I am so happy to share this next talk with you. Alexandra will talk about deploying code without actually sharing any code. Instead, Alexandra will share a set of stories. Both seem successful at first, but when you dig a bit deeper, you realize that the outcomes are actually quite different. Through these two examples, we will learn about the core needs of our teammates and the importance of communication and empathy to address those needs. We will be challenged to rethink our processes and rituals, and ultimately, we will be better prepared to be a trusted colleague to those around us. The beauty of this talk is that while the examples are focused on deploying code, the takeaways apply to all types of work.  Enjoy. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining me today at GitLab Commit for my talk, The Emotional Chaos of Deploying Code. I'm really excited to talk about this today because I think that code deploys are things that a lot of people talk about from a very technical perspective. I know lots of talks about this, lots of articles, but it's not something that you really hear about from the people side of things and the emotional side specifically. So I'm excited to talk more about what there is around people and emotions for deploys. And to start off, I wanted to address the fact that you might be here watching this talk because you saw this title and thought, like, since when is deploying code is emotional? Like, this is not a thing.  Maybe you have a QA process in place. You have a release manager. I have a release notes. You kind of have this setup that makes deploys very predictable in the technical sense. And you're wondering where does the emotion come in? Like, we have this process. And so if that's the case, I do think that there is room for emotions in your deploys. I think it is there already and it's maybe not something that you're picking up on. And so I'm excited to show you exactly what I mean by how deploys can be emotional and then how to fix things and make things a little bit for the better. So my name is Alexandra Sunderland. I'm an engineering manager at fellow.app in Ottawa, Canada. You can reach me on Twitter at alexandras underscore dev or on my website where I have other resources about this and other technical management types of things at alexandras.dev. I do work at fellow.app where we are doing multiple releases per week. I have worked in the tech industry for the last decade or so and worked at lots of large companies where we do larger, less frequent releases, worked at startups where we do many, many frequent releases. I've worked with a lot of different stakeholders for releases, so worked with enterprise sales teams and direct to customer products. And so I have a big kind of background in lots of different types of releases and lots of different types of doing them. And at the meantime though, I am at fellow.app which is a platform for teams and their managers to take meeting notes, track actions, collect feedback and overall make meetings delightful for everyone. And I highly encourage you to check it out if you're the type of person who has meetings. So the plan is actually not to talk about anything related to code because I think that the emotional side of code is maybe a little bit obvious. I think that if a deploy goes wrong, something fails, you have to stay up all night fixing things. I think the emotional side of that might be a little bit more clear cut and obvious to see because obviously people are gonna be upset and a little bit nervous and kind of scared and I'm sure we've all been there. It's not fun. It does happen to everyone. But I did want to walk through the story of a deploy that has gone wrong, but it's not gonna look like it's necessarily wrong from the outset. Then go over the story of that same deploy gone right and then talk about how we can get from one to the other. So that said, once upon a time, there was some code to deploy. Chapter one, preparing the build. So the engineering team has been working on a new feature in their enterprise SaaS application and it has been decided that it will be ready for clients at some point this week. So very typical situation nowadays.  So these are all done by me and I hope you enjoy them. Anyway though, so the first person that we meet is Emily, the QA engineer. And Emily is ramping up testing to make sure that the build is ready on time and the engineers push back saying, this is not critical, we'll fix this later for a bunch of the issues she brings up. I am guilty of this too. I think everybody once in a while has this especially in crunch time, but this is what has been happening with Emily. The deploy is also going to be the first time that a feature Maria built is going out and Maria is the newest member of the engineering team. She's tested a lot, but she's a little bit nervous about the process. Maybe nobody's walked her through it. Nobody's told her what to expect. And so this is going to be her first deploy that she's a part of. Chapter two, planning the deploy. Another engineering team in addition to the one that you're on has built a feature for this deploy too and it is now in a broken state. And so we have to sit tight and wait for it to be fixed before we can continue testing and before we can really do that countdown to get ready for the deploy. A mirror for the marketing team also needs to try out the features that are going out so that they can create marketing content for it. But at this point, there's no exact date for the release and so it's a little bit hard to plan for the deadline and schedule posts and get a mirror's work done and test it out on a stable environment. It is then decided at 9 a.m. of whatever day is that the deploy is going to happen at 3 p.m. And Kierthi, who lives in a time zone eight hours ahead and built an important part for this deploy, is hoping to be asleep at that point because it will be 11 p.m. her time, chosen arbitrary number I'm normally in bed by 11 p.m. I know that's not necessarily common, but anyway, so Kierthi is hoping to be asleep by 11 and is wondering if the people who were in that time zone really thought of that when they chose that time for the deploy. The deploy happens, everything goes well in this scenario. I mean, the server stays up, no code goes down, like everything's good, no bugs, everyone celebrates, ta-da. Chapter three, the day after, because the deploy is not over when the code is live on production. There is a lot that comes after that, which is very important. And notably in this case, because we're an enterprise SaaS application in this scenario, we have Dave from the sales team who has their first prospect demo of the day and Dave did not know about the changes and so it throws off their demo The sales people tend to have a script that they follow, like a tried and true and tested path through the app and because the new feature changed that, they don't know where to click, they don't know what's going on, and so it messes them up. Clients are also asking Antonio on the support team questions about the new features and nobody had shown it to them beforehand and so they missed their target SLAs while spending time trying to figure it out while they write documentation. And target SLAs, it's when you have a customer success team or support team, usually you try to keep your response time under a certain period of time, so it might be five minutes, it might be an hour, it might be 24 hours, totally depends on the organization, but if there's something going out that the person who's writing these responses doesn't know about yet, then that increases the amount of time that they spend replying and that's not so good because usually things like your bonuses or OKRs and goals depend on keeping these times down. So the end of the deploy, kind of, sort of, seems mostly okay maybe the day after it seemed to be a little bit more messed up, but otherwise it looks like everything with the deploy went wrong. So what actually happened here? Well, the thing that's going wrong here is that the core needs of the people on the team were not being met and in these situations, like maybe nothing was staring out, obviously, but a lot of people were feeling different things and bottling those up and not surfacing those and asking for help and so people felt a little bit out of place. And so before diving into everything, I wanted to bring up this model, so Paloma Medina has this biceps model, so it covers six different parts, which talks about all of these core needs that we have as humans in communities and at work and within families and when any one of these core needs is being threatened, then we get this fight-or-flight response and we have all sorts of different emotions. We might feel nervous, we might feel out of place, might feel sad and so these seven parts of the model are very important when it comes to anything at work and making sure that whatever you do, whatever you say, you're not doing something that is going to threaten any of these with any humans. And so there is more information about this at palomamedina.com slash biceps. I also wanted to call out a blog post in mind, a blog post that is one of my favorites written by Lara Hogan and it's called Dealing with Surprising Human Emotions, Desk Moves and it's a article that talks about this biceps model in relation to something as trivial as changing around the desk situation. Maybe not as relevant right now, but it kind of gives you that idea of like just changing the layout of where people sit and where they are in relation to each other in relation to the manager in relation to the placement of the washroom. Something as simple as that can threaten all of these items in the biceps model and can trigger that fight-or-flight response for people and so as anyway, it's a very interesting article to kind of give you a sense of just how important the stuff is. I also really like this quote by April Wenzel which says that taking time to care about other people's emotions isn't just kind, it's actually more efficient if it leads to smoother interactions that don't trigger people's threat responses. And I find that very important because in this situation, in this talk like it is, possible to ignore all these motions that are happening. Maybe that's what's already going on. It's easy to just pretend they don't exist and kind of shove it to the side. But if you go out of your way to figure out what those emotions are and correct for them and even just accommodate for them or even just acknowledge that they're there, then it's gonna make it easier for people to work together. It's gonna make it easier to communicate and get things done. And so I just wanted to call this out as something very important because it's like, even though these emotions are hidden and not surfacing, that doesn't mean that they're any less important. So to go over all of the characters in that little story, we'll start in order and go with Emily. So Emily was doing her job. She was reporting the issues and the engineers were turning them away and saying like, nope, that's not an issue. We're not gonna do it in time for the release. So it does not matter. And the corny that Emily, the corny that was being threatened here for Emily was significance because Emily's job for this release is finding errors, making sure that the application is in as good of a state as it can be.  And when the engineers are the ones saying like, nope, doesn't matter, that feels like it's saying that her job doesn't matter and then maybe she doesn't matter that much to the team, which is not true. The QA is incredible. And so the corny in here that isn't being met is significance because you wanna feel significant within the team. And so this is what Emily is feeling. Maria the engineer was the newest team member and it's the first time that a feature that Maria's built is going out onto production. And in this case, sometimes it's very easy to not go over step by step exactly what's gonna happen, what to expect, showing people what a deploy looks like. Even if it's an automated process, like I know that there may be some sort of CD pipeline setup with continuous deployment.  Even just that can feel very scary because you don't know even just like, will it take five minutes to go out? Will it take an hour to go out? Should you start looking at logs? What are you supposed to do? Do you make sure that you verify it on production? Does QA verify it on production, like what goes on? There's a lot to know there. And so not knowing what's coming next can make you feel pretty nervous and threaten that core need of predictability. A mirror from marketing was trying to create that marketing content, but there's no date set for the deploy. And in this case, it's usually a lack of communication and this is gonna be a recurring theme for a lot of the people actually. But the developers aren't necessarily always in communication directly with marketing and with other services and the business side of the organizations. And so in this case, there was a bit of a communication breakdown. Nobody was really letting the mirror know when things were going out. And to mirror the core needs that were not being that or that were being threatened were equality, so fairness and predictability. So predictability, same as with Maria, it's hard because, I mean, here you literally do not know when things are gonna go out. So it is very unpredictable in that sense directly, but equality and fairness also because you're not getting the information that the rest of the team has. Like even if they don't know exactly when the deploy is gonna go out, they can very easily communicate. Like we think it'll be at this point, it's on track for this, or like, sorry, it's getting delayed. And that helps people feel like they're more a part of the team because they feel like they're seen as equals, like their job is just as important as the engineers, which it is. And that helps with predictability as well because even though there isn't necessarily a date set in stone, they know what to expect and they can see things coming. Kierthee, the engineer was the one living in a time zone eight hours ahead and it's gonna be at bedtime during the release. And so the core need not being met here is belonging. And I think that this one is even more relevant now that teams are starting to become a little bit more distributed because we're starting to hire across different time zones. It's a lot easier to have people working remotely or just as easy as before, but we're starting to do it a lot more as a tech community. And so it's difficult though because a lot of companies are still in a situation where a core or a majority of people are within a certain time zone or a very close time zone. Like if you imagine companies in North America with the East Coast and West Coast, there's a three hour time zone difference there. So we're all pretty close together. But then if you hire someone in Europe, they might be six or seven or eight hours ahead or even further. Australia is very far away as well in terms of time zone. But when you have that large majority in one time zone, it's very easy to default to that time zone and forget that people are in another time zone and that it might not work very well for them. And you really have to put a lot of effort into remembering that. And it's to do with everything, like with scheduling meetings, scheduling deploys, discussions like when you use app channel and Slack, when you do group chats and schedule all these things. And yeah, so anyways, to the point here though is that Kirthi does not have that sense of belonging because the group that is in the majority where the time zone is does not always necessarily think of her and they should be. Dave from Sales is the person who did not know about the changes going out or knew about them and didn't necessarily get a chance to see them before they went on production. And it threw off his first demo of the day. This does not sound like a good situation to be in, especially because you're not just suffering on your own like the other people.  You're actively having to come up with solutions on the spot and people are watching you and it's a very high stress situation. And so the core need here that is being threatened is belonging, equality and fairness, those for the same reasons as with marketing and everyone just like not getting that information that the developers have and predictability for the same reason, especially because if this happens once you're gonna be on guard and kind of assume that it might happen in the future as well. And that's not a good feeling to have just always wondering like what's gonna change? What am I gonna have to adapt to? It's not a good place. Antonio from Support was the one who had to catch up writing documentation and misses the target's response times for the team because nobody gave him a demo of the new feature before it went out. Same as with the last few people, core needs here that aren't being met are belonging, equality, fairness and predictability for those same reasons. And like I mentioned a few minutes ago as well, this is especially important from the SLA side where support team, the response time for customers is incredibly important for their goals, their bonuses, it has a big impact. And for cases like this where they weren't made aware of something that was going out or they weren't properly trained on it, that's something that is not their fault for the most part. It is usually on the product and engineering team or people like with the knowledge of what's going on, it is up to them to let them know what is happening so that they can adapt ahead of time and avoid those delays. And so I mentioned this with the time zone issue with QRT as well, but the impact on remote teams in particular is very big because when you're working altogether in an office in person, you get the benefit of seeing people's reactions and seeing how they're acting. And so you can pick up on maybe people look very nervous or they're acting differently than normal so you can pick up on maybe with Maria who is doing her first deploy, maybe you can pick up on the fact that she looks a little bit tense and you might figure out like, oh, I should reassure her and let her know what's going on and what to expect. But when you're working remotely, we have the benefit and the curse of the hiding behind a screen and sometimes that means that we're feeling really scared and feeling very nervous about things but we put on a persona over text or even just in speaking, pretending like everything is okay and making it seem like there's nothing going on because we want to appear brave and we wanna appear like team members who are contributing and reliable. And so it's a bit harder to pick up on this kind of stuff on remote teams that's something that you really have to put in effort to try to find. So given that for the same situation with the same people, what does it look like when this kind of deploy goes well? So once upon a time, we are chapter one, preparing the build. Same intro as before, the engineering team has been working hard on their new feature and their enterprise SaaS application and we are going to deploy this code later this week. Emily, the QA engineer is ramping up testing to make sure that the build is done on time and Emily and the engineers plan ahead of time for what is an acceptable bug state and they work together to triage issues and maintain a backlog to fix later. This is a very important first step for any release really just because realistically, you're never gonna do a release where there's no bugs at all. There's always gonna be something or like a nice to have but there's always gonna be some sort of follow-up later. And so if you're able to ahead of time before really starting that last stretch of testing, if you're able to define what is an acceptable state for this to be deployed in, what is a stretch goal, then it's much easier for the engineers and Kierthi, sorry, and Emily to self triage the issues, figure out what is okay to do later, what is okay to do now so that it doesn't become the engineers telling Emily, like no, this is not a bug we're gonna fix, like it doesn't matter. And then Emily doesn't have her sense of belonging threatened because she's still able to log all these issues, they go into the backlog, though will happen later or beforehand and yeah, so this is a good stop to take for any release. And this deploy is going to be the first time that Maria's new feature is going out and she knows exactly what to expect because the process has been documented, the team is reassured her that her feature is in good shape. So deploy processes being written down is a great step for any team. I love talking about onboarding engineers, onboarding them remotely especially, and a big thing that I talk about there is having a lot of documentation about processes that happen over and over, because then it's very easy to onboard people because everything's written out, everyone knows what's going on, everyone has that same source of information. So if you don't have that already, that is something really good to write out. If it's a manual process, maybe even record a video and put that in the documentation so people can really see what's going on. But yeah, so this is a good step for Maria, she knows what's gonna happen, she knows what logs to look at and the team has told her like, don't worry, we're there for you, if anything goes wrong, we will make sure that it's okay and this is really good to make her feel better. Chapter two, planning the deploy. So another engineering team has built a feature for this deploy too and they are aware that something important is going out and so they're extra diligent in testing so they don't block us. This was the case where in the first version they had a bug and it blocked the deploy and then we had to wait for them to fix it. Probably the situation that has happened for people here before, especially if you have a release cycle where maybe you're doing quarterly releases or bundling a lot of projects together and releasing at the same time and you have a lot of big merge requests or pull requests going on at the same time and then it breaks the staging environment. Common situation, so in this case it's like a lot of communication between teams, a lot of planning and being aware that what you're doing has an impact on other people and that goes a long way to building trust between teams. A mirror from the marketing team needs to try out the plan feature so that they can create marketing content for it and they know when to expect the deploy because they've been in consistent communication with the team's manager or whoever it is that is running the deploy. Maybe engineering manager or maybe product manager but somebody and this goes back again to communication. Everything here is going to be solved pretty much by communication but just keeping in constant communication between all the different teams is a really good thing to do because everybody depends on each other and engineering depends on marketing, marketing depends on engineering. There's so many interdependencies that you should be in constant communication with people to let them know what's going on and in this case this is helping solve a mirror's problems from the first story. All right, so with Kierthi it was decided at 9 a.m. that the deploy will happen at 3 p.m. that day and Kierthi who lives in a time zone eight hours ahead and built an important part knows that she can be asleep by then because the team was aware of the time zone that Kierthi is in knew that she was building a big part of this deploy and went out of their way to let her know it is okay, you can go to sleep, like you don't have to stay up for this, we got it. And yeah, so for this like really just it does take a lot of repetition and trying and really consistently thinking about it but being on top of thinking of people's individual situations and thinking of how they might be affected by something is very important especially in this case with timing and time zones. All right, so the deploy goes really well as with before there are no errors, everything is all good. And chapter three, the day after. Dave from the sales team has their first prospect demo of the day and he sells a million seats to the software because his demo of the new feature was so good. Terrific, yeah, this is another situation where that constant communication really solves the issue and same with marketing, it's gonna be the same with I think the next slide as well but just constantly talking between teams letting them know what's going on, what's coming out, giving them early demos of the features coming out, it goes a long way towards building that trust. Yeah, so clients ask Antonio on the support team questions about the new feature and he got a heads up when the feature was on the staging servers and prewrote the documentation and so does not miss any SLAs and is able to answer questions right away. Same thing with that constant communication helps everybody. All right, the end. So that deploy went well, ta-da. So how would you actually get there? So a lot of that comes down to communication but also increasing the amount of emotional intelligence on the team and psychological safety and so what I mean by that is you really have to go out of your way to think about how are people feeling how might this action affect them if you were in their shoes, what might you be feeling especially for people like Maria and like it's very easy in the engineering context because for a lot of those people you may have actually been in their shoes you might have been deploying something to production for the first time ever which is scary like no matter what your level is if you could be a staff engineer joining a new team and deploying for the first time is still gonna be terrifying. So you just have to put yourself in their shoes and think about like what are they thinking what is going on and then try to adapt that try to reach out and see how you can change things or how you can help and psychological safety creating that sense on the team is really making sure that if somebody is nervous or if somebody does have an issue they feel okay voicing that concern and bringing it up and aren't worried about like retribution they aren't worried that people will see them as silly they aren't worried that they're gonna be seen as like lesser than and just making sure that anybody feels like they can bring up any issues bring up how they're feeling and have a talk about it. Specifically though, so the first tip as I have mentioned many times already but over communicate as much as possible. So you can do this in the form of having sync meetings across various teams. So it might make sense to have one-on-ones with different team leaders who can then disseminate information down through their orgs or you can have meetings maybe every two weeks every three weeks with all the leaders together so that you can talk about different priorities you can talk about the releases going out ask if there's anything also that you should know about because maybe the sales team is going to a sales conference and they really need to make sure that the demo that they have stays as is because maybe their promo video shows something a certain way or like a deploy cannot happen during this time because they're gonna be giving a keynote you really just wanna make sure you know what's going on and give out and absorb as much information as possible. So for that same pattern works really well for setting up processes for informing other teams of releases and in terms of figuring out if something's going wrong it's good to look out for changes in communication patterns on your team. This is a good indicator of whether people are feeling okay or not. Also one of those things that's a little bit easier to figure out when you're all together in person because you can see people and maybe being a little bit more reserved and maybe it's harder to capture that communication pattern on Slack or on Discord or whatever you're using to talk to each other but still something to look out for putting yourself in their shoes so really trying to figure out like building that empathy muscle and figuring out if I was them, how would I be feeling? What could I do differently? And also setting clear expectations and boundaries around code deploys. So things like who is expected to do what reduces a lot of that predictability? If you don't have a like maybe you might have one person always doing releases or it's on a rotating basis maybe it's just automatic so you don't need to worry about having like a designated person but having things like that defining what acceptable levels of bugs are having process around communication things like if you do have a manual-ish process for deploys then just figuring out what is like when you're getting ready for the deploy how do you let people know?  Who do you involve? Just having this kind of stuff reduces a lot of confusion and it makes it easier to onboard people as well because then they know what to do and the team can scale very easily. And asking questions during the deploy ramp up. So if you are in that type of schedule where you're doing larger deploys less frequently then asking a lot of questions can get you some very interesting feedback from people. So you might ask like, do you think this is a good thing to deploy?  Or like anything like that even if you don't think there's anything you'll always get some kinds of answers that surprise you. And they could be things that are really important to know but people didn't feel like it was necessarily important information to bring up or they didn't know if they were right but by asking them, they're gonna feel like it is okay to mention and that can in some cases save deploys and be really good. And the last bit here is to ask for feedback either in one-on-ones or retrospectives. I find one-on-ones really good for asking feedback because you get exactly what people are feeling it's not biased by what other people are saying in the room. They have a lot to say you get to ask a lot of probing questions and follow up questions. So I love asking people for feedback in the team in one-on-ones about anything in general like any kind of process, any kind of news but that is a really good solution or doing retrospectives. If you're not doing retrospectives already I would suggest doing those two as a team maybe every six months or so just general retrospectives about what process in the team could change what could get better, what's going really well because you get a really good sense of how things are going that you don't really get if you're a manager you're not in that day-to-day sense and everything's a bit different. So I love retrospectives as tools for getting feedback about process. So those direct next steps though that you can start taking right away are asking everyone for feedback working on that emotional intelligence so working on putting yourself in people's shoes figuratively and formalizing communication patterns around employees, around anything really but formalizing communication, writing documentation is a really good step to making your team very scalable. And just to note that this is one of many emotionally charged processes in the company and or on the team and you should be on the lookout for your team you should be on the lookout for your teammate's well-being and aim to create a culture of psychological safety. There are a lot of different things that can cause a lot of emotions right now as I mentioned before, even just desk moves can cause a lot. But yeah, so deploys are one thing to look out for but be on the lookout for others and think of how you can put yourself in people's shoes and figure out what kinds of questions to ask feedback to get to try to make things better and make the team better for everyone. And that is my talk, thank you so much for watching. Again, if you want to get in touch you can find me on Twitter at alexandras underscore dev or my website alexandras.dev And thank you so much.


In the true Jesuit educational context, Dr. Catherine Schwab in her research, in her teaching and in her outreach to the wider community brings alive the wonders of Greek and Roman art and architecture with a strong academic voice with an ability to draw contemporary connections and with an extraordinary sense of being an interdisciplinary global citizen. I first met Cathy in my sophomore year in her ancient Greek art class. Now I have my PhD in ancient Roman art and I teach here at Fairfield. That is not a coincidence. Cathy taught me how to read critically, how to look carefully, and how to teach creatively and with empathy. I am just one of her many students who owes her so much. She is able to combine high intelligence because she is clearly brilliant in her field, but she is not distant from people. And that quality really is so beautiful to see. The historic plaster cast collection that Cathy has assembled here at Fairfield is a key educational and artistic resource. There are 100 casts of objects that are currently in mostly European museums. So we can teach, for example, the Parthenon sculpture right here in Connecticut and that is amazing. Dr. Schwab's many projects and scholarly work inspired a great number of students, but contributed also to the study of the ancient Greek world in a new way, in a way that is innovative and creative. There is a Greek word that is not very known in English because there is no translation of it in English. It is called philotimo. It means the person who is always thinking of the other person. You ask me for one, I am going to give you two. This kind of always the impulse and feeling to do more above and beyond. And I think that is exactly Dr. Schwab.


Look, thanks very much for coming today. Just wanted to provide some information about some further excellent results that we've achieved for Operation Juliet Cheshire. This morning we've executed a number of search warrants on a further network involved in the distribution of significant amounts of Dainless drugs, in particular methyl amphetamine and MDMA. We've also successfully obtained the extradition of two key players from interstate drug networks who were distributing significant quantities of these drugs into the Queensland community. And overall we've had some excellent sieges and results and obviously the impact on the community will be significant, particularly in terms of being able to remove significant amounts of drugs such as MDMA or ecstasy. We seized about a week, just over a week ago we seized 4,000 pills from a residence at Victoria Point along with three kilograms of the drug ICE. Now obviously the impact that that does have, particularly on our younger members of the community in areas such as the nightclub scene and certainly licensed premises, that's a significant positive for us. About $3.5 million worth of drugs, can you just tell us about that? Look that's very conservative in wholesale terms, in street terms, for instance MDMA tablets if you're buying 4,000 pills you may pay in the vicinity of about $9 a pill. On the street they can get as much as $35 per pill so certainly there is significant profit for these people that are involved in this and that's an ongoing challenge for obviously law enforcement but it's very pleasing to be able to remove those types of dangerous drugs and those amounts from the community. Particularly with some of the drugs these days we see the ICE we've been seizing, some of the stuff that's coming from interstate is very, very high quality in the vicinity of high 70s to high 80% purity. Look there's a number of different methodologies and a lot of these networks use different methodologies all the time. The security of the airport is excellent and as you know it's been significantly improved over a number of years. We work very closely with Australian federal police, customs and the other authorities that work around transportation particularly in the air transportation. The specific information this time was that fellow travelled by plane. We have that information that often these people fly down and hire cars or use other methods to trucks, other methods to transport these drugs up so it's certainly dependent on the people and the availability and often just the circumstances. Was there any check on him? Oh look I believe it was in his carry on luggage, I haven't got that specific information but certainly it was very pleasing to intercept the kilogram that was on him and then we executed a search line on his residence and there's a further two kilograms there and also the 4,000 pills. Look this operation focused heavily around the nightclub scene in the Brisbane area and our objective obviously was to disrupt those activities and target people involved in distribution in that nightclub scene but certainly it moved further out to the higher level networks and entities and obviously the information we've got is a lot of these drugs found their way into those areas. It's been an ongoing job, there certainly will continue to investigate that. Obviously we have a lot of our young people go to those locations and we certainly work very hard to keep those types of venues a safe environment for our young people. We did identify that, we did identify some employees which is not uncommon in the industry, in different roles employed by the actual clubs themselves, security wasn't among those at this stage, it was more in employee roles either in management or in service there, there were obviously people involved in the in the entertainment areas there, the DJ that sort of stuff, there was some significant information about that and there were a couple of people identified during that. There was some staff members who arrested, something we did see was quite concerning, a lot of these people are very young, have very little criminal history previously and are not adverse to taking significant risks and being involved in fairly high-level criminal offences. No that's right, you know like some of the people were charging at 19, 20, early 20s and we're talking 20,000, 20,000, sorry 20 grams of, 20 ounces sorry of ice, thousands of pills, you know, kilograms of, one of the one of the persons we seized four kilograms of ice from was in his 20s. Yeah, as a wholesale, an ounce of ice can sell up to $12,000 even more sometimes depending on the location and the availability but when you break it down to street level there's significant more profits there as well. Particularly Fortitude Valley, this operation focused on Fortitude Valley, not the Gold Coast and that was something that we tried to maintain our focus on because it's obviously one of the major entertainment venues for Brisbane and we work very closely with Metropolitan North Region and certainly a number of the owners of clubs and the people that are involved in the Valley Business District there have been very supportive. Look our operation had a covert side and an overt side so a lot of the time, a lot of the presence of this operation has been running since September 2011. A lot of our operations continued along without the notification of, you know, the business people but we certainly didn't have any resistance from any of those businesses there. No, they were rated this morning. They were part of the syndicate that was involved with the intercept from the gentleman that flew up from Sydney. They were part of that broader syndicate. One fellow's based in Sydney and the other one is based in Melbourne. They will be brought to Queensland today. They've been remanded in our custody to appear in the British Magistrates Court tomorrow in relation to trafficking charges. Significant, significant amounts. Look, it's obviously something we continue to follow our investigations. You know, one of the pleasing things of this investigation is we have been able to move into the higher level which is obviously one of our primary focuses. So we have identified some key players with some very good links in organised crime networks. So it's something that it's been quite pleasing with this operation but it's something that we'll continue to work with, not at this stage. Very, very broad if any. With these nightclub scenes it's very surprising the types of people that we've found as I said before. Some of them haven't got as much as the traffic ticket. Oh look, I haven't personally delved into the education. Obviously the police that they'd investigate them would be aware of their antecedents but I haven't personally delved into that. We're certainly not talking about a focus on lower socioeconomic parties. They're from a broad range of areas. Look, we didn't see any significant intelligence inferring that. It's one of those, I suppose the nightclub scene and that's one of those scenes where it's fairly incestuous. People seem to know a lot of people and we'll go down one path and then all of a sudden you'll see it connect back again. There's a lot of tie-ins there with these people even though they may live in totally different locations. And as I said, we obviously focused on the nightclub scene and moved back out to the higher level which is obviously distributing the higher level distributors, drug distributors that ultimately end up in these places. So that was our focus. Look, we're still getting the results from those. Some of those searches are continuing and police are interviewing a number of people. There were drugs seized. I don't have the specific information at this stage. I haven't been advised of any significant seizures at this point in time. The significant seizures in relation to that network were Tuesday a week ago. Well, certainly there are a number of people who are still continuing to make inquiries about and I do anticipate our investigations will continue. But the main operational focus of this operation has now closed. Look, certainly in the vicinity of three and a half to four million dollars and that's a wholesale figure as I said. In terms of street value, significantly higher, you could triple that. Well, look, I'm not saying they're more educated but I said there's a broad range of people. Obviously, entertainment precincts attract a variety of different people, particularly young people. And you know, it's not uncommon. We have encountered some people in their 40s, 50s. But there is a fairly predominant focus on the people in their late teens, 20s. Look, we're seeing those traditional types of methodologies changing, evolving immensely. It wouldn't be uncommon to be able to go to a venue, not know that person at all and be able to buy drugs. And there are a lot more Oh, look, I think it's probably a reflection on the culture of society, particularly the young people. They're certainly not risk adverse. And you know, it's one of those environments, I suppose, you meet literally hundreds of people on any given weekend or any given night you go in there you can meet. And I suppose it's a lot of it's about opportunities. And that's what we're trying to disrupt those opportunities and those those avenues for these types of drugs to go into places where our vulnerable younger people are. Look, there certainly wasn't any significant intelligence about, you know, business proprietors and that it was more people that were were involved in the service industry supervised a couple of supervisors or managers, but particularly people that worked in those areas, or new people that worked in those areas. So and they weren't a large percentage of the operation. But it was obviously a concern to us as well. September, or street value, you know, street value would certainly, we certainly blow out to to those two figures. Yeah, we when we see so we sees an ounce we value it at what the ounce the answers but in reality, when you're selling grams and those sorts of things that you know, you can pay $600 or $800 for a gram of ice. I actually don't have that specific information. But I mean, sometimes what we see with these people is they don't make a pre booking or they don't have any preference. They'll arrive at an airport. And they're just booked straight away. So there's no it's very hard for law enforcement to monitor those sorts of things. So and you know, there's other sorts of challenges we have. And it may be that they walk in and there's a Tiger Airways flight available right there and then. So it's mainly about circumstances, opportunities. It's not vulnerabilities in any particular airline or any particular carrier. Oh, look, they can see they can see these things in very airtight security, airtight devices on their bodies, lots of different methodologies. You know, obviously, they learn from different, you know, law enforcement's detections and methodology from where we where we get results. They continue these people continue to learn those sorts of things.  If it's got on, it doesn't actually physically x-ray a person. So and, you know, you can have something concealed inside something else. We see it all the time with these, these importation shows, but they obviously continue to use strategies to to allude detection. And we continue to work closely with all the partner agencies to disrupt these activities and prosecute the people involved. Oh, no, not really. Obviously, when they come from overseas, they've got to get here somewhere, whether it be container, whether it be people, we get drug meals come in from overseas countries all the time. So as I said, we, we, we don't have a lot of these things or intercept people off planes. A lot of people drive up with it. Some people use different transport industries. Some people use the mail is a variety of methodologies. So it was as a result of the investigation. So we identified that. Well, the people in Melbourne are the key distributors. They're not the people that actually the fellow who went down was the actual distributor here in Queensland. And he was sourcing drugs from the fellow in Sydney. Honestly, honestly couldn't say I haven't dealt down to that thing. I would dare say that there probably would be some people that do, but I can't say for sure. Look, that's being analysed at the moment. Otherwise, I'd certainly have it here for a show and tell. And which would we try to do? But because of the, the, the time lapse between the seizure last week and the time we're in a position to, to focus on our warrants for the other parts of the network, we weren't able to have it here. It's being analysed currently as we speak. But that is a concerning fact. We've, we've seen very low levels actually in, in Australia and Queensland. And the problem with that is, often the drugs are substituted with other very harmful substances, different types of analogue drugs, poisons, other chemicals. And, and you know, these young people, that's what they really need to understand. They're taking a significant risk ingesting something they really don't know what it is and what, what it's going to do to them. I looked at the, the operation focused on the entertainment precinct, not on a Pacific nightclubs, often depending on, and a lot of these people that are involved move, as you know, from venue to venue. So we certainly looked at, at the whole, whole picture of, of the entertainment precinct. Often they sell the people they know, but they also sell the people that they meet on the night. And that's not uncommon. Yeah. Oh, look, as I said, a lot of the people we, we targeted or identified weren't employed in that industry. They were people that attended those areas. But there were some people that were involved in the industry, which obviously is disappointing and concerning. But I mean, that's, that was just one part of our focus. Yeah, through, I suppose through word of mouth that, that people, people, I suppose, ascertain information that this person may be able to provide something to them. That's usually, usually the way it happens. Yeah. Look, I'm not going to elaborate on now our methodologies or our strategies. Needless to say that we were very, very happy with the outcomes that were achieved. And in terms of seizures, to be able to see, see, have a number of networks where we've seized kilograms of these, of these drugs. Extremely pleased about that. I look this operation, I would say that is probably certainly one of the more significant operations that the Queensland Police have been involved in and have run ourselves been the lead on. And certainly, as I said, you know, to be able to seize multiple kilograms of drugs from different networks and remove them from the community and the impact that will have, the positive impact that will have in relation to harm reduction, we're very, very pleased about that. I'll look, our counterparts down there obviously assisted us in, in, in focusing on those people. And that's, we have very good relationships with, with both, you know, state and Commonwealth law enforcement agencies. And, and that's, you know, that's very important. You're going to see fairly significant quantities of, of methylamphetamine, both in white and, and a brownish colour. And we're also going to see 4,000 pills, pre-porting to be ecstasy pills. I haven't been analysed yet, but in a blue colour there. No, not at this stage, no. So, yeah.


Well, good morning everyone and first of all, thank you Krona for getting my name right You know, I think you mentioned I'm originally from Portugal and for some reason people have a problem with my name I get Pablo a lot. I get Polo with a no I get Paula people who rely too much on spell check and the last conference I was at I was introduced as Paolo was going well Elves, you know, I'm not a big guy But calling me an elf is a little bit hard if you do if you don't mind, but I've come prepared I have learned when in Ireland do as the Irish do and later on if you find Paul easier I'm happy to roll with it. No problem at all there. Anyway, I digress and I want to talk to you about evolution and I started the this talk with the video which we produced to celebrate a hundred years as a company Which we celebrated in 2016 so as Ireland was celebrating a hundred years since the Easter Rising We were celebrating a hundred years since BMW was established as a company and sometimes it's easy. You can see on the screen there the first You could call the first BMW was a Dixie and for the ones of you that know about cars It looks like a bit like an Austin 7 that's because it was a bloody Austin 7 which you're producing under license And on the right you see the BMW I8 so I've got those two cars to symbolize Evolution and sometimes it's easy for us to think that we've come a long way Let me argue that we fundamentally haven't the car is still basically where it was all that time ago You know a steering wheel four wheels very little has changed in my own lifetime That's me as a baby on my father's car on 1974 75 and By the way, it's an NSU prince which later became part of Audi And I know what you're thinking Admittedly quite an ugly baby very chubby And I first used this slide about six months ago And my wife just caught a glimpse of it on my screen on my laptop and she said who the hell is that ugly baby? Very offensive, but it's even more tragic because she was then expecting our first child And I could swear that we're about to witness the first baby ever to be born ugly according to his own mother So I was praying that you'll get at least you know mommy's looks and daddy's brains To get it something of me. Anyway, there was six months ago. Maybe he was born.  There is baby Oscar Rupert Anyway, I digress yet again I'm here to talk about evolution and Evolution is a challenging concept because it tends to be exponential and that gives us two very uncomfortable very annoying challenges the first one is if you don't like change Life is quite a dark place to be because things tend to change and change and not just they continue to change But they change faster Also the concept that you know today is the slowest rate of change You will see for the rest of your life quite scary, isn't it then the second challenge and It's probably more relevant in a conference called predict is that it is bloody hard to predict the future Because our brains tend to be much more comfortable with linear Concepts than exponential. We just can't use our own experience that we've acquired over a lifetime And sometimes as the older generation, I'm starting to jump into that camp We think we've got the experience so we know more we know bugger all because we cannot use our experience to help us predict The future we just can't so actually younger person may be better prepared to understand what's coming then indeed a more senior one and I often do some school talks and so on I took to kids about engineering and Careers and so on and I compiled this slide with gadgets that Formed my Bringing my growing up years and the stuff that unfortunately has been resigned to scrappy pretty much all of it Like I said that IBM computer my dad used to work with those my dad still work with punctured cards there You can see her on the left My first computer ever the PC kind of ZX Spectrum You can see mixtapes and Tom and Jerry in the Walkman all this stuff I thought he's so cool with my first mobile phone there, but in reality and this is now Well in the past and as I said in scrappy and I use it here as a symbol as well that If you're not careful enough despite, you know the size we have as a company and I refer to BMW as well The future may not be a certain as we think it might be so what is the future going to look like? Well as part of our celebration of our hundred years, of course We kind of give each other a hug and say isn't it great? We are one of the few companies that can get to a hundred years, but more importantly What does an X a hundred years going to look like so as part of our celebrations? We unveiled for concept Vehicles that symbolize where we think we're going to go what you can see here on the screen is a BMW vision X 100 is You know a thorough BMW a car that will allow you the pleasure of driving that our customers really value But also the ability to be driven in the car in autonomous mode if you so wish We unveiled the mini vision X 100 a car that is a nod towards shared mobility So imagine you can drive from here To Dublin Airport in your mini with your temperature settings and your colors and your radio station and everything else You fly from Dublin to London you get there and your mini comes to collect you Recognizes you and changes its configuration to exactly the same mini you left behind so that means shared mobility It doesn't need to be kind of Inocuous you're not going to be in somebody else's car. It can still be your car even though is a totally different machine The Rolls-Royce vision X 100 the car is all about opulence and the Comfort of the customers as you can imagine not even the possibility to drive it It's gonna be a fully autonomous car because we expect that's what the Rolls-Royce customer would would want and the Motorrad vision X 100 A motorbike that is so safe that you don't need the helmet it to project augmented reality information about the road condition and a bike that keeps itself upright at all times through Gyroscopic effect now These were concept cars clearly, but they symbolize very strongly where we think the development of Mobility is gonna go. I'm gonna talk to you about these four themes That shape mobility not just for us, but pretty much the whole of the automotive industry is moving that direction The first theme is one of electrification you'd have seen outside and quite a few of the cars in our range from a BMW 3530 that carries a plug-in hybrid. I think currently mentioned the BMW i3 a fully electric car We see very clearly electrification is going to feature as The the near to the long-term future and we started back in 2012 That's what you can see that the BMW i3 the BMW i8 as well, which is a very progressive sports car as a plug-in hybrid and it is important not just because of course we talk about the beauty or the advantage of Electric mobility for having zero CO2 or the tailpipe So there's no emissions But we've gone further and we looked at the whole production process and we are using a lot Less power less emissions a much smaller carbon footprint right from the beginning right from production We we've earned the Dow Jones sustainability index for the last ten years And is pretty much on the back of the focus we are putting on Sustainability so compared to a conventional small car if you look at the i3 It's about 50% of the carbon footprint in production Let alone the fact that there's no CO2 there after when you're driving the vehicle And I was recently the IAA in Frankfurt and it's clear that pretty much every brand They are rushing the kind of elbows out getting to the nearest socket to plug their cars You know everyone is really rushing towards that Electrification of the mobility and that's just not a professionally taken shot. I took that in my own camera There was our press conference and we've got we've got nine Models already including electric scooter. You can see on the screen a mini plug-in hybrid as well So nine models that are on the road today And I really encourage you I think in all your packs You've got a voucher for a go car to is a great opportunity to try for yourselves an electric car I highly recommend that so up until now when I talk about The the way mobility is developing has been very much about engineering, you know harnessing Power harnessing electricity into electronics But now it becomes about harnessing the power of data as well because electrification is still about engineering playing with technology But from now on is is about data. I talk about shared mobility We have something you call drive now is really a shared mobility concept We've got it running on the shit 12 and it's 13 cities since I put a slide together with other Milan and Brussels as well Over 810,000 customers and growing people that are using this concept of shared mobility We expect the younger generations. They can see a lot of lot here today They don't want the hassle of owning a car. They want to use it as and when they need it and Leave it back. So somebody else to worry about the tires and the maintenance and the insurance and all that kind of stuff and Also when you look at the growth for us as a company if you mentioned this very simple diagram We've got business potential on the y-axis and time on the x-axis We've gone from a very much an owning economy Which I put Ireland very firmly in that we're starting to see a bit of finance economy growing where people actually being more comfortable with the PCP you know the leasing model of Car ownership and we expect in the future the potential for growth is on demand You know, I think the mobile phone is a bit of a cliche talking about how it has changed the way we look at owning stuff But it's very true. No one will go and buy an expensive handset and then look to maintain it or replace it You pay 50 quid a month and off you go. That's your your mobile needs KG for we expect the same is gonna happen with with car ownership and the vouchers I mentioned in your pack are for go car. It's kind of a car sharing scheme living in Dublin. We don't have Drive now in Dublin at the moment. The next key theme is one of connectivity We're all obsessed with data and everything at our fingertips and you can see on the left There are quite a few of the applications drive now. I've mentioned looking at park now Parking availability is served to you. So, you know, it's like where the parking spot is waiting charge now looking at wherever you are in the world having a network of kind of charging that you can access very easily and pay for very easily and The BMW connected up which we are growing and really we're heading towards this open mobility cloud where everything from your favorite coffee shop to the weather conditions and the traffic jam and Need to be at nine o'clock in a certain place is all brought to you Into your device from the moment you're in bed where you get a warning. So actually there's been a crash You probably should get our bed now if you want to be at nine o'clock in the RDS in Dublin That's where clearly the the the kind of mobility offer is is is going and I will finish with the concept of automation Everyone is obsessed with when is a driverless car coming was great to see John actually made the a nod towards the I think the Google car you mentioned And clearly it's coming. It's kind of already here to some extent. This is the You know the the ingredients inside the latest BMW 5 series and 7 series with driving assistance We call it there's a lot of technology ready in the car to actually allow it to constantly survey the surrounding and we are already the way we look at the journey towards autonomous cars is in these five steps you can see Level zero being just about the human interface. Pops my dad's NSU prints as you saw earlier feet off with introduction of Active cruise control that the car breaks and accelerates for you based on the surroundings. We are ready at the hands-off stage So latest BMW 5 series and of course other manufacturers that do it as well Allow you to actually have hands-off for a short period of time at this stage because it's clear for legal reasons The drivers to fully in control But you can already let go of the steering wheel on the motorway and the car will carry on steering braking accelerating And to keep you safe and on the move the next stage is one of eyes off for longer periods of time You can actually go on your emails iPads and so on Mind-off allows you to sleep in the car potentially take a good nap and The car will warn you if they needs your help to eventually and I'm hoping that's the case by the time my son Goes to rugby training because I don't want to have to drive him to the training No Sunday morning and stand by the lines on a freezing cold. I can get him in a pod You'll be driven there and back without me having to get out of bed now This video will be able to explain those stages much quicker than I could The BMW group is implementing fully autonomous driving over five levels of development in the process of Responsibility for driving the car will shift from the person at the wheel to the car itself Today the second level has already been reached here The driver is aided by assistance systems and can remove their hands from the steering wheel for brief periods at the third level They will sometimes be able to completely turn their attention away from driving But must be able to step in again a short notice once level four is reached the driver might even be able to sleep They must have a still be basically fit to drive in case they have to take over control of the car for specific sections of the journey It is at the final level of development that cars will drive fully autonomously The driver will become another passenger and won't even have to be able to drive as the car will assume complete Responsibility for the task of driving at level to stereo cameras and radar sensors monitor the immediate surrounding area Level three requires highly advanced sensors such as laser scanners Ultrasonic sensors and radar systems which together produce a 360 degree model of the vehicles environment This makes it possible to calculate more complex driving maneuvers for level four fully automated driving from 2021 all sensors and cameras will supply far more precise data While the real-time data from the area maps provided by here will also be factored into the process of computing driving maneuvers Level five the first pilot projects for fully autonomous driving are due to get underway in selected cities from as early as 2020 For the BMW group the vision of fully autonomous driving has long since begun So you can see how I was developing so fast clearly when we're not there yet I don't think we'll be there just for a little while You'll see pilots appearing, but there's a lot more work needs to be done on sensor systems some of the radar some of the cameras need to be improved and You mentioned the power of artificial intelligence. That's gonna play a key role NIST would advance more because we need to be able to say confidently that the car the machine is able to handle complex situations in a similar way to a human would do ideally even safer because it's constantly creating this digital reality model and will see beyond what We as human beings will be able to see and predict the big challenge is that big chunk in the middle called Regulatory requirements. There's a lot of catching up to do. How will law deal with the fact that are you in control of the car? How will their insurance provider will kind of cover you? Is it use at your fault? Is that the car that took over? There's a lot of work needs to be done there But I think from a technology perspective. I can assure you by 2021 you'll see the technology ready pilots running. We probably expect to see fully autonomous pilots running in low-speed areas like cities even though they're complex they're safer and Semi-autonomous or highly autonomous on motorways John mentioned trucking be a great example where you can set a you know a laureate truck from Lisbon to Moscow without really having human intervention or very little human intervention as and when needed and I use this model here because in the context of the audience I've got in front of me Is relevant looking at the power of data you can see how in the future It will only work if the car if all cars are connected So actually the cars way beyond beyond the reach in terms of vision of the car and the sensors The car knows because the car is getting from other cars information about the situation so you can have cars transmitting to this mobility cloud and Which turn the reality into a model that every car is tapping into? So a car will know that 300 500 meters ahead there's an accident and will automatically reduce speed whilst we as drivers will be surprised when you get there You can see how the concept of the machine being safer than us as humans Will head towards a much safer driving environment than we see today and those are the four themes and with that I conclude my presentation so you can see a very exciting time for anyone in the industry and clearly the the message especially in a conference like this is When I talk about the shift from the power of engineering to the power of harnessing data There's a way of shaping the future of mobility and I'll finish with our in our very visual way of Representing the way we see the future for all of us The future has begun With mobility that does more than simply transport It offers new freedom personally individually and full of excitement Mobility that gives us time for other things Because it's connected That makes us the ultimate driver When we want it to that electrifies Not only because it's electric Mobility that offers us an exclusive sanctuary and gives luxury a new dimension That's not only a vehicle but also a Companion That's always there when we need it And that adapts to us the way we are That provides us a different kind of safety and a new feeling of freedom The future has begun with mobility that makes anything possible BMW Group The next 100 years Thank you


Welcome back, everyone. CUBE's live coverage here in Boston, messages Red Hat Summit 2023, as well as AnsibleFest folded in. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Rob Streche, analyst breaking down all the action with me. We've got a great guest here. CUBE alumni, Shesh Bhande, Senior Vice President and the Chief Product Officer of Red Hat. Shesh, great to see you. We did a little preview interview. We were kind of teasing it out, but now it's happening. Welcome to theCUBE for here, big event. Great, thank you for having me back, John. Good to see you. All right, so slew of announcements. Yesterday was the big day. Day two here, a lot of stuff came out, a lot of Ansible Heavy stuff in the front end. Today's about scale, efficiency, and edge. We talked about one of your customers in the automotive area, energy, open sources booming. What's your favorite announcement? Take us through the highlights. Give us the top, top announcements. Well, it's hard to pick your favorite child. Yeah. I don't want to do that. You could talk about AI, right? You got to talk about AI these days, right? I can't have a conference without an AI conversation. So I think those were really good conversations to have. Lots of interest in that space from us, right? We can see that clearly. I think what's fascinating to also see is some of the areas that you typically don't expect Red Hat to be making announcements in, that we've made some really good forward progress on. So for example, developer experience, I think was great, right? I've actually had customers come up to me and be like, wow, I was so glad to hear you're doing this work off of the backstage project. We actually use it, and now I can go off and start taking advantage of what Red Hat's being to bear. So I thought the work we're doing on the developer side was fantastic. And then another area, which I guess most of you wouldn't call sexy necessarily, but is so critical is on the secure software supply chain. I know you had Vincent Dan and come on, talk about that as well. Critical work and it's work that we've been doing inside of Red Hat that we're now going off and exposing their customers. Well, Christian Uber, his name's Uber, he's in the automotive area, was ironic, but he's one of your top customers. And he's doing the edge. He actually brought up that they're trying to enable, bring your own foundation model into the automotive. And he highlighted the transparency of the software supply chain as one of the core elements. This has been a big conversation in open source communities around the visibility, is it accurate, the changing dynamic nature of what's in the bill of the materials for the code? Why is it so important as a product owner looking at this, staring down the barrel of this really important area? What's going on? What's the priorities? What don't people know about? I think the ability for us to really dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to start onboarding the application environments is huge. So if you say, wow, something like this took me weeks if not months to do, can I get this in days? Something that took me multiple steps to do, can I do it in a few clicks? 600 plus lines of YAML code to onboard an application and bring it in. Can I do that in significantly less time? That's our vision around that. So that's number one. Number two, once you've done that, on the other end of it, you're going to make sure you're auto generating, for example, software builds of material, S-POMs. Critical from a customer perspective to do. And then be able to also incorporate all the other technologies that companies find so valuable. For example, we've invested pretty heavily with others in the community in SIGstore. Be able to start incorporating digital signing and verification of signatures at station and provenance of software components all the way through supply chain. Again, it's plumbing work. It's kind of work Red Hat does, right? This is the chopwood carry water work that we do, which we think is critically important that we can now make available to customers. I think that that has been one of the themes that I've picked up on this week has been how do you make it simpler for people? I think coming out of KubeCon where they're still doing a lot of YAML code up on their keynotes, I thought it was great when during your keynotes yesterday where it was like, hey, look, no YAML for the data scientists, for OpenShift data science to then integrate in back into that platform and back in through Ansible to go and do that. Has that been really a big goal of yours is that there's new personas coming into, especially at the platform engineering, as you kind of mentioned yesterday, is that really one of your key personas that you're naming? I think you caught on that real well, because the point of, let's say, an Ansible Lightspeed is to say, well, you're stuck with the YAML, how can we make it easy so you can put in plain text and then get something back? Conversation with someone is like, well, can't I do that in chat GPT? Well, sure you can, right? But now being able to give you something that's domain-specific is much more powerful. The next step that actually customers are asking us about is to say, well, I've got a bunch of playbooks already built in-house, right? Large Financial Service customer, big Ansible user, can I train that model directly in-house? So now we give you both, right? We give you OpenShift data science, right? For our OpenShift AI solution for the MLOps platform, run your own model, customize in that environment, and then on the other end of it, make sure that you can use it, for example, directly apply it to areas like Ansible. Rob was talking last time we were in Vancouver for OpenShift Summit about YAMLs in every demo, and yesterday you commented, finally, no YAML in a demo. Why is YAML SoCHA hanging around or when it comes to interface? And why does it take so long to kind of abstract it away because it's super important. Everyone recognizes that, but then it's also like a lot of syntax, like what's the, is there going to be an abstraction layer? Is it going to be voice? Well, we always do that, right? We always provide an abstraction layer, and then immediately people are like, wow, that's really opinionated, that doesn't really necessarily work exactly my way. What can I change or tweak? And the moment we say that, now you've got to get away a little bit from the GUIs, right, give people access to CLIs, and then start tweaking the code. There's a balance to be had, and we're seeing that clearly customers have gotten comfortable with SaaS, but I think of that really more as end user applications. The moment it becomes related to anything around infrastructure or backend, customers want some amount of... Oh, they want to get in there, they can get in there too themselves. Sure, that user interface is key. And we're an open source company, right? So our fundamental belief is, hey, code's open, you're not be able to use it. Hey, command line, it's interface, whatever your choice is, I get that. How about the developer hub? Because that was an announcement. I want to know more about that. What's the positioning there? Is that going to be like a single source of truth? What's the positioning of it? Explain how you see that rolling out and being used by customers. So that came to us via straight out customer demand. So, John, I know you were at KubeCon, right? KubeCon is when we announced some upstream participation from us, right? In typical Red Hat fashion, right? Make sure we're going into the upstream. In backstage, yeah. Sorry? In backstage. In backstage, yeah, exactly right. In backstage, right? And then once we can do that, now we can go off and say, we'll provide a distribution for you, and then we'll provide a set of plugins for you that'll make it easier for you to use a set of commonly asked tools from our customers, both within the Red Hat portfolio, but also outside that. So we'll go through a period of maturation with it, right? Just like we've historically done with every open source project. Great, great example is event of an Ansible. First time we released that was a service preview at Ansible Fest last year, and now it's got to GA. Get customer feedback, get input, gets through maturation, and then we'll take it out to GA. And I think we'll go through the same process with Developer Hub. I mean, I just ran into a couple of customers who said, hey, I didn't know if you knew. We're actually using backstage. You know, so happy to hear you've got this. I'm going to start playing with it. Yeah, and what was the big attraction for backstage? The audience, that's not familiar with it. Why are people liking it? What was resonating? And where's the future going to go in your mind? I think these are a couple of factors. One is with the pandemic, distributed workforce, right? Developers were much more spread out than before, right? So you got distributed environments, and then also just almost a cognitive overload. Lots of tools coming their way. So one, how do you make sure teams that are spread apart can use something consistently? Two, how can you have a plugin model that allows for new tools and so on to be burned to bare? And then of course, do it in a way that people can feel like, hey, I'm doing something that's accessible to me as being built by other folks with like-minded issues and be able to engage in it. And so I think that's really how it started getting a lot of traction. I think what's interesting is that, and we had had some discussions with some of the ecosystem partners as well. And I think it brings that cloud-like development environment to everybody. And I think that a lot of the clouds, they all have their version of it, and that's their control plane, and almost a control point for keeping you in that ecosystem. Have you seen customers asking for that?  I mean, the open source is one, and open shift is pretty much in every place, including not just the big hyperscalers, but even the regional sovereign clouds and things of that nature. Has that really been a push? Well, actually it's both, right? So one is we obviously want to make it really easy to use with OpenShift, but use it with other environments too. I mean, we made a similar announcement, for example, with Advanced Cluster Security as a service, right? So that's the technology we got with StackRock's acquisition. Use it via OpenShift, but use it in other non-OpenShift Kubernetes environments as well, right? So the ability to give folks choice and say, you know, use the environment that you're most comfortable with, but then we will support you. And obviously, hopefully the set of products that we're releasing, we want to make sure we have an integrated experience with, is a powerful thing, service interconnect, right? Yet another example, right? Which is, you know, developers say, I've got application microservices, you know, in this distributed environment, these clusters running in all these different places, some of which are OpenShift, some of which are other Kubernetes environments, how can I connect those up, right? And the OpenShift AI, that's really the generate AI is for hybrid cloud. That seems to be the positioning for the OpenShift piece. To be able to run generative AI models on OpenShift AI, right? So OpenShift AI is the ML. So the analogy would be, back in the day, you've got, you know, a variety of different proprietary OSs, right? Now you've got Linux.  And we brought to bear OpenShift. The same, for example, on the ML ops front, right?  How about we provide them a standard foundation to be able to run them consistently, which is done in an open fashion? And the use cases there are what? Specifically, the opening up? Use cases are varied. I mean, we've got customers today, you know, just to be clear, we're already running AI ML applications, right? An innovation award this year was given to Banco Galicia, right? What was that for? That was for running NLP, right? So basically running natural language processing to cut down significantly the amount of time to open accounts, right? And do verification of that, doing that in an open shift. The beauty is now, you know, let's give them a foundation to be able to have a way to use a variety of different tools, be able to do model serving, model training, life cycling of them, and be able to do that consistently over time. I have to ask you as the product leader, chief product officer, you get the keys to the kingdom, meaning you've got the engineering behind you, requirements for engineering, as well as customer, which is open source and customers. So you got kind of like multiple front end stakeholders. Yeah. If you're asked, what's Red Hat's top three bets? What are you guys betting on? I mean, obviously open source has been the big bet, that's kind of standard. What are you betting on from the products going forward? Because as customers look at all the array of announcements, I mean, you've got ecosystem development partners, so you've got partner products, integration, integrating in, you got a lot of AI, you got a lot of blocking and tackling, chopping wood, carrying water, you know, operating new news. Where's the bets? What's the top three bets for Red Hat? So we fundamentally stand behind our open hybrid cloud bet, which is the notion of you have an abstraction that runs regardless of where you want to run it. You saw that in keeping on investing, for example, in REL, making that available in public market places from all the hyperscalers. So we do that with that. OpenShift is made available, self-managed, or as a cloud service, you know, run that with any hyperscaler that you want, consistent, add edge to that. So now you can say, well, is that a separate bet, is that one, you know, we can, you know. It's an extension. It's an extension, right? And it's a continuum, right? For us, right? So okay, so now you say, well, our open hybrid cloud, you know, stretches out to the edge and make sure that, you know, we're providing that in a consistent fashion. I think we feel pretty good about that. So that's one. Two, now you say, well, now we're doing all of that. I've got all these applications running here. How can I do that in a more intelligent way? I can do it in a smarter way, right? That's where the AI that comes in, right? We're not in the business of, you know, producing series of models, right? Let the hugging faces of the world and the others, you know, do that, right? We want to make sure we are supporting that innovation. So I think you definitely will see us, you know, have a player on that. And then we want to surround that with a series of services that are critical, both for developers as well as for operators in those environments, right? Developer experience is key, right?  And so everything we can do to make it easier for you to want to run the hybrid cloud, take advantage of the intelligence that applications provide, you know, that sort of thing. That's great. Thanks for sharing the priorities. We talked to Matt yesterday. It was interesting what fits in that bet was the conversation we had a panel with Senior Vice President of IBM support, professional services, and a customer. Interesting dynamic, the bet and the extension into the IBM piece is one, multi-cloud came up. So obviously hybrid, in your opinion, extends to multi-cloud. Is that in the same bet category? Yeah. Okay. So the other thing we have to, I'd love to get your reaction is, is multi-cloud multi-environment or multi-cloud as in stacks? So you got Azure, AWS, and we were trying to, and we were, it's nuanced point, we went, we were kind of riffing like, what is that, is multiple environments one thing or multiple clouds a thing? Meaning, okay, I got Amazon, I got Microsoft, they're different stacks, but different environments. So it was kind of a point we were kind of riffing on because on one hand you could say environments are not multiple clouds. Yeah. Interesting point. I have to think about that some more. I think there's a lot of conversions in those, between the multi-environment multi-sets. We've got to be careful too, because the moment you allow a lot of customization, we've seen this historically, and perhaps the perspective of the person who spoke to IBM who's in the professional services business, a different one, because they'll support different choices. If we have too many places that choices have been made, now you're talking about essentially having to support multiple distributors. There's only so many that you can do in a consistent fashion and life cycle.  We're like, well, we'll hold on a second. Are we doing DevOps? Can you? Can you? 10 years is pretty good. So we've got that challenge as well, right? We've got customers who want these long life cycles, and if you keep tuning everything underneath, well, we can't. Well, that's a good point. Again, we were getting to the same conclusion of, it's nuance, terminology, semantics, matter, naming, getting confused. But I think at the end of the day, we're seeing multiple clouds in a customer environment. And so you're seeing hybrid, certainly is one, one the day, good check. Now that extends out into the edge, and you're dealing with multiple environments. So again, we stay with the environment term, but I mean, I don't know what you think, Rob, but I mean, it's a nuanced point, but people are building the stacks inside the middle layer, so if they're on Amazon and they have customers on Azure, they kind of do it under the covers. And I think we had some ecosystem discussions with Stephanie yesterday talking about how, and some of the others across the ecosystem with Jeremy Winters was here yesterday as well, about how it may be, hey, I have this stack, becomes my infrastructure, and here's the pieces I'm using from Azure, that are Azure-native and things of that nature, which I think it seems like that's where you're meeting that ecosystem and kind of looks like almost a mantra, because even on the security side, and the S-volume side, it seems to be that way as well. Agree 100%, right, and the relationship that we have with hyperscalers like both Microsoft as well as Amazon is critical in this. I mean, you're seeing them come and talk about, and I think you saw in the keynote too, right, they're talking about the long relationships that we've got with them, that we were going to work closely with them, that's the only way to do it. It's not easy, I'll say that, right? Because, you know, we got to do it. And you had, we were going on stage, she's the head of partners with Stephanie, that was a huge relationship. You have Dell making an appliance, that's pretty big news actually. The Red Hat appliance? 100% you're right, actually, maybe we didn't even talk about that a whole lot, but yes, that's another one. And then, you know, I met some other partners, they're like, hey, we want to be up on stage as well, talking about all the work we're doing with you. So, making sure that we're not at the end of it, spreading ourselves so thin, that then the customer's like, well, I'm getting a suboptimal experience, I think that's really important. What's your message to the Ansible community out there? They've done a great job. Again, that community has grown and been thriving. The Ansible Fest was folded into Red Hat. The rationale there was to kind of keep a bigger, broader piece of it, right? Bring the products together. What's the product synergy? Obviously, pretty notable on day one, it's Ansible Heavy. Yeah, well, one, automation is really important to us because we're seeing how important it is to our customers, right? Especially with our day one message about becoming much more efficient. So that's critical. Related with that is we're keeping on adding capability into core Ansible. Event-driven Ansible is a great example of that, right? Hey, you don't have to necessarily pay us more. We'll just keep, you know, building to it. But, I mean, the third one, which, you know, personally is really exciting to me, right? This is the part where I think of, you know, AI as being magical, right? Is doing things like lightspeed that really, really reduce the barriers for someone to use. I mean, Ansible is easy enough. I mean, that's one of the reasons why it's so popular. It's easy enough to use, but being able to essentially, what I think of almost like Khan Academy plugged right into a console, I mean, how amazing is that? It's funny, we're going to look back some of the cube videos we did two years ago, a shash around Ansible. We're like, this is the future. I mean, we were basically saying back then that the Ansible users end up ruling the kingdom. Turns out that automation is actually crossing over mainstream. Share your perspective to the audience on how automation will unfold, because it's not just automated configurations. That's easy, not easy, low-hanging fruit, I should say. But where does it go next? What's the next phase? Yeah, great question. So before it goes next, what we also want to make sure is that all the areas that we're releasing into start getting adopted. So that's been one of the biggest points of conversation I'm having with customers. Because I said, we're releasing all these capabilities, whether it's with Ansible LightSpeed, whether it's with automation, we're doing other works on AI and security. We're doing much more work for Ansible from a security perspective. I want to make sure that these capabilities are actually used. Because someone in product, the thing that's most exciting to us is release something that's getting used. And if it's not, get the feedback across to us as to, hey, these parts are useful, these other parts aren't. So we can go back and then go off and iterate and then change them. So for me, from this point on here, it's like, hey, this Red Hat Summit released a bunch of technology, hopefully got people really excited about that. Now I want to spend the time making sure users engage in it. Your momentum with Red Hat has been pretty spectacular. We've been following it for many, many years, as you know. It's almost got that cadence of AWS now with the news. I mean, Amazon's got a zillion announcements, but you're starting to see a lot more diversity and a bigger aperture with IBM, bringing together more customer use cases. You get a lot of products. You're like, what's it like running the show over there? Take us through the day of the life. What goes on? Is it going to get bigger? How fast is it going to expand? What are you expecting to see from a product standpoint? Well, the good news is, there's a huge amount of customer interest, right? So now the question is, how do we work substantially in areas to make a difference? What we've changed, I think in many ways, is trying to get customers much earlier into a cycle. So I don't know if either anyone from ABB or from- Just earlier today. You just came earlier, right? Great example. Both partners, ABB as well as ATOS of Bosch, we've been working with them now for many months. And the product that we're talking about, that hasn't hit GA yet, that's going to do in second half of the year. We're just starting to involve our ecosystem earlier on the process. I think that's really changed. In the past, it was only open source community and then you get feedback. Now we're like, look, how do we actually get folks who are delivering value to their customers into an involvement? It's this notion of co-creation earlier on. They're building on top of Red Hat. They had the Red Hat Vehicle Operating System. They're hardening the top to create more development in cars. So that's a mind-blowing example we had there. Yeah, and with the Edge Genius out of ABB, which was really good, because I've been in the oil and E&P part of oil and exploration. And it was very interesting to hear them talk about, because you're talking about critical infrastructure as well. I mean, you had the life safety aspect of cars, but also in the critical. They're talking about robotic arms on factory floors. They're talking about wind farms.  You saw in the keynote demo and the bottling plant. Now we can, you know, put that. You got a great job. What can people expect from you going forward? What's your priorities, the folks watching? Give it a plug for your organization. What are you guys working on? What's on the roadmap? What are some of your priorities? Well, I'll start with, you know, we want to make sure we're staying true to our heritage, right? You know, it's three decades in open source. Ensure that we're true to open source. We're true to the community, helping bring that forward, right? So I think that's number one. I want to make sure that, you know, folks don't think, you know, as we sort of expand on. Number two, there's a lot of different technology areas and, you know, the temptation, right? Especially from a product perspective, I think about if you ask me what keeps you up, oh my gosh, will we spread ourselves to 10, right? Because, you know, we have so much interest in each of the areas, but the question is, you know, you've got to be, it's necessary and sufficient. You've got to be able to balance both of those. There's so many great opportunities. Don't jump at too many of them. Exactly, right? And so how do we make sure that, you know, we're going at the right gains? Like you want to be ahead of, you know, what customers want, but not too far ahead, right? And so being able to kind of balance those as we go advance our roadmaps, I think that's super high priority for me. Yeah, and the growth is coming. And I think AI, Matt Hicks was pointing out that he thinks that the AI trajectory will match the trajectory of Linux, but much faster. And he was on the quote, yes, though, I thought that was a quote of the week. And I agree with him. I think the AI is going to have such an influence, not only to RedHap, but the community. I mean, we saw that at KubeCon, we saw it at Open Source Summit. And all the developers, it's another tool to them. They like it. Now we're like, okay, hold on. Let's see how it goes, but good stuff. That's just, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Thanks very much for having me on. Congratulations. Okay, Kube coverage here. Day two, RedHap Summit continuing. I'm John Furrier, Rob Stretcher. We'll be right back with more after this short break.