Google Cloud & CIQ: Rocky Linux is Now Fully Supported on GCP

We are excited to announce our partnership with Google Cloud Platform! In this webinar, Venkat Gattamneni from Google Cloud Platform will join us as we discuss Google Cloud and CIQ partnering to provide a first-class Linux experience and robust solutions for customers and the community. Feel free to post questions in the chat throughout the webinar as we will have a live Q&A session after the webinar recording.

Webinar Synopsis:

• Important Announcement

• Customer Support Engagement

• Why Is This Important

• Rocky Linux Background

• Customer Transitions To Rocky Linux

• Google/CIQ Partnership

• Improved Customer Experience

• Relation To SIG For Cloud

• Closing Remarks

• Q&A of Live Event

  • Differences Between Red Hat and Rocky

  • Rocky and DevOps

  • Free Images for Rocky on GCP

  • Impact of Google/CIQ Partnership

  • Timeline of Expectations

Speakers:

• Zane Hamilton, Director of Sales Engineering, CIQ

  • Linkedin

• Neil Hanlon, Solutions Architect, CIQ

  • Linkedin

• Gregory Kurtzer, Founder of Rocky Linux, Singularity/Apptainer, Warewulf, CentOS, and the CEO of CIQ

  • Linkedin

• Daniella Herrera, Partner Operations Manager, Google

  • Linkedin

• Venkat Gattamneni, Product Management Lead, Google

  • Linkedin

• Robert Adolph, Chief Product Officer, CIQ

  • Linkedin

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Note: This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors.

Full Webinar Transcript:

Zane Hamilton:

Welcome back to another webinar with CIQ. We have some friends today with us from Google.  We have an exciting announcement to make, and I will let Daniella and Venkat introduce themselves. Since we may be having a new group of people join us as well after them, Robert, Greg, would you introduce yourselves again as well? We will start with you Daniella. Tell us about yourself.

Daniella Herrera:

Of course. My name is Daniella Herrera. I am at Google. I am a Partner Operations Manager in the Cloud Support Space, and I help third parties go to market with Google and just ensure that customers have the best, most world class experience possible. I am very excited to be here. Thank you.

Zane Hamilton:

Excellent. Thank you. Venkat.

Venkat Gattamneni:

Thanks so much for having us, Zane and team. My name is Venkat Gattamneni. I lead our product management efforts on Google Cloud, as it relates to operating systems. In short, me and my teams job is to make sure that we provide customers a great experience for all of their different operating systems that they bring on the platform. And of course, I am very excited to be here and talk specifically about all the great stuff that we are working on while you are working with us, the CIQ team.

Zane Hamilton:

That is great. Thank you. Robert, would you like to introduce yourself again, please.

Robert Adolph:

Absolutely. I am the chief product officer for CIQ.

Zane Hamilton:

And Greg.

Gregory Kurtzer:

Hi everybody. I am Greg. I am one of the original founders of CentOS and the founder of CIQ and Rocky Linux.

Zane Hamilton:

Thank you very much. I think we should start off and  explain to everybody what are we announcing today. Then what the customers from GCP can expect from this. I will give that to Venkat or Daniella, whichever one of you wants to start that one off?

Important Announcement [01:57]

Venkat Gattamneni:

Yeah, I can kick us off and I will let Daniella chime in here. This is very exciting for us to be announcing today. Fundamentally, what we have been doing undercover for a while now, a good six to eight months we have been doing this with the CIQ team. We are trying to build a model where customers can use Rocky Linux on the GCP platform and should they have any issues from a support point of view, they can just lift the phone up and call Google and we will work to support customers running Rocky on GCP or Google cloud and treat the support experience just as we would with any other first party service. I will let Daniella sort of explain a little bit more in detail as to what that entails.

That is the primary thing we are announcing today. The big value proposition for customers is that now they can run with full confidence on the platform, Rocky Linux, and bring their workloads onto the platform. And for those folks who are considering moving away from CentOS and looking for an option, they can rest assured that this is a very, very well supported experience on the platform. Of course, from a support point of view, we are sharing this exciting news today, but we have a lot more that we are working on, on the product side as well, that we will be able to share in the next few minutes.

Danielle, do you want to maybe give a quick detailed view on what the support engagement may look like for customers?

Customer Support Engagement [03:24]

Daniella Herrera:

Of course, just plus one to everything you said, Venkat. Like you mentioned, we want customers to know that we will be providing a Google and CIQ backed support experience for Rocky Linux, and what that means is that if a customer has a problem with their Rocky Linux, that they are running on GCE, they'll be able to contact Google like they do for first party products right now and we will take it from there. Essentially we will engage with CIQ as needed. The reason we are doing this is because we want our customers to be comfortable and to be excited about using Rocky Linux and make sure they are able to get the most out of it and have the most world class experience that they can.

Zane Hamilton:

That is great. Thank you very much. Greg, from a Rocky perspective, why is this so exciting?

Why Is This Important [04:19]

Gregory Kurtzer:

I am going to describe this from the community standpoint, first and foremost. What we have seen over the years, as we have seen open source projects come and go and we have seen them being led by various companies and led by various organizations, I think I would really focus on what makes an open source project stable and what we need right now is stability in that fundamental, foundational operating system piece. What makes it stable is not just having a single company behind that operating system. It is having a whole group, a community of individuals, of organizations, of companies, even competing organizations, if we can, and pull everything together. Then, by pulling everybody together and having that single unified commitment to that open source project, we are able to create this massive amount of stability in that project itself.

That was really our goal with what we started off trying to do and trying to solve with Rocky. This partnership in this collaboration, both in terms of the community and open source space, as well as now, the value we can bring to that community and to customers is just so incredibly exciting as we can now take from the Google Cloud platform all the way up through that platform, through the operating system, to the end user customer experience. The entire thing is now supported. It is now a single unified solution. Because of that again, it is phenomenal. This partnership is really just first in class.

Gregory Kurtzer:

It really unifies this shared vision that we have with CIQ and Google in terms of solving problems and a commitment to customers and customers first. Because of that, from the very first moment we started talking and collaborating on this, that alignment really is what just drove this commitment to bringing this forth to customers. Again, we are excited. This is awesome.

Zane Hamilton:

That is great. One of the things I want to do, Greg, I think it is important because there may be people here that are GCP users today that may not know what Rocky Linux is or where it came from. Could you give us just a little bit of background on what Rocky is, where they come from and then a little bit probably about where CentOS came from.

Rocky Linux Background [07:08]

Gregory Kurtzer:

Yeah, I would be happy to. You do not need to give me a second cue to keep talking and hog the mic.

Zane Hamilton:

I will ask you one more question before we go any further on that. How should you say CentOS?

Gregory Kurtzer:

Oh my goodness. There is a whole story behind this. The name CentOS was actually offered by one of our early co-founders. His name was Lance and he offered up the name, CentOS, and everything at that point was in IRC, the predecessor to Slack and other chat systems and everything.  I just saw it spelled and I am like, "oh, that is really awesome. I love the name," and I said, "but you know, one thing..." because you can read it two different ways. You can read it as Centos or CentOs, or Cent OS.

I said, "you know, I really do not like Cent OS because, I get it, it is  an operating system, but you are putting a lot of emphasis on that cent piece and cent kind of has come known to mean it is  cheap, it is not expensive but it is something. And going from nothing to something is an infinite increase.” And so I said, "it is infinitely more expensive than actually what it is, which is free." So I said, "I do not like cent OS." Now of course, then the logo came out and it was Cent with capital OS. So of course everybody now says Cent OS, but yeah, there is the story.

Zane Hamilton:

And I am guilty of it. I think I said it actually when I asked you how to say it correctly.

Gregory Kurtzer:

It used to hit me every time. It would be like, oh gosh, you are doing it. It has been what, 16, 17 years? I have gotten over it. I am okay with it now, however you want to say it. I am cool with it.

Zane Hamilton:

All right. So from CentOS to Rocky. What is Rocky? Where do they come from?

Gregory Kurtzer:

We founded CentOS. CentOS grew and over time became a major operating system player in the Enterprise Linux space. Again, over time, Red Hat ended up acquiring this open source project. Through that, by the way, I was not part of that decision. I was long gone in a manner of speaking out of the CentOS world before that. So everything that CentOS came to be, in terms of how widely spread it was and whatnot, I was there for the beginning, but a big prop out to the CentOS team that has just done so much to make that such a long term success into the ecosystem. 

What ended up happening was, Red Hat ended up acquiring it in December, 2019.

Anyway, there was an announcement that CentOS was going to be end-of-lifed. And in addition to end-of-lifed pivots. And so it would end up being in front of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and then become a community portal, which is a fantastic move for Enterprise Linux and all of the Linux distributions that are taking part in the Enterprise Linux family of distributions. But, that kind of key piece that we have all come to know and love, all of a sudden just kind of went poof and it was no longer there. So, within, I think it was an hour or two after the CentOS blog was made, I posted on there, "Hey, I am thinking of doing a new CentOS. Anyone want to come and be part of that?"

In about two months, less than two months actually, there was about 10,000 members of the community that have joined up and I think almost all of those 10,000 people, it felt like at least they all messaged me directly, because of the amount of people asking to help. We decided immediately that this is going to be a massive community project and it really demonstrates how important CentOS is to the world. We are just happy to be part of it. We are happy to help enable that. And one of the things that we decided, a decision actually fairly early on, was that we did not want to put this into CIQ, into our company.

As I mentioned before, the key to a stable community is not keeping it inside of a single company. It is to actually put it out there and grow it to where there is a community of organizations, companies, and individuals that are all part of that project. We put it out there. We helped create the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, and as I said, 10,000 members of the community joined and wanted to be part of this. We had multiple clouds wanting to join, Google was among the first, and vendors, IHVs, ISVs, and this community kept growing and growing.

We started building the operating system immediately, but it was so important that everything we do is community first. We did not bring over any resources that preexisted from anything else. Everything was developed from scratch, being run and developed and managed by the community itself. That includes our build system. It  includes all of the tech that we have used and all of the components that we have used in order to pull this whole thing together. Everything is out there in the community, but what that meant is it took us a few months to actually build up that infrastructure. So, four months to build up the infrastructure, approximately, two months to actually then build the operating system.

It is not just two months to build it. We were actually working on it in parallel while we were building the infrastructure, but two months to actually get it to go through the infrastructure, pop out an ISO that we can actually start playing with and testing, another month of testing, seven months later, we actually now have an operating system. Immediately it just took off. We had a few people in the media that mentioned that this was the most anticipated release of the year.  It just took off. Since then, we are still usually just over north of a quarter million downloads a month, in terms of usage and people pulling it from our primary mirrors, from our tier one and on, and it just continues to grow. It continues to thrive. We are always hearing about more vendors and organizations that are moving toward this. It has been an absolutely exciting journey and it is an honor to be part of it.

Zane Hamilton:

That is fantastic. From a Google perspective, Venkat, how have you seen Rocky take off or has it taken off as a part of UCP? And are you seeing larger customers start moving their operating system of choice over to Rocky?

Customer Transitions To Rocky Linux [14:38]

Venkat Gattamneni:

Yeah, I think on the Google side we have, and by the way, all the mind share that Greg and the community has built up and you guys have built up, we definitely see it on our side as well. A large number of customers are using Rocky, by the way, on Google Cloud today. If you look at these customers, they are all using it for general purpose. There is not a specific use case. There are folks who are using it for high performance computing use cases. There are folks using it for their third party applications, et cetera, et cetera.

Definitely, we are seeing a trend of increased Rocky usage on Google Cloud. That is a very, very healthy trend in usage we are seeing, but beyond that, I think the mind share among the customer base that is already there for Rocky is mind blowing. Many customers that we are talking to today are looking for alternatives. They are still exploring and looking for alternatives. They have not yet jumped on Rocky Linux's yet. As they are exploring the different options, Rocky definitely is in that consideration list. In fact, I would say it is in the top of that consideration list. For many of these customers, who have not yet jumped on the Rocky bandwagon or are not using Rocky yet, they are seriously considering it and they are kicking the tires if you will with some of their applications.

That usually is a signal for what will follow. In these customer conversations, a few things that are definitely coming up from our perspective, Google's perspective is, is this something that Google will stand behind from a support point of view? What does the long term roadmap look like here from a Google cloud perspective? And those are the kinds of things that are exciting for us to hear from customers, and that is precisely the work we are doing with the CIQ here.

I have no doubt that with all the good work that you guys are doing and all the community rallying behind this, and with the work that we are particularly talking about and doing here behind the Rocky experience on Google Cloud, definitely a lot more customers and large customers will start adopting. Of course, with CentOS 7 going into end of life etcetera, which is where majority of the usage is right now, we will definitely see a chunk of those folks considering Rocky and moving to Rocky as one of the credible alternatives to their current operating system.

Zane Hamilton:

Sure. Thank you. Robert, I am going to pick on you next, because you have been quiet this whole time.

What are your thoughts on this partnership and what does it mean around the shared values for Google and CIQ? I will let Daniella, and then Venkat answer that as well, but please go Robert.

Google/CIQ Partnership [17:20]

Robert Adolph:

Probably from the first conversations we had with Venkat's team, we were in complete alignment on a shared vision of truly serving the customers and giving back to the community while we do that. From the very first conversations, we have also had almost complete alignment on how to do that. It was actually very easy to figure out how to go push us into the community today and really just start driving the adoption. One of the biggest things, I think, that Venkat and his team also brings is the ability now to have that level of confidence for customers to now move.

There is multiple years of commitments. There is multiple thought processes of how we are going to build this out. There is many different other value ads and capabilities we want to bring from a product perspective. It is not just this announcement and that is it. It is a true partnership to drive back to those customer successes that we all really want to drive and I will leave it to Venkat and Daniella to dive in a little bit more on the how, but from a high level perspective, we were in complete alignment from day one.

Zane Hamilton:

Excellent. Thank you. Venkat, do you have anything you would like to add?

Venkat Gattamneni:

 I think adding to Robert's point, I want to underscore the word confidence that he used. That is, I think, the foundational sort of tenant of our partnership here. We are here together to make sure that customers have the confidence in the Rocky experience we are creating on Google cloud. Why that is so important for us as Google is because, as customers know, Google does not have a first party operating system here.

Our philosophy is to make sure that the operating systems that customers choose, we provide a rock solid experience and confidence behind those operating systems. Now that said, of course there is a big industry shift happening here with many customers looking for alternatives to send to us right now. We want to definitely make sure that the Rocky experience is an extremely credible alternative for customers to choose. That is the core vision shared between us and CIQ here.

From a tactical perspective, in terms of things to look out for or the types of work that we will be engaging with the CIQ team to launch to customers, we are of course announcing the support model today. In the coming months, we will have much more to share about all the various things from the product point of view that we are doing to ensure that streamlined experience is there for customers on Google Cloud. This ranges from making tweaks, or fine tuning, to the operating system itself. To all the other tools that a customer will need in order for them to easily migrate over to Rocky and to ensure that their workloads and applications are running in a performance tuned and a great way on top of Rocky.

That is the kind of work we are undertaking. Of course, we also have an email address, rockylinux@google.com, which we urge customers to reach out to us, to engage with us and talk to us, so we can help shape this experience right, hearing directly from customers. That is my end, adding a little bit on the shared vision between the two companies.

Zane Hamilton:

No, that is great. Thank you. Daniella, do you have anything to add?

Daniella Herrera:

Just that we have been working together for a bit of time to get this partnership up and running and it was very clear from the beginning how important the customer experience was and how thoughtful everybody was about the different ways that we were going to interact and make sure that that was kept to the highest standard possible. I am very excited for our partnership together and to Greg's point about giving back to the community, I think that this is a way that we can do that. I am just very excited for our partnership overall.

Zane Hamilton:

Very good. Thank you. Daniella, I will come back to you with the next question and from an end user experience, or as a user of UCP, we talk about customer experience. What is the customer experience? What are they getting out of this?

Improved Customer Experience [21:53]

Daniella Herrera:

 We are essentially offering the same support that we do for our first party products and for other OS distros. Now customers that have a paid support entitlement with Google support can reach out to Google with their issue, and we will do what needs to be done to help resolve the case after they open a case with us. That means we will have CIQ rockstar, super Rocky Linux users that might help us on the back end, but in the end, Google will be quarterbacking that customer case from beginning to end. Our customers will know that they will have a person to reach out to if there is any questions. We are very excited about that. We have made sure that the process is again, as painless as possible. We strive for an Enterprise customer experience. That is what customers should be expecting.

Zane Hamilton:

Thank you. Greg, listening to all of this in talking about a very specific version of Rocky for cloud, is this in any way related to, or does it have anything to do with the SIG for cloud initiative that is happening within the Rocky community right now?

Relation To SIG For Cloud [23:10]

Gregory Kurtzer:

 What Zane is alluding to is that we have a SIG cloud that we have spun up about a month and a half ago. As I said, time is just a complete blur for me at this point. And just to correct something I said before, I said December 2019.  It was 2020. I got a bunch of messages of how dumb I am. So sorry about that, everybody. We started a SIG cloud a few months ago, I am just going to be very abstract now instead of talking specific, a few months ago and the goal of this is to not only engage specifically with Google here, but to engage with all of the cloud providers and consumers and users of the different clouds to provide capabilities back into the community, which would be optimal for all cloud experiences.

Obviously, Google is a big part of that. We are the other clouds and we want that level of engagement and collaboration between the different organizations. And again, this is what brings a stable open source project into being, and to maintain all of those different collaborations and people working together. We are super excited about that. What we are going to be doing, and now more specifically, what we are going to be adding optimizations to Rocky. These are going to be opt-in optimizations. With that, we are basically going to be creating, first and foremost, a Google optimized version of Rocky Linux. I keep shooting for the acronym, "Go Rocky," for short on Google optimize.

We will see if Google goes for that with time. The go Rocky version will basically have cloud optimizations for Google cloud. Those optimizations, along with other optimizations for other clouds, are all going to go into the SIG cloud, which is part of the Rocky Enterprise software foundation and will be available to not only all Rocky Linux users, but all users of Enterprise Linux and all of the different variants of Enterprise Linux in that family of distributions. Again, huge, huge amounts of coolness and awesomeness all coming through the pipe. We are super excited about being able to bring this into the community with our new partners, Google.

Zane Hamilton:

That is great. It is very exciting guys. I think we are getting close to the end of time, and I want to open this up if there is anything that you guys want to talk about specifically. I am just going to go around and I will start with Robert, because he seems to be the quietest again today. Do you have anything you would like to close with on this?

Closing Remarks [26:07]

Robert Adolph:

Yeah, very simply, and Venkat reiterated it earlier, it is that confidence for customers to go put Rocky into production on Google cloud. That is what we are trying to do. That was the ultimate goal and I think in execution of that, Danielle and her team have designed a great model, with the help of our team as well. I stand behind her to where at any level of need, on Google cloud, you will be taken care of when it comes to the operating system and running your application. We are super excited and we look forward to a lot of success stories.

Zane Hamilton:

Thank you, Robert. Daniella, do you have any final thoughts for us?

Daniella Herrera:

No, just it was great chatting with everyone and we are super excited to hear back from the community about their thoughts. Thanks for having us.

Zane Hamilton:

Thank you. Venkat.

Venkat Gattamneni:

Yeah, I mean first of all, I want to say a big thank you to the CIQ team here. It has been great working with the team in creating the support model and all of the stuff that we are sort of talking through here. The second thing is, especially if you are a customer listening to this and you are still thinking, "Hey, should I be running Rocky on Google cloud or not?" I am hoping that we are putting that doubt to rest. We are here. We got your back, from a support point of view, from product point of view, et cetera. If there are certain things, by way of optimizations or things that we could do better in terms of making sure that you can run this even more confidently, please do reach out to us rockylinux@google.com. We are here to hear you and make this experience even better as we go along.

Zane Hamilton:

Thank you. Greg, I will give you almost the last word.

Gregory Kurtzer:

Almost, huh? I just really wanted to just express my gratitude. The Google team that we have been working with, Venkat, Daniella and everybody on your teams, has been fantastic. It has  been a pleasure to work with you, and it is so exciting after all of the many months. Again, I am not putting a time on it because I will get it wrong, but the many months that we have been working together and bringing this into reality, has just been super exciting. It is  just exciting. It is  just an absolute pleasure to work with you. Thank you.

Zane Hamilton:

Thank you, Greg. Again for everybody out there, if you are looking for more information on this, reach out to Google, reach out to us. Live chat is always available. There is a lot of information on the website. Send emails to rockylinux@google.com. Again, we are here for you. If you would, go ahead and like, and subscribe. We would appreciate it, being able to keep in touch with you guys, and I really want to thank Daniella and Venkat for spending the time. Thank you guys for coming. We really appreciate it, and we are looking forward to where we can go next. Thank you very much, guys.

Q&A of Live Event [29:06]

Zane Hamilton:

Welcome back everyone. Daniella, good to see you again. Robert, Greg it is an exciting day.

Zane Hamilton:

I see that we have a couple questions. Thank you, Mr. Yarrow. It has  been a long time. It is  good to see you again. John's asking about, "what are the differences between Red Hat, so RHEL, and Rocky on GCP."  I will let you guys give it a shot or you can answer that or I will take it. How do you want to approach it? I guess we will start with Venkat.

Differences Between Red Hat and Rocky [29:58]

Venkat Gattamneni:

I can take a stab at it and we will look to Robert and Greg to talk about the specific differences between the actual operating systems, Red Hat and Rocky. Now, as far as Google cloud is concerned, like I said in the webinar, our philosophy is to make sure that we create a great experience for you, no matter your operating system. Of course, if Red Hat is a choice for you, then that is very well supported on the platform today. We have optimized images for Red Hat on a PSU basis for your licensing. Of course, you can bring your images on as well. If you are looking at Rocky Linux as an alternative to your CentOS usage or your general purpose applications, that is what we are creating a great experience here with CIQ team. From a Google point of view, we love all workloads. We love all Linux workloads in all CentOS workloads, and we want to make sure that we continue to up the game and provide great experience for customers across the different distributions customers have. I will look to Greg and Robert to maybe talk about some of the fine differences, right between the two distributions.

Gregory Kurtzer:

Hopefully none at a high level view. The goal of Rocky is to be, there is a bit for bit compatibility and there is bug for bug compatibility. We aim for both of those. We are looking for API and ABI compatibility, as close to legally the exact same experience that you get on one Enterprise Linux version compared to another Enterprise Linux version of a Linux distribution. That is our goal. Our goal is to see no differences between Red Hat, between Rocky or any of the other distributions within the Enterprise Linux family.

Zane Hamilton:

Great. Thank you. John has another question. He has asked me, "how does Rocky play with DevOps tools?" This is a pretty broad statement, because I think there's a lot of different DevOps tools that we could talk about, but I think the ones that come to mind for me are really around configuration management, and they play great with Rocky. If it works with RHEL, or the other RHEL variance, it does really well. I think Greg, you probably have something to say about that as well.

Rocky and DevOps [32:14]

Gregory Kurtzer:

I would basically just poke at the same point, which is, the same exact tools that you are using for Red Hat, for any of your Enterprise Linux family of distributions, are going to work on Rocky in exactly the same way. And if it doesn't, that is a bug. Let us know. It will get fixed. Everything that you are currently doing, the goal of this is to have almost no transition issues going from one to the next. To have a completely smooth compatible experience as you change from CentOS, as CentOS has gone end of life, to Rocky. That is the goal. What you are currently doing on Red Hat, what you are currently doing on CentOS, it would be very surprising if any of it does not work in exactly the same way. If you find that it doesn't work in the same way, let us know. This is part of why this partnership is so amazing. Let us know. We will work on it. We will help you.

Zane Hamilton:

Thank you. Greg, I know that you have received this question this morning, but I will ask Venkat the question, "how does this change the freely available images that are out there for Rocky on GCP?"

Free Images for Rocky on GCP [33:28]

Venkat Gattamneni:

It does not change anything. In fact, I would say, if folks are ready and want to try Rocky today and want to use Rocky on Google Cloud today, the images are there. All we are doing today is making sure that for folks who use that, if they have a support entitlement with Google, they can call Google and get support. That is what is actually changing. It is an add-on on top of existing Rocky images and all the additional changes that we are making, or optimizations we are making. We are planning on launching those in the coming months. When we launch, we will make sure that there are seamless transitions for customers who want to opt into those options, as we take those optimizations, so on and so forth. By no means do I want to say, "Hey, wait for more things to come." No, the images that are there today, go and use them. They are already fine tuned and built for a great experience on Google Cloud.

Gregory Kurtzer:

I would just add in real quick that this is a benefit for the community. This is a huge benefit for the community to have multiple organizations, again, stepping up to offer support, offer services around Rocky Linux and to really ensure the success and the wonderful, turnkey experience of Rocky Linux. We are very excited about this. It is a fantastic step in my mind for Enterprise level customers and consumers who really want to count on open source and community as that base foundation.

Zane Hamilton:

Great. Thank you, Greg. Anyone else have something else they would like to add to that? If not, I have another question.

All right. Forrest actually brought up a really good point. Since we are really an HPC focused company, can we talk about how this partnership will impact that kind of HPC computing, when it comes to GCP? Robert.

Impact of Google/CIQ Partnership [35:36]

Gregory Kurtzer:

I was going to say, who are you calling on Zane?

Zane Hamilton:

Robert's a great one for that one.

Robert Adolph:

We will have optimizations that we will be able to provide for that specifically. That is obviously something that we are talking to Venkat and his team for down the road of further integrations and further optimizations. That will definitely be a big part of it. I think every customer probably cares about performance and every customer probably cares about being able to run their specific workloads up on GCP. We have a name to optimize any and all of those workloads. Nevermind. Just HPC.

Zane Hamilton:

Great. Thank you very much. I do not see any more questions coming in. Would anybody like to just throw out some last thoughts here before we wrap it up? Other than that we are all excited and really appreciate the time.

Gregory Kurtzer:

Can we talk a little bit about, now this is completely ad hoc so apologies. Can we talk a little bit about timelines and when customers can expect to see certain capabilities coming down and being available?

I think Venkat's pulling up a document.

Timeline of Expectations [37:03]

Venkat Gattamneni:

My old map of radius things... I would say we are talking of weeks to months from a timeframe perspective in starting to launch some of these optimizations we are talking about. Today, we do not have anything specific to announce on that, but to say that any optimizations that we are thinking through are going to be in closed concert with what customers are telling us. In fact, I would flip this back and say, "Hey, please reach out to us because we are actively planning all these optimizations and features." The first round of these, I do expect they will start coming in the next few months and then definitely it is  going to be a rolling thunder, right? The work is not going to get done in a few months. This is a long term relationship and commitment between the two companies to make sure we continuously hear and iterate on the experience from customers. So, a lot to expect here, but I would say months, weeks to months to that timeframe.

Gregory Kurtzer:

I would also add to that, that the SIG cloud is already in progress. If there is anyone out there that actually wants to join, wants to help be part of this, as I mentioned before, many of the other clouds are already involved with this. We do want to have more representation from Enterprise consumers and customers as well, as part of that special interest group. Please join the Mattermost, reach out to us, contact us and get involved. We would love to have more people involved, more organizations and input.

Zane Hamilton:

Absolutely. Well guys, I appreciate you coming back and joining us for this quick Q&A. Again, really excited about the partnership and looking forward to seeing where we go next. If you guys would look and like, and subscribe, we'd really appreciate you keeping in touch with us and look forward to more announcements and stuff going on in the future with Google. Thanks guys.

Gregory Kurtzer:

Thank you.

Daniella Herrera:

Thank you.