(upbeat music)
>> Good morning everyone, from Chicago live,
theCUBE is live at AnsibleFest 2022.
Lisa Martin and John Furrier here,
for two days of wall-to-wall coverage on theCUBE.
Very excited to be back in person.
Ansible's 10th anniversary, the first in-person event,
John, since 2019.
>> John: Yeah, great to be back.
>> One of the nuggets dropped this morning,
and I know you, was ops-as-code.
>> Yeah, we're going to hear about that ops-as-code
here in this segment, we're going to get into it.
The leader of the business unit at Ansible, part of Red Hat,
so I'm looking forward to this.
>> Exactly. Tom Anderson joins us, one of our alumni.
Welcome back to the program. >> Thank you.
>> The VP and General Manager of Red Hat.
First of all, how great is it to be back in person,
with live guests and an engaged audience
and an robust community?
>> It is amazing. It really is.
I kind of questioned whether this day
was ever going to come again
after three years of being apart,
but to see the crowd here and to see, like you said,
the energy in the room this morning
and the keynotes, it's fantastic.
So, I just couldn't be happier.
>> So op-as-code, nugget drop this morning.
>> Yep. >> We want to dissect that
with you, as that was mentioned in the keynote this morning,
is Ansible is pushing into the cloud and into the edge,
what does ops-as-code mean for end users
and how is it going to help them,
to use the term that was used a lot in the keynote,
"level up" their automation?
>> Yeah, so what we see is,
look, the day zero, day one provisioning of infrastructure,
there's lots of tools, there's lots of ways to do that.
Again, it's just the company's ambition
and dedication to doing it.
The tools are there, they can do that.
We see the next big opportunity for automation
is in day two operations.
And what's happening right now in ops,
is that you have multiple clouds,
you've got multiple data centers
and now you've got edge environments.
The number of things to manage on a day-to-day basis
is only increasing, the complexity is only increasing.
This idea of a couple of years ago,
where we're going to do,
shift everything left onto the developer,
it's a nice idea,
but you still have to operate these environments
on a day-to basis.
So we see this opportunity as "ops-as-code",
just like we did infrastructure-as-code,
just like we did configuration-as-code,
we see the next frontier as operations-as-code.
>> Yeah, and this is really a big trend.
As you know with theCUBE, we've been reporting a lot
on the cloud-native velocity
of the modern application developer these days.
They're, it's a great time to be a software developer
because all the open-source goodness is happening,
but they're going faster.
They want self service, they want it built-in security,
they need guardrails, they need faster ops,
so that seems to be the pressure point.
Is ops-as-code going to be that solution?
Because you have a lot of people talking about multi-cloud,
multiple environments, which sounds great on paper,
but when you try to execute it-
>> Yeah. >> there's complexity.
So you know, the goal of complexity management
has really been one of the key things around ops.
How do I keep speed up and how do I reduce the complexities?
These are big, so how does ops-as-code fit into that?
>> Yeah, so look.
We see Ansible as this common automation back plane,
if you will, that goes across all of these environments.
It provides a common abstraction layer,
so that whether you're running on Azure,
whether you're GCP, or whether you're AWS,
or whether you're, you know,
a PLC out on a shop industrial edge floor, with a PLC,
each of those things need to be automated.
If we can abstract that into a common automation language,
then that allows these domain experts
to be able to offer their services to developers,
in a way that promotes the acceleration, if you will,
of those developers tasks.
And that developer doesn't have to know
about the underlying complexities of storage,
or database, or cloud, or edge, they can just do their job.
>> You know, Tom, one of the things I observed
in the keynotes,
this comes across every time we have an event,
and in person it's more amplified 'cause you see it,
the loyalty of the customer base.
You have great community.
It's very not corporate-like here, it's very,
no big flashy news, but there's some news, hard news,
it's very community driven.
Check the box there, so continuing on the roots.
I want to get your thoughts
on how now the modern era we're in, in this world,
the purchasing power, again,
I mentioned multi-cloud looks good on paper,
which every CXO, "I want to be multiple clouds,
I want choice!"
Now when you talk to the people running things,
like, "Whoa, hold on boss." >> Yeah.
>> The bottoms-up is a big part of the selection process,
of how people select and buy and consume technology.
With open source, you don't need to, like, do a full buy.
You can use open source and then get Ansible.
>> Yeah. >> This is going to be a big part
of how the future of buying product is, and implementing it.
So, I think it's going to be a groundswell, bottoms-up market,
in this new cloud-native, in the ops world.
What's your reaction to that? What's your thoughts?
>> So here's my thoughts.
The bulk of the people here are practitioners.
They love Ansible, they use Ansible in their day-to-day job.
It's how it helped, makes 'em successful.
Almost every executive that I go out and talk to
in our customers, they tell me,
their number one problem is attracting new talent
and retaining the talent that they have.
And so how can they do that?
They can give them the tools to do their job,
the tools that they actually like.
So, not a top-down, you know,
old fashioned systems management,
"You're going to use this tool whether you like it or not."
But that bottoms up swell
of people adopting open source tools, like Ansible,
to do their job and enjoy it.
So I see it as a way of the bottoms-up
addressing the top-down initiative of the organization,
which is skills retention, skills enhancement.
And that's what we focus on here at this event,
are the practitioners.
>> Is that the biggest customer conversation topic
these days?
Is this, the skills gap, retention, attraction, talent?
Or would you say it's more expansive,
as the organizations are so different?
>> Well so, a lot of the folks that I meet are,
you know, maybe not C-level,
but they're executives in the organization, right?
So they're struggling with attract, you know,
pretty much everywhere I go.
I was in Europe this summer,
conversation was always the same, "We got two problems.
Attracting people, we can't find people,
people we find we can't afford." (laughs)
"So we need to automate what they would do."
And then the second piece is,
"The complexity of our environment is growing." Right?
"I'm being asked to do more
and I can't find more people to do it. What's my solution?"
It's automation.
You know, at the end of the day,
that's what it comes down to.
>> It's interesting, the people who are going to be involved
in the scaling horizontally with automation,
are going to have the keys to the kingdom.
The old joke with IT was, you know,
they run everything, they power the business.
Now the business is digital, you got to be hybrid.
So we see hybrid as a steady state right now, hybrid cloud.
When you bring the edge into the equation,
how do you see that developing?
'Cause if we think it's going to be continually hybrid
and that's going to extend out on the edge,
what is the Ansible's view on how the edge evolves?
What's going on there?
Can you share your thoughts on the expansion to the edge?
>> Our experience is there's a rapid modernization happening
out at the edge, industrial edge,
you know, oil and gas platforms, retail locations,
industrial floors, all that kind of stuff.
We see this convergence of OT and IT happening right now,
where some of the disciplines that enterprises have used
in the IT area are going to expand out into OT.
But some of the requirements of OT,
of not having skilled IT resources, you know,
in the store, in the fast food restaurant,
on the oil platform, needing to have the tools
to be able to automate those changes remotely,
we're seeing a real acceleration of that right now.
And frankly, Ansible's playing a big role in that.
And it's connecting,
a lot of the connective tissue is around network.
What is the key piece that connects all of this environment,
is network, and those number of endpoints
that need to be managed, Ansible is,
you know, far and away the best.
>> It's a perfect use case for Ansible,
because Ansible's built their business
on configuration automation- >> Yeah.
>> which was, "Don't send someone out to that branch office."
Back in the old days. >> Exactly. Exactly.
>> Do it manual versus automation?
Hey, automation every time. >> Yes.
>> This is at large scale.
I mean the scale of magnitude,
can you scope the scale of what's different?
I mean, even going back 10 years,
okay, where we were and how we got here.
Where we are today, scope the size of the scale
that's happening here.
>> You know, hundreds of thousands of endpoints and things,
that's not even the API points,
but that's the, kind of, compute points,
the network points, the servers.
It's, you know, what we would've never thought,
you know, 10 years ago, a thousand endpoints was a lot,
or 10,000 endpoints was a lot of things to manage.
When you start talking about network devices.
>> Yeah, yeah. >> Home network devices
for employees that are remote employees
that need to be in a secured network.
Just order of magnitude,
maybe two orders of magnitude larger
than it has been in the past.
And so again, coming home to the automation world. (laughs)
>> The world's spun on your front door right now.
>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
>> Talk about, you talked about the acceleration.
If we think of about the proliferation of devices online,
especially the last two years, when, to your point,
so many people shifted to remote and are still there.
What are some of the changes in automation
that we've seen as businesses have had to pivot
and change so frequently and so many times,
to be successful?
>> Yeah, so here's what we've seen,
which is it's no longer acceptable
for the owner of the network team
or the ownership of the database,
or of the storage facility to,
you can't wait for them to offer their service to people.
Self-service is now the rule of thumb, right?
So how can those infrastructure owners
be able to offer their services to non-IT people,
in a way that manages their compliance
and makes them feel that they can get those resources
without having to come and ask?
And they do that by automating with Ansible,
and then offering those as package services
out to their developers,
to their QE teams, to their end users,
to be able to consume and subscribe to that infrastructure,
knowing that they are the ones who are controlling
how it's being provisioned, how it's being used.
>> What are some of the,
there were some great customers mentioned this morning
in the keynote, but do you have a favorite example
of a customer, regardless of industry,
that you think really shows the value
and the evolution of the Ansible platform
in its first 10 years,
and that really articulates the business value
that automation delivers to a company?
>> Yeah, no, it's a great question.
I would think that, you know,
if you wound the clock back 10 years,
Ansible was all about server configuration management,
right, that's what it was about.
It was provisioning, you know, VMware infrastructure,
vSphere, and then loading on VMs on top of that.
As it's expanded into network, into security
and to storage, and to database, and to cloud,
it's become a much broader platform, if you will.
And a good example is, we have a customer,
a large oil and gas customer
who was modernizing their oil platforms.
I can imagine, I've not been on one,
but I imagine the people that are out working
on that oil platforms have greasy hands
that are pushing on things.
And they had this platform that the technology modernization
included Azure, so connecting to data on Azure,
rolling out new application updates, has to have a firewall,
has to have network capabilities,
has to have underlying OS to be able to do that,
and Ansible was the glue that brought all that together,
to be able to modernize that oil platform.
And so for me, that's the kind of thing
where it sort of makes it real, you know,
the actual business of things.
>> The common set of services,
this is where we're seeing multi-cloud-
>> Yeah. >> start to have
that conversation where, "Okay, I got this edge,
it kind of looks the same, I got to make it work.
I'm a developer, I want some compute.
I want to put this together.
I have containers and orchestration behind it."
You're kind of seeing the same kind of pattern-
>> Yeah. >> evolving at scale.
>> So you guys have the platform,
"Okay, I'm in open source, I love the open source,
I got the platform 2.3.
I see supply chain management in there,
you got trusted signatures."
That's the supply chain, we've been hearing a lot
about security in the code. >> Mm hmm.
>> What else is in the platform that's updated?
Can you share the new things
that people should pay attention to in the platform?
>> Yeah, so we're going to talk
about a couple of things tomorrow
around event-driven Ansible,
which is bringing Ansible into that really day two ops world
where it's sort of hands-free automation and operations.
Where, rather than someone pushing a button
to trigger or initiate a piece of automation,
an event will take place.
"I've detected an out of space condition,
I've detected a security violation,
I've detected something."
Go to a rule book,
that rule book will kick off an automation,
close that, remediate that problem and close the thing
without anyone ever having to do anything with that.
So that's kind of one big area.
And we're going to talk tomorrow,
we got a real special announcement tomorrow
with our friends from IBM Research that I'm going to,
we'll be back on- >> We'll have you on
at 10:30, we'll mark our calenders.
>> But there's some really great stuff going on
on the platform, as we start to expand these use cases
in multiple directions,
and how we take Ansible out to more and more people,
automation out to more and more people,
from the inside experts, out to the consumers of automation,
make it easier to create automation.
>> Yeah. And one of the things I wanted to follow up on then,
the skills gap, tying that together,
is you've seen and heard in the keynote today around,
Stefanie was talking about enterprise architecture.
It's not, I won't say corner case,
I mean, it's not one niche or narrow focus.
Expanding the scope was mentioned by Kaete,
expand your scope, grow,
you got a lot of openings, people to hire.
Now, Ansible is a part of the enterprise architecture,
it's not just one thing. >> Yeah. Yeah.
>> It's a complete...
Explain what that means for the folks out there.
>> Yeah so, when you start to connect
what I call the technology domains,
so the network team uses Ansible
to automate their network infrastructure
and configure all their systems,
and the compute team uses it to deploy new servers on AWS,
and the security ops team uses it to go out and gather facts
when they have a threat detection happening,
and the storage team is using it to provision storage.
When you start to then say,
"Okay, we have all these different domains
and we want to connect those together
into a set of workflows
that goes across all of those domains,
you have this common language.
And we're saying, "Okay, so it's not just the language,
it's also the underlying platform that has to be scalable."
It's got to be secure. We talked about signing content.
I mean, people don't understand the risk
of an automation gone wild.
You can do a lot of damage to your infrastructure real fast
with automation, just like you can do a repair, right?
So is what's running in my environment secure?
Is it performant and is it scalable?
I mean, those are the three areas
that we're really looking at with the platform right now.
>> "Automation gone wild,"
it sounds like the next reality TV show.
(both laughing)
>> Yeah, I may regret saying that.
(all laughing)
>> Sounds like a great- >> Especially on live TV.
>> Great podcast title, right there. I made a mental note.
"Automation Gone Wild", episode one. Here we are.
>> You talk about Ansible as really being the catalyst
to allow organizations to truly democratize automation.
You talked about the different domains there
and it seems to me like it's positioned
to really be the catalyst
that's the driver of that democratization,
which is where a lot of people want to get to.
>> Yeah. I mean for us,
and you'll see in our sessions at AnsibleFest,
we talk a lot about the culture.
The culture of automation, right?
And saying, "Okay, how do you include more and more people
in your organization, in this process?
How can you get them to participate?
So we talked about these ideas of communities of practice.
So we bring the open source,
the concepts of open source communities
down into enterprises,
to build their own internal communities of practice
around Ansible,
where they're sharing best practices,
skills, reusable content.
That is one of the kind of key factors
that we see as a success inside organizations, is the scale,
it's sort of bringing everybody
into that culture of automation,
and not being afraid of automation.
Saying, "Look, it's not going to take my job,
it's going to help me do my job better."
>> Exactly. >> Yeah.
That automation argument always went, to me, crazy.
"Oh yeah, automating is going to take my job away."
You know, bank teller example,
there's more bank tellers now than ever before, more ATMs.
So, the job shifts, I mean the value shifts.
>> Yeah. Yeah. >> This is kind of
where the automation helps.
What's, real quick, final minute we have left,
where does that value shift?
I'm the person being automated away or job.
>> Yeah. >> Where do you see
the value job?
'Cause there's still tons of openings for people's skills.
>> You know, so we see the shift from,
particularly in operations from,
"Here's my job, I look at a ticket queue, I grab a ticket,
it's got a problem, I go look at a log,
I look for a string and a log,
I find out the error and I go configuration change that."
That's not a really, I wouldn't call that a fun existence
for eight or 10 hours a day.
But the idea, "If I can use automation to do that for me,
and then focus on innovating,
creating new capabilities in my environment,"
then you start to attract a new, you know,
the next generation of operations people
into a much more exciting role.
>> Yeah, architects too, they turned into architects,
that turned into multiple job scopes,
this like, multi-tool player.
It's like, yeah, you know. >> Yeah, yeah. (chuckles)
What is it, five tool player? >> Five tool player
in baseball, is the best of the best.
But, kind of, that's what's happening.
>> That's exactly what's happening, right?
That's exactly what's happening.
And it helps address that skills challenge.
>> Yeah. >> And the talent challenge
that organizations have as well.
>> And everybody wants to be able to focus
on delivering value to the organization.
I think at the end of the day,
that's a human component that we all want.
So it sounds like Ansible is well on its way
to helping more and more organizations across industries
achieve just that.
Tom, it's great to have you back on the program.
Sounds like you're coming back tomorrow,
so we get day two of Tom. >> I am coming back tomorrow.
>> All right. >> Excellent,
look forward to it.
Congratulations on the first in-person event in three years
and we look forward to talking to you tomorrow.
>> Thank you so much.
>> All right, for our guests and John Furrier,
I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, live from Chicago.
Day one of our coverage of AnsibleFest 2022.
Stick around, John and I welcome back
another CUBE alumni next.
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