>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida.
It's theCUBE!
Covering Microsoft Ignite.
Brought to you by Cohesity.
>> Welcome back everyone, and welcome to theCUBES's
live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando.
I'm your host, Rebecca Knight,
along with my co-host Stu Miniman.
We are joined by Nicholas Gerasimatos.
He is a Cloud Computing Evangelist at Red Hat.
Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.
>> It's a pleasure.
>> Thank you.
>> So tell us a little bit about you do at Red Hat.
>> So I work with a lot of Red Hat partners,
really trying to foster the ecosystem
and build Red Hat products and solutions
that can actually be deployable and repeatable
for different customers.
So different verticals, financial, healthcare,
it doesn't really matter for the most part.
I try and just focus on cloud computing
and really just evangelizing a lot
of our technologies that we have.
>> Okay, so what are the kinds of things
that you are doing here at Ignite?
>> So, I've been spending a lot of time actually working
with some of the partners like Accenture, IBM,
we've been doing a bunch of different webinars,
a little bit of hands-on workshops.
Kind of educating people about distributed computing,
edge computing, and some of the technologies
that we have been working on with Microsoft.
So, the co-engineering of SQL Server,
the managed service offering
that we're doing with OpenShift,
which is our anniversary Kubernetes platform.
Along with many other different things.
>> Yeah, so, Nicholas, it's been a couple of years now
that we've gotten over some of the gasp, wait,
Microsoft has not said that we're killing the penguins
(Nicholas laughs)
off on the side.
I was in Boston for Red Hat Summit talking to all those
up on stage there.
Red Hat is not hiding at this show, so bring us inside
where customer deployments are happening,
where engineering efforts are working together.
We know, we've been hearing for years,
Red Hat's in all of the clouds
and partnering all of the merits,
so what's different or special
about the Microsoft relationship?
>> I mean honestly, I think the relationship
is just evolving and growing
because our customers are asking for it, right?
They are going towards hybrid
and multicloud types of strategies.
They want to be able to take advantage
of running REHL within their own data center,
or running REHL specifically on top of Microsoft Azure.
But then they're also looking at other
cloud service providers.
I think it's going to be mandated eventually
at some point in time where customers are going to start
looking at diversification when it comes to running
applications wherever it makes sense.
Taking advantage of different
cloud native services, different providers.
So we've spending a lot of the time,
like, understanding what their needs are
and then trying to build the engineering
to actually address those needs.
I think a lot of that has really come
from the co-engineering that we have going on.
So we have Red Hat engineers sitting
alongside Microsoft engineers.
Spending a lot of time building things
like the Windows abstraction layer,
WSL, things along those lines.
>> All right, so I'll be at CUBEcon in a couple of weeks
and Kubernetes, still a lot of people
don't really understand where it fits.
>> Nicholas: It's a huge buzz word.
>> We've been saying, Kubernetes is going to be baked
into every platform.
Red Hat of course, is not only a major contributor,
but has a lot of customers on OpenShift.
We had Microsoft, this week,
talking about Azure Arc is in preview,
but David Totten who does partnership engagement says,
this does not mean that we will not continue
to partner with OpenShift and the best place
to run OpenShift is on Azure.
It's the most secure, its the best,
so help us understand as to where this fits
in the overall discussion of that multi-hybrid cloud
that we were taking about earlier.
>> I think everybody wants
kind of a single pane of glass for manageability.
They want the ability to actually look and see
where they're infrastructure is being deployed.
One of the pitfalls of moving to the Cloud is the fact
that it's so easy to spin up resources
that a lot of times we lose track
of where these resources are,
or individuals leave companies
and when they leave companies, they leave behind
a lot of leftover items and instances and that becomes
really costly over a period of time.
It may be not so bad if you have a hundred
or 500 instances but when you talk
to some of these enterprise customers
that are running 10 thousand or 100 thousand instances
and spending millions of dollars a month,
it can get very costly, and not only that
but it can also be a security risk as well.
>> So lets talk about security.
What kinds of conversations are you having with regard
to security and data protection at this conference?
>> So, one of the biggest things we've had a lot
of customers asking us about is Red Hat Insights.
So Red Hat Insights is a way, it's a smart management
application that actually ties in to looking at either
workloads or configurations management.
It can actually tell you if you have a drift.
So, for example, lets say you install SQL Sever on REHL
and you misconfigure it,
you leave the admin account running on it,
it can actually alert you and make recommendations
for remediation, or maybe in general
you are using SELinux is disabled,
or things along those lines.
So Insights can actually look into the operating system
or the applications and tell you
if there's misconfigurations.
>> All right, a lot of discussion about developers here.
Day two keynote was all about AppDev and the likes,
Satya spent a lot of time talking
about the citizen developer.
>> Nicholas: Yep.
>> Seems like that would be an intersection
between what Red Hat's doing and Microsoft.
>> Yep, so, I would say
we're obviously very developer first focused, right?
When we built things like OpenShift,
we kind of were thinking about developers
before we were thinking about operations,
and later on we actually had to build
more of the operations aspects into it.
Now, for example,
on OpenShift there's two different portals.
There's one for the developer focus
and one for the IT admin focus of the operations groups
because they want to see what's going on.
Developers don't really care specifically about seeing
the abstraction of where things are,
they just want to deploy their code,
get it out the door as quickly as they can,
and they're really just not too concerned
about the infrastructure component pieces.
But all of these developers, they want to be able
to write their applications,
write their code and deploy it,
essentially anywhere and everywhere
and have it the easiest process and we're really
just trying to make that as simple as possible.
Like Visual Studio plugins that we have for OpenShift,
Eclipse G and other things.
So really, I mean, Red Hat's always been
very developer focused first.
>> So does the, seeing Microsoft and Satya Nadella
up on the stage talking about this developer first
attitude, that Microsoft is really embracing the developer
and as you said app development for all.
That does seem like a bit of a cultural shift
for Microsoft.
>> Nicholas: Absolutely.
>> Much more aligned with the Red Hat way
and sort of open source.
So, are you talking about that with your colleagues
at Red Hat, about the change that you've seen,
the evolution of Microsoft?
>> Absolutely, I mean if you look at like, Microsoft,
the contributions that they're putting towards
Kubernetes or even contribution towards OpenShift,
it's amazing, right?
I mean, it's like the company's done a complete 180
from the way that they used to be.
They're so much more open.
The acquisition of like GitHub, for example.
All these different changes, it's amazing.
He's done amazing things with the company.
I can't say enough positive things
about all the wonderful things that he's done, so.
>> All right, so Nicholas,
Red Hat has an interesting position
in the marketplace because you do partner
with all of the clouds and the environment,
and while IBM is now the parent owner of Red Hat
and they have a cloud, your customers touch all of them.
I'm not going to ask you to competitively analyze them
but when your talking to customers are choosing Azure
is there anything that's calling out as to,
why they're choosing Microsoft?
Where they have a advantage in the marketplace
or what is drawing customers to them
and then of course Red Hat with that.
>> I think Microsoft is more advanced when it comes to
artificial intelligence and machine learning,
AI and ML and edge computing,
I think they're light years ahead of everyone else
at this point in time.
I think Amazon and Google are kind of
playing a little bit of catch up there
and it's showing, right?
If you look at the Power Platform, for example,
customers are embracing that.
It's just fantastic looking at a lot of the changes
that they've implemented
and I think it's very complimentary
to the way that people are starting
to build their applications.
Moving toward distributed infrastructures, microservices,
and then obviously cloud native services as well.
>> In terms of the future, we are really just scratching
the surface when it comes to the Cloud.
What do you see five, 10 years from now,
in terms of growth rates and also in terms of the ways
in which companies are using the Cloud?
>> So I kind of like to equate it
towards the progression that we've had with cars.
I know it sounds so simple,
but we went from steam engine to regular piston engines
and now we've gotten to the point
where we have electric cars and there's going to be
self-driving cars.
I think we are going to get to a point where code
is going to be autonomous in a sense right?
Self-correcting, the ability
to actually just write code and deploy it.
Not really having to worry
about that entire infrastructure layer.
Everybody's calling it server lists.
There's always going to be a server, per se,
but I think we're going to have a point where,
in the next five to 10 years, that all of that is going
to be completely abstracted away.
It's just going to be focused on writing the code
and machine learning is going to help us actually evolve
that code and make it run faster and make it run better.
We're already seeing huge benefits when it comes
to machine learning and the big data analytics
and things along those lines.
So it's just natural progression.
>> All right.
With a lot of, what's top of mind from the customers
that you're talking to here at the event?
Any new learnings that you have had
or things that have kind of caught your attention?
>> I think the biggest thing, honestly, is really been
the multicloud, polycloud methodology that everybody
seems to be embracing.
It seems like every customer I'm talking to
is looking at trying to avoid vendor lock in per se,
but still have that flexibility
to deploy their applications wherever,
and still utilize cloud native services without actually,
specifically having to go completely open source in a sense.
>> One of the challenges there, every cloud,
I need different skills to be able to do them.
If I'm deploying it,
>> Nicholas: People.
>> It's the people and being able to do that,
we all lived through that era of trying to do multi-vendor
and often it often it was challenges.
So have we learned from what we've done in the past?
Can multicloud actually be more valuable to a company
than the sum of it's parts?
>> I think so, and I think that's the reason why,
like Microsoft is investing in Arc, for example.
I think those methodologies, we know multicloud's tough.
It's never going to be easy
and so these companies need to start building
and developing platforms for it.
There needs to be, it'd be great
if there were standard API's and such, right,
but they're never going to do something along those lines,
but I think the investments
that they're putting forth now
are going to make multicloud and polycloud
a lot easier in the future,
and I think customers are asking for it.
Customers ask for it, they're going to build it.
>> What does this mean for the workforce, though?
In terms of the kinds of candidates
that companies are going to hire, because,
as we said, it does require
different skills and different capabilities.
So how, what's your advice to the young computer scientists
coming up in terms of what they should be learning,
and then also how do you think companies
are making sense of all of this?
>> So, I know from a company perspective, it's challenging.
A lot of companies, especially, for example,
I was talking to a very large financial institution,
they were saying that their biggest issue right now
is hiring talented people to deal with
microservices and Kubernetes.
Anytime they hire someone,
they end up getting poached by the big cloud companies,
so it's one of those things
where people are going to have to start diversifying
their talents and look at the future.
So, obviously microservices are here,
they're going to continue to be here.
I would say people should invest in that.
But also look at serverless.
I definitely think serverless is towards the future,
and then when it comes to learning skills of multicloud,
I think cloud computing that's just the number one
growing thing in general.
>> So, since you did bring up serverless,
today, I hear serverless and to most customers
that I talked to, that means AWS.
Number two in the space probably is Microsoft,
but there's efforts in to try to help, you know,
give a little bit of open source and standardization there.
Where's Red Hat stand on this, what do you see from
Microsoft, what are you hearing from customers?
>> We're heavily contributed to all the different projects.
Trying to make serverless easier to use
and not so much specific to vendors, right?
So, whether that's Apache Spark
or whatever you want to consider it to be.
We're trying to invest in those
different types of technologies.
I think the main issue with serverless right now is,
we still don't really know how to utilize it effectively,
and it's still kind of this gray area in a sense, right?
It's cutting edge, bleeding edge, emerging technologies,
and it's just, in my opinion,
it's not perfectly ready for primetime,
but I think that's specifically
because there's just not enough people
that are actually invested in it at this point in time, so.
>> So, what are you going to take back with you
when you head back to Phoenix from this conference?
What are the things
that have sparked your interest the most?
>> Gosh, I would probably have to say really digging in deep
on the Arc announcement.
I think that's the thing
that I'm most interested in understanding,
and how we can actually contribute to that,
and maybe make that plugable for things like OpenShift,
whether it's OpenShift on-premise,
OpenShift running in the Cloud and other REHL architectures.
Things like Insights being able to plug into that.
I really see us trying to work with Microsoft
to start building those things.
>> Great, well Nicholas, thank you so much
for coming on theCUBE,
it was really fabulous conversation.
>> Yeah, thank you.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman stay tuned for more
of theCUBE's live coverage from Microsoft Ignite.
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