>> (upbeat music)
>> production: From around the globe,
it's the Cube covering Google cloud
Next on-Air 20.
(Upbeat music)
>> Welcome back.
I'm Stu Miniman and this is the CUBE coverage
of Google cloud Next on Air 20.
Of course, the nine week distributed all online program
that Google cloud is doing and going to be talking about,
of course, multi-cloud, Google of course had a big piece
in multi-cloud.
When they took what was originally Borg,
They built Kubernetes.
They made that open source and gave that
to the CNCF and one of Google's partners
and a leader in that space is of course, Red Hat.
Happy to welcome to the program Sathish Balakrishnan,
he is the Vice President of hosted platforms at Red Hat.
Sathish, thanks so much for joining us.
>> Thank you. It's great to be here with you
on Google Cloud Native insights.
>> Alright. So I, I tied it up, of course, you know,
we talk about, you know, the hybrid multicloud and open,
you know, two companies.
I probably think of the most
and that I've probably said the most about
the open cloud are Google and Red Hat.
So maybe if we could start just,
uh, you hosted platforms,
help us understand what that is.
And, uh, what was the relationship between Red Hat
and the Open Shift team and Google cloud?
>> Absolutely. Great question.
And I think Google has been an amazing partner for us.
I think we have a lot of things
going on with them upstream in the community.
I think, you know, we've been with Google
and the Kubernetes project since the beginning
and you know, like the second biggest contributor
to Kubernetes.
So we have great relationships upstream.
We also made Red Hat Enterprise Linux
as well as Open Shift available on Google.
So we have customers using both our offerings
as well as our other offerings on Google cloud as well.
And more recently with the hosted our offerings.
You know, we actually manage Open Shift on multiple clouds.
We relaunched our Open Shift
dedicated offering on Google cloud back at Red Hat Summit.
There's a lot of interest for the offering.
We had back offered the offering in 2017
with Open Shift Three and we just relaunched this
with Open Shift Four and we received considerable interest
for the Google cloud Open Shift dedicated offering.
>> Yeah, Sathish maybe it makes sense if we talk about
kind of the maturation of open source solutions,
managed services has seen really
tremendous growth, something we've seen,
especially if we were talking about
in the cloud space.
Maybe if you could just walk us through
a little bit out that, you know,
what are you hearing from customers?
How does Red Hat think about managed solutions?
>> Absolutely. Stu, I think it was a good question, right?
I think, uh, as we say, the customers are looking at,
you know, multiple infrastructure footprints,
Be iteither the public cloud or on-prem.
They'll start looking at, you know,
if I go to the cloud, you know, there's this concept of,
I want something to be managed.
So what Open Shift is doing is in Open Shift,
as you know it's Red Hat's hybrid cloud platform and with Open Shift,
all the things that we strive to do
is to enable the vision of the Open Hybrid Cloud.
Uh, so, but Open Hybrid Cloud, it's all about choice,
So we want to make sure the customers have
both the managed as well as the self managed option.
Uh, so if you really look at it, you know,
Red Hat has multiple offerings
from a managed standpoint.
One as you know, we have Open Shift dedicated,
which runs from AWS and Google. And, you know,
we just have, as I mentioned earlier.
We relaunched our Google service at Red Hat Summit
back in May.
So that's actually getting a lot of traction.
We also have joint offerings with Azure
that we announced a couple of years back and,
there's a lot of interest for that offering
as well as the new offering that we announced
post-summit, the Amazon-Red Hat Open Shift,
which basically is another native offering
that we have on Amazon. If you really look at,
having, having spoken about these offerings,
if you really look at Red Hat's evolution
as a managed service provider in the public cloud,
we've been doing this since 2011.
You know, that's kind of surprising for a lot of people,
but you know, we've been doing Open Shift online,
which is kind of a multi-tenant parcel
multi-talent CaaS solution 2011.
And we are one of the earliest providers
of managed kubernetes, you know,
along with Google Kubernetes engine GKE,
we are our Open Shift dedicated offering
back in 2015.
So we've been doing Kubernetes managed since,
Open Shift 3.1. So that's actually, you know,
we have a lot of experience with management
of Kubernetes and, you know,
the devolution of Open Shift we've now made it available
and pretty much all the clouds.
So that customers have that exact same experience
that they can get any one cloud across all clouds,
as well as on-prem.
Managed service customers now have a choice of a self managed Open Shift
or completely managed Open Shift.
>> Yeah. You mentioned the choice
and one of the challenges we have right now
is there's really the paradox of choice.
If you look in the Kubernetes space, you know,
there are dozens of offerings.
Of course, every cloud provider has their offerings.
You know, Google's got GKE, they have Anthos, uh, they,
they have management tools around there.
You, you talked a bit about the, you know,
the experience and all the customers you have,
the, you know, there's one of the fighters talks about,
there's no compression algorithm for experience.
So, you know, what is Red Hat Open Shift?
What really differentiates in the market place from,
you know, so many of the other offerings,
either from the public high providers,
some of the new startups, that we should know.
>> Yeah. I think that's an interesting question, right?
I think all Google traders start with
it's complete open source and, you know,
we are a complete open source company.
So there is no proprietary software
that we put into Open Shift.
Open Shift, basically, even though it has,
you know, OC command, it basically has CPR.
So you can actually use native Google networks
as you choose on any Google network offering
that you have be it GKE, EKS or any of the other things
that are out there.
So that's why I think there are such things
with google networks and providers and Red Hat
does not believe in open provider.
It completely believes in open source.
We have everything that we is open source.
From an it standpoint, the value prop for Red Hat
has always been the value of the subscription,
but we actually make sure that, you know,
Google network is taken from an upstream product.
It's basically completed productized
and available for the enterprise to consume.
But that right, when we have the managed offering,
we provide a lot more benefits to it, right?
The benefits are right.
We actually have customer zero for Open Shift.
So what does that mean? Right.
We will not release Open Shift
if we can't run open Shift dedicated
or any of their (indistinct) out Open Shift
for them is under that Open Shift. Really really well.
So you won't get a software version out there.
The second thing is we actually run a lot of workloads,
but then Red Hat that are dependent on our managed
or open shift off. So for example, our billing systems,
all of those internal things that are important
for Red Hat run on managed Open Shift,
for example, managed Open Shift.
So those are the important services for Red Hat
and we have to make sure that those things
are running really, really well.
So we provide that second layer of enterprise today.
Then having put Open Shift online, out that in public.
We have 4 million applications
and a million developers that use them.
So that means, I've been putting it out there
in the internet and, you know, there's security hosts
that are constantly being booked
that are being plugged in.
So that's another benefit that you get
from having a product that's a managed service,
but it also is something that enterprises
can now use it.
From an Open Shift standpoint,
the real difference is we add a lot of other things
on top of google network without compromising
the google network safety.
That basically helps customers not have to worry about
how they're going to get the CIC pipeline
or how they have to do a bunch of
in Cobra Net as an outside as the inside.
Then you have technologies like Store Street Metrics
kind of really help customers not to obstruct
the way the containerization led from that.
So those are some of the benefits
that we provide with Open Shift.
>> Yeah. So, so, so Sathish, as it's said,
there's lots of options when it comes to Kubernetes,
even from a Red Hat offering,
you've got different competing models there.
If I look inside your portfolio,
if it's something that I want to put on my infrastructure,
if I haven't read the Open Shift container platform,
is that significantly different
from the managed platform.
Maybe give us a little compare contrast, you know.
What do I have to do as a customer?
Is the code base the same? Can I do, you know,
hybrid environments between them and you know,
what does that mean?
>> It's a smart questions.
It's a really, really good question that you asked.
So we actually, you know, as I've said,
we add a lot of things on top of google network
to make it really fast, but do you want to use the cast,
you can use the desktop.
So one of the things we've found, but you know,
what we've done with our managed offering
is we actually take Open Shift container platform
and we manage that.
So we make sure that you get like
a completely managed source, you know.
They'll be managed, the patching of the worker nodes
and other things, which is, again,
another difference that we have
with the native Cobra Net of services.
We actually give plush that admin functionality
to customers that basically allows them
to choose all the options that they need
from an Open Shift container platform.
So from a core base, it's exactly the same thing.
The only thing is, it's a little bit opinionated.
It to start off when we deploy the cluster
for the customer and then the customer, if they want,
they can choose how to customize it.
So what this really does is it takes away
any of the challenges the customer may have
with like how to install and provision a cluster,
which we've already simplified a lot of the open shift,
but with the managed the Open Shift,
it's actually just a click of it.
>> Great. Sathish Well, I've got the trillion dollar question
for you. One of the things we've been looking at
for years of course, is, you know,
what do I keep in my data center?
What do I move to the cloud? How do I modernize it?
We understand it's a complex and nuanced solution,
but you talk to a lot of customers.
So I, you know, here in 2020, what's the trends?
What are some of the pieces that you're seeing
some change and movement that, you know,
might not have been the case a year ago?
>> I think, you know, this is an interesting question
and it's an evolving question, right?
And it's something that if you ask like 10 people
you'll get real answers, but I'm trying to generalize
what I've seen just from all the customer conversations
I've been involved.
I think one thing is very clear, right?
I think that the world is right as much as
anybody may want to say that
I'm going to go to a single cloud
or I'm going to just be on prem.
It is inevitable that you're going to basically end up
with multiple infrastructure footprint.
It's either multicloud
or it's on Prem versus a single cloud
or on prem versus multiple cloud.
So the main thing is that, we've been noticing as,
what customers are saying in a whole.
How do I make sure that my developers are not confused
by all these difference than one?
How do I give them a consistent way to develop
and build their applications?
Not really worry about, what is the infrastructure.
What is the footprint that they're actually servicing?
So that's kind of really, really important.
And in terms of, you know, things that, you know,
we've seen customers, you know,
I think you always start with compliance requirements
and data regulations.
Back there you got to figure it out.
What compliance do I need?
And as the infrastructure
or the platform that I'm going to go to meet
the compliance requirements that I have,
and what are the data regulations?
You know, what is the data I'm going to be setting?
Is it going to meet the data submitted rules
that my country or my geo has?
I got to make sure I worry about that.
And then I got to figure out if I'm going
to basically more to the cloud from the data center
or from one cloud to another cloud.
I might just be doing a lift or shift.
Am I doing a transformation?
What is it that I really worry about?
In addition to the transformation,
they got to figure it out, or I need to do that.
Do I not need to do that? And then, you know,
we've got to figure out what your data going to set?
What your database going to look in?
And do you need to connect to some legacy system
that you have on prem? Or how do you go?
How do you have to figure that out
and give them all of these complexities?
This is really, really common for any large enterprise
that has like an enterprise ID for that multi-cloud.
That's basically in multiple geographies,
servicing millions of customers.
So that has a lot of experience doing all these things.
We have open innovation labs, which are really,
really awesome experience for customers.
Whether they take a small project,
they figured out how to change things.
Not only learn how to change things
from a technology standpoint,
but also learn how to culturally change things,
because a lot of these things.
So it's not just moving from
one infrastructure to another,
but also learning how to do things differently.
Then we have things like
the container adoption programmer, which is like,
how do you take a big legacy monolith application?
How do you containerize it?
How do you make it micro services?
How do you make sure that you're leveraging
the real benefits that you're going to get out of moving
to the cloud or moving to a container platform?
And then we have a bunch of other things like,
how do you get started with Open Shift and all of that?
So we've had a lot of experience
with like our 2,400 plus customers doing this kind of
really heavy workload migration and lifting.
So the customers really get the benefits
that they see out of Open Shift.
>> Yeah. So Sathish, if I think about Google,
specifically talking about Google cloud,
one of the main reasons we hear customers using Google
is to have access to the data services.
They have the AI services they have.
So how does that tie into
what we were just talking about?
If I, if I use Open Shift and you know.
I'm living in Google cloud, can,
can I access all of those cloud native services?
Are there any nuances things I need to think about
to be able to really unleash that innovation
of the platform that I'm tying into?
>> Yeah, absolutely not. Right.
I think it's a great question.
And I think customers are always wondering about.
Hey, if I use Open Shift, am I going to be locked out
of using the cloud services?
And if anything run out as antilock.
We want to make sure that you can use the best services
that you need for your enterprise,
like the strategy as well as for applications.
So with that, right.
And we've developed the operator framework,
which I think Google has been
a very early supporter of.
They've built a lot of operators around their services.
So you can develop those operators to monitor
the life cycle of these services, right from Open Shift.
So you can actually connect
to an AI service if you want. That's absolutely fine.
You can connect the database services as well.
And you can leverage all of those things
while your application runs on Open Shift
from Google cloud.
Also I think that done us right.
We recognize that, when you're talking about
the open hybrid cloud,
you got to make sure that customers can actually
leverage services that are the same
across different clouds.
So when you can actually leverage the Google services
from On Prem as well,
if you choose to have localized services.
We have a large catalog of operators
that we have in our operator hub,
as well as in the Red Hat marketplace
that you can actually go and leverage
from third party, third party ISV,
so that you're basically having
the same consistent experience if you choose to.
But based on the consistent experience,
that's not tied to a cloud. You can do that as well.
But we would like for customers to use any service
that they want, right from Open Shift
without any restrictions.
>> Yeah. One of the other things we've heard a lot
from Google over the last year or so has been,
you know, just helping customers,
especially for those mission, critical business,
critical applications, things like SAP.
You talked a bit about databases.
What advice would you give customers these days?
They're, they're looking at, you know, increasing
or moving forward in their cloud journeys.
>> I think it sounds as an interesting question
because I think customers really have to look at,
you know, what is the ID and technology strategy?
What are the different initiatives to have?
Is it digital transformation?
Is it cloud native development?
Is it just containerization
or they have an overarching theme over?
They've got to really figure that out
and I'm sure they're looking at it.
They know which one is the higher priority
when all of them are interrelated and in some ways.
They also got to figure out how they going to expand
to new business. Because I think as we said, right,
ID is basically what is driving personal
software is eating the load.
Software services are editing them.
So you got to figure out, what are your business needs?
Do you need to be more agile?
Do you need to enter new businesses?
You know, those are kind of important things.
For example, BMW is a great example,
they use Open Shift container platform as well as
they use Open Shift dedicated, you know.
They are like a hundred hundred plus year old car,
guess, you know what they're trying to do.
They're actually now becoming
connected car infrastructure.
That's the main thing that they're trying to build
so that they can actually service the cars in any job.
So in one shoe,
they came from a car manufacturing company
to now focus on being a SAS, an Edge and IOT company.
If you really look at the cars
as like the internet of things on an edge computer
and what does that use case require?
That use case cannot anymore have just one data center
in Munich, they have to basically build
a global platform of data centers
or they can really easily go to the cloud.
And then they need to make sure that
that application double close when they're starting
to run on multiple clouds, multiple geographies,
they have the same abstraction layer
so that they can actually apply things fast.
Develop fast.
They don't have to worry
about the infrastructure frequently.
And that's basically why they started using Open Shift.
And don't know why they're big supporters of Open Shift.
And then I think it's the right mission for their use.
So I think it really depends on, you know,
what the customer is looking for,
but irrespective of what they're looking for,
I think Open Shift nicely fits in
because what it does,
is it provides you that commonality
across all infrastructure footprints.
It gives you all the productivity gains
and it allows you to connect to any service
that you want anywhere
because we are agnostic to that and as well as
we bring a whole lot of services from Red Hat marketplace
so you can actually leverage your status.
>> Well, Sathish Balakrishnan,
thank you so much for the updates.
Great to hear about the progress
you've got with your customers.
And thank you for joining us
on the Google cloud Next On Air Event.
>> Thank you Stu. It's been great talking to you
and look forward to seeing you in person one day.
>> Alright. I'm Stu Miniman.
And thank you as always for watching the Cube.
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