 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Red Hat Summit 2017. I'm Stu Miniman, happy to have two gentlemen from the middleware group. I have Mark Little, who's the vice president of engineering, and I have Mike Peach, who is the vice president and general manager of the middleware. Ben, it is both of you from Red Hat. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. All right, Mike, let's start with you just before we get into some of the news and everything. Tell us a little bit about your role, how long have you been at Red Hat? Yeah, been at Red Hat a little over four years now. I run the middleware business unit, which comprises product management, product marketing, a couple of other ancillary product-related functions. We drive a lot of the middleware strategy, certainly in conjunction with Mark and the engineering team. We also drive a lot of the merger and acquisition activity to sort of extend and build out the business. All right, and Mark, a quick intro, maybe give us a little scope of where your engineering team sits across the globe and which products they're working on. So, I've been with Red Hat since 2006, came in with the J-Boss acquisition. Also responsible for our mobile and API management effort as well as middleware. We've got an incredibly broad and rich middleware portfolio, and part that comes with that is a very, very expansive engineering team, which is in, I think, every single time zone apart from Antarctica. Excellent. Mike, let's unpack a little bit. Tell us about the news this week. What's new at Red Hat Summit? Yeah, probably the biggest news on the middleware front is our announcement of OpenShift application runtimes. And really what that is, is you could think of it as the next generation of runtimes and really a next generation embodiment of the functionality that we've all known and loved as the application server. So one of the core elements of the J-Boss middleware portfolio from the get go, the original acquisition of the J-Boss company has been the application server, J-Boss EAP enterprise application platform in Red Hat and Omenclature. With OpenShift application runtimes, we take a lot of that functionality, a lot of that really foundational capability that has been sort of packaged into that entity, the application server and reimagined it, re-enabled it for the world of microservices. And that's what OpenShift application runtimes are all about. All right, Mark, maybe you can break this down a little bit for us. I know in other conversations we said, oh, I hear microservices. Sometimes we conflate that with containers, so some of the interfaces and challenges for building what you're doing. So microservices could be deployed into containers. In fact, you could have containers that have multiple microservices with them. There's a lot of challenges with microservices and as Mike's hinted at, some of those challenges have actually come because we've essentially had to re-architect some of our product lines to be more microservice-y in a way, sit well in containers, work well with OpenShift. So it's important that we don't just think about containers, we actually need to think about containers and orchestration of containers and hence Kubernetes, which is why we've focused on OpenShift and we spent a lot of time over the last few years re-architecting and broadening our abilities in the microservices area and everything we do, particularly on the raw, which is Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes acronym, is targeted at OpenShift and we've made a lot of efforts to make our stuff OpenShift native. Yeah, I'm curious to get both of your opinions. We've talked for years about some of the cloud-native microservices applications. It feels like there's a little bit more of a spectrum now. What we used to call almost lift and shift, kind of the re-platforming and then maybe we start breaking up some of the pieces, start componentizing them. Sounds like containers helped with some of them. What are you hearing from customers? How does that mature the solution set that you're working on? And yeah. Sure. First of all, almost all of our customers are at least talking about microservices. They're all on different, at different phases of their respective kind of trajectories and sort of going down the microservices path. Almost no one would say, oh, I would never do a microservice. I think most customers are realistic about, hey, it's not a one-size-fits-all proposition and microservices approach is really appropriate for certain use cases, certain kinds of workloads, certain kinds of application domains. And in other domains, a less microservices-ish approach might still make sense. In a way, there's not like there's this hard threshold between what is a microservice and what is a macroservice or something bigger than a microservice. There really is a spectrum of size of modules. The whole idea of microservices is just taking the idea of modularity to another level, like giving you a finer granularity to work with, but that doesn't necessarily mean that everything should be blown into its minutest possible bits. I would, and I kind of add to that, some of our competitors, some other people in the field of microservices often tend to approach this from a completely green-field environment where the assumption is that you have got nothing that you need to lift and shift or nothing that you have to bring with you to this new world, and that's simply not the case. Nobody has a true green-field environment. Everybody's kind of brown-field, slightly muddy-fields, and I think that's what we try to address with what we announced this week at Summit, but also another thing that we're all, that we're focusing on is not just looking at how we evolve our software, but also how we evolve the people that are developing these things. It's no good us saying to customers, partners, communities, everything you knew at this point, you now have to unlearn, and tomorrow morning when you come into work, you have to have completely new skill sets. People have invested a lot of time and money in themselves and their employees, and they need to be able to take that skill set and evolve it as well. Yeah, we've spent a lot of time the last few years talking about really modernization of what's happening. I've been saying for the last couple of years, the application tends to be the long pole in the tent. So I think starting to move a little faster, what's exciting you, and what things have we knocked down, and what things do we still need to mature a little bit on? Yeah, I would say it is moving noticeably faster than the last, I'll say, six to 12 months. We've really felt a rapid increase. A year ago, if we had this interview, we certainly would have talked about microservices, but there would be a much smaller number of customers who are actively pursuing them. I think part of what happens is, once you get some early successes, once you get a few examples out there of how do you do it, what actually works, that will start to snowball and bring on other customers who then become, gain some confidence from having seen it done. To answer the other part of your question, what still remains to be done? I mean, I think with our, one of the things that has, I think, continued to, if not be an actual challenge, at least be a perceived challenge in the minds of would-be microservices architects, is how do I manage all this stuff? How do I make dealing with, not tens or hundreds, but thousands or tens of thousands of these very minutely-sized workloads? How do I orchestrate them? How do I scale them? How do I manage them, et cetera? And that's one of the very challenges that our OpenShift application runtimes, the Roar offering that we announced this week, is meant to address. By putting those runtimes in an OpenShift native, Kubernetes native environment and automating a lot of that orchestration, taking a lot of that manual labor of dealing with all those pieces off the table, this will make it a lot easier for developers to develop with microservices. Mark, I can only imagine how much has changed in the last decade, containers, their rapid acceleration there. I want to ask you a little bit forward-looking though. What about things like serverless or functions as a service? What's Red Hat's viewpoint on that? How fast do you see that coming? How does that play into your environments? So we see it in a way as a natural evolution of microservices. A microservice should be something that does one thing, one thing, well, a single unit of deployment. Well, a serverless or a function is one unit of deployment. So you could see it as another way of doing microservices. And we're definitely full in on that. We've been working on projects in the Kubernetes and OpenShift efforts called Function, which is our serverless effort. And we'll be integrating that with raw. We think it's a good thing in general. It's obviously not going to be right for everybody. There are some issues with serverless that you may not find useful for your application. All right, Mike, I want to give you the final word. Speak to the customer conversations you're having. What's exciting them in the middleware space? Yeah, I've been really excited in the last 48 hours since the announcement came out, where the reaction has been really, really good. I've talked to a number of our large financial services customers, both from here in the US as well as in Europe. I've talked to some other customers in the industries outside of financial services. They are unanimous in giving us kudos that we're on the right path, that this is what they wanted and needed to hear, that we are being very forward looking with our middleware. And while we're certainly not abandoning or otherwise letting go of a number of very important workloads and capabilities that we need to continue supporting in many sort of traditional environments that we really are at the same time taking all of our deep expertise in middleware and application development platforms and providing the enterprise grade, enterprise, trusted, tested, next generation run time foundations for microservices and other emerging styles of development such as function as serverless. All right, well, Mike Peech, Marsh Little, really appreciate the updates on where you are, little visibility towards the future. We'll be turning it over to the keynote and then back with the last bit of our coverage here, three day coverage of theCUBE at Red Hat Summit. I'm Stu Miniman. I'm Stu Miniman.