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>> Hello from Chicago, Lisa Martin here
at AnsibleFest 2022 with John Furrier.
John, it's great to be here.
The transformation of enterprise
and industry through automation.
This is not only the 10th anniversary of Ansible,
this was the first in-person AnsibleFest since 2019.
>> It's awesome, it's awesome, Lisa,
and I want to welcome everyone to our live performance
here in Chicago.
We were remote for two years, 2019 in Atlanta.
AnsibleFest, part of Red Hat now, Red Hat part of IBM.
So much has happened in the past couple years
and I think one of the things
that we're going to cover this week here in Chicago,
is the evolution of Ansible,
where it fits into the new cloud-native ecosystems emerging,
and also, kind of, what it means
for developers and operators.
And we're going to see a lot of that here at AnsibleFest
with wall-to-wall coverage, keynote just happened.
Very interesting to see, you know,
Ansible stayed true to their knitting, as you say, you know.
What do they do? No big announcements.
Some big community news. But humble.
>> Very humble. Very humble, but also very excited.
All the keynotes did a great job
of addressing that community,
and being grateful to the community
for, really, the evolution that we see at Ansible
and now 10 years later.
They were talking a lot about smoothing operations
for the developers, democratizing automation
across the organization.
They talked a little bit about that skills gap.
I wanted to get your opinion, 'cause as we know there's,
they talked about it from a demand perspective,
there's over 300,000 open positions on LinkedIn
for Ansible skills.
So a lot of opportunity there,
a lot of opportunity for them
to help democratize automation across organizations.
>> Yeah, I mean, I think the big theme last year
we heard, "Three things, top three things
at AnsibleFest 2021, Animation, Automation, Automation."
Again, this year the same theme,
"Automate everywhere" is what they're talking about.
But I think you're right, there's a cultural shift
where the entire cloud ecosystems kind of spun
to the doorstep of what Ansible's ecosystem stood for
for many years in the decade, which is configuration,
running things at scale.
That notion is now persistent across all the enterprise.
And I think the key takeaway from the keynote,
in my opinion, is that configuration and automation
around devices and infrastructure stuff
is an enterprise architecture now,
it's not just a, kind of a corner case,
or a specific use case, it's going to be native
across the entire enterprise architecture.
And that's why we heard a lot
of cultural shift conversations.
And that is where the people
who are running the Ansible stuff,
they're going to be the keys to having the keys to the kingdom.
And I think you're going to see a lot more
of this automation at scale.
I love the introduction of ops-as-code,
that's a little piggyback off of infrastructure-as-code
and infrastructure-as-configuration.
They're saying operations now is the new software model
and it's like ops dev, not dev ops.
So it's really interesting to see how the operator
is now a very big important role
in the next level of cloud native.
And it's really exciting because this is kind of
what we've been reporting on theCUBE, for over 12 years.
So, watching Ansible grow organically
into a powerhouse community is very interesting.
To see how they operationalize this,
you know, going forward.
>> Well the operator's becoming really pivotal catalysts
in this next way, that you've been covering for 12 years.
You know, if we think about some of the challenges
and the barriers to adopting automation
that organizations have had,
one of them has been skills, staff rather.
The other has been, "Hey, we need to really determine
which processes to automate,
that's actually going to give us the most ROI,
most bang for our buck."
They talked a little bit about that today,
but that's still something that Ansible is working
with its customers and the community
to help sort of demystify.
>> Yeah and I think that they were front and center
around, "You on the room," people in the room,
"you make this happen."
They're very much, it's not a top-down corporate thing,
Ansible staying true to their roots as I mentioned.
But the thing about skills gap is interesting,
you heard Kaete Piccirilli talking about,
"Level Up how your organization automates,
push your people, expand your scope."
So the theme is, the power is in the hands of this community
to essentially be the new enterprise architecture
for operations.
At the same time that feeds the trend around,
we're seeing this accelerated cloud-native developer
we're seeing, we're going to be at KubeCon next week,
that cloud-native developer,
they want to go faster, they want self-service.
So you're seeing higher velocity cloud-native development
putting pressure on the ops teams to level up,
so the theme kind of connects for me.
I think Red Hat has got it right here, with Ansible,
that the theme is shifting to
ops better get their act together, to level up
and to the velocity of what the developers are expecting.
At the same time, giving them the freedom
to be using infrastructure-as-code,
infrastructure-as-configuration,
and ultimately, ops-as-code.
To me, I think this is like the evolution
of how infrastructure-as-code,
which is the nirvana of DevOps, now is ops-as-code.
Which means, if that's true,
ops becomes much more invisible,
if you will, which is what developers want.
>> And we're going to be breaking down ops-as-code today,
no doubt, in our conversations with some
of the great Ansible community folks
and partners and leaders that we have on,
as well as tomorrow in our full two days of coverage.
You talked about cultural shift,
we talk about that a lot John, it's challenging,
but one of the things I think that was very palpable
this morning, is the power of the Ansible community.
Not just those folks that are here with us in Chicago,
but all the folks watching virtually online.
>> Yeah. >> Truly help drive
that cultural shift that is needed for organizations
to really be able to streamline cloud ops.
>> Yeah and I think Adam Miller who came on,
I thought his portion was excellent, around community.
He talked about, you know, the 10 years,
put a little exclamation point on that.
Managing the communications within the community.
He actually brought up IRC and Slack
and then, "We have Discord."
And they introduced a new standard for communications
it's called Matrix, which is open-source based.
And even in their decision making,
their principles around open source stay true.
Again, they checked the box there,
I thought that was really cool.
The other thing that, within the meat of the product,
the automation platform,
Matt Jones was talking about the scale,
the managing at scale, is one thing.
But the thing that I think that hit, jumped out at me,
was that this trusted automation messaging was really huge.
Signing, having signatures,
that really hits the supply chain
that we've been talking about,
and we're going to talk about it next week at KubeCon,
the software supply chain is trusting the code.
And I think as you have automation,
it's a really big part of the new platform.
So, I thought that was really the meat on the bone there.
>> That was a very strong theme, was the trust this morning.
You know, another thing that was important
was Walter Bentley, who's coming on,
I believe, later today,
talked about how organizations really need to think
about the value that automation can deliver to the business
and then develop an automation strategy,
really thinking at it strategically rather than
what a lot of folks have done.
And they've put automation in sort of in silos and pockets.
He's really talking about,
how can you actually make it strategic
across the organization and make sure
that you really fully see and understand
and can articulate the value to the business,
from a competitive advantage perspective,
that it's going to deliver.
>> Yeah, and Stefanie Chiras who's coming on too,
she mentioned a lot about the multi-cloud,
multi-environment layer, how Ansible can sit
across all the environments
and then still support the cloud-native
through what she called "an automation loop".
That's going to be really talking to what we're seeing
as multi-cloud or super-cloud, next-gen cloud,
where Ansible's role of automating
isn't just corner case in the enterprise.
Again, if it's an enterprise-wide architecture,
it will be a centerpiece
of multi-cloud, multiple capabilities.
Whether that's compatibility services or, you know,
stuff running best of breed on different clouds.
'Cause, obviously Amazon was on stage here,
they're talking about this, big Ansible supporter.
So, we've got Google supporting Ansible,
so you got the multiple clouds
and even VM-Ware environments.
So, Ansible sits across all this.
And so, I think the big opportunity
that I'm seeing come out of this,
is that if Ansible is in this position,
this could be a catalyst for them
to be the multi-cloud hybrid architecture
for configuration and operations,
and I think, the edge is going to
be a really interesting conversation.
We have a lot of guests coming on, I'll talk about that.
But, I think running distributed workloads
across multiple clouds in multiple environments,
that's a killer app and we'll see if they can pull it off.
We're going to be drilling everyone on that topic today,
so I'm looking forward to it.
>> We're going to be dissecting that.
I like how you paint that picture of Ansible
really as the nucleus of that hybrid cloud strategy.
You know, so many organizations are living
in a hybrid cloud world for many reasons,
but for Ansible to be able to be that catalyst.
And question for you, if we think about that,
when we talk about multi-cloud strategically
or organically or whatnot, where is automation moving
in terms of the customer conversation?
We know Ansible's really focused
on smoothing the developer experience,
but where is automation going, in your vision,
up the C-suite stack?
>> Well, multi-cloud is a C-suite message
and they love to hear that,
but you talk to anyone who's in the trenches,
they hate multi-cloud.
It's more complexity
and there's a lot of issues around latency.
So what you're seeing is,
you're starting to see an evolution of more
about compatibility and interoperability.
And this is kind of classic enterprise abstraction layers
when you start getting into these inflection points,
as things get better, so it gets sometimes more complex.
So I think Ansible's notion of simplicity and ease of use,
could be the catalyst for this abstraction layer
between clouds.
So it's all about reducing the complexities,
because at the end of the day,
if you want to do something on multiple clouds,
whether that's run common services across,
that's not making it simpler.
You got to, it's going to be harder before it gets easier.
So, if that makes any sense.
So doing multi-cloud sounds great on paper,
but it's really hard
and that's why no one's really doing it.
So you're going to start to see multi-cloud,
what we call super-cloud,
which is more capabilities on one cloud.
And then having them still differentiate the idea
that some standard's going to emerge, is complete fantasy.
I think you're going to, we still need more innovation.
Amazon does a great job,
Microsoft's coming up on number two position as well,
the clouds still need to differentiate.
But that doesn't change Ansible's position.
They can still be that shim layer or bolt-on,
to whatever clouds do best.
If you run 'em on machine learning on Google, that's cool.
You want to use Amazon for this?
How do you make those work? That's a hard problem.
And, again, that's where automation ends up.
>> And with that context, do you think that Ansible
has the capability of helping to dial down some
of the complexity that's in this hybrid multi-cloud world?
>> Yeah, I mean, I think the thing about
what's going on great here, that's unique
in the history of the computer industry,
is open source is so powerful
and it continues to power away with growth.
So, more code is coming.
So, software supply chain is a big issue,
we heard that with the trusted thing,
but also now, how people buy now is different.
You can actually try stuff out on open source
and then go to Red Hat, Ansible, and say,
"Hey, I'm going to get some support."
So there's a lot of community collective intelligence
involved in decision making,
not just coding, but buyer selection and consumption.
So the entire paradigm of purchasing software and using it,
has completely changed.
So, that puts Ansible in a leading position
because they got a great community,
and now you've got open source continuing to thrive away.
So, if you're a customer,
you don't need the big enterprise sales pitch
you can just try the code, if you like it,
then you go with Ansible.
So it's really kind of set up nicely, this cloud market,
for companies like Ansible,
because they have the community and they got the software,
it's open and it is what it is, it's transparent,
everything's above board.
>> Yeah, you know, you talk about the community,
you mentioned Matrix earlier, and one of the things
that was also quite resonant during the keynote this morning
was the power of collaboration
and how incredibly important that is to them,
to stay native to their open-source roots, as you you said.
But also really go to where the customers are.
And they talked about that with respect to Matrix
and Discord and that was an interesting,
this is the community reaching out
to really kind of grow upon itself.
>> Well, being someone who's used all those tools,
even IRC 'cause I'm old, all the old folks use IRC.
Then the, kind of, Gen X'ers use,
and the millennials use Slack.
Discord, the way they mentioned Discord, it's so true.
If you're a gamer, you're younger, you're using Discord.
Now, Matrix is new, they're trying to introduce
an open source, 'cause remember they don't control Discord
and they don't control Slack.
So Slack's Salesforce now,
and Discord is probably going to try
to get bought by Microsoft, but still, it's not open.
So Matrix is their open-sourced chat service.
And I thought that was interesting
and I think, that got my attention,
because that went against the principles
of users that like Slack. So, it'd be great.
I mean if Matrix, if that takes off,
then that's going to be a case study of going against-the-grain
on the best-of-breed package software like Slack or Discord.
But I think the demographic shift is interesting.
Discord is for younger generations,
let's see how Matrix will do.
And the uptake wasn't that big.
Only been around for a couple months,
we've seen almost 5,000 members.
But, you know, not a failure.
>> Right. >> But not a home run either.
>> Right. Well we'll have to see
how that progresses- >> Yeah, we'll see
how that plays out. >> as all of the generations
in the workforce today try to work together and collaborate.
You know, if we think about some of the things
that we're going to talk about today and tomorrow,
business outcomes, increasing business agility,
being able to ensure compliance, with security
and regulatory requirements, which are only proliferating,
really also helping organizations to optimize those costs
and be as competitive as they possibly can.
So I'm excited to dissect the announcements
that came out today, some of the things
that we're going to hear today and tomorrow,
and really get a great view
of the automation infrastructure marketplace
and what's going on. >> Yeah, it's going to be great.
Infrastructure-as-code, infrastructure-as-config,
operations-as-code, it's all leading to,
you know, distributed computing edge. It's hybrid.
>> Yep. All right John- >> Yeah.
>> looking forward to two days of wall-to-wall CUBE coverage
with you, coming to you live from Chicago,
at the first AnsibleFest in person, since 2019.
Lisa Martin and John Furrier with you here all day today
and tomorrow, stick around, our first guest joins us.
We're going to dissect ops-as-code, stick around.
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