>> [] From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020. Virtual, brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and the ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And this is theCUBE coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2020 in Europe the virtual edition and you've reached the final stage. This is our last interview so hopefully, learned a lot talking to the CNCF members. We've had a few great practitioners, of course, some of the important vendors and startups in this space. And when we talk about what's happening in this, this cloud native space, one of the things that gets bandied about a lot is scale. What does that mean? You know, when it first rolled out, of course, there is only one Google out there, and only a handful of true hyperscalers. But there absolutely are some companies that really need scale, performance global and so happy to bring in he is the final boss. It is Alexandria McLean. He's a technical architect at Ubisoft. And yes, I do have a little bit of background in gaming. But here's someone that is helping enable in one of the largest gaming companies in the globe. So Alexandra, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hey, thanks for the invitation, happy to be here. >> All right, so you're no novice to this ecosystem. I know you and I have both been at many of the Docker cons, the KubeCons over the years. So if you could just give our audience a little bit of your background and what is your team responsible for Ubisoft? >> Okay, sure, so I am part of the one of the IT teams inside Ubisoft. So we're responsible mainly to provide cloud computing resources and Kubernetes infrastructure for the whole company. So again, and if you want to know more about basically, I've been, I've been leading the Kubernetes initiative, the past few years right now. So we started the journey maybe in 2016. We're already pretty busy, you know, working on the growth for the cloud, the cloud industry to stand Ubisoft, for the growth of the expansion, different data centers and supporting the needs of the different teams and development teams inside Ubisoft. And one thing we wanted to do back then was really to enable and accelerate the adoption of cloud native, the cloud native mindset and cloud native architectures. So what we did back then is did, we did a short analysis of our different technologies that was available at the time, and we decided to jump full head on Kubernetes and make this as the foundation for the different workloads, container workloads that will be that will enable drive adoption inside Ubisoft to grow and boost the productivity of many things. >> Alright, I'm really glad you brought up that cloud native mindset, if you could just up-level a little bit for, you know, the business leaders out there, they hear about, you know, Kubernetes and they won't know how to spell it. They hear something like a cloud native mindset, and they say, you know, I don't understand, what does this mean for our business? So what architecturally are you doing and what does that mean for you know, your games and ultimately your end users? >> Yeah, so I would say that basically, I mean, if you want to have a cloud native architecture, really want to make your application, first of all, very portable, very easy to deploy and manageable, and at the same time very resilient to failure. So you want to make sure that your application once it's deployed, that it's highly resilient to failure, that it was built for failures and that you can manage the project and the service to meet the expectation of either the gamers or the service owners basically. >> Yeah, you know, absolutely. I'm curious, here in 2020, we see the ripple effects of what the global pandemic has. I have to imagine that from a gaming standpoint, that has had an impact. So maybe if we use that as an analogy, if it's valid from your standpoint, I have to imagine more people are using it. What did this mean to your infrastructure? How were you ready from an IT's perspective to support that, you know, increased usage, kind of rippling around the globe as more people are home all the time? >> Hmm, yeah, that's a good question I guess. I mean, we really have like two kind of, I would say, audience inside Ubisoft in the IT team that I serve. So we have the people who are building the softwares and the applications to help the developers to, I mean the game developers in general, so we have different services, internal services, and tooling that needs to be hosted somewhere. And we need to enable these people in these teams to have a way to manage applications efficiently. And the other side we are looking at right now, I mean, we the game server and the gaming industry, is really, I think there's a shift right now in the way that she prefer doing, the way that you're going to manage the game servers in the future. And I would say that back then, there was a lot of in house tooling, things that were really, I mean, appropriately proprietary to each gaming company. But right now, what we wanted to do in the past few years, we work for instance on a solution called hygienist. So we were involved in the beginning to design this kind of next gen game server, dedicated server hosting infrastructure that was all built around communities. So, in the future, we were already started to work on that, and the next gen of games are going to be difficult to stay on top of Kubernetes, which is going to enable a lot more efficiency of resource usage and now at the same time, we'd say manageability and the profitability about all these services. Because I think that one key thing about cloud native and Kubernetes is that, once you know Kubernetes, I mean, basically, it's very easy to onboard new people in the team, the project, because they know what is Kubernetes how to operate it. So it will be much more efficient in the future for all the workflows that we have internally and the next game server infrastructure as well to be hosted in Kubernetes, it's going to be much more easy to standardize and unify that whole stack. >> Well, the skill sets are so critically important. And it's great to hear you say that onboarding somebody in Kubernetes, is easier than it might have been a couple of years ago. If you could bring us inside a little bit, you know, what's your stack look like? You know, you know, can you say what cloud or cloud you use? When it comes to Kubernetes, you know, what are the key tools that you're using and partners that you have? >> Yeah, sure. So early on, I would say, almost 10 years ago, we really started to focus on adding on prem cloud infrastructure and the technology that we chose back then was OpenStack. So we have a large footprint of OpenStack called install, installed internally and different data centers all over the world so people and different teams and anyone at Ubisoft can easily have computers or compute resources available for them. And with Kubernetes, we initially we wanted to have, you know, to make your Kubernetes a commodity. We wanted to ask people be very I mean in a position to easily experiment new things, new applications on top of Kubernetes. And for that we decided to go with Rancher. So Rancher is an open source solution made by Rancher labs, and we, initially after we started to build and in our solution, the first year because we talked back then the landscape was quite different and we thought it was the best choice for us to do. But we realized shortly after, I mean, when Rancher 2.2 came out, I think it was in something like April 2018, that we will benefit a lot go with this kind of solution which was open sourced, there was a lot of traction behind it and it will enable us to I mean, accelerate, accelerate the adoption of Kubernetes and cloud native in general, much more faster, than the you know solutions that we had built at that time. So we went with Rancher and right now we have, I would say, I mean, we have maybe 10 data centers with the cloud installed on top of it, much more data centers was going to grow in the next couple of months and years, and we have over 200 clusters and 1000 nodes that are managed by Rancher and people can just deploy on demand, to own Kubernetes cluster and get started with it if they want to. >> Okay, so if I heard you right, it's Rancher on top of the OpenStack solution in your data centers. >> Yes. >> You talk about how many clusters you have, you know, what's the state of managing those environments? You said, you're using Rancher that's one of the things we've seen a lot of discussion over the last couple of years is you know, went from managing containers to managing you know, part or cluster to now, multi clusters around multi sites, you know, what's the maturity today? Anything that you're looking for that would make your life easier to manage such a broad environment? >> Yeah, well, I would say that's one of the drawback, I mean, when we enabled that solution with Rancher we didn't see, I mean, here's the views of launching provisioning new clusters, is that right now, we have a lot of clusters, maybe too many, because we try to consolidate, I mean, the next, the next logical step for us is we try to consolidate the workloads maybe as much as possible, and see if there's really a need for people to have their own dedicated cluster for them. And initially, there was a lot of demand for that, because people basically they came to us and they said, you know, we want to use Kubernetes. And what we want to do is we want to have films which we have access to it, we want to be able to do whatever we want with it, upgrade it at our own pace. And I don't want to have any neighbor on it. I want to be completely isolated in terms of computer resources. So we said all right, we're going to make a solution that is going to provision new clusters on demand for everyone. And the intro stuff may very well. But now, after a while some people and we as especially as an IT provider and operator, we realized that, you know, maybe people don't have to be completing alone to cluster, maybe we should try to consolidate that a little bit. So we're trying to migrate workloads from certain services and tooling and say maybe you can, instead of running your own cluster, you can use this one that is going to be shared. And there will be a team dedicated I mean dedicated to support and operate is faster for you because we want to in the end, we want to offload the burden of infrastructure and Kubernetes although it's I mean, it brings a lot of abstraction in simplicity, you still have to manage your cluster in the end. So we'd rather have people focus on the application side than on the Kubernetes infrastructure side. So we will start a path of maybe try to consolidated friend workloads, and see if we can reduce the amount of clusters that we have and also to unify the way that people are using the different providers because although we have, a huge open OpenStack cloud offering internally on prem, there are still people who need to use GKE or EKS and a couple of other external cloud providers. So for these people, some of them are not using really Rancher, although it's possible with Rancher to just directly using the providers. But what we want to do is try to unify the way that you're going to get access to this cluster, try to make a central governance model for people to pass through a central team to get access and prevent the cluster. So they will be standardized, we will be able to add more maybe security policies and compliance and rules and everything. So the cluster will be created in certain ways and that too much fragmented as they are today. >> Yeah, that's ultimately what I was trying to understand is most customers I talked to, they have hybrid environments, they're using multiple clouds, if you're using Kubernetes you know, how do you get your arms around that. So I'd love to get your viewpoint just 'cause you've been involved since, kind of the early Kubernetes days, you know, what's, what's better now than it was a few years ago? You know, I heard you say that you looked at possibly, you know, creating a solution to yourself so a company like Rancher helps simplify things. So when you look at the maturity, you know, how happy are you with what you have now? And are there any things that you say, boy, I'd love my team to not have to worry about this. You know, maybe the industry as a whole would be able to, you know, standardize or make things simpler? >> Well, you know, when we started to use Rancher maybe there were a couple of things that we wanted to simplify for the users because what Rancher does is essentially is that, there's a lot of configuration options. It's very flexible because it's first mining providers. So the first few things that we did was try to simplify the user experience who we will extend we modified ventures in some ways to make It's simpler to be consumed. And also, the experience is much more simpler than it was, let's say two years ago when we started, we still want to simplify it even further, we want to ideally provide a fully manage experience. So peoples don't even have to worry about the control plane components that is currently being deployed with their competitors clusters. We want to remove that away from them so that we, once again fully focus on the application side of development. And I think one other aspect that we need to maybe improve in the future is that, when you want to deploy your application and make it resilient and geographically distributed, then you need to manage multiple clusters, and you need to deploy your applications and performance cluster. So, the whole multi cluster aspect of things like, how do I deploy my application from a version? How do I make it like consistent between the different clusters that where it needs to be deployed. How do I make service discovery possible? Or do I mesh everything all the application together to make sure that it's easy to operate, it's easy for the developers, and that it's resilient in the end. So we will start to look at the, I mean, the multi cluster multi region aspect for Kubernetes. Because that's a big challenge to us. >> All right, well, Alexandre, want to shift for a second, let's talk about the conference, KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, obviously, it's virtual this year, so there is a little bit of shift but you know, you've attended many of these in the past. What are their projects that you're interested in learning more or are there you know, peers of yours that you're looking to collaborate with? What have you seen in the past that that you're hoping you still get, from a virtual event like we have this year? >> Well, you know, I think that it has become so big, it's hard to keep up with everything that's happening at the same time, you know, nowadays, but, things that we're looking at really, is maybe like, I think chapters maybe, in terms of service mesh to a lot of technologies, I think it's maturing slowly. So we'll have, we'll always try to have a look about what is the most, the best fit for us and the use cases that we have. And some people thought you're using Kubernetes, some other people are using, you know more traditional stacks, So we try to bridge that together and see what's possible to migrate the existing workloads from the traditional cloud VMs, and call applications toward Kubernetes and everything. So maybe try to see if it's possible to bridge that path and migrate gradually for the users that we have. And other things in general, I think that it will be very interesting to see the whole bear setups, I mean, evolving to run out and see are we can try to add conformance and compliance rules to different clusters that we have to manage to make sure that it's no longer like, just add a matter of I want to create a cluster, I get access to it. We need to centralize the governance. We need to centralize that, the rules of our everything's going to be managing the end and make sure that security is a big aspect to it so make sure that there's no vulnerabilities and everything's being audited. And especially for the game students is going to be a big factor for us. So we definitely our interested into all the security discussion that's happening right now. >> All right, no shortage of lots of information. Alexandre, by the way, that there's no way that anybody can keep up on everything that's happening in this very robust community. But thank you so much for sharing your journey. It's always great to hear from the practitioner. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, awesome. >> All right, and thank you for joining us, for all the coverage. Be sure to go to theCUBE.net, you can see not only all the interviews from this show, you can go search find previous shows as well as see what events we will be at, of course right now all virtually, so, am Stu Miniman and thank you as always for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)