[Music]
hi
everyone i'm gordon half technology
evangelist with red hat
and i'm here today with my colleague
dion to talk about
i.t foundations dion introduce yourself
please
oh hey gordon uh my name is dion ballard
i am on the rel product marketing team
so
i like to talk about operating systems
and foundations quite a lot
that's part of my job so let's get this
out of the way first
that sounds pretty boring but i'm
guessing you disagree with that
uh no i mean i see the point for that
it's it's sort of like
um it's sort of like a chair or car
insurance you you really don't think
about it
uh because it's boring until the minute
it is not boring
and then it becomes the only thing you
can think about so
ideally yes your operating system should
be boring because it
should be stable and do what you want
and not put up a fuss
um it's just the it's the few times that
matter
when when it becomes a lot more
interesting as a discussion
exciting is not always good no no no it
is not always good
uh sometimes you want boring sometimes
you want reliable and predictable and
all the things that you generally don't
want your first date to describe you as
you
really want your you know your operating
system customers to describe you like
that
so what do you see organizations getting
wrong the most with respect to their i.t
foundations
oh that's a broad question just because
every infrastructure is unique to the
business running it
in general i think what we see now
is people chasing after things without a
big picture of what they're doing so
we're all hearing that there's a need to
innovate there's need to develop
um particularly with recent events
people have needed to transform
a lot more quickly maybe than their
previous schedules
had taken into account which is great
but that sometimes means that they would
just run out and do things
and a lot of different teams would run
out and do a lot of
different things and after a while you
get this um
it's never going to go away this
spaghetti model of infrastructure
where things aren't connected things are
duplicated things are wasted
um and i think that that lack of a big
picture that lack
of a plan typically is what's going to
trip people up and
and that's just true in anything that
you do in business
so our state of enterprise open source
2021 survey
found that infrastructure modernization
was the number one use
of enterprise open source now
historically this would have been
things like going from solaris to linux
going from websphere to jboss
uh you know basically going from
expensive le often less flexible
proprietary
uh software to to open source software
with initially being kind of driven but
mostly by cost although that's changed a
great deal
but today i think it means more than
that given containers and all that right
oh yeah absolutely um people are the
biggest move is of course toward public
cloud
i think is is what we see the most and
modernization could mean a simple
hardware modernization people used to
move uh from solaris
to a pc so they were a workstation so
they could run
you know linux or a different operating
system because it used to be that the
hardware and software were
were bundled we're seeing that abstract
more and more waves at first it was
physical systems and virtual systems and
now cloud
and people are moving for scale they're
moving for speed
they're uh moving for availability
they're moving because
they need to be able to do self-service
to ramp things up um so they're moving
for more
strategic reasons now rather than more
commodity or
um functional physical reasons
but again that that introduces a lot of
challenges
that didn't used to exist i mean when
you had everything you had your server
room where you could go in and look at
your racks of beautiful hardware
there were certain aspects of that that
made it
much easier to control you could control
physical access you could control
network access
user access there were a lot of things
around management
and security that were simpler
because the times were simpler and so
people are innovating for very important
reasons but sometimes they're losing the
lessons that they learned in their old
in their old data centers we hear a lot
about innovation in fact
in our enterprise open source survey uh
access to innovation was one of the top
benefits that people saw at enterprise
open source
but there's a potential dark side to
harnessing all that innovation as part
of these modern platforms
and that's complexity how do you deal
with that
uh you have to do by simplifying where
you can um this is what i was talking
about before with
people don't have projects spinning up
and they don't know where they're going
one thing that i've heard a lot of
customers say is
they'll have a team and they'll have a
guy with a credit card and he goes up
and he spins up
an aws instance and a different team
with a different project
is working in azure since someone else
is working in google
and they may not know it and they're all
trying to access the same data or
they're all generating data that they
all
ultimately rely on and you hit these
these problems of
you have different types of applications
running different places you have
different management tools you have
different
data structures you have all of this
that is compounded because everything is
siloed
it's easy and it's accessible but it's
separate
um and this is where we we talk a lot
about the difference between
multi-cloud and hybrid cloud and quite
frankly nobody really defines
any of these realistically but i
i think looking at it as a continuum
it it's a it's a goal how much control
do you have
over your environment so when you can
standardize
when you can automate wherever possible
like say with the operating system but
where you can get that layer of
consistency it brings control into these
areas that are
inherently disparate and inherently
complex with
with different environments and tools to
work with
and i think that you have to simplify
where you can because we are moving
toward more complex environments and
it's
in that sense it's just going to get
worse it's just going to get bigger it's
just going to get more sprawling
um and so that's where being intentional
having a plan having these best
practices can make a
huge difference in what you do i found
that over the years hybrid clouds have
often been talked about in this context
of some idealized end
state which probably doesn't exist
in any organization in the world so to
be clear
we're talking about practical goals here
practical goals oh yeah like if you read
the hype
even for especially from a couple of
years ago um
i mean it sounds magical it sounds
amazing it's what is a single pane of
glass where you can
have one place to look and and you have
all these environments you may not even
know where everything is because
everything is so nicely integrated
and i think we all know in in practice
that never lasts it's
kind of like organizing your pantry it's
great for about three and a half seconds
um but in reality you're gonna have
projects that come up and come down
you're going to have
shifts in data you're going to have
something like you know
a worldwide pandemic or you're going to
have a disrupt some kind of disruption
in your industry
where everything you do needs to pivot
and whatever beautiful plans you had
five minutes ago aren't going to survive
um but i think having a more practical
thing
again outlining best practices outlining
the components that you want to be
standard and then the ones that can be
adapted as needed it it can really help
to provide
that kind of guidance those kind of
principles without being
trying to be so prescriptive that your
environment becomes brittle
or simply unattainable and i think that
that's the challenge that
people are trying to balance right now
so an organization has standardized and
simplified their i.t foundation at least
they've given it the old colleagues try
at any rate
what benefits would they expect to see
at this point was it all worth it
oh it will be in a couple of areas so
when you have a standard environment
that allows you to automate and i know
that that's the word that we cook around
a lot but automation depending on the
area that you're looking at it can save
time investments easily over 90
for your administrators um it can tie in
with other processes
what that does is automation it's not
just we have a robot doing things
it it applies consistency it can apply
policy so if you're having say an iot
environment where you have
100 000 edge devices or if you're having
a new cloud instance spinning up where
you want to be able to dynamically scale
those instances according to demand you
want everything to be consistent because
otherwise you don't have
an environment you have 100 000
environments you're trying to manage
automation allows you to apply
consistent configuration it can allow
you to track
patching security vulnerabilities that
are announced
it can allow you to change policies to
change user authentication
service administration there's a huge
amount just to the ability to
consistently apply
your policy preferences is that is
incredibly powerful
and the amount of time savings for your
administrators is huge
so just just simplifying can actually
take care of a huge amount of things
particularly in that security and
compliance area
um and that is incredibly powerful over
time
well thank you dion
thank you it was a pleasure talking to
you gordon