(upbeat music) >> Announcer: TheCUBE presents KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe, 2022. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Valencia, Spain, a KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe, 2022. I'm your host, Keith Townsend alongside Paul Gillon, Senior Editor, Enterprise Architecture for SiliconANGLE. We are, I think at the half point way point this to be fair we've talked to a lot of folks in open source in general. What's the difference between open source communities and these closed source communities that we attend so so much? >> Well open source is just it's that it's open it's anybody can contribute. There are a set of rules that manage how your contributions are reflected in the code base. What has to be shared, what you can keep to yourself but the it's an entirely different vibe. You know, you go to a conventional conference where there's a lot of proprietary being sold and it's all about cash. It's all about money changing hands. It's all about doing the deal. And open source conferences I think are more, they're more transparent and yeah money changes hands, but it seems like the objective of the interaction is not to consummate a deal to the degree that it is at a more conventional computer conference. >> And I think that can create an uneven side effect. And we're going to talk about that a little bit with, honestly a friend of mine Alex Ellis, founder of OpenFaaS. Alex welcome back to the program. >> Thank you, good to see Keith. >> So how long you've been doing OpenFaaS? >> Well, I first had this idea that serverless and function should be run on your own hardware back in 2016. >> Wow and I remember seeing you at DockerCon EU, was that in 2017? >> Yeah, I think that's when we first met and Simon Foskett took us out to dinner and we got chatting. And I just remember you went back to your hotel room after the presentation. You just had your iPhone out and your headphones you were talking about how you tried to OpenWhisk and really struggled with it and OpenFaaS sort of got you where you needed to be to sort of get some value out of the solution. >> And I think that's the magic of these open source communities in open source conferences that you can try stuff, you can struggle with it, come to a conference either get some advice or go in another direction and try something like a OpenFaaS. But we're going to talk about the business perspective. >> Yeah. >> Give us some, like give us some hero numbers from the project. What types of organizations are using OpenFaaS and what are like the download and stars all those, the ways you guys measure project success. >> So there's a few ways that you hear this talked about at KubeCon specifically. And one of the metrics that you hear the most often is GitHub stars. Now a GitHub star means that somebody with their laptop like yourself has heard of a project or seen it on their phone and clicked a button that's it. There's not really an indication of adoption but of interest. And that might be fleeting and a blog post you might publish you might bump that up by 2000. And so OpenFaaS quite quickly got a lot of stars which encouraged me to go on and do more with it. And it's now just crossed 30,000 across the whole organization of about 40 different open source repositories. >> Wow that is a number. >> Now you are in ecosystem where Knative is also taken off. And can you distinguish your approach to serverless or FaaS to Knatives? >> Yes so, Knative isn't an approach to FaaS. That's simply put and if you listen to Aikas Ville from the Knative project, he was working inside Google and wished that Kubernetes would do a little bit more than what it did. And so he started an initiative with some others to start bringing more abstractions like Auto Scaling, revision management so he can have two versions of code and and shift traffic around. And that's really what they're trying to do is add onto Kubernetes and make it do some of the things that a platform might do. Now OpenFaaS started from a different angle and frankly, two years earlier. >> There was no Kubernetes when you started it. >> It kind of led in the space and and built out that ecosystem. So the idea was, I was working with Lambda and AWS Alexa skills. I wanted to run them on my own hardware and I couldn't. And so OpenFaaS from the beginning started from that developer experience of here's my code, run it for me. Knative is a set of extensions that may be a building block but you're still pretty much working with Kubernetes. We get calls come through. And actually recently I can't tell you who they are but there's a very large telecommunications provider in the US that was using OpenFaaS, like yourself heard of Knative and in the hype they switched. And then they switched back again recently to OpenFaaS and they've come to us for quite a large commercial deal. >> So did they find Knative to be more restrictive? >> No, it's the opposite. It's a lot less opinionated. It's more like building blocks and you are dealing with a lot more detail. It's a much bigger system to manage, but don't get me wrong. I mean the guys are very friendly. They have their sort of use cases that they pursue. Google's now donated the project to CNCF. And so they're running it that way. Now it doesn't mean that there aren't FaaS on top of it. Red Hat have a serverless product VMware have one. But OpenFaaS because it owns the whole stack can get you something that's always been very lean, simple to use to the point that Keith in his hotel room installed it and was product with it in an evening without having to be a Kubernetes expert. >> And that is and if you remember back that was very anti-Kubernetes. >> Yes. >> It was not a platform I thought that was. And for some of the very same reasons, I didn't think it was very user friendly. You know, I tried open with I'm thinking what enterprise is going to try this thing, especially without the handholding and the support needed to do that. And you know, something pretty interesting that happened as I shared this with you on Twitter, I was having a briefing by a big microprocessor company, one of the big two. And they were showing me some of the work they were doing in Cloud-native and the way that they stretch test the system to show me Auto Scaling. Is that they bought up a OpenFaaS what is it? The well text that just does a bunch of, >> The cows maybe. >> Yeah the cows. That does just a bunch of texts. And it just all, and I'm like one I was amazed at is super simple app. And the second one was the reason why they discovered it was because of that simplicity is just a thing that's in your store that you can just download and test. And it was open fast. And it was this big company that you had no idea that was using >> No >> OpenFaaS. >> No. >> How prevalent is that? That you're always running into like these surprises of who's using the solution. >> There are a lot of top tier companies, billion dollar companies that use software that I've worked on. And it's quite common. The main issue you have with open source is you don't have like the commercial software you talked about, the relationships. They don't tell you they're using it until it breaks. And then they may come in incognito with a personal email address asking for things. What they don't want to do often is lend their brands or support you. And so it is a big challenge. However, early on, when I met you, BT, live person the University of Washington, and a bunch of other companies had told us they were using it. We were having discussions with them took them to Kubecon and did talks with them. You can go and look at them in the video player. However, when I left my job in 2019 to work on this full time I went to them and I said, you know, use it in production it's useful for you. We've done a talk, we really understand the business value of how it saves you time. I haven't got a way to fund it and it won't exist unless you help they were like sucks to be you. >> Wow that's brutal. So, okay let me get this right. I remember the story 2019, you leave your job. You say I'm going to do OpenFaaS and support this project 100% of your time. If there's no one contributing to the project from a financial perspective how do you make money? I've always pitched open source because you're the first person that I've met that ran an open source project. And I always pitched them people like you who work on it on their side time. But they're not the Knatives of the world, the SDOs, they have full time developers. Sponsored by Google and Microsoft, etc. If you're not sponsored how do you make money off of open source? >> If this is the million dollar question, really? How do you make money from something that is completely free? Where all of the value has already been captured by a company and they have no incentive to support you build a relationship or send you money in any way. >> And no one has really figured it out. Arguably Red Hat is the only one that's pulled it off. >> Well, people do refer to Red Hat and they say the Red Hat model but I think that was a one off. And we quite, we can kind of agree about that in a business. However, I eventually accepted the fact that companies don't pay for something they can get for free. It took me a very long time to get around that because you know, with open source enthusiast built a huge community around this project, almost 400 people have contributed code to it over the years. And we have had full-time people working on it on and off. And there's some people who really support it in their working hours or at home on the weekends. But no, I had to really think, right, what am I going to offer? And to begin with it would support existing customers weren't interested. They're not really customers because they're consuming it as a project. So I needed to create a product because we understand we buy products. Initially I just couldn't find the right customers. And so many times I thought about giving up, leaving it behind, my family would've supported me with that as well. And they would've known exactly why even you would've done. And so what I started to do was offer my insights as a community leader, as a maintainer to companies like we've got here. So Casting one of my customers, CSIG one of my customers, Rancher R, DigitalOcean, a lot of the vendors you see here. And I was able to get a significant amount of money by lending my expertise and writing content that gave me enough buffer to give the doctors time to realize that maybe they do need support and go a bit further into production. And over the last 12 months, we've been signing six figure deals with existing users and new users alike in enterprise. >> For support >> For support, for licensing of new features that are close source and for consulting. >> So you have proprietary extensions. Also that are sort of enterprise class. Right and then also the consulting business, the support business which is a proven business model that has worked >> Is a proven business model. What it's not a proven business model is if you work hard enough, you deserve to be rewarded. >> Mmh. >> You have to go with the system. Winter comes after autumn. Summer comes after spring and you, it's no point saying why is it like that? That's the way it is. And if you go with it, you can benefit from it. And that's what the realization I had as much as I didn't want to do it. >> So you know this community, well you know there's other project founders out here thinking about making the leap. If you're giving advice to a project founder and they're thinking about making this leap, you know quitting their job and becoming the next Alex. And I think this is the perception that the misperception out there. >> Yes. >> You're, you're well known. There's a difference between being well known and well compensated. >> Yeah. >> What advice would you give those founders >> To be. >> Before they make the leap to say you know what I'm going to do my project full time. I'm going to lean on the generosity of the community. So there are some generous people in the community. You've done some really interesting things for individual like contributions etc but that's not enough. >> So look, I mean really you have to go back to the MBA mindset. What problem are you trying to solve? Who is your target customer? What do they care about? What do they eat and drink? When do they go to sleep? You really need to know who this is for. And then customize a journey for them so that they can come to you. And you need some way initially of funneling those people in qualifying them because not everybody that comes to a student or somebody doing a PhD is not your customer. >> Right, right. >> You need to understand sales. You need to understand a lot about business but you can work it out on your way. You know, I'm testament to that. And once you have people you then need something to sell them that might meet their needs and be prepared to tell them that what you've got isn't right for them. 'cause sometimes that's the one thing that will build integrity. >> That's very hard for community leaders. It's very hard for community leaders to say, no >> Absolutely so how do you help them over that hump? I think of what you've done. >> So you have to set some boundaries because as an open source developer and maintainer you want to help everybody that's there regardless. And I think for me it was taking some of the open source features that companies used not releasing them anymore in the open source edition, putting them into the paid developing new features based on what feedback we'd had, offering support as well but also understanding what is support. What do you need to offer? You may think you need a one hour SLA for a fix probably turns out that you could sell a three day response time or one day response time. And some people would want that and see value in it. But you're not going to know until you talk to your customers. >> I want to ask you, because this has been a particular interest of mine. It seems like managed services have been kind of the lifeline for pure open source companies. Enabling these companies to maintain their open source roots, but still have a revenue stream of delivering as a service. Is that a business model option you've looked at? >> There's three business models perhaps that are prevalent. One is OpenCore, which is roughly what I'm following. >> Right. >> Then there is SaaS, which is what you understand and then there's support on pure open source. So that's more like what Rancher does. Now if you think of a company like Buoyant that produces Linkerd they do a bit of both. So they don't have any close source pieces yet but they can host it for you or you can host it and they'll support you. And so I think if there's a way that you can put your product into a SaaS that makes it easier for them to run then you know go for it. However, we've OpenFaaS, remember what is the core problem we are solving, portability So why lock into my cloud? >> Take that option off the table, go ahead. >> It's been a long journey and I've been a fan since your start. I've seen the bumps and bruises and the scars get made. If you're open source leader and you're thinking about becoming as famous as Alex, hey you can do that, you can put in all the work become famous but if you want to make a living, solve a problem, understand what people are willing to pay for that problem and go out and sell it. Valuable lessons here on theCUBE. From Valencia, Spain I'm Keith Townsend along with Paul Gillon and you're watching theCUBE the leader in high-tech coverage. (Upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's theCUBE covering DevNet Create, 2018, brought to you by Cisco. (techy music playing) >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're live here in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley for Cisco's DevNet Create. This is their new developer outreach kind of cloud, devops conference, different than DevNet their core, Cisco Networking Developer Conference is kind of an extension, kind of forging new ground. Of course theCUBE's covering, we love devops, we love cloud. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, my cohost today. Our next guest is Alex Ellis, project founder of OpenFaas, F-A-A-S, function as a service. That's serverless, that's Kubernetes, that's container madness. You name it, that's the cool, important trend, thanks for joining us. >> Yeah, thanks for having me, it's great to be here. >> So, talk about the founding of the project. So, you're the founder of the project-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> And you now work for VmWare, so let's just get this-- >> Yeah. >> On the record, so-- >> Alex: Yeah, I think this is-- >> Take a minute to explain. >> This is important just to set a bit of context now. I started this project from the lens of working with AWS Lambda as a Docker captain. I was writing these Alexa skills and I found that I had to hack in a web editor and click upload, or I had to write a zip file, put dependencies on my laptop, and upload that to the cloud every time I changed it. It just didn't feel right because I was so bought into containers. It's the same everywhere, there's no more, "It works on my machine." >> John: You're going backwards. >> Right? (laughing) So, I put a POC together for Docker Swarm and nobody had done it at that point, and it got really popular. I got to Docker Concourse Hacks Contest and presented to 4,000 people in the closing keynote, and I kind of thought it would just blossom overnight, it would explode, but it didn't happen, and actually, the months... We're going back 14 now, I grew a community and spent most of my time growing the community and extending the project. Now, that has been really fruitful. It's led to over 11,000 stars on GitHub, 91 individual contributors, and much, much more. It's been a really rich experience, but at the same time-- >> So, rather than going big rocket ship you kind of went, hunkered down and got a kernel of core people together. >> Alex: Yeah. >> Kind of set the DNA, what is the DNA of this project if you had to describe it? >> Yeah, so I think at the heart of it it's serverless functions made simple for Docker and Kubernetes. >> Great, and so how does Amazon play into this? You were using Amazon cloud? >> Yeah, I was using AWS and I was using Lambda, and that flow was not what I was used to in the enterprise. It wasn't what I was used to as a Docker captain. You know, I wanted a finite image that I could scan for vulnerabilities. >> John: Yeah. >> I could check off and promote through an environment. >> John: Yeah. >> Couldn't do it, so that was what OpenFaas aimed to do, was to make those serverless functions easy with Docker as a runtime. >> Well, congratulations, it's a lot of hard work. First, building a community's very difficult, and certainly one that's relevant. Cool and relevant, I would say, is serverless and functions. We'll certainly be seeing that now at the uptake. Still early on, but people are working on it. So, then now, let's forward to today. You work for VMWare, so-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> How did they get involved, are you shipping the project to VMWare, do they own it? Do you maintain the independence? What's the relationship between VMWare, yourself, and the project, if you can talk about that. >> Yeah, I think that's a great question. So, I got to the point where I had demands on my time around the clock. I couldn't rest, open source project, weekends, nights, the lot. >> John: You need the beer money, too, by the way. >> Right, yeah. >> You need some beer money. >> And I was working at ADP and just doing all of this in my own time, and then had a number of different options that came up and people saying, "Look, how are you going to sustain this, "how are you going to keep doing what you love?" You know, you should be working on it full time. One of the options that came up was from VMWare to work in the Open Source Technology Center. It's relatively new-- >> John: Mm-hmm. >> And the mission of the OSTC is to show VMWare as a good citizen in the community and to contribute back to meaningful projects, right, that relate to their products. >> Yeah, and they have good leadership, too, at VMWare. A lot of people don't know that. We did a couple CUBE interviews with them last year, and there is a group inside VMWare that just does that, not with the tentacles of VMWare and Dell Technologies in there. It's an independent group. >> Alex: Yeah. >> They probably go to some meetings and do some debrief, but for the most part it's kind of decoupled from VMWare, right. >> Yeah, right. So, the mission is not necessarily to make money and to produce products. It's to contribute to open source. Help with inbound so when we need to consume a project in a product, and outbound when we want to make the world a better place. >> So, I'm not going to put words in VMWare's mouth, but I will speculate covering VMWare since theCUBE started. We've been to every VMWorld and everyone knows we've got the good presence there, but if I'm VMWare I'm like, "Hey, you know what, we just "did a deal with Amazon, our enterprise "group is not so cloud savvy." I mean, the enterprise, there are operators, not true cloud native, but they're bridging that gap. The world of cloud native and enterprise is coming together. Does this project fit into that spot? Is that kind of where they saw it? Did I get that right or what was their interest other than doing-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> Helping the world out and solving world peace in the open source community. >> Yeah, so the mission of OSTC is slightly different. It's to contribute back to meaningful projects and to have this presence in the community. You know, I think OpenFaas is particularly attractive because it has such a broad community. There's people all around the world that are contributing to it, very active. For VMWare it makes a lot of sense because it runs natively on Kubernetes or Docker Swarm, and it's gained a lot of traction, people are using it. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> I had a call with BT Research before I came out and they said, "We've been using it for seven months. "We absolutely love it, it's transforming "how we're doing our microservices," and so I think that's part of it, as well as already have kind of a lead. Already have a lot of momentum with this project. >> So, are you looking to, you know, I know that the organization that you work for is really focused on driving this outbound, right? >> Alex: Yeah, yeah. >> Is VMWare using this internally as well? >> So, I think there's been a number of people who've shown an interest. You can think, "Right, there's a problem "we could solve with this," and I'm just getting my feet under the table, but really my mission is to make serverless functions simple to build this community-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And to have something that people can turn to as an alternative. So, one of the things that I did in the talk yesterday was, "How do you explain OpenFaas to your boss," and one of the points there was to unlock your data. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And I think we talked about this briefly before, now with controversies recently about data and who owns it, what's happening with it, I think it's even more relevant that-- >> John: Yeah. >> You can have full control over the whole stack if you want-- >> John: Yeah. >> Or use a product like Microsoft AKS, their Kubernetes service-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Or GKE and actually treat OpenFaas like a very thin layer of automation. >> Lauren: Really, okay. >> Or go full stack and have everything under your control. >> I mean, that's a great conversation to have, too, because obviously you're kind of referring to the Facebook situation. Zuckerberg's testifying it front of Senate yesterday, Congress today, and it's funny because watching him talk to senators in the US, they really don't know how stuff works, and so if you think about what Facebook does... I mean, granted they took some liberties. They're not the perfect citizen, they got slapped. They took it to the woodshed, if you will, but their mission is to use the data, and this is where cloud native's interesting and I think I want to get your reaction to this, you need to use the data, not treat it as a siloed, fenced in data warehouse. That model's old, right-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> It's now horizontal and scalable. Data's got to move and you've got to have data to make other things happen. That's the way these services are working. >> Yeah. >> So, it's really important to have addressability of the data and you know, GDPR takes an attempt at, you know, kind of hand waving that simple argument away. I'm not really a big fan of that, personally, but the role of data's super important. You've got to make it pervasive, so the challenge is how do you manage those controls. Is that an opportunity for functions? What's your reaction to that whole paradigm of data? >> Yeah, so we're talking about anonymous usage data, like Facebook situation or-- >> Just data in general... Oh, no, just data in general, if I'm an application and I have data-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> That I'm generating, same development of service-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> I need, you might want to leverage that data. So, I'm going to have to have a mechanism for you to share that data to make your service better-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> Because data makes data, you know-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> The alchemy side of it is interesting, but then there's all... You get trapped in regulation, licensing, it can be destructive. >> Yes, so as an engineer, and as an open source engineer, you find people that have no clue about what an MIT license is to a GPL or why you'd use one or the other. I think there's a lot we can do to educate the wider community and help them to learn the basics of these issues. When I was at university we had a course on ethics and legal issues and licensing, and I heard on the radio earlier on the Uber that they're starting to try and up the level of that again, and I think it really needs to start at a ground level. We need to educate people about these issues so that they're aware of how to handle the data. I mean, if you look at common tools like Docker and VS Code and Atom, popular editors, they collect anonymous usage statistics and you have to opt out. You know, should OpenFaas collect data as well, because it can be super helpful for us to know the right thing to do. >> Yeah. >> And when you come to open source you get no feedback until somebody wants support from you and it has to be done yesterday for free. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> And so, yeah, getting data can be super powerful. >> Well, Alex, you bring up a great point. I think this is something that's worthy of an ongoing conversation. I think it will be, too, because GPL, Apache license, all these licenses were built when open source was a Tier 2 citizen, so the whole idea of these-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> Licenses was to create a robust sharing economy of code, and you know, with the certain nuances of those licenses. But just like stacks get updated and modernized with what we've seen the containers and now Kubernetes is serverless, the stack is changing and modernizing. The licenses have to, as well, so I think this is something that... I don't, I think it's kind of like we've got to get on it. (laughing) It's like I think we should just, this is a work area. It's not necessarily... It's game changing if you don't do it, right, because it could-- >> Yeah. >> It could flip it either way. So, to me that's my opinion. >> Well, I think you're under MIT, correct, is that-- >> So, it's under MIT right now. >> Lauren: Okay. >> One of the things that I didn't realize when I started the project is if you want to get into a big foundation like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation you need an Apache 2.0 license, and the main difference is that it offers some protections around patent claims, but it's basically-- >> Lauren: Okay. >> Compatible, so it is a minefield, and it's-- >> Lauren: So, that's just for the CNCF? >> Right, and the Apache Foundation, obviously as well. >> Lauren: Yes. >> And probably many others follow suit because I think it, we talk about the-- >> John: It's the dual source, it's the dual source. >> A refresh... >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> Right, it's a compatible license, it seems to help a lot of people. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> That's a huge issue because you could be well down the road with committing code and then the lawyers will make you take it out. >> Right, so that's why organizations like the Open Source Program Office exist within VMWare, to help these issues and to monitor and do compliance. They may use software like Black Duck to check stuff-- >> Lauren: Yep, mm-hmm. >> Automatically because you don't want to be doing checks on your aircraft once it's in the air. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> John: Yeah. >> You want to sort out everything out on the ground. >> You'll be grounding your fleet, that's for sure-- >> Right. >> When it comes to that, how do you handle that with licensing? How do you guys handle that when people contribute? >> Yeah. >> Are they aware of the license or they don't understand the implications? >> So, with OpenFaas we follow a model very similar to the Linux kernel, which is a sign off developer certificate of origin. What you're saying is I'm allowed to give you this code, I'm allowed for this to be a part of the project and I wrote it, I originated it. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And that's pretty much a good balance between a full contributor license agreement and nothing at all. >> John: Yeah. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> But look, there's a lot of projects in this space right now. I don't know if you've noticed that, Kubernetes serverless projects. >> Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of really interesting, it's why I like this show here. I think what Cisco's smart to do here at DevNet Create is identify the network programmability, which really takes devops, expands the aperture of what devops is, so-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> You know, as you got new applications coming online some developers want nothing to do with the infrastructure. Kubernetes has got a much more active and more prominent role with layer seven primitives, for instance, or-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> Managing things down to the network layer. You're talking about policy services inside services on the fly, so this is really a big, a good thing, in my opinion. So, you know, I think, Kubernetes, most people look at as a kind of generic orchestration, but I think there's so much more there. >> Alex: Yeah. >> I think that to me is attracting some really rockstar developers. >> Yeah, well I think, you know, the fact that you are open, you're under the MIT license, which I am a fan of-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> And you know, it is, you're on a very successful trajectory in terms of, you know, what you're building and who's engaged and the fact that VMWare is behind you means that they're going to put some money into it, hopefully, and help you guys along as it works, but it is also a project that is not... You know, it doesn't have folks just from VMWare. >> Alex: Yeah. >> It's really, really diverse in terms of who's committing the code. So, I think there's a lot of things that are really going for you. Now, who do you see, you mentioned competitors... >> Alex: Yeah. >> So, can you talk a little bit about what the ecosystem there looks like? >> Yeah, so there's a number of projects that I think have made some really good decisions about their architecture and their implementation. They all vary quite subtly, and one of the questions I get asked a lot is, you know, how is this different from X, cubeless nucleo, and if you look at the CNCF landscape there used to be a very small section with OpenFaas, Lambda, and a couple of others. It's now so big it has its own PDF just about serverless, and I think that's super confusing for people. So, part of what we're trying to do is make that simple and say, "Look, there may be many options. "Here's OpenFaas, here's how it works. "You can get it deployed in 60 seconds. "You can have any binary or any programming language "you want and it will scale up over Kubernetes." We'll just make a really deep integration, give you everything you'd expect, really nice developer experience. >> Lauren: That's great. >> What are some of the use cases you see right now, low hanging fruit for developers that want to come in and get involved in the project? Have you guys identified any low hanging fruit use cases? >> So, what I've seen, and I talked about this a bit yesterday in the talk, is three big use cases, really. The first one was Anisha Keshavan at University of Washington. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Now, she's doing a lot of data science with neuroinformatics, medical images. She's able to take scans of brains and give them to people like you and me, who don't know anything about medical science. We just draw around the lesions and we train her model, and then she makes it competitive like a game, gamefies it, you get more points, but actually, what we're doing is making the world a better place by training her medical imaging database. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> She'll then use that as an OpenFaas function to test real images as part of her postdoctorate. >> So, she's crowd sourcing, wisdom of crowds. >> Alex: Right. >> Collect some intelligence for her research. >> Now, one of the other things that I think's really cool is in the community we built out a project with two 17 year olds. Two 17 year olds built a really cool project, and when I think back to when I was 15, 16, I was playing with something like PHP on Windows Lamp Stack. You know, I had to do everything myself. >> John: Yeah. >> They got, like, this scaffolding built up and they could just go to the tenth story and just keep adding on. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> And they didn't have to worry about managing this infrastructure at all. >> Or architecture, foundation architecture. >> Alex: Right, right. >> Yeah, and that's exactly the reason why you want to do that. >> So, they wrote some small blocks of Python that we found this machine learning code that could convert a black and white image to color, wrapped it in a box and said, "There's a function," then dropped it into OpenFaas and started feeding tweets in, and that was pretty much it. >> John: Yeah. >> Now we have @ColorizeBot, a bit of a strange spelling but you'll find it on Twitter, and it's been in Le Monde newspaper, all round the world. It was pronounced at CubeCon as well, and it's just a super interesting way of showing how you can take something very complex, right, and democratize it. >> Yeah, we'd love to get those people working for theCUBE and put the little cube box and throw all the tweets in there. >> Alex: Right, yeah. >> Alex, thanks for coming on, congratulations. What's next on your project, tell us what's going on, what's next for you, what are you guys conquering next? >> So, I'm really focused on growing the team and community. We've got an open recruitment position open right now and a small team that's building internally. I think the more people we can get contributing on a regular basis the more support there's going to be for the community, the more people are going to want to use this Actually had 26 people join a call last week. "How to contribute to OpenFaas," that was the name of it. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Around the world, and the best part for me was where we got to the testimonies and I had people just sharing their tips and experiences. How rewarding it is to contribute something bigger, something that you as a developer will actually want to use. >> Yeah, and the value opportunities, to extract value out of the group-- >> Yeah. >> It's phenomenal, functions as a service. Super relevant in cloud and devops as the middleware, if you want to call it that, expands more capabilities in devops are coming. It's theCUBE coverage here at DevNet Create. We'll be back with more live coverage here in Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California, after this short break. (techy music playing)

>>Set restaurants. And who says TEUs had got a little ass more skin in the game for us, in charge of his destiny? You guys are excited. Robert Worship is Chief Alumni. >>My name is Dave Ante, and I'm a long time industry analyst. So when you're as old as I am, you've seen a lot of transitions. Everybody talks about industry cycles and waves. I've seen many, many waves. Met a lot of industry executives and of a little bit of a, an industry historian. When you interview many thousands of people, probably five or 6,000 people as I have over the last half of a decade, you get to interact with a lot of people's knowledge and you begin to develop patterns. And so that's sort of what I bring is, is an ability to catalyze the conversation and, you know, share that knowledge with others in the community. Our philosophy is everybody's expert at something. Everybody's passionate about something and has real deep knowledge about that's something well, we wanna focus in on that area and extract that knowledge and share it with our communities. This is Dave Ante. Thanks for watching the Cube. >>Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cube where we are streaming live this week from CubeCon. I am Savannah Peterson and I am joined by an absolutely stellar lineup of cube brilliance this afternoon. To my left, a familiar face, Lisa Martin. Lisa, how you feeling? End of day two. >>Excellent. It was so much fun today. The buzz started yesterday, the momentum, the swell, and we only heard even more greatness today. >>Yeah, yeah, abs, absolutely. You know, I, I sometimes think we've hit an energy cliff, but it feels like the energy is just >>Continuous. Well, I think we're gonna, we're gonna slide right into tomorrow. >>Yeah, me too. I love it. And we've got two fantastic analysts with us today, Sarge and Keith. Thank you both for joining us. We feel so lucky today. >>Great being back on. >>Thanks for having us. Yeah, Yeah. It's nice to have you back on the show. We were, had you yesterday, but I miss hosting with you. It's been a while. >>It has been a while. We haven't done anything in since, Since pre >>Pandemic, right? Yeah, I think you're >>Right. Four times there >>Be four times back in the day. >>We, I always enjoy whole thing, Lisa, cuz she's so well prepared. I don't have to do any research when I come >>Home. >>Lisa will bring up some, Oh, sorry. Jeep, I see that in 2008 you won this award for Yeah. Being just excellent and I, I'm like, Oh >>Yeah. All right Keith. So, >>So did you do his analysis? >>Yeah, it's all done. Yeah. Great. He only part, he's not sitting next to me too. We can't see it, so it's gonna be like a magic crystal bell. Right. So a lot of people here. You got some stats in terms of the attendees compared >>To last year? Yeah, Priyanka told us we were double last year up to 8,000. We also got the scoop earlier that 2023 is gonna be in Chicago, which is very exciting. >>Oh, that is, is nice. Yeah, >>We got to break that here. >>Excellent. Keith, talk to us about what some of the things are that you've seen the last couple of days. The momentum. What's the vibe? I saw your tweet about the top three things you were being asked. Kubernetes was not one of them. >>Kubernetes were, was not one of 'em. This conference is starting to, it, it still feels very different than a vendor conference. The keynote is kind of, you know, kind of all over the place talking about projects, but the hallway track has been, you know, I've, this is maybe my fifth or sixth CU con in person. And the hallway track is different. It's less about projects and more about how, how do we adjust to the enterprise? How do we Yes. Actually do enterprise things. And it has been amazing watching this community grow. I'm gonna say grow up and mature. Yes. You know, you know, they're not wearing ties yet, but they are definitely understanding kind of the, the friction of implementing new technology in, in an enterprise. >>Yeah. So ge what's your, what's been your take, We were with you yesterday. What's been the take today to take aways? >>NOMA has changed since yesterday, but a few things I think I, I missed talking about that yesterday were that, first of all, let's just talk about Amazon. Amazon earnings came out, it spooked the market and I think it's relevant in this context as well, because they're number one cloud provider. Yeah. And all, I mean, almost all of these technologies on the back of us here, they are related to cloud, right? So it will have some impact on these. Like we have to analyze that. Like will it make the open source go faster or slower in, in lieu of the fact that the, the cloud growth is slowing. Right? So that's, that's one thing that's put that's put that aside. I've been thinking about the, the future of Kubernetes. What is the future of Kubernetes? And in that context, I was thinking like, you know, I think in, when I put a pointer there, I think in tangents, like, what else is around this thing? So I think CN CNCF has been writing the success of Kubernetes. They are, that was their number one flagship project, if you will. And it was mature enough to stand on its own. It it was Google, it's Google's Borg dub da Kubernetes. It's a genericized version of that. Right? So folks who do tech deep down, they know that, Right. So I think it's easier to stand with a solid, you know, project. But when the newer projects come in, then your medal will get tested at cncf. Right. >>And cncf, I mean they've got over 140 projects Yeah. Right now. So there's definitely much beyond >>Kubernetes. Yeah. So they, I have numbers there. 18 graduated, right, 37 in incubation and then 81 in Sandbox stage. They have three stages, right. So it's, they have a lot to chew on and the more they take on, the less, you know, quality you get goes into it. Who is, who's putting the money behind it? Which vendors are sponsoring like cncf, like how they're getting funded up. I think it >>Something I pay attention to as well. Yeah. Yeah. Lisa, I know you've got >>Some insight. Those are the things I was thinking about today. >>I gotta ask you, what's your take on what Keith said? Are you also seeing the maturation of the enterprise here at at coupon? >>Yes, I am actually, when you say enterprise versus what's the other side? Startups, right? Yeah. So startups start using open source a lot more earlier or lot more than enterprises. The enterprise is what they need. Number one thing is the, for their production workloads, they want a vendor sporting them. I said that yesterday as well, right? So it depend depending on the size of the enterprise. If you're a big shop, definitely if you have one of the 500 or Fortune five hundreds and your tech savvy shop, then you can absorb the open source directly coming from the open source sort of universe right. Coming to you. But if you are the second tier of enterprise, you want to go to a provider which is managed service provider, or it can be cloud service provider in this case. Yep. Most of the cloud service providers have multiple versions of Kubernetes, for example. >>I'm not talking about Kubernetes only, but like, but that is one example, right? So at Amazon you can get five different flavors of Kubernetes, right? Fully manage, have, manage all kind of stuff. So people don't have bandwidth to manage that stuff locally. You have to patch it, you have to roll in the new, you know, updates and all that stuff. Like, it's a lot of work for many. So CNCF actually is formed for that reason. Like the, the charter is to bring the quality to open source. Like in other companies they have the release process and they, the stringent guidelines and QA and all that stuff. So is is something ready for production? That's the question when it comes to any software, right? So they do that kind of work and, and, and they have these buckets defined at high level, but it needs more >>Work. Yeah. So one of the things that, you know, kind of stood out to me, I have good friend in the community, Alex Ellis, who does open Fast. It's a serverless platform, great platform. Two years ago or in 2019, there was a serverless day date. And in serverless day you had K Native, you had Open Pass, you had Ws, which is supported by IBM completely, not CNCF platforms. K native came into the CNCF full when Google donated the project a few months ago or a couple of years ago, now all of a sudden there's a K native day. Yes. Not a serverless day, it's a K native day. And I asked the, the CNCF event folks like, what happened to Serverless Day? I missed having open at serverless day. And you know, they, they came out and said, you know what, K native got big enough. >>They came in and I think Red Hat and Google wanted to sponsor a K native day. So serverless day went away. So I think what what I'm interested in and over the next couple of years is, is they're gonna be pushback from the C against the cncf. Is the CNCF now too big? Is it now the gatekeeper for do I have to be one of those 147 projects, right? In order enough to get my project noticed the open, fast, great project. I don't think Al Alex has any desire to have his project hosted by cncf, but it probably deserves, you know, shoulder left recognition with that. So I'm pushing to happen to say, okay, if this is open community, this is open source. If CNC is the place to have the cloud native conversation, what about the projects that's not cncf? Like how do we have that conversation when we don't have the power of a Google right. Or a, or a Lenox, et cetera, or a Lenox Foundation. So GE what, >>What are your thoughts on that? Is, is CNC too big? >>I don't think it's too big. I think it's too small to handle the, what we are doing in open source, right? So it's a bottle. It can become a bottleneck. Okay. I think too big in a way that yeah, it has, it has, it has power from that point of view. It has that cloud, if you will. The people listen to it. If it's CNCF project or this must be good, it's like in, in incubators. Like if you are y white Combinator, you know, company, it must be good. You know, I mean, may not be >>True, but, >>Oh, I think there's a bold assumption there though. I mean, I think everyone's just trying to do the best they can. And when we're evaluating projects, a very different origin and background, it's incredibly hard. Very c and staff is a staff of 30 people. They've got 180,000 people that are contributing to these projects and a thousand maintainers that they're trying to uphold. I think the challenge is actually really great. And to me, I actually look at events as an illustration of, you know, what's the culture and the health of an organization. If I were to evaluate CNCF based on that, I'd say we're very healthy right now. I would say that we're in a good spot. There's a lot of momentum. >>Yeah. I, I think CNCF is very healthy. I'm, I'm appreciative for it being here. I love coupon. It's becoming the, the facto conference to have this conversation has >>A totally >>Different vibe to other, It's a totally different vibe. Yeah. There needs to be a conduit and truth be told, enterprise buyers, to subject's point, this is something that we do absolutely agree on, on enterprise buyers. We want someone to pick winners and losers. We do, we, we don't want a box of Lego dumped on our, the middle of our table. We want somebody to have sorted that out. So while there may be five or six different service mesh solutions, at least the cncf, I can go there and say, Oh, I'll pick between the three or four that are most popular. And it, it's a place to curate. But I think with that curation comes the other side of it. Of how do we, how, you know, without the big corporate sponsor, how do I get my project pushed up? Right? Elevated. Elevated, Yep. And, and put onto the show floor. You know, another way that projects get noticed is that startups will adopt them, Push them. They may not even be, I don't, my CNCF project may not, my product may not even be based on the CNCF product. But the new stack has a booth, Ford has a booth. Nothing to do with a individual prod up, but promoting open source. What happens when you're not sponsored? >>I gotta ask you guys, what do you disagree on? >>Oh, so what, what do we disagree on? So I'm of the mindset, I can, I can say this, I I believe hybrid infrastructure is the future of it. Bar none. If I built my infrastructure, if I built my application in the cloud 10 years ago and I'm still building net new applications, I have stuff that I built 10 years ago that looks a lot like on-prem, what do I do with it? I can't modernize it cuz I don't have the developers to do it. I need to stick that somewhere. And where I'm going to stick that at is probably a hybrid infrastructure. So colo, I'm not gonna go back to the data center, but I'm, I'm gonna look, pick up something that looks very much like the data center and I'm saying embrace that it's the future. And if you're Boeing and you have, and Boeing is a member, cncf, that's a whole nother topic. If you have as 400 s, hpu X, et cetera, stick that stuff. Colo, build new stuff, but, and, and continue to support OpenStack, et cetera, et cetera. Because that's the future. Hybrid is the future. >>And sub g agree, disagree. >>I okay. Hybrid. Nobody can deny that the hybrid is the reality, not the future. It's a reality right now. It's, it's a necessity right now you can't do without it. Right. And okay, hybrid is very relative term. You can be like 10% here, 90% still hybrid, right? So the data center is shrinking and it will keep shrinking. Right? And >>So if by whole is the data center shrinking? >>This is where >>Quick one quick getting guys for it. How is growing by a clip? Yeah, but there's no data supporting. David Lym just came out for a report I think last year that showed that the data center is holding steady, holding steady, not growing, but not shrinking. >>Who sponsored that study? Wait, hold on. So the, that's a question, right? So more than 1 million data centers have been closed. I have, I can dig that through number through somebody like some organizations we published that maybe they're cloud, you know, people only. So the, when you get these kind of statements like it, it can be very skewed statements, right. But if you have seen the, the scene out there, which you have, I know, but I have also seen a lot of data centers walk the floor of, you know, a hundred thousand servers in a data center. I cannot imagine us consuming the infrastructure the way we were going into the future of co Okay. With, with one caveat actually. I am not big fan of like broad strokes. Like make a blanket statement. Oh no, data center's dead. Or if you are, >>That's how you get those esty headlines now. Yeah, I know. >>I'm all about to >>Put a stake in the ground. >>Actually. The, I think that you get more intelligence from the new end, right? A small little details if you will. If you're golden gold manak or Bank of America, you have so many data centers and you will still have data centers because performance matters to you, right? Your late latency matters for applications. But if you are even a Fortune 500 company on the lower end and or a healthcare vertical, right? That your situation is different. If you are a high, you know, growth startup, your situation is different, right? You will be a hundred percent cloud. So cloud gives you velocity, the, the, the pace of change, the pace of experimentation that actually you are buying innovation through cloud. It's proxy for innovation. And that's how I see it. But if you have, if you're stuck with older applications, I totally understand. >>Yeah. So the >>We need that OnPrem. Yeah, >>Well I think the, the bring your fuel sober, what we agree is that cloud is the place where innovation happens. Okay? At some point innovation becomes legacy debt and you have thus hybrid, you are not going to keep your old applications up to date forever. The, the, the math just doesn't add up. And where I differ in opinion is that not everyone needs innovation to keep moving. They need innovation for a period of time and then they need steady state. So Sergeant, we >>Argue about this. I have a, I >>Love this debate though. I say it's efficiency and stability also plays an important role. I see exactly what you're talking about. No, it's >>Great. I have a counter to that. Let me tell you >>Why. Let's >>Hear it. Because if you look at the storage only, right? Just storage. Just take storage computer network for, for a minute. There three cost reps in, in infrastructure, right? So storage earlier, early on there was one tier of storage. You say pay the same price, then now there are like five storage tiers, right? What I'm trying to say is the market sets the price, the market will tell you where this whole thing will go, but I know their margins are high in cloud, 20 plus percent and margin will shrink as, as we go forward. That means the, the cloud will become cheaper relative to on-prem. It, it, in some cases it's already cheaper. But even if it's a stable workload, even in that case, we will have a lower tier of service. I mean, you, you can't argue with me that the cloud versus your data center, they are on the same tier of services. Like cloud is a better, you know, product than your data center. Hands off. >>I love it. We, we are gonna relish in the debates between the two of you. Mic drops. The energy is great. I love it. Perspective. It's not like any of us can quite see through the crystal ball that we have very informed opinions, which is super exciting. Yeah. Lisa, any last thoughts today? >>Just love, I love the debate as well. That, and that's, that's part of what being in this community is all about. So sharing about, sharing opinions, expressing opinions. That's how it grows. That's how, that's how we innovate. Yeah. Obviously we need the cloud, but that's how we innovate. That's how we grow. Yeah. And we've seen that demonstrated the last couple days and I and your, your takes here on the Cuban on Twitter. Brilliant. >>Thank you. I absolutely love it. I'm gonna close this out with a really important analysis on the swag of the show. Yes. And if you know, yesterday we were looking at what is the weirdest swag or most unique swag We had that bucket hat that took the grand prize. Today we're gonna focus on something that's actually quite cool. A lot of the vendors here have really dedicated their swag to being local to Detroit. Very specific in their sourcing. Sonotype here has COOs. They're beautiful. You can't quite feel this flannel, but it's very legit hand sound here in Michigan. I can't say that I've been to too many conferences, if any, where there was this kind of commitment to localizing and sourcing swag from around the corner. We also see this with the Intel booth. They've got screen printers out here doing custom hoodies on spot. >>Oh fun. They're even like appropriately sized. They had local artists do these designs and if you're like me and you care about what's on your wrist, you're familiar with Shinola. This is one of my favorite swags that's available. There is a contest. Oh going on. Hello here. Yeah, so if you are Atan, make sure that you go and check this out. The we, I talked about this on the show. We've had the founder on the show or the CEO and yeah, I mean Shine is just full of class as since we are in Detroit as well. One of the fun themes is cars. >>Yes. >>And Storm Forge, who are also on the show, is actually giving away an Aston Martin, which is very exciting. Not exactly manufactured in Detroit. However, still very cool on the car front and >>The double oh seven version named the best I >>Know in the sixties. It's love it. It's very cool. Two quick last things. We talk about it a lot on the show. Every company now wants to be a software company. Yep. On that vein, and keeping up with my hat theme, the Home Depot is here because they want everybody to know that they in fact are a technology company, which is very cool. They have over 500,000 employees. You can imagine there's a lot of technology that has to go into keeping Napa. Absolutely. Yep. Wild to think about. And then last, but not at least very quick, rapid fire, best t-shirt contest. If you've ever ran to one of these events, there are a ton of T-shirts out there. I rate them on two things. Wittiest line and softness. If you combine the two, you'll really be our grand champion for the year. I'm just gonna hold these up and set them down for your laughs. Not afraid to commit, which is pretty great. This is another one designed by locals here. Detroit Code City. Oh, love it. This one made me chuckle the most. Kiss my cash. >>Oh, that's >>Good. These are also really nice and soft, which is fantastic. Also high on the softness category is this Op Sarah one. I also like their bird logo. These guys, there's just, you know, just real nice touch. So unfortunately, if you have the fumble, you're not here with us, live in Detroit. At least you're gonna get taste of the swag. I taste of the stories and some smiles hear from those of us on the cube. Thank you both so much for being here with us. Lisa, thanks for another fabulous day. Got it, girl. My name's Savannah Peterson. Thank you for joining us from Detroit. We're the cube and we can't wait to see you tomorrow.