Why is a hardware vendor at a software company? Why is Intel here? Probably what you're asking. Anybody else wondering what that is? Hey, why are we here? We make servers. So it's a good question. So I'm new to Intel. I've only been there a couple of years. And when I first arrived, one of the things I got to be a part of

was starting to learn how Intel thinks. And what we do is we sell hardware, obviously. But people don't want to buy hardware unless they have reasons to use it. And so what we looked at was the way we interact with our customers is watching them have success. And that success is what motivates them to build greater and greater things.

And we actually landed on this really interesting economic principle called Jevons Paradox. And what Jevons Paradox is, it states that the easier something is to consume, the more you want it, not the less you want it. You want to use it more and more and more. So if you're Intel, you're saying, how in the world do we make computing,

cloud computing, bigger and greater? We sell more servers, of course. And it really gets down to the fact that the easier we can make cloud computing, the more automated, the more powerful it is, the more that we can grow this ecosystem, the more we can grow our own market. And then also we create the demand for all these really cool features and really cool technologies that we're designing and building.

And spending decades to design, we've got to make sure people have the ability to use those and leverage those in their data centers. So you have a team that really focuses on building out these software solutions. So basically our team is, if you see from the cool slide up there, software-defined infrastructure. So our job is literally how in the world do we make the software

and help the software be really powerful with the hardware in combination. So Intel was a launch partner for Habitat. Totally. We love it. Love it. Yeah, I do, personally. Yeah, that's great. Walk us through the why and how you see it fitting into the ecosystem. Totally, yeah. It's pretty easy.

I mean, you get down to it. Intel is a huge open source company. You might actually know that. We're like either number one or number two contributor to Linux, depending on which month it is. Huge OpenStack supporter. There are literally thousands of developers at Intel who are paid just to write open source software. They don't make a dime. They're just paid to write open source software because we recognize open source software is a key driver for innovation.

And so when we see companies like Chef come out with something like Habitat, especially in the timing of when this has come out, we recognize it as a way of helping move us all forward. And we say, how in the world can we actually make that better and how can we tie things to that and how can we enable that so our customers get to that more successful, easier to deploy cloud. And on a personal level, you yourself are involved in some pretty significant projects.

Yeah, totally. So we dog through a lot of stuff, but we also try to innovate. So one of my charters is I run emerging tech. And we do kind of fail fast projects. And one of the ones we just did last year was one called Snap. And so if you look at the space of automation in general,

you have this really repetitive cycle you see. We call it watch, decide, learn, act. But the decide is the really powerful part. It's like how can we build systems that can intelligently make decisions at scale so that me as the sysadmin or as an administrator or an engineer, I can run more things. I can have thousands of servers or tens of thousands of servers

that are under my domain of control because I've built these software systems that can make decisions where I don't have to be in every single decision. And we were looking around at these scheduling systems and saying, well, what is the one thing they need first? And it's data. And so we started looking at our own data because we make the chips. And so ultimately every bit of data that comes out of anything eventually comes from us at some root low level.

And we started looking around and saying, hey, are we being a good citizen about that? Are we exposing things in a really uniform, nice way? And the answer was, eh, kind of. And so we said, let's go try to build a brand-new framework and see if it even works that we get all of Intel behind to expose everything from disk health and network to applications to workloads.

And can we build an open source project around that? And that's what Snap ended up being. It's done quite well. And we were having conversations that we actually want to link Snap into the stuff you guys are doing with automated visibility. That's right. And do some really cool stuff with that. It seems abstract to have the hardware so intimately connected to the applications.

These days, most service providers provide a generic IOPS promise. But you're actually looking at this at a very much of a how to really bind application behavior to the underlying. I really love the way Adam's keynote. Wasn't that amazing?

I'm probably going to watch it two or three more times. It absolutely blew me away. But I love the way he teased apart complexity and ease. Because they're not the same thing. And I like to tease apart abstraction and utility. So yes, absolutely abstraction, portability is critical. You want to be able to move things around, put it in the public cloud, put it in the private cloud, go back and forth.

The faster we get to that, that's that ease. But I want to make sure that those applications have the ability to get put onto the smartest possible place. Because not all hardware is the same. Even our own lines of servers come in a wide variety and wide difference. And we have different features you can optionally have. And so the thing with Habitat that I'm fascinated with is could we take Habitat and something like our investment

and our work around with Google on Kubernetes and some of the deep telemetry stuff we're doing, could we knit a story where everything's super portable because of Habitat. Everything can be super scheduled because of Kubernetes. But the intelligence is there that you can actually build your applications and say these are the ideal scenario for how I run. And the systems just make sure they run in the best

bin-packed, scheduled, high-performance way possible. Because the ultimate goal, and actually out of all of that cool technical stuff, is that you're able to run your applications with a really nice TCO. You can run them dense and fast and keep them up. So you're painting a vision of the future. Totally. And we talked about the snap integrations,

but together we're kind of reaching this point where we can actually see this ability for how people build, deploy, manage, and how they could use Chef Automate and have Chef Automate allow those teams to collaborate, have the visibility. But underneath that, there's a lot of smarts that get plugged in

from the actual underlying hardware. So the funniest thing about us at Intel is we literally deal with every single vertical with every customer in the world. And a lot of times we get to go really, really deep. Like if you're building a supercomputer, you probably know us really, really well, because we've got people who can get right down there with you with your problem. But the more context and the more common the tooling

in the open-source ecosystem gets, the more we can actually tune and develop our servers and processors to that, and the more we can expose what's possible in there and make it an option. And for me it's really critical, because going back to the gentleman's paradox and other stuff, we see that we're at this point for the next wave. If you look at cloud computing, the majority of the market has really kind of been within a couple key players.

But we want to see that expand to everyone. And it's that next wave that we feel things like open-source and collaboration, combining tools, having things work together like Habitat, Kubernetes, Intel hardware, Snaps, for example. And leveling those up so that the customers actually get to figure out

what they can do with that and build those stacks, build those services and provide that better experience for those applications, I think that's going to be the real trick, and that's what we're after. That's a great vision of the future. Well, we want to do it, so are we serious? Is there anything else you want to cover off on? No, I mean, actually this is my first ChefConf, and this has been one of the coolest.

And to be quite honest, I go to a lot of conferences, and this one was extremely cool because everybody's a practitioner here. You listen to conversations. Every single person I meet is in the trenches, is working, is trying to solve problems, so this has been a very cool conference,

and I'll remember this one. This was awesome. That's great. Well, we're thrilled to have you here. We're thrilled by the partnership, and the future looks bright. Yeah, it does. Thank you very much.