 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 19. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. We're back at Google Cloud Next at the new improved Moscone Center. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Google's big cloud show. theCUBE is a leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. John Furrier is walking the floor, checking out the booth space. Ranga Rangachari is here. The vice president and general manager of cloud storage and hyper-converged infrastructure at Red Hat. Ranga, good to see you again. Dave, hi Stu. Good to see you again too. Thanks for coming on this show. It's growing nicely. Good thing Moscone is new and improved. How's the show going for you? Show's going really good. I just had a chance to walk around the booths and a lot of interesting conversations and the Red Hat booths too. There have been a lot of interesting conversations with customers. A lot of tailwinds these days for Red Hat. We talk about that a lot on theCUBE. This whole notion of hybrid cloud, you guys have been on that since the early days. Multi-cloud, Omni-cloud, hyper-converged infrastructure, it's in your title. It's like that all the moons are lining up for you guys. Is it just luck, skill, great prediction powers? What's your take? Well, I think it's a combination of those, but more importantly, it's about listening to our customers. I think that's what gives us today the permission to talk to our customers about some of these things they're doing. Because when we talk to them, it's not just about solving today's problems, but also where they're headed and anticipating where they're going and the ability to meet their needs. So is that thing. So the Google partnership, we were talking earlier, it started 10 years ago with the hypervisor. And it's really evolved. Where is it today from your perspective? Well, I think it continues to, we continue to cooperate in the technical community very well. And a couple of data points, right? One is that on Kubernetes, that started what, four or five years ago. And that's going really strong. But more importantly, as the industry matures, there are what I would call special interest groups that are starting to emerge in the Kubernetes community. One thing that we are playing very close attention to is the storage segment, which is the ability to federate storage across multiple clouds. And how do you do it seamlessly within the framework of Kubernetes, as opposed to trying to create a hack or a one-off that some vendors attempted to do. So we try to take a very holistic view of it and make sure, I mean, the industry we are in, standards drive volumes and volumes drive standards. So I think we play very, very close. And the objective there is leave the data in place if possible, provide secure access and fast access, provide high-speed data movement, if necessary, protect the data in motion. That is a complex problem. It is, it is. And that's why I think it's very important that the community together solves the problem, not just one vendor, but it's about how do you facilitate, the holy grail is how do you facilitate data portability and application portability across these hybrid clouds? And a lot of the things that you talked about at parts and parcel of that, but what users don't want to do is stitch them together. They want a simple, easy way. And most common example that we often get asked is, kind of migrate my data from one cloud to the other, from on-prem to a public cloud based on certain policies. That's a prototypical example of how federated storage and other things can help with that. Ranga, bring us inside some of those customer conversations because we talk on theCUBE, we go back to, customers always say, I want multi-vendor. Yes, I don't want lock-in. Portability is a good thing. But at the end of the day, some of these things, if it's some science experiment or if it's difficult, well, sometimes it's easier just to kind of stick on a similar environment. We know the core of Red Hat, it's that if I build on top of RHEL, then I know it can work lots of places. So where are customers at? How does that fit into this whole discussion of multi-cloud? What I can kind of give you a perspective of the hybrid cloud, the product strategy that we've been on for a better part of a decade now is around facilitating the hybrid cloud. So if you look at the open or the storage nature of the data nature of the conversations, it's almost two sides of the same coin, which is the developers want storage to be invisible. They don't want to be in the business of stitching their lungs and their zone, masking all that stuff. But yet at the same time, they want storage to be ubiquitous. So they want it to be invisible, they want it to be ubiquitous. So that's one of the key themes that we're hearing from customers. Come on, Rango, you guys are announcing storage lists this year, right? Yeah. Exactly. So that's a great point. The other part that we are also seeing from our customer conversations is, I think, let me give you kind of the red hat inside out perspective, is any products, anything that would release to the market, the first filter that we run through is, will it help our customers with our open hybrid cloud journey? So that kind of becomes the filter for any new features we add, any go to market motion so that there's a tremendous amount of impedance match, if you will, between where we are going and how customers can succeed with their open hybrid cloud journey. So in thinking about some of the discussions you're having with customers on their hybrid cloud strategy specifically, what are those conversations like? What are the challenges that they're having? It's a maturity spectrum, obviously, but what are you seeing at each level of the spectrum and where are some of those execution, formulation and execution challenges? So, I mean, as the industry evolves, as the technology matures, the conversation changed, right? And 12, 24 months ago, it was a dramatically different conversation, right? It was all around, you know, help me get there, right? Now the conversation is people really understand and most of the conversations that we see and even the other industry players are seeing this is, the conversation starts with on-prem looking out as opposed to a cloud looking in, right? So, customers say, look, I've invested a tremendous amount of assets, intellectual horsepower into building my on-prem infrastructure and make it solid. Now give me the degree of freedom for me to move certain workloads to one or many of these public clouds. So that's kind of a huge shift in the conversations we have with our customers. If you click one or a couple of levels below, the conversations talks about things like security, as you pointed out. It's just how do you ensure that if I move my workload, my overall corporate compliance stuffs aren't, you know, anyway compromised. So that's one aspect. The other aspect is manageability. Can I really manage this infrastructure from a proverbial single pane of glass? So now the conversations are less about more theoretical. It's more about I've started the journey, helped me make this journey successful. So when you talk about the perspective of I've built up this on-prem infrastructure, I've invested a ton in it, and now helped me connect, I could see a mindset that would say, think cloud first, of course the practical reality says I've got all this technical debt. So how much of that is going to be a potential pitfall down the road for some of these companies in your view? Well, you know, I think it's not so much of a technical debt. One way you could call it a technical debt, but the other aspect is how do you really leverage the investment that you've made without having to just say, well I'm going to do things differently? Right, so that's why I think the conversations we have with our customers are mutually beneficial because we can help them by the same token. They can help us understand where some of the roadblocks are and through our products, through our services, we can help them circumvent or mitigate some of this. And those assets aren't depreciated on the books, they've got to get a return on them, right? So Rango, we know that one of the areas that Red Hat and Google end up working a lot together is in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. You talk to, bring us up to speed as to where we are with that storage discussion because I think back when Docker launched, it was, oh, it's going to be wonderful and everything, but we all live through virtualization and we had to fix networking and storage challenges here and networking seemed to go a little further along and there's been a few different viewpoints as to how storage should be looked at in the containerized and the Kubernetes Istio world that we're moving towards today, so. So one example that illustrates storage being the center of this is there is a project called Rook.io, if you're familiar with this, think of it as kind of sitting between the storage infrastructure and Kubernetes. And that is taking on a tremendous amount of traction, not just in the community, but even within the CNCF. I could be wrong here, but my understanding, it's a project that's incubation phase right now. So we are seeing a lot of industry commitment to that Rook project and you're going to see real life use cases where customers are now able to fulfill the vision of data portability and storage portability across these multiple hybrid clouds. So Kubernetes is obviously taking off, although again, it's a maturity level, right? Some customers are diving in, others, maybe not so much. What are you seeing is some of the potential blockers? How are people getting started? Can you just download the code and go? What are you seeing there? Yeah, you know, and that's a very interesting question because we look at it as projects versus products, right, and Kubernetes is a project, a phenomenal amount of velocity, phenomenal amount of innovation, but once you deploy it in your production environment, things like security, things like life cycle management, all those things have to be in place before somebody deploys it. That's why in OpenShift, you've seen the tremendous amount of market acceptance we've had with OpenShift is a proof point that it is kind of the best Kubernetes out there because it's enterprise ready, people can deploy it, people can use it, people can scale with it, and not be worried about things like life cycle management, things like security, all the things that come into play when you deal with an upstream project. So what we've seen from our customer bases, people start to dabble and they look at Kubernetes, what's going on and understand where the areas of innovation are, but once they start to say, look, I got it deployed for some serious workloads, they look at a vendor who can provide all the necessary ingredients for them to be successful. We're having a good discussion earlier about customer's perspectives, I want to get as much out of that asset as I possibly can. You said something that interested me, I want to go back to it. Is customers want options to be able to migrate to various clouds? My question is, do you sense that that's because they want to manage their risk, they want an exit strategy, or are they actively moving more than once? Maybe they want to go once and then run in the cloud, or are you seeing a lot of active movement of that data? I think the first order of bit in those discussions are about the workloads. What workload do they want to run? And once they decide, this is the, for instance, with the Google Cloud, the ML AI type of workloads lend themselves very well to the Google Cloud infrastructure. So when a customer says, look, this is a workload I want to run on-prem, but I want the elastic capability for me to run on one of these public clouds, often the decision criteria seems to be what workload it is and where's the best place to run it in. And then the rest of the stuff comes into play. So, Rangit, let's step back for a second. I come out of the show, Google Cloud this year, and I'm hearing open, multi-cloud, reminds me of words I've heard going to Red Hat some of it for a year. Help us kind of just squint through a little bit as to where Red Hat sits in the customer, if I'm the C-suite of an enterprise customer today, where Red Hat fits in the partnership with customers and where the partners fit into that overall story. Yeah, so our view is let's look at it customer-in, right? And practically every customer that we talk to wants to embark on an open hybrid cloud story. And I want to kind of stress on the open part of it because it's the easier way to say, okay, let's me go build a hybrid cloud. The more difficult part is how do you facilitate a true open hybrid cloud story? And that's the march, if you will, that we've been on for the last five plus years. And that business strategy and the technology strategy has not, we've been unwavering on that. And the partners are, and we truly believe that for us to be successful, for our customers to be successful, we need an ecosystem of partners. And the cloud providers are absolutely a critical ingredient and a critical component of the overall strategy. And I think together with our partners and our core technology and our core go-to-market routes, we think we can really solve our customers, we are solving them today, and we think we can continue to solve them over time. And Tio, you're talking about open. Open has a lot of different definitions. Again, it's a spectrum. You know, Unix used to be open, right? So, I see that potentially as one real solid differentiator of Red Hat. I mean, your philosophy on open. But what do you see as your differentiators in the marketplace? Well, I think the first is obviously open, like you said. The second part is, I think I hinted upon it earlier, which is projects are good, right? I think they are almost a fountain of ideas and things, but I think where we spend a tremendous amount of herbs of energy is to transform it from an upstream project into a product. And if you go back, Red Hat Linux, I think we've shown that Red Hat Linux was in the same kind of state of, you know, vibe and other ways 10, 20 years ago. And I think what we've shown to the industry is by being solely committed and focused on making these projects enterprise ready, I think we've shown the market leading the way in making it successful. So, I think for us, the next wave, whether it's Kubernetes, whether it's other things, it's a very similar recipe book, nothing dramatically different. But fundamentally what we want to do is help our customers take advantage of those innovation, but yet not compromise on what they need in their enterprise data centers. The recipe book is similar, but you've got to make bets. You've made some pretty good bets over the years. You know, we could debate about OpenStack, but I mean, even there. But that's not an easy thing for an open source company to do because you got to pick your poison, you have to provide committers. What's the secret sauce there? Well, I think first off, I think the number one secret sauce from our perspective is add more technical and intellectual horse power to these communities. And not so much for the sake of community, it's about does it solve a real business problem for our customers? That's the way we go about it, because I mean, the open source community, I don't even know, hundreds of thousands of open source projects right are out there. And we pay in our office of the CTO plays very close attention to all the projects out there, identify the ones that have promised, not just from our perspective, but from a customer's perspective, and invest in those areas. And a lot of them have succeeded, so we think we'll do well in that. All right, so Ranga, one of the biggest announcements this week is Anthos from Google, want to get your viewpoint as to where that fits? You know, I think it's a good announcement, I haven't read through all the details, but part of it is, I think it validates to a certain extent what Red Hat has been talking about for the last five, seven years. Which is, you need a unified way to deploy, manage, provision your infrastructure, not just on public clouds, but a seamless way to connect to the on-prem. And I think Anthos is, you know, I guess a validation of how we've been thinking about the world. So we think it's great, we think it's really good. Ranga, Ranga, Sherry, thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. Thank you, David. Thank you again, Stu. Thank you again, sir. Have a great Red Hat Summit coming up in early May. theCUBE will be there, Stu will be co-hosting. You're watching theCUBE, day two of Google Cloud Next 2019 from Moscone. We'll be right back.