>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube,
covering AWS Re:Invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel,
and our ecosystem of partners.
>> Hey, welcome back everyone.
We're live here in Las Vegas for AWS Re:Invent 2017,
Amazon Web Services Annual Conference.
I'm John Furrier, the cohost of The Cube,
and I'm here with Keith Townsend, my cohost.
We got our next guest Mike Ferris, who's the Vice President
of Business Architecture at Technical Business Development.
Welcome to The Cube.
>> Thank you.
>> So, Red Hat has got the new Hat, it's called
the new school, it's called cloud, you have been there
for a long time.
Red has been pioneering open source,
and that's growing exponentially.
That combined with the cloud was seeing developers really
at the heart of the conversation of valued creation.
So, what's the update?
I mean, you're here at AWS, you got some things to announce,
things to share.
>> Oh yeah, it's been awesome.
I've been with the Red Hat a long time.
And it's been an amazing transition to see us go from
a company that really innovated the business models
around open source taking Linux from being really
a hobbyist activity into production workloads,
and really addressing system administrators
and IT administrators in the early days.
What's really happened, especially since Amazon started
innovating the public cloud, as you were saying,
this innovative focus around what happens with developers
in this space?
And how can you provide more tools, capabilities,
and services for them so they can really accelerate
the applications and capabilities of the customers
that they serve and really move forward.
And so, what we've been doing very aggressively
is looking up what's been happening
in the open source community,
helping innovate in the technologies that both
Amazon and Red Hat and everybody else has been maturing,
and help building out a new framework for developers
to do that.
And that's really centered around first, the base
that we built on Red Hat Enterprise, Linux,
and now more aggressively into Open Shift
and container application platforms,
so certainly the hot topics being Kubernetes,
and everything's happening there, we've been really focused
on that next generation of applications for developers.
>> Everyone who watches Cube knows I'm a huge Red Hat fan,
I always give you guys props because you guys were
the progressives back in the day.
You worked Tier One, you getting in there to give
the freedom of coding back in the old days.
And that was really the beginning of this massive wave.
And if you look at open source and what you guys have done
with open source and connected that to business value,
has really been well documented.
Amazon's done the same with the cloud.
They were laughed at for years.
Oh, it's a developer cloud.
And they're winning all these enterprise deals.
So, the threat here is you're starting to see that really,
if you have great software and you have great value creation
you can connect the business dots with developer dots.
So, that being said, the rage now is server-less.
The idea that you could tie containers
and orchestrate work loads.
This is kind of a little bit Open Shift connects there.
What is the Red Hat value there
because more open source, more community.
What is all this Kubernetes, containerization
and server-less, where does it all come together?
>> So there's multiple levels,
and kind of the core one that I always go back to
is the core principles that enterprises need
in making sure that they have secure platforms,
they maintain over a long period of time,
and they have a robust ecosystem that surrounds that.
Those are the things that customers will always value,
regardless of what level of a stack
that they're investing in,
and so by starting at, you know, the open source level
and helping innovate in the technologies there,
but bringing that in a way that customers can consume,
that our partners can work with,
and also gives them the extra value
of what's happening in the new generation technologies,
like containers and like Kubernetes,
where we're actively participating,
leading a lot of the development projects
in the community around.
Our focus is very much on taking those same core principles
and making them applicable to anything new
that gets developed.
>> So Mike, talk to us about these core principles
a little bit more.
Red Hat, developer driven organization.
You guys are deep in open source,
from Linux to Kubernetes, to projects people
have never heard of.
Talk about the value that you bring to businesses,
being able to have that developer driven focus internally,
and starting to shift the conversation
from just infrastructure, Linux, traditional,
just keeping the lights on types of technologies
to these new technologies, like Open Shift.
How has the conversations changed?
>> So certainly, you know, the developers now
are actively engaged in the design
of the systems and the products,
not just the application that they develop,
but the tools that they need,
and our experience in working in the Linux community,
where we were dealing with, certainly,
open source developers on the Colonel
and all the surrounding infrastructure,
the thousands of projects that are there,
we're taking that and applying it
to what's happening in this application
and container application space,
so being able to engage those developers and say,
what frameworks do you need?
What tools do you need?
What reliability levels do you need
in these types of frameworks?
Certainly provides a mechanism for them to engage,
both with the community, but come to Red Hat
for working with a company that can actually make that
something that we will support for a longer period of time,
that they can build their applications for,
and also trust that they will have
a strong support path through Red Hat
that works upstream in the community
to take any innovations that they need
and be able to put them in the community
as well as the supported products that we provide.
>> So developer driven organization,
talking to developers.
Where's the grown ups in the rooms?
The infrastructure of guys.
So Red Hat has been known to take open source projects
that can move extremely fast, Linux Colonel
is an example of it,
and make them enterprise ready,
enterprise stable.
How are you guys doing that with these developer tools,
such as Kubernetes, that I frankly can't keep up
with all the innovation happening in that space.
How do you guys make something like Kubernetes
enterprise ready?
>> So this is kind of the beauty
of a lot of what we do, right?
So we work with and we hire the best developers
we can find in the market to own projects,
to be key contributors to those.
Kubernetes is a great example.
It was the Colonel in the early days for Linux,
now it's in the Kubernetes space,
but just as importantly, being able to say,
you continue that innovative work in the community,
but also make sure that we have reliable products
that are fully tested by our,
and backed by our support staff,
that customers can, when they purchase into this ecosystem,
can absolutely rely on,
and if you look at what we've done,
starting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
we leaned how to move in that bifurcated market,
where you're dealing with open source innovation,
but also having to answer to customers
that want to make sure that things are always up,
always secure, and always stable,
and it's that bifurcated model that we've relied on,
and this is why when we look at open source,
we consider our development model,
we don't consider our business model,
and that's very important.
>> Mike, I want to get your thoughts on business architecture
and technical architecture.
I was having a debate last night at the analyst happy hour
with a couple analysts, and I won't say their names,
protect the innocent.
We made a joke that said if you had to pick a parachute
in 10 seconds, Amazon, Microsoft, or Google,
which one would you grab?
And of course this one analyst said, well it depends,
so of course it depends.
Just a thought exercise.
I mean no one's going to pick any cloud in 10 seconds,
but it makes you think,
but the depends conversation does matter.
Legacy, whether it's open source software
or preexisting conditions of the data center or cloud,
plays into it, but cloud is a new architecture.
There are no walls, there's no perimeter,
so how are you guys advising your customers
to lay out the business architecture,
the technical architecture, what's the playbook?
Because a lot of CXOs are like scratching their head.
I need a parachute, I need, it needs to open when I need it.
I need the cloud now.
>> Yeah, our core message to all of our customers
in the market at large is really around hybrid,
and that applies to both on premise and off premise,
but it also means multiple clouds, right,
and certainly when we partner with somebody like Amazon,
we're focused on how can we build
the best possible relationship
and the best possible technical and business environment
for customers to engage with that partner?
And we did this, back in May we announced
working with Amazon on Open Shift
and we just launched, I think it was last week,
Open Shift 3.7 that has service brokers integrated
into Open Shift container platform
so customers can actually deploy on premise Open Shift
and use Amazon services remotely
through their Open Shift applications,
but our focus in that is to make sure
that they have an open environment,
just like we did at the beginning with REL,
to say it works on all OEMs,
now our focus is REL, Open Shift.
It's available on all public clouds.
We have over 500 CCSPs,
our certified cloud service providers,
and make sure that it all works together very well
and that customers have choice in the end,
and that's really what our focus has been.
>> And also, I talked to Andy Jassie last week
for an exclusive interview.
He said the ecosystem is very robust,
but even though they might come out with something,
people are standing on their own with value,
and it's not like they're trying to compete
with the ecosystems, which people have concerns about,
so that's kind of cool, I get why he's saying that,
but I got to ask you the question.
Elastic container service has been doing well.
Containers are obviously great architecture, agree.
We're expecting to hear elastic Kubernetes service,
EKS, coming out this week.
Some are speculating.
I'm not sure if that's going to be announced,
but you can almost imagine a Kubernetes version
coming out from Amazon.
Google's got their hand in it.
So is Kubernetes going to become a political hot potato
or is it going to maintain its stability?
>> We certainly believe that it was
and certainly is being validated now
as the standard orchestration platform for containers,
right, so we chose.
>> That's a general sentiment across the whole community?
>> Absolutely.
Docker had its support for Kubernetes
in the last couple of months, right,
and so Amazon, if they choose to do so, great, right,
we welcome that and engage,
just like when we were doing Linux
as our primary product platform,
we welcomed, you know, Intel, IBM,
everyone else to engage in the community,
mature the technologies, and frankly we welcome competition
when it comes down to it because that's really
what makes things better for customers,
and choice is very important.
>> So you would agree that Kubernetes had a flash point?
It's all good right now.
Don't meddle with it.
So what do we have to look for to make sure
that no one tinkers with it too much
and take it off the rails?
>> Well I certainly hope they do tinker with it, right.
>> John: In a good way.
>> In a good way, but the community,
and what happens in the open source development realm
are really, the bad stuff gets weeded out over time,
and you know we work with customers in the community,
we make sure that where the community's going,
we can reflect that to our customer base,
so as Kubernetes matures, as the surrounding technologies
for orchestration matures,
sorry, for containers matures,
we want to make sure we're engaged in those projects
and working with a customer.
>> John: So competition's good for innovation?
>> Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.
>> John: I would agree with that.
>> So let's talk UpStack a little bit.
>> Okay.
>> Linux Colonel is Linux Colonel arm, X86.
My Linux experience is Linux no matter the platform.
Kubernetes, I just heard the same thing.
AWS, Google compute, in my own data center,
Kubernetes, Kubernetes, Open Shift, helps us to do that.
Let's talk about the rest of my applications,
my monolithic applications that are not designed
for traditional, funny I'm saying this term,
traditional Kubernetes, okay.
How does Red Hat help with this abundant choice in market
across cloud providers outside of Kubernetes?
>> Well, one, so I think you need to understand
that you know, Linux is not Linux is not Linux, right.
Anytime you deploy a platform, whether it's Linux
or whether it's Kubernetes,
you are committing to something
that is on a specific release cycle,
that may have specific support statements,
that may follow specific open source paths,
and you need to beware what you're buying into,
and I don't mean that from a financial perspective
as much as what are you committing your infrastructure?
>> Keith: What's my support model, right?
>> So absolutely, Kubernetes is the de facto technology
in the same way that Linux is the de facto technology,
but you have to make sure that the thing that you're buying
is something that you're going to be able to support
and support your customers for long term,
and so that's why, when just as you were saying earlier,
you know we look at what's happening upstream,
we absolutely follow that path,
but we also want to make sure that customers have
a long term support model and we can maintain that
in a fiscally responsible way over a period of,
likely a decade as we do with REL, right,
so when customers buy into that,
they're buying into not just the core technologies,
but they're buying into everything that surrounds it,
and so when you look.
>> And you guys vetted it too.
A lot of vetting goes on.
>> Oh yeah, so you know the release engineering
that we do, the working with partners
on the releases themselves, all surround that,
so we test, you know, Open Shift on public clouds,
we test it on hardware, on virtualization.
>> John: Red Hat stamp of approval means something.
That's the bottom line.
>> Yeah, it's not lightweight,
and having been there so long,
I can tell you it takes a lot of people and effort
to make sure that that's there,
but surrounding Kubernetes, right,
all the dev ops capabilities,
all of the, you know, integration,
with partners like Amazon,
those are the things that make the platform sing
and allow a developer to come into the platform
and immediately start deploying applications,
developing and deploying applications,
but also with the knowledge that when they develop
from the one, it's actually deployed everywhere,
and one of the lines that we've actually matured
because we believe it strongly
is that, you know, containers are Linux and Linux is REL,
right, so when you go down this path,
you're not just looking at which Kubernetes
or, you know, which platform you want to get into,
you're actually looking at what Linux am I going to choose?
Because it's all one and the same
and our focus has been how do we maintain
those core principles of security, reliability,
scalability, across this for decades?
>> Mike, congratulations.
You guys have been a great company
to watch over the years, going back decades.
Now even more,
the Red Hat stamp of approval means something.
Final question for you.
I wanted to ask, it's a personal question.
Put your personal industry tech geek hat on.
Your friend's a CIO, CXO in a company,
he's a friend, runs development shop
for the same company, you're best friends.
They ask you, what's going on with this Amazon thing?
It's scale, all this stuff.
How do I make sense of it?
What's your answer?
>> So Amazon has, I've been working with Amazon since 2007,
and the innovation is not just in the technology.
It's in how they do the business,
the business models that surround it,
and to me that means they're building
an entire IT environment, right?
It's not just about the software
or the service they provide.
It's how do you interact with your partners,
with your customers.
So when you look at Amazon, you're looking at
the whole environment about how can I best serve
my customers through this entire ecosystem?
>> John: Sounds like an operating system to me.
>> You know, cloud operating system,
you know multiple levels can really come in here.
>> It's a holistic picture,
basically what you're saying.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
>> Bigger picture.
Okay Mike, thanks for coming on the Cube.
Red Hat here, inside the Cube here for day one
of live coverage of three days of AWS Re:Invent.
I'm chatting with Keith Townsend,
your host on set one here.
Two sets, so much action, so many announcements,
so much to talk about,
so many great people here at Re:Invent 2017.
We'll bring you more after this short break.
(upbeat instrumental music)