 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. Hello, welcome back to The Sands here. We are live here in Las Vegas, along with Justin Moren. I'm John Walls, you're watching theCUBE and our coverage here of AWS re-invent 2019. Day one, off and rolling, Andy Jassy on the keynote stage this morning for a couple of hours and now a jam-packed show for him. Chris Wright joins us, the CTO at Red Hat, waking his way toward cube Hall of Fame status. Not there yet, we're getting there. This is probably like the 50th appearance I think. Good to see you. Good to see you. Yeah, always a pleasure. First off, let's just talk about kind of the broad landscape right now, the pace of innovation that's going on and what's happening in the open cloud. You know, catching up to that acceleration, if you're a legacy enterprise, you got all these guys that are born over here and they're moving at warp speed. You've got to play catch up and talk about maybe that friction, if you will, and what people are learning about that in terms of trying to get caught up to the folks that have the head start. Well, I think number one, the way I like to frame it is open source is the source of innovation for the industry and part of that is you look at the collaborative model, bringing different people together across industry to build technology together. It's hard to compete with that pace and speed. The challenge, of course, is as you describe, how do you consume that? How do you bring it into the enterprise, which has got a whole business that's running off of infrastructure that has been sustaining their business for potentially decades. So there's that impedance mismatch of needing to go quickly to keep a breast of the technology changes, while honoring the fact that your core business is running already on key technology. So I think looking at how you bring platforms in that support the newer technologies as well as create connections or even support existing applications is a great way to kind of bridge that gap and then partnering with people who can build a bridge, like an impedance match between your speed and the speed of innovation is a great way to kind of harness the power without exposing yourself to the ragged edges as much. Yeah, talk to us a bit more about enterprise experience with open source. Red Hat has a long heritage of providing open source to enterprise and pretty much sits out as a unique example of how you make money with open source. So enterprises have lots of open source that they are using every day now. Linux has come into the enterprise left front and center, but there's a lot more open source technologies that enterprises are using today. So give us a bit of a flavor of how enterprises are coming to grips with how open source helps sustain their business. Well, in one sense, it's that innovation engine. So it's bringing new technology in. And in another sense, it's what we've experienced in the Linux space is it was driving a kind of commoditization of infrastructure. So switching away from the traditional vertically integrated stack of a risk Unix environment to providing choice. So you have a common platform that you can target all your applications to that creates independence from the underlying hardware. That's something that provided real value to the enterprise. That notion continues to play out today as infrastructure changes. It's not just hardware. It's virtualized data centers. It's public clouds. How do you create that consistency for developers to target their applications to as well as the operations teams to manage? You know, it's through leveraging open source and bringing a common platform into your environment. As you go up the stack, I think you get more and more proliferation of ideas and choices from developer tools and modules and dependencies. Most software stacks today have some open source even included inside. Whether you're building exclusively on top of a platform that's open source based, you're probably also including open source into your application. So it's a whole variety from building your key infrastructure to supporting your enterprise applications. And you mentioned openness, which I know is a big, very important thing to Red Hat. And one thing that Red Hat's been speaking of lately is open hybrid cloud. So maybe you can explain that to us what is open hybrid cloud? What does Red Hat mean by that? Sure, so open hybrid cloud for us, start with open, that's our platforms are built from open source projects. So we work across like literally thousands of open source projects, bring those together into products that build our platform. Also, we create an open ecosystem. So we're really fostering partnerships and collaboration at every level from the developer level up through our commercial partnerships. The hybrid piece is talking about where you deploy this infrastructure. Inside your data center, on bare metal servers, inside your data center, virtualize in a private cloud, across multiple public clouds and increasingly out to the edge. So that notion of what is the data center to me really encompasses all those different footprints. So the hybrid cloud, cloud meaning give a cloud like experience from an operations point of view, simple to operate, meaning we're doing everything we can to help operators manage that infrastructure from a developer point of view, servicing functionality as services and APIs. And how do you give a self-service environment to developers like a cloud? So it's across all that. You talk about data in the edge, which the fact that there's so much, the computing is going on out there and staying closer to the source, right? We're not bringing it back in, you're leaving it out there. That adds a whole new level of complexity too, I would think, and scale, massive amounts, IoT, what everything is happening out there. So what are you seeing in that, in terms of handling that complexity and addressing challenges that you see coming as this growth, this tremendous growth continues? Well, one, it's how do you manage all of that infrastructure? So I think having some consistency is a great way to manage that. So using the same platform across all of those different environments, including the edge, that's really going to give you a direct benefit. Two, targeting your applications to that same common platform, having the ability to recognize some dependencies. So maybe you have a dependency on a data set and that data sets supplied from sources that are in an edge location. We can codify that and then enable developers to build applications, to test dev prod across a variety of environments, pushing all the way out to an edge deployment where thinking you're taking in a lot of data, you may be building models in a scale-out environment internally in your private cloud or out in the public cloud, taking those models, deploying those to the edge for inference in real time to make real-time decisions based on data flows through the system. I mean, that's the world that we live in today. So managing that complexity is critical. Automation for managing that, consistency, common platforms I think are key tools that we can use to help build up that rich infrastructure. Just from an industry perspective, so who is that applied to in your mind? What kind of industry is looking at this and saying, all right, this is an opportunity but also a challenge for us in something we really need to address? What's the array there, do you think? Honestly, I see it cross almost all market verticals. So we look at the world of platform-centric view from a Red Hat perspective. So we look at the world across industries. What I find interesting in the edge use cases is they tend to get more vertically specific. So in a manufacturing case, maybe you're dealing with a manufacturing line, which is a set of applications and a set of devices which looks quite different from a retail office or branch office environment. Some similar problems, but very different environments. And then you take the service provider's networks, the telco network out of the edge, and that looks quite different from a manufacturing floor. So it's a wide variety of vertically oriented solutions drawing from some common platform technologies, containers, Linux, how do you do automation across all of those environments, machine learning tools. Those are the things that I think are consistent, but you get a lot of very vertically focused use cases. Yeah, I know in the keynote today that Andy was mentioning that they love open source and we're here at Amazon and he likes to talk about their compatibility. And customer choice is also very important to Amazon's. But tell us a little bit about how openness interacts with somewhere like AWS. I mean, we're here at ReInvent, which is an AWS show. So how does Red Hat and AWS work together? How do you coexist in this ecosystem and get the benefits of open source technologies? We coexist in a number of different ways. One would be as engineers working together in open source communities building technology. Another is we have commercial partnerships. So we run our platforms on top of AWS. So we bring customers to AWS, which is a shared, we have a shared benefit there. And then there's also areas where we have competitive offerings. So it's a full spectrum, kind of the modern world of the buzzword, co-op petition or whatever. I really think when you look in the open source communities, engineers thrive on building great technology together independent of any kind of corporate boundaries. Commercially, people develop relationships that are complicated today. And we have a great working relationship. We run a lot of our cloud customers on Amazon. But again, there's areas where we're both invested in Kubernetes. Ours is OpenShift. There's is EKS. So customers have a choice in that context. Yeah, so in that context, there are some in the open source community who view cloud as possibly a bit of a villain. In certain things, we've seen some dynamics around some particular providers around the database space. I won't name particular players, but we've seen some competitive moves in that space. So do you see cloud as, is it the villain, or is it an enabler of open source technologies? Well, it's definitely an enabler. Now there's a complicated scenario in this, like is it a villain? Which is, how do we create sustainable communities? And in the context where a technology is developed largely by one vendor and it's monetized largely by another vendor, that's not going to be a very sustainable model. So we just have to focus on how are we building technology together and building it in a sustainable way? And part of that is making the contributions back into the community to help the projects themselves grow and thrive. Part of it is having a great diversity of contributors into the project and recognizing that business models change and the world evolves. Yeah, that does introduce an element of risk. It's been around for a while. At Enterprise, they're a little bit concerned about open source. Well, who's really behind this? Will this project or software still be here in six months? That seems to be decreasing as the commercial support to particular open source projects and initiatives come to bear. And we see the rise of foundations and so on that try to give a little bit of an underpinning to some of these projects, particularly ones that are critical for the support of enterprise technologies. Do you see enterprises maturing in their view of open source? Do they see it as, no, we understand that this is definitely a sustainable technology whereas this other one's like, yeah, that one's not quite there yet? Or do they still need a lot of assistance in making that kind of decision? I've been at it for a couple of decades. So in the beginning, there was a lot of evangelism that this is safe. It's consumable by the enterprise. It's not some kind of crazy idea to bring open source. You're not going to lose your intellectual property or things like that. Those days, I mean, I'm sure you can find an exception, but those days are largely over in the sense that open source has gone mainstream. So I would say open source is one. Most large enterprises have an open source strategy. They consider open sources critical to not only how they source software from vendors, but also how they build their own applications. So the world has really, really evolved. And now it's really a question of where are you partnering with vendors to build infrastructure that's critical to your business but not your differentiator and where are you leveraging open source internally for you to differentiate your business? And I think that's a more sophisticated view. It's not the safety question. It's not, is it legally, you're bringing legal concerns into the picture. It's really a much different conversation. And people in the enterprise are looking, how can we contribute to these projects? So it's really, it's pretty exciting actually. So what do you think it is in the maturation process then? Is it in the adolescent years? Is it growing into young adulthood? You've been at it for a long time and it's more acceptable. But where are we, you think, in that arc, in terms of adapting or adopting, if you will, that philosophy? It probably depends on where you are and the layer, the stack. And so the lower you get into the infrastructure, the more commonplace it is. The closer you get to differentiated value and something that's really unique, there's less reason to even build those applications as open source if it's only you consuming it. You're the one, right? Pretty broad spectrum there. I think that in general, we're in some level of adulthood. It's a very mature world in the open source communities. And what's interesting today is how we change business models around deploying and consuming open source technologies. And then a next generation of technology will be very data-centric. Data drives a whole set of questions. There's policy and governance around data placement. There's model training and model exchanging. And where models come from data, are the models open source? Is the data shareable? You know, it sets a whole new wave of questions that I think in that context, it's much earlier. So that's our next interview, by the way, with Chris. Next time down the road. Thanks for the time. As always, really good to see you. And I know you're awfully busy this week, so we really do appreciate you carving out a little slice of time for us here in the queue. I always enjoy it, glad to do it. Thanks for us. Chris Wright of Red Hat CTO, back with Justin and John, live on theCUBE here at AWS ReInvent 2019.