 Hello, everybody, John Walls here. Welcome to theCUBE and our continuing coverage of AnsibleFest 2021. We now welcome onto theCUBE three representatives from Red Hat. Joining us is Ashash Badani, who's the senior vice president of products at Red Hat. Ashash, thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having me, John. You bet. Also with us is Stephanie Shiras, who is the senior vice president of the platforms business group. Also at Red Hat and Stephanie, how are you doing? Oh, good thanks. It's great to be here with you, John. Excellent, thanks for joining us. And last but certainly not least, Joe Fitzgerald, who is the vice president and general manager of the Ansible Business Unit at Red Hat. And Joe, good to see you today. Thanks for being with us. Good to see you again, John. Thanks for having us. It's like the big three at Red Hat. I'm looking forward to this. Stephanie, let's just jump in with you and let's talk about what's going on in terms of automation in the hybrid cloud environment these days. A lot of people making that push, making their way in that direction. Everybody trying to drive more value out of the hybrid cloud environment. How is automation making that happen? How's it making it work? Yeah, we have been focused at Red Hat for a number of years now on the value of open hybrid cloud. We really believe in the value of being able to give your applications flexibility to use the best technology, where you want it, how you need it, and pulling all of that together. But core to that value proposition is making sure that it is consistent, it is secure, and it is able to scale. And that's really where automation has become a core space. So as we continue to work our portfolio and our ecosystems and our partnerships to make sure that that open hybrid cloud has accessibility to everything that's new and relevant in this changing market we're in, the automation space that Ansible drives is really about making sure that it can be done in a way that is predictable. And that is really essential as you start to move your workloads around and start to leverage the diversity that an open hybrid cloud can deliver. You know, when you're bringing this to a client, and Joe, perhaps you can weigh in on this as well. I would assume that as you're talking about automation, there's probably a lot of successful head nodding this way, but also some kind of this way too. There's a little bit of fear, right? And maybe just they have these legacy systems, there's maybe a little distrust, I don't wanna give away control, all these things. So how do you all answer those kinds of concerns when you're talking to the client about this great value that you can drive, but you gotta get them there, right? You have to bring them along a bit. It's a great question, John. And look, everybody wants to get the hybrid cloud, as Stephanie mentioned, that journey is a little complicated. And if you had silos and challenges before you went to a hybrid cloud, you're gonna have more when you got there. We work with a lot of customers. And what we see is this sort of shift from, I would call it low level task automation to much more of a strategic focus on automation. But there's also the psychology of automation. One of the analysts recently did some research on that. And you know, imagine just getting in your car and letting the car drive you down the street to work. People are still not quite comfortable with that level of automation. They sort of want to be able to trust, but verify and maybe have their hands near the wheel. You couldn't take the wheel away from them. We see the same thing with automation. They need automation, they want automation, but they need to be able to verify what it is doing, what it did do, what it's going to do. And once they build that confidence, then they tend to do it at scale. And we're working with a lot of customers in that area. Joe, you're talking about a self-driving car. That'll never work, right? I mean, you know, it brings an interesting point though. I, you know, again, I get about kind of surrendering control a little bit in a shesh, I would assume in the product development world, that's very much your focus, right? You're looking for products that people not only can use, but they're also comfortable with that they can accept and they can integrate. And there's buy-in not only on the engineering level, but also on the executive level. So maybe walk us through that product development, staging or phases, however you want to put it, that you go through in terms of developing products that you think people not only need, but they'll also accept. I think that's absolutely right. You know, I think both Stephanie and Joe let us off here. I talked about hybrid cloud and Joe started talking about moving automation forward and getting people comfortable. I think a lot of this is, you know, meeting customers where they are and then helping them get on the journey, right? So we're seeing that today, right? So traditional configuration management on-premise, but at the same time, so I'm going to think about, you know, how do we take them out into the cloud, bringing greater automation to bear there? But so that's true for us across our existing customer base, as well as the new customers that we see out there. So doing that in a way that Joe talked about, right? Ensuring the trust but verify, up as in play is critical. And then there's another area which I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about, right? Is ensuring that security implications are taken into account as we go through it. Well, let's just jump into security. That's one of the many considerations these days, but ensuring that you have the secure operation, you're doing some very complex tasks here, right? And you're blending multi-vendor environments and multi-domain environments. I mean, you've got a lot, you're juggling a lot. So I guess to that extent, how much of a consideration is security and those multiple factors today for you? And again, I don't know which one of the three you might want to jump on this, but I would assume this is a high priority, if not the highest priority, because of the headlines that security and those challenges are gongering these days. Well, there's the general security question and answer, right? So this is the whole shift left, dev sec ops, sort of security concerns. But I think specific to this audience, perhaps I can turn over to Joe to talk a little bit about, do you know how Anseld's been playing the security domain? No, it's a great way to start. Yes, people are trying to shift left, which means move sort of security earlier on in the process where people are thinking about it, the development process. So we've worked with a lot of customers who are trying to do dev sec ops, right? And to provide security automation capabilities during application build and deployment. Then on the operational side, you have this ongoing issue of some vulnerability gets identified, how fast can I secure my environment, right? So there's a whole new area of security, orchestration, automation, remediation that's evolved. And the challenge people have is, just like with networking or other areas, they've got dozens, in some cases, hundreds of different systems across their enterprise that they have to integrate with in order to be able to close a vulnerability, whether it's deploying a patch or closing a port or changing firewall configuration. This is really complicated. And they're being measured by, okay, there's this vulnerability, how fast can we get secure? And that comes down to automation, it has to. You know, Joe, you mentioned customers, if you would maybe elaborate a little bit about the customers that we've been hearing from on the stage, the virtual stage, if you will, at AnsibleFest this year, and maybe summarize for our audience what you're hearing from those customers and some of those stories when we're talking about the actual use of the platform. Yeah, so AnsibleFest is our annual, you know, automation event, right, for Ansible users. And I think it's really important here from the customers, look, we're vendors, we can tell you anything you want, and you know, try and get you to believe it. Customers, they're actually doing stuff, right? And so at AnsibleFest, we've got a great mix of customers that are really pushing the envelope. I'll give you one example, JPMorgan Chase. They're talking about how in their environment with focus over the past couple of years, they've now gotten to a level of maturity with automation where they have over 50,000 people that are using Ansible Automation. They've got a community of practice where they've got people in over 22 countries, right, that are sharing over 10,000 playbooks, right? I mean, they've taken automation strategically and embraced it and scaled it out at a level that most other organizations are envious of, right? Another one, and I'm not gonna go through the list, but another one I'll mention is Discover, which sort of stepped back and looked at automation strategically and said, you know, we need to elevate this to a strategic area for the company, and they started looking across all different areas, not just IT automation, business process automation on their practices internally, and they're doing presentation on how to basically analyze where you are today and how to take your automation initiatives forward in a strategic way. Those are usually important to other organizations that maybe aren't as far along or aren't as scaled down motivation. Yeah, so Stephanie, I see you nodding your head and you're talking about when Joe was just talking about assessment, right? You have to kind of see where are we? How mature are we on our journey right now? So maybe if you could elaborate on that a little bit and some of the key considerations that you're seeing from businesses, from clients and potential clients in terms of the kind of thought process they're going through on their journey, on their evolution. I think there's a lot of sort of values that customers are looking for when they're on their automation journey. I think efficiency is clearly one. I think one that ties back to the security discussion that we talked about, and I use the term consistency, but it's really about predictability. And I think I have a lot of conversations with customers that if they know that it's consistently deployed, particularly as we move out and are working with customers at the edge, how do they know that it's done the same way every time and that it's predictable? There's a ton of security and confidence built into that. And I think coming back to Joe's point, it is a journey providing transparency and visibility as step one, then taking action on that is then step two. And I think as we look at the customers who are on this automation journey, it's them understanding what's the value they're looking for? Are they looking for consistency in the deployments? Are they looking for efficiency across their deployment? Are they looking for ways to quickly migrate between areas in the open hybrid cloud? What is the value they're looking for? And then they look at how do they start to build in confidence and how they deliver that? And I think it starts with transparency. The next step is starting to move into taking action. And this is a space where Joe and the whole team, along with the community, have really focused on pulling together things like collections, right? Playbooks that folks can count on and deploy. We've looked within the portfolio. We're leveraging the capabilities of this type of automation into our products itself. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we've introduced systems roles. And we're seeing a lot of, by pulling in that ansible capability directly into the product, it provides consistency of how it gets deployed. And that delivers a ton of confidence to customers. So Ashash, I mean, Stephanie was talking about the customers and obviously developing, I guess cultural acceptance and political acceptance within the ranks there. Where are we headed here past what we know now in terms of the traditional applications and traditional automations or whatever? To kind of where is this going, if you would give me your crystal ball a bit about automation and what's going to happen here the next 12, 18 months. So what I'm going to do, John, is try to marry to ADS. So we talked about hybrid cloud, right? Stephanie started talking about to join the hybrid cloud. I'm going to marry automation with containers, right? On this journey of hybrid cloud, right? And give you two examples of some successful progress we've been making on that front, right? Number one, especially for the group here, right? Check out the Ansible Collection for Kubernetes. It's been updated for Python three, of course, with the end of life for Python two, but more important, right? It's the focus on improving performance for large automation tasks, right? Huge area where Ansible shines and taking advantage of Turbo mode where instead of the default being a single connection to a CUBE API for every request that's out there with Turbo mode turned on, the API connection gets reused significantly, obviously improving performance. Huge other set of enhancements as well, right? So I think that's an interesting area for the Ansible community to leverage and obviously to grow. And the second one that I want to call out was just kind of the, again, back to the sort of, you know, the notion of the marriage of automation with containers, right? Is the work that's going on, on the front of the integration, the tight integration between Ansible as well as Red Hat's advanced cluster management, right? Which is helping to manage Kubernetes clusters at scale. So now Red Hat's ACM technology can help automatically trigger Ansible playbooks upon key lifecycle actions that have happened. And so taking advantage of technologies like operators, again, core Kubernetes construct for the hybrid cloud environment. This integration between advanced cluster management and Ansible allows for much more efficient execution of tasks, right? So I think that's really powerful. So wrapping that up, right? This world of hybrid cloud really can be brought together by just a tighter integration between working Ansible as well as the work that's going on on the container front. Great. Well, thank you. Ashash, Stephanie, Joe, thank you all for sharing the time here, part of our AnsibleFest coverage here. Enjoy the conversation and continue success at Red Hat. Thank you for the time today. Thanks very much, John. You bet. Joined here by three executives at Red Hat talking about AnsibleFest 2021 coverage. I'm John Walls and you're watching theCUBE.