(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE, in Palo Alto for "CUBE Conversation" with Chris Jones, Director of Product Management at Platform9. I've got a series of questions, had a great conversation earlier. Chris, I have a couple questions for you, what do you think? >> Let's do it, John. >> Okay, how does Platform9 Solution, you- can it be used on any infrastructure anywhere, cloud, edge, on-premise? >> It can, that's the beauty of our control plane, right? It was born in the cloud, and we primarily deliver that SaaS, which allows it to work in your data center, on bare metal, on VMs, or with public cloud infrastructure. We now give you the ability to take that control plane, install it in your data center, and then use it with anything, or even in air gap. And that includes capabilities with bare metal orchestration as well. >> Second question. How does Platform9 ensure maximum uptime, and proactive issue resolution? >> Oh, that's a good question. So if you come to Platform nine we're going to talk about always on assurance. What is driving that is a system of three components around self-healing, monitoring, and proactive assistance. So our software will heal broken things on nodes, right? If something stops running that should be running, it will attempt to restart that. We also have monitoring that's deployed with everything. So you build a cluster in AWS, well, we put open source monitoring agents, that are actually Prometheus, on every single node. That means it's resilient, right? So if you lose a node, you don't lose monitoring. But that data importantly comes back to our control plane, and that's the control plane that you can put in your data center as well. That data is what alerts us, and you as a user, anytime of the day that something's going wrong. Let's say etcd latency, good example, etcd is going slow. We'll find out, we might not be able to take restorative action immediately, but we're definitely going to reach out and say,, "You have a problem, let's get ahead of this and let's prevent that from becoming a bigger problem." And that's what we're delivering. When we say always on assurance, we're talking about self-healing, we're talking about remote monitoring, we're talking about being proactive with our customers, not waiting for the phone call or the support desk ticket saying, "Oh we think something's not working." Or worse, the customer has an outage. >> Awesome. Thanks for sharing. Can you explain the process for implementing Platform9 within a company's existing infrastructure. >> Are we doing air gap, or on-prem or SaaS approached? SaaS approach I think is by far the easiest, right? We can build a dedicated Platform9 control plane instance in a manner of minutes, for any customer. So when we do a proof of concept or onboarding, we just literally put in an email address, put in the name you want for your fully qualified domain name, and your instance is up. From that point onwards, the user can just log in, and using our CLI, talk to any number of, say, virtual machines, or physical servers in their environment for, you know, doing this in a data center or colo, and say, "I want these to be my Kubernetes control plane nodes. Here's the five of them. Here's the VIP for the load balancing, the API server and here are all of my compute nodes." And that CLI will work with the SaaS control plane, and go and build the cluster. That's as simple as it, CentOS, Ubuntu, just plain old operating system. Our software takes care of all the prerequisites, installing all the pieces, putting down MetalLB, CoreDNS, Metrics Server, Kubernetes dashboard, etcd backups. You built some servers. That's essentially what you've done, and the rest is being handled by Platform9. It's as simple as that. >> Great, thanks for that. What are the two traditional paths for companies considering the cloud native journey? The two paths. >> The traditional paths. I think that's your engineering team running so fast that before you even realize that you've got, you know, 10 EKS clusters. Or, hey, we can do this. You know, I've got the I can build it mentality. Let's go DIY completely open source Kubernetes on our infrastructure, and we're going to piecemeal build it all up together. They're, I think the pathways that people traditionally look at this journey, as opposed to having that third alternative saying can I just consume it on my infrastructure, be it cloud or on-premise or at the edge. >> Third is the new way, you guys do that. >> That's been our focus since the company was, you know, brought together back in the open OpenStack days. >> Awesome, what's the makeup of your customer base? Is there a certain pattern to the size or environments that you guys work with? Is there a pattern or consistency to your customer base? >> It's a spread, right? We've got large enterprises like Juniper, and we go all the way down to people with 20, 30, 50 nodes in total. We've got people in banking and finance, we've got things all the way through to telecommunications and storage infrastructure. >> What's your favorite feature of Platform9? >> My favorite feature? You know, if I ask, should I say this as a pre-sales engineer, let me show you a favorite thing. My immediate response is, I should never do this. (John laughs) To me it's just being able to define my cluster and say, go. And in five minutes I have that environment, I can see everything that's running, right? It's all unified, it's one spot, right? I'm a cluster admin. I said I wanted three control plane, 25 workers. Here's the infrastructure, it creates it, and once it's built, I can see everything that's running, right? All the applications that are there. One UI, I don't have to go click around. I'm not trying to solve things or download things. It's the fact that it's unified and just delivered in one hit. >> What is the one thing that people should know about Platform9 that they might not know about it? >> I think it's that we help developers and engineers as much as we can help our operations teams. I think, for a long time we've sort of targeted that user and said, hey, we, we really help you. It's like, but why are they doing this? Why are they building any infrastructure or any cloud platform? Well, it's to run applications and services, to help their customers, but how do they get there? There's people building and writing those things, and we're helping them, right? For the last two years, we've been really focused on making it simple, and I think that's an important thing to know. >> Chris, thanks so much, appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you, John. >> Okay, that's theCUBE Q&A session here with Platform9. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (light music)

(relaxing electronic music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of Next Level Network Experience event. Brought to you by Infoblox. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, we're here in our Palo Alto studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Infoblox for their Next Level Networking virtual event with theCUBE. Glenn Sullivan is our guest, Principal Product Manager with Infoblox, formerly with SnapRoute, theCUBE alumni. Great to have you back on, Glenn. Great to see you, and thanks for jumping on remotely. We're doing the remote thing, the remote CUBE, good to see you. >> Yeah, it's great! I wish I could be in the studio, you guys have a great studio up there in Palo Alto, so I wish I could have joined you, but that's not possible right now. (chuckles) >> The governor's on, is off, we're get there, but when it does come back we'll certainly do a lot more remotes, and want to go to a "hybrid world." Hybrid, it sounds like the media business is turning into cloud computing, you got public videos, in person, you got hybrid, and virtual. The cloud native world is certainly spawning everywhere now with COVID, and you guys are talk about Next Level Networking, but with the word Experience. I want to get your thoughts on that because, you know, it's been six months, you've been on theCUBE, a lot's happened. Next Level Networking Experience, describe it. >> Yeah, it's really about processing things as close to where they need to be processed as possible, right? So, you don't really want to put everything in the cloud, you don't really want to have everything happen on-prem, you want to do the right data processing where it's needed, right? Have a little bit on-prem and have a lot in the cloud, or vice versa, it's really about elastic scale, right? That's what I think about with cloud native technologies is being able to run whatever you need to run service-wise as close to the delivery mechanism of either the user, or you know, as close to the app in the cloud as you need to. That's really what it means by, you know, having an elastic scale, and we try to do that every day. >> And notice the word Experience is in there, you know, that's been super important because you build and provision, manage these services from the customer standpoint. I mean, I can't drive in, there's no, there's clothes, or I got to go in, I now can do remotely. This is the key about having abstraction layer innovation, certainly DNS, DHCP, IP address management, never going away, you've got to connect stuff to the internet, I mean the network is there. >> Exactly. >> You've got to be a bit more innovative, what's your thoughts on the impact of the network now that cloud native and open source specifically are driving more action. >> Well, there's a lot going under the hood, right? And you can't just, you know, manage things the way you used to be able to, where you take and you buy a box, you know, it's that cattle vs pets thing that we talk about in cloud native, right? Where you treat this appliance very specifically and very specially, and you upgrade it and you're afraid to touch it. Now that you can't, you know, get the things, you have to do everything lights out. So, what we've learned via applying technologies in the cloud, you know, you didn't go into AWS' data center, or Google's data center, or Microsoft Azure's data center and manage these things, so what we've learned about how to manage infrastructure across the board in networking and compute and storage now is even more important, because everybody's lights out all the time now. >> And scale and speed is critical. I mean, Google's pioneered the concept of SRE, Site Reliability Engineer. What your teasing out, Glenn, is the same kind of concept for the network, you've got to have the security, you've got to have the scale. This is a huge point, can you react to that? >> Yeah, it's about spinning up instances where you need them, you know, when you need them, right? If networking equals a physical black box appliance that you specifically nurture and manage instead of just networking services, right, because DHCP is a networking service, DNS is a networking service, IPAM is a networking service, so you should be able to spin those up wherever you need to and manage those without having to worry about it all being tied to, you know, specific things that you have to manage in a very nurtured way. >> I want to get your thoughts, the term borderless enterprise is being kicked around, you guys use that term. I've heard, you know, the borderless networK, makes sense I guess, but what does the borderless enterprise mean to you. >> Well, it's really just an extension if you think about it from the software defined perimeter concept before. You know, people call it different terms now, but it's just saying that borderless means that I don't have people sitting in a office anymore, and if I do have people sitting in an office, they have the similar experience to people that are connecting remotely, no matter where they are. So, because there is no boundary to your network, right, because the edges of your network don't match edges of your walls in your branches, that's pretty borderless to me, right? And you have to kind of think about, you know, it's not just about adding more firewalls, It's not just about adding more network perimeter security, it's really about how do I apply foundational security across the board. I've been at Infoblocks now for a little over six months, and I can tell you, it's great to see thinking about these foundational services, right? These infrastructure services like DHCP, DNS, and IPAM being really at the foundational layer of the security that you apply to your network. Right, it's the first couple of things that happen, right? The first thing you do is you get an IP address, that's DHCP, you can figure out all kinds of stuff about a device that way. Then you start looking at services with DNS, right? And then it's like, "Okay, well now I've got a lot more information about what the user's doing, where they're going, and how to secure it," right?" So, these sound like they're really your plain vanilla protocol suites, until you really start applying borderless security across the board with them. >> Yeah, a lot of machinations, and also you now have massive amounts of connection points, 'cause with IoT, not only have more in terms of volume of things connecting, but they're being turned on and off very quickly. They have to get connected, so you have that going on. >> Yep, and then you got to make sure that they do what they're supposed to do, right? If they're supposed to phone home to a specific place that they only do that, and that they haven't been hijacked, and somebody isn't mimicking them with malware. There's all kinds of security threats when you start thinking about all the possibilities that IoT brings into account. >> Yeah, some light bulb that you screw in, wifi enabled, has a multi-threaded capability, and be, who knows what's on there, right? (laughs) I mean this is what the reality is, no one knows what connects, a little hygiene comes a long way. I want to just get back into what you said. You've been there for a few months, came from SnapRoute, which was doing some real fine work, that's where we did our feature interview on you and what you were doing there, that technology. With borderless enterprise, what is the role that cloud native and open source play? Because this is your wheelhouse, I want to get your thoughts because when you had that to borderless, things kind of happen. >> There's two things that I like to think about. One, it's scaling things down as skinny as possible, or as big as necessary, right, elastic scale, right? We talk about cloud native technologies, we always talk about elastic scale. Well, what does that mean? Well, that means that am I securing an entire data center? Am I securing a branch office? Am I securing a gas station? Or am I securing a person working from home? You know, this is what we mean by elastic scale. It doesn't mean that I'm, you know, purpose building the spoke specific security profiles for those individual use cases, it means that I have a system that I can scale up and scale down no matter where those folks are, right? That's really what you have to do when you think about cloud native technologies and the borderless network, is you have to be able to run things as close to the user as possible, or as close to the app as possible, or somewhere in between. The second thing that I think is super key is abstraction, right? You can't manage everyone working from home, or you can't manage as many instances as you need with everyone's individual laptop, right? This doesn't scale, right? Abstraction is key to cloud native technologies because it means that I don't pay attention to anything that's below me, right? If I'm an SRE, I don't necessarily care about what type of servers that application set's running on. If I'm a network engineer, I don't really care about the fiber patch panels that connect my network devices together, right? Abstracting away the underlying infrastructure is key for cloud native technologies. So, as we add more and more devices, more and more endpoints, more and more users to manage, we have to make sure that we abstract away the complexity of all the connections that need to be built between those users and whatever, you know, abstraction orchestration layer that we utilize. >> You almost peeled back the onion from the early days of DNS and go to the core, "Hey, I want to connect to this domain." And a packet moves from here to there across an IP address, "Oh, let's add some abstraction on it." This has been the innovation form for the internet for years, right? So, how do you describe the Next Level? Because you mentioned, again, the word Experience is in there, so Next Level means, okay, networks need to be programmable. You do have the Next Level opensource dynamic that you pointed out beautifully, what's that Next Level Experience? How do you see the preferred future evolving? Because if you take this further, if you believe cloud native provides some scale, as you pointed out, it should simplify, these abstraction layers should reduce complexity, or abstract away the complexities and provide more simplicity. >> Absolutely! I mean, I always come at it from an Ops perspective because that's just my background, right? But I was running networks for a long time before I started building, you know, network operating systems, right? I can tell you that what I need is visibility. You know, I need to be able to see what's going on at any given moment. I need to be able to know that the things that I've deployed are up and running. I need to know that the information that I need to troubleshoot the issues that arise is at my fingertips, right? Because I always think about it like the 3:00 a.m. call, right? The network engineer, or sysadmin, or the DNS admin, or it doesn't matter who they are, at 3:00 a.m. they got to wake up because they've just been paged, and something's wrong. And how do they get to what's broken? So, that's one way to think about it. There's also the deployment way to think about it, right? Like how can I deploy as many new users, as many new branches, as many new locations, whatever the process is. You know, you hear zero touch provisioning, you know, all these other, these features, and they come as part of a cloud native mentality, right? They mean that I don't have to do, you know, a whole lot of pre-thinking and pre-staging, and pre-configuration, and pre-thought before I deploy stuff, right? It means I need something, I deploy whatever is required from a service level, I kickstart it, it bootstraps itself, and it joins, right? I take away the headache of having to think about where something is or when it is, and that's a lot of the synergy that we had between what we were doing at SnapRoute and when we came to Infoblox, right? I can tell you, we were pleasantly surprised by the platform that was built, and we were like, "Okay, well this is going to be great! We can add services to this and we don't have to worry about having to go an reinvent the wheel." Because when you choose technologies like Docker containerization, you choose technologies like Kubernetes orchestration and Kubernetes abstraction, you are a lot closer to where you need to be. I mean one of the thing that, you know, isn't super well-known out there is that CoreDNS is one of the major projects that Infoblox helps maintain with inside CNCF, the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, right? CoreDNS ships at the core of every Kubernetes version from now on, you know, as of a few versions ago. So if you think about it, Infoblox has got a lot of cloud native technologies built into everything that we do, and we're one of the key maintainers of one of the key DNS features of something that's at the heart of Kubernetes, and you know, I don't have to tell you how popular Kubernetes is. >> Yeah, we've chatted about that. It sounds like it's the kernel of all the action, DNS, the CoreDNS for Kubernetes. (laughs) >> Exactly, exactly! It's definitely at the core there. >> Glenn, I want to get your thoughts. First of all, I love chatting with you, you mentioned you were from an operating background, but also you can bring a lot of dev into it too, so this is ultimately, to me, the inflection point of where DevOps goes mainstream, because you used to do Ops for a fruit company, Apple? >> Yes, yes, very popular! >> Big one. >> A very popular fruit company called Apple, and we know how hardcore they are, especially they lean heavy on, you know, lock it down, make sure everything's secure, I mean it's well known in the Silicon Valley and around the world, certainly in tech circles, the security mindset. >> Absolutely. >> Large scale operations. Now, you bring also the DevOps aspect of it with cloud native. As that world has to become secure, and networks, it's an Ops game, let's face it. No matter how much DevOps you sprinkle into the equation, at the end of the day, it's Ops. Ops, operations of networks, high availability, large scale. But now you have a little bit of development goin' on on top. The programmable internet past the tip of the network layer, what's your take on that? Because you still need security, you want to have the capability to do some advanced automation. These have been hot new trends, and networking people are now hearing this not for the first time, but it's the new thing where it's like, "Okay, I can have my Ops, but I got to do some Dev now." So make sense of this, where are we in this whole programmable networking aspect? >> Yeah, there's sort of two schools of thought, and it's interesting what's happening, right? You've got kind of, on the extreme left side you've got, "I just treat the network like it's dumb plumbing and I run all of my software overlays on top of it, and I basically treat the network like it doesn't exist." And you know, it's kind of a situation that's been perpetuated by the silos that are out there, where you have the network engineers, and the server compute engineers, or SREs, and then you know, it's like, "Well, these folks never have to talk to each other because we just treat the network like it doesn't exist, and we run overlays on top." And some of the vendors in the server overlay security space have been really proud of that interaction. And I can tell you that that's one way of doing it, but it's not the optimal way, right? Like, when I was a network engineer I could tell you, you're trying to build credibility, right? So, if I was talkin' to a network engineer now, and I'd say like, "How do you get your credibility built with your server folks?" It's kind of like learning a different language, right? If you try, if you try to speak the other language, the person actually is appreciative of that and will help you. So, I always found, you know, find thing things you can automate, run that code base, figure out the API structures, build some pseudo-code together to make it happen, and figure out what you're doing over, and over, and over again and automate it. Automate away, right? And that's some of the nice things that are the same here, right, everything we could ever want to do in any GUI is all REST API'd underneath the hood, right? So it's like, we don't have to pitch to people that, "Oh, you can automate this code if you want to, you can run these APIs if you want to." They know it, and they use it, and people are happy with it. And I think if you're a network engineer, you've got to spend the extra effort to try to, you know. You don't have to do anything complicated! >> It's not rocket science. You know, it's not like you got to go right C, I'm sorry? >> It's not rocket science. >> No, start with Ansible, you'll learn some Python, you'll learn some Django on top of that, and then keep running, right? Keep automating on top of that. >> All right, great stuff, Glenn. I know you've got a a tight deadline, appreciate you comin' on for this virtual fireside chat as part of the Infoblox Next Level Networking virtual event. What specifically can companies do to get what they need from a technology standpoint to secure the borderless enterprise? How do you see it playing out, now that you're on Infoblox side from SnapRoute, with what Infoblox has, which is a holistic portfolio approach, a holistic view, what are you guys offering customers, and how do they secure their borderless enterprise? Really start with DDI, right? I know DDI is something that is not specific to Infoblox, but if you look at what we're doing with DNS, DHCP and IPAM, it's really the foundational layer to start securing the rest of your network. We don't necessarily make it so you don't need the rest of your security stacks that are running on top, but we do optimize 'em and we make it so you can right-size 'em, and we really think that if you focus on getting that layer solid, and you really focus on the DNS security, you can apply a lot of lightweight, high impact features as early on in the packet forwarding process as possible. Right, if you think about, I'm a network engineer at heart, so I always think about the path of a packet from the start to the end, and DDI happens really early in the process, so if you give that right, the rest of your security infrastructure built on top of that is just going to work that much better. >> You're the Principal Product Manager at Infoblox, formerly with SnapRoute, how do you fit into this? What product are you managing? Can you give a little bit of background, kind of what you're working on? >> So, I'm an emerging technologies PM, so basically anything kind of new and cool that we look to add to our platform, that'll come out of myself and my group. >> And Kubernetes obviously is one of 'em. >> Well, Kubernetes is already there, so we're already doing stuff with Kubernetes inside Infoblox, like, our whole platform. If you buy BloxOne DDI and BloxOne Threat Defense today, it's all deployed using Kubernetes and Docker containers, and orchestration layers, and everything today. So, everything that we're building on my team, is all building on top of that well sold platform that's already been developed. >> There's definitely demand out there, you're startin' to see the big companies like VMware, very operational focused companies start acquiring cloud native and open source, kind of a new kind of section to them. Obviously it's a tell sign, the markers are all there in terms of the trends. What are people missing? What's real, what's vape or what's reality when you look at the landscape, and what does Infoblox bring to the table? >> So, I think what's important to know is that when you're lookin' at open source technologies, a lot of them have been hardened over many years, and there's new stuff coming out all the time, and there's definitely new uses for them. But what's kind of important is what you put on top, right? Everyone's got open source under the hood, or they've got technologies they've OEM'd under the hood, right? But the experience that you present to customers is really key, right? Because you can take any kind of open source project and wrap a, you know, very thing layer on top of it, and you can either, you know, trump up the open source software, and say is the open source software we use underneath, or you can downplay it and say hey, this open source software, you know, we don't really talk about what's under the hood and it just all works magically. We find that transparency is really helpful. You know, you let people know what's under the hood, and you contribute to it, and you show that you're involved in this community, and you use that as a leverage to kind of push forward. So, if you look at, you know, what we're doin' with some of the different projects within, you know, BloxOne DDI uses Kea, and we're part of IC that's part of the maintainers of that, like we're openly in this space, right? And I already mentioned CoreDNS before, right? So, you can either take open source, and use it, and pretend that you don't, or you can take open source and contribute to it and be a community member, and be an advocate, and usually when you're on that side of the equation, you end up in a better place with your customers, building, you know, building confidence in your customer base. >> That's great stuff, Glenn Sullivan, thanks for comin' on, I really appreciate it. I'll give you the last word. In a nutshell, if I have cloud native and open source, how do I secure my borderless enterprise? >> Think about it as close to where the source is as possible and scale things elastically so that you can do as much processing of the user experience as possible so that you aren't trying to, you know, funnel everything to a single place and apply some magical policies in a single centralized location, to where you have to process a lot of data across the board. If you think about it from a hybrid approach where you've got a little bit on-prem and you've got a little bit in the cloud, or in some combination that's right for your organization, the hybrid approach that really trumps the local survivability, and really, you know, keeps focusing on securing things as close to the user possible, or as close to the source as possible, then you're going to be in good shape. >> Glenn, great stuff. As always, a masterclass in networking. Appreciate the insights, thanks for comin' on this Infoblox Next Level Networking virtual event for theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Stay with us, and thanks for watching. (relaxing electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017, brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage live here in Austin, Texas for the CNCF's two conferences, CloudNativeCon, which was yesterday, and two days, today and tomorrow, KubeCon for Kubernetes' conference. This is theCUBE, of course, from SiliconANGLE Media. I'm John Furrier with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Our next guest, Dan Kohn, is the executive director of the CNCF, the man who put it all together. Congratulations. Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Oh, absolutely. Thrilled to have you guys back here again. >> So you kind of doing a victory lap here now, high fiving each other? >> Dan: Great hugs. >> John: Great event. >> Laughing: I'm glad it's a good event, and I am hearing fantastic feedback that folks are thrilled to be here. But we sort of describe this moment for the organization and the community as being the end of the beginning. >> John: Yeah. >> Where we now have all the major cloud vendors, all of the biggest enterprise software companies. We have a core group of 14 projects anchored by Kubernetes, but tons and tons of work in front of us. >> And tons of success, so I'm just going to read a couple of highlights from yesterday. There's a lot today. Baidu joins the CNCF, a lot of scaling production application examples, 31 new silver end-user members joined, Alibaba Cloud update to platinum, CoreDNS 1.0, Containerd, Fluentd, Jaeger, tons of news. Obviously, we've been pumping out the coverage. Today, again, more and more great goodness. But really interesting is that you guys have put a frame around this community to allow it to grow, to fertilize the open source vibe, which is all cloud but yet scaled. And you put up a slide I want to get your reaction to that I thought was compelling yesterday during your keynote. It was the flywheel, circle, and it said projects, products, profit. >> Dan: Right. >> And not that you're promoting profit, but you're not hiding the ball, either, saying, hey, you know what? There's a lot of commercial interest in cloud, obviously. We saw AWS' success last week. And that is if you create good products in this community framework, there's profit to be had. >> Right. So first of all, I should admit to plagiarizing that slide from Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. >> And similarly, I think you can look at a lot of aspects... >> It's an open source feature. >> Dan: Yes. >> Free for you to use. >> John: Right. >> Similarly, I think there's a lot of ways in which Kubernetes is trying to build on the success of Linux. And Jim even describes Kubernetes as the Linux of the cloud. >> John: Yeah. >> Stu: Yeah. >> John: That's a good point. >> Dan, one of the things we've been talking around Kubernetes is you talk about scale. >> Dan: Right. >> Talk about scale of the CNCF. You have 4 to 14 projects. People are a little worried when you get all the vendors around here and there's all these projects. It's a foundation thing, it's going to go off the rails. >> Dan: Yeah. >> Customers aren't going to have a voice. How do we make sure we kind of learn from some of the things that other projects have had challenges with in the past? >> And I think that's our advantage, which is the great thing about coming later than some of the other foundations, is we can look at where they had successes and where they had issues. And our aspiration for CNCF is to get to go make entirely new mistakes rather than replicating some of the issues that have come before. And so really from the beginning of CNCF, we had a somewhat unusual and frankly a little bit cumbersome charter where I describe it at times as a three-ring circus. We have a governing board made up of the vendors that are putting a lot of money into the community, but they don't get to run the projects and they don't even get to pick the projects. Instead, they appoint six of the nine members of an independent technical oversight committee, kind of like the Supreme Court. And then we have a third group in the end-user community that I'm thrilled to say is now up to 28 members in it. They appoint one of those folks. We finally got that working. We have Sam Lambert, the director of infrastructure at GitHub, who has just made a huge commitment to Kubernetes and is moving all their infrastructure over into it. Those seven appoint the last two. And so that body, and they just had their public meeting a couple hours ago. They feel very strongly about their independence, about their reputation, that they're trying to make very good judgments based on what they're seeing in the marketplace. >> That's interesting, the three-ring circle. I like how you put it. But let's talk about the end-user piece because I think that's critical. One of the things we were commenting earlier from the Lyft folks was you have a lot of end users who have built some large-scale systems out of their own sheer necessity. >> Dan: Definitely. >> And that is now being donated in. We saw Kubernetes come in with, you shepherded beautifully, went from Google, but you've got Lyft donating an amazing product convoy. >> This first convoy has a huge amount of excitement. And what was fun was, actually, on the same stage that they contributed back in LA in September, Uber contributed a separate project. Now, unlike Uber and Lyft, the two projects are in no way competitive- >> John: Yeah. >> Like Jaeger is really fantastic tracing one. But what they have in common is that they're companies that have had to grow from nothing to extremely high scale and then had problems that they solved. And they wanted to share that expertise with us. >> I want to get your thoughts on this. Because we've been speculating, on theCUBE, we've been kind of thinking, an editorial, but just that this is all good business. Now, that's pretty obvious, right? You're starting to see this kind of contribution, the gifts that keep on giving. These are significant code. >> Dan: Yeah. >> Not like, okay, let's start a little group and huddle and build something organically. You have real goodness coming in from Google, Uber, Lyft, and there's a million others. >> Dan: Right. >> How is that changing the game? Certainly accelerating it. That's really bringing goods to the table. >> Right. I think the whole... >> You have to manage it. >> Well, and for what it's worth, I don't actually manage the projects. And so we do provide a set of services- >> John: The community? >> -to them and we help them, we market them. But one of the unusual aspects of CNCF is that the projects do actually manage themselves. A little bit of guidance from the TOC, but we really are unusual in that sense. And that's one of the reasons the projects have been... >> And what's interesting is, to connect the dots, though, one step further, you're talking about a commercial entity donating massive intellectual property in the open for all the goodness of everyone else. But yet that flywheel is continuing. They're still using it. So it is inherently commercial dynamic. >> Right. And back to that circle, I think really the underlying concept is that companies agree that sharing key parts of their infrastructure has a huge amount of value to the whole ecosystem, to each other. And then they're absolutely eager to compete above that. And so you can look at it with the public clouds where we have now Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, IBM, Oracle all at the table. They are absolutely fierce competitors. But they're saying that this specific software infrastructure layer isn't the area that they want to compete. They want to compete on all the value-added services, customer service, et cetera. >> Dan, I wonder if you can speak to how CNCF connects to some of the broader communities out there. Things like Kata containers got announced coming out of the OpenStack group. You've got a serverless track happening here, kind of extends some of where Kubernetes is going. How does CNCF fit into the broader... >> Sure. And it's definitely the case that all the innovation out there cannot happen in CNCF. Most obviously, everything that we do, almost everything depends on Linux. And so that's our parent organization, the Linux Foundation. But we've had a good collaboration with Jonathan Bryce from OverStack. They have two booths on the floor here at the show. And we've spoken to Clear Containers and RunV, the two predecessors in the past. But the part that I'm particularly pleased with for Kata containers is that it is an OCI-compliant runtime, that's another sister organization, and is really designed to work well for Kubernetes. And then they can pitch that and let the market go decide which container runtimes they find the most valuable. >> Obviously a lot of traction here in terms of the sentiment around service meshes and pluggable lock-in textures. That's been very cool. But security came up. So I want to get your thoughts around security, obviously storage and these older models around how to deal with storage and networking. Obviously, always in the action. >> Yeah. >> But security is top of mind for everyone. How is that being addressed? You know, talk is out there... >> Sure. I mean our philosophy on this is that moving to cloud-native and particularly the continuous integration and continuous development that goes along with that is the most important step that you can do to help secure your infrastructure. And Equifax is the example everyone always brings up. But there was a case where they were using known insecure software and they didn't have the processes up to place where instead of doing quarterly updates or monthly updates, you want to be doing dozens of updates per day. And a cloud-native infrastructure allows you to do that. >> What's next for you? Because you've got great traction with both community response, and the community has been absolutely amazing, the quality of people, level has been great, but also at the funding sponsors. You've got a lot of people that are involved. What's next? What happens next? What do you envision happening? What's the plan, and then how do you view that evolving? >> Well, I hate to fall into the buzzword implosion here, but if you go back to the crossing the chasm metaphor, I think we're still very much just in the early adopter phase. 2018 could very well be the moment that we jump over to the early majority. And I do feel like this whole community now has the velocity to do that and that we're on track for it. But as that happens, there's just far, far more people who need to be educated so they understand the projects and the options and how to work with them. And then hopefully they go from just being consumers of these technologies to contributors and that we can welcome them into our community and hopefully get the advantage of their expertise as well. >> I want to get your thoughts on a comment that Stu and I were talking about. Stu, you and I were talking about the notion of value creation above the stack, and then how Kubernetes, although some could say being commoditized, but it's also creating value because with that consistency of Kubernetes, you can now create value. So we believe, and I want to get your reaction to this, because we think a whole new ecosystem dynamic will emerge of a new kind of ecosystem. And if this new app developer combined with software engineering, which is really going on, you're talking about the cloud, the app developers will just build in value, that value creation will be rewarded. That's where monetization will be happening. >> And if I could build off that... >> John: Yeah. >> Dan, I loved one of your opening comments. You quoted, "exciting times for boring infrastructure, "maybe too exciting." So this week we've been teasing out there's a lot of work to make that infrastructure boring. You've got everybody on this floor, the CNCF board, lots of new projects making that. Where the action is and what this is going to create is that application monetization and the speed and agility of being able to create these cool new cloud-native applications out there. So it's interesting dynamic, spans broad pieces of this, layers of the stack there. >> Yeah. Well, I will point out that there was an odd level of unanimity of just a ton of different leaders in the community, in keynotes from Craig McLuckie and Chen Goldberg and others where they all agree that Kubernetes is not by any means the ultimate answer or the final answer. I think everybody now expects to see Kubernetes as a core aspect of the infrastructure for software for the next decade or more. But there's a belief that there's a whole ton of value that needs to be added above it, particularly to try and show for a regular application developer who just has a PHP app or no-GS microservices or anything else what's the easiest way to go from having a piece of software and deploying it effectively. >> Dan, so it's interesting. You watch the people on the outside. They're like, oh, look at Kubernetes. They're all holding hands and saying Kumbaya. We know there's some spirited debates that happen- >> Dan: Definitely. >> In the code, some projects that are sometimes competing up there. Why has the community come together, and where are some of the areas that we still need to work on and improve to help customers going forward? >> And again, I think they have the big advantage of having watched other communities that didn't value community and consensus and the ability to work through their issues. And so thankfully, we just have a ton of really capable engineers who also have some of those social or personal qualities that they care about working these things out. And to date, at least, I think most of those disagreements have been settled pretty amicably and in a positive direction. I think there's still huge swathes of this space that are still up in the air. Storage is an obvious one where there's a ton of work going on in a storage working group of CNCF. Serverless is another where I think everyone agrees that the application deployment model of AWS Lambda is really exciting and has things that people should replicate and should be brought over to Kubernetes. But how that should happen, what the software is, et cetera, there's still, in fact, we have our first serverless track today here at KubeCon where several different competing approaches are all talking about what they'd like to do. >> Awesome stuff. And you also announced some dates for next year, December 11 and 13 in Seattle. >> Dan: Yes. >> Okay. >> Dan: That's a year from now. >> November 14 and 15 in Shanghai. >> Now, you and I met in Hangzhou in the lobby, which was just amazing. But I certainly am hoping to convince you to go back to China with us. This will be our first event... >> I got a three-year visa. >> Good, yeah, that's the exactly right one. But this will be our first event in China, which I think is just a huge opportunity. We now have Baidu, Tencent, Huawai, ZTE, a number of startups. There's just so much excitement for this space over there that we're really excited to satisfy. >> Stu: And Copenhagen in May. >> And that's the last one. Thank you. May 2 to 4 in Copenhagen, and we're really excited for the event, to bring it to Europe and the rest of the world. >> Okay. So you've been working like a dog, you've been working hard. I've seen you in China. It's serendipitous. But it's not without being mentioned that this has been great effort by your team and the Linux Foundation and Jim and the whole team. But congratulations. Are you having a pinch me moment? I know it's too early to do a victory lap. >> But you've got to be pretty excited. >> Yeah. It really has been a great thing for the foundation that we sort of accomplished many of our 2018 and 2019 goals this year. But I'm sure we're going to find plenty of stuff to do next year. >> And your goal for the next 6 to 12 months, what's on your top three to-do's, continue the momentum? Share your API for... >> Yeah. What's great is that we really have plenty of members. We'd always like to add new ones and serve the ones we have better. But right now, the focus is really about providing better services to our projects. All of them feel overworked. They would love help on documentation, on marketing, on messaging about it, and some of them need help with testing development and other things. So that's really what we're buckling down on. >> Great community are going to test them, being here on the ground, personally present at creation. And I was standing there with J.J. and Lew Tucker, OpenStack three years ago, talking about Kubernetes. We were kind of ripping. We couldn't have imagined, then, obviously, they bolted it on last year with your event. Now second year here, huge community... >> But you have 4,100 folks here, is more than the previous four events combined. >> Yeah, awesome. >> So it really is exciting. >> TheCUBE, always on the ground. And sometimes the squirrel finds a nut. We found a cloud-native foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. CNCF, Cloud-Native Compute Foundation, really a new, growing, and relevant community for cloud and a new way to do software and reimagine the future from software engineering to full application development, a new way. This is theCUBE's coverage, and we are here live in Austin. More live coverage after this short break. We'll be right back. [Techno Music]