 Welcome to AnsibleFest 2021, the virtual version. This is theCUBE and my name is Dave Vellante. We're going to dig into automation and it's continuing evolution. Tom Anderson is here as the Vice President of Red Hat Ansible, the automation platform and Richard Henshaw is also here, Senior Manager of Ansible Product Management of course at Red Hat. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us Dave. You're welcome. With this latest release of the Ansible Automation Platform, AAP, we'll get the acronyms out of the way, the focus seems to be on expanding the reach of automation in its potential use cases. I mean, I'll say automation everywhere, not to be confused with the RPA vendor. But the point is, you're trying to make it easier to automate things like provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, throw in orchestration and all these other IT processes. Now you've talked about this theme in previous releases of AAP. So what's new in this release? What can customers do now that they couldn't do before? Yeah, it's a good question. Thank you. So we look at this in two dimensions. So the first dimension we have is like where automation can happen, right? So, you know, we always have traditional data center. Cloud's been very prevalent for us for the last, you know, sort of five, 10 years in most people's view. But now we have the edge, right? So now we have edge computing, you know, which is sometimes a lot more of the same, but also it comes with a different dynamic of how it has to be sort of used and utilized by different use cases, different industry segments. But then while you expand the use cases and make sure that people can do automation where they need to do it and make sure we're done close to the edge or close to the data center based on where the technology needs to be run, you also have to think about who's now using automation. So the second dimension is making sure that different users can take access. You mentioned like application deployment or infrastructure or network configuration. We expand the number of different users we have that are starting to take advantage of Ansible. So how do we get more developers? How do we get into the developer workflow, into the development workflow for how Ansible is created, as well as how we help with the operation or the post deployment stage that people do, operating automation, as well as then the running of Ansible automation platform itself. Excellent, okay. So in thinking about some of those various roles or personas, I mean, I think about product leads. I would see developers, obviously, you're going to be in there, managers I would think want that view. You know, the thrust seems to be, you're trying to continue to enhance the experience for these personas and others, I suppose, with new tooling. Maybe you could add some color to that. I mean, what's happening in the market, Tom, maybe you take this and Rich chime in. What's happening in the market that makes this so important? Who are the key roles and personas that you're targeting? Yeah, so there's a couple of things happening here. I mean, traditionally, the people that had been using Ansible to automate their subsystems were the domain expert for that subsystem, right? I'm the storage operations team. I'm the network operations team. I'm using this tool to automate the tasks that I do day to day to operate my piece of the subsystem. Now what they're being asked to do is to expose that subsystem to other constituencies in the organization, right? They're not waiting for a call to come in to say, can I have a network segment? Can I have the storage allocated to me? Can I deploy these servers so I can start testing or building or deploying my application? Those subsystems need to be exposed to those different audiences. And so the type of automation that is required is different. Now we need to expose those subsystems in a way that makes those domain owners comfortable. So they're okay with another audience having access to their subsystem. But at the same time, they're able to ensure the governance and compliance around that and then give that third party, that developer, that QE person, that line of business manager, whoever it might be that's accessing that resource, a interface that is friendly and easy enough for them to do. It's kind of the democratization. I know it's a cliche, but the democratization of automation within organizations, giving them role specific experiences of how they can access these different subsystems and speed their access to these systems and deploy applications. So if we can stay on that for a second, because that's a complicated situation. You know, opening this up, you're rich, you mentioned the edge. So you got to make sure that the person that's getting access has access, but then you also have to make sure that that individual can't screw it up, do things that you don't want that individual to do. And it's probably a whole other set of compliance issues and policy things that you have to bake in. Is that, am I getting that right? Yeah, and then that's the aspect of it. When you start to think, you know, Tom listed off there, you know, 10, you can just keep adding different sort of personas that individuals that work in roles identify with as themselves. I'm a network person, I'm a storage person. To us, they're all just Ansible users, right? They may be using it slightly different ways, they may be using it slightly different places, but it's an Ansible user, right? And so as you have like those people that just like become organically, you've now got thousands potentially of Ansible users inside a large enterprise organization or a couple of hundred of you are smaller, but you then go, well, what do I do with Ansible, right? And so at that point, you then start to say, now we try to look at it as what's their use of Ansible itself? Because it's not just a command line tool, it's got a management interface, it's got analytics, we've got content management, we've got operational runtime, we've got responsiveness to disaster recovery scenarios for when you need to be able to do certain actions. You may use it in different ways at different places. So we start to try and break out what is the person doing with Ansible Automation Platform at this part of their workflow? Are they creating content, right? Are they consuming content or are they operating that automation content for those other constituent users that Tom referred to? Yeah, that's really helpful because there's context there, different roles, different personas need different context, you know, trying to do different things. Sometimes somebody just wants to see the analytics and make sure it's, you know, hey, everything's green. Oh, we got a yellow versus, hey, I actually want to make some changes and I'm authorized to do so. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about containers. I want to understand how containers are driving change for customers, maybe what new tools you're providing to support this space. What about the edge? Yeah, how real is that in terms of tangible pockets or patterns that you can identify that require new types of capabilities that you're delivering? Maybe you can help us unpack that a little bit. Okay, so I think there's two ways to look at containers, right? So the first is how are we utilizing the container technology itself, right? So containers are a package, right? The amount of work we've been doing as Ansible has become more successful than the last couple of years, separating content out with Ansible Collections. The ability to bring back, manage, control a containerized runtime of Ansible so that you can lifecycle it, you can deploy it, becomes portable. Edge is important there. How do I make sure I have the same automation running in the data center as the same automation running out on the edge if I'm looking at something that needs to be identical? The portability that the packaging of the container gives us is a fantastic advantage given you need to bring together just that automation you want, smaller footprint, more refined footprint, lifecycle managed footprint. By the same time, containers are also a very useful way of scaling the operation, right? And so as Red Hat puts things like OpenShift out in all these different locations, how can we leverage those platforms to push the runtime of Ansible, the execution component, the execution plane of Ansible, out into anywhere that's hospitable for it to run? And as we move out towards Edge, as you move further away from the data center, you need a more ubiquitous or like runtime plane that you can put these things on so they can just spin up as and when you need to. Potentially even at the end, actually being on the device because at the same time with Edge you will also have different limits around how Edge works. It's not just about, hey, I'm Wi-Fi points in a NFL stadium. Actually, you're talking about, I'm at the end of a 2000-mile piece of cable on an oil pipeline or potentially I'm a refinery out in the Gulf of Mexico. You've got a very different dynamic to how you interact with that endpoint than you do when it's a nice, big controlled network powered location which is well governed and well orchestrated. That's good. Thank you, Rich. Tom, I think about automation back in the day which seems like a long time ago, but it really wasn't. Automation used to scare some IT folks because sometimes it created unintended consequences or maybe it was a cultural thing and that they didn't want to automate themselves out of a job, but regardless, the cloud has changed that mindset, showing us what's possible. You guys obviously had a big role in that. And the pandemic and digital initiatives, they really have made, I call it the automation mandate. It was like the fourth march to digital. At least that's how I see it. I wonder if you could talk about how you see your users approaching automation and as it relates to their business goals. Do you think automation is still being treated sometimes with trepidation or as a side project for some organizations or is it really continuing to evolve as a mainstream business imperative? Yes, so we see it continuing to evolve as a strategic imperative for our customers. I mean, you'll hear some of the keynote folks that are speaking here today. I've done an interview or doing an interview with Joe Mills from Discover, talking about extreme automation throughout Discover's organization. You'll hear a representative from JPMC talk about 22,000 JPMC employees contributing automation content in their environment across 20 or 22 countries. I mean, just think about that scale and the number of people that are involved in automation now and their tasks. So I think we have moved beyond or are moving beyond that idea that automation is just there to replace people's jobs. And it's much more about automation, replacing the mundane, increasing consistency, increasing security, increasing agility and giving people an opportunity to do more and more interesting stuff. So that's what we hear from our customers, this idea of them building, and it's not just the technology piece, but it's the cultural piece inside organizations where they're building these guilds or communities of practice, bringing people together to share best practices and experience with automation so that they can feel comfortable learning from others and sharing with others and driving the organization forward. So we see a lot of that and you'll hear a lot of that at some of the AnsibleFest sessions this week. Well, I mean, I think that's a really important point, the last point you made about the skills because I think you're right, I think we have moved beyond, it's just job replacement. I don't know anybody who loves provisioning lawns and say, oh, I'm the best in the world at that. It's kind of something that was maybe important 10, 15, 20 years ago, but today you should let the machines do that. So the whole skills transformation is obviously a big part of digital transformation, isn't it? It absolutely is. And frankly, we still hear it's an impediment. That skills shortages are still an impediment to our customer success. They are still skilling up. I mean, honestly, that's one of the differentiators for Ansible as a language, a human readable language that is easy to learn, easy to use, easy to share across an organization. So that's why you see job boards and whatnot with so many opportunities that require or ask for Ansible skills out there. It's just, it's become sort of a ubiquitous automation language in organizations because it can be shared across lots of different roles. You don't have to be a Ruby software developer or a Python software developer to create automation with Ansible. You can be Tom Anderson or Rich Henshaw. You don't have to be the sharpest software developer in the world to take advantage of it. So anyway, that's one of the things of kind of overcoming some of the skills apprehension and bringing people into this, into the kind of new environment of thinking about automation as code, not software code, but thinking of it like code. You got it. Guys, we got to leave it there, but Rich, how about you bring us some, we'll give you the last word. I mean, I think, you know, what, what Tom just said there, I think about the skills side of things is I think that the part of me that resonates the most. I mean, I was a customer before I joined Red Hat and trying to get large numbers of people onto a same path to try and achieve that outbound objective that an organization has. The objective of an organization is not to automate. It's to achieve what is needed by what the automation facilitates. So how do we get those different groups to go from, hey, this is about me. So this is actually about what we're trying to achieve as a business, what we're trying to facilitate as a business and how do we get those people easier access of reduced barrier of entry to the skills they need to help make that successful that complements what they do in their primary role with a really strong secondary skillset that helps them do all the bits and pieces they need to do to make that job work. That's great. I mean, you guys have done a great job. I mean, it wasn't clear, decade ago or maybe half a decade ago who was going to win this battle. Ansible clearly has market momentum and has become the leader. So guys, congratulations on that and good job. Keep it going. Really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you, thanks. Okay, this is theCUBE's continuous coverage of Ansible Fest 2021. Keep it right there for more content that educates and inspires. Thanks for watching.