 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage here on location in Las Vegas for AWS re-invent, AWS's annual conference, our 11th year covering theCUBE and every year of that time, up until two years ago, Stu Miniman has been covering with us, has been our analyst like we keep on now, it's called CUBE Research. Stu's now at Red Hat Stu is here with me. Stu Miniman, senior director of hybrid platforms at Red Hat, also a distinguished member of the CUBE Collective Analyst Program, which is our open collective analyst group. Thank you for coming on. Hey John. You can't get rid of us. No, thank you, it's good. We were saying, you know, part of the collective, it's like the Borg. I was assimilated after a decade and I might have a different job, but yeah, it's been awesome. I love coming on to talk to you and Dave towards the end of the show, share what we've got, because I mean, John, you say this is the Super Bowl for our industry and it's been an exhausting but a really good week. Yeah, and you've been great at Red Hat and you've been a big part of our team, but also you've been an analyst, so the friends of theCUBE, our collective is our way to just connect. It was Dave, that's still, you have a lot of it. You're now on the Red Hat side, you still see a lot. You've been here from day one. I remember in 2013, well, there's James Hamilton. And I'm like, who's James Hamilton? And you tell him, let's get them on it. Hey, do you want to come up? We yanked him up from the crowd. He's like, I'll do the CUBE. And probably one of our most popular videos early on 2013, he was laying down the epic architecture that we're seeing happen here now. And Andy Jackson started coming on. I got Swami coming on when he came on. All the execs have come and been on theCUBE. Yeah, I mean, John, there is no shortage of big brains to look up to and we admire. And this week has been in spades. It really felt, last year was a good show. This year, it is bigger. The amount of people here, the conversations, the energy and that little thing called AI, which is the gift that keeps on giving to all of us right now. And the thing too is that Adam Sileski had to deliver a mega keynote. He was getting hammered in the press, but this is Amazon style, as you know. And then they come to Rio, they keep their mouth quiet, they close, they don't really go on the hype and they just lay it out at re-inventing and go, okay, they're not behind or they're now ahead. John, AWS, if there's anything where they have a gap, you know they are going to close it fast. They listen, they learn, they move really fast on these things. Volante used to say the 800 pound, the elephant that can actually move this fast as the cheetah or the 800 pound gorilla, I think that moves as fast as the cheetah was a mega post that he wrote years ago about them. And it's still true, there's still growth, there's still a lot of change going on and Amazon is still such a major force in our industry. And they're changing too, and I think Adam laid a great keynote down, obviously there on the trajectory, some have been saying, and we've been kind of talking about on theCUBE a little bit, not too hard courses, it's not yet fleshed out, but we're looking into it, is that the two pizza team concepts, great for putting stuff out fast, but we're kind of in a model now where there's a unification of data stew. So as these solutions need to work together and generate AI in this hybrid, distributed computing world, you got to start looking at, is the two pizza team still the primary mechanism for development? We have saw Amazon security teams now, one security team for the entire company. Data? Stu? I mean- John, actually, so you guys did some research and said, is there anything that will stop Amazon? And I commented that their current organizational structure could be a challenge for them because when you're small and you've got 20 or 30 products, the two pizza team are awesome, every product manager has to deal with the integrations with all of their partners and all of the other products and when they've got 250 services, they can't keep up with it. So there should be more shared services, you need to adjust things, you're always worried about Conway's law taking over and Amazon's structure has been great to get them where they are, but I don't know that it will be what will move them forward for the next 10 years, so that's great insight and absolutely something that's pretty interesting and it's tough to be an Amazon employee, it's hard work, there's a lot going on and talent. Well, I was talking to Andy Jesse about this when I was talking with them and as well as Adam, Adam had more of a business side of it, but they're growing up, right, AWS says, and what's interesting is that the growth is still there and you look at how they're changing because they're changing, they have to change too. So I think it's not so much is Amazon broken, what do they need to evolve to? You know. Hey John, it's always day one, but you do need to mature and grow and we said what's going to be different for the next million cloud customers compared to the last million and as we said, AI is going to impact all of this, so there's certain things that I can streamline the team a little bit and leverage those tools and there's other things where you have to have more expertise across so you might need a bigger team. Well we got some research coming out, Dave's going to drop some knowledge on what we think their JNI strategy, where the reality of it is, certainly from an announcement standpoint, it checks all the boxes, still a lot of work to do on some of those products like Q, is it really baked and these kinds of questions are going to come up and we'll have data on that, but I think directionally it's there and if you look at the Microsoft versus Amazon, which has been the big dialogue and Google bought the Sphere out, which is a genius move, if you look at who's here still, I mean they're not losing, it's bigger than ever. Okay, there's still the hallway, I mean the buyouts of the restaurants, can't even get food anymore. So John, one of the things I love about my job is I meet with customers every week, so AI, we are talking with every customer at AI, it is part of their overall strategy, there are some customers that are already training models and doing everything they have, but it is early days, I often say it reminds me of those early days of the web, where I know it's going to change everything, it's going into every environment on the consumer side, talk to all these startups here at the show that are building, it's not just the Amazon marketplace and what's there, it's going into the Apple and Google stores for everybody's phone, it will impact there. John, our kids are playing with some of this kind of stuff, so it impacts everyone, but from an enterprise customer, we're early, there's some early returns, the apps are doing great, but also, trend we've seen for years, I remember going to some of the networking shows with you John a decade ago, AI infuses the same thing that telemetry did before, so IT ops is pretty huge, it's an area where we've had some early returns that Red Hat, our Ansible team has automation, our OpenShift team is looking at some of those pieces to be able to do generation and get code faster to accelerate some of those people, so yeah, it's early returns with a lot of hype, and there's customers doing good. You bring up a good point, so a couple of things on tact there, one is, during the pandemic, if you were in the cloud, you had a tailwind, if you were in the cloud, you were kind of screwed. In AI, if you have good data and you've been doing the work with automation and setting up that trajectory, you're going to win out of the gate, low-hanging fruit's going to be there, if you've been like with Ansible, for instance, we've had multiple conversations at Ansible Fest about automation now with the IBM announcement they just had with you guys, and the last event, I mean, it's there, and by the way, it's not a demo, and that's the difference, a good demo versus an actual production-ready workload. I mean, that's the test. And John, we've looked at AI as a workload for a long time, AI is not a monolithic application, it's where am I going to train my data, I need to train it, I need compute, I need my GPUs and all this, is that going to be in Amazon? Amazon will win a lot of that business, Microsoft doing well in that space, but also data center, some customers that like, I need a handful of GPUs, I'm going to bang on them all the time, I should own them rather than rent them, and the other thing is the other piece, where's the data transacting? It's at the edge, so we've got products up on the International Space Station, satellites, drones, remote sites, and our hybrid strategy we've been talking about for a data, oh my God, AI's the killer use case of this kind of stuff, it comes to right to what we've been talking about, an open hybrid cloud for a decade. Yeah, and you guys are going to do well with that. I want to get back to some of the comments we made about the embryonic stage of AI. Doug Merritt was on yesterday, and we were discussing the App Store. So in 2007, the iPhone, and a year later, I think 2008, the App Store came out, it wasn't, and then you had apps on there, the Flashlight and Game Apps, like simple stuff. It wasn't really until two, three years later, you saw Uber. And that's because Travis couldn't get a cab in Paris, and so he's like, I'll build an app. That was the spark and put that in motion. We see that happening here. You mentioned the web we were talking, Dave and I were talking with Adam Sileski about this, that the web went from dial up, slow loading pages with no images, then images that were low and slow, and HTML, blue text, coated by hand, but it got better. But if you focused on the connectivity problem, that's not the right, that's telecom fixed. So AI, similar thing, it's still going to get better. So there's a big rush to judgment of who has good AI. To your point, we're going to need to let it gestate a little bit. Does it happen faster? It might happen faster than the App Store. It might happen faster than the web. John, we watch all of these waves. Friend of ours, friend of the cube, Randy Baez posted something, and he said, sometimes there are hope cycles. He said, the metaverse was kind of a hope cycle. We hope we will figure something out. He was like, AI is a hype cycle. There's a lot of hype, but this is real. And we all agree that there's certain waves. I mean, cloud, a huge wave, and we're still reaping the benefits of it. AI, this is a massive one. This will impact the next generation of workers, it'll impact everything that we're doing. And it's why, I mean, Adam's keynote, they spent 15 minutes to get to it, and then spent two hours talking to all AI, and I thought he had a really solid keynote. That's why I agree with you on the web, it's the best analogy, because at that time, there was an obvious, I mean, we might be in that's our generation, but we were in our prime then, but you saw the difference. You say, that's a web page. I don't have to read a book. I don't have to send a mail message. There was specific benefits, it was such a no-brainer that you could take the leap of faith and hope that, hey, you know what, I can see this growing up in the future, where people can type in keywords rather than URLs, or, hey, do stuff on the PC. Well, John, there's so many technologies. Will this give access to new capabilities to people that before I had to be a nation-stater, government, or one of the Fortune 100 to be able to do it? And AI, my family members can play with this. It's like, when you go over Thanksgiving, you don't talk about cloud computing to most people. They're like, oh yeah, I store in the A Cloud and I do some things, but it doesn't, in my day-to-day, doesn't AI will impact so many jobs. John, every website and app I go to now, it's like, hey, would you like to try our little AI enhancements and we can do all these other things and we're improving it. It's like, so we are in just that frothy state right now and what it will look like in two years. It's great to talk about it, but it's like, I'm super excited for it because it's one of these, so many times it's like, what's new and what's there? So this is a huge opportunity. So what do you think from the keynote? What was the big takeaway from the keynote? It was Q, obviously, is their co-pilot. That looked like it did more of a demo to me. We'll like to look under the covers there. I'm going to review that, but that is exactly what the low-code, no-code environment will bring, that Edge worker productivity gain, simplicity, get work done, but if you don't have the data, let's do it. Okay, this is a hybrid problem, right, to solve. No, you are absolutely right. So yeah, John, we've already had customers for years that they do training. We had, I sat on a panel at KubeCon in Detroit a year ago and we talked to AI inferencing. It's like, that's, of course, what you're going to be doing with all these. We work with the car manufacturers. We work with Lockheed, with drones, and AI is part of that. Well, I don't know if you notice that KubeCon, that North America in Chicago, Tim Hawken on stage, he said inference is the new web app, which I thought was awesome. I'm calling it the killer app, but he's basically saying that's the new web app because you have to infer. Now, I put that same question to the CEO of Grock, which is the hottest inference chip on the market at the SuperCupra Computing Conference. He was also the inventor of Google's TPU, Tensor Processing Union. He's like a total nerd fest. And by the way, his chip is fast. And he says, yes, it is the killer app for the same exact reason, because inferencing is going to be the user experience that gets them low latency next step answers, that gets them to something productive, faster versus waiting for download and clicking on a SaaS app. You're getting in and generating and inferring. Yeah, so John, you asked, some of my takeaways from Adam's keynote is what's good is Amazon still has a lot of choice. They're doing some interesting things with the anthropomorphic. Of course, Jensen's here, he's at everything. We've got a great partnership with NVIDIA. NVIDIA is in the Catbird seat and still will have for a while, they've got a big lead. Everybody else is looking at chips and trying to figure out how to break that up because they are so profitable. And a certain company, I know a big one that says your profit is my opportunity. John, who's that? Yeah, that was Bezos that said that. They got a lot of financial leverage. I mean, the chip guys, so at Supercomputing, I was pontificating around how chips are going to move up and with DGX Cloud, remember when DGX Cloud was launched, Amazon was not included. And then you heard, yes, in the keynote, and I'm not sure if that was my number one customer on stage with my number one customer and the DGX being a competitive, potential enabler of these tier two GPU clouds, like CoreWeave, Stu. And Vidya could enable Bear Metal to stand up and do what OpenStack was trying to do for years. Absolutely, but even, you know, our friends at IBM had an announcement with Amazon because Watson X will also be available in AWS. And that actually runs on the Red Hat software underneath in Amazon. So we've been enabler, it's nice. We've had great growth with our first party offering with AWS. Hey, John, I can share, you know who my number one customer is for that product? It's IBM, you know? You know, no big surprise, but you know, they enable it. So more than a year ago, they launched all of their SaaS offerings on that. So AWS powered by OpenShift and now AI is another killer workload for that. So that's good. We still, the hybrid model, the governance, all the things that IBM brings, and it's where, you know, we work with IBM Research and we can still be separate and work across all these environments. But, you know, Arvin knows how to partner with Amazon and it's been really fun to be able to see that activity and got a lot of discussion about that this week. And we see how the edge is a lot of activity. I'm going to have Tom Sotter some on next after you. And he worked at the chip propulsion laboratory, public sector. I interviewed him at Red Hat Summit in 2018. It's one of the few interviews that I put on my personal, like Facebook. John, you remember what a space geek I am. John, how jealous was I when you took the cube to Amazon Remars because I went to that show and worked that so that we could get the cube there. I know, I just saw a Remars guest on earlier. So yeah, so Tom's going to come on. I've been trying to get him on the cube for like two years in three bars. So, looking forward. Stu, put a plug in for what you were doing at Red Hat, the relationship with Amazon, what you're doing here, just what's happening in your world. Yeah, thanks John. So we've got a phenomenal partnership with AWS. AWS has hundreds of services. We are actually jointly engineering, jointly develop the Red Hat OpenShift service on AWS. Three years, hundreds of customers, you know, SaaS customers, financial customers. That's a phenomenal thing. And of course we're in the Amazon marketplace like everyone else, but that deep relationship. So, Amazon, great partner of ours, we help. I want to go use all the stuff that Amazon does. That's why they embraced us, brought us into that activity. And it's really good to be here, work with our joint customers and be part of all the excitement around AI too. Stu, we miss you on the cube. We've been thriving at Red Hat, but I'm glad you're part of the collective. Always the open door for us. You know, always have a seat in the cube for you. Thanks for coming on. All right. I've taken the time out of your business because Stu and the man at Red Hat doing a hybrid. The senior director of hybrid platforms at Red Hat, formerly a cube host, now part of the cube collective, as always, a friend of the cube. More action coming here on location for reinvent. Now back to the studio.