 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering AnsibleFest 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2019 here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Stu Miniman, really excited to be at this event for the first time, getting to talk to a number of the practitioners, talking to some of the executives, and to give us a slightly different angle on it. We're really going to talk about education and what's happening in the space, and joining me, first time guest on the program, Carlos Casado, who is an associate professor at Syracuse University. Carlos, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, thanks for inviting me. All right, so Syracuse, the snow belt hasn't hit yet for 2019, up your neck of the woods, but tell us a little bit about what you do, the programs you work on, and then we'll get into how much automation is a piece of that. Okay, so I'm a professor of the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, and about two years ago, we decided to launch a new master's degree program on enterprise data systems that focuses on cloud technologies, automation, scripting, and all that's required nowadays to manage and work with infrastructure that data-centric enterprises need nowadays. Basically, we saw this need because the traditional, let's say, way of working with infrastructure from the command line interface wasn't going to cut it anymore. You need to work at scale, you need new concepts, APIs, get containerization, virtualization. So we need to create a program that replace our traditional networking program and modernize it and bring it up to speed with what's currently happening in the industry. I think that's great. We talk about how do we close the gap between what business needs, what skill sets are needed, and what's coming out of university. For a long time, it was like, okay, let's get everybody in computer sciences and do that, but whatever programming language you learn today, it's like, oh boy, it seems to change and be out of date there. And if you talk about a master's degree in IT, we're working with how does the technology and the business, how do they work together? So I have to imagine that this, that master's level helps prepare your students to kind of live in that world. Yes, we're a bit different than what you would call a traditional network engineering degree, which focuses a lot on the technology. We embed or try to give our students also a business perspective. So they learn management, information management or management concepts for information professionals, information policy concepts, so they understand the business side, but then we also embed a lot of technology components into their curriculum. So the idea is to have this kind of multidisciplinary hybrid professional that understands that whatever's being worked at the infrastructure level needs to support the goals of the business and can walk those worlds, be a good participant in teams. That's everything, collaboration's the key nowadays as we've seen in this. Carlos, what prerequisites do your students have to have coming in? I mean, do they need to be certified on a certain network year? What do they need to understand? And what do you give them that might be different than what they would have gotten out in industry? Well, preferably students that come in should have some knowledge of networking, the TCP IP stack, basically, what routing and IP addresses. And from there on, they'll see courses on advanced networking, scripting, cloud management, cloud architecture, and so forth, plus the business side, as I mentioned, to get them prepared for the real world. Okay, one of the things that was, you know, greatly talked about here is really that evolution of automation. You know, how do we move it from being a, just, you know, tactical, one of the keynote speakers yesterday talked about, you know, the whack-a-mole, I'm going to solve all of these little problems to a more strategic view. How have you been seeing and how does the evolution of automation impact your curriculum? Well, that's a great question. So the idea is not to have automation for the sake of automation. Like I said, we need a business focus and whoever is participating in a team and moving the automation story forward needs to be conscious that the end goal is to support the business. However, in terms of how it has impacted our curriculum, we embedded automation in several courses because that's the way to go in the future. You can't just cut it with, you know, a device-by-device kind of approach. So everything nowadays changes too quickly and the demands for businesses to respond to these changes require a quick turnaround for whatever the infrastructure needs to provide to support the business. So we need to build professionals that understand this and can apply innovation to their benefit of their enterprise. Yeah, okay, one of the interesting conversations we've had this week is that the software, the technology is actually helping to drive some of the collaboration and communication between groups and roles. You know, how much of that does that get touched on at all? You know, when you talk about working with the business and doing all that. Yes, so we can build on team-based assignments and labs just to get students to understand they're going to have to be part of a team. And you might have people that speak a different language than you or at a different level. You are, let's say, more business-oriented, more process-oriented, more technology-oriented, but you have to be, well, at least the professional we're preparing, have to be that glue that keeps the team cohesive and working together to a common goal. So yeah, collaboration is key. We've seen that in this event that it's all about changing the culture and having this, let's say, positive approach towards being collaborative. And we're hoping that we're building professionals that, from day one, understand this and can be part of a team. All right, so you talk about that collaboration. I'm curious, in higher education, you know, how is what you're doing impacting your peers? How do you learn from both your peers in education as well as in industry? Well, so at least, you know, at our university, we have a culture of collaboration between different departments and disciplines. So I work a lot with engineering. We might work a lot with the business school, law school. So again, to bring this interdisciplinary knowledge to students. We also like to reach out to industry and build partnerships, build bridges so that we can leverage some of the resources they have to, well, promote or educate people on their products, but also to get students to actually be very hands-on and work with things that are out there in the real world. So the idea is that they can speak the same language as many professionals that are already out there. Yeah, can you speak to, you know, Red Hat participation? How are they partnering and enabling what your mission is? So I've been using Ansible in several of my courses. And so we have a scripting course, just to mention one, where we do a lot of modules on Ansible and again, to understand this concept of mass automation, that automation is the key element for moving infrastructure and having infrastructure deliver goals in the future. So with Red Hat, we partner such that we get to use their products in an easy way and we keep on building new bridges to use more of the products. Now with the announcement of the automation platform, I really want to dig into that and start building new labs for students on that platform. Okay, so it sounds like you're excited by the announcement. Anything particular that caught your eye on that? It sounds like the networking pieces with collections seems like something that might be useful. Yes, so well, being an information school, we're big on data, right? So now you have the story of being able to automate at the device or service level, putting that into Ansible Tower, doing access control, monitoring, and then collecting statistics based on that, monitoring the performance of your playbooks, monitoring the performance of your automation tasks. So having that data, that analytics side, for example, is quite exciting for an information school because we might get some ideas as to how to leverage that in the future. So I'm wondering if you could share kind of what your students think about automation in general. If you talk about just the general workforce, over the years there's sometimes that fear, oh, the robots and the automations are going to take over what I'm doing. Is there any of that fear from the generation or does working with the technology help enable what they're looking to do? Well, it's definitely kind of a mixed bag. So until students get introduced to tools like Ansible, they do have some of the fear that, well, now it's like one person can do the work of 20 or 30 people. But once they understand the story of tools like Ansible, they change their focus. I had two students at the Ansible FAST last year and they were amazed about looking at the way that many enterprises are using automation. So it's not just about taking out these mundane tasks that network managers have to do, is getting the time to actually innovate, to be creative, get rid of those tasks that occupy time but are not really important. They're the minimum tasks to get the ship moving along but then build on top of that to create new products and new services. Yeah, it's interesting. If you look at the research on it, information technology often has not had the efficiency increases of kind of worker productivity that you might expect and definitely not to the point that it's going to be massive job, killing of jobs. Hopefully, when we talk to some of the people here, it should improve your job satisfaction, hopefully get rid of some of those, oh my gosh, I got to spend every fifth weekend working on this and we can automate some of those away but yeah, there's that disconnect between the reality and what the technology is actually doing. Yes, you don't want to be putting fires every weekend or every day and you want to bring additional value to the enterprise and I think that's what automation allows in a big way. Great, so Carlos, you've been to Ansible Best before. It gives your impression so far, the event this week and some of the key things that you have been or are looking to take away from Ansible Best 2019. Well, as I mentioned before, the automation platform, definitely want to look into that. I think the way that people are talking about collaboration around automation is very important. I think that kind of validates the team-based focus and approach to some of our assignments at least at the program level. Also, I think the way that companies are now telling their stories of automation is pretty neat. I hope to bring some of them into the curriculum. I just saw one from these guys from New Zealand at data.com. They had videos as to how they implemented some big massive automation tasks. That was pretty interesting. So hopefully I get to take some of what I've learned here into the curriculum. Yeah, and just final thing, how prevalent are these curriculums of automation throughout the country? Any data on that? Well, that's a good question. So basically, I would split the universities of the programs like in three groups. So you have one group that's developing programs mostly on the network engineering side, very, very technical. Other group that probably hasn't really catched on the evolution of networking and probably just teaching networking in the same traditional manner, hoping to get people prepared for Cisco certifications or certifications of all the type, very static, traditional network instruction. And then there are other groups which we would be in kind of the middle where it's not fully about the technology, it's also about the business and how much you concentrate on both sides is where we can distinguish each of these programs. So besides us, I think there are a couple smaller universities that are also preparing these transitions. It's a hard thing to do because things change so quickly and it's a hard for faculty to keep up and we want to do a little up-to-date content with students and it's extremely difficult. My content changes by at least a third from year to year. So I have to prepare new slides, new assignments, new labs, get more infrastructure. It's very exciting but also very challenging. And so we hope that our students are built to embrace change, prepare for it and not oppose it. I think that's a great mission. Not only does the technology and the business need to work close together but we know that the only constant in our industry is change so being prepared for as a workforce to be able to live in that and thrive in that environment is so critically important. Carlos, thank you so much for sharing with us the curriculum at Syracuse and we look forward to catching up with you in the future. Thank you. All right, we'll be back with lots more coverage. Stu Miniman, John Furrier is also in the house. It's our two days live coverage here from Antipole Pest 2019 Atlanta. Thanks for watching theCUBE.