SUSECON 2019 Wednesday Keynote Michael Miller and Thomas Di Giacomo

Yeah, inside the impact links. A few years ago, we used to have one job, whether we were part of the infrastructure team as a storage expert in charge of backup. It was well-defined; we were not supposed to touch the network and just focus on storage as storage experts. Playing with servers and inserting applications and OS was clearly defined, a bit siloed. It's still a little bit the case today, but things are changing, and we will see a lot more combination and mix of different skills and expertise coming together in a single role moving forward. All those different facets in how IT is changing make it more interesting for people in the IT industry, but it also creates new demands and challenges for vendors like SUSE to provide the technologies they need.

Operations have changed a lot as well. In the past, with virtualization, you were in charge of cells and switches. With entire virtualized environments, the scope of your role changed because you had to manage all of that. Now, it's even more the case with containers, and your business is expecting you to treat your private data center as a cloud, providing self-service features to other parts of the organization, sometimes third parties. You need to plan for capacity, manage budgets, and sometimes bill as well. It's creating a lot of new challenges.

At SUSECON, we are soon releasing to the cloud, the OpenStack cloud version 9, which brings the code base of the HP OpenStack and SUSE OpenStack together, including the latest OpenStack upstream release called Rocky, with things for bare metal. We've improved the lifecycle manager to make life easy for day zero, day one, day 2000. Also, we have the SUSE Container as a Service Platform, based on Kubernetes, a certified distribution. We recently became a certified Kubernetes service provider. Additionally, it's not only about private cloud; you have workloads and data in public clouds. As IT experts, you're supposed to manage all of that with different clouds, visibility, and a hybrid cloud operations scenario is becoming common.

We have the DevZone, a dev track with a lot of things on top of Linux and with containers. Check it out; it's great. As a French guy, DevZone sounds a bit like Death Zone, which is good for developers—if you lose a couple on the way, that's not right. So I went off script a little.

Yeah, anything? Let me keep going. Containers are good for developers, but that's not enough. If you're a developer, you just want to focus on your code, not deal with container infrastructure. Today, the life of developers can be easy with new technologies like SUSE Cloud Application Platform based on Cloud Foundry, releasing version 1.4. It comes with a great management platform for IT operators to see the status of Kubernetes together with Cloud Foundry applications, and developers don't have to deal with infrastructure—they just push their code and it runs magically.

I find this point exciting. A year ago at SUSECON, we talked about the convergence of Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry with microservices. Our vision was to bring those two things together for the power of both in a unified way. We've done two main things: we containerized Cloud Foundry and deploy Cloud Foundry services on top of any Kubernetes. If you're running workloads on Azure, AWS, or Google, you can use Kubernetes services and add Cloud Foundry for the developer experience. We also removed the legacy container scheduler from Cloud Foundry and integrated Kubernetes natively, with partners like IBM. Now, we've talked about operations and developers; we can't forget the business people. We should focus on business outcomes—creating differentiation, reducing cost, new markets, features, being faster to market. They shouldn't care about technology; our role is to hide it and show them what they can do. If they know about technology, it usually means something didn't go well.

We cannot cover the entire history of computing, but I'll take a few steps back. Before we jump in, I need to do a little education on a non-technical topic. In my role at SUSE, I travel and meet customers, partners, and communities worldwide. I've learned that in some places, pronouncing SUSE is not easy. At SUSE, we are customer-obsessed and take feedback seriously, so we decided to clarify it once and for all. Let's play a video about how to pronounce SUSE. After the video, I hope it helps, and I want you to say SUSE properly. Now, staying with kids, when SUSE started in 1992, this is how we played video games: alone, except with friends or siblings. All the power and storage came from our own private gaming data center, similar to enterprise IT at the time with on-premise hosting. Then, technology and commercial improvements happened in centralized computing and networking, leading to lower latency and higher throughput. Online gaming took off in the late 90s and early 2000s with massive multiplayer games like World of Warcraft. This breakthrough in broadband and centralized computing, with new pricing models, made public clouds possible for enterprise IT. Unlike players sharing, companies use public clouds to offload IT infrastructure management, reduce capex, and shift to usage-based opex. This should be game over for private compute and storage, but online gaming didn't remove offline gaming because they serve different use cases—solo play and online multiplayer. Similarly, public clouds don't replace specific needs for localized compute and storage; they are complementary. Edge computing is emerging, and hyper scalers propose cloud services on-premise. You benefit from using many different public clouds, like gamers use PlayStation, PC, and Xbox. Enterprise IT should expect data and workload portability across multiple clouds, depending on applications, data, teams, skills, processes, culture, business, and regulations. Compute, storage, and networking will run best on a combination of clouds, and proximity to data sources varies. This increases needs for security, compliance, low latency, and high-performance computing on the edge. Centralizing IT in public clouds avoids single supplier dependency and benefits from best-of-breed and interoperability. Thus, a hybrid and multi-cloud approach is essential. While infrastructure strategy is key, applications and data are more visible. Application delivery modernized with DevOps, CI/CD, progressive delivery, microservices, and containers, enabling cloud-native focus on business outcomes with agility, flexibility, and scalability. Container portability facilitates hybrid and multi-cloud strategy. Now, a topic we cannot avoid is machine learning and AI. AI has been used in games for decades to define virtual environments and non-playable characters. Humans compete against AI, but we still have an edge in some cases. Machines learn from data sets, but humans learn through role models and more senses and feelings. AI is smart but not natural; it lacks feelings and survival instincts. AI and machine learning provide benefits for business today, with more to come. They facilitate automation, improve systems, enable quicker simulation and research, and help understand user behavior. These capabilities are possible due to innovations in high-performance computing, specific software and hardware, coupled with hybrid and multi-cloud management, based on open source technologies. A great example is Blade, a French customer with a cloud-native game streaming solution called Shadow, using cloud power for game compute and storage, and network power to bring games to any device, with an edge gaming device. This shows how to leverage current infrastructure and application technology. Looking at the shift to hybrid and multi-cloud, we the IT community—ops, DevOps, developers—are the game players. We understand the game and will be critical for pushing engagement to the next dimension, as heard from James Tatum. The role of IT is evolving to a more exciting game, moving from plumbing and maintenance to creative and strategic elements, working with trusted partners to optimize business impact. Our role is now about tomorrow; we are leaders defining innovations to differentiate our organizations and make them smarter.