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Karthik Krishnamoorthy

VP Product Management

Cloudera

Arne Arnold

Senior Principal Product Manager, SAP Solutions

Red Hat

Cloudera and Red Hat team up to enhance AI cloud security

Through its partnership with Red Hat Inc., Cloudera Inc. looks to meet an increasing demand for artificial intelligence workloads with a stronger and more protected cloud infrastructure.“The power of [Red Hat] OpenShift elasticity and the combination of our streaming solutions provide [customers] an elastic solution that is cloud-native,” said Karthik Krishnamoorthy (pictured, left), vice president of product at Cloudera. “It not only starts with OpenShift, but also expands fully into a hybrid architecture in the future as well

play_circle_outline Tailoring the operating system to meet the needs of the application

play_circle_outline Security and reliability with CVE mitigation and extensive testing

play_circle_outline Collaboration to address customer needs by meeting them where they are

Info

Karthik Krishnamoorthy | Cloudera & Arne Arnold | Red Hat

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

VP Product Management Cloudera

Arne Arnold

Senior Principal Product Manager, SAP Solutions Red Hat

Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to day two of theCUBE's live coverage of the Red Hat Summit here in beautiful, sunny, but cold Denver, Colorado. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Paul Gillan. Paul, one of the things that Red Hat does so well is you really feel the sense of community here and you feel the sense of the importance of these strategic partnerships and collaborations that Red Hat has throughout the

Paul Gillin

>> partners and from the customers. One thing Red Hat does very well with this conference is it involves its customers as presenters on the main stage and they really let the customers do the talking. And I think they do that probably better than any other company in the industry.

>> I would agree. I would agree.

Rebecca Knight

>> And a great segue to introduce our next two guests. We have Karthik Krishnamoorthy. He's the VP of Product Management at Cloudera. Welcome, Karthik.

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

>> Hello, nice to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> And Arne Arnold. He is a Senior Principal Product Manager at SAP Solutions Red Hat. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.

Arne Arnold

>> Good morning. Thanks for having us here.

Rebecca Knight

>> So speaking of strategic partnerships and collaborations, I know that you both, you are part of a strategic collaboration. I would love you to walk through our viewers, what it means and what it does and what it means for customers? Karthik, let's start with you.

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

>> Cloudera and Red Hat have been partners for a very long time, for over 10 years. We've joined solutions into the market, especially how our products work closely with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. 90% of our customers use RHEL as their base OS. And now we see a lot of customers transitioning from CentOS into RHEL. And RHEL gives them the best secure platform, mitigate CDs, gives them up-to- date performance at scale that Cloudera's customers and Red Hat's customers use.

Paul Gillin

>> Was the transition from CentOS to RHEL an easy decision or did you look at alternatives seriously?

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

>> It is pretty slam dunk and straightforward. RHEL and CentOS are mirrors of each other and for customers, it's a pretty straightforward transition. And Red Hat makes it easy for customers to even move from CentOS to RHEL. And then our customers, Cloudera's customers who are running large data, running petabytes and petabytes of data, we have about 25 extra bytes of data on our platforms and a lot of these customers want a secure operating system because that's what InfoSec policies mandate. So for them, it's pretty straightforward with their relationship with Red Hat and their relationship with

Cloudera as well.>> Arne, I want to bring you into this conversation.

Rebecca Knight

>> How do you describe this partnership in terms of driving further innovation within the open source community? Because that is after all, Red Hat's sweet spot.

Arne Arnold

>> Yes. Well, data is driving our today's businesses. And so at Red Hat, we have Red Hat Enterprise Linux built for enterprises, but we actually want to meet the customers where they are with the needs of their businesses. So we do focus more on some of business-critical workloads, which actually are at the heart of a customer business. And so our partnership with Cloudera is one of those partnerships. So we really want to make sure that we tailor the operating system more to the needs of the application to deliver a more differentiated experience. And so working with Cloudera over past by making sure that their workload is running on OpenShift as well as on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is actually where we are providing additional value not only to our partners' operations, but also to the end customer by actually making it more easy for the end customer to bring the joint solution, for example, to InfoSec process. But also ensuring with our work, which we do in regards to live kernel patching and being able to provide fixes for critical CVEs more faster to Cloudera and hence also to the end customers making the difference.

Paul Gillin

>> Now, in addition to making this migration, you've also released a number of operators for OpenShift. Tell us what those are and why they're specifically valued to your customers?

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

>> Absolutely. So our customers use for the entire data lifecycle. So right from the data at source, from ingestion, all the way to using it for AI. And a lot of the streaming customers use OpenShift for today's containerization and cloud-native platforms. Now, our data in motion, which is what a suite of products are, which is Apache Kafka and NiFi, and we built operators on them so they can run on the OpenShift infrastructure. So customers can very easily deploy them and start deploying their data in motion or streaming data pipelines right away. And then they can combine those data with other static data, et cetera. And what this does is, especially for customers who want to move towards cloud-native architectures, the power of OpenShift elasticity and the combination of our streaming solutions provide them an elastic solution that is cloud-native. And tomorrow, it is easily expandable into the public cloud with a hybrid architecture. So it not only starts with OpenShift, but also expands fully into a hybrid architecture in the future as well.

Paul Gillin

>> And for those who don't know, maybe just briefly what Apache NiFi is?

>> Apache NiFi is data flow.

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

>> So we have all these different agents that can run on different edge systems that collect data. So typically, an oil manufacturing or an oil extraction company can use it in edge refineries, et cetera, to collect data and send it over the wire to central systems that data is processed. Another example is manufacturing data. So these are examples of data where that is captured live or captured in bits and streams. And then the advantage of something like this is customers can then run SQL or live queries on streaming data. So when they run it on a platform like OpenShift, you can elastically scale based on the size of the data, size of the query, et cetera.

Rebecca Knight

>> So you're going through a lot of what the benefits are for existing as well as potential customers. Can you walk us through some of the other advantages of this partnership in terms of security and reliability?

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

>> Absolutely. So security, today's world is of highest concern. Our customers come to us with several different asks and one of the top asks is CVE mitigation. So most of the enterprise customers have very strict CVE mitigation policies. And about two years ago, we saw the whole Log4j zero vulnerability. So zero vulnerability happened. So how quickly we reacted into the market and how quickly, not only just our platform but our partnership with Red Hat comes into play because it is not just your application or your application platform, it is also the end-to-end infrastructure. So customers can patch OpenShift, customers can patch Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and also us simultaneously as we have tools and mechanisms to automate large deployments with security patches. Now, in a large data platform, reliability is obviously very important. That is why I think we take great care in terms of testing our platform at scale with our partnership with specifically Red Hat here. We use some of their guidance on testing it in large OpenShift systems, et cetera. Labs, we have set up for almost 30, 60, 90- day QE workflows to catch and remediate reliability issues that can happen before the product is released. Right? And we also consume a lot of the binaries from Red Hat as an early access customer. So that is where the partnership comes into play because as soon as Red Hat has a beta version available, we start testing with it so that we don't have to wait for the end product to come before we test. So our partnership here tremendously helps us build our QE systems for catching and doing reliable tests over time. And at the time of release, we are confident that we are putting out a stable system for customers.

Arne Arnold

>> And I can only echo that. Security, it's about the entire supply chain, it's about the entire stack. And so having the joint solution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux makes sure that actually, customers and Cloudera operations can benefit from all the work which we do in the operating system by having SA Linux and fapolicyd and all those features. But it also means that actually, our ecosystem or part of the ecosystem and we work with the hyperscalers which we do is of benefit to Cloudera where we can make sure that we support also the hardware technologies where instances provide are enabled in the operating system and hence enabled into the stack. And I think one aspect, which you also mentioned which stands out is really with breadth of technology in the portfolio, integration between OpenShift and RHEL using standardized tools, having Red Hat insights, enabling the operations team to easily identify any CVEs which needs to be patched, any other activities which needs to be carried out, having similar life cycle, having one person to call for support, that is really where... Ultimately, the customer gets the benefit from all those different pieces interacting and integrating and making sure that we hold stack, not just for piece which is running on OpenShift, vice versa for piece is running on RHEL, but the entire stack end-to-end is being secured by the work which we do and by the collaboration which we have together.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent.>> Cloudera,

Paul Gillin

>> several years ago positioned itself as a maker of tools for machine learning. LLMs have come along. How has that changed your priorities and your positioning?

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

>> So the generative AI market and the ML market has just exploded in the last two years. So we have a suite of products where we do NLP to SQL where we train all of the languages, queries, et cetera. So a customer can type almost the entire SQL in written English and it'll translate into queries. And we integrate into all of the known LLMs in the market, whether it's Mistral, whether it is Llama, but not just the open source LLMs and the model registry that is provided with hugging phase, but also proprietary models because of our integration into AWS BedRock, as well as AWS SageMaker and all these other tools. And I think our partnership with OpenShift is very collaborative here in a couple of different ways because some of these on-prem customers deploy data at scale and they have large amounts of data that they want to train for their LLMs. And that is where I think our partnership comes into play because when they run our ML models either for traditional ML or deep learning type workloads or for the modern genAI and enterprise AI type workloads. I think running them on OpenShift gives them the ability to quickly release things like Copilot into their customer base. We have one customer out of APAC who uses Copilot with OpenShift and Cloudera quite a bit. They've built a whole suite of AI applications for their business analysts, but also for their Python developers, et cetera. So you can see that there's a broad range of applications coming out of this partnership and out of the collaborative power of both technologies.

Rebecca Knight

>> I want to go back to something that Arne was talking earlier in the conversation around the importance of meeting customers where they are. How do the two of you and the partnership at large I mean, how are you talking with customers, getting their feedback on what their pain points are, the challenges that they're facing, and then coming together to collaborate and solve their problems? It's something that at least Paul was saying, it's something that Red Hat appears to do quite well, but how do you work together to make sure you are in fact answering and addressing customers' needs?

Arne Arnold

>> If it comes to a cloud solution or a customer primarily contacts Cloudera directly, if we talk about more of a private cloud solution, we may be more directly engaged and actually, we are serving the needs of the end customer also in terms of the operations. So all what I mentioned earlier, now benefiting in the cloud solution in regards to insights and automation, all that piece. That is something that we have in the private deployment, also for direct customer relation. But in the end, it's a joint go-to-market to the customer, really focusing on the business need, which is served by the private Cloudera data platform, and then underpinned by the infrastructure which Red Hat provides. And as we just talked about AI and we heard yesterday in the keynote, AI and open Source also is going closely to gather. And so looking into the future, I think that also creates a great opportunity to even deepen that partnership also in that area of AI running on top of OpenShift and RHEL.

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

>> Yeah, if I can quickly just add a couple of lines to it, I think we have a lot of customers who are joint customers. So conversation is fairly natural extension of our conversation. So when we talk about Cloudera products, it automatically expands into the underlying ecosystem that Red Hat provides and vice versa. So we have alliance partnerships established between both companies. We do a lot of joint events like what we do here at the Red Hat Summit. We've also done the same thing at the KubeCon where partners as part of the Red Hat booth there to give live demos. So we have a lot of demos and how the products work together built in with OpenShift plus our data services. So customers will come look at these demos, look at how the products work together, or automatically enthuse to go take up these two together.

Rebecca Knight

>> And they see you as one.>> Yes, absolutely.

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

>> Exactly. Excellent. Well, Arne

Rebecca Knight

>> and Karthik, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. A really fun conversation.

>> Thank you so much.>> Thanks a lot also.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Paul Gillan.

Arne Arnold

>> Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

>> of the Red Hat Summit. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise technology coverage.

Karthik Krishnamoorthy | Cloudera & Arne Arnold | Red Hat

Rebecca Knight

Paul Gillin

>> I would agree. I would agree.

Rebecca Knight

>> And a great segue to introduce our next two guests. We have Karthik Krishnamoorthy. He's the VP of Product Management at Cloudera. Welcome, Karthik.

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

>> Hello, nice to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> And Arne Arnold. He is a Senior Principal Product Manager at SAP Solutions Red Hat. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.

Arne Arnold

>> Good morning. Thanks for having us here.

Rebecca Knight

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

Paul Gillin

>> Was the transition from CentOS to RHEL an easy decision or did you look at alternatives seriously?

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

Cloudera as well.>> Arne, I want to bring you into this conversation.

Rebecca Knight

>> How do you describe this partnership in terms of driving further innovation within the open source community? Because that is after all, Red Hat's sweet spot.

Arne Arnold

Paul Gillin

>> Now, in addition to making this migration, you've also released a number of operators for OpenShift. Tell us what those are and why they're specifically valued to your customers?

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

Paul Gillin

>> And for those who don't know, maybe just briefly what Apache NiFi is?

>> Apache NiFi is data flow.

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

Rebecca Knight

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

Arne Arnold

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent.>> Cloudera,

Paul Gillin

>> several years ago positioned itself as a maker of tools for machine learning. LLMs have come along. How has that changed your priorities and your positioning?

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

Rebecca Knight

Arne Arnold

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

Rebecca Knight

>> And they see you as one.>> Yes, absolutely.

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

>> Exactly. Excellent. Well, Arne

Rebecca Knight

>> and Karthik, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. A really fun conversation.

>> Thank you so much.>> Thanks a lot also.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Paul Gillan.

Arne Arnold

>> Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage

Karthik Krishnamoorthy

>> of the Red Hat Summit. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise technology coverage.