Hats Off

Chris Wright, CTO of Red Hat, did not start his tech journey with an open source company working on open source technologies. He started off as a system administrator maintaining and managing Unix systems in the early 1990s. However, he could not bring those massive Spark machines home with him, so he explored and discovered Linux and set up an x86 machine so he could play with the technology. "I enjoyed it. I like digging under the hood," he said.

He then graduated to become a developer working on high availability (HA) for a telecommunity platform and became more involved with Linux. With his work on the Linux HA project, he was bitten by the bug of working and collaborating with a community. "I was surrounded with incredibly smart people, and I learnt a lot from them."

He continued to evolve and ended up working on the Linux kernel itself. Some 12 years ago when Red Hat was looking for virtualization expertise, he joined the company from Open Source Development Labs (OSDL). "Back then, Red Hat didn't have virtualization offerings. They didn't really have a very large hypervisor team. They were using Xen and were looking at expertise in this space to drive that technology, productize it, and bring to market."

What Does the CTO Do?

Wright rose up the ranks within Red Hat and became the Chief Technology Officer (CTO)of the company. But what does the CTO of an open source tech company really do when most of their technologies are being developed in the open by different communities?

"My role is about strategy around technology, to make sure that we are paying attention to emerging technology trends and markets that are potentially relevant to Red Hat," said Wright.

Every new technology or trend could be an opportunity or a threat, irrespective of its nature. Companies like Red Hat need to keep an eye on them and turn threats into opportunities. That's what Red Hat has been doing lately. The company has evolved from being a Linux vendor to a solution provider, making it easier for its customers to use technologies that add value to their businesses.

The good news is that most of these technologies are open source. "I call open source the innovation engine for the industry," said Wright. "We are a part of these open source communities. One of my jobs is to find the emerging and exciting technology trends and understand what impact it would have on our products. That influences our roadmap and direction."

Crystal Ball

Keeping up with the latest trends and technologies is a not an easy job these days. New technologies, new paradigms, and new buzzwords are popping up on a monthly basis. Open source has triggered an innovation revolution, where companies are putting out their work for wider exploration and adoption. Collaboration makes it easier to iterate on such technologies by a much larger and diverse community than a few engineers on the payroll of the company.

So, how does Wright keep an eye on all these technologies? Does he have a crystal ball? "My crystal ball is visibility into other people who are giving me all the information that I need. It's not just me; it's a team effort."

Red Hat has a very strong presence in most of the open source projects, which enables Red Hat to gain insight into what customers are looking for, the real challenges customers face, and trends. Wright's team has access to this insight, which helps him frame the roadmap for the company.

"It's relatively easy to find emerging trends and technologies, but the real challenge is to identify the projects which are healthy and then try to find the intersection point into our product world," said Wright. "We spend our time looking at one level deeper: What are the projects? What are they up to?"

Another challenge is that many of these emerging trends tend to have multiple projects that overlap others' efforts; each project tries to achieve the same or a slightly different goal with its own approach. "We try to find those projects that will withstand the test of time and be there for the long term. We try to find those key projects and then help our enterprise customers make use of them in a reliable, consumable way," said Wright.

Red Hat is very actively and directly involved with all of these trending technologies to make these open source technologies useful for customers. Open source is about building the core technologies; it's about day one, but customers need to bring them into production. They need plumbing so all those components work together. They need support. It would be way too expensive to hire developers who know everything from kernel to containers to blockchain. That's where companies like Red Hat enter the picture, to offer fully integrated solutions so companies can focus on using technologies to add value to their business instead of wasting resources in putting the pieces together.

HAL Opens the Door

One of the hottest trends that caught Wright's attention was machine learning. "It's big, but there is a big hype cycle associated with it, so part of what we also do is try to distill fact from fiction," he said. As exciting as machine learning is, Red Hat is not going to offer a machine learning platform. It's yet another workload that can run using Red Hat technologies. "We have to make sure our platforms support that workload. It may not sound as exciting as machine learning and AI, but it's a lot of work," he said. Red Hat is also using machine learning internally so that its own products and services can benefit from it.

The Dangers of Machine Learning

I am personally a huge fan of the British science fiction series Black Mirror, and every time I meet a hard-core technologist, I ask whether they watch the show. Wright doesn't have enough time to watch the series, but he has seen a few episodes. The reason I talk about Black Mirror is that we are living in a time when we are surrounded by the marvels of technology – machine learning, AI, Internet of Things (IoT), and whatnot – but the same technologies have almost become surveillance mechanisms, where the balance tips toward giving away more than is received in return. It's less about technology and more about business models and ethics. Would it be different if these technologies were developed by fully open source companies like Red Hat?

"It's not unique to now. There's a long history of powerful technologies being useful in really positive ways and also capable of having a negative impact on humanity," he said. "I think we always have to look at: How are we responsible with technology development? There is an interesting project called The Partnership on AI [1]; though Red Hat is not a member, I support the concept."

The project is trying to understand the social implications behind machine learning and data collection. "There are some potential, real negative ways that technology could be used and the implicit biases that can enter into models that we then assume are unbiased because they're generated by a machine," he said. "I think it's really important to understand the potential social impacts of technology that we invent."

That's where open source comes to the rescue. "What I like about open source is at least the whole technology development process is open, collaborative, visible, and transparent," he said, "but it still doesn't mean that the technology that we create couldn't be used in positive or negative ways."

The big challenge with machine learning is that it's not that much about framework and platform as it's about data. Most companies have open sourced their machine learning platforms, but the real value is in data collected by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Uber, and so on. AI technologies feed on this data, and that data is not democratized, even if all the technologies consuming this data are.

"The open source development process creates technology that we understand; we know how to use it as code. That code may not be very useful without the data that's creating the data model," said Wright. "We have shifted that value from the code itself to the data. There is an interesting question about what data should be open and accessible. Especially when it's your data that's given to some service provider. A future vision that I would like to see is that I still retain a lot of control over my data – who has access to it; how it gets used. So you could imagine that there's a technology solution embedded in that problem, but first we have to recognize more at an industry level what it means to have all this value in data, and from an open source project point of view, we're going to keep building the technology. But it is true that some of that technology by itself is less useful without the data, which is providing a lot of the real value."

Other Areas of Interest

"There is a lot of working going on in and around containers and Kubernetes. Containers, container applications, and stuff that augment it is of interest to us – technologies that help us flush out the hybrid cloud story; it's about application portability. We also look at connectivity and storage," he said.

IoT is another area of interest, but Wright sees it more as an emerging market than an emerging technology. He looks at the set of use cases that employ technologies we already have. "We spend a lot of time in the NFV network function virtualization and telco space, looking at how that whole market is shifting to be fundamentally software driven. A lot of work is going on in preparation for 5G, which also has potential for edge computing and machine learning."

Conclusion

The takeaway from the interview, irrespective of whether you use Red Hat products or not, is that you should keep an eye on emerging technologies and markets. Try to see which are threats and which are opportunities; try to turn threats into opportunities, then bring those technologies to your customers in a way that they can invest their resources in adding value to their business instead of maintaining the stack – which is more or less a summary of Wright's job at Red Hat.