>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia,
It's theCUBE covering Ansible Fest 2019.
Brought to you by Red Hat.
>> Welcome back everyone.
It's theCUBE live coverage in Atlanta, Georgia
for Ansible Fest.
This is Red Hat's event where all
the practitioners come together, the community to talk about
automation anywhere, I'm John Furrier
with my co Stu Miniman, our next two guests
Robyn Bergeron, Principal Community Architect
for Ansible, now Red Hat and Greg DeKoenigsberg,
Senior Director Community at Ansible as well,
thanks for coming on, appreciate it.
>> Greg And Robyn: Thank you.
>> Hey so we we're talking before camera
that you guys had, this is the two day event,
we're covering theCUBE you guys have AnsibleFest
but you had your community day yesterday,
the day before the event, people came in early,
the core community, heard great things about it,
love to get an update, can you share just what happened
yesterday and then will get into some of the community.
>> Sure, so for all of our AnsibleFests for a while now
we've started them with a community contributor conference
and the goal of that conference is to get together
a lot of the people we work with online, right,
people we see as IRC Nics or GitHub handles
to get them together in the same room,
have them interact with core members of our team
and that's where we really do make a lot of decisions
about how we're going to be going forward,
get really direct feedback from some of our key contributors
about the decisions we're making,
the things we're thinking about,
with the goal of involving our community deeply
in a lot of decisions we make, that's the goal.
>> John: So it's like working session
meets social get together.
>> That's right several working sessions
and then drinks afterward for those who want the drinks
and just hang out time that we don't usually get.
>> By the way drinks and dinner last night
was really good, I caught the end of it,
I missed the sessions but I caught the.
>> Greg: Did you have the peaches,
the peaches at all the table?
>> It was good, it was good, but this is the dynamic
of community, this is one of the things we know,
so you're not a seat open in the house on the key note,
standing room only, active participant base
from this organic Ansible community now going mainstream,
how are you guys handling it?
How are you guys riding this wave?
Because certainly, you certainly do the community days
which is great for feedback that you get from the community
but as you have the commercialized open source
and Ansible it's a tough task.
>> Well I'd like to think part of it is
I guess maybe it's not our first rodeo
is that what we'd say I mean.
>> Greg: Yeah.
>> For Ansible, I worked at Elasticsearch
doing community stuff, before that I worked at Red Hat
and I was the Fedora Project Leader number five
and you were Fedora Project Leader, what number was that?
Oh number one.
>> Greg: It depends on how you count it but.
>> You were the one that got us to be able
to call it having a Fedora Project Leader
so I sort of count that as number one.
So we've been dealing with this stuff for
a really long time, it's different in Ansible in that
unlike a lot of old school things like Fedora,
a lot of this stuff is newer and part of the reason
it's really important for us to get some of these folks here
to talk to us in person is that especially,
and you saw my key note this morning
where they talked about or I talked about modularity,
a lot of these folks are really just focused
on their one little bit and they don't always have
as much time, people are working in lots of open source
projects now, right, and it's hard to pay deep attention
to every single little thing all the time
so this gives them a day of in case you missed it
here's the deep dark dive into everything
that we're planning or thinking about
and they really are, people who are managing
those smaller parts all around Ansible,
really are some of our best feedback loops, right,
because they're people that probably wrote that module
because they're using it every single day
and they're hardcore Ansible users
but they also understand how to participate
in community so we can get those people actually
talking with the rest of us who a lot of us
used to be SaaS admins, I used to be a SaaS admin,
lots of us, a lot of our employees actually
just got into wanting to work on Ansible
because they loved using it so much at their jobs
and when you're not actually SaaS admining everyday
you lose a little bit of.
>> John: The frontline's where the truth is.
>> Greg: That's exactly right.
>> The ground truth is right there.
>> And putting all these people together in a room
makes sure that they all also, when you have to look
at someone in the eye and tell them news
that they might not like, you have a different level
of empathy and you approach it a little bit differently
then you may on the internet so.
>> Robyn so I looked in your key notes this morning,
you talked about Ansible first commit was only back in 2012
so that simplicity, that modularity
and the learnings from where open source
had been in the past.
>> Robyn: Yes.
>> Can you share a little bit, what could Ansible do
being a relatively young project
that it might not have been able to do
if it had a couple of decades of history?
>> Maybe Greg should tell the story about the funk project.
>> There was a project at Red Hat that we started in 2007
in a coffee shop in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
There was myself and Michael DeHaan and Seth Vidal
and Adrian Likins who still works with us at Ansible
and we put together an idea with all the same underpinnings,
right, a highly modular automation tool.
We debated at the time on whether
it should be based on SSL or SSH.
For funk we chose SSL and after
watching that grow to a certain point
and then stagnate and it being inside of Red Hat
where there were a lot of other business pressures,
things like that, we learned a lot from that experience
and we were able to take that experience
and then in 2012 there was, the open source community
was a little different, open source was more acceptable,
GitHub was becoming a common platform
for open source project hosting and so a lot of things
came together in a short period of time.
All that experience, all of those.
>> And also market conditions had changed, right.
>> And the market conditions, yep.
>> Like in 2007, cloud was sort of a weird thing
that not really everyone was doing.
2012 rolls around.
>> Greg: Yeah.
>> Everyone has these cloud images and they need
to figure out how to get something in it
and it turns out that Ansible's
a really great way to actually do that.
>> Greg: Yes.
>> And even if we had picked SSH
back in the beginning, I don't know.
>> Might not have had the same luck.
>> Sometimes projects grow to a certain point
and I can point to lots of projects that were just,
it's a shame that they were so ahead of their time
and because of that money ran out or people moved on, yeah.
>> Timings everything, but the key I think now
what I've always admired about the simplicity is
automation requires that they extract away the complexities.
>> Robyn: Yep.
>> And so I think you bring up cloud,
that brings up more complexity, more use cases
for some of the underlying pinnings.
>> Greg And Robyn: Yeah.
>> Part of the plumbing and this is always going to,
this is a moving train that's never going to stop.
>> Robyn: Yeah (laughs).
>> What was the feedback from the community this year round
as you guys get into some of these analytical capabilities.
So the new features have a platform flared to it,
it's a platform, you guys announced
Ansible automation platform.
>> Yeah.
>> That implies it enables some value.
>> I think in a way we've always been a platform, right,
because a platform is a set of smalls rules
and then modules that attach to it,
it's about how that grows, right,
and traditionally we've had a batteries included model
where every module and plugin was built to go into Ansible.
Boy that got really big, right, and so.
>> Yeah we're like, we're at I don't even know
how many thousands of modules.
>> 3000, I'll say 2000 and then it'll 3000,
I say 3000 it'll be something else so it's a lot of content.
>> And it's, in the beginning it was, I can't imagine
this ever being more than 200, 250 batteries included
and at some point it's like yeah taking care of this
and making sure it all works together all the time
gets more and more difficult so.
>> You guys have done a great job with the community
and one of the things that you mentioned with cloud is
as more use cases come scale becomes a big question
and there's real business benefits now so open source
has become a part of the business,
people talking about business models in open source,
you guys know that, you've been part of that
28 years of history with Linux
but now you're seeing DevOps, which is, go back to 2007,
8, 9, 10 time frame, only the purest
were talking DevOps at that time,
infrastructure as code was being kicked around.
We've certainly been covering theCUBE since 2010 on that.
But now in mainstream enterprise
it seems like the commercialization and operationalizing
of DevOps is here, you guys have a proof point
in your own community of people taking about culture,
about relationships, we had one guest on talking about
they're now friends with the other guys (laughs) and gals
so you see the collaborations now becoming a big part of it
because of the playbooks, because of these instances
so talk about that dynamic of operationalizing
the DevOps movement for enterprise.
>> All right so I remember an example at one of the first
AnsibleFests I ever went to, there were a few
before I came on board but it was,
I think it was the first one I came to
when I was about to make the jump from my previous company
and I was just there as a visitor and a friend of the team
and there was an admin who talked to me
and said for the first time I have this thing, this playbook
that I can write and that I can hand to my manager
and say this is what we're going to do, right,
and so there was this artifact that allowed for a bridging
between different parts of the organization,
it was the simplicity of that playbook
that was human readable, that he could show to his boss
or to someone else in the org that they could agree on
and suddenly there was this sort of a document
that was a mechanism for collaboration
that everyone could understand and buy into
that hadn't really existed before Ansible existed
and for me that was one of the many flip of the light
moments where I was like oh wow,
maybe we have something really big here.
>> There were plenty of other infrastructures, code things
that you could hand to someone
but for a lot of people it's like
I don't speak that language, right,
and that's why we like to say like Ansible's sort of this
universal automation language, right,
like everybody can read it, you don't have to be
a rocket scientist, it's great for your exact example right.
I'm showing this to my manager
and saying this is the order of operations
and you don't have to be a genius to read it
because it's really, really readable.
>> John: It's connecting systems which connects people.
>> That's right.
>> What's fascinating to me is there was this whole wave of
enterprise collaboration tools that the enterprise
would try to push down and force people to collaborate
but here is a technology tool that from the ground up
is getting people to do that collaboration
and they want to do it and it's helping
break down some of those walls.
>> Well and it's interesting so you mention that
and I'm sure something like Slack is a thing
that falls into that category and they've built a business
around making sure that the 20 billion people
inside a company all sign up until somebody
in the IT department's like what do you mean
these random people are just, everyone's using it,
no one's saving it and this is secure and they all freak out
and well I mean this is sort of
everybody tells their friend about Ansible
and they go oh right tool that's going to save the world
number 22 oh wait actually yeah no this is it,
this actually is pretty cool, yeah,
yeah get started in 15 minutes.
>> Well sometimes the better mouse trap
will always drive people to that solution,
you guys have proven that organic.
What's interesting to me is not only does it win
on capabilities, it actually grew organically
in this connected tissue between different groups.
>> Greg: Right.
>> Kind of breaks down that whole silo mentality
and that's really where IT's been stuck.
>> Greg: Yes.
>> And as software becomes more prominent
and data becomes more prominent
it's going to just shift more power
in the hands of the developer.
>> Robyn: Yeah.
>> And to the SaaS admins who are now being redeployed
into being systems architects or whatever they are.
I mean this transitional human roles with automation.
>> Robyn: Digital transformation architect.
>> Oh my god, yeah (laughs).
>> Robyn: That's got to be a title now.
>> That's the real title, yeah, I don't have it but (laughs).
>> Just double my pay I'll take it.
(Robyn laughs)
>> So collections is one of the key things talked about
when we talk about the Ansible automation platform.
Been hearing a lot of discussion about how the partner
ecosystem's really stepping up even more than before,
4600 plus contributors out there in the community
but the partner's stepping up.
>> Greg: Yeah.
>> Where do you see this going?
Where will collections really catalyze
the next growth for your community?
>> It's got to be the future for us,
there were a few key problems that we recognized
that collections was ultimately the solution that we chose.
One key problem is that with the batteries included model
that put a lot of pressure on vendors
to conform to whatever our processes were.
They had to get their batteries into our thing
to be a part of the ecosystem
and there was huge demand to be a part of our ecosystem
so partners would just sort of swallow hard
and do what they needed to do but it really wasn't optimized
to help partners, right, so they might have different
development processes, they might have
different release cycles, they might have
different testing on the back end
that would be more difficult to hook together.
Collections breaks a lot of that out
and gives our partners a lot of freedom
to innovate in their own time.
>> Robyn: Release on their own cycles, right.
>> Release on their own cycle.
>> We just released our new version of software
but you can't actually get the new Ansible modules
that are updated for it until Ansible releases
is not always the thing that.
>> Right.
>> Makes their product immediately useful,
if you're a vendor, you release something new,
you want people to start using it right away
not wait until Ansible comes around so.
>> And that new artifact also creates more network effects
with Galaxy and automation hub
and the new deployment options
that we're going to have available for that stuff.
So it's, I think it's just leveling up, right,
it's taking the same approach that's gotten us this far
and just taking it out to another level.
>> Yeah, but I certainly wouldn't consider it
to be like that partners are separate
part of our, they're still definitely part of the community
it's just they have slightly different problems
and there were folks from all sorts of different companies
who are our partners in the contributor summit yesterday.
>> And they were excited.
>> Who were actually participating
and folks swapping stories and listening to each other
and again being part of that feedback loop.
>> Maybe just a little bit broader,
the other communities out there,
think of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation,
the Open Infrastructure Foundation,
you're wearing your Zuul pin
and talk about how Ansible plays across these
other communities which are very much
a mixture of the vendors and the end users.
>> Well I mean Ansible certainly had,
sorry are asking about how Ansible
is relating to those other communities?
>> Stu: Yes.
>> Okay, yeah, 'cause I'm all about that,
I mean we certainly had a long standing
sort of fan base over in Open-Sec
slash Open Infrastructure Foundation land.
Most of the floyment tools for all of,
all the different ways, so many ways to deploy open stack.
A lot of them wound up settling on Ansible
towards the end of time, that community sort of matured
and there's a lot of periods of experimentation
and that's one of those things is somethings live
somethings didn't but the core parts
of what you actually need to make a cloud
are basically still there.
And then we also have a ton of modules actually in Ansible
that help people to operationalize all their open stack
cloud stuff just like we have modules for AWS
and Google Cloud and Azure and whoever else
I'm leaving out this week.
As far as the CNCF stuff goes, I mean again we've seen
a lot of how to get this thing up and running,
turns out Kubernetes is not particularly easy
to get up and running, it's even more complicated
than a cloud sometimes 'cause it also assumes
that you've got a cloud of some sort already
and I like working on our thing.
I can actually use it, it's pretty cool.
Kubespray and then a lot of the other projects
also have things that are related to Ansible
and now there's the Ansible operator stuff,
I don't know if you want to touch on that but.
>> Yeah, we're working on, we know one of the big questions
is how do Ansible and OpenShift slash Kubernetes
work together, frequently in sort of Kubernetes land,
OpenShift land you want to keep as much as you can
on the cluster, lots of operations on the cluster.
Sometimes you got to talk to things outside of the cluster,
right, you got to set up some networking stuff
or you got to talk to an S3 bucket,
there's also something, some storage thing,
as much as you try to get things into container land
there's always legacy stuff, there's always new stuff
maybe edge stuff that might not all be part of your cluster
and so one of the things we're working on
is making it easier to use Ansible
as part of your operator structure
to go and manage some of those things
using the operator framework that's already built in
to Kubernetes and OpenShift.
>> John: Again more complexity out there.
>> Well and the thing is we're great glue,
Ansible is such great glue and it's accessible
to so many people and as we move away from monolithic
code bases to micro services and vastly spread out
code bases, it's not like the complexity goes away,
the complexity simply moves to the relationship
between the components and Ansible is excellent glue
for helping to manage those relationships
between components.
>> John: Who doesn't like a glue layer?
>> If it's good and easier to understand, even better.
>> The glue layers key, guys thanks for coming on.
>> Yeah, thanks for having us.
Robyn, Greg, sharing your insights.
>> Thank you so much.
>> Take a quick minute to give a quick plug
for the community, what's up, stats, updates,
quick projects, give a quick plug
for what's going on in the community real quick.
>> You go first.
>> We're big, we're huge, six, seven.
>> Robyn: It was number six, number seven was Kubernetes.
>> Right, number six out of 96 million projects
on GitHub so lots of contributors, lots of energy.
>> Anytime I try to cite a stat I find
that I actually have to go and look it up
and I was about to cite again the wrong.
>> So active high numbers of people activity.
>> Lots of activity.
>> I mean you're running the plumbings,
obviously it's cloud and on premise.
Other updates, projects or the contributor day,
what's next, what's on the schedule?
>> We're looking to put together our next
contributor summit we're hoping in Europe
sometime in the spring so we've got to get that on the plate.
I don't know if we've announced the next AnsibleFest yet.
>> Oh no that happens tomorrow so don't ruin that.
>> I won't ruin that for everybody.
>> Congratulations on a great community,
you guys done great work, obviously open source,
open business, open everything these days,
can't bet against open.
>> It's hard to bet against open.
>> I wouldn't bet against open.
>> We're here, CUBE, we're open, we're sharing all the data
here in Atlanta, with the interviews, I'm John Furrier,
Stu Miniman, stay with us for more after this short break.
(electronic music)