(upbeat music)
>> Welcome back to the Seaport in Boston, Massachusetts
The city's crazy with Bruins and Celtics talk,
but we're here.
We're talking Red Hat, Linux, OpenShift, Ansible.
And Ashesh Badani is here as the senior vice president
and the head of products at Red Hat,
fresh off the keynotes had Amex up in the state.
Ashesh, great to see you face to face.
Amazing that we are here now after two years
of the isolation economy, welcome back.
>> Thank you, great to see you again as well
and you as well, Paul.
>> Yeah, so no shortage of announcements
from Red Hat this week.
Paul wrote a piece on Siliconangle.com.
I got my yellow highlights.
I've been through all the announcements,
which is your favorite baby?
(Ashesh laughs)
>> Hard for me to choose, hard for me to choose.
I'll talk about Rel9.
Rel9's exciting and in a weird way.
It's exciting because it's boring.
Because it's consistent.
Three years ago, we committed to releasing
a major Rel every three years, right?
So customers, partners, users can plan for it.
So we released the latest version of Rel
in between when delivering releases every six months
as well minor releases, a lot of capabilities
that are bundled in
around security, automation, edge management.
And then Rel is also the foundation of the work we announced
with GM, with the in vehicle operating system.
That's extremely exciting news for us as well
and the collaboration that we're doing with them.
Another whole host of other announcements
around cloud services, work around DevSecOps and so on.
So yeah, a lot of news, a lot of announcements
I would say Rel9 and the work with GM
probably comes right up to the top.
>> I wanted to get into one aspect of the Rel9 announcement,
and that is the role CentOS Stream in that development.
Now in December, I think it was
Red Hat discontinued development or support for CentOS
and moved to CentOS Stream.
I'm still not clear what the differences between the two,
can you clarify that?
>> I think we'll go into a situation
especially with many customers, many partners, as well,
that didn't sort of quite exactly get a sense
of where CentOS was from a life cycle perspective.
So was it upstream to Rel, was it downstream to Rel?
What's the life cycle for it itself as well?
And then there became some sort of implied notions
around what that looked like.
And so what we decided was to say, well,
we'll make a really clean break and we'll say
CentOS Stream is the upstream for enterprise Lenox.
From day one itself, software partners,
hardware partners can collaborate with us
to develop Rel and then take
it all the way through lifecycle.
So now it becomes a true upstream,
a true place for development for us.
And then Rel essentially comes out
as a series of releases based on the work that we do
in a fast moving CentOS environment.
>> But wasn't CentOS essentially
that upstream development environment to begin with?
>> It was actually-
>> What's the difference between CentOS and CentOS stream?
>> It wasn't quite upstream.
It was actually a little bit downstream.
>> Yeah, it was bidirectional ish.
>> Yeah, and so then that sort of became
an implied life cycle to it when there really wasn't one
but there just became one because of some usage in adoption.
And so now this really clarifies
the relationship between the two.
We've heard feedback, for example from software partners,
users saying, hey, what do I do for development?
'Cause I used CentOS in the past.
We were like, yep, we have Rel for developers available.
we have Rel for small teams available.
We have Rel available for non-profit organizations.
And so we've made Rel now available in various form factors
for the needs that folks had.
And they were perhaps using CentOS for it
because there was no such alternative for Rel historically.
>> So language, so now there's clarity.
So I mean, that's really the key point there.
So language matters a lot in the technology business.
We've seen it over the years.
The industry coalesces around terminology
whether it was the PC era, everything was PC this, PC that,
the internet era and certainly the cloud.
We learned a lot of language from the likes of AWS,
two pizza teams and working backwards
and things like that became commonplace.
Hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of
the parlance of the day, you guys use hybrid.
You and I have talked about this,
I feel like there's something new coming.
I don't think my term of super cloud
is the right necessary terminology,
but it signifies something different.
And I feel like Ashesh, your announcements point to that
within your hybrid umbrella.
Point being so much talk about the edge.
We heard Paul Cornier talk about new hardware architectures
and you're seeing that at the edge.
What you're doing with the in vehicle operating system,
these are new.
The cloud isn't just a bunch of remote services
in the cloud anymore.
It's on-prem, it's a cloud, it's cross clouds.
It's now going out to the edge.
It's something new and different.
I think hybrid is your sort of term for that
but it feels like it's transcending hybrid.
What are your thoughts?
>> Really, really great question.
Actually, since you and I talked, Dave,
I've been spending some time
sort of noodling just over that.
And you're right, there's probably some terminology
something sort of that will get developed
either by us or in collaboration with the industry.
We sort of almost have almost like a Metacloud
that we're sort of working our way towards.
Because there's if you will, the cloud.
So, on premise, virtualized bare metal
by the way, increasingly interesting and important,
we do a lot of work with Nvidia,
folks want to run specific workloads there.
we announced support for Arm,
another now popular architecture,
especially as we go out to the edge.
So obviously there's private cloud, public cloud.
Then the edge becomes a continuum now on that process.
We actually have a major shipping company.
So a cruise lines that's talking about using OpenShift
on cruise lines.
So, that's the edge.
Last year we had Verizon talking about 5G
and RAN and the next generation there.
To them that's the edge.
When we talk to retail, the store front's the edge.
You talk to a bank, the bank environments.
So everyone's got a different kind of definition of edge,
we're working with them.
And then when we announce this collaboration with GM
now the edge there becomes the automobile.
So if you think of this as a continuum,
bare metal, private cloud, public cloud
take it out to the edge,
now we're sort of almost living in a world
of a little bit of abstractions
and making sure that we are focused
on where data is being generated.
And then how can we help ensure that we're providing
a consistent experience regardless of where that shows up.
>> I like Metacloud 'cause I can work in NFTs,
I can work a little-
>> We're going to get through this whole thing
without saying metaverse, I was hoping.
I do want to ask you about the edge
and the proliferation of hardware platforms.
Paul Cornier mentioned this during the keynote today
hardware is becoming important.
There's a lot of purpose in hardware
that's in development now for areas like intelligent devices
and AI, how does this influence your development priorities?
And you have all these different platforms
that you need to support.
>> Yeah, so we think about that a lot
mostly because we have engagements
with so many partners in hardware.
So obviously there's the more traditional partners
I'd say like the Dell and the HPs that we work with,
historically work with them.
Also working with them in newer areas
with regard to appliances that are being developed.
And then the work that we do with partners like Nvidia
or new architectures like Arm.
And so our perspective is this will be use case driven
more than anything else, right?
So there are certain environments
where you have Arm based devices,
other environments where you've got specific workloads
that can take advantage of being built on GPUs
that we'll see increasingly being used
especially to address that problem
and then provide a solution towards that.
So our belief has always been, look,
we're going to give you a consistent platform,
a consistent abstract across all these pieces of hardware.
And so you, mister or miss customer
make the best choice for yourself.
>> Couple other areas we have to hit on.
I want to talk about cloud services.
We got to talk about security.
We'll leave time to get there,
but why the push to cloud services, what's driving that?
>> It's actually customers, they're driving.
So we have customers consistently been asking us say,
love what you give us, want to make sure that's available
to us when we consume in the cloud.
So we've made Rel available for example on demand.
You can consume this directly via public cloud consoles.
We are now making it available via marketplaces,
talked about Ansible available
as a managed service on Azure.
OpenShift, of course available as a managed service
in multiple clouds.
All of this also is because, we've got customers
who've got these committed spends that they have
with cloud providers.
They want to make sure that the environments
that they're using are also counting towards that.
At the same time, give them flexibility,
give them the choice.
If in certain situations they want to run in the data center,
great, we have that solution for them.
Other cases they want to procure from the cloud
and run it there, we're happy to support them there as well.
>> Let's talk about security
'cause a lot of this is like security everywhere.
And then some specific announcements as well.
I always think about these days
in the context of the solar wind supply chain hack,
how would this have affected up?
But tell us about what's going on in security,
your philosophy there
and the announcements that you guys made.
>> So, our secure announcements actually span
our entire portfolio.
And that's not accident, that's by design
because we've really been thinking and emphasizing
how we ensure that security profile is raised for users
both from a malicious perspective
and also helping accidental issues.
So both matters.
So one, huge amounts of open source software
out of the world, and then estimates are one in 10
has some kind of security vulnerability in place.
Massive amount of change where software's being developed.
So rate of change, for example in Kubernetes is dramatic
much more than even than Lenox.
Entire parts of Kubernetes get rewritten
over a three year period of time.
So as you introduce all that being able to think,
for example, about what's known as shift left security
or DevSecOps, how do we make sure we move security
closer to where development is actually done?
How do we ensure we give you a pattern?
We introduce a software supply chain pattern via OpenShift.
Delivers complete stack of code that you can go off and run
that follows best practices including for example,
for developers with Git ops
and support on the pipelines front
a whole bunch of security capabilities in Rel,
a new IMAs, integrity measurement architecture,
which allows for better ability to see
in a post install environment
what the integrated of the packages are,
content signing technology,
they're incorporating OpenShift as well as an Ansible.
It's a long list of capabilities and features.
And then also more and more defaults
that we're putting in place that make it easier,
for example, for someone not
to hurt themselves accidentally.
>> On the security front, I noticed that
today's batch of announcements included support
with an OpenShift pipelines for Sigstore
which is an open source project that was birthed
actually at Red Hat.
We haven't heard a whole lot about it.
How important is Sigstore to your future product direction?
>> Yeah, so look, I think of that
as work that's being done out of our CTO's office
and obviously security is a big focus area for them.
Sigstore is a great example of saying, look,
how can we verify content that's in containers?
Make sure it's digitally signed that's appropriate
to be deployed across a bunch of different environments.
But that thinking isn't maybe unique for us
in the container side mostly because we have two decades
or more of thinking about that on the Rel side.
And so fundamentally containers are being built on Linux.
So a lot of the lessons that we've learned,
a lot of the expertise that we've built
over the years in Linux now we're starting
to use that same expertise trying to apply it to containers.
And my guess is increasingly we're going to see
more of the need for that into the edge as well.
>> I picked up on that too.
Let me ask a follow up question on Sigstore.
So if I'm a developer and I use that capability
it ensures the providence of that code.
Is it imitable, the signature?
And the reason I ask is because again,
I think of everything in the context of the solar winds
where they were putting code into the supply chain
and then removing it to see what happened
and see how people reacted.
And it's just a really scary environment.
>> Yeah, the hardest part in these environments
is actually the behavior change.
So what's an example of that?
Packages built, verified by Red Hat.
When it went from Red Hat to the actual user,
have we been able to make sure we verify the integrity
of all of those when they were put into use?
And unless we have behavior that make sure that we do that,
then we find ourselves in trouble.
>> I see.
>> In the earliest days of OpenShift,
we used to get knocked a lot by developers
because I said, hey, this platform's really hard to use.
We investigate, hey look, why is that happening?
So by default we didn't allow for root access
and so someone's using the open platform,
they're like, oh my gosh, I can't use it.
I'm so used to having root access.
We're like, no, that's actually sealed by default
because that's not a good security best practice.
Now, over a period of time when we ran that enough times,
explained that enough times now behavior chain is like,
yeah, that makes sense now.
So even just kind of these behaviors
the more that we can do, for example in the shift left,
which is one of the reasons by the way
why we bought StackRox a year ago
for declarative security, contained native security.
So threat detection, network segmentation,
watching intrusions, malicious behavior
is something that now we can essentially make native
into development itself.
>> All right, going to escape key talk futures a little bit.
So I went downstairs to the expert,
asked the experts and there was this awesome demo.
I dunno if you've seen it.
It's like a design thinking booth
how you build an application.
And I think they were using the WHO,
one of their apps during COVID.
And it shows the granularity of the stack
and the development pipeline
and all the steps that have to take place.
And it strikes me of something we've talked about.
So you've got this application development stack,
if you will.
And the database is there to support that.
And then over here, you've got this analytics stack
and it's separate.
And we always talk about injecting more AI into apps,
more data into apps, but there's separate stacks.
Do you see a day where those two stacks can come together?
And if not, how do we inject more data in AI, into apps?
What are your thoughts on that?
>> Great, that's another area we've talked about Dave
in the past.
So we definitely agree with that.
And what final shape it takes,
I think we've got some ideas around that.
What we started doing is starting to pick up specific areas
where we can start saying, let's go and see
what kind of usage we get from customers around it.
So for example, we have OpenShift data science,
which is basically a way for us to talk about ML ops.
And how can we have a platform that allows
for different models that you can use?
We can test and train data, different frameworks
that you can then deploy in an environment of your choice.
And we run that for you and assist you in making sure
that you're able to take the next steps you want
with your machine learning algorithms.
There's work that we've introduced at summit
around databases service.
So essentially our cloud service that allows for DBass
or an easy way for customers to access either MongoDB
or Cockroach in a cloud native fashion.
And all of these things
that we're sort of experimenting with is to be able to say,
look, how do we sort of bring the worlds closer together?
Off database, off data, off analytics with a core platform
and a core stack.
Because again, this will become part of one continuum
that we're going to work with.
>> And I like your continuum,
that's I think really instructive.
It's not a technical barrier is what I'm hearing.
It's maybe organizational mindset.
I should be able to insert a column into my application
development pipeline and insert the data.
I mean, Kafka, TensorFlow in there.
There's no technical reason I can't do that.
It's just we've created
these sort of separate stove pipe organizations.
>> 100% right, so they're different teams.
They've got the platform team or the ops team
and you're a separate dev team.
They're the separate data team.
They're the separate storage team
and each of them will work
slightly differently independently.
So the question then is,
I mean, that's sort of how DevOps came along.
Then you're like, oh, wait a minute,
don't forget security and now we're in DevSecOps.
So the more of that that we can kind of bring together,
I think the more conversions that we'll see.
>> Yeah, when I think about the in vehicle OS,
I see that that is a great use case
for realtime AI inferencing streaming data.
>> I wanted to ask you that about that real quickly
'cause at the very, just before the conference began
we got an announcement about GM,
about your partnership with GM.
It seems like this came together very quickly.
Why is it so important for Red Hat?
This is a whole new category of application
that you're going to be working on.
>> Yeah, so we've been working with GM
not publicly for a while now.
And it was very clear that look,
GM believes this is the future.
Electric vehicles into autonomous driving.
And we're very keen to say, we believe there are
a lot of attributes that we've got in Rel
that we can bring to bear in a different form factor
to assist with the different needs that exist
in this industry.
So one, it's interesting for us because
we believe that's a use case that we can add value to.
But it's also the future of automotive.
So the opportunity be able to say, look,
we can get open source technology.
We can collaborate out with the community
to fundamentally help transform that industry
towards where it wants to go,
that's just the passion that we have
that is what wakes us up every morning.
>> You're opening into that.
>> Ashesh Badani, thank you for coming on theCUBE.
Really appreciate your time and your insights
and have a great rest of the event.
>> Will do, thank you for having me.
>> Meta cloud, it's a thing.
>> Paul: Meta cloud.
>> It's a thing, right?
It's kind there.
We're going to see it emerge over the next decade.
All right, you're watching theCUBE's coverage
of Red Hat Summit, 2022 from Boston.
Keep it right there, I'll be right back.
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