September 26, 2019 • 44 mins
IBM and Red Hat have some big plans when it comes to cloud computing. From open source to artificial intelligence, we find out what they have in store for the future.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to this special
Bonus sponsored episode of tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland. I'm
an executive producer with How Stuff Works and I Heart
Radio and I love all things tech and back in
July two thousand nineteen, IBM completed it's acquisition of the
(00:28):
company red Hat, famed for its work in open source software.
The company's invited me out to red Hat headquarters, which
does in fact have a big red hat on it,
to talk about why the company has made this move,
how they plan to work together, and ultimately what does
this mean for all of us? And so in this episode,
(00:50):
you're going to hear sections of an interview I did
with IBMS Steve Robinson and red hats a Chesh Badani,
and I'll be popping in and out to give a
bit more content text and explanation. But first I want
to set the stage a bit. Now. We're mainly going
to talk about cloud computing and open source software in
this conversation, and the reason that this is a big
(01:12):
deal is that more companies are putting more of their
operations on the cloud, and there are a lot of
different reasons to do this. One is to make sure
that the services they provide are available whenever and wherever
the end user needs them, whether the end user is
someone else in the company, a different company, or a
consumer like you or me. Another reason is to maximize resources,
(01:36):
and there are tons of other reasons besides those that
companies do this. What about the average user? You know,
I don't run a global company with worldwide service, so
why do I care about all this? Well, for me,
it's about the utility and availability of the apps I
run on all these different devices, whether it's a computer
(01:58):
or a mobile phone, a tablet, whatever it might be.
More of those apps are tapping into lots of different
aspects that a company is involved with. So a bank,
for example, could have an app that allows you to
access your bank account. You can make transfers, you can
pay bills, you can check your reward status on any
credit cards you might have, You might be able to
(02:19):
apply for loans, and more. To the end user, it
might seem like all that stuff just sort of lives
in the brick and mortar building that the bank we
use happens to be located in, But in reality, those
services might be spread across numerous computer systems all over
the place. Some of them might be on premises at
the bank itself, some might be in a privately managed
(02:41):
data center off site. Some might depend upon large cloud
computing services run by big companies. So there's a whole
variety out there now. As an end user, I just
expect that stuff to work. I expect all those services
to be integrated into the app seamlessly, and it's frustrating
when that's not the case, right like when you try
(03:03):
to do something and either there's a long wait time
or it doesn't work the way you expected. But the
cloud computer landscape it's a complicated one for reasons that
we're going to get into in the discussions I had
with Steve in a chef. So making this happen all
the stuff working together isn't as easy as just inserting
a few links between services. So let's get started. I
(03:26):
began with what seems like a simple question but is
actually fairly complicated. So I'm very pleased that I get
to speak to two experts on this subject because about
a decade ago I wrote more than a dozen articles
all about the concept of cloud computing. Back then, cloud computing,
(03:49):
at least for the mainstream, was just creeping into the
public consciousness and there was a lot of confusion about it.
And I think over the years everyone has a better
and standing of what cloud computing is. But the problem
is everyone has a different understanding of what cloud computing is.
So can we talk about the definition of cloud computing
and how that has actually evolved over time? Be happy
(04:13):
to and I think you you again, you hit the
nail on the head with regards to I think it's
one of the most amorphous definitions out there. You ask anybody,
I think they've got a different view. And I think
around a period of time, at least in an IBM's view,
is is that it's one that's continually redefining, and it's
probably in a phase right now where it's being redefined
(04:34):
as well. I think in most cases people originally assumed
an associated cloud with the large public clouds, you know,
the multi tenant hyper scalers and UH And it reminds
me a little bit like the early days of the Internet.
You know, if you if you go back to UH
the Internet, you had extra net, you had internet, you
(04:55):
had public Internet, you had private Internet, and before long
you started to see most of the vendors start to
rally around a small set of standards T C P
I P H, T M L, and before long it
just became the Internet. You know, you would serve up
a U R L and you really didn't care where
the server was that was serving up the content behind it.
(05:16):
It could be in your data center, could be on
go Daddy, could be wherever that uh, it could be
in one country versus another. It just became the Internet.
And I think that the cloud we're kind of ad
that position to. I think the cloud is going to
start to expand to be almost anywhere that I've got
compute and data capabilities. And we've seen this this whole
rally around a certain set of standards really driving that
(05:39):
and driving that at a speed that's just unbelievable. Right now,
I think, you know, the adoption of lenox, I think
the whole history of containers and the maturity of containers,
which are you know, kind of you know, finer grained
virtualization that allows me to to have code and move
it around and pack the middlewhere into it, etcetera. And
then finally kubernet ease that gives me the ability to
(06:01):
orchestrate and manage those containers. Are kind of that becoming
that Lingua franco. You know, I think we all of
the major vendors are now kind of embracing those three standards.
I think there's probably over forty to fifty different distros
of coube today and that's now I think kind of
turning it into cloud. I Can I do cloud in
my data center? Sure, there's a lot of things I
(06:22):
can do. I can run containers, I can run Kubernetes,
I can build a p I S, I can have
always on, I can do a lot of cloud native
concepts right in the data center. Can I do a
dedicated cloud that may be set up and assigned to
a single client or a single customer. Yep. You now
have been able to to do cloud concepts and put
a single customer boundary around it as well. And then
(06:43):
you've got the hyper scale ers that can do that
for a wide range and never know where. You know,
my my my machine, maybe in one data center one day,
in one data center the next day. So I think
all of this is becoming the cloud, and uh, I
think within the next couple of years, cloud will be
anywhere that I'm doing kind of cloud native properties independent
(07:04):
of its its final locality here. And this has kind
of been the real basis of some of the work
you guys have been doing the red house strategy the right. Yeah, yeah,
And you're write about the definition of cloud search changing, right,
So from this notion of cloud computing is when it
just happened on somebody else's computer, right or somewhere else.
(07:26):
And you know, if we go back, right, if you
can ask yourself, look, where were people's expectations of this frame, right?
Were they in the P two P sharing? You know,
if anyone remembers that, right, So there's notion of kind
of you know, music sharing or streaming um or or
even this notion that you had with regard to well
I can get my email and that's being served over
(07:48):
the internet. And then you know, people to equate the
Internet to the cloud. And so I'll sort of taking
people the different sort of you know, aspect of that
from you, Steve, because I think people expectations for cloud
competing we're also computing. We're also sort of shaped around
being able to access software from anywhere they were, right,
So in the past, WHEA was Hey, I'm locked down
(08:09):
to particular desktop or particular laptop or machine write a
physical location. And now you can say, well, I'm free
now right now, I can you know, get my information
wherever and you know, the same data I could get
from a laptop. You know, I can be on the go,
you know, hiking in Peru, and I can access at
the same time too. Having said all that, I think
also the definition of cloud or the sort of expectation
(08:30):
cloud or sort of shifting to new areas right and
to all call out around security and privacy. Increasingly we're finding,
especially red hat, we're seeing customers sort of you know,
talking about you know, inasmuch as a fine value from
being able to take advantage of you know, deploying applications,
running them, thinking avoute, all the new technologies you talked about.
It's also about, you know, is this secure? You know,
(08:54):
is this something you know, if I'm audited that I
can kind of stand behind u, you know, is this
complying with the regular lation and the governance of the
particular region that I'm working with? And then ultimately, right
are we making sure I think maybe you know you've
talked about this before. Stay around gdp R or privacy
or regulations that are put in place to ensure that
when customers and you know, be the individual consumers, are
(09:15):
actual enterprises, we're meeting the requirements that they've put in
place to us as providers. This is a good spot
for me to jump back in here and explain some
basic concepts like containers and kuberneties. You may remember I
did an episode not long ago about virtualization, and the
concept of virtualization is to use software to create a
(09:37):
virtual machine on top of an actual, real physical machine.
And when I say machine, I'm really talking about computers.
And there are lots of different reasons that you would
want to build a virtual computer on top of a
physical computer. You might want to have a virtual machine
dedicated to running a specific application, for example, and you
want it completely separated from any other process running on
(10:00):
the physical hardware itself, and the application might not be
so demanding that would take up all, or maybe even
a significant amount of a physical machine's resources. So if
you did decide I'm just going to buy a server
and that server is just going to run this one app,
even though the app only relies on maybe five percent
(10:21):
of the server's processing power and storage, you would have
a ton of computing power just sitting idle, essentially going
to waste. Virtual machines give you the chance to run
data centers more efficiently with less idle time. On computers,
you could have multiple virtual machines on the same physical device,
and that way you're maximizing the use of that physical
(10:43):
hardware and you're minimizing downtime. This is increased efficiency, better savings.
It just makes more sense. Containers are similar to virtualization
in many ways. A container sits on top of an
operating system on a computer, and containers hold all the
components necessary to run some bit of code in isolation
(11:05):
of everything else. And you can have multiple containers on
the same machine, each in its own protected environment, on
the same operating system, so you don't need a bunch
of virtual machines on the same physical hardware. You could
run containers on virtual machines, but you could also run
containers just on a computer without the virtual machine and
hypervisor layers, so there's no need to allocate resources to
(11:29):
apps dynamically because the containers quote unquote contain everything needed
to run that code. Moreover, it's easy to move those
containers from environment to environment, so a developer builds the
some app and puts it into a few containers. The
different containers are specific parts of what that app does,
(11:51):
and then it's very easy for the developer to move
those containers over to a test environment and from there
to a production environment or deployment to the cloud. You
can think of containers as keeping things efficient and tidy,
and they're called that because it's very much like the
containers you would have in shipping. The whole idea is
that you've standardized this and it's really easy to move
(12:12):
it around to wherever it needs to go. Okay, but
what is Kubernetes. Well, that's a system that's designed to
manage the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It's
not the only one out there. There are other strategies
for doing this, but it's one that has become incredibly
popular over the last few years. So an application might
(12:33):
require the use of several containers. Kubernetes organizes containers for
applications into groups called pods, nodes, and name spaces. That's
going from the smallest to largest. So containers your basic unit.
Then you have pods, the nodes, the name spaces. I'm
not going to get too much into the weeds here,
because we get really kind of bogged down. But think
(12:55):
of this as a way to coordinate all of these
different containers so that the apps work the way they
need to and you can easily poured it over to
whatever environment you need to use. And the use of
containers and orchestration strategies like Kubernetes is making it easier
for developers to build and deploy apps that will work
on any computing environment. All right, now, let's get back
(13:16):
to my discussion with Stephen a chef. So for the
average person, I think most people, if they hear about
cloud computing, they're mostly thinking of public cloud applications. You
think about cloud storage is probably the number one application
that they think of us exactly. And then and then
if they're thinking about the apps that they're running, they
(13:37):
might have a little bit of appreciation about that as well.
But I think a lot of people who aren't in
that world, they hear terms like public cloud and private cloud,
and that already starts to get a little confusing to them.
So could you just for a moment kind of talk
about the difference is what what are those entities and
(14:00):
what would you use public cloud for versus private cloud.
If you're let's say, I don't know a global corporation
that has locations in the EU, for example, Yeah, let
me do that. So and we'll try to break it
down whereby we don't get so caught up in definitions
that we miss the point of where we're trying to
(14:22):
get to, right, which is um Historically, you know, we
always dealt with this right. So we we've talked about,
for example, data centers, and it could be your own
data center that you managed, could be a third party
that sort of managed it on your behalf. You might
deploy some applications on your own, you might have someone
else deploying on your behalf, and then you should go
(14:42):
back and forth across them. Now, if you extend that
out and then you say, well, you know what if
we started having and I'm going to sort of take
this if this sort of analogy to its logical conclusion.
What if we now had a vast pool of compute,
network and storage, right, and then we dev that up
to say, some of it lives physically in a certain area,
(15:04):
managed by a certain party, some live somewhere else managed
by someone else. You can take advantage of economics. Because
it shared, multiple parties can use it and then be
able to say, well, I'll deploy now those applications that
I have based on policies right now, those policies might
be cost they might be based on latency, they could
be based on performance, they might be based on you know,
(15:26):
we talked about regulation, privacy and governance and so on,
right and then in that sense, it doesn't really matter
what we've called it. And this is why I think
between a red hat and IBM and I think we
share this vision. And I'm sure Steve you'd agree with
this right that, you know, the hybrid cloud notion is,
you know, really the abstraction that we can put in
front of resources that can be made widely available to
(15:50):
customers around the world, and then for us to now
think about what productive things can they do on top
of that, What new applications can they build? How can
they integrate both exists stinging around as they have the
new ones they wanted to build out, How can they
create great agility and great innovation in vols? Jumping back
in here again just to clear up a couple more things. So,
why would a company want to keep some stuff on premises?
(16:13):
Some in a private cloud and some on a public cloud. Well,
it has to do with a lot of different stuff,
including security, governance, and cost. All this data has to
ultimately live on physical machines somewhere, and it costs money
to buy and maintain those machines, and they take up
physical space. So there are limiting factors, mostly money in space.
(16:37):
The restrict how many computers are going to have in
your physical location. Now, some stuff you're gonna want to
keep close to you. Maybe you have some trade secrets
that you're protecting. Maybe you have private data on customers
that you don't want leaked out to anybody else. Maybe
there are specific laws in place that state you have
to keep certain information under your control and you alone
(17:02):
are allowed to have access to it. Whatever the motivation.
You may want some of your data and services running
on equipment that your team directly manages, so you keep
all that stuff on premises or on prem We talk
a lot about the EU and this discussion, because the
EU has strict rules about what data can and can't
leave the continent, and in those cases, you have to
(17:24):
make sure your system respects those restrictions. If you're doing
business inside the EU, now, you might hire a third
party to oversee servers running your apps, and that's all
those particular servers are doing, right you. They aren't running
any applications for any other client on those particular servers.
They might all exist in a similar data center, but
(17:46):
the machines you're using are quote unquote yours alone. You're
essentially renting them. Your stuff is completely separated from anyone else's.
Or maybe you've got some services you want to move
to big public cloud providers, and those solutions might cost
much less than running the machinery yourself, and the services
guarantee redundancy. They have multiple machines holding onto your data,
(18:10):
so if one set of servers go down, other servers
with the same information can take their place, and this
takes a lot of the management of that information off
of your plate. So there are a lot of big
companies that are using multiple cloud and on premises solutions
to host their services and their data, and as you
(18:31):
can imagine, that gets really complicated. Just knowing where stuff
is is complicated, getting stuff to work together with each
other on these different platforms is even more so, And
so you have to figure out how to make all
this data living in these different environments to play nice together,
and that's where the concept of the hybrid cloud comes
(18:52):
into play. Let's get back to Stephen Asches. So this
kind of gets us into this concept of the hybrid
cloud strategy. Can you talk a bit more about what
that is and how that's going to benefit companies? That's
sactly right. So the part that we sometimes skip over,
and I think this is kind of you know, where
(19:12):
hybrid really really shines is far that you know, Steve
started talking about, right, And I think Steve, you're describing
this as sort of the two phases, right, you know
about you know, we're about of our way into the journey.
We've got any percent to go? Why is that really important?
It's almost like an iceberg, right, We've got so much
more to do, and yet we only see the tip
(19:32):
of what we've done now. If you don't think of
the world, you know, in a hybrid fashion, when as
a hybrid you know, I'm sort of gonna call out
your right at uses a terminology call four footprints, right,
running something in a physical environment, running something in the
virtual environment virch your life environment, running it in a
private cloud, running in a public cloud. If you don't
have something that stands the four footprints? What are you
(19:53):
doing right? You are potentially choosing to disregard that any
percent that you haven't moved over where you can make
it most productive. Why is it important? Most enterprises of
any size have large investments in applications, services, processes, people's
(20:15):
skills that they've made over decades. What happens to all
of those? Right? And if we aren't able to unlock
all of that, right, how can we truly deliver innovation
and the scale that we want while leaving all that
moroon on the side. Right, So the opportunity to able
to say, look, I am going to be able to
bridge you know, existing investments that I've made and I
(20:36):
obviously worked with the clients you know for decades around this,
but at the same time expose them to what we
call you know, cloud native, you know ways of working. Right.
There's notion of micro services. Right. Let me not build
out massive applications. Let me build them in smaller and
more actual fashion. Steeve talked about you and having a
PI is available right to make it just easier for
(20:56):
different applications to to interact each other and be able
to share information data across them, but to be able
to realize all that promise, and we've got to be
able to provide a hybrid cloud platform that spans both
the new environments that we're all trying to go towards
as well as the existing applications and environment that we
have running today. And I think it's an interesting case
(21:17):
in point. Right when we announced the acquisition intent of
red Hat, I had a ce IO executive VP of
a large fast food restaurant chain called me up and
he says, okay, Steve, give me the scoop. Why did
you do it? And I had to tell him. I said, well,
let's just take a look at what we're doing with you.
And at that point in time, um, we were putting
(21:37):
a server in every single one of those restaurants, were
putting a private cloud in every single one of his restaurants,
and what we were attaching that we were attaching our
Watson services to do the ordering so that you just
speak in but automatically handle it, etcetera, saving the labor
on that, etcetera. We had also outfitted every one of
his stores with IoT cameras, so all of a sudden,
you see the bustload of high school students start to
(21:59):
come in. He felt that if he had just a
minute lead time, he could reposition his employees and be
ready to take that that that on and manage the
traffic of that. You know, those two applications resided, and
we're critical just to that store. They didn't benefit from
bouncing or sending any data back up to their data
center or to the public cloud. They all the processing
(22:21):
etcetera needed to happen right there in the store. I said,
that's your private cloud. I said, Now that same store
also has to order from you, do your supply chain,
do your analytics, do your HR, get your paychecks, etcetera.
All that and you know, so that's coming back into
your worldwide headquarters, and that's probably running in conjunction with
historical applications that you have, and probably some dedicated cloud
(22:43):
capabilities is there. And I said, and we're also working
with your marketing department on kind of running your annual
sweep stakes game and doing your customer loyalty etcetera. You
want to reach as many as people across as many
channels as possible. That's your public cloud, and that's what
you're doing as well. I said. I said, now imagine
in architecture, so your programmers could build that once and
(23:04):
they could then deploy that in all three of those
environments seamlessly, so you didn't have to know ahead of
time where that application was going to run. You know,
let's just imagine that all of a sudden, speeds came up.
You know, all of a sudden, we're doing five G
I can I can move those private cloud applications back
to a center location do that more efficiently. A single
architecture gives the ability to write at once, run it
(23:25):
anywhere that I want to. We're starting to future proof
those applications as well. So a hybrid cloud strategy is
one that has a layer that facilitates operations across different
computer environments. In an ideal version of the hybrid cloud strategy,
it wouldn't matter where your data and services lived. The
(23:46):
hybrid cloud infrastructure would create the connections necessary for services
to run without any hiccups and give developers opportunities to
build new applications without having to worry about some services
or information being off limits. It's just sort of meant
to smooth everything out and pave the way for more interoperability.
(24:06):
Let's get back to Stephen the chef, So can you
talk to me a little bit about IBM S multi
cloud platform and what that means to businesses. I think
we early on decided that, you know, no firm or
no enterprise is going to be wed to a single cloud,
much much to the chagrine of the public cloud vendors.
(24:27):
I think, uh, you know, we're starting to hear from
some of the analysts calling it a mono cloud, you know,
where they're trying to you know, build either outposts or
build you know some some some code that replicates their
public cloud down into the data center. Uh so it's
more easy to go up to their public cloud. But
we did a lot of work. We've done a lot
of interviews with enterprise customers, and you know, they are
(24:50):
not going to be wed to a single vendor. You know,
we we learned back from the our our prior days
of working with them over the past decades. Nobody likes
lock in. Everybody wants choice, and I think many of
them are attracted to certain clouds based off unique capability
and unique functions associated with those. Some of those may
maybe cost oriented, management oriented, but you're starting to see
(25:11):
some very unique services that are pretty much went to
a single cloud as well. So we made the determination
that we wanted to be one of the few vendors
that could really tackle a multi cloud problem. And we
could have done two things. We've taken our stack and
custom fit it to every single cloud that's out there,
plus build our own tremendous private cloud infrastructure. Or could
(25:35):
we look at at a fabric that could be consistent
across these multiple environments. And this what attracted us to
our early work that we had done with Kubernetes, and
then again we were we were you know, it was
a tremendous ory. Maybe a chef tell the whole story
on open Shift as well, but but that was unlike
anything we had seen. And red Hat both brought that
(25:56):
fabric to the table for us. And then they already
had you know, deep relationships with all the public cloud
vendors itself that you know, we would have taken us
years to develop that. So we felt that this would
give us tremendous acceleration. Use that beautiful foundation, that fabric
and their multi cloud relationships, and then all we had
to do was right on top of that and we
start to fulfill out our We start to fill out
(26:16):
our overall multiploud story very rapidly here yes to to
add towards perceived cetera, which is which is great And
I think this is a truly a great partnership that
we put together between Red and IBM. That the platform
that you know, we've built that that IBM has taken
into account here and then it's going to build out
(26:37):
further an ad additional services on top. UM. The foundation
of that is Linux. And then for the folks who
for all the technology they know, Linus is the foundation
of you know, pretty much every significant platform that's running
out there today, but has been building that for twenty
years UM. And what we decided was to say, well,
how can we now think about while Linux was the
(27:00):
best platform for running applications in traditional data centers, what
would be the right platform for running these applications in
a hybrid line environment. And the lesson that we learned
in building this operating system that's running mission critical applications
really all around the world, UM, and then build the
next platform on it, and that's open Shift UM. And
the journey we've taken, you know, for that is to
(27:22):
really evolve that from initially being you know, a platform
we say, well, it's an a pinated platform for specific
sense of developers to really being one that we can
say is now serving a multitude applications. So whether you're
trying to run reservation systems, whether you're thinking about building
your next gent you know, web application, whether you're thinking about,
(27:44):
you know, building software that you can stand up and
run and serve to other customers in the cloud, you
can now build with this same technology and sticking advantages
some of the concepts that Steve Leader earlier, and there's
notions of you know, containers or Kuberneties, which has contained orchestration,
which has now become industry standards, and so being able
to now have this well called really is the industry
(28:07):
standard platform right now, we're serving over a thousand applications
customers today running these applications that scale along with IBM S.
Ability to be able to now deploy this hybrid multi
cloud platform in front of it's thousands of customers, you know,
I think it's an extremely powerful value proposition that related
in front of customers. Steve and A Chees have mentioned
(28:29):
Linux a few times. Lenox is an operating system, meaning
it's the software that acts as a liaison between programs
and the computer hardware that makes stuff you know actually
happen on computers. And Linux is an open source operating
system with an enormous community of developers. There are numerous
versions of Linux out there, and they're referred to as
(28:51):
distros or distributions. They all share the same basic DNA,
but they have different user interfaces and a few other
unique aspects to each distribution. Computers running Linux make up
about nine of the workload in the public cloud, and
a big reason for that is the open source nature
of Linux. Because the code is open, anyone can look
(29:13):
at it. Anyone can take that code and make their
own version or distribution of Linux. Anyone can look for
ways to improve how it works, or search out vulnerabilities
and patch them. Now that's true with open source software
in general, and it's why open source projects can evolve
rapidly with a strong enough community contributing to those projects.
(29:33):
All right, back to the conversation. The next thing I
want to talk about is something that I think is
almost synonymous with red hat. It's another two word phrase,
that being open source. And you know red hat and
IBM both have done incredible work around open source. I
know that for my listeners. That sometimes comes as a
(29:55):
surprise to hear about ibm s involvement in it. That's
not frequently a name that they would associated with it.
But I've been to IBM think a couple of times.
My eyes have been Yeah, it was definitely But yeah,
let's talk about open source for a bit. Why why
is that so important? Specifically? Why is it going to
(30:16):
be critical in this world where we're looking at this
this cloud infrastructure for various services in different industries. Yes,
so open sources at the beating hard. It's in the
d n A, you know, use whatever way you want
to describe it, you know, for red hat, but has
been since its earliest days, right, it's has been in
(30:36):
two decades. Everything that we do with red hat is open, right,
there's no code that we keep behind. Everything shed out
of the community. Why do we do that. We've believed
in that from the earliest days, right, that the greatest
amount of innovation that will happen will happen out in
the open um. And and that, by the way, it's
proven true. Right. So if you look at the basis
of you know, critical infrastructure, you look at the base
(31:00):
is of you know, what you see on security, emerging
technologies like blog chain. You see, uh, innovation that's been
happening in big data everything is founded on the base
of open source. That's because also large corporations, you know,
whether they be providers technology or consumers technology, have started understanding,
(31:20):
you know, you cannot innovate as well within your own
sort of for virtual walls of an organization versus being
able to unlock a global community of innovation. Right, So
this notion of crowdsource, saying, this notion of collaboration, you
know how it is that you sort of want to
think about it. You know, we've always believed that there's
much more value that you can generate, right when you've
(31:41):
got hundreds of thousands of eyes looking at something, right
versus you know, something that's just a small fraction of that.
So so that's one aspect, right, which is if you
you can call the philosophical belief, you can call it
that you know, are sort of you know, a commitment
that that's that's the way innovation must happen. Went forward,
um another side of that, right, he said, it's a
(32:02):
smart decision for customers, right if you're concerned about lock
in and by the way, which customer isn't What better
way you know, to be able to avoid that or
minimize that then to rely on open source technologies. Right
If your provider, your your vendor isn't delivering the technology
and the way you wanted to the quality or the
(32:23):
price that you wanted, now you have the ability to
go switch out to someone else who's building on that basis.
And so you know, in that way also you know,
we think there's great value that's created for customers. It
also keeps us on its right. It keeps us as
a company always sort of looking to say, how can
we contially deliver value for for the for the price
(32:43):
that that we're charging U customers. And then finally, what
this also does, right is creates you know, what will
call a sort of open standards, right ways for different
organizations to come together to collaborate and start you know, deciding, hey,
this is the best way for to essentially get a commonality.
What often happened in technology, and Steve probably knows this
(33:04):
as well as I do, is that moment different choices
get made right now, enterprises are forced to pick one path,
they pick the wrong path. They're now going down, you know,
a road which will become a dead end. So right,
if you've got you know, a coalescing of companies around,
you know, open source and open standards, then they have
a lot more confidence. Hey, I can build applications, I
(33:25):
can build services on top of that, and of course
that will make sure that you know, I have something
that's vibrant and that's something that has a long life.
I think Steve we called the future. I love those answers.
I mean h I I have often referred to open
source versus having the more closed off approach. If you
have the closed off approach, you can hire the smartest
(33:47):
people you can run into, but you can only fit
so many of the room, right, But an open source
you have access to all the smartest people in all
the rooms. So that's a I fully on board on
the open source train. That's I think that that's where
we see not just rapid innovation, but we see that
(34:09):
rapid response when something hasn't gone right because we all
know that sometimes in software, something there's a vulnerability that
someone didn't know, or maybe someone builds something new that
breaks something old. When you have that community there, they
recognize that so quickly and are able to respond so
much more nimbly than an in house team typically could that.
(34:32):
I've been a big proponent of it, so it's it's
good to see this. I think you're exactly right, and
I think just case in point, I think somebody was
doing some pin testing against the Kubernetes code out there
and a few vulnerabilities were found. They were patched almost
within days. Look at a commercial software vendor. I was
involved in starting up the security division at IBM, and
we used to track with our our X force work
(34:54):
as to how long it took a commercial vendor to
patch some of their code. You're talking years if ever
in some of these cases the speeds unbelievable. Here, well,
this lets me transition the chef to a question for you.
Red hat is known for its platform neutrality, for its independence.
It's been called the Switzerland of i T Switzerland and
our our board discussions all this. It was there from
(35:16):
day one. So with that in mind, what steps are
are you taking over a red hat to to kind
of ensure that in this new era, how do you
make certain that this thing that red hat has been
known for is protected and preserved and grown. Yeah, I'll
answer from my perspective, and then it'd be great to
hear from from Steve because then he can tell you
(35:37):
what steps IBM take, because that's not like, look what
we've got a saying I think a red hat and
it's probably true at IBM as well. Um, you know
red hat is still red hat? What does that mean?
That means that a big part of our value and
I being fully recognizes this right as as it should
have been, you know, going to the process to get
(35:58):
approvals due to make this accosition happened. A big part
of our value is to be you know, as you
describe you in Switzerland or neutral or the commonality. You know,
you use the word of choice that you want. Um,
we firmly believe in that. Right. So whether it's for
us to work with let's say Amazon or Microsoft or
Google or any of the other you know, large providers
(36:21):
or other partners right like HP or Dell, emerging companies.
You know, a big part of what we do right
is to be able to work with these companies, have
commercial relationships with them also collaborative community with them. Right.
And then sometimes you know those two work together really well,
and other times, you know, we have to sort of
make sure that we balance across them right to sort
(36:41):
of keep keep terms consistent and fair. Um, so our
focus really is that we're going down that path and
we're want to continue going on that path. We haven't
really changed any of that. Of course, you know that
with the opportunity with the IBM is to be able
to go and avail our customers with with with you know,
a lot greater reach than than we've had before. But
(37:02):
that independs that we had the broad ecosystem that we've
cultivated of providers of partners around the world. We continue
to work with it and so you know, oftentimes when
the questions that comes back, you know, my response, I
don't want it to sound glibe, is to say business
as usual. Right, We've worked in a certain way. It's
(37:23):
been reasonably successful, we'd like to believe, and we want
to keep continue going on that. All Right, It's been
several weeks since red Hat and IBM came together, and
the question is is the honeymoon over? How have things been,
how's the transition going? What have you learned so far?
I just really started this last year even started well,
(37:45):
it's been a whirlwind. Right, So, so the the good
news that wasn't surprised exactly working looking through it for
a while. UM, I think maybe what the surprice sing
part has been is that there is so much more
in common than we thought there was. What do you
(38:08):
mean by that? It's you know, IBM has invested in
so you've talked about this, you know, the commitment to Linux,
the long relationship that I've been read at has had.
There's a lot of work that's happened from an engineering perspective,
collaboration over the years that we had in place. UM. So,
you know, just this sort of notion of hey, we're
(38:29):
actually working with you know, people that many parts of
the company have worked with in the past, you know,
has been good. UM. I think also the realization on
both sides to respect you know, both parties, if you will,
culture and heritage right. You know, I've been honestly as
a long storied one, but all the work that we've
done with Steve and his team and you know the
(38:52):
large Organs organization general, you know, has been extremely positive.
I think you know, both parties have now done work
them essentially established. You know, we're all called, for lack
of better describe them, you know, offices within sales organization,
the products team to interface with IBM um and so
you know, every person right that doesn't feel like, you know,
(39:13):
I've got to engage with it doesn't voc from IBM
and vice versa. You know, we have some you know,
sort of processes to be able to do that, and
I think that's important, right because you know, we talked
a little bit about red Hat still being red Hat,
you know, the business that we're pursuing, the work that
we turned to, the neutrality that you know we wanted
to keep in place as we go forward and do that,
(39:34):
and so it's important for all that to happen. So
we've seen all of that and I think that's been great.
We've also seen the ability, you know, for us to
reach out to customers to have different conversations. I don't know,
I was getting pulled into conversations with some customers you know,
who we've never previously engaged with, mostly because they said, hey,
you know, we worked very closely with IBM, and the
CIO of the large insurance organization said, you know, I'd
(39:56):
love for you and your teams to come up and
meet with us and talk about you know, what we've done. Well,
that's opening up new things and more and more of
you know, when that happens, right, I think, you know,
there's a great level of comfort within Red Hat to say, yeah,
this was really good. So it's one hand to sort
of think it and the other hand to kind of
see it and say, you know, our culture is in place,
the way we're working is in place, and neutrality in place,
(40:18):
and independence is in place, and and their new and
bigger opportunities. So I think that's good. You know, we
we had this concept better together. You know, let's let's
kind of I think one of the biggest fears is
we turned four hundred thousand people of IBM loose on
on Red Hat. And yeah, I've have probably spent over
half of my career in acquisitions at IBM, from Lotus
(40:40):
to Rational to multiple security companies, etcetera. And I've seen
both the good and I've seen the bad and the
nice thing. I think we worked very closely together during
the closing period as to putting the right type of
gates in place so that you know, the right discussions
could be had at the right time. But there wasn't
this full inundation of activity from from both sides. I mean,
(41:01):
it can be a little overwhelming some sometimes, but again
you know this, uh you know, buying a strong growth
company that had had sixties plus quarters worth of double
digit growth, we were very dependent on them just doing
what they're doing as well. But suggestion, I think, you know,
we've been doing a lot of account planning right now.
I think you see a lot of excitement between the
two teams. A lot of things we could not talk
(41:23):
about pre clothes that we're now able to talk about,
so we can now actually you know, share information that
we have on our customer sets, who has water new opportunities.
And I think the teams are just overly excited as
we kind of look at some of the first key
accounts that we're jointly just looking at to see how
can we serve them better? And and I think we're
getting a lot of excitement back from our client basi
(41:45):
as well. So we're excited. I don't think we're you know,
we're not. We're keeping our eyes open to look for
friction points as we move forward. I think we've got
some good mechanisms in place to address those fairly quick. Uh.
You know, we're doing this podcast from the Red Hat building.
You still see red Hat on top associate the logo
in the front. We're not changing anything as well, so
this whole independence, this Switzerland red hat is still red hat.
(42:07):
You know. We're taking that very serious. And there's a
few x i BMRs on the red Hat side they're like, Wow,
you guys are really taking this serious, and I think
that's reflecting in a lot of comments. I want to
thank IBM and red Hat for having me out to
Raleigh to talk about this partnership and what it means now. Ultimately,
their goal is to create a service that lets other
(42:28):
companies build better apps for end users, whether that's folks
like me and you, or other companies or even just
people within that organization itself. So IBM and red hat
are building out the stuff that makes other people's stuff work,
in other words, and it can be difficult to get
an appreciation for that. I know that I've been guilty
(42:49):
at looking at the surface level of a service or
an app and not really taking into consideration what's required
to you know, actually work. So this gave me a
deeper appreciation of that, and frankly, I'm excited to see
where this goes, because it could mean that the sort
of things that you and I interact with on a
(43:10):
daily basis, whether it's an app program on our desktops
or laptops. Maybe it's Internet of Things related, could be
a service that we don't even realize is connected to
the cloud. All of those can become more robust, more
feature rich, that can work better. We get a fewer vulnerabilities,
(43:30):
fewer hiccups. That's the ideal, uh future that we could see,
and I'm really hoping that that's what we get. And ultimately,
if it works well, we probably won't even think about it.
That's kind of the way things work, and we know
that everything's going well if that happens. So thanks again
to IBM and red Hat. Thank you guys for listening.
(43:53):
I hope you enjoyed this bonus episode of tech Stuff
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff
is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to this special
Bonus sponsored episode of tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland. I'm
an executive producer with How Stuff Works and I Heart
Radio and I love all things tech and back in
July two thousand nineteen, IBM completed it's acquisition of the
(00:28):
company red Hat, famed for its work in open source software.
The company's invited me out to red Hat headquarters, which
does in fact have a big red hat on it,
to talk about why the company has made this move,
how they plan to work together, and ultimately what does
this mean for all of us? And so in this episode,
(00:50):
you're going to hear sections of an interview I did
with IBMS Steve Robinson and red hats a Chesh Badani,
and I'll be popping in and out to give a
bit more content text and explanation. But first I want
to set the stage a bit. Now. We're mainly going
to talk about cloud computing and open source software in
this conversation, and the reason that this is a big
(01:12):
deal is that more companies are putting more of their
operations on the cloud, and there are a lot of
different reasons to do this. One is to make sure
that the services they provide are available whenever and wherever
the end user needs them, whether the end user is
someone else in the company, a different company, or a
consumer like you or me. Another reason is to maximize resources,
(01:36):
and there are tons of other reasons besides those that
companies do this. What about the average user? You know,
I don't run a global company with worldwide service, so
why do I care about all this? Well, for me,
it's about the utility and availability of the apps I
run on all these different devices, whether it's a computer
(01:58):
or a mobile phone, a tablet, whatever it might be.
More of those apps are tapping into lots of different
aspects that a company is involved with. So a bank,
for example, could have an app that allows you to
access your bank account. You can make transfers, you can
pay bills, you can check your reward status on any
credit cards you might have, You might be able to
(02:19):
apply for loans, and more. To the end user, it
might seem like all that stuff just sort of lives
in the brick and mortar building that the bank we
use happens to be located in, But in reality, those
services might be spread across numerous computer systems all over
the place. Some of them might be on premises at
the bank itself, some might be in a privately managed
(02:41):
data center off site. Some might depend upon large cloud
computing services run by big companies. So there's a whole
variety out there now. As an end user, I just
expect that stuff to work. I expect all those services
to be integrated into the app seamlessly, and it's frustrating
when that's not the case, right like when you try
(03:03):
to do something and either there's a long wait time
or it doesn't work the way you expected. But the
cloud computer landscape it's a complicated one for reasons that
we're going to get into in the discussions I had
with Steve in a chef. So making this happen all
the stuff working together isn't as easy as just inserting
a few links between services. So let's get started. I
(03:26):
began with what seems like a simple question but is
actually fairly complicated. So I'm very pleased that I get
to speak to two experts on this subject because about
a decade ago I wrote more than a dozen articles
all about the concept of cloud computing. Back then, cloud computing,
(03:49):
at least for the mainstream, was just creeping into the
public consciousness and there was a lot of confusion about it.
And I think over the years everyone has a better
and standing of what cloud computing is. But the problem
is everyone has a different understanding of what cloud computing is.
So can we talk about the definition of cloud computing
and how that has actually evolved over time? Be happy
(04:13):
to and I think you you again, you hit the
nail on the head with regards to I think it's
one of the most amorphous definitions out there. You ask anybody,
I think they've got a different view. And I think
around a period of time, at least in an IBM's view,
is is that it's one that's continually redefining, and it's
probably in a phase right now where it's being redefined
(04:34):
as well. I think in most cases people originally assumed
an associated cloud with the large public clouds, you know,
the multi tenant hyper scalers and UH And it reminds
me a little bit like the early days of the Internet.
You know, if you if you go back to UH
the Internet, you had extra net, you had internet, you
(04:55):
had public Internet, you had private Internet, and before long
you started to see most of the vendors start to
rally around a small set of standards T C P
I P H, T M L, and before long it
just became the Internet. You know, you would serve up
a U R L and you really didn't care where
the server was that was serving up the content behind it.
(05:16):
It could be in your data center, could be on
go Daddy, could be wherever that uh, it could be
in one country versus another. It just became the Internet.
And I think that the cloud we're kind of ad
that position to. I think the cloud is going to
start to expand to be almost anywhere that I've got
compute and data capabilities. And we've seen this this whole
rally around a certain set of standards really driving that
(05:39):
and driving that at a speed that's just unbelievable. Right now,
I think, you know, the adoption of lenox, I think
the whole history of containers and the maturity of containers,
which are you know, kind of you know, finer grained
virtualization that allows me to to have code and move
it around and pack the middlewhere into it, etcetera. And
then finally kubernet ease that gives me the ability to
(06:01):
orchestrate and manage those containers. Are kind of that becoming
that Lingua franco. You know, I think we all of
the major vendors are now kind of embracing those three standards.
I think there's probably over forty to fifty different distros
of coube today and that's now I think kind of
turning it into cloud. I Can I do cloud in
my data center? Sure, there's a lot of things I
(06:22):
can do. I can run containers, I can run Kubernetes,
I can build a p I S, I can have
always on, I can do a lot of cloud native
concepts right in the data center. Can I do a
dedicated cloud that may be set up and assigned to
a single client or a single customer. Yep. You now
have been able to to do cloud concepts and put
a single customer boundary around it as well. And then
(06:43):
you've got the hyper scale ers that can do that
for a wide range and never know where. You know,
my my my machine, maybe in one data center one day,
in one data center the next day. So I think
all of this is becoming the cloud, and uh, I
think within the next couple of years, cloud will be
anywhere that I'm doing kind of cloud native properties independent
(07:04):
of its its final locality here. And this has kind
of been the real basis of some of the work
you guys have been doing the red house strategy the right. Yeah, yeah,
And you're write about the definition of cloud search changing, right,
So from this notion of cloud computing is when it
just happened on somebody else's computer, right or somewhere else.
(07:26):
And you know, if we go back, right, if you
can ask yourself, look, where were people's expectations of this frame, right?
Were they in the P two P sharing? You know,
if anyone remembers that, right, So there's notion of kind
of you know, music sharing or streaming um or or
even this notion that you had with regard to well
I can get my email and that's being served over
(07:48):
the internet. And then you know, people to equate the
Internet to the cloud. And so I'll sort of taking
people the different sort of you know, aspect of that
from you, Steve, because I think people expectations for cloud
competing we're also computing. We're also sort of shaped around
being able to access software from anywhere they were, right,
So in the past, WHEA was Hey, I'm locked down
(08:09):
to particular desktop or particular laptop or machine write a
physical location. And now you can say, well, I'm free
now right now, I can you know, get my information
wherever and you know, the same data I could get
from a laptop. You know, I can be on the go,
you know, hiking in Peru, and I can access at
the same time too. Having said all that, I think
also the definition of cloud or the sort of expectation
(08:30):
cloud or sort of shifting to new areas right and
to all call out around security and privacy. Increasingly we're finding,
especially red hat, we're seeing customers sort of you know,
talking about you know, inasmuch as a fine value from
being able to take advantage of you know, deploying applications,
running them, thinking avoute, all the new technologies you talked about.
It's also about, you know, is this secure? You know,
(08:54):
is this something you know, if I'm audited that I
can kind of stand behind u, you know, is this
complying with the regular lation and the governance of the
particular region that I'm working with? And then ultimately, right
are we making sure I think maybe you know you've
talked about this before. Stay around gdp R or privacy
or regulations that are put in place to ensure that
when customers and you know, be the individual consumers, are
(09:15):
actual enterprises, we're meeting the requirements that they've put in
place to us as providers. This is a good spot
for me to jump back in here and explain some
basic concepts like containers and kuberneties. You may remember I
did an episode not long ago about virtualization, and the
concept of virtualization is to use software to create a
(09:37):
virtual machine on top of an actual, real physical machine.
And when I say machine, I'm really talking about computers.
And there are lots of different reasons that you would
want to build a virtual computer on top of a
physical computer. You might want to have a virtual machine
dedicated to running a specific application, for example, and you
want it completely separated from any other process running on
(10:00):
the physical hardware itself, and the application might not be
so demanding that would take up all, or maybe even
a significant amount of a physical machine's resources. So if
you did decide I'm just going to buy a server
and that server is just going to run this one app,
even though the app only relies on maybe five percent
(10:21):
of the server's processing power and storage, you would have
a ton of computing power just sitting idle, essentially going
to waste. Virtual machines give you the chance to run
data centers more efficiently with less idle time. On computers,
you could have multiple virtual machines on the same physical device,
and that way you're maximizing the use of that physical
(10:43):
hardware and you're minimizing downtime. This is increased efficiency, better savings.
It just makes more sense. Containers are similar to virtualization
in many ways. A container sits on top of an
operating system on a computer, and containers hold all the
components necessary to run some bit of code in isolation
(11:05):
of everything else. And you can have multiple containers on
the same machine, each in its own protected environment, on
the same operating system, so you don't need a bunch
of virtual machines on the same physical hardware. You could
run containers on virtual machines, but you could also run
containers just on a computer without the virtual machine and
hypervisor layers, so there's no need to allocate resources to
(11:29):
apps dynamically because the containers quote unquote contain everything needed
to run that code. Moreover, it's easy to move those
containers from environment to environment, so a developer builds the
some app and puts it into a few containers. The
different containers are specific parts of what that app does,
(11:51):
and then it's very easy for the developer to move
those containers over to a test environment and from there
to a production environment or deployment to the cloud. You
can think of containers as keeping things efficient and tidy,
and they're called that because it's very much like the
containers you would have in shipping. The whole idea is
that you've standardized this and it's really easy to move
(12:12):
it around to wherever it needs to go. Okay, but
what is Kubernetes. Well, that's a system that's designed to
manage the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It's
not the only one out there. There are other strategies
for doing this, but it's one that has become incredibly
popular over the last few years. So an application might
(12:33):
require the use of several containers. Kubernetes organizes containers for
applications into groups called pods, nodes, and name spaces. That's
going from the smallest to largest. So containers your basic unit.
Then you have pods, the nodes, the name spaces. I'm
not going to get too much into the weeds here,
because we get really kind of bogged down. But think
(12:55):
of this as a way to coordinate all of these
different containers so that the apps work the way they
need to and you can easily poured it over to
whatever environment you need to use. And the use of
containers and orchestration strategies like Kubernetes is making it easier
for developers to build and deploy apps that will work
on any computing environment. All right, now, let's get back
(13:16):
to my discussion with Stephen a chef. So for the
average person, I think most people, if they hear about
cloud computing, they're mostly thinking of public cloud applications. You
think about cloud storage is probably the number one application
that they think of us exactly. And then and then
if they're thinking about the apps that they're running, they
(13:37):
might have a little bit of appreciation about that as well.
But I think a lot of people who aren't in
that world, they hear terms like public cloud and private cloud,
and that already starts to get a little confusing to them.
So could you just for a moment kind of talk
about the difference is what what are those entities and
(14:00):
what would you use public cloud for versus private cloud.
If you're let's say, I don't know a global corporation
that has locations in the EU, for example, Yeah, let
me do that. So and we'll try to break it
down whereby we don't get so caught up in definitions
that we miss the point of where we're trying to
(14:22):
get to, right, which is um Historically, you know, we
always dealt with this right. So we we've talked about,
for example, data centers, and it could be your own
data center that you managed, could be a third party
that sort of managed it on your behalf. You might
deploy some applications on your own, you might have someone
else deploying on your behalf, and then you should go
(14:42):
back and forth across them. Now, if you extend that
out and then you say, well, you know what if
we started having and I'm going to sort of take
this if this sort of analogy to its logical conclusion.
What if we now had a vast pool of compute,
network and storage, right, and then we dev that up
to say, some of it lives physically in a certain area,
(15:04):
managed by a certain party, some live somewhere else managed
by someone else. You can take advantage of economics. Because
it shared, multiple parties can use it and then be
able to say, well, I'll deploy now those applications that
I have based on policies right now, those policies might
be cost they might be based on latency, they could
be based on performance, they might be based on you know,
(15:26):
we talked about regulation, privacy and governance and so on,
right and then in that sense, it doesn't really matter
what we've called it. And this is why I think
between a red hat and IBM and I think we
share this vision. And I'm sure Steve you'd agree with
this right that, you know, the hybrid cloud notion is,
you know, really the abstraction that we can put in
front of resources that can be made widely available to
(15:50):
customers around the world, and then for us to now
think about what productive things can they do on top
of that, What new applications can they build? How can
they integrate both exists stinging around as they have the
new ones they wanted to build out, How can they
create great agility and great innovation in vols? Jumping back
in here again just to clear up a couple more things. So,
why would a company want to keep some stuff on premises?
(16:13):
Some in a private cloud and some on a public cloud. Well,
it has to do with a lot of different stuff,
including security, governance, and cost. All this data has to
ultimately live on physical machines somewhere, and it costs money
to buy and maintain those machines, and they take up
physical space. So there are limiting factors, mostly money in space.
(16:37):
The restrict how many computers are going to have in
your physical location. Now, some stuff you're gonna want to
keep close to you. Maybe you have some trade secrets
that you're protecting. Maybe you have private data on customers
that you don't want leaked out to anybody else. Maybe
there are specific laws in place that state you have
to keep certain information under your control and you alone
(17:02):
are allowed to have access to it. Whatever the motivation.
You may want some of your data and services running
on equipment that your team directly manages, so you keep
all that stuff on premises or on prem We talk
a lot about the EU and this discussion, because the
EU has strict rules about what data can and can't
leave the continent, and in those cases, you have to
(17:24):
make sure your system respects those restrictions. If you're doing
business inside the EU, now, you might hire a third
party to oversee servers running your apps, and that's all
those particular servers are doing, right you. They aren't running
any applications for any other client on those particular servers.
They might all exist in a similar data center, but
(17:46):
the machines you're using are quote unquote yours alone. You're
essentially renting them. Your stuff is completely separated from anyone else's.
Or maybe you've got some services you want to move
to big public cloud providers, and those solutions might cost
much less than running the machinery yourself, and the services
guarantee redundancy. They have multiple machines holding onto your data,
(18:10):
so if one set of servers go down, other servers
with the same information can take their place, and this
takes a lot of the management of that information off
of your plate. So there are a lot of big
companies that are using multiple cloud and on premises solutions
to host their services and their data, and as you
(18:31):
can imagine, that gets really complicated. Just knowing where stuff
is is complicated, getting stuff to work together with each
other on these different platforms is even more so, And
so you have to figure out how to make all
this data living in these different environments to play nice together,
and that's where the concept of the hybrid cloud comes
(18:52):
into play. Let's get back to Stephen Asches. So this
kind of gets us into this concept of the hybrid
cloud strategy. Can you talk a bit more about what
that is and how that's going to benefit companies? That's
sactly right. So the part that we sometimes skip over,
and I think this is kind of you know, where
(19:12):
hybrid really really shines is far that you know, Steve
started talking about, right, And I think Steve, you're describing
this as sort of the two phases, right, you know
about you know, we're about of our way into the journey.
We've got any percent to go? Why is that really important?
It's almost like an iceberg, right, We've got so much
more to do, and yet we only see the tip
(19:32):
of what we've done now. If you don't think of
the world, you know, in a hybrid fashion, when as
a hybrid you know, I'm sort of gonna call out
your right at uses a terminology call four footprints, right,
running something in a physical environment, running something in the
virtual environment virch your life environment, running it in a
private cloud, running in a public cloud. If you don't
have something that stands the four footprints? What are you
(19:53):
doing right? You are potentially choosing to disregard that any
percent that you haven't moved over where you can make
it most productive. Why is it important? Most enterprises of
any size have large investments in applications, services, processes, people's
(20:15):
skills that they've made over decades. What happens to all
of those? Right? And if we aren't able to unlock
all of that, right, how can we truly deliver innovation
and the scale that we want while leaving all that
moroon on the side. Right, So the opportunity to able
to say, look, I am going to be able to
bridge you know, existing investments that I've made and I
(20:36):
obviously worked with the clients you know for decades around this,
but at the same time expose them to what we
call you know, cloud native, you know ways of working. Right.
There's notion of micro services. Right. Let me not build
out massive applications. Let me build them in smaller and
more actual fashion. Steeve talked about you and having a
PI is available right to make it just easier for
(20:56):
different applications to to interact each other and be able
to share information data across them, but to be able
to realize all that promise, and we've got to be
able to provide a hybrid cloud platform that spans both
the new environments that we're all trying to go towards
as well as the existing applications and environment that we
have running today. And I think it's an interesting case
(21:17):
in point. Right when we announced the acquisition intent of
red Hat, I had a ce IO executive VP of
a large fast food restaurant chain called me up and
he says, okay, Steve, give me the scoop. Why did
you do it? And I had to tell him. I said, well,
let's just take a look at what we're doing with you.
And at that point in time, um, we were putting
(21:37):
a server in every single one of those restaurants, were
putting a private cloud in every single one of his restaurants,
and what we were attaching that we were attaching our
Watson services to do the ordering so that you just
speak in but automatically handle it, etcetera, saving the labor
on that, etcetera. We had also outfitted every one of
his stores with IoT cameras, so all of a sudden,
you see the bustload of high school students start to
(21:59):
come in. He felt that if he had just a
minute lead time, he could reposition his employees and be
ready to take that that that on and manage the
traffic of that. You know, those two applications resided, and
we're critical just to that store. They didn't benefit from
bouncing or sending any data back up to their data
center or to the public cloud. They all the processing
(22:21):
etcetera needed to happen right there in the store. I said,
that's your private cloud. I said, Now that same store
also has to order from you, do your supply chain,
do your analytics, do your HR, get your paychecks, etcetera.
All that and you know, so that's coming back into
your worldwide headquarters, and that's probably running in conjunction with
historical applications that you have, and probably some dedicated cloud
(22:43):
capabilities is there. And I said, and we're also working
with your marketing department on kind of running your annual
sweep stakes game and doing your customer loyalty etcetera. You
want to reach as many as people across as many
channels as possible. That's your public cloud, and that's what
you're doing as well. I said. I said, now imagine
in architecture, so your programmers could build that once and
(23:04):
they could then deploy that in all three of those
environments seamlessly, so you didn't have to know ahead of
time where that application was going to run. You know,
let's just imagine that all of a sudden, speeds came up.
You know, all of a sudden, we're doing five G
I can I can move those private cloud applications back
to a center location do that more efficiently. A single
architecture gives the ability to write at once, run it
(23:25):
anywhere that I want to. We're starting to future proof
those applications as well. So a hybrid cloud strategy is
one that has a layer that facilitates operations across different
computer environments. In an ideal version of the hybrid cloud strategy,
it wouldn't matter where your data and services lived. The
(23:46):
hybrid cloud infrastructure would create the connections necessary for services
to run without any hiccups and give developers opportunities to
build new applications without having to worry about some services
or information being off limits. It's just sort of meant
to smooth everything out and pave the way for more interoperability.
(24:06):
Let's get back to Stephen the chef, So can you
talk to me a little bit about IBM S multi
cloud platform and what that means to businesses. I think
we early on decided that, you know, no firm or
no enterprise is going to be wed to a single cloud,
much much to the chagrine of the public cloud vendors.
(24:27):
I think, uh, you know, we're starting to hear from
some of the analysts calling it a mono cloud, you know,
where they're trying to you know, build either outposts or
build you know some some some code that replicates their
public cloud down into the data center. Uh so it's
more easy to go up to their public cloud. But
we did a lot of work. We've done a lot
of interviews with enterprise customers, and you know, they are
(24:50):
not going to be wed to a single vendor. You know,
we we learned back from the our our prior days
of working with them over the past decades. Nobody likes
lock in. Everybody wants choice, and I think many of
them are attracted to certain clouds based off unique capability
and unique functions associated with those. Some of those may
maybe cost oriented, management oriented, but you're starting to see
(25:11):
some very unique services that are pretty much went to
a single cloud as well. So we made the determination
that we wanted to be one of the few vendors
that could really tackle a multi cloud problem. And we
could have done two things. We've taken our stack and
custom fit it to every single cloud that's out there,
plus build our own tremendous private cloud infrastructure. Or could
(25:35):
we look at at a fabric that could be consistent
across these multiple environments. And this what attracted us to
our early work that we had done with Kubernetes, and
then again we were we were you know, it was
a tremendous ory. Maybe a chef tell the whole story
on open Shift as well, but but that was unlike
anything we had seen. And red Hat both brought that
(25:56):
fabric to the table for us. And then they already
had you know, deep relationships with all the public cloud
vendors itself that you know, we would have taken us
years to develop that. So we felt that this would
give us tremendous acceleration. Use that beautiful foundation, that fabric
and their multi cloud relationships, and then all we had
to do was right on top of that and we
start to fulfill out our We start to fill out
(26:16):
our overall multiploud story very rapidly here yes to to
add towards perceived cetera, which is which is great And
I think this is a truly a great partnership that
we put together between Red and IBM. That the platform
that you know, we've built that that IBM has taken
into account here and then it's going to build out
(26:37):
further an ad additional services on top. UM. The foundation
of that is Linux. And then for the folks who
for all the technology they know, Linus is the foundation
of you know, pretty much every significant platform that's running
out there today, but has been building that for twenty
years UM. And what we decided was to say, well,
how can we now think about while Linux was the
(27:00):
best platform for running applications in traditional data centers, what
would be the right platform for running these applications in
a hybrid line environment. And the lesson that we learned
in building this operating system that's running mission critical applications
really all around the world, UM, and then build the
next platform on it, and that's open Shift UM. And
the journey we've taken, you know, for that is to
(27:22):
really evolve that from initially being you know, a platform
we say, well, it's an a pinated platform for specific
sense of developers to really being one that we can
say is now serving a multitude applications. So whether you're
trying to run reservation systems, whether you're thinking about building
your next gent you know, web application, whether you're thinking about,
(27:44):
you know, building software that you can stand up and
run and serve to other customers in the cloud, you
can now build with this same technology and sticking advantages
some of the concepts that Steve Leader earlier, and there's
notions of you know, containers or Kuberneties, which has contained orchestration,
which has now become industry standards, and so being able
to now have this well called really is the industry
(28:07):
standard platform right now, we're serving over a thousand applications
customers today running these applications that scale along with IBM S.
Ability to be able to now deploy this hybrid multi
cloud platform in front of it's thousands of customers, you know,
I think it's an extremely powerful value proposition that related
in front of customers. Steve and A Chees have mentioned
(28:29):
Linux a few times. Lenox is an operating system, meaning
it's the software that acts as a liaison between programs
and the computer hardware that makes stuff you know actually
happen on computers. And Linux is an open source operating
system with an enormous community of developers. There are numerous
versions of Linux out there, and they're referred to as
(28:51):
distros or distributions. They all share the same basic DNA,
but they have different user interfaces and a few other
unique aspects to each distribution. Computers running Linux make up
about nine of the workload in the public cloud, and
a big reason for that is the open source nature
of Linux. Because the code is open, anyone can look
(29:13):
at it. Anyone can take that code and make their
own version or distribution of Linux. Anyone can look for
ways to improve how it works, or search out vulnerabilities
and patch them. Now that's true with open source software
in general, and it's why open source projects can evolve
rapidly with a strong enough community contributing to those projects.
(29:33):
All right, back to the conversation. The next thing I
want to talk about is something that I think is
almost synonymous with red hat. It's another two word phrase,
that being open source. And you know red hat and
IBM both have done incredible work around open source. I
know that for my listeners. That sometimes comes as a
(29:55):
surprise to hear about ibm s involvement in it. That's
not frequently a name that they would associated with it.
But I've been to IBM think a couple of times.
My eyes have been Yeah, it was definitely But yeah,
let's talk about open source for a bit. Why why
is that so important? Specifically? Why is it going to
(30:16):
be critical in this world where we're looking at this
this cloud infrastructure for various services in different industries. Yes,
so open sources at the beating hard. It's in the
d n A, you know, use whatever way you want
to describe it, you know, for red hat, but has
been since its earliest days, right, it's has been in
(30:36):
two decades. Everything that we do with red hat is open, right,
there's no code that we keep behind. Everything shed out
of the community. Why do we do that. We've believed
in that from the earliest days, right, that the greatest
amount of innovation that will happen will happen out in
the open um. And and that, by the way, it's
proven true. Right. So if you look at the basis
of you know, critical infrastructure, you look at the base
(31:00):
is of you know, what you see on security, emerging
technologies like blog chain. You see, uh, innovation that's been
happening in big data everything is founded on the base
of open source. That's because also large corporations, you know,
whether they be providers technology or consumers technology, have started understanding,
(31:20):
you know, you cannot innovate as well within your own
sort of for virtual walls of an organization versus being
able to unlock a global community of innovation. Right, So
this notion of crowdsource, saying, this notion of collaboration, you
know how it is that you sort of want to
think about it. You know, we've always believed that there's
much more value that you can generate, right when you've
(31:41):
got hundreds of thousands of eyes looking at something, right
versus you know, something that's just a small fraction of that.
So so that's one aspect, right, which is if you
you can call the philosophical belief, you can call it
that you know, are sort of you know, a commitment
that that's that's the way innovation must happen. Went forward,
um another side of that, right, he said, it's a
(32:02):
smart decision for customers, right if you're concerned about lock
in and by the way, which customer isn't What better
way you know, to be able to avoid that or
minimize that then to rely on open source technologies. Right
If your provider, your your vendor isn't delivering the technology
and the way you wanted to the quality or the
(32:23):
price that you wanted, now you have the ability to
go switch out to someone else who's building on that basis.
And so you know, in that way also you know,
we think there's great value that's created for customers. It
also keeps us on its right. It keeps us as
a company always sort of looking to say, how can
we contially deliver value for for the for the price
(32:43):
that that we're charging U customers. And then finally, what
this also does, right is creates you know, what will
call a sort of open standards, right ways for different
organizations to come together to collaborate and start you know, deciding, hey,
this is the best way for to essentially get a commonality.
What often happened in technology, and Steve probably knows this
(33:04):
as well as I do, is that moment different choices
get made right now, enterprises are forced to pick one path,
they pick the wrong path. They're now going down, you know,
a road which will become a dead end. So right,
if you've got you know, a coalescing of companies around,
you know, open source and open standards, then they have
a lot more confidence. Hey, I can build applications, I
(33:25):
can build services on top of that, and of course
that will make sure that you know, I have something
that's vibrant and that's something that has a long life.
I think Steve we called the future. I love those answers.
I mean h I I have often referred to open
source versus having the more closed off approach. If you
have the closed off approach, you can hire the smartest
(33:47):
people you can run into, but you can only fit
so many of the room, right, But an open source
you have access to all the smartest people in all
the rooms. So that's a I fully on board on
the open source train. That's I think that that's where
we see not just rapid innovation, but we see that
(34:09):
rapid response when something hasn't gone right because we all
know that sometimes in software, something there's a vulnerability that
someone didn't know, or maybe someone builds something new that
breaks something old. When you have that community there, they
recognize that so quickly and are able to respond so
much more nimbly than an in house team typically could that.
(34:32):
I've been a big proponent of it, so it's it's
good to see this. I think you're exactly right, and
I think just case in point, I think somebody was
doing some pin testing against the Kubernetes code out there
and a few vulnerabilities were found. They were patched almost
within days. Look at a commercial software vendor. I was
involved in starting up the security division at IBM, and
we used to track with our our X force work
(34:54):
as to how long it took a commercial vendor to
patch some of their code. You're talking years if ever
in some of these cases the speeds unbelievable. Here, well,
this lets me transition the chef to a question for you.
Red hat is known for its platform neutrality, for its independence.
It's been called the Switzerland of i T Switzerland and
our our board discussions all this. It was there from
(35:16):
day one. So with that in mind, what steps are
are you taking over a red hat to to kind
of ensure that in this new era, how do you
make certain that this thing that red hat has been
known for is protected and preserved and grown. Yeah, I'll
answer from my perspective, and then it'd be great to
hear from from Steve because then he can tell you
(35:37):
what steps IBM take, because that's not like, look what
we've got a saying I think a red hat and
it's probably true at IBM as well. Um, you know
red hat is still red hat? What does that mean?
That means that a big part of our value and
I being fully recognizes this right as as it should
have been, you know, going to the process to get
(35:58):
approvals due to make this accosition happened. A big part
of our value is to be you know, as you
describe you in Switzerland or neutral or the commonality. You know,
you use the word of choice that you want. Um,
we firmly believe in that. Right. So whether it's for
us to work with let's say Amazon or Microsoft or
Google or any of the other you know, large providers
(36:21):
or other partners right like HP or Dell, emerging companies.
You know, a big part of what we do right
is to be able to work with these companies, have
commercial relationships with them also collaborative community with them. Right.
And then sometimes you know those two work together really well,
and other times, you know, we have to sort of
make sure that we balance across them right to sort
(36:41):
of keep keep terms consistent and fair. Um, so our
focus really is that we're going down that path and
we're want to continue going on that path. We haven't
really changed any of that. Of course, you know that
with the opportunity with the IBM is to be able
to go and avail our customers with with with you know,
a lot greater reach than than we've had before. But
(37:02):
that independs that we had the broad ecosystem that we've
cultivated of providers of partners around the world. We continue
to work with it and so you know, oftentimes when
the questions that comes back, you know, my response, I
don't want it to sound glibe, is to say business
as usual. Right, We've worked in a certain way. It's
(37:23):
been reasonably successful, we'd like to believe, and we want
to keep continue going on that. All Right, It's been
several weeks since red Hat and IBM came together, and
the question is is the honeymoon over? How have things been,
how's the transition going? What have you learned so far?
I just really started this last year even started well,
(37:45):
it's been a whirlwind. Right, So, so the the good
news that wasn't surprised exactly working looking through it for
a while. UM, I think maybe what the surprice sing
part has been is that there is so much more
in common than we thought there was. What do you
(38:08):
mean by that? It's you know, IBM has invested in
so you've talked about this, you know, the commitment to Linux,
the long relationship that I've been read at has had.
There's a lot of work that's happened from an engineering perspective,
collaboration over the years that we had in place. UM. So,
you know, just this sort of notion of hey, we're
(38:29):
actually working with you know, people that many parts of
the company have worked with in the past, you know,
has been good. UM. I think also the realization on
both sides to respect you know, both parties, if you will,
culture and heritage right. You know, I've been honestly as
a long storied one, but all the work that we've
done with Steve and his team and you know the
(38:52):
large Organs organization general, you know, has been extremely positive.
I think you know, both parties have now done work
them essentially established. You know, we're all called, for lack
of better describe them, you know, offices within sales organization,
the products team to interface with IBM um and so
you know, every person right that doesn't feel like, you know,
(39:13):
I've got to engage with it doesn't voc from IBM
and vice versa. You know, we have some you know,
sort of processes to be able to do that, and
I think that's important, right because you know, we talked
a little bit about red Hat still being red Hat,
you know, the business that we're pursuing, the work that
we turned to, the neutrality that you know we wanted
to keep in place as we go forward and do that,
(39:34):
and so it's important for all that to happen. So
we've seen all of that and I think that's been great.
We've also seen the ability, you know, for us to
reach out to customers to have different conversations. I don't know,
I was getting pulled into conversations with some customers you know,
who we've never previously engaged with, mostly because they said, hey,
you know, we worked very closely with IBM, and the
CIO of the large insurance organization said, you know, I'd
(39:56):
love for you and your teams to come up and
meet with us and talk about you know, what we've done. Well,
that's opening up new things and more and more of
you know, when that happens, right, I think, you know,
there's a great level of comfort within Red Hat to say, yeah,
this was really good. So it's one hand to sort
of think it and the other hand to kind of
see it and say, you know, our culture is in place,
the way we're working is in place, and neutrality in place,
(40:18):
and independence is in place, and and their new and
bigger opportunities. So I think that's good. You know, we
we had this concept better together. You know, let's let's
kind of I think one of the biggest fears is
we turned four hundred thousand people of IBM loose on
on Red Hat. And yeah, I've have probably spent over
half of my career in acquisitions at IBM, from Lotus
(40:40):
to Rational to multiple security companies, etcetera. And I've seen
both the good and I've seen the bad and the
nice thing. I think we worked very closely together during
the closing period as to putting the right type of
gates in place so that you know, the right discussions
could be had at the right time. But there wasn't
this full inundation of activity from from both sides. I mean,
(41:01):
it can be a little overwhelming some sometimes, but again
you know this, uh you know, buying a strong growth
company that had had sixties plus quarters worth of double
digit growth, we were very dependent on them just doing
what they're doing as well. But suggestion, I think, you know,
we've been doing a lot of account planning right now.
I think you see a lot of excitement between the
two teams. A lot of things we could not talk
(41:23):
about pre clothes that we're now able to talk about,
so we can now actually you know, share information that
we have on our customer sets, who has water new opportunities.
And I think the teams are just overly excited as
we kind of look at some of the first key
accounts that we're jointly just looking at to see how
can we serve them better? And and I think we're
getting a lot of excitement back from our client basi
(41:45):
as well. So we're excited. I don't think we're you know,
we're not. We're keeping our eyes open to look for
friction points as we move forward. I think we've got
some good mechanisms in place to address those fairly quick. Uh.
You know, we're doing this podcast from the Red Hat building.
You still see red Hat on top associate the logo
in the front. We're not changing anything as well, so
this whole independence, this Switzerland red hat is still red hat.
(42:07):
You know. We're taking that very serious. And there's a
few x i BMRs on the red Hat side they're like, Wow,
you guys are really taking this serious, and I think
that's reflecting in a lot of comments. I want to
thank IBM and red Hat for having me out to
Raleigh to talk about this partnership and what it means now. Ultimately,
their goal is to create a service that lets other
(42:28):
companies build better apps for end users, whether that's folks
like me and you, or other companies or even just
people within that organization itself. So IBM and red hat
are building out the stuff that makes other people's stuff work,
in other words, and it can be difficult to get
an appreciation for that. I know that I've been guilty
(42:49):
at looking at the surface level of a service or
an app and not really taking into consideration what's required
to you know, actually work. So this gave me a
deeper appreciation of that, and frankly, I'm excited to see
where this goes, because it could mean that the sort
of things that you and I interact with on a
(43:10):
daily basis, whether it's an app program on our desktops
or laptops. Maybe it's Internet of Things related, could be
a service that we don't even realize is connected to
the cloud. All of those can become more robust, more
feature rich, that can work better. We get a fewer vulnerabilities,
(43:30):
fewer hiccups. That's the ideal, uh future that we could see,
and I'm really hoping that that's what we get. And ultimately,
if it works well, we probably won't even think about it.
That's kind of the way things work, and we know
that everything's going well if that happens. So thanks again
to IBM and red Hat. Thank you guys for listening.
(43:53):
I hope you enjoyed this bonus episode of tech Stuff
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff
is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
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TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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