>> Host: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE
covering AnsibleFest, 2019
brought to you by Red Hat.
>> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage
of AnsibleFest, 2019.
I'm Stu Miniman.
My co-host for the week is John Furrier and this is
theCUBE Insights where we share our independent analysis,
break down what we're hearing from the community,
what we've learned from all of our interviews.
John, we knew community would be a big portion
of what we did here, culture and collaboration were things
that we talked a lot about that wasn't necessarily
what I thought I would be hearing.
You've been talking a lot about how observability
and automation are the huge wave we've seen,
acquisitions, we've seen IPOs, we've seen investments
so your take as we're wrapping up, John.
>> First of all Stu, as we said in our opening
and the big theme here is been automation for all,
that's Ansible's kind of rap, because they're announcing
their main news, Ansible Automation Platform,
so that's the big news.
But the bottom line is where is the merge from
was configuration management.
Ansible started out as a small little project,
that solved a very specific problem.
It solved configuring devices and all the automation around
opening up ports and things that were important, beyond
the basic static routing the old web 1.0,
web 2.0 model and it grew into a software abstraction
layer for automating because a lot of that stuff,
the mundane tasks in configuring networks and servers
frankly were boring and redundant.
Everyone hated them, patches, so easy ground to automate
and I think it's evolved a lot into DevOps because
with the cloud scale, more devices just because
software is defining everything doesn't mean servers go away
so we know that, there's more servers, there's more storage,
it's in the cloud, it's on premis, it's cloud operation.
So automation, I think, my prediction is that automation
will be as big of a category as observability was.
Remember, we couldn't miss observability.
We saw it was important, we covered all those companies
but it's basically network management on steroids
with the cloud, but look what happened,
multiple companies went public,
big companies getting sold for billions of dollars,
lot of MNA activity.
Observability is one of the most important areas
of cloud 2.0, it's not just some whitespace
around network management.
The data is super important.
I think automation is going to grow into a highly
competitive, highly relevant and lucrative market place
for companies and I think Ansible is in pole position
to capture that with Red Hat and now Red Hat,
part of IBM, I think automation is going to be very
big land grab.
It's going to be where the value is created.
And I think observability and automation
are going to go hand in hand, and I think AI and data,
those are the things programming infrastructure
revolve around those two spheres.
I think it's going to be super important and I think
that's why theCUBE is here.
We smelled it out, we sniffing it, we can see it,
we can touch it, and the community here,
they're doing it, they actually have proof points.
This community is demonstrating that the process,
it can be more efficient, the technology works
and the people are transforming and that is a key piece.
With automation, people can work on other things
and it's certainly changing the game.
So all three aspects of
digital transformation are in lock step
and expanding rapidly.
>> John, I would expect nothing less than a bold prediction
from you on this space, you know it's only
$150 million acquisition which you know
is really small compared to a lot of the acquisitions
that we see these days.
Heck, you know, Red Hat, you know, Ansible didn't
get talked about all that much when IBM went and spent
you know over $30 billion for Red Hat,
but absolutely automation is so important
that infrastructure is code movement that we've been
tracking for quite a long time, helps enable
automation across the entire stack, lot of discussion
this week here, networking in security two areas that we
know need to make progress and we need to have less errors.
We need to be able to make changes faster
and cloud, in the infrastructure space that configuration
management, we need to be able to simplify things.
Absolutely, one of the things that will slow down
the growth of cloud is that we can't simplify those
environments, so the same type of tooling and where
Ansible is trying to span between the traditional
environment and the cloud is to get this working
in the containerization, cloud native, Kubernetes world
that we're living in today.
>> Yes Stu, you're right on, this is the analysis,
it's spot on.
I think one of the nuances in the industry
landscape is when Red Hat got acquired by IBM
for a massive amount of money, everyone's scratching
their heads, but if you think about what Red Hat has done,
and you know I'm a real big fan of Red Hat, you are too.
They're smart, they make great acquisitions,
Ansible, not a big payout, they had Coral West,
they had OpenShift, they're operations systems people,
they get the notion of systems architecture,
I think Red Hat is executing brilliantly in that systems
mindset, which is perfect for cloud computing.
I think Arvind Krishna at IBM really understood
the impact of Red Hat and when I talked to him
at Red Hat Summit, two years ago,
right before the acquisition,
he had the twinkle in his eye when I asked him about
Red Hat, because you can see him connecting the dots.
Red Hat brings a lot to the table, if IBM doesn't
screw up Red Hat, then they're going to do well.
We talk about Red Hat not screwing up Ansible,
they didn't, now part of it.
If IBM doesn't screw up the Red Hat acquisition,
let Red Hat bring that systems mindset in,
I think IBM could Red Hat as a beautiful way to bring
a systems architecture into cloud, cloud native
and really take a lot territory
down these new cloud native applications.
>> John, automation is a forced multiplier for customers
and Ansible has that capability to be a forced multiplier
for Red Hat. When you look at the ecosystem they are
building out here, the Ansible Automation Platform really
helps get customers more in lock steps, so you know
I was talking to some people and said oh AWS has
an update, we need to roll the entire core and put out
another version, I can't wait for that.
I need to be able to decouple the partner activity
which, by the way, they talked about how this project
is the sixth most popular in GitHub.
Decoupling collections might actually put them lower
on the list, but that's okay because they're solving
real customer problems and it's interesting John,
when we talk about the ecosystem here,
there's only a couple of other companies other
than Red Hat that can commit
without having to go through approval.
Microsoft is not one of them, so,
you talk about the collaboration, the ecosystem here
where this could be.
>> Well Stu, the thing about Ansible
is that it's double edged sword,
their value is also an achilles heel and
one of the critical analysis that I have is that they're
not broad enough yet.
I will say misunderstood, the customers here
in the community, they totally get it,
everyone here loves Ansible.
The problem is that in the global landscape of the industry
they're tiny.
Red Hat needs to bring this out faster.
I think IBM has to get Ansible out there faster because
they have all the elements kind of popping right now.
You got community, very strong, customer base,
loyal and dynamic, you got champions developing,
that's a classic sign of success.
They got great product, perfectly fit for this glue layer
this integration layer, you know below containers and
maybe even sitting above containers,
depending on how you look at it.
And finally, the ecosystem are partners,
not yet fully robust, but all the names are here,
Microsoft, Cisco, NetApp, F5,
kind of feels like VM world
on a small scale, they have to up level it.
I think that's the critical problem I see with these guys
is that it's almost too good and too small.
>> You know, when I looked back at when Red Hat made the
acquisition, they were a handful of companies,
most of them embracing open source as to, you know
which configuration management tool you're going to do.
Ansible did well against them and Red Hat helped
make them the category leader in this space.
There is a different competitive landscape today,
which is public cloud, you know Ansible can help,
but there's some customers that would be like oh, I've got
different tooling and doesn't fit into what I'm doing today
so there's some different competitive landscape.
And we know, John, if a customer you've already talked to
they've got a lot of tools.
So, how does Ansible
get mindshare inside the company, they had some great
stories that we heard, both on theCUBE from like ING
and the Southern Company as well as in the keynotes
from JP Morgan where they're scaling out, they're
building playbooks, they're doing this,
but, this is not just push a button to get all
of this rolled out--
>> Well, IBM marketing should help here, the marketing team
at IBM, I'd be like all over this because this is a
game changer, because this could be a digital
transformation ingredient for people equation.
The problem is that, again IBM has to embrace this
and Ansible has that glue layer integration.
This could be great.
Now the benefit to them, I think their tailwind is
they can solve a lot of problems.
One nuance from the show that I learned was okay
configuration management DevOps, great, the network
automation is looking good.
The security is a huge
opportunity because if you think about the basic
blocking and tackling, patches, configuration,
misconfigurations, automation plays perfect role.
So to get beachhead in the enterprise as
an abstraction layer, is to own and dominate those basics.
Because, think about the big hacks, Capital One,
misconfigured firewall to an S3 bucket, that wasn't
Amazon's fault but the data on Amazon.
This automation can solve a lot of these problems,
patches, malware, vulnerabilities, the adversaries are
going to be all over this.
So, I think the security piece,
huge upside, position to Ansible and Red Hat
as an abstraction layer to solve all those basic problems
rather than overselling it.
It could be a great strategy,
I think they're going a good job at that.
>> Yeah, totally built on simplicity and modularity,
this tooling is something it could sit lots of places
in the organization and help that cultural communication.
A bit critical of enterprise collaboration, that top down
push that you get, but here, you know, you've got a tool
that as we said in our final interview with Prague.
You know, developers, they didn't build this for developers
but developers are embracing it, the infrastructure
people embracing it, it give some reasons to work together.
>> While we're here, I think AnsibleFest is a community event
which we love, but too, I think this is early days
in the canary in the coal mine in saying
that the Ansible formula for automation is going to be
a growth here, that's my prediction.
And we have data to back it up,
if you look at our community and the folks out in
theCUBE Alumni know that when we reach out to them
and get some data.
But, here's what supports why I think
the automation thing with Ansible and Red Hat
is relevant, because it applies to what
we just talked about.
The number one thing that came back
from the community Stu was,
focused efforts on better results.
Automation from time efficiency, days,
hours to minutes, check.
Security is absolutely a top driver for automation,
that's the tailwind.
The job satisfaction issue is not like a marking
feel good thing, people actually like their jobs
when they don't have to come in on the weekends,
so, this automation does align with that,
and finally, infrastructure and developers re-skilling
with new capabilities and new things, is just an uplift.
So, those are the drivers driving the automation,
that's why RPA is so hot and this is a critical foundation
in my opinion.
So, Ansible is leading the wave here in this
new automation wave, and I think it's going to be a big part
because it's controlling the plumbing,
it's the only machinery.
>> John, the future of work, we know that automation is going
to be hugely important.
You mention, you know, RPA, a huge one.
I had an interview
with an associate professor from Syracuse University,
they're teaching this to education, it's not just
oh hey, you got to go learn coding
and learn this programming language.
No, we need to have that combination of the business
understanding and the technology and automation can sit
right at that intersection.
>> Stu, what's you big learning point,
what did you take away?
>> So, it is, it's that point here that this is not just some
cool little tool on the side, this is something, John,
we've talked at many shows, software can actually be
a unifying factor inside companies to help build platforms
and for customers to help them collaborate
and work together.
This, a tool like Ansible isn't just something that is done
tactically but strategically, it gets everyone on the same
page, it enables that collaboration, it isn't just another
channel of you know, some other thing
that I don't want to have to deal with it.
It helps me get my job better, increases
that job satisfaction, that's so hugely important.
>> And Stu, if you think about digital transformation
forming the people, process, technology.
How many interviews have we done, how many interviews
have we done and companies we've talked to where they
have a great product on the process side
to address the process.
They have the tech, but they fail on the people side.
It's a cultural adoption,
it's the real enablement and I think Ansible's challenge
is to take the platform, the capabilities of their software,
launch the platform, and create value,
because, if they're not enabling value out of the platform,
that does not cross check with what platforms
are supposed to do, which is create value.
>> And John, the thing I want to look for when we come back
to this show next year is, how much are they allowing
customers to leverage their data.
When we heard from their
engineering division here, okay the platform's the
first piece, but, how do I measure internally and
how do I measure against our peers?
We know that that's people want to have,
there's so much information out there,
but, how am I doing?
Where am I on my five step progression
and adoption of automation and you know, hey, am I doing
good against my competition or are they smoking me?
>> Well, that's the metrics, with the insight piece,
and tying it to Rell, now people can say,
look, I just saved a bunch of money.
I saved some time, that's the business impact.
I think, when you have the KPIs and the analysts to back
it up, good things will happen.
Stu it's been great.
>> All right.
John, always a pleasure to catch up with you, we got
lots more here toward the second half of 2019.
Big thanks to the whole community for of course
watching us here at AnsibleFest,
check out theCube.net for all the upcoming shows.
Thank you to our whole production team and to our
host Red Hat, for giving us this beautiful set right
in the middle of the show and thanks as always
for watching theCUBE.
(upbeat music)