>> Live from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE here in Barcelona, Spain at the Fira, it's KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and my co-hosts for two days of live wall-to-wall coverage is Corey Quinn. Joining us back, we have two CUBE alums, Liz Rice, right to my right here who is a Technology Evangelist with Aqua security. Liz, thank you so much welcome back. >> Pleasure to be here. >> And Jeff Brewer, Vice President and Chief Architect, Small Business & Self-Employed Group, of Intuit. A CUBE alum since a few hours ago this morning. >> Yes, yes, thank you. >> Jeff, welcome back. >> Thank you. >> So, we've got you back with a different hat. Everybody in our industry can definitely recognize we wear lots of different hats we have lots of jobs thrown at us. Both of you are in the Technical Oversight Committee and Liz is not only a member but also the Chairperson, President. (people laughing) >> President is definitely a promotion. But, yeah, I'm Chair of the committee. >> Maybe, as it's known, the TOC. Liz, before we get there, your shirt says +1 binding. You have to explain for us and did not get a preview before the interview, so we'll see where this goes. >> It's one of the perks of being on the TOC. When we have something that comes to a vote we want to get input from the community so we ask anyone in the community to vote. But unless you're a member of the TOC your vote is non-binding. As a member of the committee, we have binding votes. And the traditional thing you write on the voting email is +1 binding. So, it's a nice surprise to get a t-shirt when I joined the TOC. >> Very nice. Can you just give us, our audience, that might not be familiar with the TOC, give us some of the key things about it. >> It's the Technical Oversight Committee for the CNCF. We are, really, the technical curation of the projects that come in to the CNCF. Which projects will get support and at what level because we have the sandbox experimentation stage then incubation and then finally graduation for the really established and kind of, de-risked projects. So, we're really evaluating the projects and kind of making a decision collaboratively on which ones we want the CNCF to support. >> All right. So Jeff, we had a great conversation with you about Intuit's cloud journey. Tell us how you got involved in the TOC. We always love the end users, not just using but participating in and helping to give some governance over what the community is doing. >> Yeah, so, about a year and a half ago we made a decision to acquire a small company called Applatix. Who was, actually, already in the end user community. And also contributors as well. Through that acquisition, I was part of that acquisition, I led that acquisition from the Intuit side and really got excited about the Kubernetes and the KubeCon story overall. Through the Kubernetes experts, I met them at a KubeCon and they introduced me to a whole lot more of the community. Just through some overall partnerships with AWS and also spending a lot of time with end-users that's how I really got to know the community a little bit. And then, was voted onto the CNCF as an end user representative in January. >> Wonderful. As far as you're concerned, as you go through this, do you find it challenging at times to separate your roles professionally from working for a large company, to whom many things matter incredibly. Again, as mentioned earlier, I am one of your customers. I care very much about technical excellence, coming out of Intuit, versus your involvement with the larger project. >> Yeah, so like most people in technology companies I'm extremely busy and I would love to spend, I would love to clone myself and spend more (laughing) more time. >> Everybody wants to submit a client project to the TOC we will prioritize that one. >> Exactly, exactly. >> The way I really balance it is that I make an explicit time carve out for those two activities. And most importantly, I attend the meetings. The TOC meetings that we have, those are extremely important. We get a lot of project reviews in those meetings. Liz chairs those meetings. That's where I always make sure that my schedule is cleared for that. >> Taking it, I guess, one step further. Do you find it challenging at all to separate out, in fact, when you're making decisions and making votes, for example, that are presumably binding, +1 binding as we've learned now, is the terminology. Do you find that you are often pulled between trying to advocate for your company and advocating for the community or are they invariably aligned in your mind? >> I mean, my job's the easiest because I come from an end user. So what I use and what I consume is likely what the community at large. There might be some niches and stuff like that. But I usually don't have that conflict. I don't know, as more of a vendor, you might have more of a conflict. >> It's something that I have be conscious of. I just try to mentally separate. I have a role with a company that pays my salary but when I'm doing open-source things if I feel conflicted about. This hasn't really come up yet, but if I do feel that there's some kind of conflict of interest I will always recuse myself. Actually, in my previous role, as the Co-Chair for the Program Committee for the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Conference, on a couple of occasions we had competitors submit, and I would always just step back from those. Because it's the right thing to do. >> All right. So Liz, there's quite a few projects now, under the umbrella of CNCF. If I've go it right, it was like, 38 different ones. When Brian went on the stage this morning, 16 in the sandbox, 16 incubating and six have graduated now. How do you manage that? You know, there's some in the community they're like, oh my gosh, reminds us of like, big tent, from some initiatives. Some other things here, how much is too much? How do you balance that and what's the input of the TOC? >> Yeah, so one of the things that we're doing with the TOC is we've just established a thing called the SIGs, the special interest groups. Very much following the same model of Kubernetes SIGs. But the idea here is that we can, kind of formalize getting experts in the community to help us with particular kind of areas. So, we've already got a storage and security SIG set up. We expect there will be probably four to six more coming on board during the year. And that helps us with things like the project reviews and the due diligence to just be able to say, we would really appreciate some help. Those groups are also really enthusiastic about kind of sharing knowledge in the form of things like white papers. I think it will be really important for end-users to be able to navigate their way around these projects. Quite often there is more than one solution for a particular thing. And being able to, in a non-vendor way, in a neutral way, express why project X is good in one circumstance and project Y would be better in a different environment. There's work to be done there and I'm hoping to see that come out. >> This is one of my passions as the end user representative, is that trail map or that road map. That's one of the reasons why we really have invested at Intuit, in the Kubernetes technology and the Cloud Native technology. We didn't just roll them out as is. We actually curate them and create, really, a paved road for our developers to navigate that space. >> Yeah, and as we heard from your story it's not always, well, if there's some overlap you use SDO and Hellman. >> Yeah. >> That there's a fit for both of those in your environment, right. >> Yeah. >> From a, I guess, an end user perspective is there a waiting difference between someone like Intuit and someone like Twitter for pets, where there's a slight revenue scale, a slight revenue difference, like scale difference, like everything difference. >> Yes. >> Certainly, there is. I think that, but that's one of the beautiful things about the Cloud Native technologies. You can consume what you need and what you want, right. It's not one size fits all. A lot of people talk about, oh, there's a paradox of choice, there's so many projects, right. Actually, that's a benefit. Really, all you need is that road map to navigate your way through that, rather than just adopting a paved road that might not work for everybody. >> It almost feels, to some extent, almost like the AWS Service Catalog. Whenever you wind up looking at all the things they offer. It feels like going out to eat at the Cheesecake Factory. Where there is 80 pages of menu to flip through with some advertisements, great. And reminding yourself, at time, that they are not Pokemon, you do not need to catch them all. It's, sometimes, a necessary step, as you start to contextualize this. >> That's one of the great things about having over 80 members in the end user is. You can find a buddy, you can find a company like you. Talk to them, get connected with them and figure out what they're doing and learn from them. The community is broad enough to be able to do that. >> All right, so Liz, let's talk about security. >> Okay. (people laughing) >> You said there's a SIG that started up. Where are we, how are things going and you can you share about where we're going in the near future? >> The SIG came together from a group of people who really wanted to make it easier for end-users to roll out their Cloud Native stacks in a secure fashion. We don't always, as a community, speak the same language about security, we don't always have the most secure settings by default. They really came together around this common interest of just making it easier for people to secure. I think a big part of that will be looking at how the different projects, are they applying best practices from a security perspective? Is there more they should do to document how to operate their particular project more securely? I think that whole initiative and that group of people who've come together for SIG security, I'm so impressed and so pleased that they have come together with that enthusiasm to help on that front. >> Any commentary on what you're seeing in this space? >> Yeah, so as an almost, a fintech company, with a lot of fintech and, you know, we're not quite a bank, but we have a lot of the same security and compliance things. That SIG is so, so important to us. And having a roadmap. I found a education is really, really a big part of it of the security experts, right. Because this is somewhat newer technology. Even though it's been in use at Google for a long time the regulator's, the compliance people, don't totally understand it, right. So you have to have a way to explain to them what's going on. So things like, open policy agent, something that we've adopted, helps us explain what's going on in our system. Once they get it, they're like, this is awesome and our end users can now, really, our end users, meaning the people that use QuickBooks and TurboTax can really trust that we have those guardrails in place. >> At Aqua, it's a huge concern from a lot of our customers. Many of whom, coming from that kind of finance industry. That they're coming to us and saying, well, how can I be PCI compliant or GDPR. How do I manage these requirements with my container based stack, with my Cloud Native stack. That's why there is this huge ecosystem quite a lot of effort around security, compliance, policy. >> It feels very much like it's two problems rolled into one. First, how do you make sure that data is secure in these things? Secondly, how do you effectively and responsibly communicate that to a regulator, who expects to be taken on a tour of a data center when they show up on site? (people laughing) I checked, they won't let you. >> There are definitely two sets of security people in my experience. There are a set of people who care about how will I get attacked. How will breaches happen. And there are other people who go, I have a checklist and I need to check the boxes in the checklist, tell me how. Sometimes those two things overlap, but not always. >> All right, Liz, lot of updates, as always. Jeff, I really appreciate your commentary there. Well, there's the paradox of choice but we have a lot of customers out there and therefore we do. (people chuckling) Any highlights you want to share with our audience? >> I think one thing that happens every year is we see more. Well, we saw Kubernetes graduate, I think, early last year, end of the previous year. Now we've got six projects into graduation. From my perspective, that says something about how mature this whole set of projects, this whole platform is becoming. Because graduation is a pretty high bar. Not least in terms of the number of end users that have to be using it in production. This is solid technology. >> Yeah, any highlights from you? >> I think, like we might have touched on a little bit this morning. But I think that usually the technologies that where you're facing the big problems is pretty obvious which one to use, right. Like serverless, you're going to go look at something like Knative or whatnot. Functions as a service. There's some open fast projects, whatnot, like that. SDO services mesh is another one where it's getting mature and it's getting to the point where you can have these ubiquitous service meshes throughout it. So, those are the areas that we're most looking at right now. >> Great, all right. Well, Liz and Jeff, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for all the work you do on the Oversight Committee and appreciate you sharing the updates with our community. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> For Cory Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back more, with theCUBE here at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and ecosystem partners. >> Hi and welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Corey Quinn, and you're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Jeff Brewer, who's the Vice President and Chief Architect of Small Business and Self-Employed Group at Intuit. He's going to talk about your cloud journey. Jeff, thanks so much for joining us. >> You're welcome, I'm glad to be here. >> All right, so, Jeff, the easy part of this is, I think, most of our audience has probably heard of Intuit, but maybe give us that first setting of, you know, the part of the group you're in, and your role, and then we want to get into that journey. >> Yeah, yeah, no, it's great. So, yeah, first of all, thanks for having me here and I'm what's called the Chief Architect of the Small Business and Self-Employed Group. Intuit is about powering prosperity around the world. That's our fairly new mission. And helping both taxpayers with TurboTax and QuickBooks is our other big project. So, think of me as the Chief Architect for the QuickBooks group. And so, mostly for small businesses, helping small businesses survive through their first year, survive and prosper continuing on, so. >> And your charter there, is that the infrastructure there, you're not trying to help the world rid those malicious attacks of like, oh no, I got the new TurboTax and it didn't work well because, disclaimer, you know, I'm not paid, I've used it for many years and it's super easy for me. >> Yeah so, as a Chief Architect, I set the technical direction of the overall QuickBooks franchise both the desktop version which is our older version that, you know, has been around for 20, 25 years, and our QuickBooks Online version, which is about, only about 15 years old and is our SAS offering. And so, I do things like choose technologies that we adopt. I do things like set what are the most important technology priorities whether it's breaking things up into microservices, our cloud strategy, Kubernetes, going to cloud native, all that kind of stuff. >> Okay, so, you are a member of the Technical Oversight Committee, but we're actually going to bring you back a little bit later to talk about that, so, we'll put a pin in that. But give us a little bit as to kind of what led to this journey towards cloud and, you know, all of those pieces that you were just talking about. >> Yes, so, like many other companies with, you know, lots of legacy and lots of code that we've developed over about 35 years of existence, we actually started out in the early 2000's with building our own data centers, right. And it's very expensive, very ambitious, but at the time, there really wasn't a public cloud. But we realized that, you know, putting servers under our desks and stuff like that, you know, we really needed to grow to a more robust data center. And, you know, as we progressed in that journey, we figured out we're not the experts at maintaining and developing all the complicated networking you have to do, reliability, resiliency. We had some outages, this is 10 years ago or so, where a truck drove into a light post outside one of our data centers and took us down for a day. And that's just not acceptable for our customers. The public cloud was just starting out, AWS was a big partner out there, and our CIO, and CEO, met with the AWS executives and really decided that we needed a great partner in public cloud that really was their technical expertise. And so, we began this journey, mostly I would describe it as lift and shift, of technologies and services that we already had. We had to rewrite a few of them to make them actually work with the cloud. But by and large, most of our code is written in Java and that ports pretty well. So, we started on that journey and really right now, we are mostly running in the public cloud. We have a few legacy systems that are still running in our private data centers, but we're planning on decommissioning those. And with the public cloud, a journey we really have seen quite a, improvement in our reliability, our downtime, we can fail over between availability zones, it's just been fantastic from our overall availability, recoverability standpoint. But what we realized during that journey was that the, that the AWS native experience for our developers, while AWS is just an amazing, amazing partner, it wasn't quite the developer experience we wanted. >> It had some sharp edges. >> Yeah, we worked with them on that, and that's why we started looking at cloud-native technologies, things already developed by the community. AWS is part of the community, as well, and so they were extremely supportive in our journey to want to, from the developer experience standpoint, really start to press on these cloud-native technologies. >> Wonderful. As you went down that entire path, whenever a company goes public and they put in their S1 that they're doing some committed level of giant deal with AWS, people immediately chime in with, oh, they could save so much money by building and running their own data centers. How do you stand on that particular perspective? >> So, what's really interesting about our, our public cloud journey, right, it's not necessarily about saving a lot of money, right? And we realized that, you know, Intuit, as a mature company, you know, we're not a start-up looking to shave every little penny off of every little server. What we really want is reliability for our customers, we want awesome operations, and so, the public cloud journey actually hasn't been a huge, huge cost savings, but it has been a huge improvement in all these other levels, so it does amazing things for our customers. And we're looking to cloud native as just another, you know, bump up in that overall thing, where we get immediate mean time to recovery, where things go down, things go wrong, and we get those pods and those services right back up and running. >> Can you elaborate a little bit about the application that you're talking about, like when I first heard you say, you know, we just lifted and shifted there, it's like, oh wait, you know, a lot of times that is when we kind of claw things back because it's costs more than I thought or it didn't run as well as I thought. >> It turns out the mainframe's hard to move because they didn't build an AWS 400 yet, something doesn't happen. >> So, the challenges there, and then, you know, connect the dots with that to what you're calling the cloud native piece of this, as to what your application development looks like. >> So, I'll use QuickBooks Online as an example. Massive property, over four million customers. >> I'm one of them. >> And it started out as a, as kind of our first really big foray into SAS, right? And luckily, at the time we wrote it, mostly in Java. But it was written as this huge, monolithic piece of code, right. And so, millions of lines of code, you can imagine, large memory footprints, all that kind of stuff. And so, during our first, for public cloud, we just looked at, well, we're not going to rewrite these millions and millions of lines of code, but we want to get into public cloud. Lucky for us, EC2 instances, things like that, can run those large memory footprints. But once there, we really started examining, okay, what does this look like as microservices? Because when you have over 400 engineers working on a single code base, imagine what doing a release, a release is a ceremony, right? It's like this huge thing, you have-- >> It takes a many page calendar in order to do those things. >> Exactly, and so, what we really wanted to do is press into the microservices journey and say, okay, what if instead of having this huge oil tanker, you know, driving down the, you know, sailing down the ocean, what if we could be a bunch of speedboats, right, and use that analogy. And that's where cloud native comes in, because that's really what it's meant to do, right? A bunch of independent teams doing dev ops, you build it, you run it, right? You write the code, you run the code. And so, it plays right into to this, this ability to be very agile, give each team, you can imagine at a scale of 4000 engineers, you want little pizza team, you know, to be independent and do their own releases, and not have to coordinate all with each other. >> So, Jeff, which of the, you know, CNTF pieces are you using at Intuit, and I would like you to go in a little bit, you know, Kubernetes, a lot of people, it's like, oh well, I want portability, and it sounds like you're all in, primarily, on one public cloud, so that's probably not the first thing on your list, so, help us understand the landscape from your eyes. >> So, really it's about, it's about developer productivity. So yes, we do have this very good, strong partnership with AWS, and that is our public cloud provider. And so, the cloud-native technology, using, obviously, Kubernetes, obviously, you know, we're running Docker in the background for running the containers and all that infrastructure. We have our own open source called Argo, which we're using for deployments in the community, so we're contributing a little bit back to community, as well. We're using Istio and Envoy as a service match to really secure the interservice communications and support all the routing and whatnot. And we're also leaning very heavily now into serverless technologies, and so, we write our app, QBO or QuickBooks Online, as a stateful application, but we're realizing the power of having these really stateless small functions, and so we want to do that, as well. And the way we look at it as, Lambda is a fantastic technology for something like that, but the developer experience, we want the same developer experience for our containers that we do from our functions, right? And if you really think about it, it's just about deploying, it's how you deploy. Do I deploy into containers and then a pod structure, like in Kubernetes? Or do I deploy to a functions as a service? It should run on the infrastructure, and so, from a developer standpoint, from the end developer that's actually developing the applications and services that our customers are using, we want the declarative infrastructure of Kubernetes, we want the ease of deployment and of operations. You can just imagine a development team not having to learn the huge depth that's behind that Kubernetes, that developer experience is just unbelievable and second to none. And you can imagine these teams sitting around, you know, at lunch time, doing their release, something goes wrong, they're on the call, they're solving the problems for their customers, in fact, doing another release, if there's any problems. And so, that's where we really, really lean in heavily to these cloud technologies, the cloud-native technologies, so we can get even faster at the developers. >> Do you find that making it more accessible and having a consistent developer experience has, I guess, broadened the ability of your developers to iterate more rapidly, or is more about ensuring consistency across the board? In other words, is it a speed value for you or is it more about just consistency, so you can wind-up up-to-point to multiple architectures? >> It's really about both. We see, you know, agility is often confused with speed and velocity, but we see that enabling a developer to release code to production in just a few minutes is extremely, extremely powerful to the overall velocity because what they're more likely to do is they're more likely to experiment, be bold, try new things, and then get immediate feedback for the customer. There's this experimentation loop that you want it to move as fast as possible. And so, not only that, but to your second part about the consistency, for a company like Intuit with 4000 developers, you want mobility in your organizations, and so, you want someone to feel very natural going from one small pizza team to another, and have the same tools, the same deployment architecture, and the same thing, right? So, you're not retraining them on a ton of different technologies. >> Alright, so, Jeff, you know, what could the ecosystem, you know, the partners you're working with, the various ecosystem, what could they do to make your life easier? I mean, the one that comes to mind for me is, you know, today, serverless, you know, Lambda, specifically, and Kubernetes. There are some ways to get them, you know, work at little bit, but, you know, is that top of your mind or are there other things? >> That is actually really top of my mind. We have a lot of teams experimenting with Lambda. We're running huge workloads in Lambda, but we're very much worried about this. If there's teams working on that and it's very, it's very fragmented. Some teams are deploying Lambdas off their laptops, other teams are, you know, using CICD processes. And so, we want that experience to be consistent, secure and everything. And so, as it moves to more production workloads, right, we would really like the Kubernetes and the CNCF Foundation to really have a story about serverless itself. I think it's probably more aptly called functions as a service or running functions. And I think a lot of thing happens is that it's treated as a versus. It's like, oh, I'm going to skip over that containers to Kubernetes thing and go to serverless, because it's versus, right? It's not versus, it's a choice for the developer about what to I want to deploy in functions, in short-running functions, or do I want to deploy in containers? Everything else up to that point is the same. And so, I'd really like to see, and that, as my role on the Technical Oversight Committee, that's something I'm really focused on for the end users 'cause I see that a lot in the end user's communities. They're dealing with the same things that we are on that functions as a service. >> Alright, so, Jeff, before I let you go, Intuit's an award winner, so, congratulations on that. >> Thank you. >> I want final word from you. Talk a little bit about the award and two, talk your peers that might be, you know, they've heard about Kubernetes, but, you know, we're into the, we've crossed the chasm in the majority, but that means there's a lot of people that are still relatively early. What do you recommend to them, what tips would you give them, and start with the award though. >> Yeah, so, we're extremely honored to be the CNCF end user award winner. Our cloud journey has been a really interesting one that came really out of a, also, out of an acquisition that we did of some fantastic Kubernetes experts about 14 of them, a little company called Applatix that had this Argo project. And their mission was to make Kubernetes accessible to the overall community. And by acquiring them, we left their mission the same, but they're really helping Intuit, and we're not selling their, they're helping the community for free, when they were charging before as enterprise customers. And that's something I'd overall recommend for the peers and the companies thinking about going on a cloud native journey is it's about those people that you can find here at the conference, right, about those experts that you can hire, just a few of them, have them come into your company, explain these things, and it turns the entire company around. We now have hundreds and hundreds of teams going through and onboarding, we call it modern SAS, internally, onboarding onto this technology because they started out with that nugget or that kernel. >> Alright, well, Jeff, modern SAS, love the story, thank you so much and thanks for joining us and we will see you later to talk about the TOC. >> Glad to be here, thank you very much. >> Thank you very much. >> For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman, and that was Jeff Brewer from Intuit, we'll be back with lots more coverage and thank you for watching theCUBE. (dynamic digital music)