>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco it's theCUBE!
Covering Red Hat Summit 2016
brought to you by Red Hat.
Now here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely.
(upbeat techno music)
>> Welcome back.
Happy to have on the program,
fresh off the morning keynote, Paul Cormier,
who's the President of Products and Technology, Red Hat.
Paul, welcome back to the program.
>> Thank you, very much.
>> All right, so Brian and I have been looking
through the announcements that are made
and the line we had, "It's containers, containers
"and more containers."
So, you've got a certain belief as to not only
why Red Hat is relevant, but why Linux
and containers are fully enmeshed,
and why you guys should have the pole position
in this market place?
>> Sure, I mean, if you look at what containers are,
what the architecture is of containers,
containers is the Linux operating system
that is just reconfigured in a different way.
The host is the kernel and the container, itself,
is the marriage of the application
and the pieces of user space that the app needs.
It needs to be maintained, it needs to be lifecycled,
it needs all the things
that Linux and the enterprise needs today.
If you look, three, four months ago,
as I said in my keynote,
we had a buffer overflow bug in glibc.
There was a huge security gap, huge security hole,
virtually most every container on the planet had
that vulnerability in it.
So, our normal cycle is
what we do with Linux, we fixed it in 24 hours.
That's what you have to do to be a container vendor.
You literally have to be a commercial Linux vendor.
>> Okay, so if I walk through the show floor, I see lots
of companies that are talking about container.
Of course you got companies like Docker and CoreOS,
which is Linux distribution, but then even Intel, Dell,
Hewlett-Packard, Enterprise all being involved.
They're all partners of yours,
but you're competing with them.
How do you see those boundaries?
>> Well, not necessarily.
I mean, in the case of Intel,
they're working upstream in container development.
You talk about Docker, there's Docker the project
and Docker the company.
We like to call it big D, little D.
We're great partners upstream with Docker.
But Docker, the company, they're down a commercial path.
It's competitive.
But, it doesn't mean, we've worked with all vendors
and competitors upstream,
that's the way open source works.
We're totally fine with that.
Intel, as well, Intel works upstream.
But Docker, the company, with their platform,
they are a commercial Linux vendor.
I think they ship Alpine Linux inside their tools.
That's what, if enterprises run on that,
they will be moving to Alpine Linux,
>> Would you mind walking us through the Red Hat portfolio
and where containers touch everything?
Some of your products got some rebranding
and it looks like it touches everything.
>> Well, because it's Linux.
And Linux touches everything that we do.
Not only from a Red Hat perspective
but, even as I said in my keynote,
Linux has driven the innovation
that we're all deploying right now.
So, it's all intertwined.
So if you look at it, what we announced yesterday
and I talked about this morning,
is really container platform for all aspects
of the development cycle, all the way out.
Let's face it, companies moving to the Cloud,
it's all about the application moving to the Cloud.
Containers is a new way to carry an application.
It's about the app.
So, what we did was, OpenShift is our container,
both our container development and deployment platform.
So, it's a past platform for development.
We can add JBoss services on top of it
for developers to build their applications
with JBoss services, in a PaaS environment.
But also, it's a deployment platform for containers.
So, what we announced yesterday is in our
for developers development, we have a developer kit,
a CDK, a container development kit that's OpenShift.
It's free for all developers to use to develop their app.
Same bits as OpenShift, same rel as rel.
We then have the OpenShift platform for the lab,
once they put it in the lab to test and integrate
with other parts of the project.
And then container enterprise, which is OpenShift today.
And now we marry it with OpenStack
for a hybrid cloud OpenShift environment.
But, I think the point of it is, it's the same exact bits
and same platform in each of those steps.
And so a developer can start from day one
and already be integrated for the environment
that they're going to need
once they get all the way down to production.
We want to really want to drive this hard,
and so that's how we felt the best way to do it was.
Just take out the step
of developing on one thing, testing on another thing
and then deploying on another.
Start here and by the time you get here,
you're already integrated.
>> Yeah.
>> We've seen some interesting things
in the industry the last even just couple of weeks.
Containers on Windows, we've seen some
of the containers vendors starting to embed other parts
of how you run a container.
There's the container and there's operating it.
Kubernetes and Swarm.
What's Red Hat's philosophy on how kind of intertwined
that other stuff should be with Linux,
or with the containers versus, it's kind
of an architecture versus an end point discussion.
But what's your philosophy on that?
>> We are all about the OCI, open containers initiative.
And a whole group of companies, including Docker
and Google and Red Hat and others,
got together maybe nine months ago, a year ago or so
and developed OCI Open, containers initiative.
Which we standardized on the format of the container.
And really, what the tools for containers, it's a format
of the container, the packaging of the container.
We want to standardize on that
so that developers don't have to learn new things as they go
from one platform to the next.
So that's what we standardize.
What we do everyday, OpenShift is our container platform.
We bring various pieces, from various communities,
together in the platform.
We integrate that as products
and that's what the product is.
And so, containers itself,
we're most interested in the format.
As Docker, the company, goes to Swarm technologies
or other technologies, we'll evaluate each
of the technologies on their own merit.
Remember, we're driving real enterprises.
The technology that we put in our products has
to be ready for Enterprise deployment.
In our container product of OpenShift, we've focused
on Kubernetes as the orchestration engine.
We work, we're the number two contributor
in the Kubernetes community.
But also, it's the same thing, within that platform,
as our customers need new function,
it may come through the Kubernetes community
and all the way down in the product.
It may come from a different community.
We're about what we deliver
to the customer and we accomplish that
by integrating various technology pieces
from various communities.
>> Yeah.
You talked about everything's moving towards software.
Networking is based in Linux now, storage...
Do you find people understand,
that they grasp how much things have shifted
from proprietary networking, proprietary storage?
Obviously Linux has been on the server side.
You have to be a Linux admin, but you've got to be able
to patch it, you got to be able to do things in real time.
Are people grasping how broad the Linux movement has gotten
around everything?
>> I don't think a lot of the vendors grasp it, frankly.
You look at just the talk about containers.
How many vendors, which you're not going to get me to name,
how many vendors out there ever admit or tell you
that Linux is at the heart of the container?
I don't think a lot of the industry has
yet woken up to that.
They are starting to now
that we're seeing containers go into production.
Because prior to very recently,
as containers were mostly in dev and test,
you don't really have to worry about the lifecycle
and the things like that,
that you do once it's in production.
Now that they're going into production, now customers
and other vendors are realizing, it's real.
It's Linux inside and I have to figure out
how I'm going to maintain that.
And even from a customer perspective,
once they go into production they have to figure,
"Am I going to change my Linux environment overnight?"
The other thing that customers, they tell me all the time,
is we talk about the open hybrid cloud,
the footprints of applications running on physical,
virtual VMs, private clouds and public clouds.
What customers really want with that,
and this is where containers will come into play,
they want the ability to use those four footprints
as one environment.
They want to manage one environment, manage it as one,
they don't want an island.
They don't want, when their app's running in one
of the cloud providers, to be on one type
of Linux environment and when it's running
on their own private cloud, on a different.
They want one environment manages one.
I asked one of the CIOs of one of the major banks
on Wall Street a couple weeks ago,
"If you have an app that's running in one
"of the public clouds, and it has a security vulnerability,
"is that your problem or their problem?"
You know the answer, it's the customer's problem.
And that's the way they're looking at it.
It's a whole different look
as we're now going into production.
>> Yeah. >> Yeah,
Paul, in your keynote this morning,
you talked about consistency of experience
between whether it's bare-metal, virtualize
or in the public cloud.
When it comes to something like security, are we there yet?
How much do you have to develop differently
and can customers actually realize
that consistency across those environments?
>> That is all about the consistency.
So if you look in rel we have things like SC Linux,
and cgroups and things like that to isolate processes.
You can use all of those, even in a container environment,
because it is rel, it's rel inside.
So, that's the type, it's not just the consistency
of running the app, but people have built their tools
and processes are for security, around things
that are in the operating system.
They don't want to revamp those tools and processes
as they go to one of these different footprints,
including containers.
So, that is the beauty of what we can bring
to the enterprise.
We can keep them consistent for the apps, the processes
and the tools across that entire environment.
All the way out to the public cloud.
>> Yeah. >> You talked a
little this morning
that there's change in every dimension here.
It's almost a little bit chaotic,
we've never really seen every dimension changing.
When you talk to customers, when you talk to CIOs,
you're talking to banks, what are they telling you,
what are you hearing from them, what are the three
or four key things where you go,
"If I got to make an architectural decision,
"that one's really important, that one's really important,
"the rest of them, I can deal with change."
Are you seeing that yet?
>> No, they all want, the customers that I talk to,
what you heard maybe a year ago
from the public cloud providers,
some of the public cloud providers,
was the whole world was going to the cloud tomorrow.
And we all know that's impractical.
What I hear today, just as I talked about,
I want to use the public cloud as part of my environment
and not necessarily the environment.
I may even want to use it on demand
as part of my environment.
When I do that, I need to be able to manage it
with common tools, I need to be able to monitor,
I need to be able to secure it.
My applications, it's all about the applications.
So, that's what we hear all the time.
What we hear is, if I'm changing my infrastructure
to be hybrid cloud, it's a good time to go to containers
because that's why containers are popular right now,
it's a good vehicle for the app to get to the hybrid cloud.
But, they also have
to retool their entire management infrastructure as well,
because now they need to manage across those footprints.
So, that's what we hear.
They're looking at it from the whole big architecture piece,
they're taking it in pieces, they have a vision
where they want to go, but they absolutely want to keep control.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
>> So, Paul, we know Red Hat has this very strong commitment
to communities and building off open-source.
But what I'm curious about, Red Hat's gone well
beyond Linux as you go to things like Kubernetes
and you talked about just how many huge amount
of projects there are out there.
Are there subcultures in the communities?
Are there different ways you have to engage?
>> Paul: Oh, absolutely
>> If you could give some color on that?
>> There's sub-cultures, the Linux kernel is
an absolute meritocracy, OpenStack for example,
there's a board where you pay to play.
Many of these are being governed in such a way today.
We have to understand that and we play very different
in each of the communities.
That's the thing about us at Red Hat,
it still is the best technology wins.
We don't come in and put things in our products
that aren't going to be accepted in the appropriate community.
But it's also why we choose very carefully
of what communities we're going to base our products on.
And it's also why we feel very passionate
about being a huge contributor to the communities
that our products are dependent on.
In order to do that, you have to hire the best engineers.
You saw the guys giving a demo today?
We have world-class people.
The way they become effective
in these communities is not
because they have a Red Hat badge,
it's because they're just good.
And so, those are the guys that we bring
into the company for that reason.
>> One other thing I wondered if you would comment on,
usually software companies,
there's certain features they tell you about
and there's certain things they work on for a while.
When you're out in open source,
there can't be too many surprises.
How do you stay in the lead and how do you keep up
with what the customer's asking for?
>> A lot of times, we use storage is a great example.
A lot of times, there's areas
we feel they're important to build out our vision.
So, you look at storage.
You can't have a hybrid cloud with physical storage.
It's really tough to stuff an Isilon box down the wire
for your Amazon applications
to have access to their storage.
So, we knew we had to go, we went into software
to find storage specifically
with the use case of open hybrid cloud.
We didn't have a lot of expertise in storage
and we didn't have a lot of interaction
with any of the storage communities.
We bought a company.
We bought Gluster.
And the reason why, there was not a lot
of business there when we bought Gluster.
The reason we bought Gluster was the community.
And not to control it, but so we could invest in it.
Because we're not going to take our shareholders money
and go invest in a community
that we don't know is going to bear fruit for us down the road.
So, we buy a company,
we did the same thing with Qumranet when we went to KVM.
We buy a company that's the leader in a community
and we do that in order to invest.
And now it becomes part of the product portfolio,
now we can get a revenue stream going on it,
invest even more.
We did the same thing with Ansible, with Ceph.
We did the same things when we go buy.
The world's changing so much and we're sort of leading
that charge, the companies we buy are typically companies
like that, they're leading in a community.
It's a very different, trust me,
going to your board of directors and saying,
"I want to spend x hundred millions of dollars
"on this company that is going to be an integral part
"of our world, but doesn't necessarily have
"a lot of revenue right now.
"And oh, by the way, it's open."
Our board has come to very much support that
and understand that, that's what you see
in the acquisitions that we've done in the last years.
>> What about the public cloud players.
Look, Amazon announced a elastic file system today.
Microsoft has a long history of trying
to build software storage products.
Google has their own solution.
How do you balance,
they're on the one hand embracing Red Hat,
but also have competing solutions.
>> We're all about being able to bridge
from on-premise to off-premise in the cloud.
But also, the trend we're seeing from CIOs
now are starting to worry about bridging
across the cloud, across the public clouds.
So, that's what we're all about.
We can give you that consistency and anti-lock in
from on to off, as well as across.
People want to use the services in the public clouds,
that's great, some of these services are great.
But they have to understand, it's unlikely that Azure
or Google are going to support elastic cloud
from Amazon, down the road.
We're all about giving our customers a platform
to have consistency and to be open on,
across all aspects of that.
>> All right.
So, Paul, I want to give you the last word.
Lots of announcements, lots of exciting things going on.
What's a key takeaway you want people to have
from Red Hat Summit and what you've announced?
>> I think the key takeaway we want is,
it's around containers.
Containers is the next footprint of Linux.
And with our announcements this week, what we,
I think laid the gauntlet down is,
we're going to make this so usable and so consumable
by the enterprise, we actually want to increase the rate
of adoption beyond what it's been today.
>> All right.
Well, Paul, we really appreciate your insights here.
Container obviously major important move,
and really interested in what Red Hat's doing here.
We'll be back, lots more coverage from Red Hat Summit.
You're watching theCUBE.
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