 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. And welcome back to our coverage here on theCUBE, Red Hat Summit 2019, we're at the BCEC in Beantown, Boston, Massachusetts playing host this week. There's some 9,000 strong attendees, packed keynotes, just a great three days of programming here in educational sessions. Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, we're joined by Mike Peach, who is the VP and General Manager of Middleware at Red Hat. Mike, good to see you today. Great to be back. And Mark Little, VP of Engineering at Middleware at Red Hat, Mark, good to see you as well, sir. Yeah, first off, let's just talk about your ideas at the show here. Been here for a few days. As we've seen on the keynote stage, wide variety of first off announcements and great case studies, great educational sessions, but your impressions of what's gone on and some of the announcements we've heard about this week. Well, sure, I mean, definitely some very big announcements with RHEL 8 and OpenShift 4. So as Middleware, we're been a little bit more in sort of a gorilla mode here while some of the bigger announcements take a lot of the limelight. But nevertheless, those announcements and the advances that they represent are very important for us at Middleware, particularly OpenShift 4, as the sort of the next layer from OpenShift, which the developers sort of touch and feel and live and breathe on a daily basis. We are the immediate beneficiaries of much of the advances in OpenShift. And so that's something that we as the Middleware guys sort of make real for the enterprise application developer. And I'd say probably for me, building on that in a way, one of the biggest announcements, one of the biggest surprises is going to be the first keynote where we had Satya from Microsoft on stage with Jim announcing the collaboration that we're doing, I never believed that would ever happen. And that's fantastic. Has a benefit for Middleware as well, but just for Red Hat as a whole, who would have thought it? Who would have thought, right? Yeah, we actually, we just had Marco Bill Peter on and he was talking about it. He's like, look, we've actually had some of our support people up in Redman now for a couple of years. We had Chris Wright on earlier and he says, sometimes we go to these shows and you get the Big Bang announcement. It's like, well, really we're working incrementally along the way and open source, you can watch it. It's sure sometimes you get the new chipset or there's a new this or that, but it's very, very small thing. So in the spirit of that, maybe give us the update since the last time we got together, what's happened in the Middleware space? As you said, as we build up the stack, we got Relate, we got OpenShift 4 and you're sitting on top. Yeah, well, one aspect that's an event like this makes clear in almost a reverse sort of way. We put a lot of effort, particularly on Mark's team, in getting to a much more frequent and more incremental release cycle and style, right? So getting away from sort of Big Bang releases every year, couple of years to a much more agile, incremental, again, sort of regime of rolling out functionality. Now, one of the downsides of that is that you don't have these big grand product announcements to make a big deal about in the same way as Relgis did with 8, for example. So we need to rethink how we sort of absence the big dot oh releases, how we sort of batch up the interesting news and roll it out at a large event like this. Now, one of the things that we have been working on is our application environment narrative, right? And then the whole idea of the story here is that many people talk about cloud native and about having lots of different capabilities and services in a cloud environment. And as we've sort of gone through the, particularly the last year or so, it's really become apparent from what our customers tell us and from what we really see as the opportunities in the cloud native world. The value that we bring is engineering all these pieces together, right? So that it's not simply a list of these disparate, disconnected, independent services, but rather middleware in the world of cloud native, reimagined. It is capabilities that when engineered together in the right way, they make for this comprehensive, unified, cohesive environment within which our customers can develop applications and run those applications. And for the developer, you get developer productivity. And then at runtime, you're getting operational reliability. So there really is a sort of a dual-sided value proposition there. And this notion of middleware engineered together for the cloud is what the application environment idea is all about. Yeah, I'd add kind of one of the things that ties into that, which has been big for us at least at Summit this year is an effort that we kicked off or we announced two months ago called Quarkus. And as you'll know, a lot of what we do within middleware, within Red Hat is based on Java and Java is still the dominant language in the enterprise. But it's been around for 20 years. It developed in a pre-cloud era. And that made lots of assumptions on the way in which the Java language and the JVM on which it runs were developed, which aren't necessarily that conducive for running in a cloud environment, a hybrid cloud environment and certainly a public cloud environment based on Linux containers and Kubernetes. So we've been working for a number of years in the upstream open JDK community to try and make Java much more cloud native itself. And Quarkus kind of builds on that. It essentially is what we call a Kube native approach where we optimize all of the middleware stack upfront to work really, really well in Kubernetes and specifically on OpenShift. And it's all Java though, that's the important thing. And now if people look into this, they'll find that we're showing performance figures and memory utilization that is on a par with some of the newer languages like Go for instance. Very, very fast. Typically your boot time has gone from seconds to tens of milliseconds. And people that have seen it demonstrated are literally blown away because it allows them to leverage the skills that they've had invested in their employees to learn Java and move to the cloud without telling them you guys are going to have to learn a completely new language and stuff from scratch. All right, Mark, if I get it right because we've been at the Kubernetes shows for a bunch of years, but this is, you're looking at kind of the application side of what's happening in those Kubernetes environments. So many times we've been talking about the platforms and the infrastructure down, but it's the app piece on top, super important. I know down the DevZone people were buzzing around all the Quarkus stuff. What else for people that are looking at that kind of cloud native containerization space? What are the areas should they be looking at when it comes to your space? Well, again, tying into the app environment thing, hopefully, you've heard of Knative and Anistio. So Knative is a, to put it in a quick sentence, is essentially an enabler for serverless, if you like. It's where spinning up containers really, really quickly based on events. But really any serverless platform lives and dies based on the services in which your business logic can then rely upon. You know, do I have a messaging service there? Do I have a transaction service or a database service? So we've been working with Google on Knative and with Microsoft on Knative to ensure that we have a really good story and open shift but tying it into our middleware suite as well. So many of our middleware products are now Knative enabled, if you like. The second thing is, as I mentioned, Istio, which is this sidecar approach. I'm going to details on that. But again, Istio, the aim behind that is to remove from the application developer some of the non-functional business logic that they had to put in there, like how do I use a messaging service? How do I secure this endpoint and push it down into the infrastructure? So the security service, the messaging service, the caching service, et cetera, they move out of the business logic and they move into Istio. But from our point of view, it's our security service that we've been working on for years. It's our transaction service that we've been working on for years. So these are bulletproof implementations that we have just made more cloud-native by embedding them, in a way, in Istio and, like I said, enabling them with Knative. I think we mentioned, student Chris Wright was on earlier. And one of the things he talked about was this new data-centric focus and how that's at the core so much of what enterprise is doing these days. The fact that the network's being as distributed as they are and you've got so many data inputs coming in from, you know, to a unified user trying to get their data the way they want to see it, you might want it for totally another reason, right? I'm just curious, how does that influence or how has that influenced your work in terms of making sure that that transport goes smoothly because you do have so much more to work with in a much more complex environment for multiple uses that are unique, right? It's not all the same. Huge, huge impact, for sure. The whole idea of decomposing an application into a much larger number of much smaller pieces than was done in the past has many benefits. Probably one of the most significant being the ability to make small changes, small incremental changes and afford a much more trial and error approach to innovation versus more macro level planning, waterfall as they call it. But one of the implications of that is now you have a large number of entities, whether they be big or small, there's a large number of them running within the estate and there's the orchestration of them and the interconnection of them for sure but it's a N squared relationship, right? The more these entities you have, the more potential connections between each of them, you have to somehow structure and manage and ensure our being done securely and so on. So that has really driven the need for new ways of tying things together, new ways of essentially integration, right? It has definitely amplified the need for disciplines, API management for example. It has driven a lot of increased demand for an event driven approach where you're streaming in real time and distributing events to many receivers and dealing with things asynchronously and not depending on round trip times for everything to be consistent and so on. So I mean, there's just a myriad of implications there that at a very detailed technical level, drive some of the things that we're doing now. Yeah, I just add that in terms of data itself, you know, we've probably heard this a number of times, data is king. Everything we do is based on data and one way or another. So we've, as Red Hat, as a whole and Middle West specifically, we've had a very strong data strategy for a long time. You can't look at, just you've got myriad types of data, you can't assume that one way of storing that data is going to be right for every type of data that you've got. So, you know, we've worked through the integration efforts on ensuring that, you know, no SQL data stores, relational data stores, in memory data caching and even the messaging service as a whole is a way of storing data in transit in some ways allows you to actually look at it in an event-driven way and make intelligent decisions. So that's a key part of what anybody should do if they are in the enterprise space, but certainly what we're doing because at the end of the day, people are building these apps to use that data. Well, gentlemen, I know you have another engagement, we're going to cut you loose, but I do want to say, you're the first guest to get applause from across the way. People at home can hear, but so congratulations. You're being very well-received already. I think they're clearly tuned in to the renaissance of the job in here. Thank you both. Thanks for the time. Thanks so much. Appreciate that. Back with more. 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