- Thanks Stefanie, for joining me today.
Let's have a conversation about hybrid cloud.
Something a lot of folks are talking about,
but I'm interested in hearing kinda your point of view.
So let me first ask you about Red Hat's position marketing,
go to market strategy as a cloud company,
because you're not a cloud provider,
but what is your role in helping customers realize
their vision for hybrid cloud?
- Yeah, I think it's an interesting point.
If you go back in the industry five years ago,
cloud was probably one of the most overused
and most least defined terms that in the marketplace.
Now, I think as we look at what cloud means to customers,
it's really about having a choice in where
and how they deploy their workloads.
And it could be a private cloud on your premises,
it could be a managed cloud,
it could be a public cloud provider,
it could be multiple public cloud providers.
And so when we talk about cloud from a Red Hat perspective,
it's about making sure that all of those options,
even including, kind of new ways clouds are being used,
whether it be a, as the service or a software as a service
or platform as a service,
our view is how do we bridge and link all of those possible
definitions of what cloud has become,
and provide accessibility to it?
And so our focus is not so much of being
a single destination point of what cloud can mean
to someone, but how do we provide accessibility to all
the things that cloud could mean to someone?
- One of the things I've seen you guys say
is cloud is not an end state.
One of the things, when I talk to clients,
a lot of them are still, their vision
of journey to cloud is 'I've got to get to AWS' or 'I've got
to get to Azure' or 'I've got to get to Google.'
And so it's this lift and shift or shift and lift that's
where we're going, that's the end state.
But you guys have a different point of view there.
- Yeah, exactly.
And I think in the market,
that view is maturing as well.
I think as more of these capabilities of cloud become
available because technology is rising,
and we have various aspects to
machine learning as a service or Kafka as a service, or,
just infrastructure as a service,
as all of those things continue to evolve,
I think folks view of their changing needs is more becoming
a focus on how do I prepare myself to use that change and to
be able to get innovation from that change
rather than saying, I know how the world is gonna look
in one year in two years in three years,
and therefore I am starting here and I'm going to end there.
I think what is starting to become clear is,
with all the innovation happening from so many different
vendors, and, this is where open source plays a key role
because open source provides kind of a,
an ability to build upon an interact
and have interoperability.
Building upon that now
it's about all of these capabilities being able
to link and augment one another.
And so our view about having it be
a capability and not a destination is really about providing
a few strategic decisions that prepare you to leverage
the innovation and the change that's yet to come.
But we may not even know what's going to come yet,
but we know there's gonna be new innovation.
And we know it's gonna be built on Linux just because
of how the public clouds have evolved.
So that's what we mean.
And I think there's, it's less clear even within
the customers I talk to that,
this is the final destination I want to be at.
I think what it is is today,
I have a workload that runs best here,
and I'm gonna test that out and we're gonna,
I'm gonna drive it there.
And then perhaps as I add in new capabilities
or new vendors come about, I may want to move
that workload elsewhere.
So how do I prepare myself for that flexibility rather than,
it's a clear goal from point A to point B.
- I'd like to go back a minute,
because you mentioned a while back when we were talking,
some strategic decisions, both ones that you,
Red Hat has made and one that customers
or clients are facing.
So I'd like to explore that a little bit
and talk about what you mean.
- We really believe that if you look at where
the innovation is happening today,
there are two key things that keep showing up,
one is open source.
Open source has changed the way development is being done.
It is moving innovation at a much faster rate,
and because of all the standards and the interoperability
that is inherent into open source, that allows flexibility.
So moving to an open source strategy,
we're seeing more and more customers recognize that that is
a foundational choice that is going to allow them to use
what's available today,
and bridge to what's going to be built tomorrow.
Core and critical to that certainly is Linux,
and Linux has become the equalizing playing field
that is foundational to many of the innovations
we see today.
- Obviously containerization of applications,
building applications around microservices, creating,
that portable set of code.
As long as it's built on Linux that can move
to different environments is key,
where those environments move requires
some evolution in edge computing.
Like how can I deploy this container out to a smaller server
or even a device that's capable of hosting
a Docker container and being deployed
and managed by Kubernetes.
I see a lot of that.
Things like some of the stuff that you guys briefed me on,
there's another open source KubeEdge,
it's applying Kubernetes to edge and telco spaces.
It's really interesting,
but the thing that kind of glues that all together is all
the advancements are watching in the networking space like
virtual networking infrastructure, software defined WANs,
low power WANs,
and the translation between low power and Wi-Fi and TCP IP,
all that advancement in the networking space is what's going
to enable I think the edge to become the new target
architecture of hybrid clouds.
It's not gonna be data center or public cloud it's gonna
be data center, public cloud, and a variety
of edge environments that are very heterogeneous
and hard to manage in the traditional way.
- Yeah, I agree.
And so as you start to look at what the future
of hybrid cloud becomes,
it becomes a real equal opportunity access.
So how do I prepare myself to have equal access
to what I currently have in the four walls
of my data center, how I leverage public clouds
and major public cloud providers,
how I prepare myself to leverage edge
and pull all of that together.
And when we look at how someone would build that up,
it's really about creating a foundation built upon Linux.
Clearly that's where we focus our product,
bringing in the capabilities or flexibility around things
like application movement and cloud native
and microservices as you talked about with Kubernetes
and our focus with OpenShift,
and then how do you manage it all?
You made a good point about management.
I mean, with this kind of a complex environment management
and automation become really, really key to the decisions
that you make.
And this is really how we at Red Hat have built up
our entire portfolio.
It's about how do you create a solid platform that has
an ecosystem that is sustainable and relevant,
and how do you then bring in the additional capabilities
that are needed with management and automation
in particular, but really right now in today's world,
that's just key to scale.
- Thank you for the time.
This was fascinating conversation.
And I look forward to see what you guys do next.
- Great.
Thanks, nice to talk with you, Brian.
I look forward to doing it again
and to see where all of this goes.