(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019. And a special segment, we're actually going to doing our 2020 predictions. I am Stu Miniman, joining me, my two co-hosts of the week. To my left is Justin Warren, who I believe's been to, you went to the first one? >> I've been to all four, yeah. >> All four of the North America shows. >> Yep. >> I personally have been now to three of the North American, as well as one in the Barcelona. And we have a first time KubeConner, but long time host of theCUBE and things, John Troyer to my right. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. So first thing, the rapid fire. 12,000 in attendance. Last year 8,000, the year before 4,000. So, my math says that it will be 16,000 when we come next year to beautiful November in Boston, Massachusetts, which I can drive to. We've had snow in Austin, rain in San Diego. So, I'm predicting 60 to 70 degree weather in Boston, 'cause that never happens in Boston. Number of attendees next year, Justin? >> Well, it was doubling and now they have dropped it to 50%, so I reckon another 50%, I'll reckon 18 to 20,000. >> Stu: Oh, John? >> Yeah, I'll go higher. That many plus one. >> Okay, I feel like we'll do, I bet $1, $1. But, okay-- >> We have not hit peak Kubernetes yet. >> No. >> We definitely have not hit peak Kubernetes. One of the things, I keep looking for the theme of the show, and one of the things, we've been talking in some of the segments, is there needs to be simplification. When we talk about where we're at with cloud adoption, when we talk about some of these environments, there is a broad ecosystem. So, there needs to be some winnowing down of the technologies. We've seen some areas where things like MicroK8s and K3s to be able to be able to put Kubernetes at the edge. It's not that, that will replace Kubernetes, but things need to get simpler in some environments. Justin, I'll throw it to you first. Is simplification the theme of the show, is there something else that's grabbing you? >> The theme for me is that the money has arrived. We saw a little bit of that last year but this year it is definitely just the number of sponsors that we have here, the number of startups that we have here, the ecosystem, the number of parties, the VCs are here. This feels like a lot of other technology shows that we've been to before in their hay day. We are right here in the hay day of Kubernetes. So, I can see it getting bigger. Will there be consolidation? Yes, I think there will. But I think that this is going to broaden out further first. I don't think that we're quite at the point where things need to start collapsing in. I think we're still going to be exploring all the different options that we have. I think the theme is simplification, yes, I agree. But it's now going to be people trying to solve that problem by creating these higher-level services, managed-Kubernetes offerings. A lot of the different component projects that are there, we're going to see a lot of options where they try to manage that for you and make it easier to consume. But there will be several different attempts at that and not all of them are going to survive. >> Yeah, I'll go with you. Simplification's going to be an issue. Has to happen, we saw a lot of different stacks here at the show, if you go out on the show floor. A lot of people are trying to give you a generic platform. A general-purpose platform, maybe it has its own opinionated view of networking, or storage, or management, or security. But at the end of the day we need things on top of the platform. So, I'm hoping next year we see more things on top of the platform, more applications. We saw some big data applications this year. But people are still building engines and I want them to build cars, because not everybody can build the engine. >> Justin: Yes! >> Well, and actually, Justin, a question for you is when we talk about Kubernetes, there's so many people I interview here and they're like, "Well, no, "we know how to build it better than others "and when you want to go across all environments "we should do it." Is that, are we still going to see that for awhile? Or, can we all hold hands, and talk about open source and be able to just manage across all of these environments? >> Well, one of the key founding principles of Kubernetes is that you can operate it the same everywhere. If it's certified Kubernetes, it should function the same, no matter who's build of it it is. So, that just provides us a common platform that we then build on top of. So, I think the main differentiation's going to be on things like the tooling and the services that allow you to operate that base layer of Kubernetes. But that base layer of Kubernetes is about interesting as Ethernet. It's extremely pluggable and it's just ubiquitous, but no one really cares which brand of Ethernet you happen to be giving me. I care about all the stuff that I run on it. And that's what I think that we're going to see a lot more, I'm with you, John. We're going to see a lot more of those services. I'm seeing a bunch of startups at this show that are starting on that journey, they're providing a lot of things like database services, very highly-tuned monitoring and measurement telemetry systems. There's a big push to make sure that there is a certain amount of interoperability between these different services. Things like having open telemetry be the standard for sending telemetry information around. Because everyone knows that if we all build to Ethernet we're all going to have a much better time of it, than if we all start trying to come up with our own version of it and call it Banyan VINES, and FidoNet, and God knows what. >> Okay, I'm glad you brought up the example of Ethernet. First of all, I have no problem watching a 45-minute discussion of what 400 Gig's going to look like, and the challenge and the opportunities. And if you are talking Ethernet in someone's data center, for the most part they're going to run that on a single vendor because while there is interoperability, it's not until I go to the Internet, because layer two, I want to keep it single vendor, when I go layer three I want to do that. Is that, maybe it's not the best analogy but Kubernetes-- >> No, I think that's reasonable. And if you're trying to operate something across different environments then it's much easier if the two environments can talk to each other. Simple example that people tend to forget about is M&A. If one company goes and buys another one and I run Banyan VINES and you run, I don't know, FinLand or something, then we can't talk to each other, and integrating those two companies becomes impossible. But at least if we both have, you might have Juniper, I might have Cicso, those two network sets can still talk to each other. You might be running, I don't know ,Mesosphere, and someone else might be running Mirantis or Rantia, and that's their system for operating Kubernetes. Turns out, actually if you can operate it much the same, one of you can decide, you know what, we're going to operate everything with Rantia, 'cause we think that that's going to be the best thing for the holistic company. You may keep them separate. As long as you get the same outcome then it doesn't really matter. >> Yeah, that's why I think we aren't yet at peak Kubernetes. Those Kubernetes skills that are in high demand from a job market that people are being upskilled on, they're actually still going to be useful. Now, these stacks that these opinions that people are doing. I mean, they want us to talk about people over projects, right? That's a great philosophy, this is a very friendly community, it's very open source. But, cynically, I think, and sometimes people swap your company T-shirt for your project T-shirt that your company is the one that's behind. And that's kind of a, that's a little bit of a bait and switch. Yes, it's an open source stack. Yes, all the major vendors have open source, 100% open source stacks around Kubernetes. But they're all with different projects and they all pick their own projects. So, I think that is yet to be resolved. >> Well, it's interesting 'cause the thing that I heard is it used to be open source was something that people contribute to it. Now, the majority of people that contribute to open source do it as part of their job. So, there is some of that. Yes, I'm paid by company X, but my job is to participate in the community. There is a large company that got bought by $34 billion. They have a lot of contributors out there. Their job is open source, they are on those projects, they might switch from one project to another. We had Kelsey Hightower on today, he's like, "Hey, right, "but we need to think of people above project. "It's okay for them to move from one to the other "between projects or between companies." But, right, it is very much often companies that are behind the scenes and pushing people and dollars into these projects. One thing I like about the CNCF here is we do have, there's 129 end-user companies participating here, so we've reached a certain maturity level that they are driving it, not just companies driving it for the dollars. So, I guess the thing I want to ask though is, there's so many companies here, we started off the conversation this week, John, talking about Docker. And the cautionary tale of how many companies, when I asked, "What is your business model, what do you do?" Is, I created some cool new project. What does that mean? You look at the business model. You live right with Silicon Valley there. What are you seeing as you look forward? What do you expecting to see consistently? >> Oh sure, I mean, half the logos will be gone but they'll be swapped out for other logos, so that's all fine, right? If you have a point solution, as I was kind of pointing out, things are kind of stackifying. So, things need to consolidate from a buyer's perspective. A lot of the sessions here were about custom projects that people did, either in-house or for a customer. So, I think that's okay, that's the natural, it's the natural Cambrian explosion and then die off. >> Yep, creative destruction. (John laughing) That's the general point of how we do things. There's a lot of things that are basically a feature and you can't really build a company behind a feature. They're hoping that they will find some sort of pathway to money, we've seen some big acquisitions where they didn't really find a good route to money. That's fine, people will figure that out. And how you fund this development, Stu, I mean that's the perennial problem. At the moment it's possibly not the perfect solution but it's a pretty good one, in that we have developers are employed by a company that pays them to develop open source software. So, anyone can go and grab that software and then use it. So, we don't actually really depend on that company sticking around. >> And enterprise sales, it's still very expensive to have even a small booth here, and three or four people and nice T-shirts, and all of your swag, and you flew them here. And fly them all around the country to company after company, conference room after conference room. That is an expensive model to sell things. I mean, you need to have a fair amount of revenue. >> All right, so, Justin, a lot of progress, a lot of projects. >> Yeah. >> What's missing? Look out for 2020, is there an area or a space that needs to mature or needs work? What's your advice for this ecosystem? >> Well, for me it's all about the data. So, we've seen a lot of evolution in stateful sets and being able to manage state-based data within the Kubernetes ecosystem, a lot of progress on that, but there's still a long, long, long way to go. Also, just on the general operational tooling. So, the things that we are used to and have taken for granted in other traditional, like vSphere, or we've come from the VMware ecosystem. Simple things like higher availability. So, I need my data to always be available and I need to be able to have this managed. There's a lot of stuff in there but there's still a lot more stuff that needs to happen. Service mesh and that service discovery and making that easy enough for normal mortal humans to deal with, that still really isn't there. You kind of have to be a bit of a super genius to configure that and get it working and operating. So, there's still a lot of very hard work on these quite hard problems, to then make it look simple. >> Yeah, so, John, the one I want to throw to you is Dan Kohn came out on the keynote stage yesterday and he said, "Kubernetes has crossed the chasm, "yet most enterprises are still worried "about software failure." We know many people that are coming in new and shell-shocked when they come to look. What does the industry as a whole and this ecosystem, specifically, need to do to make sure that we don't come a year from now and say, "Wow, things slowed down "because we kind of couldn't get "the vast majority of people on board?" >> Well, I mean, we're going back to, I guess then the same thing, things have to be simpler. In times of uncertainty people either stop or they go to a trusted provider. There is, probably, although there's a high value on Kubernetes skills right now, that also means there's not enough folks. So, if you can't get the engineers. That was a problem in previous generations of some of these stacks, in that if you couldn't get enough engineers, or if the stack, if everybody had their own snowflake version of it and the skills were not transferable you could not move forward. So, I'm hoping we'll see more managed service providers. I'm hoping that we'll see more startups and services built on top of these existing infrastructures, I think we're seeing more of those. I see a lot of stuff in the operations space and kind of the SRE space, the incident management space. Kind of all the tooling you'll need to actually run these things in day two and beyond. And then, hopefully, the industry keeps pounding on digital transformation and process transformation. One project at a time, you start with one, you start small, you start tooling, you start tooling up, you get some small things under your belt and start to learn. But that's enterprise timeline. So, at a certain speed. >> All right, last thing, any aha moments, surprises, cool things as you've been going around the show? Justin? >> Oh, just walking into the show surprised me. Just how big it has gotten and how much energy there is here. It's amazing to me and I can just only see it getting bigger and, I hope, better. I am surprised by the reaction from people who haven't come into the Kubernetes ecosystem, I think. There's still a lot of people out there for whom this is a big surprise. That it's as big a show as this is, there are lots and lots of people out there who can't actually spell Kubernetes. So, there's a lot of work for us to go and do to figure out how we get those people to come into this ecosystem in a way that doesn't shock them and scare them away. >> Yeah, absolutely. Welcome to the party, those of you that had been joined. John? >> Hey, the thing that surprised me was this is both a multicloud show and a non-cloud show. This is the only show where people working in multiple public clouds can come together. So, that's one of the systemic forces causing it to grow. On the other hand, this is not a public cloud-only show. Over and over again, we talk to people here on theCUBE, I talk to people on the show floor, and most of their workloads, or many of their workloads, are on-premises, right? Kubernetes is fully functional and fully up to speed in private cloud, in people's data centers because it is useful. And they're starting to do that process tooling and process re-engineering, even on-site. And then they may be using a portfolio of different clouds. So, I think that was one of the surprising things to me is this was not 100% public cloud show. >> Yeah, and a little bit of caution I'll give there is we want to make sure we don't become complacent and say, oh, well, we could just kind of slide in what we were doing before and not make some change because the driver here, we've been talking about for decades now, was really kind of that application modernization. And Kubernetes and this whole, it is about cloud-native. It's not the Kubernetes, it's the cloud-native piece. >> You know what I didn't hear? I did not hear putting legacy apps on Kubernetes as much this year. Much quieter this year. >> So, and I'll just say, I'll highlight, we did an interview yesterday with the American Red Cross. Tech For Good, it's something that we've been highlighting, John, for especially helping lead the charge and make sure we highlight that. The Microsoft show, they very much talked about that this year. American Red Cross is saying, hey, we always want your dollars but we'd also love your skillset. So, if this community, and specifically Kubernetes, cloud-native ecosystem makes it easier. There's common tooling, something that I've been hearing a lot this year is when I go through that modernization I can hire the next-generation workforce. There's too many of those, oh, I'm doing it the old way. If I don't have somebody with 30 or 40 years experience in the industry, you won't understand our systems and we need that next generation of workforce to be able to get involved. So, love future jobs, Tech For Good, all good things. This community's always been strong on diversity and inclusion. And so, I guess final word I'll say, big shout-out to, of course, the CNCF, this event, they have a large menagerie that they need to take in here and manage, and they're doing a good job. There's always things to work on. They are listening and open. We have really appreciated the partnership. A huge shout-out, of course, to our sponsors that make it possible for us to do this. So, for Justin Warren, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much. We definitely are excited for one more day. Tomorrow, as well as next year in 2020, Amsterdam and Boston. Please reach out always if you have any questions. And thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)