>> Announcer: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's the CUBE, covering KubeCon and Cloud Native Con Europe 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. (busy music) >> Welcome back, everyone, live here in Copenhagen, Denmark, it's the CUBE's coverage of KubeCon 2018. I'm John Furrier, the host of the CUBE, along with Lauren Cooney, who's the founder of Spark Labs. She's been co-host with me two days, two days of wall to wall coverage. Stephan Fabel, Product Strategy Lead at Canonical, is here inside the CUBE, and from San Francisco. Again, welcome to the CUBE, thanks for coming. >> Thank you, thanks so much for having me. >> I've got to, you guys have been around the block, you know about open source software platforms, you get and do it for a while. Interesting time here at KubeCon. Kubernetes, Istio, Kubeflow, Cloud Native, they've still got the brand name CloudNativeCon and KubeCon. Modern application architecture's now in play. I see this notion of an interoperability model coming in that's certainly going to be a de facto standard. People are already kind of declaring it a de facto standard. It really shows a path to multi-cloud, but also frees up developers from a lot of the heavy lifting. Lou Tucker from Cisco was saying they don't want to do networking. Let's just have that be infrastructure as code, that's DevOps, that's what we want. >> Stephan: That is exactly right. >> What are you guys doing here? What's the story with Canonical and how does that fit into the megatrends? >> Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things that we at Canonical always believe to be one of the core sort of tenets in our distribution of Kubernetes. As you know, we've been very active in this space fairly early on, and have been an active distributor of Kubernetes and a certified distributor of our version of Kubernetes. Pure upstream, remain conformant to the main public clouds, such as to enable that workload migration and mobility from on prem up to any of the other providers to accommodate all kinds of use cases, right. >> You guys made a bet on Kubernetes, obviously, good call. >> Stephan: Right. >> Right. What's the progress now, what's next? Because that's, the bets are paying off. I saw Red Hat had a great bet with what they did with Kubernetes, changed what OpenShift became. You guys had a bet in Kubernetes, what has that become for Canonical? >> Yeah, so based on the pure upstream distribution that we have, we really feel that enabling the ecosystem in a standards compliant way so that all of the landscape projects that are part of the CNCF can be deployed on top of Kubernetes, on top of our distribution of Kubernetes in just the same way that they would be developed or deployed in any of the large containers of service offerings that are out there is one of the big benefits that our customers would gain from using our Kubernetes. >> What's your differentiator for the distribution of Kubernetes that you have versus others? >> Well, there's two. The first one, I think, is the notion that deploying Kubernetes on premise is something that you want to do in a repeatable fashion, operationally efficient with the right capex opex mix, so we believe that there is a place for Kubernetes as a product, just deploy it, it works on any substrate that you've got available to you. But then also, for mainstream America, right, you may want to have a managed service on top of Kubernetes as well. We offer that, too, just a way to get started and kick the tires and see where that takes you as far as the developers are concerned. Now, on prem, you will find that there are a couple of challenges when deploying Kubernetes that are really the key differentiator. The first one, I would say, is things like integration into the storage that's local, integration into the network that's local, and integration into all of those services that should be available in the Cloud Native microservices architecture platform, such as low bouncers, right, elasticity, object store, etc. The second, and most importantly, because it is a key enabler for those next generation workloads, is the GPGPU enablement work that we're doing with partners such as NVIDIA. When you deploy the Canonical distribution of Kubernetes, you actually get the NVIDIA acceleration out of the box the way that NVIDIA envisions this on top of Kubernetes and the way that it is, by the way, being deployed on the public clouds. >> You bring a lot of your goodness to the table inside the Kubernetes distribution. OK, what are some customers doing? Give some use cases of some customers' Kubernetes, what are some of the things that they're doing with it, what's the early indication? What's the feedback? >> Sure. We have a ton of customers that are using our version of Kubernetes to do the machine learning applications and the AI of the next gen workloads in use cases such as smart cities or connected cars, where, when you look at self-driving cars, right, as the next gen that's coming out of the valley, they put in 300,000, 150,000, 400,000 miles a year on the road these days just optimizing the models that are being used to actually take over one day. Enabling those kinds of workloads in a distributed fashion requires DevOps expertise. Now, the people who are actually writing those applications are not DevOps people, they're data scientists, right. They shouldn't have to learn how to deploy Kubernetes, how to create a container and all those things. They should just be able to deploy the application on top an attractive substrate that actually supports that distributed application use case, and so that is where we come in. >> This is interesting, because what you're basically doing is making an application developer a DevOps developer overnight. >> Stephan: That's exactly right. >> That's really important. I was just talking with the co-chair of CNCF. We're talking about, Liz Rice and I were talking about why everyone's so, like, excited here. One of the things I said was, because people who are doing DevOps were hardcore, and they had to build everything from scratch, and all the scar tissue. But the benefits, once you got through the knothole there, the benefits were amazing, right. You go, okay, you don't want to do that again, but now there's a way to make it easier. There's kind of a shared experience even though no one's met each other, so there's kind of a joint community. >> I agree. I think it is increasingly about enabling developers who are experts in their field to actually leverage Kubernetes and the advantages that it brings in a more intuitive fashion. Just take it up a notch. >> How did the Kubernetes vibe integrate in with Canonical? I'm sure, given the background of the company, it probably was a nice fit, people embraced it. You guys were early. >> Stephan: Yeah. >> What's the internal scuttlebutt on the vibe with Kubernetes? >> Oh, we love Kubernetes as a technology. Ubuntu was always close to the developer and close to where the innovation happens. It was a natural fit to actually support all that workflow now in this new world of Kubernetes. We embraced OpenStack for the same reason, and in a similar fashion, Kubernetes has really driven the point home, containerist applications with a powerful orchestration framework such as Kubernetes are the next step for all the developers that are out there, and so as a consequence, this was a perfect match. >> It's also a no-brainer if you think about it, software methodology moving to the next level. This is total step up function for productivity for developers. That's really a key thing. What's your observation of that trend? Because at the end of the day, there's now Kubernetes, which does a lot of great things, but one of the hottest areas is Istio service meshes, and then you've got Kubeflow orchestration, a lot of other things that are happening around Kubernetes. What are you guys seeing that's important for Canonical's customers, what you're doing product wise. Where's the order of operations, what's next? What are you guys focused on, what's the priorities? >> Well, our biggest priority right now is enabling things like Kubeflow, which, by the way, are also using Istio internally, right, to actually enable those data scientists who actually deploy their I workload. We work very closely with Google to try and enable this in an on prem fashion out of the box which is something you can actually do today. >> John: You guys are doing this now inside this. >> We're doing this right now. This is also where we're going to double and triple down. >> This is actually your best practice, too, if you think about it, you want to take it in house, and then get a feel for it. What's the internal vibe on that, positive? >> Oh, absolutely. I mean, we always saw infrastructure as code and actually as intelligent infrastructure as something that we wanted to build our conceptual framework around, so very concretely, right. We've always had this notion of composable building blocks adding up to, sum of one being greater than two, right, like those types of scenarios. Actually using things like Kubernetes as an effective building block to then build out web applications that use things like machine learning algorithms underneath, that's a perfect use case for a next gen workload, and also something that we might use ourselves internally. >> Well, hey, that whole building block thing, it's happening. >> Stephan: Yeah. >> News flash. >> Stephan: Exactly, right? >> I mean, it's almost a pinch me moment for the people in the industry like, oh my god, it's going to go to a whole other level. How do you guys envision that next level going? Beyond the building blocks, is it, I mean, what's the vision that you guys have? Obviously, infrastructure as code programmability, but now, you're talking about infrastructure as code was great, but now you've got microservices growth coming on top of it, it's a services market now. >> It is, it is. I think that the biggest challenge will be the distribution of the workloads, right. You have edge compute coming along in the telco space, you have, like I said, smart cities, right, the sensors will be everywhere, and they will feed data back, and how do you manage that at scale, right? How do you manage that across various different hardware perspectives? We have hardware platforms such as ARM 64 picking up, right, and actually playing a very significant role at the edge, and increasingly, even in the core. We've always believed that providing that software and the distribution of IS such as Kubernetes and others on top of those additional architectures would make a huge difference, and that is clearly paying off. What we see is, the increased need of managing hybrid workloads across multi-cloud scenarios that could be composed of different architectures, not just x86, the future is not homogeneous at all. It'll be all over the place. All those use cases and all those particular situation require that building block principle, like all the way from the OS up to the application. >> John: That's a great use case for containers. Kubernetes, Istio, Kubeflow. >> Absolutely. >> All stacking in line beautifully from an evolution standpoint. I've got to ask you a personal question. I mean, I was at Canonical, great company, I want to thank Canonical for being a sponsor of the CUBE over the years. We've had Mark Shuttleworth on the CUBE had an OpenStack going way back when. You guys are a great participant in the community as a company and the people there been phenomenal. You're new. >> I'm new. >> What attracted you to Canonical? What was the motivating force? What drew you in? You're now running Products, a big job. You've got a lot in front of you. Obviously, it's a great market, so you're a great company. Just share, just color and why Canonical, what attracted you there? >> I've always been a user of Ubuntu, I've been a user since the first hour. I've used Ubuntu in my research. I did robotics based on Ubuntu way before it was cool. I built all kinds of things on top of Ubuntu throughout my entire career. Working for Canonical, which is a company that always exhibited great vision into the future and great predictions into trends that would prove to become true was just, for me, something that was very attractive. >> Their leadership has a good eye on the prize. They had good 20 mile stare, as we say, they can see the roadmap ahead and then make either course corrections or tweaks. >> Yeah. >> Great, awesome. Well, I mean, what's new there? What's your, take a minute to explain what's new at Canonical, role here at KubeCon, what are some of the conversations you're having? >> Yeah, so I mean, for us at KubeCon, it's always been an important part of our outreach to the community, great opportunity for us to have great conversations with our partners in the field. I think it is really about enabling the ecosystem in a more straightforward way. There's no better place to have those types of conversations than here, where everybody comes together and really establishes those relationships. For us, it is about, again, enabling the developer and really staying close to that innovation and supporting that in an optimal way. Yes, I mean, that, to us, is the role that we play. You've got a lot of end users here who are building stuff. >> Oh, absolutely, yeah. They, I mean, I had a talk today about Kubeflow with Google, and after the talk, lots of folks came up to me and said, hey, how can I use this at home, right? >> Sometimes with, whether it's timing, technology, all the above, Kubernetes really hit it strong with the timing, industry was ready for it. Containers had a nice gestation period. People know about containers. >> Stephan: Absolutely. >> Engineers know containers, know about those kinds of concepts. Now we're at a whole other operating environment. >> Stephan: Absolutely. >> You guys are at the forefront. Thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Oh, thank you, I appreciate it. >> Stephan sharing the perspective, Stephan Fabel. Running Product and Strategy for Canonical, building stuff, this is what's going on in Kubernetes in KubeCon, end users are actually building and orchestrating workloads. Multi-cloud is what people are talking about and the tech to make it happen is here. I'm John Furrier with the CUBE. Stay with us for more live coverage here at KubeCon 2018, part of the CNCF CUBE coverage. We'll be right back after this short break. (busy music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCube. Covering KubeCon and Cloud Native Con Europe 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE exclusive coverage of CNCF. The Cloud Native Foundation, Compute Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation of KubeCon 2018 here in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm John Furrier co-host of theCUBE here with analyst this week Lauren Cooney, who is the founder of Spark Labs, brand new start up that she founded to help companies bring innovation to Cloud Native, bring in all of her expertise to companies. Also, here on theCUBE, Lauren, great to have you this week. >> Thanks, John. >> Here in Europe, you've done so much work in the area of open source over the years. You've done, you were radical renegade, progressive, pushing PHP, bringing that to Microsoft. Doing a lot of great things, and now we're in a new modern era, and you're bringing that expertise, but you're also on the front lines of the new wave. >> Lauren: Definitely. >> Cloud Native, so what's your take? What's your analysis? I mean, there's so much going on. You can't just retrofit old school open source, but it's got to build on the next generation. What's your thoughts? >> It has to build on the next generation, but you also have to look back at what has happened in the past. I think what is incredibly important to see is the mistakes that have been made in the past, so that people don't repeat them. One of the things that I'm seeing here and hearing a lot about is multiple distributions of Kubernetes out there, and when I hear multiple distributions I get worried that they're going the open sack route and there is going to be too many distributions out there. I would rather see one or two standard become kind of more standard and people building on top of that. I think it's the right way to go versus the splintering of the community. If the community is going to stay together you're going to have to narrow that down. >> What's the rationale for the distribution? Because, we've seen this before. Certainly at Hadoop, we saw people come out with distros and then abandon them, and then people coalesce around. >> Oh, they'll just die on the vine. I mean, fundamentally they just will die on the vine. It won't be, if it's not de facto already you're probably not going to get it de facto. >> John: What should companies do? Should they have a distro down. >> They should map to one of the key distros right now. They should, basically, use what is out there already. The one that they feel is right, and for their users, and for their company long term. >> I really enjoyed a couple of interviews we had yesterday. I want to just kind of revisit a couple of them. Tyler and Dirk, we had Tyler on from the new programming language ballerina that was launched. He's part of WSO2. Dirk is from Vien, where former early Linux guy, Linux foundation guy, worked with Linux tarballs in the early days. These guys know up the source. So you look at some of those leaders, and they say, "Hey, this is about the people" What are the things that we can draw from the past that are still relevant today? As the new formula of Kubernetes horizontally scalable cloud, Cloud Native thousands and, potentially, millions of micro-services coming online, new kinds of dynamic policy based infrastructure software, everything's coming. >> Service mesh, can't forget service mesh. >> Service meshes are going to be huge. What do we have to keep and preserve, and what is being built out that's new? >> Well, I think that you need to preserve the feeling of the community and what's going on there. I mean, these communities, actually it's communities not community, and these folks are coming along for the wave right? And I think it's important to make sure that people are aware of that, and there's lots of different personalities and lots of different goodness that can be brought to the table with that and the recognition of that. I also think that, for the most part, I do believe that this is one of the strongest communities out there, and it will continue to be for a number of years. >> I want to get your thoughts on something Ed Warnicke said from Cisco because he was very complimentary of the CNCF as are other people, and we have been complimentary as well about keeping everything tight to the core and allowing people to innovate. So you have, and we have commented on theCUBE and other KubeCons about this, and they've been doing it, which is let the innovation foster on the technical side as well as let people flex their business model opportunities. >> Lauren: Definitely. >> Not so much just for the sake of commercialization because if you have too much commercialization you might stunt the community of growth organically so there's a balance, and I think CNCF has done a good job there, but they've kept the core of Kubernetes really tight which has allowed the de facto standard approach to be Kubernetes. That has created great opportunity, and people are super excited by that. What's your analysis of what happens next? What needs to happen? What's the momentum phase two of this? >> I think part of it is, how do you monetize, right? It's looking at, and this is part of what Spark Labs actually does, is we actually work with companies, some that are in the CNCF, and we work on them in different ways to monetize. Is it a services wrapper that's going to work? Is it additional features or functionality? The innovation comes with the technology, but with that technology you have to have the business model kind of in mind when you're building this out so you can figure out how to make money. As these smaller companies especially are looking to do and some of the bigger companies as well. >> I really think it's important for the CNCF and the Linux foundation and I know they're on this so its not critical analysis so much as it is more of an observation. You have a long tail of start ups and kind of a fat tail if you will, that are out there, and you have the big whales out there Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others at the top. There was a comment in Austin, a snarky comment. I won't say by who, but I was looking at the logo board of the sponsors, and the guy said, "All those start-ups, they might be dead in 18 months" and it made me pause and say okay, that's an observation because they were brand new companies. >> Lauren: Mm hmm. >> That can't happen. We need to have a model of preservation for start-ups to experiment, to grow. This is something you're doing at Spark Labs so what's your view of this? And, reaction to the fact that this has to happen. What can we do as an industry and community to make sure the start ups-- >> I think the Linux foundation is doing one of the best things that can be done out there. Other open source foundations do too. Is they create the infrastructure so that folks have the support for marketing, or legal, or something along those lines, but so companies are allowed to innovate and then the Linux Foundation basically bets on the innovation and they bet on multiple innovations with multiple companies so they allow these companies to thrive while giving them the support inside of that. >> John: Yeah. >> And I think that's really helping a lot of these companies along. >> Well, Dave Collins always says is the membership organization, so no members no business model so I mean they're incented to make sure that, or hope, that these guys can survive, and certainly there's going to be some misfires and people will natural evolution. So what are you most excited about? I got to ask ya, I mean you're out on your own now. Congratulations, you started up. >> Thank you. >> Super exciting for you and I'm happy that you're going to go out on your own. What are some of the things you're excited about? What are you digging your teeth into, in terms of projects? Share what you're doing. >> I'm super excited about these companies that are coming out with true multi-cloud. So, allowing applications to run across multiple environments, public, private, et cetera. And we've been saying we can do it for a decade or something like that, but fundamentally that wasn't the case. You did have to re-write code. You did have to do a lot of underlying things to make that occur. One of the things that I'm super excited about is being able to take those companies and figure out how to actually get their product to market faster. Some of these guys are still in stealth. They need to move really fast if they want to catch up. I also love working with them on figuring out how to build out their teams, figuring out how to monetize. What are the next steps? What are the business plans, really, behind this? What is the one, three, five year model that they're going to use? I also love helping them get the money, of course. I think that's the fun part too. >> Yeah, it's always fun. Start-ups are great. What I'm excited about, I got to tell ya, I got to share with you just some personal feelings. I love this market right now because I've seen many waves of innovation and I think this wave of cloud native, whatever you want to call it this massive wave or sets of waves coming in and you got blockchain and other things going on behind it these centralized applications which I think is part of this set coming in, is that it's bigger than all the other waves combined and because there's so much value creation on the horizon and I think historically, this moment in time, historically is going to be a point we're going to look back and say the Kubernetes de facto standard galvanized a set of industry, a new card of players who are going to establish a new way methodology of doing things, and we're documenting it. Secondly, the role of community, as you pointed out, is so important here, and it's strong, but now we're living in a new age of digital. We're seeing formations of new kinds of community engagement digitally, not just the events, so I'm excited with theCUBE and what we're doing here, and what the Linux Foundation is doing because there's now going to be, potentially, exponential growth and acceleration around the combination of community. >> Yup. >> The community growth with this new modern commercialization on digital. >> It's definitely increasingly important, and you have to look at it from the technologies making it happen. The technology is looking at, edge computing is going to make digital happen really when you look at all the end points and things along those lines. And, I think that it's going to be great for everyone involved in that. >> Yeah, and we can learn a lot from looking at the Facebook example of how fake news swayed the election. How people were weaponizing content for bad things. There's also an opposite effect, we believe that you can do the for good. >> Lauren: Totally agree. >> I think digital will have a big role in the next generation community formations, community growth, short cuts to the truth, really that's what it's all about. It's about the people, so certainly we're going to be documenting it. Thanks for your commentary. >> Lauren: Definitely. >> Appreciate it, great to work with you this week. Day two of exclusive coverage, here at the Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Compute Foundation's, CNCF's KubeCon 2018. This is where Kubernetes, service mesh, Istio a lot of great projects, from a lot of smart people. We're here on the ground covering it live. Day two, we'll be back with more coverage. Stay with us for day two coverage, after this short break. (electronic music)