>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> In mid-2014, announced the world, coming out of Google led by Joe Beda, sitting to my right, Brendan Burges and Craig McLucky, all Kube alumni. Kubernetes, which is the Greek for governor helmsman or captain and here we are, five years later at the show. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon here in Barcelona, Spain. Joe you've got your title today is that you're a principal engineer at VMware of course, by way of acquisition through Heptio, but you are one of the people who helped start this journey that we are all on Kubernetes, thanks so much for joining us. >> Yeah, thank you so much for having me. >> Alright, so, the cake and the candles and the singing we'll hold for the parties later. We have Fippy and the gang have been watching our whole thing, for people who don't know there's a whole cartoon, books and stuffed animals and everything like that. Joe, when you started this merchandising, that was what you were starting, no. In all seriousness though, bring us back a little bit give us a little bit of historical context as to we've had you on the program a few times but yeah, here we are five years later was this what you were expecting? >> I mean when I remember Craig and Bren and I sitting around and we're like hey, we should do this as an open source project This is before we got approvals and got the whole thing started. And I think there was, like an idea in the back of our head, of like, this could be a big deal. You dream big a lot of times and you know that there's a reality and that it's not always going to end up being this. And so, I don't think anybody involved with Kubernetes in the early days really thought it was going to turn into what it has turned into. >> Yeah, so when we look at open source projects, I remember back a few years back, it was like to succeed you must have a phoenetical dictator that will make sure the community does this or wait we don't want too much vendor we're just going to let the user community take over and there's all these extremes out there, but these are complicated pieces. The keynote this morning the discussion was Kubernetes is a platform of platforms it's like I've got all of these APIs and by itself, Kubernetes doesn't do a lot. It is, what it enables and what things put together, so walk us through a little bit of that the mission, how it changed a bit and a little bit of the community and we'll go from there. >> Yeah, I think so early on one of the goals with Kubernetes from Google's point of view was to essentially take a lot of the ideas that had been incubated over about a decade, with respect to Borg and other things and so, a lot of the early folks who got involved in the project and worked on those systems and really bring that to the outside world as a way to actually start bridging the gap between what Googlers did and what the rest of the world did. We had a really good idea of what we were looking to get out of this system and that was widely shared based on experience across a bunch of relatively senior engineers. We brought in some of the Red Hat folks early on Clayton Coleman and some of the other folks who are still super involved in the project. I think there was enough of an understanding that we looked and said okay we got a lot of work to do let's just get this done. So, we didn't really need sort of the benevolent dictator because there was a shared understanding and we had senior engineers that were willing to make trade-offs to be able to go and move forward. So that I think was a key bit of the success early on. >> Alright, so you talked, it was pulling in some other vendor community there. Talk a little bit about how that ecosystem grew and when was user feedback part of that discussion? >> Yeah, I mean, when you say we pulled in the vendor we pulled in people who worked for vendors but we never really viewed it as, there was really from the beginning this idea of well what's good for the project? What's going to actually create sustainability and for the project, sort of project over vendor is really something that we wanted to establish. And that even came down to the name, right? Like, when we named the project, we could have called it Google XYZ or some sort of XYZ but we didn't want to do that because we wanted to establish it as an independent thing with a life of its own. And so, yeah, so we wanted to bring in those external ideas and I think early on, we did have some early users, we did listen to them but it really resonated with folks who could actually see where we were going. I think it took time for the rest of the world to really catch on with what the vision was. >> OK, when we look at today, there's a lot at the show that is on top of or next to or with Kubernetes it's not all about that piece. How do you balance what goes in it versus what goes with it? One of my favorite lines last year overall, was from you, saying Kubernetes is not a magic player it is not the be all and end all it is set with very specific guidelines. How do you avoid scope creep? As engineers it's always like, I don't know, we know how to do that piece of it better. >> So when we started out the project we didn't actually have a governance model. It was just a bunch of engineers that sort of worked well together. Over time and as the project grew, we knew that we needed to actually get some sort of structure in place. And so a bunch of us who had been there from the start got together, formed a steering committee, held elections. There's a secret architecture that we formed and these are the places where we can actually say what is Kubernetes what is Kubernetes not how do we actually maintain sort of good taste with how we actually approach this stuff and that's one of the ways that we try to contain scope creep. But also, I think everybody realizes that a thriving ecosystem whether officially part of the CNCF or adjacent to it, is good for everybody. Trying to hold on too tight is not going to be good for the project. >> So, Joe, tremendous progress in five years. Look forward for us a little bit. What does Kubernetes 2024 look like for us? >> Well a lot of folks like to say that in five years, Kubernetes is going to disappear. And sometimes they come at this from this sort of snarky angle. (chuckles) But other times, I think it's going to disappear in terms of like it's going to be so boring, so solid, so assumed that people don't talk about it anymore. I mean, we're here, at something that the CNCF is part of the Linux Foundation, which is great. But how often do people really focus on the Linux kernel these days? It is so boring, so solid, there's new stuff going on, but clearly, all the exciting stuff all the action, all the innovation is happening at higher layers. I think we're going to see something similar happen with Kubernetes over time. >> Yeah, that being said the reach of Kubernetes is further than ever. I was talking to this special interest group looking at edge computing and IoT people making the micro-cage version of this stuff when the team first got together, I mean, is you must look at and said there were many fathers, many parents of this solution, but, could you imagine the kind of the family and ecosystem that would have grown out of it? >> I think we knew that it could go there I mean, Google had some experience with this, I mean When Google bought YouTube, they had a problem where they had to essentially build out something that looked a little bit like a CDN. And so there were some examples of sort of like, how does technology, like Boar, adapt to an Edge type of situation. So, there was some experience to borrow we definitely knew that we wanted this thing to scale up and down. But I think that's a hallmark of these successful technologies is that they can be used in ways and in places that you really never thought about when you got started. So that's definitely true. >> Alright, Joe, want to give you the final word the contributors, the users, the ecosystem community, what do you say with five years of Kubernetes now in the books? >> I just want to send a huge thank you to everybody who made it happen. This is, it was started by Google it was started by a few of us early on. But, we really want to make it so that everybody feels like it's theirs. A lot of times Brendan Burns and me and Kelsey wrote a book together and I'll do signing and a lot of times I'll sign that and I'll say thank you for being a part of Kubernetes. Because I really feel like every user everybody who bets on it, everybody who shares their knowledge, they're really a big part of it. And so thank you to everybody who's a big part of Kubernetes. >> All right, well, Joe, thank you as always for sharing your knowledge with our community >> Thank you so much. >> We've been happy to be a small part in helping to spread the knowledge and everything going on here, so congratulations to the community on five years of Kubernetes and we'll be back with more coverage here from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)