might have a better service here than that cloud provider and vice versa. So what customers want to do is they want one common operating environment, both the applications developer and the operators. They can't afford to have five different silos because just like the example I used with Linux distributions being different, every one of these Kubernetes distributions is different. And so, Anthos, for example, if you're going to have all your applications, including bare metal applications on Google Linux, then that's good because your operators have one operating environment, your developers have one development environment, but that's impractical and that's why that's not going to work. I mean, the reason why I think Microsoft is one of our best partners here is they understand this, which is why they've embraced OpenShift so deeply, even though they have AKS in their stable. And the reason why I think they understand this is because they, like us, have been in the enterprise space for a long time. This is how enterprise computing works. And I think that's the model that our customers, they have no choice to deploy. They just can't afford to have five different operating environments. It's like the Unix days. It's like the Unix days all over again. And when you had one vertical stack and customers started to roll out a common stack, that's why RHEL succeeded, because we gave them that commonality and they couldn't afford five different silos to try to manage and develop their applications to. You know, is there a different rhythm or a unique rhythm to the open source community in terms of development, in terms of new products that might be a little different than older models? Because, you know, I'm just saying if there's an interest that focuses maybe in one area and the interest shifts over, you know, or momentum shifts over to a different direction and maybe this standard or this old way kind of loses a little bit of its impetus or its force. I mean, would that create decision challenges on the customer side? But absolutely, and that's why, as I said, even with Kubernetes, we didn't jump in full force exactly right away. You know, we sort of worked in many of the, with many container orchestration technologies out there, most of which, besides Kubernetes, have gone by the wayside a bit now. And, you know, we sort of look at that and see where it goes. See how this plays out, kind of. Well, we get involved, but we also try to make the best technical decision as well. Kubernetes now, it's got way too much momentum. And with open source, because it's got so much momentum, that's where the innovation's happening. And at the end of the day, customers, even though they have confused many projects with their products, they still want the right technology to solve their business problems, right? And so, Kubernetes has so much momentum around it, that's where the innovation's happening. So that's the big part of the platform right now. And so I think that's, the other thing I think that a lot of people that try to jump into this space miss is, if you're going to base your enterprise product on an upstream project, you better have good influence in that upstream project. Because when your customers ask you to address an issue or take it in a direction or help take it in a direction, if you don't have that influence, you can't satisfy your customers. So we learned very, very early on that upstream is not a bolt-on for us. It's an integral part that starts even before the product starts. So, Paul, I've heard many people often call Red Hat the Switzerland of IT. Being where you sit in the community, and for years at this show, we've interviewed all of the hardware players, and everything like that. Sorry about that. Important calls, it's no worries, live audience can wait. We'll show you the clip of John Cleese when we got interrupted on a program once. We won't throw water at you. I think it was my admin telling me I needed to come here. You're good, but, so with Red Hat starting as that Switzerland, when I look at the multicloud world, you've got interesting combinations. Satya Nadella up on stage is not something that we would have thought of five years ago. So, VMware, supporting OpenShift announced today is not something that many people will look at and be like, oh geez, that seems surprising to me because we have fights over virtualization or various pieces of the stack. What do you see in the software and multicloud world today that's maybe a little different than it was five or 10 years ago? Well, I think, I mean, to VMware's credit, they're trying to satisfy their customers and their customers are saying I want OpenShift and so we're trying to satisfy our customers too. The Microsoft arrangement, I mean, as you guys probably well know, we weren't the best of friends, you know, five, six, seven, eight years ago and I think Satya said it on stage and our customers got us together. Literally, we had a set of big customers that almost took us in a room and said you guys need to talk and frankly, I think they're one of our best partners right now. I'm not sure it could have happened without Satya but they're one of our best partners because we're both interested in satisfying our customers and as I said, I think Microsoft really understands the enterprise world and that's why we're going in a common direction. We almost, when we get in the room with their engineers we almost complete each other's sentences of, you know, when we start talking about what we need to do. You know, there's been an announcement early in the week, you had a global economic study done. IDC came up with this huge number, right? $10 trillion impact that Linux is having globally speaking. Just, if you would, I mean, I'm just curious about your perspective on that. What kind of a statement that is and the dollar values that are achieved or the incremental values that are achieved in terms of applying these technologies? I think it's a couple things. I think it's a statement that this is the innovation model. Open source is the innovation model going forward. Period, end of story, full stop. And I think, as I said in my keynote yesterday, you know, leading up to the biggest acquisition ever for a software company, not an open source software company a software company that happened to be an open source software company. I don't think there's any doubt that open source has won here today. And it's because of the pace of innovation. I mean, yes, I mean, we've been at RHEL for 17 plus years. Well, we probably spent the first third or so without 17 plus years trying to convince the world that Linux was secure and it was stable and it was ready for the enterprise. Once we got through that hurdle, it was just off to the races from there. And Kubernetes, what, you know, I said yesterday, containers came on the scene, although they've been here technically for a long time. They came on the scene in 14, Kubernetes in 15. It's only 2019. It's really not that far downstream. Where as you said, we've got 1,000 commercial customers and the keynote this morning, talking about some of the use cases that we're solving with OpenShift. I mean, Boston Children's Hospital is just unbelievable of what they can do in a matter of a week that used to take them a matter of a months to do. That's because of the innovation model. We had Dr. Elon Grant on yesterday, by the way. So if you haven't watched that yet, go back to thecube.net and check that interview out. Yeah, I mean, fascinating customer conversations we've had about transformation. But Paul, I want to get your take on the only constant in our industry, which is change. I wrote right after the announcement of the acquisition and meeting with your changes, Red Hat, the one thing that they've actually built themselves for is to deal with the massive amount of change. You know, you could tell better than more how fast the Linux kernel is changing. You know, a third of the code's changed in the last two years and Kubernetes is actually not as many lines of code as Linux, but it's massive amounts of change. I heard, you know, we relays out. Took about five years of development on that. I heard the pace going forward will only get faster. Every three years, you're going to have a major release. Every six months, a minor release. So how do you get the team and the community and all of these things, you know, ever keeping up and even turning it up to 11? Yeah. That's probably one of the biggest parts of our job. Our customers can't deal with that change. You know, frankly, I think in the beginning of OpenStack, one of the mistakes that we as a community did for our customers was, there were some vendors out there trying to tell customers, you need to stay close to the head, to the upstream head. You need to stay close to the head. And we really all try to get things out in six months. That's great to try to start to evaluate innovation what you can do with that. It's not great for necessarily running a stable business on. And that's what I think our job is, is to help our customers consume open source developed technologies in a way that they can continue to run their business on. That was the goal, that was the audacious goal of RHEL from the beginning. Is that the model of RHEL, and it's why it's not necessarily about the bits because they're free. It's about the life cycle of that and how we can help our customers consume that. And that's what we do, frankly, to the core. Well, just to follow up on that, if you ask your customer and you say, hey, you're using Azure, what version are you using? They're like Microsoft patches and updates that constantly, as opposed to the traditional patch Tuesday in Windows. So, we seem to be closing that gap a little, but it's challenging between the stuff I control and the stuff that I consume. Well, look at even OpenShift 4. We used, I know Ashesh was on yesterday talking about that, but we used a lot of the great technology we got from CoreOS to start to bring that model onto even on-premise if you so choose with OpenShift, because there's so many of the components that are intertwined with each other. You've got Kubernetes with talking to user space, talking to the kernel, user space talking to the kernel, talking to storage, talking to networking. So now automating that for our customers for that updates is what they want because that's how they consume it in the cloud. I remember when we first started RHEL, we used to put the features on the side of the box and the first thing was what version of the kernel it was. That quickly went away too. They don't want to have to worry about that because they don't have the expertise to be a DIY-er themselves. Well, congratulations, Paul. Great week. Thank you very much. Again, well done on the keynote stage yesterday. Fascinating stuff this morning too, so well done on the programming side and we wish you luck down the road and don't forget to check your voicemail. I will, thank you guys very much. Might be important. Always a pleasure. Back with more here from Red Hat Summit 2019, you're watching us live here on theCUBE.