Many companies are fumbling through low-yield digital transformation experiments. Transformation is a vague target anyway. Is it big data? Is it artificial intelligence? Is it developer operations? Some are fatigued by the hype around the term. Is there an exact outcome or particular technology we can point to as representing true DX?

“The bigger point from my perspective is, how do you move more dollars, more euros, more spend towards innovation?” said Ashesh Badani (pictured), vice president and general manager of cloud platforms at Red Hat Inc.

Companies do it by automating as much work as possible and moving human IQ up the stack. The factory of the future will have two employees — a man and a dog, Badani joked. The man’s there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to make sure the man does’t go touch the equipment.

This is the kind of self-sufficient information technology environment Red Hat is trying to create through automation, including its Operator Framework technology, which helps make it easier to build Kubernetes applications.

Badani spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Seattle, Washington. They discussed the real fruits of automation and Red Hat’s work with operator technology. (* Disclosure below.)

Self-sufficient IT puts humans in their place

RedHat acquired CoreOS Inc. in January 2018. The startup optimizes Kubernetes — an open-source platform for orchestrating containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications). Red Hat is building more automation into its products, including the OpenShift container platform.

“Customers have said, ‘You know, look. I want these clusters to be more self managing, self healing,'” Badani said.

Customers are running hundreds or thousands of containers in production now. There is no way a human can manage them at that kind of scale, Badani pointed out. Red Hat and the CoreOS team are working with a technology called the Operator Framework that can automate the necessary tasks.

The main idea behind Operator Framework is simplification. “How can we take the human knowledge that exists to take complex software that’s built by third parties and bring that natively into the platform, and then have the platform go and manage them on behalf of the actual customer itself?” Badani stated. “Now we’ve got over 60 companies building operators. And we’ve, in fact, taken entire OpenShift platforms and put operators to work. So it’s completely automated and self-managed.”

The Operator Framework can automate away a lot of human labor from the management of IT. “In the past, you needed perhaps several database admins. But if your operator’s built for databases … you can now run those within the platform,” Badani stated. “Now you don’t need as many database admins. You free those people up now to build actual business innovation value.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE