GS-2: Keynote 2: Thomas Di Giacomo: Engineering and Innovation Keynote

Hi everyone, welcome to SUSECON Digital 2020. My name is Lisa Showell, Vice President of Transformation. Thank you so much for joining us today for the Engineering and Innovation keynotes. We live in challenging times both at home and at work. Many of you have to deal with loved ones being affected by COVID-19. For businesses, these are tough and unpredictable economic conditions. Because of that, we knew it's more important than ever that we bring you SUSECON. This session and all the other content from SUSECON Digital 2020 is available on demand and at no cost to support you as you balance these priorities. As tough as things are, often out of crisis comes innovation. We at SUSE are here to help you innovate through and beyond COVID-19. In this session, we'll pick up on some of the themes and priorities Melissa identified in our keynotes, telling the story of what comes next for SUSE and the strategic direction we're taking from an engineering and innovation point of view. I'm delighted to introduce Thomas Giacomo, our President of Engineering and Innovation, and Daniel Nelson, VP for Product Management.

Thanks, guys. Basically said thanks, Lisa. Thomas, maybe we could kick off with a few words about how you think about simplify, modernize, and accelerate, the themes we heard from Melissa's talk about. Sure. And I'm really excited to share the great news of innovation we've been working on, from AI and ML solutions for data scientists and IT ops, to embedded Linux for automotive and edge, as well as significant improvements to optimize, automate, and orchestrate multi-cloud management of data, applications, and infrastructure. As you would have hoped, Melissa Suzhou is deeply committed to providing outcomes to our customers that support our ultimate business goals, helping them simplify, modernize, and accelerate their business. And this is exactly how we approach our engineering and innovation focus, bringing the best of open-source technologies and contributing to them, while it has the biggest impact for you. SUSE packages and supports such solutions, allowing the customers to focus on their own business priorities. Simplify, modernize, and accelerate are now top of mind; they have a profound meaning for customers. In the effort process, we'll explore some of the problems associated with each of these areas and the way that SUSE will solve them now and in the future. The team at SUSE is focused on bringing the vision that you have helped build to life, make it real for you as you grapple with an ever more complex set of business transformation and IT challenges. So today, we'll be taking a deeper dive from a more technical standpoint into our solutions and how customers optimize their environments, and in doing so, how we help them to simplify, modernize, and accelerate. But before we look at that from an engineering innovation and solution point of view, let's first of all spend a moment looking through a customer lens at some of the complex problems that have served the real good works that we have done by simplifying, modernizing, and accelerating. Let's roll the video.

It's been said that there are no traffic jams along the extra mile. And at SUSE, we're proud to say that we've been enjoying the open road for some time with 25 plus years of Linux experience. It's no wonder why two-thirds of SUSE customers give our engineers a perfect score. While perfect scores can help us perfect our system, our real goal is much larger. Welcome to Knorr-Bremse, the global market leader in driver assist and automated braking systems for road and rail transportation. Knorr-Bremse said their vision is to be the global driving force behind innovative and sustainable system solutions to make mobility and freight transportation safer, more reliable, and more efficient. Excellence is the standard at Knorr-Bremse, and since partnering with SUSE, they've been able to do just that, maintaining an ever-evolving level of excellence. Responsible for safer vehicles and trains, which leads to less accidents on the roads of life. This is Orchard Park, New York. The overall crime rate in Orchard Park is 67 percent lower than the national average and has been deemed safer than 70 percent of the cities in the United States. This is largely due to the critical surveillance tools that help keep the Orchard Park Police Department officers and its citizens safe. And thanks to SUSE, they're now able to access surveillance footage from their enterprise storage 24/7, making safety simply a click away. China UnionPay, the world's largest credit card payment provider. But credit cards aren't all they provide. China UnionPay also has two outstanding programs. UnionPay International works with a charity foundation to carry out educational aid activities like donating books to schools. A branch of UnionPay International has been carrying out assisted teaching activities in art classes for children with autism for the last five years. The SUSE-powered cloud platform offers China UnionPay the security it needs to run the applications to keep these outstanding programs up to date. The American Association for Cancer Research or AACR is currently developing safe and effective methods to prevent, detect, diagnose, treat, and ultimately cure many diseases we call cancer. With SUSE, they're able to save more money on their applications per year than ever before. With the money saved, they're able to focus on research to combat cancer. Money saved today equals lives saved tomorrow. As you can see, SUSE is about changing lives for the better and making the world a better place. Only those who go the extra mile can find out how far they can really go.

So, let's talk about what simplify means to SUSE, and let's start with an infrastructure perspective. It's super interesting as a topic because, you know, Thomas and Lisa, you guys been working in this industry for a long time just like I have. You know, it seems like everybody's always focused upon the next capability, the new feature, kind of what's coming, what's new. And what's interesting is, like, over time, what you see is like kind of an avalanche or this wave of capability, and it comes out a lot. And so over time, especially for some of our existing infrastructure or existing technologies, it becomes not about what we can do, but how we go about doing that, and can we do that in a simpler way. And what simplify really means is easier, right? I mean, like, that's what it means, either like I can say I don't need a rocket scientist to do this stuff anymore, I can give this to more kind of generalized staff, or like instead of it taking an hour, I want to get it done in a couple of minutes. That's really what we talk about within this, and it's one of those things that underlines, you know, how organizations scale, how they're able to bring technologies into the mainstream to make it available to everybody. And that's really, really important. It's a critical problem that our customers are struggling with. You know, we will talk a lot about, and we have talked a lot about things like containers and AI and ML, but it's just as important to understand, like, how do developers get basic functionality? How do they get an image? How do they get services? And those things are really important to them. How do they do it in an efficient manner? From an open-source perspective, this is a really kind of interesting and critical conversation because communities are great at innovation. Communities are great at like, 'Oh, check out this new idea that I had or this other person had,' and like, let's go do it. And that's the stuff everybody wants to work on, and that's what's wonderful about open source. Our part now becomes down to, well, how do I make that simple? Okay, great, you can do this wonderful thing, but there's really four people in the world that can make that work. You know, how useful is that technology? And so when we talk about simplification, that's what we talk about. We talk about consumption, we talk about scalability, we talk about making it available to our customers and for their end customers to actually get benefit about it, right, as they kind of move forward. And because that's not inherently addressed by the community, so that's something that we at SUSE really want to focus on and really want to kind of make available, and that's one of the benefits that you get from our expertise and what we bring to the table, not just what we contribute to open source, which is a lot, not just how many developers we have working on upstream, but all the kinds of things we're doing to make it safe, to make it simple, to make it available to our core constituencies, our customers, and then their end customers. That's what simplify means to us.

Thanks, Daniel. Do you think you could elaborate a little on some of these specifics of all we're actually doing in these areas?

Sure, sure. So, I'll talk about in three specific areas. One is around what we're doing with our existing investments, or what you as blue chip customers are doing with your existing investments. You know, every time a new technology comes along, it's not like we throw out everything that we've worked on for the last two decades. You know, all the benefits and sins of the past kind of move with us as we go through the stream of time. So we've got to figure out how to simplify that stuff. We've also got to simplify how the new stuff is being used, like how do we make that accessible, how do we make that usable. And then we also need to simplify how do we bring these things together because neither of these two work in silos; they're all part and parcel to the whole thing. So I'll give you some examples. So we talked about simplifying existing investments. Let's talk about one example what SUSE has done. So we'll talk about specifically enabling what are called very large instances on Azure for SAP. And so SAPs are obviously mission-critical to so many different companies. Wanting to simplify how that's used, how it's consumed, how it can be brought to market was a partnership with Azure where they created some of the largest instances in the world in the public cloud, specifically to run SAP. What we did at SUSE is we enabled our SAP technology to run on that seamlessly, so customers could very easily move from their existing big implementations of SAP onto the public cloud, making it easier, making it simpler for everybody to consume. So this is kind of one example what I mean by simplifying the existing. Another really good one is the technology that is now in the community, but it was invented by SUSE and contributed back, like live patching. Everybody has to patch, whether it's for security reasons, whether it's for performance reasons, whether it's just go up to the new update. And the hard part about the complexity about that was always, all right, what do I do? I need to bring the system down, orchestrate everything. I have to have a maintenance window, I have downtime, I have to like let everybody know, and it's an enormous painful process for organizations. Well, we did with live patching and say, look, you can keep it up to date, you can do whatever you want, and you do with no service disruption, making that process simple, easy, streamlined, and ultimately non-disruptive to the business. So I think that's another great example of how we're able to simplify what we do from an existing standpoint. But pivoting a little bit, if we talk about how we're simplifying some of the new things, a good example of this is what we're doing around Cloud Foundry and cloud-native delivery of solutions, bringing together Kubernetes with Cloud Foundry to be able to simplify the movement and delivery of applications within those brand-new frameworks. Because the hard part about applications is not getting them to run once well on a developer's machine. I think anybody who's been in this business a long time is always sort of, like, 'Hey, where's the machine? You know, what's the problem?' It's how do we move those applications, how do we blow them out, how do we make them readily available, and simplifying that with some of the new technologies as well, like Kubernetes, is huge. And then bringing them all together, I think as Stratos and the things that we're doing from a UI perspective, a really good example of just having a common framework to visualize what's going on, whether that's VMs or containers, you're monitoring your existing infrastructure, and being able to do that from one platform, so a human is not having to context switch all the time to understand how they actually are able to run these things. But they can do it, you know, with one pane of glass. But that's my view on simplification. You know, the other part of this is obviously how do we modernize? Like, how do we do that new stuff? Thomas, I know you got a lot of ideas around this. Where do you go? So.

Thanks, Thomas. Can you tell us a little bit more about the collaboration with partners in this area?

So we've discussed about simplify and modernize, and at the end of the day, what our customers, where every business wants to do is to speed up, accelerate, scale, do more, right? So Daniel, I know we are, we've been working a lot with customers in the market, and acceleration and accelerate solutions. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Sure, I mean I really get points and I talk to customers all the time, Thomas I know you do, Lisa you do as well. You know, acceleration is what everybody's talking about. We know that's the goal, right? Because it's how do I get faster to market, it's agility in the ability to get faster. You know, if there's a lesson that our industry has learned over the last 10 to 15 years is that the one who learns fastest wins. And learning fast is about having these very tight feedback cycles, like being able to have something go to market, get feedback from your customer, 'Oh, I thought it was great,' or honestly much more important, 'Here's what I think is wrong and what you need to do better.' Oh, let me prove that back in the development, how do I get faster at that? And the company with the fastest decision cycles, the company that learns fastest, are the companies that win in their segments. Because ultimately organizations are no longer, especially even IT organizations, we're no longer in the business of delivering servers, right? Now we're in the business of delivering services, and it's that business critical on providing you the way that you can go about doing your work or the way that I can go about or you can go about getting your needs met for you. That's what our customers are in. And Thomas, to your point, I think it's a really good one, they're not looking for speed or scale, they're looking for speed and scale. It's how do I go faster and do it more ubiquitously on a larger scale, less expensively? How do I bring all those things together? And ultimately, that's the reason why customers simplify and modernize is so you can enable acceleration. So that's what comes to fruition when you kind of bring all these things together. It sounds really interesting. Daniel, do you think you can give us some examples? All right, sure. So like SAP and Azure, as Thomas was talking about, accelerate delivery and development of those multi-cloud, hybrid cloud use cases. That's a really good example. An example that's actually super cool that I like is what we're doing around AI and ML. So data scientists themselves spend a ton of time actually just putting together their stack so that they can understand the data that comes at them from a lot of the data that applications are there or aggregating or that they're just happening in the environment so they can make decisions. Getting rid of the time that they spend just doing their infrastructure so that they can get down to decision making and analysis, that is absolutely critical and speaks directly to what I was saying before. Let's accelerate the decision making timeframes. So those are two really good examples just off the top of my head. See if I understand the importance of accelerate as it comes to application delivery. What about around high performance computing and edge? Two topics that are super keen and I think for me are really close to my heart about what I want to be doing at SUSE is those topics. So let's just start kind of very immediate in terms of what's going on right now. So we've enabled high performance computing on Microsoft Azure as both pay-as-you-go and bring your own subscription offerings, and so you can have that kind of functionality ubiquitously within your own environment, whether that's on the cloud, on-premise capabilities available to you. And so I think that's really important because customers are choosing where to run their workloads on a variety of circumstances. We don't want to have them choose whether or not they can use the underlying high performance computing advantages that they get from SUSE. They get to choose where they want to go do that for themselves. From an edge standpoint, you know, you heard Melissa talk about in her keynote some of the work we're doing with Elektra bit in terms of bringing Linux to the automotive industry. I think that that's a really good example. And to kind of extend with that, one of the ones that I want to talk about specifically is what we're doing with Formula One. So Formula One is a super cool use case. Like, you know, not only is Formula One in general super super cool, but like what we're doing within it is also really cool. So Formula One, I don't know if everybody knows this, is one of the foremost areas that people are gathering IoT sensor data, like doing real-time performance analysis and artificial intelligence analysis around what that means during a race, after a race, how do I optimize? It's a high-performance computing use case, it's an AI use case, it's an edge use case, and Formula One is starting to bring all this together using SUSE technologies to say, like, here's an individual circumstance where we can go everything from operating system to AI, ML, the high performance computing, high availability. How do we bring this all together from a real-time perspective to make decisions where milliseconds actually matter? And I love that use case and it's super cool and indicative overall about where the industry is going, whether you talk about airplanes and being able to fly them in a more efficient manner and more safe manner, autonomous vehicles for consumers, medical devices to give individual feedback to consumers as they're waiting in their doctor's office versus having to schedule an appointment six or eight weeks later. These are the kinds of decision making, decisions being made, and compute problems being solved that SUSE is intrinsically involved in that really impact people's everyday lives.

Thanks, Daniel, Thomas, for really bringing simplify, modernize, accelerate to life. I heard a rumor that we're in a position to show rather than tell in the form of a demo. Is that true?

Hi everyone, I'm Aaron Quill, Technical Evangelist here at SUSE. I have with me John Pugh, a Technical Enablement Manager, and Jeff Preiss, the Chief Architect with SUSE's Global Services. We want to show you today a few examples that really bring to life the points that Thomas and Daniel were making. Specifically, we want to show you how SUSE solutions can help companies simplify, modernize, and accelerate the delivery of infrastructure and applications to drive their businesses. We're going to start with the developer's point of view and we're really going to show how SUSE's solutions can enable those developers to deliver applications faster and transparently across a range of infrastructure from core to edge to cloud. Then we're going to shift and really look at the administrator's point of view and show how we're going to give them the ability to manage cloud-native workloads across container environments. We've talked to customers all across the world, and without surprising everyone, really wants to do the same thing, which is accelerate productivity, including being able to take advantage of new technologies like containers and Kubernetes on hybrid clouds. The challenge is, how do you adopt these new technologies without having to retrain the entire organization from day one? So John, tell me a bit about the things that we're doing to enable businesses to allow developers to become productive faster on some of these new technologies.

Sure, and so you know, as we talk to firms with large development organizations, they all want to ramp up on cloud-native computing models, right? So they struggle though to find the time to have everyone trained in developing to Kubernetes and the operational implications of all those designs. Now in a lot of cases, there's a small team that establishes the container environment with Kubernetes, like SUSE's CaaS Platform, and it can be made available to rest of organization through things like SUSE's Cloud Application Platform with its intuitive Stratos user interface. So let me show you how that works. So first, developers need to be able to deploy the app quickly that they're working on in a dev or a test environment. Now as most customers' environments are getting more complex, a lot of developers struggle to figure out how to effectively recreate accurate test and dev environments using infrastructure as code. Those simplify that and accelerate the creation of these environments. In our case, we've duplicated what we're calling an edge production environment in the public cloud. So as you can see here in the Stratos console, a user is only going to see the resources based on their role. Now in our case, we see some favorite endpoints representing core, edge, and cloud environments. We have a mix of cloud environments, or a cloud provider, so Microsoft Azure is represented as well as AWS, and we see on-premise deployments running multiple instances of SUSE's CaaS Platform, CASP, and SUSE's Cloud Application Platform, as we know it as CAP. Now Aaron, this strongly demonstrates our abilities for the multi-cloud environment. Now we're going to deploy into our edge replicas. We see the applications already running there. We're going to go ahead and pick a demo organization and the dev space, and then simply clicking on the plus here will give me a number of choices on where to pull the application code from. And as you can see, the context is already pre-populated from our filter on an earlier screen. Next, enter the project name, pick a branch, we just have one, and then we're going to pick a specific commit, an earlier commit here. You have our choices, and you can see you've been working on this app and have quite a few to choose from. Now this screen gives us options to override the manifest, but for our demo, we're just going to choose a random route and we're going to click deploy. The application will take just a minute to spin up, but in the meantime, you have all the basic information about the app, and once it's running, we can click on this visit button to quickly check out this simple application. Now remember, Aaron, a lot of companies simplify these steps by integrating it into their CI/CD pipelines. We've done it here manually just for demonstration purposes.

Yeah, so you really just deployed an application into a Kubernetes cluster without any infrastructure coding at all? Meaning you didn't write a line of YAML or anything?

Exactly. So I really only needed to focus on writing code for the application. I didn't have to drill down into the details of how or where it's physically deployed or run. And that's the point, is you can accelerate the adoption of these technologies right away without having to do any training to your people, right? And you get to ensure that they're still lined up with whatever deployment policies the company already has in place.

So Jeff, as the operator, what kind of things are going to be important to you to view this deployment?

So let's take a look at John's app. When John actually deployed the application, it was built and deployed as a Kubernetes container under the covers. This is possible due to the cross-community integration projects that we're working on. SUSE is with Cloud Foundry, we're enabling customers to have the best of both worlds. So developers, they just want to write their application code, and they shouldn't have to worry about, as John said, you know, creating YAML code to get their applications deployed. The operators, on the other hand, they do want to have that visibility and control at the infrastructure level. So Stratos lets you see it all the way from top to bottom. So right up to the application summary screen here, we can see things like uptime and resource quotas and network information. We can also see scaling information, the number of instances that are running and how many resources are being consumed. So for troubleshooting, you're going to want to probably see some log streams, and we have a graded log stream here that's live, so people can do troubleshooting right here. So giving the modern operator visibility and control in order to help the developers accelerate their deployments and any target operation, target environment, that's what this is about.

That's cool. So now John, can you show us what the experience would be like for a developer using Cloud Application Platform to push an application now into production?

Yeah, sure. You know, it used to be the developers had to worry about the differences between environments, you know, when you have a different cloud, cloud environments, or edge and on-prem. But when you have a consistent SUSE solution across the core, edge, and cloud, you don't have to worry about that. Now as you mentioned a bit ago, we demonstrated how we deploy our application to our dev or test environment to test it out, but now let's deploy to production. Now production, in our case, is a SUSE CaaS environment running in a data center at the edge. The deployment location, the DNS, infrastructure, that's all immaterial. It doesn't matter to me where this is. It's as easy as selecting a different location or environment from a list of those made available to me, and this could be CAP or CaaS, which is our Kubernetes solution, or anybody else's for that matter. And you know, it's very simple, I choose where, I choose what. Yeah. We won't do any of the overrides in this particular case. We're going to pick the latest commit, and boom, that's it. I mean, I've just deployed an application to a completely different environment running inside, in this case, an edge ecosystem.

Jeff, we just showed how easy it is to take an application and deploy to development or production environments, and we just showed how easily the operator can really view what's going on with that application. Are there other ways that SUSE simplifies the operator's role to really see what's going on in cloud-native and multi-cloud environments? I mean, like everybody's got to deal with policies and compliance, another big challenge that always comes up with cloud-native applications is scalability and really setting up scalability rules to meet the demands of companies and not get caught off guard. What can we do to really help with the visibility of those things?

So Stratos gives you insights at those levels in all those areas. Let's take a look at compliance and some best practices. So the app that Jon just deployed, right, we're working to integrate a bunch of analysis engines right into the applications themselves. So let's go look at this one. We deployed this instance of Jenkins using a Helm chart, and you can deploy right through Stratos. We built some analysis engines into Stratos, like Popeye and Kube-score and Clair, and so what we're going to do is just kick off some of those analyses here, and then once those analyses run for a few seconds, you can pick one of them. This one, for example, this is an overlay of Popeye, and it shows down here in the pods section that we've got a few warnings that we want to take a look at. So let's click on those and see what we see. Oh, it looks like your container is running as root and is consuming more memory than you had planned, right? So a few things that we're going to take a look at here in development, because in production they're going to be enforced. So we'll fix them here and do some more testing. If we want to see some security vulnerabilities, you can do that. Click on the analysis tab over here, and there's quite a few, in fact, there's a critical CVE. This app won't make it into any of our production environments.

Yeah, so Jeff, this is really cool how you can kind of pull all this centralized information together into one access point. So now can you show me how we can use the Stratos console to let both of you guys work together to set up scalability for this app? I mean, whenever we're building cloud-native applications, scalability is one of the biggest issues you've got to deal with. How does Stratos help you with that?

Yeah, you know, so Aaron, as a developer, I'm going to benchmark my application during the testing, and with CAP, I can also set up these auto-scaling rules. So here you can see overall resources for like CPU, memory, and storage. We get a quick overview, and then if we click over here on the auto-scale tab, we can get details on setting up scaling policies. So let's go and edit that policy, and we'll see what rules that we've set up. Now we have a default minimum and maximum that we've set up to, for the minimum, 10-4 based on the benchmarks, and now we can see the average throughput. So based on our benchmarking, we've set it up so the traffic thresholds trigger some scaling up and down. Yep, and here, like marketing just told us, be ready for the Thursday drop. We're going to set up a recurring schedule, picking a Thursday and the hours of 8:00 to 6:00, and we're going to scale up to a minimum of 5 instances. Click, click, done, and the policy is in place. That is very cool. Now I get it, but this has to require a bunch of powerful and complex infrastructure to get this running, right, Jeff?

Sure, complex modern infrastructure via software made simple. So putting the appropriate controls into the hands of the developers and the operators that live in these environments every day, giving visibility into those environments for managers or operators to make sensible decisions regarding governance and best practices and how they deploy things, all from a centralized console.

That wraps up our quick tour of SUSE's Container as a Service and Cloud Application Platform, all running on SUSE's non-stop infrastructure. This greatly simplifies the developer's ability to rapidly deploy and manage cloud-native applications. This also simplifies and accelerates the operator's ability to govern cloud-native applications across modern multi-cloud ecosystems.

Thank you everyone for joining us SUSECON Digital 2020. Don't forget to look after the Dell and Microsoft keynotes. Enjoy the rest of the show.

Thank you. Thank you.