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>> Welcome back everyone to the KubeCon
CloudNativeCon coverage.
I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE.
We're here in person. 2021, a real event.
It's a hybrid event.
We're streaming live to you with all the great coverage
and guests coming on next three days.
Clayton Coleman's here, Chief Hybrid Cloud Architect
for Red Hat is joining me here
to give an overview of his talk,
but also talk about hybrid cloud, multi-cloud,
where it's all going, what Red Hat's doing.
Great to see you, thanks for coming on.
>> It's a pleasure to be back.
It's a pleasure to be back at KubeCon.
>> It's an honor to have you on as the Chief Architect
at Red Hat on hybrid cloud.
It is the hottest area in the market right now.
The biggest story, obviously we're back in person.
That's the biggest story here.
The second biggest story,
that's the most important story is hybrid cloud.
And what does it mean for multi-cloud?
This is a key trend, you just gave a talk here.
What's your take on it?
>> You know, I like to summarize hybrid cloud
as the answer to, or it's really the summarization of
yes please, more of everything,
which is, we don't have one of anything.
Nobody who's got any kind of real footprint is single cloud.
They're not single framework.
They're not single language.
They're not single application server.
They're not single container platform.
They're not single VM technology.
And then looking around here in this partner space,
we're eight years into Kubernetes,
and there was an enormous ecosystem of tools,
technologies, capabilities, add-ons, plugins,
components that make our applications better.
The modern application landscape is so huge
that I think that's what hybrid really is.
We've got all these places to run stuff, more than ever.
And we've got all this stuff to run, more than ever,
and it doesn't slow down,
so how do we bring sanity to that?
How do we understand it, bring it together?
And Kubernetes has been a big part of that.
It unlocked some of that.
What's the next step?
>> Yeah. That's great, great commentary.
I want to dig into the Kubernetes piece, but you know,
as we've been reporting,
the digital transformation has an all time high.
Speed is the number one request.
People want to go faster.
Not just speeds and feeds, but like ship code faster,
build apps faster, make it all run faster and secure.
Okay, check. Get that. Look where we were 15 years ago,
10 years ago, five years ago.
2016, the first KubeCon.
>> Clayton: Yep.
>> In Seattle. We were there for small events, Kubernetes.
We got to sell it, figure it out.
>> Clayton: Right. Convince people that it's worth it.
>> Yeah. So what's your take on that?
I mean, obviously it's mature,
it's kind of defacto standard at this point.
What's missing? Where is it?
>> So, I think Kubernetes has succeeded at the core mission,
which is helping us stop worrying about all the problems
that we spent endless amounts of time arguing about.
How do I deploy software? How do I roll it out?
But in the meantime, we've added more types of software.
You know, the rise of AIML,
the whole ecosystem around training, software models.
What is an AI model? Does it look like an application?
Does it look like a job?
It's part batch, part service, it's spread out to the edge.
We've added mobile devices.
The explosion in mobile computing
over the last 10 years has co-evolved.
And so, Kubernetes succeeded at that, kind of set a floor
for what everybody thought was an application.
And in the meantime,
we've added all these other parts of the application.
>> It's funny, Dave Vellante, we're talking about,
and with Stu Min and his networks of Red Hat
will be on later.
Back in the first two KubeCons, we're like,
this is a good TCP/IP Bowman, the OSI model,
that was a killer part of the stack
now was all standardized below TCP/IP.
Kubernetes feels like a similar kind of construct
where it's unifying, it's creating some enablement.
It's enabling some innovation,
and it kind of brought everyone together at the same time.
Everyone realized that it's real,
the whole cloud native is real.
And now we're in an era now
where people are talking about doing things
that are completely different.
You mentioned, is it a batch? Is it a Java?
How is AI?
New software paradigm, development paradigms,
not to suffer down the life cycle,
but just like software development in general has impacted.
>> Absolutely. And you know, the components,
we spend a lot of time talking about how to test
and build application,
those are things that we all kind of internalize.
Now we have CICB processes.
CICB's critical because it's going to be in lots of places.
People are looking to standardize,
but sometimes the new technology
comes up alongside the thing we're trying to standardize,
and we're like, well, let's just use
the new technology instead.
Function as a service is, it came up,
Kubernetes grew K native, and then you see,
the proliferation of functions as a service.
Choices, you know, what do people use?
So there's a lot of choice
and we're all building on those common layers,
but everybody kind of has their own opinions.
Everybody's doing something subtly different.
>> Let me ask your opinion on
more under the hood kind of complexity challenge.
There's general consensus in the industry
that there's a lot of complexity. Okay.
You don't mean to debate that,
but that's in a way a good thing
in the sense of, if you solve that,
that's where innovation comes in.
So the goal is to solve complexity,
abstract out of the heavy lifting,
[Inaudible] would say,
or abstract away complexity make things easy to use.
>> Well and, open source.
And this ecosystem is an amazing,
it's one of the most effective methods we've ever found
for trying every possible solution
and keeping the five or six most successful.
And that's a little bit like developers,
developers flow downhill,
developers are going to do what's easy.
If it's easier to put a credit card in
and go to the public cloud, you're going to do it.
If you can take control away from the teams
at your organization that are there to protect you,
but maybe aren't as responsive as you like,
people will go around those.
And so I think a little bit of what we're trying
to do is, what are the commonalities that we could pick out
of this ecosystem that everybody agrees on
and make those the downhill path that people follow?
Not putting a credit card into a cloud,
but offering a way for you
not to think about what cloud you're on until you need to,
right? Because you want to go to the fridge as a developer,
you want to go to the fridge,
pull out your favorite brand of soda.
That favorite brand of soda might have an AWS label on.
>> So talking about the open shift
and the Kubernetes relationship,
and how you guys push that boundaries.
Dennis being control, plane, and nodes.
These are the things that you talked about in your talk.
Because you guys made some good bets on OpenShift.
We've been covering that.
How's it playing out and what's the relationship now?
>> It's interesting, coming into Kubernetes.
We came in from the platform as a service angle, right?
Platform as a service was the first iteration
of trying to make the lowest cost path for developers
to flow to business value.
And so we added things on top of Kubernetes.
We knew that Kubernetes were going to be complex.
So we built in a little bit in our structure
and our way of thinking about Cube,
that it was never going to be just
that basic bare bones package
that you were going to have to make choices
for people that made sense.
Obviously, as the ecosystem's grown,
we've tried to grow with it.
We've tried to be a layer above Kubernetes.
We've tried to be a layer in between Kubernetes.
We've tried to be layer underneath Kubernetes,
and all of these are valid places to be.
I think that next step is, we're all kind of asking,
we've got all this stuff.
Are there any ways that we can be more efficient?
So I like to think about practical benefits.
What is a practical benefit
that a little bit of opinionation
could bring to this ecosystem?
And I think it's around applications.
It's being application-centric.
What does a team, 90% of the time need, to be successful?
They need a way to get their code out.
They need to get it to the places that they want it to be.
And that place is everywhere.
It's not one cloud or on-premise or a data center.
It's the edge, it's running as a lambda.
It's running inside devices that might be coming,
being designed in this very room today.
>> It's interesting, you know, you're an architect,
but obviously the computer science industry is,
the people were trained in the air, are learning.
It's pretty fascinating
and almost intoxicating right now in this market
because you have an operating system,
dynamic systems, kind of programming model
with distributed cloud. >> Clayton: That's right.
Edge is on fire.
That's only going to get more complicated with 5G
and high density data applications.
And then you've got this changing modal,
mode of operations work programming
with bots and AI and machine learning.
True new things.
But it's kind of the same distributed computing paradigm.
What's your reaction to that?
>> Well, it's interesting.
I'd kind of described like layers.
We've gone from Linux replaced,
proprietary Unix or mainframe to virtualization,
which then we had a lot of Linux. We had some Windows too.
And then we moved to public cloud and private cloud.
We brought config management in, we moved to Kubernetes.
We've still got that OS at the heart of what we do.
We've got application libraries
and we have shared services and common services.
I think it's interesting to learn from Linux's lesson,
which is, we want to build an open, expansive ecosystem.
>> John: Yup. Here.
>> Kind of like what's going on.
We want to pick enough opinionation that it just works.
'Cause I think just works is what, let's be honest,
we could come up with all the great theories
of what the right way computers should be done,
but it's going to be what's easy.
What gets people, help them get their jobs done.
Trying to time to take that from where people are today
on CUBE, in cloud, on multiple clouds,
give them just a little bit more consolidation.
And I think it's, trick people or convince people
by showing them how much easier it could be.
>> Yeah. What's interesting around what you guys have done,
Red Hat, is that you guys have real customers
are demanding and you have enterprise customers.
So you're done the front edge of the bleeding edge,
making things easier.
And I think there's good enough is a good angle,
but let's face it.
People are just lifting and shifting to the cloud now.
They haven't yet refactor
and refactoring is a concept of taking what you're doing
in the cloud and taking advantage of new services
to change the operating dynamic
and value proposition of, say, the application.
So the smart money is all going there.
You're seeing the funding come into applications
that are leveraging the new platform, re-platforming,
and then refactoring. What's your take on that?
Because you got the edge, you got other things happening.
>> There are so many more types of applications today.
And it's interesting because almost all of them
start with real practical problems
that enterprises or growing tech companies
or companies that aren't tech companies,
but have a very strong tech component, right?
That's the biggest transformation in the last 15 years
is that you can be a tech company
without ever calling yourself a tech company
because you have a website and you have an app
and your entire business model flows like that.
So there is,
I think pragmatically people are,
they're okay with their footprint where it is.
They're looking to consolidate.
They're very interested in taking advantage of the scale
that modern cloud offers them.
And they're trying to figure out
how to bring all the advantages
that they have in these modern technologies
to these new footprints and these new form factors
that they're trying to fit into,
whether that's an application running on the edge
next to their load balancer in a gateway in Telco.
5G is happening right now.
Red Hat's been really heavily involved
in the Telco ecosystem
and it's Kubernetes through and through.
It's building on those kinds of principles.
What are the concepts that help make a hybrid application?
An application that spans the data
flowing from a device back to the cloud,
out to a gateway, processed by a big data system
and a private region someplace where compute is cheap.
>> John: Can't be a silo.
>> No, absolutely not.
>> John: It has to be distributed non-siloed based mouth.
>> And how do we do that and keep security?
How do we help you track where your data is?
And who's talking to whom?
There's a lot of people here today
who are helping people connect.
I think that next step, that connectivity,
the knowing who's talking and how they're connecting,
that'll be a fundamental part of what emerges as-
>> And that's why the observability to me is the data.
It's really about a data funding,
a new data sector of the market.
It's going to be addressable.
Having data addressability is critical.
Clayton, I really appreciate you coming on
and giving me your perspective.
You're an expert in the field.
I got to ask you, you know,
I got to say from a personal standpoint,
how Open Source has truly been a real enabler?
You look at how fast new things could come in
and be adopted and vetted and things get kicked around.
People try stuff, it fails,
but they build on each other. Right?
So AI, for example,
it's just a great example
of looking at what machine learning and AI is going on,
how fast that's been adopted. >> Clayton: Absolutely.
I don't think that would be done in Open Source.
I have to ask you guys at Red Hat,
as you continue your mission
and with IBM, with that partnership,
how do you see people participating with you guys?
Obviously you're here. You're part of the ecosystem,
big player.
How you guys continuing to work with the community,
take a minute to share what you're working on.
>> So, first off, it's impossible to get anything done,
I think in this ecosystem, without being open first,
and that's something that Red Hat and IBM
are both committed to.
A lot of what I try to do is I try to map
from the very complex problems that people bring to us
because every problem in applications is complex
at some way, and you've got to have the expertise,
but there's so much expertise.
So you've got to be able to blend the experts
in a particular technology,
the experts in a particular problem, domain,
like the folks who consult or contract
or help design some of these architectures
or have that experience at large companies
and then move on to advise others and how to proceed.
And then you have to be able to take those lessons,
put them in technology,
and the technology has to go back and take that feedback.
I would say my primary goal
is to come to these sorts of events
and to share what everyone is facing.
Because if we, as a group, aren't all working at some level,
there won't be the ability of those organizations
to react because none of us know the whole stack.
None of us know the whole set of things.
>> And this tech's changing too.
I mean, I've referenced the OSI model.
It's more of an '80s metaphor, but you know,
but that changed the game on proprietary
and that was the beginning.
>> It allows us to think and to separate, you know,
you want to have nice, thin layers
that the world on top doesn't worry about below,
except when you need to.
And below, you can make things more efficient
and public cloud, Open Source, Kubernetes,
and the proliferation of applications on top.
That's happening today.
>> I mean, Paul Maritz used to talk about the heart
and top when he was the VMware CEO back in 2010.
I remember him saying that,
he says he predicted the whole,
we called it the mainframe in the cloud at the time,
because it was a funny thing to say,
but it was really the computer.
I mean, essentially distributed nature of the cloud.
It happened. >> Clayton: Absolutely.
>> Clayton, thanks for coming on theCUBE
to share your insights. Appreciate it.
>> It was a pleasure, thank you.
>> All right. Clayton's here on theCUBE.
I'm John Furrier here live in LA
for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in-person.
It's a hybrid event with streaming
also going to the CUBE platform as well. Check us out there.
All the interviews, three days of coverage.
We'll be right back.
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