 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Ansible Fest 2022. We're live in Chicago. This is day two of wall-to-wall coverage on theCUBE. John Thurrier here with me, Lisa Martin. John, today's a big news day. Yeah, big time. I mean, we got the chief architect on this segment. It's going to be great. We have lead product management. All the new stuff coming out really is a game changer. It's very cool and relevant, very key to be relevant and being a part of the future. This is a changeover you see in the next gen cloud, developer environment open source all coming together. So Ansible, we've been covering for many, many years. We've always said they're in the middle of all the action and you're starting to see the picture coming. So we're looking forward to a great segment. Yes, we've got two alumni back with us to unpack the news and all the great stuff that's going on here. Richard Henshel joins us, senior manager Ansible product management and Matthew Jones is here fresh from the keynote stage. Chief architect of Ansible Automation. Guys, great to have you on the program. Thanks for having us. Good to be here. So this morning was all about event-driven Ansible. Unpack that, talk about the impact that this is going to have, the excitement, the buzz that you've heard on the show floor today. Yeah, you know, it's exciting. We've been working on this for a while. We've been really excited to show this off because it's something that feels like the natural evolution of the platform and where it's going, really being able to connect the automation with the sources of data and the actions that we know people want to use. We came into this knowing everybody here at this conference, this is something that everybody will be able to use. Talk about the innovation strategy. We've always had these great conversations with Ansible. Yeah, the practitioners, they're building the product with you. You guys are very hardcore on that, no secret. This is different. This is like a whole another level of opportunity that's going to take the community to new heights in terms of what they do in their job and free them up to do more creative development. Yeah, you're exactly right. You know, we know that people need to bring that sort of reactive and active automation to it. We've done a lot of work to bring automation to everybody, to the masses. Now we need to meet them at the place where they are, where they have to do the most work and act in the most strategic and specific ways. All right, so before we get into some of the deep talks, I've got a ton of questions. This is a really exciting product. Take a minute to explain what was the key announcement? Why, what specifically does this mean for the audience watching customers and future customers? What's the big deal? To take a minute to explain what was announced. This is about the evolution and the maturity of the automation that our users are doing. So, you know, you think about provisioning servers, you know, configuring networks, all that sort of stuff that we've established and everybody's been doing for a number of years. And then you go, well, I've invested in that. I've done the heavy lifting. I've done the things that cost me agility. I think that it cost me time. Well, now I'm going to refer to, so what can I go further into? When you move further up the stacks, you move away from the infrastructure. Please, you move away from infrastructure as code. You move towards through configures code up to ops as code. You start to get into, well, I've got road tasks. I've got repetitive actions that I'm doing. I've got investigations. I've got remediations. I've got responses. All this work that I do on a daily basis that is toil, right? It's not efficient work. I should be invaluable work in the operation space as much as I should be doing in the build space. And how do we move them up into that space? This is all based off observation. You can do this today, but how do we make it easier? We're going to make it easy for them to do that and get there. It's all about success, it's about the outcomes which are going to drive users towards. They need to be successful as quickly as possible. How do we make that happen? And Matt, I remember we talked in 2019 with Ansible, the word platform. We say, hey, platforms are super important. It's not a tool. Tools and platforms are distinctions. You mentioned platform. This is now platform. A lot of people put a lot of work into this. Explain what went on behind the scenes. So you're exactly right. And we've spent the last couple of years really taking that disparate set of tools that we've invested a lot of time in, building that platform. It's been exciting to see it come together. We always knew that we wanted to capture more of where people find automation and find they need automation, not just out on the edge, on the end of the actions and tasks that they need to do. They've got a lot of things coming in, a lot of things that they need to take care of. And the community is really what drives this for us. People have been doing this for years, and they've been asking us, meet me halfway. Give me something. Give me a part of this platform and a capability that enables me to do this. So I feel like we've done that. And you did it. Yeah, exactly. Step one. That must feel pretty good too, to be able to deliver what you know the masses are looking for and why they're looking for it. Yeah, there was no question that we knew this was going to deliver the kind of real value that people were looking for. Thanks for the building blocks real quick. I know on stage you went through it in detail. What should people know about the core building blocks of this particular event driven piece? Yeah, I think the most important thing to understand at the outset is the sources of data and events that come in. It's really easy to get lost in the details, like what do you mean a source? But we've shown examples using Kafka, but it's not just Kafka, right? It's webhooks, it's CI systems. It's any place that you can imagine an event coming from, your monitoring platforms. You can bring those together under the same umbrella. We're not requiring you to pick one or choose or what's your favorite one. You can use them all and condense them down into the same place. There's a lot of data events everywhere now. There's more events. Is there a standard interface? Is there any kind of hook in there? What's going to limit, are there any limits? I don't think there is a limit. And we can't even imagine where events and data are going to come from, but we know we need to get them into the system in a way that makes the most sense for the customers. And then that drives through into the rule books, like okay, we have the data now, but what do we do with that data? How do we translate that into the action? What are the rules that need to follow? It's giving the person who is automating who understands the data that's coming in and understands the tasks that they need to take. The rules are where they map those into it. And then the last part of course is the playbook, the automation itself, which they already know. They're already experts in the system. So we've built this like eight lane highway. They get some right into those actions. Let's talk about, Richard, let's unpack those actions and really kind of double click on the business outcomes of this is actually going to enable organizations in any industry to achieve. Yeah, so, like Matt said, it's really hard to encapsulate everything that we see as possible. But if you just think about what happens when a system goes down, right? At that point in time, I'm potentially not making money. I'm saying it's costing me time, it's costing me over. That's a business impact. If I can speed up how quick I can resolve that problem. If I can reduce time in there, that's customer improvement, that's customer satisfaction. That's bottom line money for businesses, right? But it's also satisfaction for the users. They're not involved in having the stress for get online, get it quickly, activate whatever account you need to do, go and start doing discovery. You can detect a lot of that information for it. The discovery use case that we see, respond to an event, scan the system for that same logic that you would normally do as a user, as a human. And that's why the rules are important to add into EDA. It's like, how do I take that human, that brain part that I would say, well, if I see this bit, now I'll go and have a look at this other log file. If I see this piece, I'll go and do something different. How do we translate that into Ansible so that you've got that conditional logic just to be able to say, if this, do that, or if I see these three things, it means a certain outcome has happened. And then, getting that defined, that's what's going to help people like choose where it becomes useful. And that's how we take that process forward. I'm sure people are going to get excited by this. I'm sure the community already knows that, but as it's going to attract more potential customers, what's different about it? And you share the differentiation. Like, why didn't I already have that already? Do they have it already? What's different? What makes this different? What's in it for them? Yeah, when we step up into a customer situation, an enterprise, an organization, what's really important becomes the ability to control where you do some of that work, so the control and the trust. You know, would you trust an automatic system to go and start making changes to hundreds or thousands of devices? And the answer is often not straight away. So how do we put this sort of, the same separation of duties we have between Dev and Ops and all the nice structures we've done over the last number of years and actually apply that to that programmatic access of automation that other systems do. So let's say AIML systems that are detecting what's going on, observability platforms that are much more intrusive, intrusive is the wrong word. They're much more observable of what's going on in the system, right? But at the same time, I want to make sure that I know that at any point in time I can decide what is there and what can be run and who can run it and when they can run it. And that becomes an important dimension. The versatility seems like a big deal too. They can, any team could get involved. And that's the, yeah, the same flexibility and the same extensibility of Ansible exists in this use case, right? The ability to take any of those tasks you want to do in action, string them together and the way that it works for you, not the way that it works that we see, but the way that you see and you convert your operational DNA into how you do that automation and then how that gets triggered as you see fit. Talk with us, both of you, I'd like to get your perspectives on Event-Tripping Ansible as part of the automation journey that businesses are on. Obviously, you can look at different industries and different businesses or at different places along that journey. But where does this fit in and kind of plug in to accelerating that journey? That's a good question. You know, sometimes this ends up being like that last mile of, we've adopted this automation. We've learned how to write automation. We even understand the things that we would need to automate. But how do we carry it over that last hump and connect it to our knowledge systems, our data stores, our data lakes, and how do we combine the expertise of the systems that we're managing with this automation that we've learned? Like you mentioned, the community and the coalescing of data and information, the definition of the event rules and the event-driven architecture lives alongside the automation that you've developed in the exact same place where you can feel that trust and ubiquity that we keep talking about, right? It's there, it's certified. And we've talked a lot about secure supply chain recently. This gives you the ability to sign and certify that the rules and actions that we're taking and the sources that we're communicating with works exactly the same way. And there's something we didn't correlate this when we first started doing the work. We were deserved teams doing self-healing and extending Ansible. And then over the last 18 months, what we've also seen is this platform engineering movement, the SRE teams becoming much more prominent. And this just nicely sits in as a type of use case for that type of transformation. We've got to remember that Ansible is high, is also a transformative tool. It's like, how do you teach this behavior to a bunch of people? How do you upscale a larger base of engineers with what you want to be able to do? And I think this is such an important part that we just, I wouldn't say we weren't stumbled into it, but it was a very, very nice. It was a natural progression. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, Tom, and we were talking with Tom yesterday, and he said, yes, bring up the SRE to you guys when you come on theCUBE. This is exactly a culture shift that we're talking about. I mean, SRE is really his legacy with Google. We all know that. Everyone kind of knows that. But it's become like a job title. Well, they kind of, what does that even mean now? If you're not Google, it means you're running stuff. DevOps has become a title. So what that means is that's a cultural shift, not so much semantics on title. This is kind of what you guys are targeting here, enabling people to run platforms, engineer them like an architect, and enable more composability coding. And that distinction is so important because we see many customers come from different places, many users, all the different legacy or heritage of tools that have existed. And so often those processes are defined by the way that tool works. You have no other way that that, and it happened 10 years ago. Somebody implemented it, that's how it now works. And then they come and try and take something new and you go, well, you can't let the tool define your process. Now your culture and your objective has to define the process. So this is really, how do we make sure we match that ability? By giving them a flexible tool that lets you, well, what are you trying to achieve? I want to achieve this outcome. That's the way you can do it. That's the way you can achieve it. I mean, that's how I read that. It basically means, in my mind, I mean, I'd rather get your reaction. It means I'm running stuff at scale. Yeah. I'm engineering and infrastructure at scale to enable high-velocinance. I'm responsible for it and it's my baby. It's my responsibility to do that and how do we allow people to do that better? And, you know, it's about freeing people up to focus on things that are really important and transformative. We can be transformative and we do that by taking away the complexity and making things work fast. And that's what people want. People in their daily jobs want to be able to deliver value to the organization. You want to feel that. The something, Richard, that you were talking about that struck me a couple of minutes ago was a venture of an Ansible, there's employee benefits, there's customer benefits. Those two are, and it's strictly linked, but I like how you were talking about what it facilitates for both. And all the way to the customer satisfaction brand reputation. That's an important element for any brand to consider. And that, I mean, you know, think about what digital transformation was all about. I mean, as we evolve past all these initial terms that come about, you know, we actually start getting to the meat of what these things are. And that is it, connecting what you do with actually what is the purpose of what your business is trying to achieve. And you can't, you can't almost put money on that. That's the holy grail of what you're trying to get to. So how, you know, and again, it just comes back to how do we facilitate, how do we make it easy? If we don't make it easier, we're not doing it right. We've got to make it easier, right? Well, exciting news, I want to get your guys' reaction. And if you don't mind sharing your opinion or your commentary on what's different now with Ansible this year than just a few years ago in terms of the scope of what's out there, what's been built, what you guys are doing for the customer base and the community, what's changed? Obviously people's roles looked like they're going to expand and have more, I say more power, you know, more keys to the kingdom. However you want to look at it, but things have changed. What's changed now from a few years ago? It's, you know, it's funny because we've spent a lot of time over the last couple of years setting up the capabilities that you're seeing us deliver right now, right? We looked back two or three years ago and we knew where we wanted to be. We wanted to build things like EDA. We wanted to invest in systems like Project Wisdom and the types of content, the cloud journey that now we're on and we're enabling for folks. But we had to make some really big changes and those changes take time and take investment. The move into, last year, John, we talked about execution environments and separating the control plane from the execution plane. All of that work that we did and the investment into the platform and stability of the platform leads us now into what capability is. And that's an architectural decision that's the long game in mind. Making things more cohesive but decoupled. That's an operating system kind of thinking. It totally is. It's a systems engineering and system architecture thinking. And now we can start building on top of these things. Like what comes after EDA? What does EDA allow us to do within the platform? All of the dev tools that we've focused on, we haven't spent a lot of time talking about that from the product side, but coming in with a prescriptive and opinionated dev tools, now we can show you how to build it. We can show you how to use it and connect it to your systems. Where can we go next? I'm really excited. Yeah, your customer base too has also been part of from the beginning and they solved their own problems and they rolled it up, grew with it. And now it's a full-on platform. The question I then ask is, okay, if you believe it's a platform, which it is, it's enabling. What do you guys see as that possible dots that could connect that might come on top of this from a creativity standpoint, from an ecosystem standpoint, from an Ansible standpoint, from maybe Red Hat. I mean, wisdom shows that you can go into the treasure trove of IBM's research, pull out some AI and some machine learning, bolt that in or shim layer it in, whatever you do. I mean, what I'm starting to see much more, especially the nice thing about being here is actually getting face-to-face with customers again and you can actually hear what they're talking about. But we've moved away from an Ansible specific story where I'm talking about how I was always, I was looking to automate, I was looking to go to Ansible. Well, now I've got the automation capability. Now we've enhanced the automation capability. Wisdom enhances the automation capability further. What about all those broader set of management solutions that I've got that I would like to start connecting to each other? So we're starting to take the same, like you mentioned as then, software architecture, software design principles. We'll apply those same application design principles, apply them to your IT management because we've got data center with the pressures on there, we've got the expansion into cloud, we've got the expansion to the edge. Each of you are adding a new layer of complexity and a new layer of more that you have to then look after. But there's still the same number of people. So a thousand flower blooms kind of situation. Yeah, exactly. And so how do I constrain, how do I tame it? How do I do that and go, I can control that now. I can look after that. I can tame that, I can deal with what I want to do so I'm focusing on what's important and we're getting stuff done. We've been quoting Andy Grove on theCUBE lately, let chaos reign and then reign in the chaos. I mean, that's kind of every inflection point has complexity before it gets simpler. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I see you can't, I don't know if there's an answer to that. I want to do it. That's right. You said it perfectly, yeah. What do you expect to see? Chief Farkin, you got to have the vision. What's going to pop out? What's that low hanging fruit? What's going to bloom first? What do you think is going to come? I, you know, my overarching vision is that I just want to be able to automate more. Where can we bring that, so edge cloud, right? That's obvious. But what things run in the cloud and on the edge, devices, you heard Chad in the keynote this morning talk about programmable logic controllers, sensors, fans, motors, things like that. This is the sort of, this is the next frontier of automation is that connecting your data centers and your systems, your applications and needs all the way out to where your customers are gas stations, point of sale systems. It's instant IT is what it is. It's like just add faster and bigger. Yeah. What happens, I'll give you a tease, but I think is what happens, this happens. So I've got much more rich, feature rich, diverse set of tools looking after my systems, observing what's going on. And they go through a whole filtering process and they say such and such has happened, right? Wisdom picks that up and decides from that natural language statement that comes out of the back of that system, that's the task I think is now appropriate to run. Where do you run that? You need a secure execution capability. Pass that to Ansible, that single task and now we run inside the automation platform at any of those locations that you just mentioned, right? Stitching those things together and having that sequence of events all the way through where you pre-define what's possible. You start to bias the system towards what is your accepted standard and then let those clever systems do what you're investing in them for, which is to run your IT and make it easier. Rich here was on earlier. I said, hey, about voice activated IT, provision the cluster. Last question, guys, before we run out of time for customers to take advantage of this new frontier, how can they get started with the venture of Ansible? That's a good question. We've engaged our community because they trust us and we trust them to build really good products. Ansible.com slash events. Oh man. I had the cut. The landing page? Somebody find that. Well, it's on GitHub, right? Yes, it is. Yeah, it is, absolutely. Ansible.com, it's probably a link somewhere on the front page on GitHub that could coach you. Exactly, and so look at there. You can see where we're going on a roadmap, what we're capable of today. Examples, we're going to be doing labs and blogs and demonstrations of it over the next day, week, month, right? You'll be able to see this evolve. You get to be the sort of vanguard of support and actions on this. Because we really want users to play with it. We've been doing this for a while. We think he's right. We want users to play with it, tell us whether the syntax works, whether it makes sense, how does it run, how does it work? That's the exciting part. But at the same time, we want the partners. We don't know all the technologies. We want the partners that we have that work with us already in the community to go and sort of do those integrations, do those triggers to their systems, define rules for their stuff. Because they'll talk to their customers about it as well. It'll be exciting to see what unfolds over the next six to nine months or so with the partners getting involved, the community getting involved. Guys, congratulations on the big announcement. Sounds like a lot of work. I can tell, we can tell your excitement level is huge. And a job well done. Thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE. Thank you very much. Our pleasure. All right, for our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Chicago in Civil Fest 22. John and I will be right back with our next guest of Stay Tuned.