>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco.
It's theCUBE!
Covering RedHat Summit 2018.
Brought to you by Red Hat.
>> Alright welcome back, this is theCUBE's exclusive
coverage of Red Hat 2018.
I'm John Furrier, the co host of theCUBE
with John Troyer, co-founder of
TechReckoning Advisory Firm.
Next guest is Chris Wright, Vice President
and CTO Chief of Technology of his Red Hat.
Great to see you again, thanks for joining us today.
>> Yeah, great to be here.
>> Day one of three days of CUBE coverage,
you got, yesterday had sessions over there
in Moscone South, yet in classic Red Hat fashion,
good vibes, things are rocking.
Red Hat's got a spring to their step,
making some good calls technically.
>> Chris: That's right.
>> Kubernetes' one notable, Core OS Acquisition,
really interesting range, this gives,
I mean I think people are now connecting the dots
from the tech side, but also now on the business side,
saying "Okay we can see now some, a wider market
opportunity for Red Hat".
Not just doing it's business with Linux,
software, you're talking about a changing
modern software architecture, for application developers.
I mean, this is a beautiful thing, I mean.
>> Chris: It's not just apps but it's the operator,
you know, operation side as well, so
we've been at it for a long time.
We've been doing something that's really similar
for quite some time, which is building
a platform for applications, independent
from the underlying infrastructure,
in the Linux days I was X86 hardware,
you know, you get this HeteroGenius hardware underneath,
and you get a consistent standardized application run time
environment on top of Linux.
Kubernetes is helping us do that at a distributive level.
And it's taken some time for the industry
to kind of understand what's going on,
and we've been talking about hybrid cloud for years and,
you really see it real and happening
and it's in action and for us that distributed layer
round Kubernetes which just lights up
how do you manage distributed applications
across complex infrastructure, makes it really real.
>> Yeah it's also timing's everything too right?
I mean, good timing, that helps,
the evolution of the business,
you always have these moments and these big waves where
you can kind of see clunking going on,
people banging against each other and you know,
the glue layers developing, and then all of a sudden
snaps into place, and then it just scales, right?
So you're starting to see that,
we've seen this in other ways, TCPIP,
Linux itself, and you guys are certainly
making that comparison, being Red Hat,
but what happens next is usually an amazing growth phase.
Again, small little, and move the ball down the field,
and then boom, it opens up.
As a CTO, you have to look at that 20 mile stair now,
what's next?
What's that wave coming that you're looking at
in the team that you have on Red Hat's side
and across your partners?
What's the wave next?
>> Well there's a lot of activity going on
that's beyond what we're building today.
And so much of it, first of all,
is happening in Open Source.
So that itself is awesome.
Like we're totally tuned into these environments,
it's core to who we are, it's our DNA
to be involved in these Open Source communities,
and you look across all of the different projects
and things like machine learning and blockchain,
which are really kind of native Open Source developments,
become really relevant in ways that we can
change how we build functionality and build business,
and build business value in the future.
So, those are the things that we look at,
what's emerging out of the Open Source communities,
what's going to help continue to accelerate
developers' ability to quickly build applications?
Operations team's ability to really give
that broad scale, policy level view of
what's going on inside your infrastructure
to support those applications,
and all the data that we're gathering
and needing to sift through and build value from
inside the applications, that's very much where we're going.
>> Well I think we had a really good example of
machine learning used in an everyday
enterprise application this morning,
they kicked off the keynote, talking about
optimizing the schedule and
what sessions were in what rooms,
you know, using an AI tool right?
>> Chris: That's right.
>> And so, that's reality as you look at,
is that going to be the new reality
as you're looking into the future of
building in these kind of machine learning opportunities
into everyday business applications
that, you know, in the yesteryear
would've been just some, I don't know,
visual basic, or whatever, depending on
how far back you look, right?
You know, is that really going to be a
reality in the enterprise?
It seems so.
>> It is, absolutely.
And so what we're trying to do is
build the right platforms, and build the right tools,
and then interfaces to those platforms and tools
to make it easier and easier for developers
to build, you know, what we've been calling
"Intelligent Apps", or applications that
take advantage of the data, and the
insights associated with that data,
right in the application.
So, the scheduling optimization that you
saw this morning in the keynote is
a great example of that.
Starting with basic rules engine,
and augmenting that with machine learning intelligence
is one example, and we'll see more and more of that
as the sophisticated tools that are coming out of
Open Source communities building machine learning
platforms, start to specialize and make it
easier and easier to do specific machine learning tasks
within an application.
So you don't have to be a data scientist
and an app developer all in one,
you know, that's, there's different roles
and different responsibilities,
and how do we build, develop, life cycle managed models
is one question, and how do we take advantage
of those models and applications is another question,
and we're really looking at that
from a Red Hat perspective.
>> John F: And the enterprises are always challenged,
they always (mumbles),
Cloud Native speaks to both now, right?
So you got hybrid cloud and now multi-cloud on the horizon,
set perfectly up with Open Shift's kind of position
in that, kind of the linchpin, but you got,
they're still two different worlds.
You got the cloud-native born in the cloud,
and that's pretty much a restart-up these days,
and then you've got legacy apps with container,
so the question is, that people are asking is,
okay, I get the cloud-native, I see the benefits,
I know what the investment is, let's do it upfront,
benefits are horizontally scalable,
asynchronous, et cetera et cetera, but I got legacy.
I want to do micro-servicing, I want to do
server-less, do I re-engineer that
or just containers, what's the technical view
and recommendation from Red Hat
when you say, when the CIO says or
enterprise says, "Hey I want to go cloud native
for over here and new staff,
but I got all this old staff, what do I do?".
Do I invest more region, or just containerize it,
what's the play?
>> I think you got to ask kind of always why?
Why you're doing something.
So, we hear a lot, "Can I containerize it?",
often the answer is yes.
A different question might be, "What's the value?",
and so, a containerized application,
whether it's an older application that's
stateful or whether it's a newer cloud-native application
(mumbles), horizontally scalable, and all the great things,
there's value potentially in just the automation
around the API's that allow you to
lifecycle manage the application.
So if the application itself is still continuing to change,
we have some great examples with some of our customers,
like Keybank, doing what we call the
"Fast moving monolith".
So it's still a traditional application,
but it's containerized and then you
build a CICD model around it, and you have
automation on how you deliver and deploy production.
There's value there, there's also value
in your existing system, and maybe
building some different services
around the legacy system to give you access,
API access, to data in that system.
So different ways to approach that problem,
I don't think there's a one size fits all.
>> So Chris, some of this is also a cultural
and a process shift.
I was impressed this morning, we've already
talked with two Red Hat customers,
Macquarie and Amadeus, and you know
Macquarie was talking about,
"Oh yeah we moved 40 applications in a year,
you know, onto Open Shift",
and it turns out they were already started
to be containerized and dockerized and,
oh yeah yeah you know, that is standard
operating procedure, for that set of companies.
There's a long tail of folks who are still
dealing with the rest of the stuff
we've had to deal, the stack we've
had to deal with for years.
How is Red Hat, how are you looking at
this kind of cultural shift?
It's nice that it's real, right?
It's not like we're talking about microservices,
or some sort of future, you know, Jettison sort of thing,
that's going to save us all, it's here today
and they're doing it.
You know, how are you helping companies get there?
>> So we have a practice that we put in place
that we call the "Open Innovation Lab".
And it's very much an immersive practice
to help our customers first get experience
building one of these cloud native applications.
So we start with a business problem,
what are you trying to solve?
We take that through a workshop,
which is a multi-week workshop,
really to build on top of a platform like Open Shift,
real code that's really useful for that business,
and those engineers that go through that process
can then go back to their company
and be kind of the change agent for
how do we build the internal cultural shift
and the appreciation for Agile development methodologies
across our organization, starting with
some of this practical, tangible and realist.
That's one great example of how we can help,
and I think part of it is just
helping customers understand it isn't just technology,
I'm a technologist so there's part of me
that feels pain to say that but
the practical reality is there's whole
organizational shifts, there's mindset and cultural changes
that need to happen inside the organization
to take advantage of the technology
that we put in place to build that optimize.
>> John F: And roles are changing too,
I'll see the system admin kind of administrative
things getting automated way through more operating role.
I heard some things last week at CubeCon in
Copenhagen, Denmark, and I want to share
some quotes and I want to get your reaction.
>> Alright.
>> This is the hallway, I won't attribute the names but,
these were quotes, I need, quote,
"I need to get away from VP Engine firewalls.
I need user and application layer security
with unfishable access, otherwise I'm never safe".
Second quote, "Don't confuse lift and shift with
running cloud-native global platform.
Lot of actors in this system already running seamlessly.
Versus say a VM Ware running environment
wherein V Center running in a data center
is an example of a lift and shift".
So the comments are one for (mumbles) cloud,
you need to have some sort of security model,
and then two, you know we did digital transformation
before with VM's, that was a different world,
but the new world's not a lift and shift,
it's re-architect of a cloud-native global platform.
Your reaction to those two things,
and what that means to customers as they think about
what they're going to look like,
as they build that bridge to the future.
>> Security peace is critical, so every CIO
that we're talking to, it's top of mind,
nobody wants to be on the front page of
The Wall Street Journal for the wrong reasons.
And so understanding, as you build a
micro-services software architected application,
the components themselves are exposed to services,
those services are API's that become potentially
part of the attack surface.
Thinking of it in terms of VPN's and firewalls,
is the kind of traditional way that we manage
security at the edge.
Hardened at the edge, soft in the middle
isn't an acceptable way to build a security policy
around applications that are internally
exposing parts of their API's to other
parts of the application.
So, looking at it for me, application
use case perspective, which portions of the application
need to be able to talk to one another,
and it's part of why somebody like Histio
are so exciting, because it builds right in
to the platform, the notion of
mutual authentication between services.
So that you know you're talking to a service
that you're allowed to talk to.
Encryption associated with that,
so that you get another level of security
for data and motion, and all of that is
not looking at what is the VPN
or what is the VLAN tag, or what is the
encapsulation ID, and thinking layer two,
layer three security, it's really
application layer, and thinking in terms of
that policy, which pieces of the application
have to talk to each other, and
nobody else can talk to that service
unless it's, you know, understood
that that's an important part for
how the application works.
So I think, really agree, and
you could even say DevSecOps to me
is something that I've come around to.
Initially I thought it was a bogus term
and I see the value in considering
security at every step of build,
test and deliver an application.
Lift and shift, totally different topic.
What does it mean to lift and shift?
And I think there's still, some people want to say
there's no value in lift and shift,
and I don't fully agree, I think there's still value
in moving, and modernizing the platform
without changing the application,
but ultimately the real value does come in
re-architecting, and so there's that balance.
What can you optimize by moving?
And where does that free up resources
to invest in that real next generation
application re-architecting?
>> So Chris, you've talked about machine learning, right?
Huge amounts of data, you've just talked about security,
we've talked about multi-cloud, to me that says
we might have an issue in the future with the data layer.
How are people thinking about the data layer,
where it lives, on prem, in the cloud,
think about GDPR compliance, you know,
all that sort of good stuff.
You know, how are you and Red Hat,
how are you asking people to think about that?
>> So, data management is a big question.
We build storage tooling, we understand
how to put the bytes on disc, and persist,
and maintain the storage, it's a different question
what are the data services, and what is
the data governance, or policy around placement,
and I think it's a really interesting
part of the ecosystem today.
We've been working with some research partners
in the Massachusetts Open Cloud and Boston University
on a project called "Cloud Dataverse",
and it has a whole policy question around data.
'Cause there, scientists want to share data sets,
but you have to control and understand
who you're sharing your data sets with.
So, it's definitely a space that we
are interested in, understand,
that there's a lot of work to be done there,
and GDPR just kind of shines a light right on it
and says policy and governance around
where data is placed is actually fundamental and important,
and I think it's an important part,
because you've seen some of the
data issues recently in the news,
and you know, we got to get a handle on
where data goes, and ultimately,
I'd love to see a place where
I'm in control of how my data is shared
with the rest of the world.
>> John F: Yeah, certainly the trend.
So a final question for you,
Open Source absolutely greatness going on,
more and more good things are happening
in projects, and bigger than ever before,
I mean machine learning's a great example,
seeing not just code snippets,
code bases being you know, TensorFlow jumps out at me
(mumbles), what are you doing here
this year that's new and different from
an Open Source standpoint, but also
from a Red Hat standpoint that's notable
that people should pay attention to?
>> Well, one of the things that we're focused on
is that platform layer, how do we
enable a machine learning workload
to run well on our platform?
So it starts actually at the very bottom of the stack,
hardware enablement.
You got to get GPUs functional,
you got to get them accessible to
virtual machine based applications,
and container based applications,
so that's kind of table stakes.
Accelerate a machine learning workload
to make it usable, and valuable,
to an enterprise by reducing the training
and interference times for a machine learning model.
Some of the next questions are
how do we embed that technology in our own products?
So you saw Access Insights this morning,
talking about how we take machine learning,
look at all of the data that we're gathering
from the systems that our customers are
deploying, and then derive insights from those
and then feed those back to our customers
so they can optimize the infrastructure
that they're building and running and maintaining,
and then, you know, the next step is that
intelligent application.
How do we get that machine learning capability
into the hands of the developer,
and pair the data scientist
with the developers so you build these
intelligent applications, taking advantage
of all the data that you're gathering
as an enterprise, and turning that into value
as part of your application development cycle.
So those are the areas that we're focused on
for machine learning, and you know,
some of that is partnering, you know,
talking through how do we connect
some of these services from Open Shift
to the cloud service providers that are
building some of these great machine learning tools, so.
>> Any new updates on (mumbles)
the success of Red Hat just in the past two years?
You see the growth, that correlates,
that was your (mumbles) Open Shift,
and a good calls there, positioned perfectly,
analysts, financial analysts are really
giving you guys a lot of props on Wall Street,
about the potential revenue growth opportunities
on the business side, what's it like now at Red Hat?
I mean, do you look back and say,
"Hey, it was only like three years ago
we did this", and I mean, the vibes are good,
I mean share some inside
commentary on what's happening inside Red Hat.
>> It's really exciting.
I mean, we've been working on these things for a long time.
And, the simplest example I have is
the combination of tools like the JBoss Middleware Suite
and Linux, well they could run well together
and we have a lot of customers that
combine those, but when you take it to the next step,
and you build containerized services
and you distribute those broadly,
you got a container platform,
you got middleware components,
you know, even providing functionality
as services, you see how it all comes together
and that's just so exciting internally.
And at the same time we're growing.
And a big part of--
>> John F: Customers are using it.
>> Customers are using it, so putting things
into production is critical.
It's not just exciting technology but it's in production.
The other piece is we're growing,
and as we grow, we have to maintain
the core of who we are.
There's some humility that's involved,
there's some really core Open Source principles
that are involved, and making sure that as we
continue to grow, we don't lose sight of who we are,
really important thing for our internal culture, so.
>> John F: Great community driven, and great job.
Chris, thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it.
Chris Wright, CTO of Red Hat,
sharing his insights here on theCUBE.
Of course, bringing you all a live action as always
here in San Francisco in Moscone West,
for Red Hat Summit 2018, we'll be right back.
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