>> Announcer: TheCube presents HPE Discover 2022,
brought to you by HPE.
>> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2022,
theCube's continuous wall to wall coverage,
Dave Vellante with John Furrier.
Keith Basil is here
as the General Manager for the Edge Business Unit at SUSE.
Keith, welcome to theCube, man
good to see you.
>> Great to be here,
it's my first time here
and I've seen many shows and you guys are the best.
>> Thanks you. >> Thank you very much.
>> Big fans of SUSE you know,
we've had Melissa on several times.
>> Yes.
>> Let's start with kind of what you guys are doing
here at Discover.
>> Well, we're here to support our wonderful partner HPE,
as you know SUSE's products and services
are now being integrated into the GreenLake offering.
So that's very exciting for us.
>> Yeah. Now tell us about your background.
It's quite interesting
you've kind of been in the mix
in some really cool places.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
>> Probably the most relevant
was I used to work at Red Hat,
I was a Product Manager working in security
for OpenStack and OpenShift
working with DOD customers in the intelligence community.
Left Red Hat to go to Rancher,
started out there as VP of Edge Solutions
and then transitioned over
to VP of Product for all of Rancher.
And then obviously we know SUSE acquired Rancher
and as of November 1st, of 2020, I think it was.
>> Dave: 2020.
>> Yeah, yeah time is flying.
I came over, I still remained VP of Product for Rancher
for Cloud Native Infrastructure.
And I was working on the edge strategy for SUSE
and about four months ago
we internally built three business units,
one for the Linux business,
one for enterprise container management,
basically the Rancher business,
and then the newly minted business unit
was the Edge business.
And I was offered the role to be GM for that business unit
and I happily accepted it.
>> Very cool.
I mean the market dynamics
since the 2018 have changed dramatically,
IBM bought Red Hat.
A lot of customers said,
"Hmm let's see what other alternatives are out there."
SUSE popped its head up.
You know, Melissa's been quite,
you know forthcoming about that.
And then you acquire Rancher in 2020,
IPO in 2021.
That kind of gives you another tailwind.
So there's a new market
when you go from 2018 to 2022,
it's a completely changed dynamic.
>> Yes and I'm going to answer your question
from the Rancher perspective first,
because as we were at Rancher,
we had experimented with different flavors
of the underlying OS underneath Kubernetes
or Kubernetes offerings.
And we had, as I said, different flavors,
we weren't really operating system people for example.
And so post-acquisition,
you know, one of my internal roles
was to bring the two halves of the house together,
the philosophies together
where you had a cloud native side
in the form of Rancher,
very progressive leading innovative products with Rancher
with K3s for example.
And then you had, you know, really strong enterprise roots
around compliance and security,
secure supply chain with the enterprise grade Linux.
And what we found out
was SUSE had been building a version of Linux
called SLE Micro,
and it was perfectly designed for Edge.
And so what we've done over that time period
since the acquisition
is that we've brought those two things together.
And now we're using Kubernetes directives and philosophies
to manage all the way down to the operating system.
And it is a winning strategy for our customers.
And we're really excited about that.
>> And what does that product look like?
Is that a managed service?
How are customers consuming that?
>> It could be a managed service,
it's something
that our managed service providers could embrace
and offer to their customers.
But we have some customers
who are very sophisticated
who want to do the whole thing themselves.
And so they stand up Rancher,
you know at a centralized location at cloud
GreenLake for example
which is why this is very relevant.
And then that control plane if you will,
manages thousands of downstream clusters
that are running K3s at these Edge locations.
And so that's what the complete stack looks like.
And so when you add the Linux capability to that scenario
we can now roll a new operating system,
new kernel, CVE updates,
build that as an OCI container image registry format, right?
Put that into a registry
and then have that thing cascade down
through all the downstream clusters
and up through a rolling window upgrade
of the operating system underneath Kubernetes.
And it is a tremendous amount of value
when you talk to customers that have this massive scale.
>> What's the impact of that,
just take us through what happens next.
Is it faster?
Is it more performant?
Is it more reliable?
Is it processing data at the Edge?
What's the impact of the customer?
>> Yes, the answer is yes to that.
So let's actually talk about one customer
that we we highlighted in our keynote,
which is Home Depot.
So as we know, Kubernetes is on fire, right?
It is the technology everybody's after.
So by being in demand,
the skills needed, the people shortage is real
and people are commanding very high, you know, salaries.
And so it's hard to attract talent is the bottom line.
And so using our software
and our solution and our approach
it allows people to scale their existing teams
to preserve those precious human resources
and that human capital.
So that now you can take a team of seven people
and manage let's say 3000 downstream stores.
>> Yeah it's like the old SRE model for DevOps.
>> Correct.
>> It's not servers they're managing one to many.
>> Yes.
>> One to many clusters.
>> Correct so you've got the cluster,
the life cycle of the cluster.
You already have the application life cycle
with the classic DevOps.
And now what we've built and added to the stack
is going down one step further,
clicking down if you will
to managing the life cycle of the operating system.
So you have the SUSE enterprise build chain,
all the value, the goodness, compliance, security.
Again, all of that comes with that build process.
And now we're hooking that into a cloud native flow
that ends up downstream in our customers.
>> So what I'm hearing is your Edge strategy
is not some kind of bespoke,
"Hey, I'm going after Edge."
It connects to the entire value chain.
>> Yes,
yeah it's a great point.
We want to reuse the existing philosophies
that are being used today.
We don't want to create something net new,
cause that's really the point in leverage that we get
by having these teams,
you know, do these things at scale.
Another point I'm going to make here
is that we've defined the Edge into three segments.
One is the near Edge,
which is the realm of the--
>> I was going to ask about this, great.
>> The telecommunications companies.
So those use cases and profiles look very different.
They're almost data center lite, right?
So you've had regional locations,
central offices where they're standing up gear
classic to you machines, right?
So things you find from HPE, for example.
And then once you get on the other side
of the access device right?
The cable modem, the router, whatever it is
you get into what we call the far Edge.
And this is where the majority of the use cases reside.
This is where the diversity
of use cases presents itself as well.
>> Also security challenges.
>> Security challenges.
Yes and we can talk about that following in a moment.
And then finally,
if you look at that far Edge as a box, right?
Think of it as a layer two domain, a network.
Inside that location,
on that network you'll have industrial IOT devices.
Those devices are too small
to run a full blown operating system
such as Linux and Kubernetes in the stack
but they do have software on them, right?
So we need to be able to discover those devices
and manage those devices and pull data from those devices
and do it in a cloud native way.
So that's what we called the tiny Edge.
And I stole that name from the folks over at Microsoft.
Kate and Edrick are are leading a project upstream
called Akri,
A-K-R-I,
and we are very much heavily involved in Akri
because it will discover the industrial IOT devices
and plug those into a local Kubernetes cluster
running at that location.
>> And Home Depot would fit into the near edge
is that correct?
>> Yes.
>> Yeah okay.
>> So each Home Depot store, just to bring it home,
is a far Edge location
and they have over 2,600 of these locations.
>> So far Edge?
You would put far Edge?
>> Keith: Far Edge yes.
>> Far edge, okay.
>> John: Near edge is like Metro.
Think of Metro.
>> And Teleco, communication, service providers
MSOs, multi-service operators.
Those guys are--
>> Near Edge.
>> The near edge, yes.
>> Don't you think,
John's been asking all week about machine learning and AI,
in that tiny Edge.
We think there's going to be a lot of AI influencing.
>> Keith: Oh absolutely.
>> Real time.
And it actually is going to need
some kind of lighter weight you know, platform.
How do you fit into that?
>> So going on this, like this model I just described
if you go back and look at the SUSECON 2022 demo
keynote that I did,
we actually on stage stood up that exact stack.
So we had a single Intel nook
running SLE Micro as we mentioned earlier,
running K3s
and we plugged into that device, a USB camera
which was automatically detected
and it loaded Akri
and gave us a driver to plug it into a container.
Now, to answer your question,
that is the point in time where we bring in the ML
and the AI, the inference and the pattern recognition,
because that camera when you showed the SUSE plush doll,
it actually recognized it
and put a QR code up on the screen.
So that's where it all comes together.
So we tried to showcase that in a complete demo.
>> Last week, I was here in Vegas for an event Amazon
and AWS put on called re:Mars,
machine learning, automation, robotics, and space.
>> Okay. >> Kind of but basically for me
was an industrial edge show.
Cause The space is the ultimate
like glam to edge is like,
you're doing stuff in space that's pretty edgy
so to speak, pun intended.
But the industrial side of the Edge
is going to, we think, accelerate with machine learning.
>> Keith: Absolutely.
>> And with these kinds of new portable
I won't say flash compute
or just like connected power sources software.
The industrial is going to move really fast.
We've been kind of in a snails pace at the Edge,
in my opinion.
What's your reaction to that?
Do you think we're going to see a mass acceleration
of growth at the Edge industrial,
basically physical,
the physical world.
>> Yes, first I agree with your assessment okay,
wholeheartedly, so much so that it's my strategy
to go after the tiny Edge space
and be a leader in the industrial IOT space
from an open source perspective.
So yes.
So a few things to answer your question
we do have K3s in space.
We have a customer partner called Hypergiant
where they've launched satellites
with K3s running in space
same model, that's a far Edge location,
probably the farthest Edge location we have.
>> John: Deep Edge, deep space.
>> Here at HPE Discover,
we have a business unit called SUSE RGS,
Rancher Government Services,
which focuses on the US government and DOD and IC, right?
So little bit of the world
that I used to work in my past career.
Brandon Gulla the CTO of of that unit
gave a great presentation
about what we call the tactical Edge.
And so the same technology
that we're using on the commercial
and the manufacturing side.
>> Like the Jedi contract,
the tactical military Edge I think.
>> Yes so imagine
some of these military grade industrial IOT devices
in a disconnected environment.
The same software stack
and technology would apply to that use case as well.
>> So basically the tactical Edge is life?
We're humans, we're at the Edge?
>> Or it's maintenance, right?
So maybe it's pulling sensors from aircraft,
Humvees, submarines
and doing predictive analysis
on the maintenance for those items, those assets.
>> All these different Edges,
they underscore the diversity
that you were just talking Keith
and we also see a new hardware architecture emerging,
a lot of arm based stuff.
Just take a look at what Tesla's doing at the tiny Edge.
Keith Basil, thanks so much.
>> Sure. >> For coming on theCube.
>> John: Great to have you.
>> Grateful to be here. >> Awesome story.
Okay and thank you for watching.
This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier.
This is day three of HPE Discover 2022.
You're watching theCube,
the leader in enterprise
and emerging tech coverage.
We'll be right back.
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