 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2020 virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2020, the virtual edition. I'm Lisa Martin. Got a couple of guests with me here today. Please welcome Ken Holtz, the Principal Partner Manager for Red Hat. Hey Ken, and welcome to theCUBE. Hi Lisa, thank you. And Bonito Lopez is also joining us, Senior Manager of Business Development and the Solutions Provider Services Provider, vertical, excuse me, F5 from F5. Hi Bonito, how are you? Hi Lisa, I'm good, you're in San Francisco, thank you. All right, yes, we're all very socially distanced. So guys, KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, the virtual version here, still the opportunity to engage with a lot of leaders in the community, folks interested. Bonito, let's go ahead and start with you. As we look at this very dynamic environment in which we are all living and working, organizations are under even more pressure to deliver the information and the services and the experiences that customers demand, internal customers, external customers. I know F5 is known for load balancing and load balancing is one of those tools that can certainly help with that. But talk to us about what's kind of going on, what's new in that respect from F5's perspective. We have evolved into an adaptive application services company. What do I mean by adaptive application services? It's the ability to scale, secure, and protect applications wherever they may reside, whether they're in the far edge, whether in the cloud, whether they're on premises, and it's the ability to also observe the analytics and telemetry emanating from those applications to be able to act upon what we see in that space. So when we talk about service-based architecture, it's all about no longer being reliant on a single vendor on a monolithic application set of services or on what you call a vertical stack appliance. Service-based architecture means you want it to be a scalable architecture whereby you can add, deduct, subtract different types of network functions in 5G. So the way this is going to be dependent, the key enabler for a service-based architecture is gonna be container-based services whereby services will no longer just be, applications are going to be disaggregated into microservices in container clusters. And F5's role here is to be able to scale and secure that traffic into a service-provided environment. More importantly, our role is to turn a container-based architecture, which is not service-provided grade into a service-provided grade architecture, which means we can actually see service-provided specific protocols into the container cluster. And more importantly, scale and secure and apply the right policies within a containerized environment. Again, containers is all about a service-based, is part of a service-based architecture. And containers today, especially on Kubernetes, need a service-provider grade platform of which we provide to the market. All right, so Kubernetes is seeing a lot of activity with telco customers. What are some of the challenges, Mita, we'll stick with you for another few seconds here. What are some of the challenges that you're seeing that you're helping customers to work through? Well, one is, the first challenge is, how do you make Kubernetes telco grade? That's the first challenge. So what F5 does is we actually act as the ingress and egress point into Kubernetes environment, whereby we see telco, we're able to scale and secure telco-specific protocols that Kubernetes today does not support. And we work closely with Red Hat in that space, together with their OpenShift architecture to an OpenShift platform cut. We work with Red Hat today, we respect their OpenShift platform, and that helps the service provider have a telco cloud-like platform that is scalable, that is secure, and that is highly performant and low-latent. All right, so speaking of Red Hat, let's bring Ken into the conversation here. Ken, kind of same question for you as we look at the activity in telco with respect to Kubernetes. Let's talk to some of the ways that Red Hat is helping customers address some of the challenges so that they can leverage that technology to really move their businesses forward, especially in such a dynamic environment right now. Yeah, thanks Lisa. So Red Hat has a goal of ensuring our OpenShift platform is ready and hardened enough to enable telco workload. For our 5G platform, while we work with other partners, F5 has been one of our key partners in this particular space. For the first time, OpenShift networking is natively integrating seamlessly with a commercial load balancer from F5, making it ready for telco 5G. This is a co-engineered, co-developed solution, a new piece of software that we've implemented together. Oven Kubernetes is enterprise and service provider ready. We believe OVN will help significantly with latency overall, and this is an evolution. We have our first implementation of this now, and we're working now on making this even more cloud native, which means making it more performant, more resilient, and even more capable and ready for telco grade requirements. So can continuing on with you for a second, in terms of how you're working together with customers to maybe customize or adapt the technologies, can you talk to me a little bit about some of the customer feedback? Like some of those challenges that they're facing in today's environment, which as we know is so dynamic and probably going to be for a while, what's the customer-like influence in terms of the partnership and the co-development? Well, so my focus at Red Hat is on partnership, and the ecosystem partner management team allows Red Hat to meet the needs of a growing number of Red Hat partners. The team serves as a partner's single point of contact for product questions, roadmap updates, engineering interlocks, and general guidance for how to partner with Red Hat, and with open source communities to achieve their business goals. So we're helping the end customers through our tight partnership. Imagine a lot of collaboration there. So Benito, let's talk from your perspective, from F5's perspective on the partnership and the collaboration that you have together and with your customers to help them be successful. Well, ecosystems partnerships are going to be critical for our success as a company. And more importantly, as service providers today, especially as I mentioned earlier around with respect to as they migrate and transform their networks from 4G to 5G, the architecture is going to horizontalize. It's going to require a telco grade type of infrastructure manager, a telco grade OS, and at the same time is going to require a telco grade proxy and security platform. And therefore Red Hat, with them being what we call as a leader in open source and containers with their open shift platform, we see them as a vital partner in working with service providers to transform their networks into a telco grade containerized environment. So as they migrate into, as they migrate from just software virtualization to containerization which is going to be critical for 5G, Red Hat is a key partner for us to work with to ensure that their network is, their containerized network is telco grade and highly performant and secure. Excellent, thanks and Ken back to you. I know the audience would like to hear kind of some more specifics on the collaboration between you guys and also kind of beyond what they can see what's coming down the pipe in terms of open source projects or kind of beyond that. Yeah, so some examples of our work together would include joint roadmap alignment. We're very closely tied together on the roadmap front. Early pre-GA enablement, early access to code. And we have a goal of achieving certification here. So we'd like to achieve certification which provides assurance of compatibility and support, avoids vendor lock-in and dispels any security concerns that customers may have. Excellent, well guys, anything else that you wanna add here to the audience that is attending this virtual edition of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2020, Benito, to you? Well, I'd like to just say that as you migrate to, as your network begins to transform and you are looking at the containerized architecture, F5 and Red have your best partners to have that VelcoGrade architecture infrastructure in place. I like that, both statement very well put. Ken, last thoughts from you. I think Benito said it best and I just wanted to say thanks a lot for having us and this has been fun. Excellent guys, thank you for sharing what's going on with the F5 Red Hat partnership, how you're helping customers in telco with Kubernetes, the challenges there to alleviate. Ken Benito, thanks for joining me on theCUBE today. Thank you, thank you. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE.