>> Narrator: Live from Boston Massachusetts it's theCube,
covering Red Hat Summit 2019, brought to you by Red Hat.
>> Well, good morning, welcome back
to our live coverage here in Boston, we're are the BCEC,
and we're at Red Hat Summit 2019.
You're watching exclusive coverage here on the theCube.
This is day three of three great days here at the summit.
Stu Miniman, John Walls, and we're joined now by
Paul Cormier who's the president of products
and technologies at Red Hat.
Good Morning, Paul. >> Good morning, guys.
>> How you doing? >> How are you?
>> I'm doing great! >> Great, so are we!
Wonderful job on the keynote stage yesterday.
We're going to jump into that a little bit,
but I wanted to run something by you, here.
A great man once said, Every great achievement
begins with a bold goal.
>> I heard that somewhere. >> I'm looking at that man.
One of the many statements that I thought
really jumped out yesterday.
Let's talk about that in terms of the Red Hat philosophy,
what's happened with RHEL 8,
where you've gone with OpenShift 4,
and how that is embedded in your mind
to how Red Hat goes about its business.
>> Well, we've been in the enterprise space
for 17 plus years, and prior to that,
Red Hat, we were basically through the retail channel,
but first and foremost,
Red Hat started as an open-source company.
That's where they started.
Not as an enterprise company.
Once we decided, with the bold goal,
that we're gonna get this into the enterprise,
that's when we transformed into what you've maybe heard
before from out of my mouth is we're
not an open-source company,
although everything we do is open source,
we're an enterprise software company
with an open-source development model.
That was kind of the beginning of the first bold goal.
Let's get Linux to the enterprise.
And that's sort of how we've thought about it
from day one is, let's take it one step at a time.
As I said, get Linux in the enterprise.
Make RHEL the operating system in the enterprise.
Now let's take on virtualization.
First Xen, then KVM.
And then, as that all happens,
so much innovation happened around Linux
that all these other pieces came.
You know, Hadoop, Kubernetes, all the other pieces.
So we just kept growing with that
because it's all intertwined with Linux.
That's one step at a time.
>> Paul, before we get off this place,
I want you to put a fine point on it for our audience,
because, you look out there, open source is not a community,
it's lots of communities, and it's not one thing,
it's many things out there,
and today, people will look at, there's certain companies,
How do I create IP and monetize what we're doing?
where the project and the company are sometimes intertwined,
and licensing models changing.
Red Hat has a very simple philosophy on it,
and it's not something
that's necessarily easily replicatable.
>> Yeah, the simple philosophy is: it's upstream first.
That's our philosophy.
Yes, we are a business, and certainly,
making our products successful is important.
Number one goal.
Number zero goal before that is make the project successful.
Our products can't be successful
unless we're built on a successful project,
and it's not something that we even think about,
because it's just ingrained.
It's in our DNA.
I'll give you examples.
Even Kubernetes, we didn't start the project,
Google started the project,
but we knew if we were going to incorporate that
in a big way into our products,
that we had to be prominent in the community.
So that's what we did first,
and then it rolled out into the products.
It's just ingrained.
It's in the DNA.
>> Yeah, so, let's talk a little bit about Kubernetes.
OpenShift, you've now got over 1,000 customers.
Congratulations on that. >> Thank you.
>> OpenShift 4, we've spent a bunch of time talking
with the team, but let's start a little bit higher level,
'cause there's dozens of Kubernetes options out there.
People look at: is there interoperability between them?
In the early days, customers
would just spin their own pieces,
and today, every cloud provider has at least one option,
if not multiple options, and there's all the independent.
How does this play out?
Where are we along the maturity,
and how do all these pieces fit together, or do they?
>> If you look at Kubernetes, here's the good news:
the good news is open source has become so prominent
and everywhere, we're now, ourselves included,
we make this mistake ourselves,
we've confused projects with products.
Kubernetes is a project.
It's a development project,
and we all talk about that like it's a product.
It's the same thing with Linux.
I'll give you an example.
The Linux kernel.
All the commercial vendors and everyone else
is in that same upstream development tree
with the Linux kernel.
But when the commercial guys, like ourselves,
when we go to build a product,
we make choices of which file systems
we're gonna support,
which installers we're gonn support,
what we're gonna do for management,
what we're gonna support for storage,
and for many reasons, we all make different decisions.
So that's why, at the end of the day,
when we come down to our products,
even though they're all completely open,
RHEL is different from SuSu,
which is different from Ubuntu,
which is different from all the others.
It's the same exact thing with Kubernetes.
We all develop here,
but now we bring it all into a platform like OpenShift.
Kubernetes touches user space APIs, it touches kernel APIs,
and, so, unless you integrate those
and they all move forward in the life cycle
of that platform at the same time,
we get out of sync with each other,
and that's one of the reasons why it's a product,
and they don't necessarily work across each other
with all the other products.
It's the same exact principle that made RHEL,
and it's the same exact principle how Linux works.
>> Right, so, what advice do you give to customers
as to how they look at this, because they're like,
Oh, wait, there's now Azure and OpenShift,
this jointly-offered solution, but do I use that,
or do I use the native AKS solution out there?
You've got partnership with AWS.
Where does OpenShift versus Anthos on Google fit?
It definitely is a little bit fragmented.
>> Well, the other thing that's happened around the cloud,
one of the things that happened early in the cloud,
a lot of the cloud providers said
Every application's going to the cloud tomorrow.
I think that was 10 years ago.
And the last number I saw, sorry, we're about 20% there.
And, so, that's great!
We think that's great.
But customers still have on-premise applications,
and they're running on-premise either Bare Metal,
virtual machines, they have their own private clouds
in many cases, and now they want to go across clouds.
Every customer I talk to.
And it's not just for lock in.
That's definitely an issue.
They want to go across clouds, because this cloud provider
might have a better service here than that cloud provider,
and vice-versa.
So, what customers want to do is,
they want one common operating environment,
both for the applications developer and the operators.
They can't afford to have five different silos,
because, just like the example I used
with Linux distributions being different,
every one of these Kubernetes distributions is different.
And so, Anthos, for example.
If you're gonna have all your applications,
including Bare Metal applications on Google Linux,
then that's good, because your operators
have one operating environment,
your developers will have one development environment,
But that's impractical,
and that's why that's not gonnawork.
I mean, the reason why I think Microsoft
is one of our best partners here is they understand this,
which is why they've embraced OpenShift so deeply,
even though they have AKS in their stable.
And the reason why I think they understand this
is because they, like us, have been in the enterprise
space for a long time.
This is how enterprise computing works.
And I think that's the model that our customers
have no choice to deploy.
They just can't afford to have
five different operating environments.
It's like the Unix days.
It's like the Unix days all over again,
when you had one vertical stack,
and customers started to roll out a common stack.
That's why RHEL succeeded.
Because we gave them that commonality,
and they couldn't afford five different silos
to try to manage and develop their applications to.
>> Is there a different rhythm, or unique rhythm,
to the open-source community in terms of development,
in terms of new products that might be a little different
than older models?
Because if there's an interest
that focuses in maybe one area,
and the interest shifts over, or momentum shifts over
to a different direction, and maybe this standard,
or this old way, kind of loses a little bit of its impetus
or its force.
Would that create some decision challenges
on the customer side?
>> Absolutely, and that's why, as I said,
even with Kubernetes, we didn't jump in full force
exactly right away.
We worked with many container orchestration technologies
out there, most of which, besides Kubernetes,
have gone by the wayside a bit now.
And, we sort of look at that and see where it goes
>> See how this plays out >> Well, we get involved,
but we also try to make the best technical decision as well.
Kubernetes, now, it's got way too much momentum,
and with open source, because it's got so much momentum,
that's where the innovation's happening.
And at the end of the day, customers,
even though they have confused many projects with products,
they still want the right technology
to solve their business problems, right?
And, so, Kubernetes has so much momentum around it,
that's where the innovation's happening,
so that's the big part of the platform right now.
The other thing I think that a lot of people
that try to jump into this space miss is,
if you're gonna base your enterprise product
on an upstream project,
you better have good influence in that upstream project,
because when your customers ask you to address an issue,
or take it in a direction, or help take it in a direction,
if you don't have that influence,
you can't satisfy your customers.
So, we learned very, very early on
that upstream is not a bolt-on for us,
it's an integral part that starts
even before the product starts.
>> So, Paul, I've heard many people often call Red Hat
the Switzerland of IT.
Being where you sit in the community,
and for years at this show we've interviewed
all of the hardware players (phone ringing)
and everything like that.
>> Paul: Sorry, sorry, sorry about that.
>> Take your time. >> Important calls,
it's no worry, live audience can wait.
We'll show you the clip of John Cleese
when we got interrupted on a program once.
We won't throw water on you. >> I think it was my admin
telling me I needed to come here.
(laughing)
>> You're good.
So, with Red Hat starting as that Switzerland,
when I look at the multi-cloud world,
you've got interesting combinations.
Satya Nadella up on stage is not something
that we would have thought of five years ago.
VMware supporting OpenShift, announced today,
is not something that many people will look at and be like,
Oh, geez, that seems surprising to me,
because we have fights over virtualization,
or various pieces of the stack.
What do you see in the software and multi-cloud world today
that's maybe a little different than it was
five or 10 years ago?
>> Well, I think, to VMware's credit,
they're trying to satisfy their customers,
and their customers are saying, I want OpenShift.
We're trying to satisfy our customers too.
The Microsoft arrangement.
As you guys probably well know,
we weren't the best of friends five, six, seven, eight
years ago, and I think Satya said it
on stage the other night.
Our customers got us together.
Literally, we had a set of big customers
that almost took us in a room and said,
You guys need to talk, and, frankly,
I think they're one of our best partners right now.
I'm not sure it could have happened without Satya,
but they're one of our best partners
because we're both interested in satisfying our customers.
And, as I said, I think Microsoft really understands
the enterprise world, and that's why we're going
in a common direction.
When we get in a room with their engineers,
we almost complete each other's sentences
when we start talking about what we need to do.
>> There's been an announcement, I think earlier in the week,
you had a global economics study done.
IDC came out with this huge number, right?
Ten trillion dollar impact that Linux is having,
globally speaking.
If you would, I'm just curious
about your perspective on that,
what kind of a statement that is,
and the dollar values that are achieved,
or the incremental values that are achieved
in terms of applying these technologies?
>> I think it's a couple things.
I think it's a statement that this is the innovation model.
Open source is the innovation model going forward.
Period, end of story, full stop.
And I think, as I said in my keynote yesterday,
leading up to the biggest acquisition ever
for a software company.
Not an open-source software company, a software company
that happened to be an open-source software company,
I don't think there's any doubt that open source
has won here today.
And it's because of the pace of innovation.
We've been at RHEL for 17 plus years,
but we probably spent the first third or so
of those 17 plus years trying to convince the world
that Linux was secure and it was stable
and it was ready for the enterprise.
Once we got through that hurdle,
it was just off to the races from there.
And Kubernetes, I said yesterday,
containers came on the scene,
although they've been here technically for a long time,
they came on the scene in '14, Kubernetes in '15.
It's only 2019.
It's really not that far downstream.
Where, as you said, we've got 1,000 commercial customers,
and the keynote this morning talking
about some of the use cases
that we're solving with OpenShift.
Boston Children's Hospital, >> Fascinating
>> it's just unbelievable of what they can do
in a matter of a week
that used to take them a matter of months to do.
That's because of the innovation model.
>> We had Doctor Ellen Grant on yesterday, by the way,
so if you haven't watched that yet,
go back to thecube.net and check that interview out.
>> Fascinating customer conversation we've had
about transformation, but, Paul, I want to get your take
on the only constant in our industry, which is change.
I wrote right after the announcement of the acquisition
and the meeting with your changes, Red Hat,
the one thing that they've actually built themselves for
is to deal with the massive amounts of change.
You can tell better than more
how fast the Linux kernel is changing,
a third of the code's changed in the last two years,
and Kubernetes is actually
not as many lines of code as Linux,
but it's massive amounts of change.
RHEL 8 is out, about five years of development on that.
I heard the pace going forward will only get faster.
Every three years you're going to have a major release,
every six months, a minor release.
So, how do you get the team and the community
and all these things ever keeping up
and even turning it up to 11?
>> That's probably one of the biggest parts of our job.
>> Our customers can't deal with that change.
Frankly, I think in the beginning of OpenStack,
one of the mistakes that we as a community
did for our customers was,
there were some vendors out there trying to tell customers,
You need to stay close to the head, to the upstream head,
you need to stay close to the head.
And we really all tried to get things out in six months.
That's great to try to start to evaluate innovation
and what you can do with that.
It's not great for necessarily running a stable business on,
and that's what I think our job is,
is to help our customers consume open-source-developed
technologies in a way that they can continue
to run their business.
That was the goal,
that was the audacious goal of RHEL from the beginning.
The model of RHEL, it's not necessarily about the bits,
because they're free,
it's about the life cycle of that and how we can
help our customers consume that,
and that's what we do, frankly, to the core.
>> Just to follow up on that, if you ask your customer,
and you say, Hey, you're using Azure,
what version are you using?
and they're like,
Microsoft patches and updates that constantly,
as opposed to the traditional patch Tuesday in Windows.
We seem to be closing that gap a little,
but it's challenging between the stuff I control
and the stuff that I consume.
>> Well, look at even OpenShift 4.
I know Ashesh was on yesterday talking about that.
We used a lot of the great technology we got from CoreOS
to start to bring that model on to even on-premise,
if you so choose, with OpenShift,
because there's so many of the components
that are intertwined with each other.
You've got Kubernetes talking to user space,
talking to the kernel.
User space talking to the kernel, talking to storage,
talking to networking.
So, now automating that for our customers
for that updates is what they want,
because that's how they consume it in the cloud.
I remember when we first started RHEL,
we used to put the features on the side of the box,
and the first thing was what version of the kernel it was.
That quickly went away too.
They don't wanna have to worry about that,
because they don't have the expertise
to be a DIYer themselves.
>> Well, congratulations, Paul, great week.
>> Thank you very much.
>> Again, well done on the keynote stage yesterday.
Fascinating stuff this morning too,
so well done on the programming side,
and we wish you luck down the road,
and don't forget to check your voicemail.
>> Oh, I will, Thank you guys very much.
>> It might be important.
>> Paul: Always a pleasure.
>> Back with more here from Red Hat Summit 2019,
you're watching this live here on theCube.
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