 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. Hi, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm Stu Miniman. This year's event, of course, happened globally, which means we're talking to Red Hat executives, customers, and partners where they are around the globe and happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE alumni, Ashesh Badani, who is the senior vice president at Red Hat. Ashesh, it's great to see you. Yeah, thanks a lot, Stu, for having me back on. Yeah, absolutely. So the usual wall-to-wall coverage that we do in San Francisco, well, it's now the global digital, little bit of a dispersed architecture to do these environments, which reminds me a little bit of your world. So the main keynote stage, Paul's up there is the new CEO talking about open hybrid cloud. And of course, the big piece of that is open shift and the various products in the portfolio there. So, first of all, we know there's not big announcements of launches and the like, but your team and the product portfolio has been going through a lot of changes and a lot of growth since last time we connected. So bring us up to speed as to what we should know about platform. Sure, thanks. So yes, not a huge focus around announcements. This summit, especially given everything going on in the world around us today. But that being said, we continue on our open shift journey. We started that, well, many years ago, but in 2015, and we had our first release focused on Kubernetes and a container-focused platform. But ever since then, we continue to ground, revolve, at last count now, over 2,000 customers globally, by trust to the platform in industries, literally every industry, and also obviously every geography around the globe. So that's been great to see. Last summit, we actually announced a fairly significant enhancement of the platform with the launch of open shift four. Big focus around greater manageability, the ability to use operators, which is Kubernetes concept to make applications much more manageable when they're being run natively within the platform. We continue to invest there. So there's a new release of the platform, OpenShift 4.4 based on Kubernetes 1.17 being made available to our customers globally. And then really sort of this notion of over-the-air updates, right? To create a platform that is almost sort of autonomous in nature acts more like you're a mobile phone in the way you kind of manage and update and upgrade. I think it's a key value proposition that we're providing to our customers. But so we're excited to see that and then be able to share that with you first of all. Yeah, so Ashish, I want to dig into that a little bit. So one of the discussions we've had in the industry for many years is how much consistency there needs to be across my various environments. We know Kubernetes is great, but it is not a silver bullet. Customers will have clusters. They will have different environments. I have what I do in my data centers or Colos using things in the public clouds and might be using different Kubernetes offerings. So as you said, there's things that Red Hat is doing but give us insight into your customers as to how should they be thinking about it? How do they manage it? One of the new pieces that we've been digging into a little bit of course from a management standpoint is ACM, which I know OpenShift today but going to support some of the other Kubernetes options down the road. So how should customers be thinking about this? How does Red Hat think about managing this ever complex world? Yeah, so Stu, you should have been talking about this for several years now, right? With regard to just the kinds of things customers are doing. And look, let's start with customers first, right? Because it's all about the value we provide for them. So at this year's summit, we're announcing some innovation award winners, right? So a couple of really interesting ones, BMW and Ford. BMW, building its next generation autonomous driving platform, using containers and pulling this massive data platform on OpenShift. Ford doing a lot of interesting work with regard to bringing together its development team to get advantage of the existing investments in hardware and so on. That they've got in place with the platform but also increasingly companies that are, for example, in public sector, right? So we've got the Argentine Ministry of Health. We've got a large electricity distribution company, adopting containers, adopting middleware technologies for example, on OpenShift, and delivering great value, right? So network alerts when there's electricity outage, going from three minutes to 10 seconds. And so as you now see more and more customers doing, more and more, if you will, mission critical activities on these platforms, to your points to, and your question, which is a really good one, is now we've got clusters running in multiple environments, right? Perhaps in their own data center, across multiple clouds, and managing these clusters at scale becomes more and more critical. And so we've been doing a bunch of work with regard to a team that actually joined us from IBM that's been working on this cluster management technology for a while, and as part of Red Hat, we're now releasing in technology preview advanced cluster management. Trying to solve and address questions around, what does it mean to manage the life cycle of my applications across different clusters? How do I monitor and view cluster health, regardless of where they run? How do I have consistent security and compliance for my policies across these different clusters? So we're really excited, right? It is some really interesting technology. It's probably the most advanced cluster management technology that's out in the market, but IBM been working on it well before the team from there joined us, and now we're making it much more widely available to all of these teams. Yeah, actually, Shesh, one of the things, really impressed some of those customers. First of all, congratulations, 2000. There's a great milestone there, and yeah, we're going to have some of the opportunity to talk on theCUBE, some of those essential services. You talk ministry of health, obviously, with the global pandemic on critically environment. Energy companies need to keep up and running. I've got Vodafone Idea also from India talking about how communication services. So essential pieces and definitely OpenShift, big piece of the story as to how they're working and managing and scaling. Everybody talks about scale for years, but the current situation around the globe, scales something that is definitely being stressed and strained and understood what's really important. Another piece really interesting, like to dig in a little bit here, talk about OpenShift is, we talk Kubernetes and we're talking containers, but there's still a lot of virtualization out there, and then from an application development standpoint, there's, well, let's throw everything away and go all serverless on there. So my understanding OpenShift is embracing the full world and all of the options out there. So help us walk through how Red Hat maybe is doing things a little bit differently. And of course, we know anything Red Hat does is based on open source. So let's talk about those pieces. Yeah, so two super interesting areas for us. One is the work we're doing based on an open source project called KubeVirt, and that's part of the CNCF incubating projects. And that is the notion of bringing virtualization into containers. What does that mean? Obviously, there are huge numbers of workloads running in machine machines globally. And more and more customers want one control plane, one environment, one abstraction to manage workloads, whether they're running in containers or in VMs. Bill, you sort of say, can we take workloads that are running in these KVM-based virtual machines or VMs running in VM-ware-based environment and then bring them natively and run them as containers and manage by Kubernetes and orchestrate across this distributed sort of cluster that we've talked about. I've been extremely powerful. And it's a very modern approach to modernizing existing applications as well as thinking about building new services. And so that's some technology that we're introducing into the OpenShift platform and trying to see some early customer interest around. Yeah, so Ashash, yeah, I've got, I know I'm going to have a breakout with Joe Fernandez to talk about this a little bit, but what I note is you're wording on that is you're bringing VMs into the container world. And what Red Hat does well because your background and what Red Hat does is from an operating system, you're really close to the application. So one of my concerns from early days of virtualization was, well, let's shove things in a VM and leave it there and not make any changes. As opposed to what you're describing is let's help modernize things. I saw one of the announcements talking about, how do I take Java workloads and bring them into the cloud? There's a project called Quarkis. So once again, I hear you right, you're bringing VMs into the container world with the help to move towards that journey to modernize everything so that we were, we're doing a modern platform, not just saying, hey, I can manage it with the tool that I was doing before, but it's that application that's the important piece of it. Yeah, and that's a really good point, right? You know, we've so much to cover and probably too little time to do it, right? Because the one that you touched on is really interesting project called Quarkis, right? Again, as you rightly pointed out, everything where that does open source up. And so that's a way for us to say, look, if we were to think about Java and be able to run that in a cloud native way, right? And be able to run that natively within a container and be orchestrated again by Kubernetes, what would that look like, right? How much could we reduce density? How much could we improve performance around those existing Java application? Let's take advantage of all the investments that companies have made, but make that available in Kubernetes and cloud native world, right? And so that's what the Quarkis project is about, seeing a lot of interest, you know? And again, because of the open source model, right? We already have companies that are adopting this, right? So there's a, I think there's a telecom company based out in Europe, that's talking about the work that they're already doing with this and there's already been a blog about it, talking about the value from a performance and usability perspective that they're getting with that. And then you, so you couple this idea of how do I take VMs bring them into containers, right? Great, existing workload, move that in, run that natively. Check, right? The next one, how do I take existing Java workloads and bring them into this modern cloud native, you know, Kubernetes-based world, right? You know, making progress with that with Quarkis, you know, check. And then the third area is this notion of serverless, right? Which is, you know, I've got new applications, new services, I want to make sure that they're taking advantage of proper resources, but only the exact number of resources are required. But do that in a way that's native to Kubernetes, right? So we've been working on implementing K-native-based technologies as the foundation, as the building block of the work we're doing around serving and eventing towards leading a more kind of portable serverless solution, regardless of where you run it across any of your cloud footprints. And that'll also bring the ability to have functions that are made available by really any provider in that same platform. So if you haven't already put all the pieces together, right, the way we're thinking about this is the center of gravity is a Kubernetes-based platform that we make fully automated, that we make, you know, very operational, make it easy for different, you know, third-party pieces to plug in, right? So sort of, you know, make sure that it's interoperable and modular. And at the same time, then start layering on additional capabilities. Yeah, a lot of topics, as you said, Ash, and I'm glad on the serverless piece, we're teasing it out, because it is complicated. You know, there were some that were just like, well, from my application developer standpoint, I don't need to think about all that Kubernetes and containers pieces, because that's why I love serverless, I just developed to it and the platform takes care of it. And we would look at this a year or two ago and say, well, underneath that, what is it? Is it containers? And the answer was, well, it could be containers, it depends what the platform is doing. So, you know, from Red Hat's standpoint, you're saying OpenShift serverless, you know, yes, it's Kubernetes underneath there, but then I heard you talk about, you know, live wherever it is. So I saw there's, you know, a partner of Red Hat in the open source community, TriggerMesh, which was answering one of the questions I had, you know, when I talked to people about serverless, most of the time it's AWS based up, not just Lambda, lots of other services, you know, I did an interview with Andy Jassy a few years ago, and he said, if I was to rebuild AWS today, everything would be built on serverless. So might some of those have containers and Kubernetes under it, maybe, but Amazon might do their own thing. So they're doing really a connection between that. So how does that plug in with what you're doing with OpenShift, how do all these various open source pieces go together? Yeah, so I would expect for us to have partnerships with several startups, right? You know, you name one in our ecosystem, you know, you can imagine Azure functions, you know, running on our serverless platform, as well as functions provided by, you know, any third party, including those that are built by Red Hat itself, you know, for the portability in this platform. Because ultimately, you know, we're building the platform to be operational, to be managed at scale, to create greater productivity for developers, right? So for example, one of the things that we're working on are in the area of developer tools, give customers ability to have, you know, the product that we have is called CodeReady Workspaces, but essentially this notion of, you know, how can we take containers and give workspaces that are easy for remote developers to work with? We've got a great example of a customer actually in India that's been able to rapidly cut down time to go from dev to production weeks, you know, in two days, because they're using, you know, things like these remote workspaces running in containers, you know, this is based on the Eclipse Apache, the CHAY project, you know, for this. So this notion that, you know, we're building a platform that can be used by ops teams is absolutely true. But at the same time, the idea is, how can we now start thinking about making sure these abstractions we're providing are extremely productive for developing teams load? Yeah, such an important piece. Last year I got the chance to go to AnsibleFest for the first time and it was that kind of discussion that was really important, you know, can tools actually help me bridge between was traditionally some of those silos that they talked about, you know, the product developer, the infrastructure and ops team and the app dev team all get things in their terminology and where they need, but common platforms that cut between them. So sounds like similar methodology we're seeing other pieces of the platforms, any other, you know, guidance you talked about all your customers there, how are they working through, you know, all of these modernizations adopting so many new technologies? Boy, you talked about like DevOps tooling. It, you know, still makes my head spin when I look at some of these charts is to all the various tools and pieces that, you know, organizations are supposed to help choose and pick out of there they up. So how was your team helping customers on kind of the organizational side? Yeah, so, well, there's a couple aspects here. So one is how do you make sure that the platform is working to help these teams? You know, by that, what I mean is, you know, we are introducing this idea and working very closely with our partners globally around this notion of operators, right? Which is every time I want to run databases and, you know, there's so many different databases that are out there, right? You know, SQL, NoSQL and a variety of different ones for different use cases. How can I make sure that we make those easy for customers try out and then be able to deploy them and go to manage them, right? So this notion of an operator life cycle to make those applications much more manageable when they run with the containers. So you make it easier for folks to be able to use them. And then the question is, well, what other if you will advise or help can we give them, right? So off late, you've probably heard, you know, we hired a bunch of industry experts and brought them into Red Hat around this notion of a global transformation and be able to bring that expertise, you know, whether it's the folks who are deep in DevOps and written a DevOps handbook or some of the things that our industry is a lot like the Phoenix project and just in various different parts of our business and be able to start saying, look, you know, these are thought leaders, they can share ideas with you. And a couple of that with things like open innovation labs that come from Red Hat, as well as similar kinds of offerings from our various partners around the world to help ease the transition into being able to do these things. All right, so a final question I have for you, let's go a little bit high level, you know, as you've mentioned, you and I have been having these conversations for a number of years. Last year or so, I've been hearing some of the really big players out there, ones that are of course partners of Red Hat, but they say similar things. So, you know, whether it's, you know, Microsoft Azure, releasing Arc, if it's, you know, VMware, which lots of your open ship customers sit on top of it, but now they have, you know, the Project Pacific piece and Anzoo. So, many of them talk about this, you know, heterogeneous, you know, multi-cloud environment. So, how should customers be thinking about Red Hat? Of course, you partner with everyone, but, you know, you do tend to do things a little bit different than everybody else. Yeah, I hope we do things differently than everyone else, you know, to deliver value to customers, right? So for example, all the things that we talk about open ship for really is about industry leading. And I think there's a bit of a transformation that's going on as well, right? Within the way how Red Hat approaches things. So, customers have known Red Hat in the past, in many ways for saying, look, they're giving me an operating system that's, you know, commoditizing, if you will, you know, what the proprietary providers have provided. I've been giving me for all these years. They've provided me an application server, right? That, you know, is giving me better value than what proprietary providers are providing. Now, increasingly what we're doing with, you know, the work that we're doing around, let's say whether it's OpenShift, or, you know, the next generation virtualization that we talked about, so on, is about how can we help customers fundamentally transform how it is that they work, that they build and deploy applications, both in a new cloud native way, as well as the existing ones. And what I really want to point to is now we've got at least a fiber history on the OpenShift platform to look back at, to be able to point out and say, here are customers that are running directly on bare metal. Here's why they find, you know, this virtualization solution that, you know, that we're providing is so interesting. Here we have customers running in multiple different virtualized environments, running on OpenStack, running in these multiple private clouds, or sorry, public clouds, and why they want distributed cluster management across all of them. You know, here's some examples that, you know, we can provide you, right? You know, here's the work we've done with, you know, whether it's these, you know, government agencies or with private enterprises that we've talked to, right? You know, they're receiving innovation awards for the work we've been doing together. And so I think our approach really has been more about, you know, we want to work on innovation that is fundamentally impacting customers, you know, transforming them, meeting them, where they are, moving them forward into the world that we're going into, but then also ensuring that we're taking advantage of all the existing investments that they've made in their skills, right? So, the advantage of, for example, the years of Linux expertise that they have, and saying, how can we use that to move you forward? All right, well, Chefs, thank you so much, absolutely. I know the customers I've talked to at Red Hat talk about not only how they are ready for today, but feel confident that they are ready to tackle the challenges of tomorrow. So thanks so much, congratulations on all the progress and definitely look forward to talking to you again in the future. Likewise, thanks again, Stuart. All right, I'm Stu Miniman and lots more coverage from Red Hat Summit 2020, as always. Thanks for watching theCUBE.