>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia.
It's theCUBE covering Ansible Fest 2019.
Brought to you by Red Hat.
>> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE.
We are broadcasting live here, in Atlanta, Georgia.
I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, my co-host,
TheCUBE's coverage of Red Hat, Ansible Fest.
This is probably one of the hottest topic areas
that we've been seeing in Enterprise Tech emerging,
along with observability.
Automation and observability is the key topics here.
Automation is the theme, Stu,
Ansible just finished their keynotes, keynote analysis,
general availability of their new platform,
the Ansible Automation Platform is the big news.
It seems nuanced for the general tech practitioner
out there, what's Ansible doing?
Why are we here?
We saw the rise of network management turn into
observability as the hottest category
in the cloud 2.0.
companies going public, lot of M&A activity,
observability is data driven.
Automation's this other category that is just exploding
in growth and change.
Huge impact to all industries and it's coming
from the infrastructure scale side where
the blocking and tackling of DevOps has been.
This is the focus Ansible and their show
Automation for all, your analysis of the keynote,
What's the most important thing going on here?
>> So John, as you said automation is a super hot topic.
I was just at the New Relic show talking about
observability last week, we've got the Pager Duty show
also going on this week.
The automation is so critical.
We know that IT can't keep up with things
if they can't automate it.
It's not just replacing some scripting.
I loved in the keynote the talked about
strategically thinking about automation.
We've been watching the RPA companies talk about automation.
There's lots of different automation,
there's the right way to do it and
another angle, John, that we love covering is
what's going on with Open Source?
You were just at the Open Core summit in San Francisco.
The Red Hat team very clear,
Open Source is not their business model.
They use Open Source and everything that
Red Hat does is 100% Open Source and
that was core and key to what Ansible was
and how it's created.
This isn't a product pitch here,
it is a community, John this is the 6th most active
repository in GitHub.
Out of over 100 million repositories out there,
the 6th most active.
That tells you that this is being used by the community,
it's not a couple of companies using this,
but it's a broad ecosystem.
We hear Microsoft and Cisco, F5, lots of companies
that are contributing as well as just all the Nusers.
We heard JP Morgan in the keynote this morning,
so a lot of participation there.
But it is building out that sweep with a platform
that you talked about,
and we're going to spend a lot of time the next few days
understanding this maturation and growth.
>> Yeah, the automation platform that they announced,
that's the big news.
The general availability of their automation platform
and Stu, the word they're using here is scale.
This is something that you brought up the Open Core summit
which I attended last week was the inaugural conference,
lot of controversy.
And this is a generational shift we are seeing the midst
of our own eyes right in front of us,
on the ground floor of a shift in Open Source community.
How the platform of open source is evolving.
What Amazon, now Azure and Google and the others are doing
is showing that scale has changed the game
in how Open Source is going to not only grow and evolve
but shape application developers.
And the reason why Ansible is so important right now
and this conference is that we all know
that when you stand up stuff, infrastructure,
you've got to configure the hell out of it.
DevOps has always been infrastructures code
and as more stuff gets scaled up,
as more stuff gets provisions,
as more stuff gets built and created,
the management and the controlling of the configurations,
this has been real hotspot.
This has been an opportunity and a problem.
Anyone who's here, they're active
because you know, this is a major pain point.
This is a problem area that's an opportunity
to take what is a blocking and tackling operational role,
configuring standing up infrastructure,
enabling applications and making it a competitive advantage.
This is why they game is changing.
We're starting to see platforms not tools.
Your analysis, are they positioned?
Was this keynote successful?
>> Yeah, John. I really liked what Robyn Bergeron came out
and talked about the key principles of
what Ansible has done.
It's simplicity, it's modularity
and it's learning from Open Source.
This project was only started in 2012.
One of the things I always look at
is in the old days you wanted to have that experience.
There's not compressions algorithm for experience.
Today, if I could start from day one today,
and build with the latest tools, heavily using DevOps,
understanding all of the experience that's happened
in Open Source, we can move forward.
So from 2012 to 2015 Red Hat acquired Ansible,
to today in 2019, they're making huge growth
and helping companies really leverage
and mature their IT processes
and move toward true business innovation
with leveraging automation.
>> Stu, this is not for the faint of heart either.
These are rockstar DevOps infrastructure folks
who are evolving in taking either network
or infrastructure development to enable
a software extraction layer for applications.
It's not a joke either.
I mean they've got some big names up on stage.
One tweet I want to call out and get your reaction to.
JP Morgan, his presentation the exec there,
a tweet came out from Christopher Festa,
"500 developers are working to automate business processes
leading to among other benefits,
98% improvement in recovery times.
What used to take 6 - 8 hours to recover,
now takes 2 - 5 minutes." Christopher Festa.
Stu.
>> So John, that's what we wanted.
How can we take these things that took hours
and I had to go through this ticketing process
and make that change.
What I loved of what Chris from JP Morgan did,
is he brought us inside and he said look,
too make this change it took us a year
of sorting through the security, the cyber,
the control processes.
We understand there's not just oh hey,
lets sprinkle a little DevOps on everything
and it's wonderful, we need to get buy in from the team,
and it can spread between groups and change that culture.
It's something that we've tracked in Red Hat for years
and all of these environments.
This is something that does require commitment,
because it's not just John taking oh I scripted something,
and that's good.
We need to be able to really look at these changes
because automation, if we just automate a bad process,
that's not going to help out business.
We really need to make sure we understand
what we're automating, the business value
and what is going to be the ramifications of
what we're doing.
>> Well one of the things I want to share with folks watching
is research that we did at SiliconAngle, theCUBE
and Wikibon as part of our CUBE insights,
Stu I know you're a part of this.
We talked to a bunch of practitioners and customers,
dozens of our community members and we found
that observability we've just pointed out,
has been an explosive category.
That automation has been identified,
and we're putting a stake in the ground,
right here in theCUBE as one of the next big sectors
that will rise up as a small little white space
will become a massive market, automation.
You watch that cloud 2.0 sector called automation.
Why?
The reasoning was this,
here's the results of our survey.
Automations quickly becoming a critical foundational element
of the network as enterprises focus on multi-cloud,
network being infrastructures, service and storage,
and multi-cloud rapid development and deployment.
Software to find everything's happening,
pretty much we've been covering that on theCUBE.
And most enterprises are just grappling
with this concept and see opportunities.
The benefit that people see in automation
as we've discovered, Stu, are the following:
1. Focused on focused efforts for better results,
efficiency, security is a top driver on all these things.
You've got to have security built into the software,
and then automation is creating job satisfaction
for these guys.
This is mundane tasks being automated away.
So people are happier so job satisfaction.
And finally, this is an opportunity to re-skill.
Stu, these are the key bullets points that we've found
in talking to our community.
Your reaction to those results.
>> Yeah John, I love that.
Ultimately we want to be able to provide
not only better value to my ultimate end user,
but I need to look internal.
As you said, John, how can I retool some of my sales force
and get them engaged.
And if you want to hire the millennials,
they want to not be doing the drudgery,
they want to do something where they feel
that they are making a difference.
You laid out a lot of good reasons why it would help
and why people would want to get involved.
John, you know I've talked to a number of government
adgencys, when we changed that 40 year old process
and now we're doing things faster and better,
and that means I can really higher that next generation
of workers because otherwise I wouldn't be able to higher
them to just do things the old way.
>> Stu this is a 2-pointer and this is about modernization.
You mentioned Open Source, Open Core summit,
that is a tell sign that Open Source is changing,
the communities are changing,
this is going to be a massive way.
Again, we've been chronicling this cloud 2.0,
we coined that term, and we're trying to identify
those key points, obviously observability, automation.
But look, at the end of the day,
You've go to have a focused effort to make the job go better
you heard JP Morgan pointing out.
Minutes versus hours.
This is the benefit of infrastructure as code.
At the end of the day employee satisfaction,
the people that you want to hire that can be redeployed
into new roles, analytics, math, quantitative analysis,
versus the mundane tasks.
Automation is going to impact all aspects of the stack.
So final question Stu,
What are you expecting for the next two days,
we're going to be here for two days,
what do you expect to hear from our guests.
>> So John, one of the things I'm going to really look at
is as you mentioned, infrastructure where this all started.
So how do I use it to deploy a VM, Ansible's there.
VMware, I've already talked to a number of people
in the virtualization community,
the love and embrace Ansible.
We saw Microsoft up on stage, loving and embracing.
As we move towards micro-service architectures,
containerization and all of these cloud native deployments,
how is Ansible and this community doing?
Where are the stumbling blocks?
To be honest, from what I hear coming into this,
Ansible has been doing well.
Red Hat has helped them grow even more,
and the expectation is that IBM will help proliferate
this even further.
The traditional competitors to Ansible,
you think about the Sheffs and Public's of the world,
have been struggling with that cloud data world.
John, I know I see Ansible when I go to the cloud shows,
I hear customers talking about it.
So Ansible seems to making that transition to cloud native
well but there are other threats in the cloud native world.
When I go to the server less conference,
I have not yet heard where this fits into the environment.
So we always know that that next generation in technology,
how will this automation move forward.
>> As Red Hat starts getting much more proliferated
in major enterprises with IBM,
which will extend their lead even further in the enterprise,
it's an opportunity for Ansible.
The community angle is interesting.
I want to get your community angle real quick
So I saw a tweet from NetApp,
their tagline at their booth is
Simplify, automate, orchestrate.
Sounds like they're leaning into the Kubernetes world,
containers, you've got the start of thinking about
software obstructions, this aint
the provisioning hardware anymore.
Whole new ball-game.
Your assessment of Ansible's community presence,
I mentioned that was a tweet from Red Hat, I mean NetApp.
What's your take on the community angle here?
>> John it's all about community.
The GitHub's staff speak for themselves,
this is very much a community event.
Kudos to the team here, a lot on the diversity,
inclusion effort, so really pushing those things forward.
So John, something we always notice at the tech shows,
the ratios of gender is way more diverse
at an event like this.
We know we see it in the developer communities,
that there's more diversity in there, gender and ethnicity.
>> Still a lot of guys though.
>> Sure there is, by the way, when they took over this hotel,
all of the bathrooms are gender-neutral,
so you can use whatever bathroom you want there.
>> I'll make sure I'm using the right pronouns
when I'm saying hello to people.
Stu, thanks for Commentary.
Keynote analysis, I'm John Ferrier with Stu Miniman,
breaking down why we are here?
Why Ansible?
Why is automation important?
We believe automation will be a killer category,
we're going to see a lot of growth here,
and again the impact is with machine learning and A.I.
This is where it all starts, automating the data,
the technology and the configurations going to empower
the next generation modern enterprise.
More live coverage from Ansible Fest after this short break.
(Upbeat techno music)