(bright upbeat music)
>> Welcome back to Boston, Massachusetts.
We're here at the Seaport.
You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022.
My name is Dave Vellante
and Paul Gillin is here.
He is my cohost for the next day.
We are going to dig into the famous RHEL,
Red Hat Enterprise Linux. (Paul chuckling)
Gunnar Hellekson is here, the vice president
and general manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Gunnar, welcome to theCUBE.
Good to see you.
>> Thanks for having me, nice to be here Dave and Paul.
>> RHEL9 is a-
>> Wow Nine, holy cow. >> Yep.
>> It's been a lot of iterations.
>> Gunnar: That's the highest version
of RHEL we've ever shipped.
>> Dave: Yeah, yeah.
And now we're talking edge.
Right? >> Yeah.
That's right.
>> And so what's, what's inside?
Tell us.
>> So we've got, you know,
we got three kind of people we need to keep happy
with a new RHEL release.
The first is the hardware partners, right?
Because they rely on RHEL to light up all their delicious
hardware that they're making.
And you got application developers
and the ISVs who rely on RHEL
to be that kind of stable platform for innovation.
And then you've got the operators,
the people who are actually using
the operating system itself
and trying to keep it running every day.
And we've got something for everybody.
I think.
So we've got on the,
I'll start with the hardware side,
which is something, as you know, RHEL's success.
And I think you talked about this with Matt,
just in a few sessions earlier, that the success of RHEL
really hinges on our partnerships
with the hardware partners.
And in this case we've got,
let's see, in RHEL9, we've got
all the usual hardware suspects.
And we've added just recently in January,
we added support for ARM servers,
as a general ARM server class hardware.
And so that's something customers been asking for.
Delighted to be shipping that in RHEL9.
So now ARM is kind of a first class citizen, right?
Alongside X86, power, Z and all the other usual suspects.
And then of course working with
our favorite public cloud providers.
So making sure that RHEL9's available
at AWS and Azure and GCP and all of our
other cloud friends. Right?
>> Yeah.
So we're seeing, you mentioned ARM,
we're seeing ARM in the Enterprise.
>> Yep.
>> We're obviously seeing ARM at the edge.
>> Yep.
You guys have been working with ARM for a long time.
You're working with Intel, you're working with Invidia,
you've got some announcements this week.
Gunnar, how do you keep Linux from becoming Franken OS
>> Yeah. >> With all these capabilities?
>> Gunnar: Yeah, yeah. This is a great question.
So first is the most important thing is to be working
closely with, I mean,
the whole point of Linux and the reason why Linux works
is because you have all these people working together
to make the same thing, right?
And so fighting that is a bad idea.
Working together with everyone,
leaning into that collaboration,
that's an important part of making it work over time.
The other one is having, just like in any good relationship,
having healthy boundaries. (laughing)
And so making sure that we're clear
about the things that we need to keep stable,
and the places where we're allowed to innovate,
and striking the right balance between those two things,
that allows us to continue to ship
kind of one coherent operating system
while still keeping literally thousands of platforms happy.
Right?
>> Dave: So you're not trying to suck in all
the full function,
you're trying to accommodate that function
that the ecosystem is going to develop.
>> Yeah, that's right.
So the idea is that what we strive for is consistency
across all of the infrastructures,
and then allowing for kind of optimizations.
And, you know,
we still let ourselves kind of take advantage of
whatever indigenous feature might appear on
thus and such an ARM chip,
or thus and such a cloud platform.
But really we're trying to deliver a uniform
platform experience to the application developers, right?
Because they can't be having,
there can't be kind of one version of RHEL over here,
and another version of RHEL over here.
The ecosystem wouldn't work, the whole point of Linux,
and the whole point of Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
is to be the same so that everything else can be different.
>> Paul: And what incentives do you use
to keep customers current?
>> To keep customers current?
>> Yeah.
>> Well, so the best thing to do, I found,
is to meet customers where they are. (laughs)
And so a lot of people think, you know,
we release RHEL9.
At the same time, we have Red Hat Enterprise Linux Eight,
we have Red Hat Enterprise Linux Seven,
all these are running at the same time.
And then we also have multiple
minor release streams inside those.
So at any given time we're running,
let's say, a dozen different versions of RHEL are being
maintained and kept up to date.
And we do this precisely to make sure
that we're not force marching people into the new version.
And they have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription.
They should just be able to sit there
and enjoy the minor version that they like.
And we try and keep that going for as long as possible.
>> Paul: Even if it's 10 years out of date?
>> Even, well, so 10 years, interesting you chose that number
because that is the life cycle.
>> That is the life cycle.
>> That's the end of the life. Right.
And so 10 years is about as,
that's the natural life of a given major release.
But again, inside that you have
several 10 year life cycles kind of cascading on each other.
Right?
So Nine is kind of the start of the next 10 year cycle
while we're still living inside the 10 year cycle
of Seven and Eight.
So lots of options for customers.
>> Dave: How are you thinking about the edge?
How do you, let's not go into the definition,
(Gunnar laughing) but at a high level,
I've been a conference last week.
It was Dell Tech World.
I'll just say they were sort of,
the edge to them was a retail store.
>> Gunnar: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
>> Right? Lowe's. Okay, cool.
I guess that's kind of edgy. >> Yeah.
I guess. >> Yeah.
But I think space is the edge.
(Gunnar laughing)
>> Right. Right, right.
>> Or a vehicle. >> Yeah.
>> How do you think about the edge?
All the above, or?
But it's the exciting stuff to me, is that far edge,
but I wonder if you- >> Yeah.
>> can comment on it. >> Yeah.
So there's all kinds of taxonomies out there for the edge.
For me, I try,
I'm a simple country product manager at heart.
And so I try to keep it simple, right?
>> Uh-huh.
And the way I think about the edge is,
here's a use case in which somebody needs
a small operating system that deploys on
probably a small piece of hardware,
usually, varying sizes, but it could be pretty small.
That thing needs to be updated without
any human touching it, right?
And it needs to be reliably maintained
without any human touching it.
Usually in the edge cases, actually touching the hardware
is a very expensive proposition.
So we train to be as hands off as possible.
>> No truck rolls.
>> No truck rolls ever. Right.
Exactly.
And then now that I've got that stable base,
I'm going to go take an application.
I'll probably put it in a container for simplicity's sake,
and same thing. I want to be able to deploy that application.
If something goes wrong,
I need to build to roll back to a known good state.
And then I need a set of management tools
that allow me to kind of touch things,
make sure that everything is healthy,
make sure that the updates roll out correctly, you know,
maybe do some AB testing, things like that.
So I think about that as that's the,
when we talk about the edge case for RHEL,
that's the kind of the horizontal use case.
>> Yeah.
>> And then we can kind of do specializations inside
particular verticals or particular industries,
but at bottom, that's kind of,
that's the use case we're talking about
when we talk about the edge.
>> And an assumption of connectivity at some point.
>> Yeah.
>> Right. You know how you have to always be on, right?
>> Yeah. Intermittent, latent, eventual connectivity,
even that, that's right. (Dave and Gunnar laughing)
>> Red Hat was originally a one trick pony.
I mean, RHEL was it,
and now you've got all of these other
extensions and different markets that you expanded into.
How do you, what's your role in coordinating
what all those different functions are doing?
>> Gunnar: Yeah. So what I find is that the,
you look at all the innovations we've made,
whether it's in storage, whether it's in OpenShift
and elsewhere, RHEL remains
kind of the beating heart, right?
It's the place where everything starts.
And so, you know,
a lot of what my team does is we're trying to,
yes, we're trying to make all the partners happy.
We're also trying to make our
internal partners happy, right?
So the OpenShift folks need stuff out of RHEL
just like any other software vendor.
And so I really think about RHEL is yes, we're a platform.
Yes. We're a product in our own right,
but we're also kind of a service organization
for all the other parts of the portfolio.
And the reason for that is
we need to make sure all this stuff works together right?
Part of the whole reasoning behind
the Red Hat portfolio writ large,
is that each of these pieces build on each other
and compliment each other, right?
And so I think that's an important part
of the Red Hat mission, the RHEL mission. Yeah.
>> There's an article in the Journal yesterday about how
the tech industry was sort of, you know,
pounding the drum on H1B visas,
>> Mm hmm. >> there's a limit.
I think it's been the same limit since, I dunno, 2005,
65,000 a year.
>> Right.
>> We're facing, your customers are facing,
you guys I'm sure as well, we are,
you know, a real skills shortage.
>> Gunnar: Yeah. That's right. >> There's a lack of talent.
How are you seeing companies, you know, deal with that?
What are you advising them? >> Gunnar: Yeah.
What are you guys doing yourselves?
>> Gunnar: Yeah, yeah yeah.
So it's interesting, especially as we're going through,
everybody went through some flavor of digital transformation
during the pandemic,
and now everybody's going through some,
kind of connected to that,
everybody's making a move to the public cloud.
Well, they're also making operating system choices
when they're making those >> Mm hmm.
>> platform choices, right?
>> And I think what's interesting is that
what they're coming to is, well,
I have a Linux skills shortage and for whatever,
for a thousand reasons,
the market has not provided enough Linux admins.
That mean these are very lucrative positions, right?
>> Yeah. >> They command a lot of money.
You would expect their supply would eventually catch up,
but for whatever reason, it's not catching up.
So, okay.
I can't solve this by throwing bodies at it.
So I need to figure out a more efficient way of running
my Linux operation. People are making a couple choices.
The first is they're creating,
ensuring that they have consistency
in their operating system choices,
whether it's on premise or in the cloud,
or even out on the edge, if I have to juggle three,
four different operating systems,
as I'm going through these three or four
different infrastructures, like that doesn't make any sense.
Cuz the one thing is most precious to me is my Linux talent.
Right? And so I need to make sure that they're consistent,
optimized and efficient.
The other thing they're doing is tooling and automation,
and especially through tools like Ansible,
right? >> Yeah.
Being able to take advantage of as much automation
as possible and much consistency as possible,
so that they can make the most of the Linux talent
that they do have.
And so with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Nine in particular,
you see us make a big investment in things like
more automation tools for things like SAP
and SQL server deployments,
you'll see us make investments in things like,
basic stuff like the web console, right?
That we should now be able to go and point and click
and do basic Linux administration tasks.
That lowers the barrier to entry
and makes it easier to find people
to actually administer the systems that you have.
>> As you move out onto these new platforms,
particularly on the edge. Many of them will be much smaller,
limited function. >> Gunnar: Yeah.
How do you make the decisions about what features
you're going to keep or what you're going to keep in RHEL?
>> Gunnar: Oh yeah.
>> When you're running on a thermostat.
>> Oh yeah, yeah yeah.
Okay. So let me be clear.
I don't want RHEL to run on a thermostat.
(all laughing)
>> Paul: I gave you a bad choice.
I can't handle the margins on something like that,
but at the end-
>> You're running on the GM.
>> Yeah, no that's right.
And so the choice that,
the most important thing we can do is give customers
the tools that they need
to make the choice that's appropriate for their deployment.
I have learned over several years in this business
that if I start choosing what content
a customer wants on their operating system,
I will always guess it wrong. Right?
So my job is to make sure that I have a library of reliable,
secure software options for them,
that they can use as ingredients into their solution.
And they give them tools that allow them to kind of curate
the operating system that they need.
So that's the tool like image builder,
which we just announced,
the image builder service lets a customer go in and point
and click and kind of compose the edge operating system
that they need, hit a button,
and now they have an atomic image
that they can go deploy out on the edge reliably. Right?
>> Gunnar, can you clarify the cadence of releases?
>> Oh yeah.
>> You guys, the change that you made there.
>> Yeah.
>> Why that change occurred and what's the standard today?
>> Gunnar: Yeah. So back when we released RHEL8,
so we were just talking about hardware and you know,
it's ARM and X86, all these different kinds of hardware,
the hardware market is, internally I tell everybody
"The hardware market just got real weird."
Right? It's just got, the schedules are crazy,
We got so many more entrants,
everything is kind of out of sync from where it used to be.
Used to be, there was a metronome, right?
You mentioned Moore's law earlier.
It was like a 18-month metronome.
Everybody could kind of set their watch to.
>> Right.
>> So that's gone.
And so now we have so much hardware
that we need to reconcile.
The only way for us to provide the kind of stability
and consistency that customers were looking for
was to set our own clock.
So we said three years for every major release,
six months for every minor release, and that we will
ship a new minor release every six months and a new major
release every three years, whether we need it or not.
And that has value all by itself.
It means that customers can now plan ahead of time and know,
"Okay, in 36 months, the next major release
"is going to come on. And now that's something I can
"plan my workload around, that's something I can
"plan a data center migration around," things like that.
So the consistency of this,
and it was a terrifying promise to make three years ago.
I am now delighted to announce that
(Dave laughing)
we actually made good on it three years later. Right?
And plan to again, three years from now.
>> Is it- >> So- go ahead.
>> Is it, just follow up, is it primarily the processor,
optionality and diversity,
or as I was talking to a system architect the other day
and his premise was that we're moving from
a processor centric world to a connect centric world,
not just the processor, but the memories, the I/O,
the controllers, the NICs. >> Gunnar: Yeah.
And it's just keeping that system in balance.
Does that affect you or is it primarily the processor?
>> Gunnar: Oh, it absolutely affects us. Yeah. Yeah.
>> How so?
>> Yeah, so, the operating system
is the thing that everyone relies on
to hide all that stuff from everybody else, right?
(laughing) And so, if we cannot offer that abstraction
from all of these hardware choices that people need to make,
then we're not doing our job.
And so that means we have to encompass
all the hardware configurations
and all the hardware use cases that we can,
in order to make an application successful.
So if people want to go disaggregate
all of their components, we have to let 'em do that.
If they want to have a more traditional kind of
boxed up OEM experience,
they should be able to do that too. So yeah,
this is what I mean is because it is RHEL's responsibility
and our duty to make sure that people are insulated
from all this chaos underneath.
That is a good chunk of the job.
>> Dave: Yeah, the hardware and the OS
used to be inseparable, right? Before.
>> That's right. (all overlapping)
>> Hence the importance of hardware.
>> Yeah, that's right.
>> I'm curious how your job changes. So you just,
every 36 months, you roll out a new release,
which you did today. You announced a new release.
You go back into the workplace in two days,
>> Gunnar: Yeah. >> how is life different?
>> Gunnar: Not at all.
So the only constant is change, right?
And to be honest, you know, a major release,
that's a big event for our release teams.
That's a big event for our engineering teams.
It's a big event for our product management teams,
but all these folks have moved on and like,
we're now we're already planning.
RHEL 9.1 and 9.2 and 8.7,
and the rest of the releases.
And so it's kind of like brief celebration,
and then right back to work.
>> Paul: Mm. Okay. >> Yeah.
>> Paul: Doesn't change much.
>> Dave: So what can we look forward to?
What's the future look like of RHEL10?
>> Oh yeah. More bigger, stronger, faster,
more optimized for those and such and yeah.
>> Longer, lower, wider.
>> Yeah.
>> That's right. Yeah. (laughing) That's right. Yeah.
>> I am curious about CentOS stream.
>> Yeah.
>> because there was some controversy around the end of life
for CentOS and the move to CentOS stream.
>> Yeah. >> A lot of people,
including me are not really clear on what stream is,
and how it differs from CentOS. Can you clarify that?
>> Gunnar: Absolutely.
So when Red Hat Enterprise Linux was first created,
this was back in the days of Red Hat Linux, right?
And because we couldn't balance
the needs of the hobbyist market
from the needs of the Enterprise market,
we split into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Fedora.
Okay. So then for 15 years,
yeah, about 15 years, we had Fedora,
which is where we took all of our risks.
That was kind of our early program,
where we started integrating new components,
new open source projects and all the rest of it.
And then eventually we would take that innovation and then
feed it into the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The trick with that is that the Red Hat Enterprise Linux
work that we did was largely internal to Red Hat,
and wasn't accessible to partners.
And we've just spent a lot of time talking about how much
we need to be collaborating with partners.
They really,
a lot of them had to wait until the beta came out
before they actually knew what was going to be in the box.
Okay, well that was okay for a while.
But now that the market is the way that it is,
things are moving so quickly.
We need a better way to allow partners to work together with
us further upstream from the actual product development.
So that's why we created CentOS stream.
So CentOS stream is the place where we kind of
host the party and people can watch the next version
of Red Hat Enterprise Linux get developed in real time,
partners can come in and help,
customers can come in and help.
And we've been really proud of the fact that
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Nine is the first release
that came completely out of CentOS stream.
Another way of putting that is that
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Nine
is the first version of RHEL that was actually built
80, 90% of it was built completely in the open.
>> Okay. So that's the new playground.
>> Yeah, that's right.
>> Paul: You did get a lot of negative pushback
when you made the announcement.
Is that basically because the CentOS users
didn't understand what you were doing?
>> No, I think the CentOS Linux,
when we brought CentOS Linux on,
this was one of the things that we wanted to do,
is we wanted to create this space where we could
start collaborating with people.
Here's the lesson we learned.
It is very difficult to collaborate when you are downstream
of the product you're trying to improve,
because you've already shipped the product.
And so once you're collaborating downstream,
any changes you make have to go all the way
up the water slide- >> Paul: Ah.
>> before they can head all the way back down.
So this was the real pivot that we made,
was moving that partnership and that collaboration activity
from the downstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
to putting it right in the critical path
of Red Hat Enterprise Linux development.
>> Dave: Great. Well, thank you for that, Gunnar.
Thanks for coming on theCUBE. It's great to-
>> Yeah. My pleasure.
>> great to see you and have a great day tomorrow.
>> Thanks.
>> And we look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
We start at 9:00 AM. East coast time.
I think the keynotes will be here right after that
to break that down, Paul Gillin and myself.
This is day one for theCUBE's coverage
of Red Hat Summit 2022 from Boston. We'll see you tomorrow.
Thanks for watching.
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