(cheery synth music) >> Hello, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here for a KubeCon CloudNativeCon preview for the North America show in Los Angeles, here in person and a virtual event. Two of the co-chairs are with me again this year, Constance Caramanolis, principal engineer at Splunk, and of course, Stephen Augustus, head of Open Source at Cisco. Great to see you guys. Hey, thanks for coming on, virtually, for the preview. >> Great to be had! >> Constance: Thank you for having us. >> Stephen: Great to see you again John. (laughing) >> Constance: Yeah. >> So I love... well, KubeCon has gotten, It's my favorite event every year. This is where the DevOps actually, where the people are reading the tea leaves, connecting the dots, but also meeting up and doing what communities do best, which is set the agenda for the next, next generation that's happening in person. Last year, it was virtual. We had the European virtual KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. This year a mix. Give us a taste of updates that you want to share. Let's get, let's get into it. >> Sure. Uh, so I think, you know, um, I-I-I think uh, seeing this event in particular and uh, you know, one, we've got this, we've got this hopeful r-return to you know, some semblance of normalcy. I know that you know, over the last year and change, we've been uh, we've been kind of itching t-t-to see each other in person. And, and you know, and, and I-I think I say on a lot of uh, interviews that I, you know, one of my favorite parts of any conference is the, is the hallway track, right? It's really hard to, and, and we've- we've made, you know, we've made strides to replicate it, but there's- I don't think there's anything uh, you know, close t-to being in person, right? And, and getting to, to bounce i-ideas off of uh, your, your co-conspirators, (laughs) co-conspirators or compatriots. Um, so I'm- I'm really excited for that, um, I love the, I love the um, the mandates that we've put in place, uh, to make sure that people are uh, a little bit more safe. Um, and, you know, overall, like seeing uh- I-I think one of the things that gets me most excited is the, is the uh, the set of day zero events, right? Um, I-I think the, the increase in the uh, day zero events, we, we've got uh, Constance, what's the, what's the count at now? I'm, I'm looking over it and, and it's uh, it's, it's massive, right? You know, SupplyChainSecurityCon, Uh, the, you know, the Cloud Native for Eclipse Foundation, it's beyond, >> Too, hmm, too many to count right off the bat when I'm looking at it. >> Too many, too many to count! >> And it's also like, this is a reduced number because some people decide or some, not people, like projects, decide to do virtual uh, days or a non-conference outside of the normal KubeCon cycle because of... >> Yeah, well, let's get, let's get- >> that thing that should not be named. >> Let's get into some of the data. >> I want to jump into the trends. But just for the folks watching, this is a hybrid event, and- >> Yeah. >> There's going to be this day zero, which is the pre-programming. Which by the way, I think has evolved into a format that's just tremendous. You got the pregame, pre-event action. Very dynamic, very ad-hoc, ephemeral in the, in the, in the, in the, in the people getting together and making things happen. Then you got the structured event. It's uh, the 11th to the 12th on the pre-programming, day zero stuff, which you talked about, and then the 13th to the 15th, the main conference. It's in-person and virtual, so it's going to be a hybrid event, which should be dynamic because you have an in-person dynamic where it's a scarce resource of the face-to-face, working and trying to create synchronicity with the asynchronous environment on virtuals. So it should be an action packed and a must-watch event. So I'm personally excited, we'll be there in person. But I got to ask you guys, the co-chairs, how are you guys handling this? How are the papers coming, what's the call for talks? How are you structuring things? Can you just give a quick overview of what's, what's happening on the talks? >> Uh, talks, uh, I feel like it went really well this round. >> Um, really like, wide variety. I know it's pretty vague, but there's a wide variety of topics, uh, things that are getting I think, I feel like more popularity, like security is getting more popular. Uh, business value, one thing that I'm really passionate about, is getting a lot more traction. Uh, student track 101 is also, as always, I guess, as ever since it's been, since inception has been popular, um, it's definitely getting to the point where we're actually, well not to the point, but maybe it's just being more highlighted that a lot of the, like, like, some of the like great content from the day zeros are also showing up in KubeCon and then like, vice versa and they're kind of everywhere. Uh, Yeah, the talks I think was really- >> John: The sessions, the sessions are always driving it. Stephen I'm like from a, from a, from a maturisation standpoint, you have the, the, the people developing and then you got the f... the things are getting hardened. Can you talk about the trends around, what's kind of hardening out from a project basis on these sessions and what's forming relative to the trend line this year. >> Yeah. So, you know, so to Constance's point, I think that we're, we're starting to see some diversity in, or continued diversity and kind of the personas that are coming into the conference, right? So whether you're talking about that continuing 101 track or, the student track, which, you know, a lot of people have, have kind of jumped in and seeing that as an opportunity to, to, to not only start becoming part of the community, but also to immediately contribute to content. And then you've got that For me? It's, it's security, all day, right? I think, you know, I think that, you know, there's not a week, there's not a week that passes that I don't have a chat with someone around what's happening in security lately. And I think you'll see that highlighted in in all of the keynotes that we have planned there are, there's not one, not two, but three uh, keynotes around software supply chain security, and some of the different things that you have to consider as we're kind of walking into the space of you know, protecting, protecting your, your build pipeline, protecting your production artifacts, so that's something that really, you know, that goes to that, you know, that goes to my work on that, you know, in Kubernetes for SIG release, release engineering, that's, you know, something that we, we know that there are countless downstream consumers, right? So, some, you know, some that we may not have even had contact with yet from the upstream perspective, right? So it's, it's paramount for us to make sure that, you know, everything that we're pushing out to the community and to the wider world is safe to consume. So, so security is definitely top of mind for me. I would say for, you know, lots of things around you know, continue, continuing to talk about uh, GitOps observability. And I think, and I think that, you know, each of these, what's, you know, what's fun about um, each of these, uh, the, each of these topics, each of these areas is that they're all interconnected, right? So more and more you're seeing, you're seeing, oh, well, you know, the, you know, the Tekton folks are, you know, are talking to the Flux folks. And, and they're talking to the, the folks who are working on uh, Sigstore and Rekor and, and, and all of these fun tools about how to integrate into, you know, how to integrate into those respective areas. Um, so it's, it's, it's really a time of um, collaboration underscored by um, you know, protecting, protecting the community and the, and the end users. >> John: Yeah. We're seeing a lot of ah, um, you know, the security discussions. I mean, how far can you shift left before it becomes like standard, right? So like, you know, we're seeing that being built in. I got to ask you guys also on the trend of DevOps there's been a lot of conversations around Cloud Native, around obsolete management and in terms of ability, but data, the role of data has been different approaches on how people are leveraging machine learning and AI, can you, did that come up a lot in, in some of the, the discussions and the analysis? Because everyone's slapping machine learning on things these days, and there's a little bit of that going on, but it seems to be data and machine learning and horizontal scale, classic DevOps, things are happening. What's your reaction to, to some of those things that are happening? Can you guys, is there anything happening there? >> I feel like this year wasn't that big of a machine learning year in terms of submissions. >> Yes. >> I'm certain you agree with that, but it wasn't, as I think, like, security took a lot and, and, like, and this might also just be like, thinking about it holistically now, like security was, had such amazing submissions that it probably took a little bit of the spotlight off of when we were looking at the machine learning ones. Um... >> John: So security... >> Also I'm biased, so I think >> John: So security dominated more than, than everyone else did. >> Yeah. I think, you know, I think for this year, security is, security is dominating. I, you know, I think we even talked about this in the last uh, chat we had, um, the, you know, kind of from the AI side, I think you're, we're, we're running, there have been discussions around the, uh, you know, bias in, in AI models and um, you know, how we work through that, um, I'm not sure that we have any content for that this time around, but I think it, yeah, but I think, you know, as we start to talk about like how we collect data, you know, are, are we collecting the right types of data, how we serve it, especially as a, those relate to like collecting data at the edge, right? Like, how do we, how do we, how, how do we even deploy applications at the edge? We, we have a lot of potential solutions for that. But when you combine that with, well, how do we, how do we scrape information from the things that we're deploying from the edge, right? Or, or, or some, some of the things you'll see in the, in the program. >> Constance and Stephen, talk about the community vibe right now, because you know, that's the biggest part of this conference is seeing how the people come together, but it's also the vibe sets the tone. What's, what's the current vibe in the community that you're seeing and what do we expect this year at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon? >> Yeah, I'm going to say, I imagine the community's tired and it's been a long few, two years. It feels like 10 years, it feels like forever. And a lot of the in-person aspect that used to be like social validation, we just get like is lacking, so, but that being said, there's still been amazing, like collaboration from like the open, from like the Observability and Open Telemetry part. Like, I am seeing so many projects within the tag Observability collaborate together and making that a focus. And so even though we are tired, it's still, we're still doing good work. And we're still making a point of trying to keep that community tight even though it's much harder on Zoom and right, you know, it's going to try and do the awkward, like Zoom handshake. It just doesn't do the same thing there. But to Stephen's keynote, can't remember how long ago it is, about like resiliency. We are pretty resilient. And we're also, I think we're all learning to work at a slower pace because maybe we were working too fast beforehand. And I think that, I think that's a really good takeaway from all of this. So I think it's going to, for as safe as it can be to have some variation, it's probably going to just be like, it's going to be a big party because we're going to finally get to see each other after a long time then. >> John: Yeah. >> I hope we get to do that in a safe way. >> Stephen, you bring it in, Steve, you go. Oh, Steve, you always got the energy certainly on camera, but in person as well. >> (laughs) >> This in-person dynamic this year is huge. >> Yeah, we, >> Wh-what do you think is going to happen? What, give us your take. >> Yeah, so I mean, I, you know, I would echo Constance in saying that, you know, we're, we're, we're all tired, we're all very tired at this point. Um, but I, you know, but, they, they, the conference tagline for, for North America is, uh, is 'Resilience Realized', right? I think that, you know, throughout this, this year, um, the, the contributors, maintainers of, of all of these, you know, CNCF projects have made incredible strides uh, to empower the communities to, to, uh, to be together, to be family, to, to work better together, um, in spite of, you know, in spite of uh, location, location uh, boundaries, in spite of, you know, uh, uh, health concerns, like we've, we've really made the effort to um, to show up for each other. Um, so I think that, you know, what we'll see in the conference and, and, you know, one of my favorite tracks personally um, is the, the community track, um, so lots of, lots of content around, you know, a-around community building, around uh, I think more of the, the meta of, of maintaining communities, right? So the, you know, the, the, the, the code of conduct committee, as well as uh, steering committee uh, for Kubernetes got together um, last conference to, to talk about the values and principles of the community, right? And, and I think that, you know, that, that needs to continue to be highlighted, um, you know, some of the conversations that we've had around um, how you maintain groups, you know, how do you maintain groups, especially as um, especially as a, the, the, the size of the group grows, right? Once you escape that kind of like Dunbar's number uh, area, like it gets harder and harder to s have the s the same bandwidth conversations that you would in a smaller group, right? So making sure that we're continuing to, to have valuable conversations, but also be inclusive while we're doing that is, um, is something that will continue to be highlighted over the next year and change really. >> Well. I'm really impressed by what you guys do. And I know we're all tired getting, and we want to get back and, hats off to pulling it together and creating a great program because your, your group and your community is a social construct. It's, it's, we're all social animals. And this whole COVID virtual, now hybrid really is going to, going to show in real world as all playing out, and we're going to see how it evolves, and evolution is part of social communities. And I think that the progress has been made and, you know, and with the team and you guys putting together this great event. So my hat's off to you guys, thanks for, for doing that. Appreciate, great stuff. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Now, final question, um, what do you expect? Given, I mean, this is a social organization, um, things evolve, we're social organisms. We're going to be face to face. We're going to have virtual. We're going to have great talks, security obviously is prime time, Mainstream Enterprise Adoption in Kubernetes and Cloud Native. This is crunch time, so what do you guys expect for this event? Share your thoughts. >> Yeah, I-I think there's going to be lots of um, lots of fun, uh, I think uh more social conversations, less structured. Um, you know, i-if you have, if you haven't had the opportunity to kind of hang out on CNCF Slack, while one of these events are happening, we, we've spun up something of like a hallway track. Um, so, so people are hanging out, they're giving their takes during the um, you know, you know, in between uh talks, there, there was also a, you know, kind of after conference uh, hangout for, for the hallway track that we did. Um, so w we definitely want to continue some of that stuff. Um, as you know, between the last few conferences we've launched uh, Cloud Native TV um, and lots of great producers uh, and, and, and content over there. So you'll see, you'll see, kind of, us start to break the wall between um, that virtual content that we've created uh, across the last few months, as well as, you know, th s seeing that turn physical, right? Um, so how do we, you know, how, how do we, how do we manage that and h-how do we make that seamless for people who may be maybe participating virtually as opposed to physically, right. That there's going to be a bit of um, there, there's an aspect of like, you're, you're almost running two conferences, right. Simultaneously. So. >> It's a total experiment in the real world, but it's, it's all important. It's super important. Constance, your thoughts on, on the event, what people are expecting to see and surprises that might emerge, what do you, what's your thoughts? >> Um, I, well actually, see while you were saying something, I had an idea that I think we can make it more connected, So I just wrote it down, um, uh, I, I have some silly ideas when it comes to the conference stuff, which is why Stephen's laughing, although you can't see it. >> (both men laughing) >> Um, my, I, like, I'm, I'm trying to go in with no expectations, mostly because I'm so excited. I don't want to be disappointed um, and I don't want to miss out. I think, I actually think that probably a lot of the discussions are just going to be like, hi, like, it's so nice to actually meet you and just talk about random things. Maybe not as much technology discussions as maybe there would be at a normal, I like, ah, I don't want to say normal, right? Because we are in a new normal, like what KubeCon was several years ago. Um, I think that I do. I think that it would be probably a little painful, this hybrid part, since we don't know what to expect. I think there's going to be so many things that we're going to look back and be like, face palm and be like, oh, we should've thought about these things. So for anyone who's attending virtually, apologies in advance, and please give us feedback. There's so many things I know we're going to have to improve, we just, we don't know them yet. So please be patient with us and know that we wish that you could be there in person with us too. >> Um, uh, I don't know. >> Well, that's the thing, that's the thing. >> I'm just going to go in there with an open mind. Well that's the thing, it's, it's new, it's all new, virtual. So it's, it's, we're learning together. That's, I think, people put too much pressure. I think people like expecting, you know, some magic to happen, but it's all evolving. And I think the magic is the event. And I think, I think it's going to work out great. And by the way, there's no downside it's, you know, learn. >> Exactly! >> So, yeah. So, you know, so one of the things that I um, I, I have this spiel that I give to um, the release team, the Kubernetes release team, every time we start a new cycle, right? Um, you've got a set of returning contributors. You've got a set of uh, net new contributors, right? And um, and, and moving into the release team, you're kind of like thrown right into the fire of Kubernetes, right? So it's, it's, it's one of those things. I, I, I come in and, and, and, essentially say, um, be curious, question everything. Um, this is like, it's a, it's, it's very much like a human experience, right? And I think that, you know uh, to, to Constance's point, we're all here to, to learn and grow, make this a better experience for everyone. Um, so bring yourself, like bring yourself to the conference, right? I think it's, you know, in, in terms of offering feedback, we have, you know, feedback forms for every one of the, you know, every one of the, the talks that you attend, um, you can feel free to reach out to Constance, and myself and, and Jasmine, um, if you have feedback that you want to give personally, you know, there, there are, there are ways to get in touch with us. There are ways to make the event better. And I think that every time we, we uh, we incorporate, like, we incorporate a lot of this feedback into the next conference. So every time um, you provide some piece of information for us, that gives us an opportunity to make it better, right? So this conference is built, uh, this conference is built by the community, right? The, you know, it's not just a, you know, it's not a, you know, it's not a body just uh making, making decisions kind of off the cuff, it's, we are taking your ideas and we're trying to turn them into a program, right? So it's, it's the maintainers, it's the end users. It's the students, it's people who have never used Kubernetes in their lives, or never used Cloud Native technology in their lives. It's folks who are coming from the, you know, the, the corporate IT kind of classic uh, background, and, and just trying to understand how to be effective in this, in this new world for them. Um so it's like, it takes all kinds and we, we don't get it done without your feedback. So please, um, as you're coming to the conference, whether it's in-person or virtually, like, bring yourselves, be curious, ask questions, um, provide that feedback. And then um, and I think, you know, from the, you know, th-the kind of from the uh, the, yes, we need to be human, but we also need to um recognize some of the, the requirements, uh, that, that are, that we have going into this conference. So reminder that, you know, all of, all of the events are under, you know, under a code of conduct, please make sure to familiarize yourself with uh, code of conduct. I think that um, you know, I-I think that coming back into a physical space for a lot of people, the um, the, some of the social skills can, can erode over time. So please not just bring yourself, bring your best self. And, you know, be sure to review all of the policies around health and, and safety as we go into this. >> Constance, Stephen, that's great stuff. Love talking with you guys. Constance, you want to add something? Go ahead. >> I want to add one thing, also be gentle with yourself and like, be really kind to yourself and others, because this is going to be really overwhelming. I haven't been around more than 10 people at once in almost two years. And so, just remember to be kind as well, always be curious and question everything. >> Yeah. That's great stuff. Great reminder. This is what it's all about, face-to-face. Face-to-face, presence, being together, but also having the openness and the community around you. A lot of mentoring, you guys have a great community for people coming in that are new and there's great mentors, people are open and cool, great community. Thanks for coming on for this special preview for KubeCon CloudNativeCon, thank you so much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of Kubecon CloudNative, and we've been every year of KubeCon. It's been in fantastic growth. Going the next level again in person, a lot of security, real time adoption should be uh, should be great, virtual and in-person. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (cheery synth music)

>> From the palace of fine arts in San Francisco it's the Cube. Covering AT&T Spark, now here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco at the AT&T Spark event and it's all about 5G. 5G is this huge revolution and I haven't got a definitive number but it's something on the order of hundred X, improvement of speed and data throughput. There's a lot of excitement but one of the things that is less talked about here but it was actually up on the keynote was really the roll of opensource and AT&T talked a lot about opensource and how important it is and really redefining the company around the speed of software development versus the speed of hardware development and that's a big piece of it. We're excited to have somebody who knows all about opensource our next guest he's Jeff McCaffer. He's the Director of Opensource Progress Officer at Microsoft, did I get that right Jeff? >> No, well it said Opensource Programs Officer. >> Programs Officer. >> Yep. >> So you do all about opensource. >> Yeah. >> Well first off, welcome. >> Thank you very much Jeff, it's good to be here. >> So Microsoft, you know, no one would have ever thought, I mean, you know, I'm probably dating myself. 15 years ago with that Microsoft would be a big component of opensource but in fact they're a huge proponent of opensource. >> Absolutely, even just not so long ago you know, it was not the foremost in everybody's mind that Microsoft would be doing opensource. But now it's a core part of our company. It's a core part of how we work and our engagement with the rest of the industries. So it's really growing and it's continuing to grow. >> So how did it kind of get there and what are some of the real key components that you have to worry about in your role to managing, you know, participating in all these various communities all over the place. >> Yeah, well I mean it's been a long road but it's really the way software's happening today, you mention in the intro about the dispute of software versus hardware and software's just going so fast and you know, you can aspire to be world class but when everybody else starts there with opensource, you know it's really hard to start from zero get to there. So we're really happy to be you know, using opensource and contributing. One of the real challenges we've had going forward is the scale like simply we've got literally millions of uses of opensource across all of our products and services. And managing that, keeping track of it, engaging with those, all those communities and everything is a real big challenge. So we've been building paulo season tools and changing the culture to understand that you know, you need to engage, push fixes back, all those sorts of things. And then when we look at our releasing our software, we have thousands of opensource repositories on GitHub, thousands of developers at Microsoft working on GitHub repositories, our own and others in the community. So it's just managing all of that as being a really big challenge. >> Right and it's interesting cause the opensource projects themselves, we've seen at time and time again. You know, they fork and they go a lot of different directions. There's sometimes disagreement about direction. >> Sure. >> And prioritization, so you've got a kind of manage that within the opensource thread but as well as within, you know, where those products play a role in your products. >> Right, right and we've taken a sort of federated model in the company, we're very diverse as you know right and so my team sort of helps put guidelines in place for for project teams to run and then those project teams run their own program. How they engage with opensource, however they want to and sort of at the level they want to that matches their business requirements. So it ranges everywhere from people who are fully opensource to folks who are just you know, using a little bit of stuff here and there within their products. >> Right, what if you could speak a little to opensource and the role that it plays in employee happiness, employee retention cause you know, there's so much goodness and you see it at these shows. >> Absolutely. >> Where there's particular contributors that you know, they're rock stars in their community. They've made super important contributions. >> Yeah. >> They've managed the community and I always think back, if you're the person managing that person back at the office you know, how much time do they put into their opensource effort? >> Sure. >> How much time do they put in their company efforts? How much of their time is really the company software that's built on top of that opensource. >> Yeah. >> And how do you manage that because it is a really important piece for a lot of people's personas. >> Absolutely. >> And their self values. >> Yeah, well and there's been a lot of research that says also that high performing teams, one of the traits of high performing teams is engaging in opensource. And at the personal level like individuals, there's kind of a different set of possibilities there, you know, either you're engaging in opensource for part of your product work, right, so that's sponsored by the company. Or you might be doing some things on the side or some tangential range in between there, right? >> Right. >> And sort of all of those you need to drive to the appropriate level, the folks who are working on it day to day for their, for the company. There's some really interesting dynamics that can get setup. Super exciting for the team, sometimes it can get a little waylaid maybe but you know, you want to keep them, keep them on task. But then also the, the folks who are doing it of their own volition, like on their own time and that sort of thing. That also brings back a bunch of energy and everything into the workplace. New technologies that they'll discover in their area and they'll bring back the energy and the excitement about engaging back to the regular team. >> Right. >> So there's lots of possibilities there. >> So what brings you here, what brings you to AT&T Spark today? >> Well they invited me to speak on a panel earlier today about opensource and the future of opensource and so I had a, there were a couple of other people from Linux Foundation and from AT&T. So we had a good conversation on stage. >> Yeah it's pretty interesting how, pretty much all these projects you know, eventually get put in to the Linux Foundation. That they, you know, they've just kind of become this defacto steward for a wide variety of opensource projects. >> Yeah, well there's a number of different foundations, Linux Foundation's certainly one of the better known ones, the Eclipse Foundation, Apache. >> Right, Apache yeah, right. >> Been around lots of times doing lots of good things. So there's a ton of amazing projects out there in all of these foundations. And it's just super exciting to see them all be engaging like in this sort of cohesive right, and with a good governance model. >> Right. >> Yep. >> So I'll give you the last word, one of my favorite lines always that's opensource is opensource is free like a puppy. >> Yes, it's totally free like a puppy. >> So, you know, you're living in that world, what is one of the things about opensource that most people miss, one of the really positive attributes that most people just don't see. And then what's one of the big, you know kind of biggest, kind of ongoing challenges, that's just part of operating in this opensource world? >> Well I mean, I phrase it in challenges and opportunities, right, there are obviously lots of challenges, like I was saying with scale and managing security. And the culture change that goes around collaboration and that sort of thing. The opportunities, I think are boundless really, I mean there's, one of the most gratifying things that you can see as an opensource project, is people take your technology and use it in ways you never imagined. Right, so there's, we can think of that as our products too and we take our products and they've got opensource APIs. They've got opensource frameworks and such. And people take them and do amazing things with them that we never imagined possible. And that just, that part is really exciting and invigorating. >> Yeah, alright Jeff well thanks for taking a few minutes. >> Sure. >> Congrats on all your work and I guess we'll see you in Orlando in a month or so. >> Okay, possibly. >> Alright, he's Jeff, I'm Jeff, we're all Jeffs here and we're at the Palace of Fine Arts at AT&T Spark, thanks for watching, see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2018 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to see CUBE's exclusive coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018 live in San Francisco, California at Moscone West. I'm John Furrier, your cohost of theCUBE with John Troyer co-founder of Tech Reckoning advisory and community development firm. Our next two guests Mike Piech Vice President and General Manager of middleware at Red Hat and Mark Little, Vice President of Software Engineering for middleware at Red Hat. This is the stack wars right here. Guys thanks for coming back, good to see you guys again. >> Great to see you too. >> So we love Middleware because Dave Vellante and I and Stu always talk about like the real value is going to be created in abstraction layers. You're seeing examples of that all over the place but Kubernetes containers, multi-cloud conversations. Workload management and all these things are happening at these really cool abstraction layers. That's obviously you say global I say middleware but you know it's where the action is. So I got to ask you, super cool that you guys have been leading in there but the new stuff's happening. So let's just go review last year or was it this year? What's different this year, new things happening within the company? We see core OS' in there, you guys got OpenShift is humming along beautifully. What's new in the middleware group? >> There's a few things. I'll take one and then maybe Mike can think of another while I'm speaking but when we were here this time last year we were talking about functions as a service or server-less and we had a project of our own called Funktion with a K, between then and now the developer affinity around functions as a service has just grown. Lots of people are now using it and starting to use it in production. We did a review of what we were doing back then and looked around at other efforts that were in the market space and we decided actually we wanted to get involved with a large community of developers and try and move that in a direction that was pretty beneficial for everybody but clearly for ourselves. And we've decided, and we announced this publicly last year but we're now involved with a project called Apache OpenWhisk instead of Funktion. And OpenWhisk is a project that IBM originally kicked off. We got involved, it was tied very closely to cloud foundering so one of the first things that we've been doing is making it more Kubernetes native and allowing it to run on OpenShift. In fact we're making some announcements this week around our functions are service based on Apache OpenWhisk. But that's probably one of the bigger things that's changed in the last 12 months. >> I would just add to that that across the rest of the middleware portfolio which is as you know, a wide range of different technologies, different products, in our integration area we continue to push ahead with containerizing, putting the integration technologies in the containers, making it easier to basically connect the different components of applications and different applications to each other together through different integration paradigms whether it's messaging or more of a bus style. So with our Jboss Fuse and our AMQ we've made great progress in continuing to refine how those are invoked and consumed in the Openshift environment. Forthcoming very shortly, literally in the next week or two is our integration platform as a service based on the Fuse and AMQ technologies. In addition we've continued to charge ahead with our API management solution based on the technology we acquired from Threescale a couple of years ago. So that is coming along nicely, being very well adopted by our customers. Then further up the stack on the process automation front, so some of the business process management types of technologies we've continued to push ahead with containerizing and that was being higher up the stack and a little bit bigger a scale of technology was a little bit more complex in really setting it up for the containerized world but we've got our Process Automation 7.0 release coming out in the next few weeks. That includes some exciting new technology around case management, so really bringing all of those traditional middleware capabilities forward into the Cloud Native, containerized environment has been I would say the most significant focus of our efforts over the last year. >> Go ahead. >> Can you contextualize some of that a little bit for us? The OpenShift obviously a big topic of conversation here. You know the new thing that everyone's looking at and Kubernetes, but these service layers, these layers it takes to build an app still necessary, Jboss a piece of this stack is 17, 18 years old, right? So can you contextualize it a little bit for people thinking about okay we've got OpenStack on the bottom, we've got OpenShift, where does the middleware and the business process, how has that had to be modernized? And how are people, the Java developers, still fitting into the equation? >> Mark: So a lot of that contextualization can actually, if we go back about four or five years, we announced an initiative called Xpass which was to essentially take the rich middleware suite of products and capabilities we had, and decompose them into independently consumable services kind of like what you see when you look at AWS. They've got the simple queuing service, simple messaging service. We have those capabilities but in the past they were bundled together in an app server, so we worked to pull them apart and allow people to use them independently so if you wanted transactions, or you wanted security, you didn't have to consume the whole app server you actually had these as independent services, so that was Xpass. We've continued on that road for the past few years and a lot of those services are now available as part and parcel of OpenShift. To get to the developer side of things, then we put language veneers on top of those because we're a Java company, well at least middleware is, but there's a lot more than Java out there. There's a lot of people who like to use Pearl or PHP or JavaScript or Go, so we can provide language specific clients for them to interact. At the end of the day, your JavaScript developer who's using bulletproof, high performing messaging doesn't need to know that most of it is implemented in Java. It's just a complete opaque box to them in a way. >> John F: So this is a trend of microservices, this granularity concept of this decomposition, things that you guys are doing is to line up with what people want, work with services directly. >> Absolutely right, to give developers the entire spectrum of granularity. So they can basically architect at a granularity that's appropriate for the given part of their job they're working on it's not a one size fits all proposition. It's not like throw all the monoliths out and decompose every last workload into it's finest grain possible pieces. There's a time and a place for ultra-fine granularity and there's also a time and a place to group things together and with the way that we're providing our runtimes and the reference architectures and the general design paradigm that we're sort of curating and recommending for our customers, it really is all about, not just the right tool for the job but the right granularity for the job. >> It's really choice too, I mean people can choose and then based on their architecture they can manage it the way they want from a design standpoint. Alright I got to get your guys' opinion on something. Certainly we had a great week in Copenhagen last week, in Denmark, around CUBECon, Kubernetes conference, Cloud NativeCon, whatever it's called, they're called two things. There was a rallying cry around Kubernetes and really the community felt like that Linix moment or that TCPIP moment where people talk about standards but like when will we just do something? We got to get behind it and then differentiate and provide all kinds of coolness around it. Core defacto stand with Kubernetes is opening up all kinds of new creative license for developers, it's also bringing up an accelerated growth. Istio's right around the corner, Cubeflow have the cool stuff on how software's being built. >> Right. >> So very cool rallying cry. What is the rallying cry in middleware, in your world? Is there a similar impact going on and what is that? >> Yeah >> Because you guys are certainly affected by this, this is how software will be built. It's going to be orchestrated, composed, granularity options, all kinds of microservices, what's the rallying cry in the middleware? >> So I think the rallying cry, two years ago, at Summit we announced something called MicroProfile with IBM, with Tomitribe, another apps vendor, Piara and a few quite large Java user groups to try and do something innovative and microservices specific with Enterprise Java. It was incredibly successful but the big elephant in the room who wasn't involved in that was Oracle, who at the time was still controlling Java E and a lot of what we do is dependent on Java E, a lot of what other vendors who don't necessarily talk about it do is also dependent on Java E to one degree or another. Even Pivotal with Springboot requires a lot of core services like messaging and transactions that are defined in Java E. So two years further forward where we are today, we've been working with IBM and Oracle and others and we've actually moved, or in process of moving all of Java E away from the old process, away from a single vendor's control into the Eclipse Foundation and although that's going to take us a little while longer to do we've been on that path for about four or five months. The amount of buzz and interest in the community and from companies big and small who would never have got involved in Java E in the past is immense. We're seeing new people get involved with Eclipse Foundation, and new companies get involved with Eclipse Foundation on a daily basis so that they can get in there and start to innovate in Enterprise Java in a much more agile and interesting way than they could have done in the past. I think that's kind of our rallying call because like I said we're getting lots of vendors, Pivotal's involved, Fujitsu. >> John F: And the impact of this is going to be what? >> A lot more innovation, a lot quicker innovation and it's not going to be at the slow speed of standards it's going to be at the fast, upstream, open source innovative speed that we see in likes of Kubernetes. >> And Eclipse has got a good reputation as well. >> Yeah, the other significant thing here, in addition to the faster innovation is it's a way forward for all of that existing Java expertise, it's a way for some of the patterns and some of the knowledge that they have already to be applied in this new world of Cloud Native. So you're not throwing out all that and having to essentially retrain double digit millions of developers around the world. >> John F: It's instant developer actually and plus Java's a great language, it's the bulldozer of languages, it can move a lot, it does a lot of heavy lifting >> Yep. >> And there's a lot of developers out there. Okay, final question I know you guys got to go, thanks for spending the time on theCUBE, really appreciate certainly very relevant, middleware is key to the all the action. Lot of glue going on in that layers. What's going on at the show here for you guys? What's hot, what should people pay attention to? What should they look for? >> Mark: I'll give my take, what's hot is any talk to do with middleware >> (laughs) Biased. >> But kind of seriously we do have a lot of good stuff going on with messaging and Kafka. Kafka's really hot at the moment. We've just released our own project which is eventually going to become a product called Strimsy, integrated with OpenShift so it's coognative from the get-go, it's available now. We're integrating that with OpenWhisk, which we talked about earlier, and also with our own reactive async platform called Vertex, so there's a number of sessions on that and if I get a chance I'm hoping to say into one >> John F: So real quick though I mean streaming is important because you talk about granularity, people are going to start streaming services with service measures right around the corner, the notion of streaming asynchronously is going to be a huge deal >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Mark: And tapping into that stream at any point in time and then pulling the plug and then doing the work based on that. >> Also real quick, Kubernetes, obviously the momentum is phenomenal in Cloud Native but becoming a first class citizen in the enterprise, still some work to do. Thoughts on that real quick? Would you say Kubernetes's Native, is it coming faster? Will it ever be, certainly I think it will be but. >> I think this is the year of Kubernetes and of enterprise Kubernetes. >> Mike: I mean you just look at the phenomenal growth of OpenShift and that in a way speaks directly to this point >> Mike, what's hot, what's hot? What are you doing at the show, what should we look at? I'd add to, I certainly would echo the points Mark made and in addition to that I would take a look at any session here on API management. Again within middleware the three-scale technology we acquired is still going gangbusters, the customers are loving that, finding it extremely helpful as they start to navigate the complexity of doing essentially distributive computing using containers and microservices, getting more disciplined about API management is of huge relevance in that world, so that would be the next thing I'd add. >> Congratulations guys, finally the operating system called the Cloud is taking over the world. It's basically distributed computer all connected together, it sounds like >> All that stuff we learned in the eighties right (laughs) >> It's a systems world, the middleware is changing the game, modern software construction of Apple cases all being done in a new way, looking at orchestration, server lists, service meshes all happening in real time, guys congratulations on the all the work and Red Hats. Be keeping it in the open, Java E coming around the corner as well, it's theCUBE bringing it out in the open here in San Francisco, I'm John Furrier with John Troyer we'll be back with more live coverage after this short break