 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Got some great coverage here talking about software supply chain and sustainability in the cloud. We've got a great conversation, Gunnar Helixson, vice president and general manager at Red Hat Enterprise, Linux and business unit of Red Hat. Thanks for coming on and Ednon EJAS, director, product management of commercial software services at AWS. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me today. It's a pleasure. You know, the hottest topic coming out of cloud native developer communities is supply chain software sustainability. This is a huge issue as open source continues to power away and fund and grow this next generation modern development environment. You know, supply chain, you know, sustainability is a huge discussion because you got to check things out. What's in the code, okay? Open source is great, but now we got to commercialize it. This is the topic, Gunnar. Let's get in, get with you. What are you seeing here? And what's some of the things that you're seeing around the sustainability piece of it because, you know, containers, Kubernetes, we're seeing that runtime really dominate this new abstraction layer of cloud scale. What's your thoughts? Yeah, so it's interesting that the, you know, so Red Hat's been doing this for 20 years, right? Making open source safe to consume in the enterprise. And there was a time when in order to do that, you needed to have a long-term life cycle and you needed to be very good at remediating security vulnerabilities. And that was kind of, that was the bar that you had to climb over. Nowadays with the number of vulnerabilities coming through, what people are most worried about is kind of the provenance of the software and making sure that it has been vetted and it's been safe and that things that you get from your vendor should be more secure than things that you've just downloaded off of GitHub, for example, right? And that's a place where Red Hat's very comfortable living, right? Because we've been doing it for 20 years. I think there's another aspect to this supply chain question as well as especially with the pandemic, you know, we've got these supply chains have been jammed but the actual physical supply chains have been jammed up and the two of these issues actually come together, right? Because as we go through the pandemic, we've got these digital transformation efforts which are in large part people creating software in order to manage better their physical supply chain problems. And so as part of that digital transformation, you have another supply chain problem which is the software supply chain problem, right? And so these two things kind of merge on these as people are trying to improve the performance of transportation systems, logistics, et cetera. Ultimately, it all boils down to it all both supply chain problems actually boil down to a software problem. It's very interesting. Well, that is interesting. I want to just follow up on that real quick if you don't mind because if you think about the convergence of the software and physical world, you know, that's IoT and also hybrid cloud kind of plays into that at scale. This opens up more surface area for attacks, especially when you're under a lot of pressure. This is where, you know, you can, you have a surface area in the physical side and you have constraints there and obviously the pandemic causes problems. But now you've got the software side. Can you, how are you guys handling that? Can you just share a little bit more of how you guys are looking at that with Red Hat? What's the customer challenge? Obviously, you know, skills gaps is one, but like that's a convergence at the same time more security problems. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And certainly the volume of, if we just look at security vulnerabilities themselves just the volume of security vulnerabilities has gone up considerably as more people begin using the software and as the software becomes more important to kind of critical infrastructure, more eyeballs are on it and so we're uncovering more problems, which is kind of, that's okay, that's how the world works. And so certainly the number of remediations required every year has gone up, but also the customer expectations, as I mentioned before, the customer expectations have changed, right? People want to be able to show to their auditors and to their regulators that, no, we, in fact, I can show the provenance of the software that I'm using. I didn't just download something random off the internet. I actually have like adults paying attention to how the software gets put together. And it's still, honestly, it's still very early days. We can, I think, as an industry, I think we're very good at managing, identifying, remediating vulnerabilities in the aggregate. We're pretty good at that. I think things are less clear when we talk about kind of the management of that supply chain, proving the provenance, proving and creating a resilient supply chain for software. We have lots of tools, but we don't really have lots of shared expectations. So it's going to be interesting over the next few years. I think we're going to have more rules are going to come out. I see NIST has already published some of them. And as these new rules come out, the whole industry is going to have to kind of pull together and really rally around some of this shared understanding. So we can all have shared expectations and we can all speak the same language when we're talking about this problem. That's awesome. Adnan, an Amazon web service is obviously the largest cloud platform out there. You know, the pandemic, even post-pandemic, some of these supply chain issues, whether it's physical or software, you're also an outlet for that. So if someone can't buy hardware or something physical, they can always go to the cloud. You guys have great network, compute and whatnot. And you got thousands of ISVs across the globe. How are you helping customers with this supply chain problem? Because whether it's, you know, I need to get in my networking gears and delay, I'm going to go to the cloud and get help there. Or whether it's knowing the workloads and what's going on inside them with respect to open source, because you got open source, which is kind of an external forcing function. You got AWS and you got, you know, physical, compute, storage, networking, et cetera. How are you guys helping customers with the supply chain challenge, which could be an opportunity? Yeah, thanks John. I think there are multiple layers to that. At the most basic level, we're helping customers by abstracting away all these data center constructs that they would have to worry about if they were running their own data centers. They would have to figure out how the networking gear you talk about, you know, having the right compute, right physical hardware. So by moving to the cloud, at least they're delegating that problem to AWS and letting us manage and making sure that we have an instance available for them whenever they want it and if they want to scale it, the capacity is there for them to use. Now then that, so we kind of give them space to work on the second part of the problem, which is building their own supply chain solutions. And we work with all kinds of customers here at AWS from all different industry segments, automotive, retail, manufacturing. And, you know, you see that the complexity of the supply chain with all those moving pieces, like hundreds and thousands of moving pieces, it's very daunting. So, and then on the other hand, customers need more better services. So you need to move fast. So you need to build your agility in the supply chain itself. And that is where, you know, Red Hat and AWS come together where we can build, we can enable customers to build their supply chain solutions on platform like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL, or Red Hat OpenShift on AWS, we call it Rosa. And the benefit there is that you can actually use the services that are relevant for the supply chain solutions like Amazon Managed Blockchain, you know, SageMaker. So you can actually build predictive and elliptics. You can improve forecasting. You can make sure that you have solutions that help you identify where you can cut costs. And so those are some of the ways where we're helping customers, you know, figure out how they actually want to deal with the supply chain challenges that we're running into in today's world. Yeah, and you know, you mentioned sustainability outside of software sustainability. You know, as people move to the cloud, we've reported on SiliconANGLE here in theCUBE that it's better to have the sustainability with the cloud because then the data centers aren't using all that energy too. So there's also all kinds of sustainability advantages, Gunner, because this is kind of how your relationship with Amazon's expanded. You mentioned Rosa, which is Red Hat OpenShift on AWS. This is interesting because one of the biggest discussions is skills gap, but we were also talking about the fact that the humans are a huge part of the talent value. In other words, the humans still need to be involved and having that relationship with managed services and Red Hat, this piece becomes one of those things that's not talked about much, which is the talent is increasing in value, the humans. And now you got managed services on the cloud. So it'll get scale and human interaction. Can you share how you guys are working together on this piece? Because this is interesting because this kind of brings up the relationship of that operator or developer. Yeah, yeah, so I think about this in a few dimensions. First is it's difficult to find a customer who is not talking about automation at some level right now. And obviously you could automate the processes and the physical infrastructure that you already have that's using tools like Ansible, right? But I think that combining it with the elasticity of a solution like AWS. So you combine the automation with a kind of elastic and converting a lot of the capital expenses into operating expenses. That's a great way actually to save labor, right? So instead of like racking hard drives, you can have somebody who's somebody do something a little more like, you know, more valuable work, right? And so, okay, but that gives you a platform. And then what do you do with that platform? And if you've got your systems automated and you've got this kind of elastic infrastructure underneath you, what you do on top of it is really interesting. So a great example of this is the collaboration that we had with running the rail workstation on AWS. So you might think like, well, why would anybody want to run a workstation on a cloud? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Unless you consider how complex it is to set up if you have the use case here is like industrial workstations, right? So it's animators, people doing a computational fluid dynamics, things like this. So these are industries that are extremely data heavy. They have workstations have very large hardware requirements often with accelerated GPUs and things like this. That is an extremely expensive thing to install on premise anywhere. And if the pandemic taught us anything, it's if you have a bunch of very expensive talent and they all have to work from home, it is very difficult to go provide them with several tens of thousands of dollars worth of workstation equipment. And so combine the rail workstation with the AWS infrastructure and now all that workstation computational infrastructure is available on demand and available right next to the considerable amount of data that they're analyzing or animating or working on. So it's a really interesting, it was actually, this is an idea that I was actually born of the pandemic and it's kind of a combination of everything that we're talking about, right? It's the supply chain challenges of the customer. It's the lack of talent making sure that people are being put their best and highest use. And it's also having this kind of elastic, I think OPEX heavy infrastructure as opposed to a CAPEX heavy infrastructure. That's a great example. I think that illustrates to me what I love about cloud right now is that you can put stuff in the cloud and then flex what you need when you need it in the cloud rather than either ingress or egress of data. You just more, you get more versatility around the workload needs, whether it's more compute or more storage or other high level services. This is kind of where this next gen cloud is going. This is where customers want to go once their workloads are up and running. How do you simplify all this? And how do you guys look at this from a joint customer perspective? Because that example, I think, will be something that all companies will be working on, which is put it in the cloud and flex to whatever the workload needs. I can put it closer to the compute. I want to put it there. If I want to leverage more storage and networking, well, I'll do that too. It's not one thing. It's got to flex around. How are you guys simplifying this? So I'll give my point of view and then I'm very curious to hear what Edna has to say about it. I think about it in a few dimensions, right? So there is a technically, like any solution that a non-team and my team want to put together needs to be kind of technically coherent, right? That things need to work well together. But that's not even most of the job. Most of the job is actually the ensuring an operational consistency and operational simplicity so that everything is the day-to-day operations so that the things kind of work well together. And then also, all the way to things like support and even acquisition, right? I'm making sure that all the contracts work together, right? It's a really, so when Edna and I think about places of working together it's very rare that we're just looking at a technical collaboration. It's actually a holistic collaboration across support, acquisition, as well as all the engineering that we have to do. And on your view on how you're simplifying it with Red Hat for your joint customers, making collaborations. Yeah, yeah, gonna go with it. Well, I think the benefit here is that Red Hat has been the leading Linux distribution provider. So they had a lot of experience. AWS has been the leading cloud provider. So we have both our own point of views, our own learning from our respective set of customers. So the way we try to simplify and bring these things together is working closely. In fact, I sometimes joke internally that if you see Gunnar and my team talking to each other on a call, you cannot really tell who belongs to which team because we're all of us figuring out, okay, how do we simplify discount experience? How do we simplify programs? How do we simplify go-to-market? How do we simplify the product pieces? So it's really bringing our learning and share our perspective to the table and then really figure out how do we actually help customers make progress. Rosa that we talked about is a great example of that. You know, together we figured out, hey, there is a need for customers to have this capability in AWS and we went out and printed. So those are just some of the examples in how both teams are working together to simplify the experience, make it complete, make it more coherent. Great, that's awesome. Next question is really around how you help organizations with the sustainability piece and how to support them in simplifying it. But first, before we get into that, what is the core problem around the sustainability discussion we're talking about here, supply chain sustainability? What is the core challenge? Can you both share your thoughts on what that problem is and what the solution looks like and then we can get into advice? Yeah, well, from my point of view, it's, I think, you know, one of the lessons of the last three years is every organization is kind of taking a careful look at how resilient it is. Or I should say every organization learned exactly how resilient it was, right? And that comes from both the physical challenges and the logistics challenges that everyone had, the talent challenges you mentioned earlier, and of course, the software challenges, you know, as everyone kind of embarks on this digital transformation journey that we've all been talking about. And I think, so I really frame it as resilience, right? And resilience is, at bottom, is really about ensuring that you have options and that you have choices. The more choices you have, the more options you have, the more resilient you and your organization is going to be. And so I know that that's how I approach the market. I'm pretty sure that's how Adnan is approaching the market, is ensuring that we are providing as many options as possible to customers so that they can assemble the right pieces to create a solution that works for their particular set of challenges or their unique set of challenges and unique context. Adnan, does that sound about right to you? Yeah, I think you covered it well. I can speak to another aspect of sustainability, which is becoming increasingly top of mind for our customers. It's like, how do they build products and services and solutions and whether it's supply chain or anything else, which is sustainable, which is for the long-term good of the planet. And I think that is where we've been also being very intentional and focused in how we design our data center, how we actually build our cooling system so that we, those are energy efficient. We are on track to power all our operations with renewable energy by 2025, which is five years ahead of our initial commitment. And perhaps the most obvious example of all of this is our work with the ARM processors, Graviton 3, where we are building our own chip to make sure that we are designing energy efficiency into the process. And we, the on Graviton 3 ARM processors chips, they are about 60% more energy efficient compared to some of the X86 comparable. So all those things that are also, we are working on and making sure that whatever our customers build on our platform is long-term sustainable. So that's another dimension of how we're working there in our platform. That's awesome. This is a great conversation. The supply chain is on both sides, physical and software. You're starting to see them come together in great conversations. And certainly moving workloads to the cloud, running them more efficiently will help on the sustainability side, in my opinion. Of course you guys talked about that and we've covered it. But now you start getting into how to refactor, and this is a big conversation we've been having lately is as you not just lift and shift, but replatform and refactor, customers are seeing great advantages on this. So I have to ask you guys, how are you helping customers and organizations support sustainability and simplify the complex environment? That's a lot of potential integrations. Obviously API's help, of course, but that's the kind of baseline. What's the advice that you give in customers? Because it can look complex and it becomes complex, but there's an answer here. What's your thoughts? Yeah, I think so whenever, when I get questions like this from customers, the first thing I guide them to is we talked earlier about this notion of consistency and how important that is. It's one thing, it is one way to solve the problem is to create an entirely new operational model and entirely new acquisition model and an entirely new stack of technologies in order to be more sustainable. That is probably not in the cards for most folks. What they want to do is have their existing estate and they're trying to introduce sustainability into the work that they are already doing. They don't need to build another silo in order to create sustainability, right? And so there has to be some common threads, there has to be some common platforms across the existing estate and your more sustainable estate, right? And so things like red enterprise Linux, which can provide this kind of common, not just a technical substrate, but a common operational substrate on which you can build these solutions. If you have a common platform on which you are building solutions, whether it's RHEL or whether it's OpenShift or any of our other platforms, that creates options for you underneath so that in some cases maybe you need to run things on-premise some things you need to run in the cloud but you don't have to profoundly change how you work when you're moving from one place to another. And what's your thoughts on the simplification? Yeah, I mean, I think when you talk about replatforming and refactoring, it is a daunting undertaking, you know, in today's, especially in today's fast-paced world. So, but the good news is you don't have to do it by yourself. Customers don't have to do it on their own. You know, together AWS and Red Hat, we have a rich partner ecosystem, you know, AWS has over 100,000 partners that can help you take that journey, the transformation journey. And within AWS and working with our partners like Red Hat, we make sure that we have all, in my mind, there are really three big pillars that you have to have to make sure that customers can successfully replat from, refactor their applications to the modern cloud architecture. You need to have the rich set of services and tools that meet their different scenarios, different use cases, because no one size fits all. You have to have the right programs because sometimes customers need those incentives, they need those, you know, that help in the first step. And last but not least, they need training. So all of that, we try to cover that as we work with our customers, work with our partners, and that is where, you know, together we try to help customers take that step, which is a challenging step to take. Yeah, you know, it's great to talk to you guys, both leaders in your field, obviously Red Hat's full story history. I remember the days back when I was provisioning and loading OS's on hardware with CDs. If you remember those days, Gunner, but now with high level services, if you look at this year's reinvent, and this is kind of my final question for the segment is, then we'll get your reaction to it. Last year we talked about higher level service. I sat down with Adam Sileski, we talked about that. If you look at what's happened this year, you're starting to see people talk about their environment as their cloud. So Amazon has the gift of the CapEx, all that investment, and people can operate on top of it. They're calling that environment their cloud. Okay, for the first time we're seeing this new dynamic where it's like they have a cloud, but they're Amazon's the CapEx. They're operating. So you're starting to see the operational visibility, Gunner, around how to operate this environment. And it's not hybrid, this, that, it's cloud. This is kind of an inflection point. Do you guys agree with that or having a reaction to that statement? Because I think this is kind of the next gen super cloud-like capabilities. It's we're going, we're building the cloud. It's now an environment. It's not talking about private cloud, this cloud. It's all cloud. What's your reaction? Yeah, I think it's very natural. I mean, we used words like hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. If a super cloud is what the kids are saying now, right? It's all describing the same phenomenon, right? Which is being able to take advantage of lots of different infrastructure options, but still having something that creates some commonality among them so that you can manage them effectively, right? So that you can have kind of uniform compliance across your estate so that you can have kind of, you can make the best use of your talent across the estate. I mean, this is a, this is, it's a very natural thing. They're calling it cloud. The estate is the cloud. Yeah, so yeah, so fine. If it means that we no longer have to argue about what's multi-cloud and what's hybrid cloud, I think that's great. Let's just call it cloud. And what's your reaction? Cause this is kind of the next gen benefits of higher level services combined with amazing compute and resource at the infrastructure level. What's your view on that? Yeah, I think the construct of a unified environment makes sense for customers who have all these use cases which require, like for instance, if you are doing some edge computing and you're running a WS outpost or wavelength these things. So it is, it is fair for a customer to say, think that, hey, this is one environment, same set of tooling that they wanna build that works across all their different environments. That is why we work with partners like Red Hat so that customers who are running Red Hat enterprise Linux on premises and who are running in AWS get the same level of support, get the same level of security features, all of that. So from that sense, it actually makes sense for us to build these capabilities in a way that customers don't have to worry about, okay, now I'm actually in the AWS data center where it says I'm running outposts on premises. It is all one. They just use the same set of CLI, command line, APIs and all of that. So in that sense, it actually helps customers have that unification so that that consistency of experience helps their workforce and be more productive versus figuring out, okay, what do I do? Which tool I use? We're here. And you just nailed it. This is about supply chain sustainability, moving the workloads into a cloud environment. You mentioned wavelength. This conversation is going to continue. We haven't even talked about the edge yet. This is something that's going to be all about operating these workloads at scale and all with the cloud services. So thanks for sharing that. And we'll pick up that edge piece later, but for re-invent right now, this is really the key conversation, how to bake the sustained supply chain work in a complex and why I'm making it simpler. And so thanks for sharing your insights here on theCUBE. Thanks for having us. Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 22. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.