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>> Welcome back, everyone,
to Cube's Coverage of Red Hat Summit 2023
here in Boston, Massachusetts.
I'm John Furrier.
Rob Strechay, breaking down all the analysis
here in the news.
Our next guest, Jeremy Winter, corporate Vice President
Azure Cloud native and hybrid at Microsoft.
Thanks for coming on.
>> Yeah, thanks for having me.
It's good to be here.
>> Saw you were up on stage with Stephanie.
>> Yeah.
Yep.
>> Let's break down what you were on.
What's up?
What was it like up there for you?
What was the topic?
Break down, what you guys talked about.
>> Yeah.
I think really what the main topic
we were trying to really land for everyone
is just this relationship that we have
between Microsoft and Red Hat.
And it's just a longstanding relationship that we've had
over the course of the last eight to 10 years.
But it's a continuing to grow in importance to us
on both sides of the fence.
And I think what's really interesting on that
is really this notion of the shared customer.
And this is the key that I continue to see
every day with our customers is,
Microsoft customers are Red Hat customers and vice versa.
And ensuring that the success of those two
relationships is important to us
for our customers, ultimately.
>> Yeah.
One of the things that Microsoft
has been so great at, over in the history of the company
it's been that north star of developers, right?
And the ecosystem of developers is now driving the change.
And if you look at anything that becomes defacto,
the developers are driving it in Open Source.
And you're starting to see massive growth.
Kubernetes containers, obviously cloud native services.
And it's kind of going all the way
into the cloud up and down the stack.
>> Yeah.
>> As you've seen many cycles of these waves.
Where, what,
how do you peg this one?
>> Well, I think this one,
there's two big dynamics I'm seeing
just listening to the question that I see popping.
First is, cloud,
which is also part of what we mentioned in the keynote is,
the Cloud really is the strategic bet
that everyone is taking right now.
And where they're seeing just growth,
both for how they modernize their approach,
how they modernize their skilling of their organizations.
But it's also just the existing infrastructure that's there.
The second one, as you mentioned, is Open Source.
And this cloud native energy
is really centered on Open Source
and Kubernetes and the Linux communities.
And this is just where I think this partnership, again,
going back to the enterprise customer, really fits us well.
And why we're so both jointly committed to it.
>> Yeah.
I think that's the thing that gets me is that,
you must hear it all the time, right?
I mean, 10 years ago, this was probably
unthinkable about how much Open Source
there is at Microsoft.
>> Yeah.
>> And I think what surprises your customers,
your joint customers when you go out there
and have those discussions.
>> Yeah. I think...
One of the things that I just,
even though I was just thinking of a customer conversation
we had yesterday was just the shared...
I'm serious about the shared commitment here.
The fact of just this conversation
if you can call Microsoft support and get to Red Hat,
or you can call Red Hat support and get to Microsoft.
When we're thinking about those shared
joint engineering we've done with Ansible
or this OpenShift work we've done, or even on RHEL.
We really have connected the two systems
and the companies together.
You know, but here's what I think is really interesting
to go back to this Cloud and this other surprise is,
clearly we're seeing the enterprise customer
look to Red Hat and Microsoft as two,
as I'd say almost the important vendors
that they're betting with
for their strategic compute fabric of the future.
Whether it's on-prem or in the cloud.
These two have really, really popped over the course
of the last, I'd say, two or three years for sure
as both Cloud and Red Hat have come into the picture.
>> Yeah.
I mean, the change and the alignment with Microsoft
and the growth of the industry has been phenomenal.
I remember we interviewed Santi Etella
before he was CEO in the Cube at Stanford University.
And he was on the infrastructure side.
And one of the things he did, I thought was a really
compelling moment was he Open Sourced a lot
of their proprietary infrastructure to the OCP.
>> Yeah.
>> Open compute foundation.
>> Yep.
>> And that was the beginning of
open and building these ecosystems in a new way.
And I think Open Source here is same for you.
>> Absolutely.
And we have teams that are dedicated to it.
Even on my own space, we have teams that are focusing
just on upstream components into the Kubernetes.
We've had the many projects that come in through that space.
We've even taken aspects of teams like the kin vog team
that came and joined Microsoft are still very much engaged
in bringing their components like headlight
and stuff up into the community.
So, I just think it's just a,
for us, Microsoft,
we are continuing to go drive up into the community,
stay engaged in the community
stay on board with the Linux Foundation, the CNCF, and,
>> What's your view on the cloud native version
of the security equation?
Cause you guys have a great security business
at Microsoft in and of itself.
But the cloud native shift left movement has been big.
>> Yeah.
>> And the software supply chain's super important.
>> Yep.
>> Developer productivity's banking on this.
>> Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, we have upstream open--
You know, we have work we've been doing upstream
for the secure supply chain.
But more importantly, the shift left is going to happen
and you want it to happen.
And so, it's how do we take governance, security,
and these other components and shift them up
into the developer pipeline?
And that's really where we're spending the time
putting that work up in the developer pipeline,
both with our Azure tools.
But you see also the work with Red Hat doing that
in OpenShift and what they're doing
in the development tool space in there.
The number one question that I hear and I want to ask,
and people want to know about is, the real question is,
can I get a discount on open AI tokens?
(laughter)
We're seeing our limit.
>> Everyone's in the AI side of the house right now
>> NVIDIA and Microsoft Azure, the two most,
"Can I get a graphics card?" every NVIDIA points it.
If someone asks me for another graphics card
I'm going to... >> Yeah.
>> Jump.
No, but seriously,
you guys have a great relationship
with Open AI and the the Bing server.
>> Absolutely.
>> That's obviously on your infrastructure side
Cloud at Azure Scale.
That's changed the game.
What's your perspective?
You get pinch me moment here at Microsoft,
where it's like, oh my God, look at this.
>> I mean, there's no question that AI has really changed
how a lot of us are thinking about
even our daily jobs in daily lives.
This technology and our bet with OpenAI and ChatGPT is,
that partnership is really, really important to us
strategically, and why we've spent the time
with the companies there.
If I take that from a macro perspective
which we've all seen, and let's drop it down
into say, Azure itself.
We're absolutely committed
to ensuring that we can power those AI workloads
whether it's your natural language or your ML models.
We're there making sure
that the need for high performance compute
and AI models can operate right on Azure.
So, we're really focused on that key to piece.
But if you drop out a layer, you know, deeper,
you have from an AI perspective,
it's going to change the way we think about
the operating environment.
When we think about with Azure
and some of the work we're doing in that front,
the ability to put natural language onto deploying
to how to actually troubleshoot the systems that are there.
This is going to be profound
for how we actually think about it.
And you'll see a lot of the work we're doing
at Microsoft with the notion of co-pilots.
And co-pilots inside Azure are a key element
that you'll see continue to go down the line.
>> Yeah.
I think that's really interesting
because I think when the announcement of Code Assistant
was earlier with an Ansible. >> Yeah.
>> Actually the meeting spot is Visual Studio.
>> Yep. >> Which is really interesting
that there's multiple models coming together.
>> Absolutely.
And I think this is key.
When you saw in the keynote today,
just this Ansible and the notion of AI.
This is again, really to help just bring that technology
to simplify that in for Red Hat.
And I think that's again,
just going to help both with the Ansible
and the OpenShift momentum that's coming down the path.
>> Yes.
And that we were talking Matt Hicks earlier
about the leaked Google memo that came out
around Open Source, and that movement,
how much stuff has come out of the Meta leak,
so-called leak.
And then just the contribution of code.
Open AI has now donated some
of their large LLM to Open Source.
The Open Source movement is moving very fast with AI.
>> Yeah.
>> And things are being refactored.
I saw a tweet the other day that said
"Why isn't someone building virtual studio
for prompt engineering?"
>> Yeah.
>> So you got more of this, the mindset shifting.
Where do you see the refactoring coming from AI?
Because these are going to be refactor something
or a startup will take your lunch, an existing someone.
This is the market that you have these big waves.
There are winners and losers.
There'll be winners who ride the wave right.
Some will get washed away.
>> Well the beauty of the community and the Open Source is
you get to use the brightest minds from around the world
to contribute and really make the movement happen.
And I think that's what we've seen with Linux
and what we've seen in other aspects.
And so you're going to,
of course you're going to see that happen in the AI space.
I think the refactoring is going to really come down to
companies that are willing to take the bet
to really go look at how to help innovate some of those
tasks that AI fits extremely well into.
Cloud computing, your infrastructure management,
your deployment, your software.
Those are ripe for being able to leverage
and speed up the work that's happening in that space,
so we can go on to do more harder problems
with the resources and talent that we have.
>> Yeah.
Rob and I, were at CubeCon EU, we're at Open Source summit
in Vancouver just recently.
And we were asking everybody,
you know, impact of AI.
This wave's going to come.
Will it topple Open Source?
That was our question.
Of course, we kind of knew the answer.
It might shake and rattle things a little bit
but it's going to be more, a lot of growth.
But the consensus generally is amongst infrastructure nerds
and business people is,
it's just another tool.
But they're really, they don't want hallucinations
because that's the ChatGPT version of all the hype.
>> Yeah.
>> Like, oh yeah, it's a lose.
But infrastructure, you need to be secure,
declarative, >> Yep.
>> And on point.
What's your reaction to that?
>> And I think that of course infrastructure needs to be
secured and declarative
(John laughs)
>> And we need to be able to go, you know,
to that infrastructure as code type model.
But I do see, AI has a place for it.
>> Yeah.
>> And it's going to take some time.
But I think it will help all of us be smarter
in how we actually run our apps,
deploy our apps, develop our apps, or troubleshoot our apps.
And I think it's going to be out to those breakthroughs.
Like, you're seeing what we do with copilot,
or Red Hats adding with what they're doing in Ansible
and OpenShift that these are,
these are really going to help separate
and ease the work for the team.
>> I guess my question, I'll rephrase it to say,
what are the low hanging fruit use cases that you see
that people are going to jump on?
You mentioned configuration.
>> I think, config, deploy and troubleshoot
are going to be your, some of your most fas--
Your fast ones that are out there.
I think, heck, I can remember when I was writing code
where I'd have to write the same tables over and over again,
or the same functions as I was working through.
That could just be done now, for me.
And it gets me onto the hard parts of the logic.
>> Yeah.
Humans plus AI is better than AI.
>> I think.
I hope.
We'll see.
>> Thanks for coming on The Cube.
Any, put a plug in for what you're working on.
Azure.
Share with the folks, what's happening.
>> Yeah.
Inside, you know, with me inside Azure,
clearly I'm working with the Red Hat side of the house.
This is a key investment for us
as part of our cloud native energy.
I also have inside the house, not only do we have
the VM, sorry, the Red Hat work that's going through.
I also have Azure resource manager that's inside there.
And then we have some of the other cloud native work
like, Kubernetes.
So, when you think about it as Red Hat, Linux, Kubernetes
and the overall Azure resource management.
>> And build is happening this week in Seattle.
>> Build is this week.
It's keynote starts today.
And so you'll see a lot of
what we're doing with our developers,
how we're thinking about AI with the developers,
what are we doing with our development tooling,
and some of the new application systems
that are coming out.
>> Well, we'll see you at CNCF, probably CubeCon.
>> Yep.
My teams are always there.
And we just had, you know, CubeCon just a month ago.
And so, we're headed into
already thinking about the next one this fall.
>> Where are you going to be?
>> Where do you mean?
>> You're going to be at CubeCon?
>> Oh yeah, I'll be at CubeCon.
>> All right.
>> And or the teams will be there and then Ignite.
It really just depends on the timing of what's happening.
>> Well Jeremy, we'll have you back on.
Thanks for the conversation. >> Yeah.
>> Congratulations on Keynote.
>> Absolutely everyone.
>> Appreciate it. >> Thank you.
>> Okay.
Just to keep coverage, I'm John Furrier,
with Rob Strechay, here live for two days of coverage
analyzing the news, laying down our opinions,
and talking to the smartest people here in The Cube.
Thanks for watching.
We'll be right back.
>> See you, everyone.
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