 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of a Red Hat Summit 2020. The event happened digitally this year. We are bringing in Red Hat executives, customers and partners from where they are around the globe, and happy to welcome back to the program. One of our CUBE alumni, Robyn Bergeron is the senior principal community architect with Ansible, part of Red Hat. Robyn, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. So we've got the community coming together even while we're apart. Indeed, that's what we're good at. So we're glad to be back here again with y'all, so. All right, so Robyn, we caught up with you last at Ansible Fest, of course, Red Hat Summit. So much community activity that goes on. The Ansible community is a big piece of summit even though they also have the separate Ansible Fest. So just give us a little bit of update on what's happening in your world and the community. Well, I hate to say it's a big wide world because it sounds very cliche, but the Ansible world is fairly big. I don't know if, let's see, we talked last at Ansible Fest and that was in September in Atlanta, is that correct? Sounds right, yep. I believe so. So right around that time is when GitHub released their annual list of, you know, they have a report called the Octoburst they publish every year in conjunction with their annual event. And one of the metrics they have on that list is most active projects. So we clocked in at the number ninth most active project on GitHub this past year, and that's out of, I've lost count of GitHub's like number of projects. It's not quite at United States national debt status, but it's like a hundred million repositories or something like that. So we're the number nine most active repository this year. And I believe we were one of two projects who've been on that list every year since 2016, I wanna say. So yeah, we're at 5,900 contributors right now. So it's, you know, all over the globe, a lot of people keeping us very busy. I guess to that end, in fact, it's so busy. And, you know, we talked about collections a bit when we were at Ansible Fest this past year. And it's been a thing that we've been talking about continuously in the Ansible community. And also, you know, it was part of Red Hat's product line for a while. We've actually now gotten to the point of sort of splitting out the Ansible repository. Ansible, Ansible is going to continue to be the, you know, if you have a car and you look under the engine and there's like the things that make the car run, you know, Ansible base separate from the windshield wipers and all the add-ons and all the cool stuff that you actually, you know, wanna get when you get a car. And that stuff is actually getting split out into Ansible collections that we'll have. Our repository is actually more managed by the community, which will empower them to be able to make more decisions for us to be able to get things done, you know, more rapidly because in the past, it's always been a really a tug of war between, you know, we're at Red Hat. We've always been very respectful about, you know, how the balance between community and product because obviously without a community, you don't have a product. And this is obviously a method that Red Hat has sort of nailed down. I guess IBM really liked the idea. So here we are, but we're really looking forward to, right now we've got a handful of contributors who are adding new modules into this new repo, but they're also helping us work out all the kinks in the contributor process and how it works that way. Once we open for business, since we've got several thousand contributors, we don't say open for business and then have everybody come running into a glass wall and like it and then fall on the floor, right? Like we want the doors to be open. We want the registers, so to speak, to be, you know, processing things. We want, you know, all the bots to be working, all of the, we want all the magic to be happening just as it has in the past, but this time with a little bit more empowerment to the community. So that's been a work in progress for, it feels like forever, but, you know, nine months and you're in the next few weeks, that will be open for business. And we're hoping that, you know, by the time Ansible Fest rolls around that that will be part of the two, you know, part and parcel to the 210 release. And we're hoping that that, even though under the hood for contributors, that's changed, we believe will be very transparent brand users, which has been one of the most important things for us because we don't like to break people. That's not the idea. No, absolutely, Robin. So it was one of the key things announced at Ansible Fest last year. Anybody that knows the software world is the traditional release train, you know, get on that train, got to make sure you get your feature in there. But for a solution like Ansible, which as you said has a lot of, you know, partners and it's a very big ecosystem. If you have to worry about how much stuff do I get shoved into one release? It's a little bit limiting. So you break those pieces up. It's more like the, you know, the containers that go on the train and you can make sure that you're adding and doing the various pieces as they go. So maybe not the perfect analogy, but you know, very important. So Robin, you know, as you've been going through this, I'm wondering, you know, what, you know, what feedback are you getting from the contributors there and how about the community? As you said, very active community. We know if anybody, you know, says something, you get, you know, the crowd and the wisdom coming in and giving you ideas. But, you know, how do you balance that? You know, you're not going to have everybody be happy about every decision, but you know, making sure that that, you know, the ultimate release train, you know, does the job and delivers the overall solution. What color are we going to paint our bike shed, right? Like the yak or circling. So it's, I don't want to say it's been mixed. You know, it's, you know, we, I can, I compare and contrast this, you know, one of my previous roles was being the Fedora project leader, right? And which is, as we know, the upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And it's some of the, you know, Linux and a lot of the Linux distributions have been around for forever, back when there were like, I don't know, 10, 15 open source projects that anybody at all could contribute to. Now, as we can see, looking on, you know, GitHub and many other places, GitLab, you know, open dev, you know, there's a, you know, you name it, there's a gazillion open source projects out there. People aren't always as attached I don't want to say attached because that sounds terrible, but open sources become such a norm that people are just very used to, there's something wrong. I'm going to submit it. I'm going to hope it gets accepted, but I'm going to move on with my life because I also have all these other places that I can also contribute, right? That said, we do have, you know, a significant number of contributors who have been with us back since Ansible started. Some of those folks go back with us to, you know, Fedora days, early Linux days, on and on and on. Some of them, you know, some folks have concerns. They do like that this is the opportunity to give them more empowerment to figure out better ways to run the, you know, contributor process. I think the number one thing that everybody's been concerned about is what is the user experience going to be? And I think that's a testament to just the power of our community is that people aren't just concerned about how am I going to get my stuff in and your stuff in and like the tug of war of like is like one person going to get something else in before someone else. Everybody's very concerned about is this going to still work for the end users? Is this going to disrupt them because, you know, it's a change under the hood. Are they going to have to change all their playbooks and all of their, you know, roles and everything that they have? And right now the goal is it should be transparent. Anything that you have that you've written right now should continue to work. You shouldn't even notice. Once we get to 3.0, like, you know, our goal is to ramp people up into harnessing the power of collections. But first we need to get the collections infrastructure in place before we can start getting them to harness the power of collections. Like it's, you can't just flip a switch and be like, hi, so it used to be this way. Now we have collections and now you got to redo everything, right? Because that's, we still have the opportunity because it's open source. We'll have this window where we can still find all the bugs and get that rapid feedback, which means, you know, once we roll out, you know, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, the next version of, you know, I'm not going to say an Ansible Fest. That would be shocking, right? We never do announcements at events. But whenever that product comes out, we want to make sure, you know, that the power of open source and, you know, having that rapid feedback ensures that, you know, what we wind up delivering to customers winds up being solid. But I believe we'll be very, very solid for contributors because, or, and, you know, community users because a significant number of our contributors are community users and they have that in their own interest in mind. And we've seen that not just from, you know, I'm a community user at a university, but, you know, all of our partners are actually participating in the community as well. And they're, you know, participating and chatting. And, you know, we had a, we had planned to have a European Ansible Contributor Summit, which is a thing we normally run in combination or right the day before Ansible Fest. And we had planned that for Sweden. I was so excited. I was going to go to Gothenburg. I hear it's a charming little town, except when we are all stuck in the world that we are in currently. So we ran that virtually. And a lot of our long-term contributors are actually from Europe. So that was really exciting, except for me because I had to get up at 3 a.m. but it was still nice to see them all. We had 50 some odd folks pop in over the course of that day. And we talked through collections and debated and, you know, got some demos from folks, had some folks talk through some specific collections, folks talking about AWS and some of the networking things. So, yeah, it was nice to see everyone. I was sad that it wasn't in Gothenburg, but it is what it is. So Robin, you know, I think back to 2019 and automation was, you know, right at the top of hot topics when I talked to practitioners out there, you know, many conferences I went to, not just, of course, Ansible Fest, which focuses on it, but many other, you know, shows and events when you talk to people about key initiatives. It's, you know, really leveraging automation, you know, something that, you know, I've heard talked about my entire career, but really it feels like the last painful of years that people are much more serious about it. You know, you referenced that the times that we live in right now are unprecedented with the global pandemic. So, you know, I'm not saying that, you know, somebody, everybody all of a sudden woke up and say, oh my gosh, I have to work from home and I need to be smarter. Let me finally use this automation that I've been hearing about all these years. But, you know, why don't you bring us into, you know, what is happening today, what you are hearing customers, because automation obviously is a critical piece of what everybody is doing, and probably just shines a light on it even more, you know, now that we need to make sure that people are being efficient and still being able to deal with their lives while everything else is going on. Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, some of it is, Ansible is used, there's actually a dependency graph that you can look at on GitHub and it will tell you how many other things in GitHub are actually depending on Ansible. I can't even remember them, but it's a very large number, like tens of thousands of things, as I recall. Disclaimer, my memory is terrible sometimes. But I believe it was in the tens of thousands of things. Lots of people use Ansible, you know, it's almost like, probably not quite as popular as, you know, use this Docker container to get started, but I'd venture to guess it might be a number two to that, you know, type this Ansible thing and this thing will magically come up, right? For folks that are, you know, in a traditional IT department, you know, just trying to get a long day-to-day right now who are, you know, they're like me, they're at home, they're with their spouse, they're sharing an office, they're also homeschooling their kids if they got out of bed. Hopefully we all have enough bandwidth. For those folks, you know, it's, I'm just glad that I continue to have this Ansible thing. You know, if they're using Ansible Tower, they're glad that they can still, you know, manage to figure out how to collaborate with their coworkers in that type of environment for all the folks out there who are doing, you know, research or, you know, trying to set up any type of infrastructure anywhere to, you know, relate to this. I don't care if it's a grocery store or you're a research laboratory, whatever it is. The last thing you want to do is, like, spend five hours being like, oh, God, okay, let me get out my manual. Where did I go? Hey, there's an Ansible play. Excellent, I can type this Ansible thing in and, you know, if for some reason it gets hung up, you know, we have folks on IRC, we have, there's folks on Stack Overflow, there, you know, folks literally everywhere. You can ask a question on Twitter and, you know, it's a pretty large, friendly global community of people who have plenty of answers. And that's, you know, I can't say we're like, hey, we solved everything, but we got all the stuff out of the way so that people can actually solve all of their, you know, they can get down to what's actually important for them. So that, you know, it's always been one of the most redeeming things about Ansibles that it, you know, for me is the thing that I work on is, it's easy and it helps people solve their problems and gets all their stuff out of the way so that they can concentrate on what's actually important to them. So I like to think Ansible is important to them and I know it is, but, you know, it's interesting seeing how, you know, things change, you know, lots of people are like, are you going to teach Ansible now? And it's like, well, if they're in need of a job, there are a lot of online resources for that, but if they're just trying to get through their job, like everybody's sort of in a don't rock the boat position. Like if I can get a little bit ahead, that's cool. If I've already got a bunch of stuff automated. Yes, that's one last thing that I have to worry about right now. And that's all we can really hope for at this moment. Yeah, great stuff, Robin. One of the high points always is seeing the value and support of the community. And as you said, it's something that we definitely see highlighted up there. All right, Robin Bergeron, great as always to catch up with you. Thank you so much. I'm sure there are, you know, so many community activities that people will be able to participate in, you know, this week at Red Hat Summit, even though we're all doing it remotely and the challenges there. We've got a great community central area. So you can come on and come on by and see all of the various Red Hat open source communities doing their thing. All right, lots more coverage from Red Hat Summit coming at you. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.