(upbeat synth intro music) >> Hey everyone and welcome to Detroit, Michigan. theCUBE is live at KubeCon CloudNativeCon, North America 2022. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, this event, the keynote that we got out of a little while ago was, standing room only. The Solutions hall is packed. There's so much buzz. The community is continuing to mature. They're continuing to contribute. One of the big topics is Cloud Native at Scale. >> Yeah, I mean, this is a revolution happening. The developers are coming on board. They will be running companies. Developers, structurally, will be transforming companies with just, they got to get powered somewhere. And, I think, the Cloud Native at Scale speaks to getting everything under the covers, scaling up to support developers. In this next segment, we have two Kube alumnis. We're going to talk about Cloud Native at Scale. Some of the things that need to be there in a unified architecture, should be great. >> All right, it's going to be fantastic. Let's go under the covers here, as John mentioned, two alumni with us, Madhura Maskasky joins us, co-founder of Platform9. Sirish Raghuram, also co-founder of Platform9 joins us. Welcome back to theCUBE. Great to have you guys here at KubeCon on the floor in Detroit. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Excited to be here >> So, talk to us. You guys have some news, Madhura, give us the sneak peak. What's going on? >> Definitely, we are very excited. So, we have John, not too long ago we spoke about our very new open source project called Arlon. And, we were talking about the launch of Arlon in terms of its first release and etcetera. And, just fresh hot of the press, we, Platform9 had its 5.6 release which is its most recent release of our product. And there's a number of key interesting announcements that we'd like to share as part of that. I think, the prominent one is, Platform9 added support for EKS Kubernetes cluster management. And, so, this is part of our vision of being able to add value, no matter where you run your Kubernetes clusters, because, Kubernetes or cluster management, is increasingly becoming commodity. And, so, I think the companies that succeed are going to add value on top, and are going to add value in a way that helps end users, developers, DevOps solve problems that they encounter as they start running these environments, with a lot of scale and a lot of diversity. So, towards that, key features in the 5.6 six release. First, is the very first package release of the product online, which is the open source project that we've kicked off to do cluster and application, entire cluster management at scale. And, then there's few other very interesting capabilities coming out of that. >> I want to just highlight something and then get your thoughts on this next, this release 5.6. First of all, 5.6, it's been around for a while, five reps, but, now, more than ever, you mentioned the application in Ops. You're seeing WebAssembly trends, you're seeing developers getting more and more advanced capability. It's going to accelerate their ability to write code and compose applications. So, you're seeing a application tsunami coming. So, the pressure is okay, they're going to need infrastructure to run all that stuff. And, so, you're seeing more clusters being spun up, more intelligence trying to automate. So you got the automation, so you got the dynamic, the power dynamic of developers and then under the covers. What does 5.6 do to push the mission forward for developers? How would you guys summarize that for people watching? what's in it for them right now? >> So it's, I think going back to what you just said, right, the breadth of applications that people are developing on top of something like Kubernetes and Cloud Native, is always growing. So, it's not just a number of clusters, but also the fact that different applications and different development groups need these clusters to be composed differently. So, a certain version of the application may require some set of build components, add-ons, and operators, and extensions. Whereas, a different application may require something entirely different. And, now, you take this in an enterprise context, right. Like, we had a major media company that worked with us. They have more than 10,000 pods being used by thousands of developers. And, you now think about the breadth of applications, the hundreds of different applications being built. how do you consistently build, and compose, and manage, a large number of communities clusters with a a large variety of extensions that these companies are trying to manage? That's really what I think 5.6 is bringing to the table. >> Scott Johnston just was on here early as the CEO of Docker. He said there's more applications being pushed now than in the history of application development combined. There's more and more apps coming, more and more pressure on the system. >> And, that's where, if you go, there's this famous landscape chart of the CNCF ecosystem technologies. And, the problem that people here have is, how do they put it all together? How do they make sense of it? And, what 5.6 and Arlon and what Platform9 is doing is, it's helping you declaratively capture blueprints of these clusters, using templates, and be able to manage a small number of blueprints that helps you make order out of the chaos of these hundreds of different projects, that are all very interesting and powerful. >> So Project Arlon really helping developers produce the configuration and the deployment complexities of Kubernetes at scale. >> That's exactly right. >> Talk about the, the impact on the business side. Ease of use, what's the benefits for 5.6? What's does it turn into for a benefit standpoint? >> Yeah, I think the biggest benefit, right, is being able to do Cloud Native at Scale faster, and while still keeping a very lean Ops team that is able to spend, let's say 70 plus percent of their time, caring for your actual business bread and butter applications, and not for the infrastructure that serves it, right. If you take the analogy of a restaurant, you don't want to spend 70% of your time in building the appliances or setting up your stoves etcetera. You want to spend 90 plus percent of your time cooking your own meal, because, that is your core key ingredient. But, what happens today in most enterprises is, because, of the level of automation, the level of hands-on available tooling, being there or not being there, majority of the ops time, I would say 50, 70% plus, gets spent in making that kitchen set up and ready, right. And, that is exactly what we are looking to solve, online. >> What would a customer look like, or prospect environment look like that would be really ready for platform9? What, is it more apps being pushed, big push on application development, or is it the toil of like really inefficient infrastructure, or gaps in skills of people? What does an environment look like? So, someone needs to look at their environment and say, okay, maybe I should call platform9. What's it look like? >> So, we generally see customers fall into two ends of the barbell, I would say. One, is the advanced communities users that are running, I would say, typically, 30 or more clusters already. These are the people that already know containers. They know, they've container wise... >> Savvy teams. >> They're savvy teams, a lot of them are out here. And for them, the problem is, how do I manage the complexity at scale? Because, now, the problem is how do I scale us? So, that's one end of the barbell. The other end of the barbell, is, how do we help make Kubernetes accessible to companies that, as what I would call the mainstream enterprise. We're in Detroit in Motown, right, And, we're outside of the echo chamber of the Silicon Valley. Here's the biggest truth, right. For all the progress that we made as a community, less than 20% of applications in the enterprise today are running on Kubernetes. So, what does it take? I would say it's probably less than 10%, okay. And, what does it take, to grow that in order of magnitude? That's the other kind of customer that we really serve, is, because, we have technologies like Kube Word, which helps them take their existing applications and start adopting Kubernetes as a directional roadmap, but, while using the existing applications that they have, without refactoring it. So, I would say those are the two ends of the barbell. The early adopters that are looking for an easier way to adopt Kubernetes as an architectural pattern. And, the advanced savvy users, for whom the problem is, how do they operationally solve the complexity of managing at scale. >> And, what is your differentiation message to both of those different user groups, as you talked about in terms of the number of users of Kubernetes so far? The community groundswell is tremendous, but, there's a lot of opportunity there. You talked about some of the barriers. What's your differentiation? What do you come in saying, this is why Platform9 is the right one for you, in the both of these groups. >> And it's actually a very simple message. We are the simplest and easiest way for a new user that is adopting Kubernetes as an architectural pattern, to get started with existing applications that they have, on the infrastructure that they have. Number one. And, for the savvy teams, our technology helps you operate with greater scale, with constrained operations teams. Especially, with the economy being the way it is, people are not going to get a lot more budget to go hire a lot more people, right. So, that all of them are being asked to do more with less. And, our team, our technology, and our teams, help you do more with less. >> I was talking with Phil Estes last night from AWS. He's here, he is one of their engineer open source advocates. He's always on the ground pumping up AWS. They've had great success, Amazon Web Services, with their EKS. A lot of people adopting clusters on the cloud and on-premises. But Amazon's doing well. You guys have, I think, a relationship with AWS. What's that, If I'm an Amazon customer, how do I get involved with Platform9? What's the hook? Where's the value? What's the product look like? >> Yeah, so, and it kind of goes back towards the point we spoke about, which is, Kubernetes is going to increasingly get commoditized. So, customers are going to find the right home whether it's hyperscalers, EKS, AKS, GKE, or their own infrastructure, to run Kubernetes. And, so, where we want to be at, is, with a project like Arlon, Sirish spoke about the barbell strategy, on one end there is these advanced Kubernetes users, majority of them are running Kubernetes on AKS, right? Because, that was the easiest platform that they found to get started with. So, now, they have a challenge of running these 50 to 100 clusters across various regions of Amazon, across their DevTest, their staging, their production. And, that results in a level of chaos that these DevOps or platform... >> So you come in and solve that. >> That is where we come in and we solve that. And it, you know, Amazon or EKS, doesn't give you tooling to solve that, right. It makes it very easy for you to create those number of clusters. >> Well, even in one hyperscale, let's say AWS, you got regions and locations... >> Exactly >> ...that's kind of a super cloud problem, we're seeing, opportunity problem, and opportunity is that, on Amazon, availability zones is one thing, but, now, also, you got regions. >> That is absolutely right. You're on point John. And the way we solve it, is by using infrastructure as a code, by using GitOps principles, right? Where you define it once, you define it in a yaml file, you define exactly how for your DevTest environment you want your entire infrastructure to look like, including EKS. And then you stamp it out. >> So let me, here's an analogy, I'll throw out this. You guys are like, someone learns how to drive a car, Kubernetes clusters, that's got a couple clusters. Then once they know how to drive a car, you give 'em the sports car. You allow them to stay on Amazon and all of a sudden go completely distributed, Edge, Global. >> I would say that a lot of people that we meet, we feel like they're figuring out how to build a car with the kit tools that they have. And we give them a car that's ready to go and doesn't require them to be trying to... ... they can focus on driving the car, rather than trying to build the car. >> You don't want people to stop, once they get the progressions, they hit that level up on Kubernetes, you guys give them the ability to go much bigger and stronger. >> That's right. >> To accelerate that applications. >> Building a car gets old for people at a certain point in time, and they really want to focus on is driving it and enjoying it. >> And we got four right behind us, so, we'll get them involved. So that's... >> But, you're not reinventing the wheel. >> We're not at all, because, what we are building is two very, very differentiated solutions, right. One, is, we're the simplest and easiest way to build and run Cloud Native private clouds. And, this is where the operational complexity of trying to do it yourself. You really have to be a car builder, to be able to do this with our Platform9. This is what we do uniquely that nobody else does well. And, the other end is, we help you operate at scale, in the hyperscalers, right. Those are the two problems that I feel, whether you're on-prem, or in the cloud, these are the two problems people face. How do you run a private cloud more easily, more efficiently? And, how do you govern at scale, especially in the public clouds? >> I want to get to two more points before we run out of time. Arlon and Argo CD as a service. We previously mentioned up coming into KubeCon, but, here, you guys couldn't be more relevant, 'cause Intuit was on stage on the keynote, getting an award for their work. You know, Argo, it comes from Intuit. That ArgoCon was in Mountain View. You guys were involved in that. You guys were at the center of all this super cloud action, if you will, or open source. How does Arlon fit into the Argo extension? What is Argo CD as a service? Who's going to take that one? I want to get that out there, because, Arlon has been talked about a lot. What's the update? >> I can talk about it. So, one of the things that Arlon uses behind the scenes, is it uses Argo CD, open source Argo CD as a service, as its key component to do the continuous deployment portion of its entire, the infrastructure management story, right. So, we have been very strongly partnering with Argo CD. We, really know and respect the Intuit team a lot. We, as part of this effort, in 5.6 release, we've also put out Argo CD as a service, in its GA version, right. Because, the power of running Arlon along with Argo CD as a service, in our mind, is enabling you to run on one end, your infrastructure as a scale, through GitOps, and infrastructure as a code practices. And on the other end, your entire application fleet, at scale, right. And, just marrying the two, really gives you the ability to perform that automation that we spoke about. >> But, and avoid the problem of sprawl when you have distributed teams, you have now things being bolted on, more apps coming out. So, this is really solves that problem, mainly. >> That is exactly right. And if you think of it, the way those problems are solved today, is, kind of in disconnected fashion, which is on one end you have your CI/CD tools, like Argo CD is an excellent one. There's some other choices, which are managed by a separate team to automate your application delivery. But, that team, is disconnected from the team that does the infrastructure management. And the infrastructure management is typically done through a bunch of Terraform scripts, or a bunch of ad hoc homegrown scripts, which are very difficult to manage. >> So, Arlon changes sure, as they change the complexity and also the sprawl. But, that's also how companies can die. They're growing fast, they're adding more capability. That's what trouble starts, right? >> I think in two ways, right. Like one is, as Madhura said, I think one of the common long-standing problems we've had, is, how do infrastructure and application teams communicate and work together, right. And, you've seen Argo's really get adopted by the application teams, but, it's now something that we are making accessible for the infrastructure teams to also bring the best practices of how application teams are managing applications. You can now use that to manage infrastructure, right. And, what that's going to do is, help you ultimately reduce waste, reduce inefficiency, and improve the developer experience. Because, that's what it's all about, ultimately. >> And, I know that you just released 5.6 today, congratulations on that. Any customer feedback yet? Any, any customers that you've been able to talk to, or have early access? >> Yeah, one of our large customers is a large SaaS retail company that is B2C SaaS. And, their feedback has been that this, basically, helps them bring exactly what I said in terms of bring some of the best practices that they wanted to adopt in the application space, down to the infrastructure management teams, right. And, we are also hearing a lot of customers, that I would say, large scale public cloud users, saying, they're really struggling with the complexity of how to tame the complexity of navigating that landscape and making it consumable for organizations that have thousands of developers or more. And that's been the feedback, is that this is the first open source standard mechanism that allows them to kind of reuse something, as opposed to everybody feels like they've had to build ad hoc solutions to solve this problem so far. >> Having a unified infrastructure is great. My final question, for me, before I end up, for Lisa to ask her last question is, if you had to explain Platform9, why you're relevant and cool today, what would you say? >> If I take that? I would say that the reason why Platform9, the reason why we exist, is, putting together a cloud, a hybrid cloud strategy for an enterprise today, historically, has required a lot of DIY, a lot of building your own car. Before you can drive a car, or you can enjoy the car, you really learn to build and operate the car. And that's great for maybe a 100 tech companies of the world, but, for the next 10,000 or 50,000 enterprises, they want to be able to consume a car. And that's why Platform9 exists, is, we are the only company that makes this delightfully simple and easy for companies that have a hybrid cloud strategy. >> Why you cool and relevant? How would you say it? >> Yeah, I think as Kubernetes becomes mainstream, as containers have become mainstream, I think automation at scale with ease, is going to be the key. And that's exactly what we help solve. Automation at scale and with ease. >> With ease and that differentiation. Guys, thank you so much for joining me. Last question, I guess, Madhura, for you, is, where can Devs go to learn more about 5.6 and get their hands on it? >> Absolutely. Go to platform9.com. There is info about 5.6 release, there's a press release, there's a link to it right on the website. And, if they want to learn about Arlon, it's an open source GitHub project. Go to GitHub and find out more about it. >> Excellent guys, thanks again for sharing what you're doing to really deliver Cloud Native at Scale in a differentiated way that adds ostensible value to your customers. John, and I, appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks so much >> Our pleasure. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Detroit, Michigan at KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2022. Stick around, John and I will be back with our next guest. Just a minute. (light synth outro music)

(gentle upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome back to KubeCon CloudNativeCon here in Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined with John Furrier. John, we are in the meat of the conference. >> It's really in crunch time, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage and this next guest is running the show at CNCF, the OG and been in the community doing a great job. I'm looking forward to this segment. >> Me too. I'm even wearing... You may notice, I am in my CNCF tee, and I actually brought my tee from last year for those of you. And the reason I brought it, actually, I want to use this to help introduce our next guest is the theme last year was resistance realized, and I think that KubeCon this year is an illustration of that resistance realized. Please welcome Priyanka Sharma to the show. Priyanka, thank you so much for being here with us. >> Thank you for having me. >> This is your show. How are you feeling right now? What does it feel like to be here? >> It's all of our show. I am just another participant, but I am so happy to be here. I think this is our third hybrid in person back event. And the whole ecosystem, we seem to have gotten into the groove now. You know, the first one we did, was in LA >> Savannah: Yes. >> Where you have that shirt from. Then we went to Valencia, and now here in Detroit I could sense the ease in the attendees. I can sense that it just feels great for everyone to be here. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And you guys, who were face to face in LA, but this is really kind of back face to face, somewhat normalized, right? >> Priyanka: Yeah. >> And so that's a lot of feedback there. What's your reaction? Because the community's changed so much in three years, >> Savannah: Yes. >> Even two years, even last year. Where do you see it now? Because there's so much more work to do, but it feels like it's just getting started, but also at the same time it feels like people are celebrating at the same time. >> Yeah. >> Kubernetes is mainstream, CloudNative at scale. >> Savannah: That feels like a celebration. >> People are talking about developer... more developers coming on board, more traction, more scale, more interoperability, just a lot of action. What's your thoughts? >> I think you're absolutely right that we are just getting started. I've been part of many open source movements and communities. This is... I think this is something special where we have our flagship project considered mainstream, but yet so much to be done right over there. I mean, you've seen announcements around more and more vendors coming to support the project in, you know, the boring but essential ways that happened I think this week, just today, I think. And so Kubernetes continues to garner support and energy, which is unique in the ecosystem, right? Because once something becomes mainstream, normally, it's like, "Okay, boring." (John laughs) But that's happening. And I think the reason for that is CloudNative. It's built upon Kubernetes and so much more than Kubernetes. >> We have 140 plus projects >> Absolutely. >> and folks have a choice to contribute to something totally cutting edge or something that's, you know, used by everyone. So, the diversity of options and room for innovation at the same time means this is just the beginning. >> And also projects are coming together too. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> You're starting to see formation, you're starting to see some defacto alignment. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> You're starting to see the- >> Priyanka: Clustering. >> Some visibility into how the big moves are being playing out, almost the harvesting of that hard work. >> Priyanka: Yes, I do think there is consolidation, but I would definitely say that there's consolidation and innovation. >> John: Yeah. >> And that is something... I genuinely have not seen this before. I think there are definitely areas we're all really focusing on. I talked a lot about security in my keynote because it continues to gain importance in CloudNative, whether that is through projects or through practices. The same, I did not mention this in my keynote, but around like, you know, continuous delivery generally the software delivery cycle, there's a lot coming together happening there. And, you know, >> John: Yeah. >> many other spaces. So, absolutely right. >> Let's dig in a little bit actually, because I'm curious. You get to see these 140 plus projects. >> Yes. >> What are some of the other trends that you're seeing, especially now, as we're feeling this momentum around Kubernetes? The excitement is back in the ecosystem. >> Yes. So, so much happening. But I would definitely say that like the underlying basis of all these projects, right? I brought that up in my keynote, is the maintainers. And I think the maintainer group, is the talent keeps thriving and growing, the load on them is very heavy though. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And I do think there's a lot more we all company, the companies around us need to do to support these people, because the innovation they're bringing is unprecedented. Besides Kubernetes, which has its own cool stuff all the time. I think I'm particularly excited about the Argo projects. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> So, they're the quadruplets as I like to call them. Right? Because there's four of them within the Argo banner. I had Yuan from Argo on my keynote actually. >> Savannah: Oh, nice. >> Alongside Hiba from Kubernetes. And we talked about their maintainer journey. And it's interesting. Totally different projects. Same asks, you know, which is more support and time from employers, more ways to build up contributors and ultimately they love the CNCF marketing supports. >> That Argo project's really in a great umbrella. There are a lot of action going on. Arlon, I saw that. Got some traction. A lot of great stuff. The question I want to ask you, and I want to get your reaction to this, you know, we always go to a lot of events with theCUBE and you can always tell the vibrant of the ecosystem when you see developers doing stuff, projects going on. But when you start seeing the commercialization >> Priyanka: Yes. >> The news briefings coming out of this show feels a lot like reinvent, like it's like a tsunami. I've never seen this much news. Everyone's got a story, they got announcing products. >> Savannah: That was a lot of news. That's a great point, John. >> There was a lot of flow even from the CNCF. >> Yeah. >> What's your reaction to that? I mean like to me it's a tell sign of activity, certainly, >> Right. >> And engagement. >> Right. >> But there's real proof coming out, real visibility into the value propositions, >> Priyanka: Yes. >> rendering itself with real products. What's your reaction to the news flow? >> Absolutely. I think it's market proof, like you said, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> That we have awesome technologies that are useful to lots of people around the world. And I think that, I hope this continues to increase. And with the bite basket of project portfolios that's what I hope to see. CNCF itself will continue supporting the maintainers with things like conformance programs which are really essential when you are... when you have people building products on top of your projects and other initiatives so that the technological integrity remains solid while innovation keeps happening. >> I know from a little birdie, Brendan, good friend of mine that you had a board meeting today. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> And I am curious because I hope I'm not going out about an assumption I imagine that room is full of passionate people. >> Priyanka: Absolutely. >> CNCF board would be a wild one. (Priyanka laughs) What are the priorities for the board between now and KubeCon next year? >> Sure. So the CNCF governing board is an over... It's like an oversight body. And their focus is on working with us on the executive team to make sure that we have the right game plan for the foundation. They tend to focus on the business decisions, things such as how do we manage our budget, how do we deploy it, and what are the initiatives? And that's always their priority. But because this is CloudNative and we are all technologists who love our projects, >> Savannah: Yeah. >> we also engage closely with the technical oversight committee who was in the said meeting that we just talked about. And so lots of discussions are around project health, sustainability. How do we keep moving? Because as you said, Kubernetes is going mainstream but it's still cool. There are all these other cool things. It's a lot going on, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. You got a lot of balls in the air. It's complex decision making and balancing of priorities. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> John: And demands, stakeholders. You have how many stakeholders? Every project, every person, every company. >> Everyone's a stakeholder. You're a stakeholder, too. >> And a hundred... I mean, I love how community focused you are. Obviously we're here to talk about the community. You have contributors from 187 different countries. >> Priyanka: It's one of the things I'm the most proud of. >> Savannah: It's... Yeah. It gives me all the feels as a community builder as well. >> Priyanka: Yeah. >> What an accomplishment and supporting community members in those different environments must be so dynamic for you and the team. >> Absolutely, and it behooves us to think globally in how we solve problems. Even when we introduce programs. My first question is, are we by accident being, let's say, default U.S. or are we being default Europe, whatever it may be because we really got to think about the whole world. >> John: It's global culture, it's a global village. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> And I think global now more than ever is so important. And, the Ukraine >> Priyanka: Yes. >> discussion on the main stage was awesome. I love how you guys did that because this is impacting the technology. We need the diverse input. Now I made a comment yesterday that it's going to make... it might slow things down. I meant as is more diversity, there's more conversations. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> But once people get aligned and committed, that's where the magic happens. Share your thoughts on the global diversity, why it's important, how things are made, how decisions are made. What's the philosophy? Because there's more to get your arms around. >> Yes, absolutely. It may seem harder or slower or whatever but once it gets done, aligned and committed, the product's better, everything's better. >> Priyanka: Yes, absolutely. I think the more people involved, the better it is for sure. Especially from a robustness resilience perspective. Because you know, as they say, sunlight makes bugs shallow. That's because the more eyes on something the faster people will solve problems, fix bugs and make, you know, look for security, vulnerability, solve all that. So especially in those areas, I think, where you want to be more resilient, the more the people, the better it is. A hundred percent. And then when it comes to direct technical direction and choosing a path, I think that's where, you know it's the role of the maintainers. And as I was saying there's only a thousand audit maintainers for 140 plus projects, right? So they are catering- >> Wow, they have a lot of responsibility. >> Right. >> Serious amount of responsibility. >> It's crazy. I know. And we have to do everything we can for those people because they are the ones who set the vision, set the direction, and then 176,000 plus contributors follow their lead. So we have... I think, the bright mechanisms of contribution and collaboration in a global way are in place. And we keep chugging along and doing better and better each year. >> What's next for you guys? You got the EU of show coming out, >> Priyanka: Correct, Amsterdam. the economy looking, I don't see your recession for technology, but that's me. I'm Polish on tech. Yeah, there's some layoffs going on, some cleaning up, overinflated expectations on valuations of startups, but I don't see this stopping or slowing down. But what's your take? >> Priyanka: Yeah, I mean, as I said in my keynote, right? Open source usage soars in times of turmoil and financial turmoil is one example of that. So we are expecting growth and heavy growth this year, next year and onwards. And in fact, going back to the whole maintainer journey, now is a time there's even more pressure on them and companies as they manage their, you know, workforces and prioritization, they really need to remember they're building products off of open source. They are... This is open sources on which what their business realize, whether they're a vendor or end user and give maintainers a space time to work on what they need to work on. >> Yeah. They need a little work-life balance. I mean the self-care there, I can't even imagine the complexity of the decision matrix in their mind. Speaking of that, and obviously you... Culture must be a huge part of how you lead these teams. How do you approach that as leader? >> I think the number one... So the foundation is a very small set of staff, just so you know. >> Savannah: I was actually... Let's tell the audience, how many people are on the team? >> Priyanka: You know, it's actually a difficult question because we have folks who like spin up and down and we have matrix support from the Linux Foundation, but about 30 people in total are dedicated to CNCF at any given time. >> Savannah: Wow. >> But compared... >> Savannah: You all do hard work. >> Yes. >> Savannah: You're doing great. I am impressed. >> It's a flat organization. >> It's pretty flat. >> Seriously, it's beautiful. >> It's actually in some ways very similar to the projects and there the, you know, contribution communities there where it's like everyone kind of like steps up and does what needs to be done, which is wonderful and beautiful, but with the responsibility on our shoulders, it's definitely a balancing act. So first off, it is, I ask everyone to have some grace for the staff. They are in a startup land with no IPO on the other side of the rainbow. They're doing it because they love love, love this community and technology so much. >> John: Yeah. Yeah, and then also they're acknowledging that nobody in open source wants to see a bureaucracy. >> Priyanka: Right. >> I mean, everyone see lean, efficient. >> Savannah: Yeah, absolutely John. It's great. It's a great point. And and I think that it's just... It's amazing what passionate people can do if given the opportunity. Let's talk a little bit about the literal event that we're at right now. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> Theme today, building for the road ahead. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> What was the inspiration for that? >> Detroit. (group laughs) We're in Detroit, people drive here. >> Savannah: In case you didn't know, cars have been made in this city. >> Motor city. >> It's everywhere being here in this city, which is awesome. >> But you know, it did... There was of course a geographical element but it also aligns with where we're at, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> We're building for the road ahead, which frankly given the changes going on in the world is a bumpy road. So it's important to talk about it. And that's what the theme was. >> And how many folks have shown up... This is a totally different energy from Los Angeles last year. I'm sure we can both agree. Everyone was excited last year, but this is an order of magnitude. >> Yes. >> How many folks do you think are milling around? >> Yeah, it's much more than double of Los Angeles. We are close to 8,000. >> Savannah: That's amazing. And it's so... You're absolutely right. The energy is just... >> Savannah: Way up. >> It's so good. People are enjoying themselves. It's been lovely. >> That's great. So you're feeling good? You're riding the high? >> Congratulations. >> Awesome. >> Yeah, thank you. I mean, I'm a little bit of a zombie right now. (group laughs) >> You don't look it, we wouldn't know. Nobody knows. They don't know. >> If you want to take a break, We got 12 interviews tomorrow. (Savannah and Priyanka laughing) You can co-host with us. We'd love to have you. >> Exactly. You're welcome anytime. Welcome anytime, Priyanka. >> Well thank you. But no, it's been such a wonderful show and you folks are part of the reason you say everybody here is contributing to the awesomeness. >> John: Yep. >> You're part of it. Look at your smiley faces. >> John: And Lisa Marty is over there. Lisa's over there. >> Yes! >> Say hi to Lisa and team. >> Yes, the team is awesome. >> Guys, thank you for your support for theCUBE. We really appreciate it. We enjoy it a lot. And we love the community. Thank you. >> Yes. Thank you for your support for CloudNative. >> Thank you. >> One last thing I just want to point out, because it's not always it happens in this industry. The women outnumber the men on this stage right now. >> John: Proud of that? >> And I know the diversity and inclusion is a priority for CNCF. >> Priyanka: Top priority. >> Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? >> Yes. It is something at the forefront of my mind, no matter what we do. And it's because I have such great role models. You know, when I was just a participant in the ecosystem, Dan Conn was leading the foundation and he took it so seriously to always try to uplift people from a diverse backgrounds and bring those faces into CloudNative. >> Savannah: Yes. >> And he made a serious lasting impact. >> John: Yes. >> And I am not going to let that go to waste. It's not going to be me who drops the ball. (group laughs) >> We're behind you all the way. >> Right? >> We see improvement over here. >> We got your back. >> I mean, even from an attendance perspective on stage I feel like you've done just an outstanding job with the curation and representation. I don't say that lightly. It really matters to me. But even in the audience looking around, it's so refreshing. Even it sounds silly. The shirts are more fitted. >> It's not silly. >> There's different types of shirts, and I mean, you know how it is. We've been in this industry long enough. >> It's a shirt you want to wear. >> Savannah: Exactly. And that's the whole point. I absolutely love it. Have we announced a location for KubeCon North America 2023, yet? >> It's Chicago. >> Savannah: Exciting! >> Yes. >> Savannah: All right. So we'll be seeing you >> Midwest. >> not that far away. >> This is the first time I've said this publicly, I just realized, It's Chicago, people. >> The scoop, yay! >> Oh, I feel so lucky we got to break the scoop. I was learning from John's lead there and I'm very excited. Amsterdam, Chicago. It's going to be absolutely >> I'll get my hotel now. >> Fantastic. >> Yes. >> Smart move. Everybody listen to him. >> Yeah, right? Especially after Detroit. It's actually not a... It's not a bad move. Priyanka, is there anything else you'd like to say to folks? Maybe they're thinking about coming or contributing to the ecosystem? >> Priyanka: Yes. Anyone and everyone can and should contribute and join us. The maintainers are holding us all up. Let's rally to support them. We have more and more programs to do that. As you know, we did ContribFest here this week which was the first time. So we will help you get involved so you're not on your own. So that's my number one message, which is anyone and everyone, you're welcome here. We'll make sure you have a good time. So just come. >> Okay. Please do it. >> I can tell you that Priyanka is not blowing smoke. I feel very welcome here. This community has welcomed me as a non-technical, so I think you're absolutely preaching the truth. Priyanka, thank you so much for being here with us today on the show, for helping herd the cats and wrangle the brilliant minds that make CNCF possible. And honestly for just bringing your energy and joy to the entire experience. John, thank you for hanging out with me. >> I'm glad I can contribute in a small way. >> I was going to say... I was going to say thank you for founding theCUBE so that we could be here in this little marriage and collaboration can be possible. And thank all of you for tuning in to theCUBE here, live from Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson. I am thrilled to be sharing this content with you today and I hope to see you for the rest of our interviews this afternoon. (gentle upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hey, guys. Welcome back to Detroit, Michigan. Lisa Martin and John Furrier here live with "theCUBE" at KubeCon CloudNativeCon, North America. John, it's been a great day. This is day one of our coverage of three days of coverage. Kubernetes is growing up. It's maturing. >> Yeah, we got three days of wall-to-wall coverage, all about Kubernetes. We heard about Security, Large scale, Cloud native at scale. That's the big focus. This next segment's going to be really awesome. You have a fast growing private company and a practitioner, big name, blue chip practitioner, building out next-gen cloud. First transforming, then building out the next level. This is classic, what we call Super Cloud-Like interview. It's going to be great. I'm looking forward to this. >> Anytime we can talk about Super Cloud, right? Please welcome back, one of our alumni, Haseeb Budhani is here, the CEO of Rafay. Great to see you. Santhosh Pasula, also joins us, the global head of Cloud SRE at Mass Mutual. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, Haseeb, you've been on "theCUBE" many times. You were on just recently, with the momentum that's around us today with the maturation of Kubernetes, the collaboration of the community, the recognition of the community. What are some of the things that you're excited about with on day one of the show? >> Wow, so many new companies. I mean, there are companies that I don't know who are here. And I live in this industry, and I'm seeing companies that I don't know, which is a good thing. It means that the community's growing. But at the same time, I'm also seeing another thing, which is, I have met more enterprise representatives at this show than other KubeCons. Like when we hung out at in Valencia, for example, or even other places, it hasn't been this many people. Which means, and this is a good thing that enterprises are now taking Kubernetes seriously. It's not a toy. It's not just for developers. It's enterprises who are now investing in Kubernetes as a foundational component for their applications going forward. And that to me is very, very good. >> Definitely, becoming foundational. >> Haseeb: Yeah. >> Well, you guys got a great traction. We had many interviews at "theCUBE," and you got a practitioner here with you guys, are both pioneering, kind of what I call the next-gen cloud. First you got to get through Gen-One, which you guys done at Mass Mutual extremely well. Take us through the story of your transformation? 'Cause you're on at the front end now of that next inflection point. But take us through how you got here? You had a lot of transformation success at Mass Mutual? >> So, I was actually talking about this topic few minutes back. And the whole cloud journey in big companies, large financial institutions, healthcare industry or insurance sector, it takes generations of leadership to get to that perfection level. And ideally, the cloud for strategy starts in, and then how do you standardize and optimize cloud, right? That's the second-gen altogether, and then operationalization of the cloud. And especially if you're talking about Kubernetes, in the traditional world, almost every company is running middleware and their applications in middleware. And their containerization is a topic that came in. And Docker is basically the runtime containerization. So, that came in first, and from Docker, eventually when companies started adopting Docker, Docker Swarm is one of the technologies that they adopted. And eventually, when we were taking it to a more complicated application implementations or modernization efforts, that's when Kubernetes played a key role. And as Haseeb was pointing out, you never saw so many companies working on Kubernetes. So, that should tell you one story, right? How fast Kubernetes is growing, and how important it is for your cloud strategy. >> And your success now, and what are you thinking about now? What's on your agenda now? As you look forward, what's on your plate? What are you guys doing right now? >> So we are past the stage of proof of concepts, proof of technologies, pilot implementations. We are actually playing it, the real game now. In the past, I used the quote, like "Hello world to real world." So, we are actually playing in the real world, not in the hello world anymore. Now, this is where the real time challenges will pop up. So, if you're talking about standardizing it, and then optimizing the cloud, and how do you put your governance structure in place? How do you make sure your regulations are met? The demands that come out of regulations are met? And how are you going to scale it? And while scaling, how are you going to keep up with all the governance and regulations that come with it? So we are in that stage today. >> Haseeb talked about, you talked about the great evolution of what's going on at Mass Mutual. Haseeb talk a little bit about who? You mentioned one of the things that's surprising you about this KubeCon in Detroit, is that you're seeing a lot more enterprise folks here? Who's deciding in the organization and your customer conversations? Who are the decision makers in terms of adoption of Kubernetes these days? Is that elevating? >> Hmm. Well, this guy. (Lisa laughing) One of the things I'm seeing here, and John and I have talked about this in the past, this idea of a platform organization and enterprises. So, consistently what I'm seeing, is somebody, a CTO, CIO level, an individual is making a decision. I have multiple internal Bus who are now modernizing applications. They're individually investing in DevOps, and this is not a good investment for my business. I'm going to centralize some of this capability so that we can all benefit together. And that team is essentially a platform organization. And they're making Kubernetes a shared services platform so that everybody else can come and sort of consume it. So, what that means to us, is our customer is a platform organization, and their customer is a developer. So we have to make two constituencies successful. Our customer who's providing a multi-tenant platform, and then their customer, who's your developer, both have to be happy. If you don't solve for both, you know, constituencies, you're not going to be successful. >> So, you're targeting the builder of the infrastructure and the consumer of that infrastructure? >> Yes, sir. It has to be both. >> On the other side? >> Exactly, right. So that look, honestly, it takes iteration to figure these things out. But this is a consistent theme that I am seeing. In fact, what I would argue now, is that every enterprise should be really stepping back and thinking about what is my platform strategy? Because if you don't have a platform strategy, you're going to have a bunch of different teams who are doing different things, and some will be successful, and look, some will not be. And that is not good for business. >> Yeah, and Santhosh, I want to get to you. You mentioned your transformations, what you look forward, and your title, Global Head of Cloud, SRE. Okay, so SRE, we all know came from Google, right? Everyone wants to be like Google, but no one wants to be like Google, right? And no one is Google. Google's a unique thing. >> Haseeb: Only one Google. >> But they had the dynamic and the power dynamic of one person to large scale set of servers or infrastructure. But concept can be portable, but the situation isn't. So, Borg became Kubernetes, that's inside baseball. So, you're doing essentially what Google did at their scale, you're doing for Mass Mutual. That's kind of what's happening, is that kind of how I see it? And you guys are playing in there partnering? >> So, I totally agree. Google introduce SRE, Site Reliability Engineering. And if you take the traditional transformation of the roles, in the past, it was called operations, and then DevOps ops came in, and then SRE is the new buzzword. And the future could be something like Product Engineering. And in this journey, here is what I tell folks on my side, like what worked for Google might not work for a financial company. It might not work for an insurance company. It's okay to use the word, SRE, but end of the day, that SRE has to be tailored down to your requirements. And the customers that you serve, and the technology that you serve. >> This is why I'm coming back, this platform engineering. At the end of the day, I think SRE just translates to, you're going to have a platform engineering team? 'Cause you got to enable developers to be producing more code faster, better, cheaper, guardrails, policies. It's kind of becoming the, these serve the business, which is now the developers. IT used to serve the business back in the old days, "Hey, the IT serves the business." >> Yup. >> Which is a term now. >> Which is actually true now. >> The new IT serves the developers, which is the business. >> Which is the business. >> Because if digital transformation goes to completion, the company is the app. >> The hard line between development and operations, so that's thinning down. Over the time, that line might disappear. And that's where SRE is fitting in. >> Yeah, and then building platform to scale the enablement up. So, what is the key challenges? You guys are both building out together this new transformational direction. What's new and what's the same? The same is probably the business results, but what's the new dynamic involved in rolling it out and making people successful? You got the two constituents, the builders of the infrastructures and the consumers of the services on the other side. What's the new thing? >> So, the new thing, if I may go first. The faster market to value that we are bringing to the table, that's very important. Business has an idea. How do you get that idea implemented in terms of technology and take it into real time? So, that journey we have cut down. Technology is like Kubernetes. It makes an IT person's life so easy that they can speed up the process. In a traditional way, what used to take like an year, or six months, can be done in a month today, or less than that. So, there's definitely speed velocity, agility in general, and then flexibility. And then the automation that we put in, especially if you have to maintain like thousands of clusters. These are today, it is possible to make that happen with a click off a button. In the past, it used to take, probably, 100-person team, and operational team to do it, and a lot of time. But that automation is happening. And we can get into the technology as much as possible, but blueprinting and all that stuff made it possible. >> We'll save that for another interview. We'll do it deep time. (panel laughing) >> But the end user on the other end, the consumer doesn't have the patience that they once had, right? It's, "I want this in my lab now." How does the culture of Mass Mutual? How is it evolve to be able to deliver the velocity that your customers are demanding? >> Once in a while, it's important to step yourself into the customer's shoes and think it from their perspective. Business does not care how you're running your IT shop. What they care about is your stability of the product and the efficiencies of the product, and how easy it is to reach out to the customers. And how well we are serving the customers, right? So, whether I'm implementing Docker in the background, Docker Swam or Kubernetes, business doesn't even care about it. What they really care about, it is, if your environment goes down, it's a problem. And if your environment or if your solution is not as efficient as the business needs, that's the problem, right? So, at that point, the business will step in. So, our job is to make sure, from a technology perspective, how fast you can make implement it? And how efficiently you can implement it? And at the same time, how do you play within the guardrails of security and compliance? >> So, I was going to ask you, if you have VMware in your environment? 'Cause a lot of clients compare what vCenter does for Kubernetes is really needed. And I think that's what you guys got going on. I can say that, you're the vCenter of Kubernetes. I mean, as as metaphor, a place to manage it all, is all one paint of glass, so to speak. Is that how you see success in your environment? >> So, virtualization has gone a long way. Where we started, what we call bare metal servers, and then we virtualized operating systems. Now, we are virtualizing applications, and we are virtualizing platforms as well, right? So that's where Kubernetes plays a role. >> So, you see the need for a vCenter like thing for Kubernetes? >> There's definitely a need in the market. The way you need to think is like, let's say there is an insurance company who actually implement it today, and they gain the market advantage. Now, the the competition wants to do it as well, right? So, there's definitely a virtualization of application layer that's very critical, and it's a critical component of cloud strategy as a whole. >> See, you're too humble to say it. I'll say, you're like the vCenter of Kubernetes. Explain what that means in your term? If I said that to you, what would you react? How would you react to that? Would you say, BS, or would you say on point? >> Maybe we should think about what does vCenter do today? So, in my opinion, by the way, vCenter in my opinion, is one of the best platforms ever built. Like it's the best platform in my opinion ever built. VMware did an amazing job, because they took an IT engineer, and they made him now be able to do storage management, networking management, VM's multitenancy, access management, audit. Everything that you need to run a data center, you can do from essentially single platform. >> John: From a utility standpoint, home-run? >> It's amazing. >> Yeah. >> Because you are now able to empower people to do way more. Well, why are we not doing that for Kubernetes? So, the premise man Rafay was, well, I should have IT engineers, same engineers. Now, they should be able to run fleets of clusters. That's what people that Mass Mutual are able to do now. So, to that end, now you need cluster management, you need access management, you need blueprinting, you need policy management. All of these things that have happened before, chargebacks, they used to have it in vCenter, now they need to happen in other platforms but for Kubernetes. So, should we do many of the things that vCenter does? Yes. >> John: Kind of, yeah. >> Are we a vCenter for Kubernetes? >> No. >> That is a John Furrier question. >> All right, well, the speculation really goes back down to the earlier speed question. If you can take away the complexity and not make it more steps, or change a tool chain, or do something, then the Devs move faster. And the service layer that serves the business, the new organization, has to enable speed. This is becoming a real discussion point in the industry, is that, "Yeah, we got new tool. Look at the shiny new toy." But if it move the needle, does it help productivity for developers? And does it actually scale up the enablement? That's the question. So, I'm sure you guys are thinking about this a lot. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, absolutely. And one thing that just hit my mind, is think about the hoteling industry before Airbnb and after Airbnb. Or the taxi industry before Uber and after Uber. So, if I'm providing a platform, a Kubernetes platform for my application folks, or for my application partners, they have everything ready. All they need to do is build their application and deploy it, and run it. They don't have to worry about provisioning of the servers, and then building the Middleware on top of it, and then, do a bunch of testing to make sure they iron out all the compatible issues and whatnot. Now, today, all I say is like, "Hey, we have a platform built for you. You just build your application, and then deploy it in a development environment, that's where you put all the pieces of puzzle together. Make sure you see your application working, and then the next thing that you do is like, do the correction. >> John: Shipping. >> Shipping. You build the production. >> John: Press. Go. Release it. (laughs) That when you move on, but they were there. I mean, we're there now. We're there. So, we need to see the future, because that's the case, then the developers are the business. They have to be coding more features, they have to react to customers. They might see new business opportunities from a revenue standpoint that could be creatively built, got low code, no code, headless systems. These things are happening where there's, I call the Architectural List Environment where it's like, you don't need architecture, it's already happening. >> Yeah, and on top of it, if someone has an idea, they want to implement an idea real quick. So, how do you do it? And you don't have to struggle building an environment to implement your idea and test it in real time. So, from an innovation perspective, agility plays a key role. And that's where the Kubernetes platforms, or platforms like Kubernetes plays. >> You know, Lisa, when we talked to Andy Jassy, when he was the CEO of AWS, either one-on-one or on "theCUBE," he always said, and this is kind of happening, "Companies are going to be builders, where it's not just utility, you need that table stakes to enable that new business idea." And so, in this last keynote, he did this big thing like, "Think like your developers are the next entrepreneurial revenue generators." I think I'm starting to see that. What do you think about that? You see that coming sooner than later? Or is that an insight, or is that still ways away? >> I think it's already happening at a level, at a certain level. Now ,the question comes back to, you know, taking it to the reality. I mean, you can do your proof of concept, proof of technologies, and then prove it out like, "Hey, I got a new idea. This idea is great." And it's to the business advantage. But we really want to see it in production live where your customers are actually using it. >> In the board meetings, "Hey, we got a new idea that came in, generating more revenue, where'd that come from?" Agile Developer. Again, this is real. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Absolutely agree. Yeah, I think both of you gentlemen said a word as you were talking, you used the word, Guardrails. We're talking about agility, but the really important thing is, look, these are enterprises, right? They have certain expectations. Guardrails is key, right? So, it's automation with the guardrails. Guardrails are like children, you know, shouldn't be heard. They're seen but not heard. Developers don't care about guardrails, they just want to go fast. >> They also bounce around a little bit, (laughs) off the guardrails. >> Haseeb: Yeah. >> One thing we know that's not going to slow down, is the expectations, right? Of all the consumers of this, the Devs, the business, the business top line, and, of course, the customers. So, the ability to really, as your website says, let's say, "Make Life Easy for Platform Teams" is not trivial. And clearly what you guys are talking about here, is you're really an enabler of those platform teams, it sounds like to me. >> Yup. >> So, great work, guys. Thank you so much for both coming on the program, talking about what you're doing together, how you're seeing the evolution of Kubernetes, why? And really, what the focus should be on those platform teams. We appreciate all your time and your insights. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Our pleasure. For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" Live, KubeCon CloudNativeCon from Detroit. We'll be back with our next guest in just a minute, so stick around. (bright upbeat music)

>> Narrator: The cube presents, the Kubecon and Cloudnativecon Europe, 2022 brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Valencia, Spain in Kubecon and Cloudnativecon Europe, 2022. I'm your host Keith Townsend. It's been a amazing day, three days of coverage 7,500 people, 170 sponsors, a good mix of end user organizations, vendors, just people with open source at large. I've loved the conversations. We're not going to stop that coverage just because this is the last session of the conference. Colin Murphy, senior software engineer, Adobe, >> Adobe. >> Oh, wow. This is going to be fun. And then Liam Randall, the chair of CNCF Cloud Native WebAssembly Day. >> That's correct. >> And CNCF & CEO of Cosmonic. >> That's right. >> All right. First off, let's talk about the show. How has this been different than other, if at all of other Kubecons? >> Well, first I think we all have to do a tremendous round of applause, not only for the vendors, but the CNC staff and all the attendees for coming out. And you have to say, Kubecon is back. The online experiences have been awesome but this was the first one, where Hallwaycon was in full effect. And you had the opportunity to sit down and meet with so many intelligent and inspiring peers and really have a chance to learn about all the exciting innovations that have happened over the last year. >> Colin. >> Yeah, it's been my most enjoyable Kubecon I've ever been to. And I've been to a bunch of them over the last few years. Just the quality of people. The problems that we're solving right now, everywhere from this newer stuff that we're talking about today with WebAssembly but then all these big enterprises trying to getting involved in Kubernetes >> Colin, to your point about the problems that we're solving, in many ways the pandemic has dramatically accelerated the pace of innovation, especially inside the CNCF, which is by far the most critical repository of open source projects that enterprises, governments and individuals rely on around the world, in order to deliver new experiences and to have coped and scaled out within the pandemic over the last few years. >> Yeah, I'm getting this feel, this vibe of the overall show that feels like we're on the cuff for something. There's other shows throughout the year, that's more vendor focused that talk about cloud native. But I think this is going to be the industry conference where we're just getting together and talking about it and it's going to probably be, in the next couple of years, the biggest conference of the year, that's just my personal opinion. >> I actually really strongly agree with you. And I think that the reason for that is the diversity that we get from the open source focus of Kubecon Kubecon has started where the industry really started which was in shared community projects. And I was the executive at Capital One that led the donation of cloud custodian into the CNCF. And I've started and put many projects here. And one of the reasons that you do that is so that you can build real scalable communities, Vendors that oftentimes even have competing interest but it gives us a place where we can truly collaborate where we can set aside our personal agendas and our company's agendas. And we can focus on the problems at hand. And how do we really raise the bar for technology for everybody. >> Now you two are representing a project that, you know as we look at kind of, how the web has evolved the past few decades, there's standards, there's things that we know that work, there's things that we know that don't work and we're beyond cloud native, we're kind of resistant to change. Funny enough. >> That's right. >> So WebAssembly, talk to me about what problem is WebAssembly solving that need solving? >> I think it's fitting that here on the last day of Kubecon, we're starting with the newest standard for the web and for background, there's only four languages that make up what we think of as the modern web. There's JavaScript, there's HTML, there's CSS, and now there's a new idea that's WebAssembly. And it's maybe not a new idea but it's certainly a new standard, that's got massive adoption and acceleration. WebAssembly is best thought of as almost like a portable little virtual machine. And like a lot of great ideas like JavaScript, it was originally designed to bring new experiences to browsers everywhere. And as organizations looked at the portability and security value props that come from this tiny little virtual machine, it's made a wonderful addition to backend servers and as a platform for portability to bring solutions all the way out to the edge. >> So what are some of the business cases for WebAssembly? Like what problem, what business problem are we solving? >> So it, you know, we would not have been able to bring Photoshop to the web without WASM. >> Wow. >> And just to be clear, I had nothing to do with that effort. So I want to make sure everybody understands, but if you have a lot of C++ or C code and you want to bring that experience to the web browser which is a great cost savings, cause it's running on the client's machines, really low latency, high performance experiences in the browser, WASM, really the only way to go. >> So I'm getting hints of fruit berry, Java. >> Liam: Yeah, absolutely. >> Colin: Definitely. >> You know, the look, WebAssembly sounds similar to promises you've heard before, right ones, run anywhere. The difference is, is that WebAssembly is not driven by any one particular vendor. So there's no one vendor that's trying to bring a plug in to every single device. WebAssembly was a recognition, much like Kubecon, the point that we started with around the diversity of thought ideas and representation of shared interest, of how do we have a platform that's polyglot? Many people can bring languages to it, and solutions that we can share and then build from there. And it is unlocking some of the most amazing and innovative experiences, both on the web backend servers and all the way to the edge. Because WebAssembly is a tiny little virtual machine that runs everywhere. Adobe's leadership is absolutely incredible with the things that they're doing with WebAssembly. They did this awesome blog post with the Google Chrome team that talked about other performance improvements that were brought into Chrome and other browsers, in order to enable that kind of experience. >> So I get the general concept of WebAssembly and it's one of those things that I have to ask the question, and I appreciate that Adobe uses it but without the community, I mean, I've dedicated some of my team's resources over the years to some really cool projects and products that just died on the buying cause there was no community around. >> Yeah. >> Who else uses WebAssembly? >> Yeah, I think so. We actually, inside the CNCF now, have an entire day devoted just to WebAssembly and as the co-chair of the CNCF Cloud Native WebAssembly Day, we really focus on bringing those case studies to the forefront. So some of the more interesting talks that we had here and at some of the precursor weekend conferences were from BMW, for example, they talked about how they were excited about not only WebAssembly, but a framework that they use on WebAssembly called WASM cloud, that lets them a flexibly scale machine learning models from their own edge, in their own vehicles through to their developer's workstations and even take that data onto their regular cloud Kubernetes and scale analysis and analytics. They invested and they just released a machine learning framework for one of the many great WebAssembly projects called WASM cloud, which is a CNCF project, a member project here in the CNCF. >> So how does that fit in overall landscape? >> So think of WebAssembly, like you think of HTML. It's a technology that gives you a lot of concept and to accelerate your journey on those technologies, people create frameworks. For example, if you were going to write a UI, you would not very likely start with an empty document you'd start with a react or view. And in a similar vein, if you were going to start a new microservice or backend application, project for WebAssembly, you might use WASM cloud or you might use ATMO or you might use a Spin. Those are three different types of projects. They all have their own different value props and their own different opinions that they bring to them. But the point is is that this is a quickly evolving space and it's going to dramatically change the type of experiences that we bring, not only to web browsers but to servers and edges everywhere. >> So Colin, you mentioned C+ >> Colin: Yeah. >> And other coding. Well , talk to me about the ramp up. >> Oh, well, so, yeah, so, C++ there was a lot of work done in scripting, at Adobe. Taking our C++ code and bringing it into the browser. A lot of new instructions, Cimdi, that were brought to make a really powerful experience, but what's new now is the server side aspect of things. So, just what kind of, what Liam was talking about. Now we can run this stuff in the data center. It's not just for people's browsers anymore. And then we can also bring it out to the edge too, which is a new space that we can take advantage of really almost only through WebAssembly and some JavaScript. >> So wait, let me get this kind of under hook. Before, if I wanted a rich experience, I have to run a heavy VDI instance on the back end so that I'm basically getting remote desktop calls from a light thin client back to my backend server, that's heavy. >> That is heavy. >> WebAssembly is alternative to that? >> Yes, absolutely. Think of WebAssembly as a tiny little CPU that is a shim, that we can take the places that don't even traditionally have a concept of a processor. So inside the browser, for example, traditionally cloud native development on the backend has been dominated by things like Docker and Docker is a wonderful technology and Container is a wonderful technology that really drove the last 10 years of cloud native with the great lift and shift, if you will. Take our existing applications, package them up in this virtual desktop and then deliver them. But to deliver the next 10 years of experiences, we need solutions that let us have portability first and a security model that's portable across the entire landscape. So this isn't just browsers and servers on the back end, WebAssembly creates an a layer of equality from truly edge to edge. It's can transcend different CPUs, different operating systems. So where containers have this lower bound off you need to be running Linux and you need to be in a place where you're going to bring Kubernetes. WebAssembly is so small and portable, it transcends that lower bound. It can go to places like iOS. It can go to places like web browsers. It can even go to teeny tiny CPUs that don't even traditionally have a full on operating systems inside them. >> Colin: Right, places where you can't run Docker. >> So as I think about that, and I'm a developer and I'm running my back end and I'm running whatever web stack that I want, how does this work? Like, how do I get started with it? >> Well, there's some great stuff Liam already mentioned with WASM cloud and Frmion Spin. Microsoft is heavily involved now on providing cloud products that can take advantage of WebAssembly. So we've got a lot of languages, new languages coming in.net and Ruby, Rust is a big one, TinyGo, really just a lot of places to get involved. A lot of places to get started. >> At the highest level Finton Ryan, when he was at Gartner, he's a really well known analyst. He wrote something profound a few years ago. He said, WebAssembly is the one technology, You don't need a strategy to adopt. >> Mm. >> Because frankly you're already using it because there's so many wonderful experiences and products that are out there, like what Adobe's doing. This virtual CPU is not just a platform to run on cloud native and to build applications towards the edge. You can embed this virtual CPU inside of applications. So cases where you would want to allow your users to customize an application or to extend functionality. Give you an example, Shopify is a big believer in WebAssembly because while their platform covers, two standard deviations or 80% of the use cases, they have a wonderful marketplace of extensions that folks can use in order to customize the checkout process or apply specialized discounts or integrate into a partner ecosystem. So when you think about the requirements for those scenarios, they line up to the same requirements that we have in browsers and servers. I want real security. I want portability. I want reuseability. And ultimately I want to save money and go faster. So organizations everywhere should take a few minutes and do a heads up and think about one, where WebAssembly is already in their environment, inside of places like Envoy and Istio, some of the most popular projects in the cloud native ecosystem, outside of Kubernetes. And they should perhaps consider studying, how WebAssembly can help them to transform the experiences that they're delivering for their customers. This may be the last day of Kubecon, but this is certainly not the last time we're going to be talking about WebAssembly, I'll tell you that. >> So, last question, we've talked a lot about how to get started. How about day two, when I'm thinking about performance troubleshooting and ensuring clients have a great experience what's day two operation like? >> That's a really good question. So there's, I know that each language kind of brings their own tool chain and their, and you know we saw some great stuff on, on WASM day. You can look it up around the .net experience for debugging, They really tried to make it as seamless and the same as it was for native code. So, yeah, I think that's a great question. I mean, right now it's still trying to figure out server side, It's still, as Liam said, a shifting landscape. But we've got some great stuff out here already >> You know, I'd make an even bigger call than that. When I think about the last 20 years as computing has evolved, we've continued to move through these epics of tech that were dominated by a key abstraction. Think about the rise of virtualization with VMware and the transition to the cloud. The rise of containerization, we virtualized to OS. The rise of Kubernetes and CNCF itself, where we virtualize cloud APIs. I firmly believe that WebAssembly represents the next epic of tech. So I think that day two WebAssembly continues to become one of the dominant themes, not only across cloud native but across the entire technical computing landscape. And it represents a fundamentally gigantic opportunity for organizations such as Adobe, that are always market leading and at the cutting edge of tech, to bring new experiences to their customers and for vendors to bring new platforms and tools to companies that want to execute on that opportunity. >> Colin Murphy, Liam Randall, I want to thank you for joining the Cube at Kubecon Cloudnativecon 2022. I'm now having a JavaScript based app that I want to re-look at, and maybe re-platforming that to WebAssembly. It's some lot of good stuff there. We want to thank you for tuning in to our coverage of Kubecon Cloudnativecon. And we want to thank the organization for hosting us, here from Valencia, Spain. I'm Keith Townsend, and you're watching the Cube, the leader in high tech coverage. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: theCUBE presents KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2022, brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Valencia, Spain, in KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2022. I'm your host Keith Townsend, along with Paul Gillon. And we're going to talk to some amazing folks. But first Paul, do you remember your college days? >> Vaguely. (Keith laughing) A lot of them are lost. >> I think a lot of mine are lost as well. Well, not really, I got my degree as an adult, so they're not that far past. I can remember 'cause I have the student debt to prove it. (both laughing) Along with us today is Kenneth Hoste, systems administrator at Ghent University, and Marcel Hild, senior manager software engineering at Red Hat. You're working in office of the CTO? >> That's absolutely correct, yes >> So first off, I'm going to start off with you Kenneth. Tell us a little bit about the research that the university does. Like what's the end result? >> Oh, wow, that's a good question. So the research we do at university and again, is very broad. We have bioinformaticians, physicists, people looking at financial data, all kinds of stuff. And the end result can be very varied as well. Very often it's research papers, or spinoffs from the university. Yeah, depending on the domain I would say, it depends a lot on. >> So that sounds like the perfect environment for cloud native. Like the infrastructure that's completely flexible, that researchers can come and have a standard way of interacting, each team just use it's resources as they would, the Navana for cloud native. >> Yeah. >> But somehow, I'm going to guess HPC isn't quite there yet. >> Yeah, not really, no. So, HPC is a bit, let's say slow into adopting new technologies. And we're definitely seeing some impact from cloud, especially things like containers and Kubernetes, or we're starting to hear these things in HPC community as well. But I haven't seen a lot of HPC clusters who are really fully cloud native. Not yet at least. Maybe this is coming. And if I'm walking around here at KubeCon, I can definitely, I'm being convinced that it's coming. So whether we like it or not we're probably going to have to start worrying about stuff like this. But we're still, let's say, the most prominent technologies of things like NPI, which has been there for 20, 30 years. The Fortran programming language is still the main language, if you're looking at compute time being spent on supercomputers, over 1/2 of the time spent is in Fortran code essentially. >> Keith: Wow. >> So either the application itself where the simulations are being done is implemented in Fortran, or the libraries that we are talking to from Python for example, for doing heavy duty computations, that backend library is implemented in Fortran. So if you take all of that into account, easily over 1/2 of the time is spent in Fortran code. >> So is this because the libraries don't migrate easily to, distributed to that environment? >> Well, it's multiple things. So first of all, Fortran is very well suited for implementing these type of things. >> Paul: Right. >> We haven't really seen a better alternative maybe. And also it'll be a huge effort to re-implement that same functionality in a newer language. So, the use case has to be very convincing, there has to be a very good reason why you would move away from Fortran. And, at least the HPC community hasn't seen that reason yet. >> So in theory, and right now we're talking about the theory and then what it takes to get to the future. In theory, I can take that Fortran code put it in a compiler that runs in a container? >> Yeah, of course, yeah. >> Why isn't it that simple? >> I guess because traditionally HPC is very slow at adopting new stuff. So, I'm not saying there isn't a reason that we should start looking at these things. Flexibility is a very important one. For a lot of researchers, their compute needs are very picky. So they're doing research, they have an idea, they want you to run lots of simulations, get the results, but then they're silent for a long time writing the paper, or thinking about how to, what they can learn from the results. So there's lots of peaks, and that's a very good fit for a cloud environment. I guess at the scale of university you have enough diversity end users that all those peaks never fall at the same time. So if you have your big own infrastructure you can still fill it up quite easily and keep your users happy. But this busty thing, I guess we're seeing that more and more or so. >> So Marcel, talk to us about, Red Hat needing to service these types of end users. That it can be on both ends I'd imagine that you have some people still in writing in Fortran, you have some people that's asking you for objects based storage. Where's Fortran, I'm sorry, not Fortran, but where is Red Hat in providing the underlay and the capabilities for the HPC and AI community? >> Yeah. So, I think if you look at the user base that we're looking at, it's on this spectrum from development to production. So putting AI workloads into production, it's an interesting challenge but it's easier to solve, and it has been solved to some extent, than the development cycle. So what we're looking at in Kenneth's domain it's more like the end user, the data scientist, developing code, and doing these experiments. Putting them into production is that's where containers live and thrive. You can containerize your model, you containerize your workload, you deploy it into your OpenShift Kubernetes cluster, done, you monitor it, done. So the software developments and the SRE, the ops part, done, but how do I get the data scientist into this cloud native age where he's not developing on his laptop or on a machine, where he SSH into and then does some stuff there. And then some system admin comes and needs to tweak it because it's running out of memory or whatnot. But how do we take him and make him, well, and provide him an environment that is good enough to work in, in the browser, and then with IDE, where the workload of doing the computation and the experimentation is repeatable, so that the environment is always the same, it's reliable, so it's always up and running. It doesn't consume resources, although it's up and running. Where it's, where the supply chain and the configuration of... And the, well, the modules that are brought into the system are also reliable. So all these problems that we solved in the traditional software development world, now have to transition into the data science and HPC world, where the problems are similar, but yeah, it's different sets. It's more or less, also a huge educational problem and transitioning the tools over into that is something... >> Well, is this mostly a technical issue or is this a cultural issue? I mean, are HPC workloads that different from more conventional OLTP workloads that they would not adapt well to a distributed containerized environment? >> I think it's both. So, on one hand it's the cultural issue because you have two different communities, everybody is reinventing the wheel, everybody is some sort of siloed. So they think, okay, what we've done for 30 years now we, there's no need to change it. And they, so it's, that's what thrives and here at KubeCon where you have different communities coming together, okay, this is how you solved the problem, maybe this applies also to our problem. But it's also the, well, the tooling, which is bound to a machine, which is bound to an HPC computer, which is architecturally different than a distributed environment where you would treat your containers as kettle, and as something that you can replace, right? And the HPC community usually builds up huge machines, and these are like the gray machines. So it's also technical bit of moving it to this age. >> So the massively parallel nature of HPC workloads you're saying Kubernetes has not yet been adapted to that? >> Well, I think that parallelism works great. It's just a matter of moving that out from an HPC computer into the scale out factor of a Kubernetes cloud that elastically scales out. Whereas the traditional HPC computer, I think, and Kenneth can correct me here is, more like, I have this massive computer with 1 million cores or whatnot, and now use it. And I can use my time slice, and book my time slice there. Whereas this a Kubernetes example the concept is more like, I have 1000 cores and I declare something into it and scale it up and down based on the needs. >> So, Kenneth, this is where you talked about the culture part of the changes that need to be happening. And quite frankly, the computer is a tool, it's a tool to get to the answer. And if that tool is working, if I have a 1000 cores on a single HPC thing, and you're telling me, well, I can't get to a system with 2000 cores. And if you containerized your process and move it over then maybe I'll get to the answer 50% faster maybe I'm not that... Someone has to make that decision. How important is it to get people involved in these types of communities from a researcher? 'Cause research is very tight-knit community to have these conversations and help that see move happen. >> I think it's very important to that community should, let's say, the cloud community, HPC research community, they should be talking a lot more, there should be way more cross pollination than there is today. I'm actually, I'm happy that I've seen HPC mentioned at booths and talks quite often here at KubeCon, I wasn't really expecting that. And I'm not sure, it's my first KubeCon, so I don't know, but I think that's kind of new, it's pretty recent. If you're going to the HPC community conferences there containers have been there for a couple of years now, something like Kubernetes is still a bit new. But just this morning there was a keynote by a guy from CERN, who was explaining, they're basically slowly moving towards Kubernetes even for their HPC clusters as well. And he's seeing that as the future because all the flexibility it gives you and you can basically hide all that from the end user, from the researcher. They don't really have to know that they're running on top of Kubernetes. They shouldn't care. Like you said, to them it's just a tool, and they care about if the tool works, they can get their answers and that's what they want to do. How that's actually being done in the background they don't really care. >> So talk to me about the AI side of the equation, because when I talk to people doing AI, they're on the other end of the spectrum. What are some of the benefits they're seeing from containerization? >> I think it's the reproducibility of experiments. So, and data scientists are, they're data scientists and they do research. So they care about their experiment. And maybe they also care about putting the model into production. But, I think from a geeky perspective they are more interested in finding the next model, finding the next solution. So they do an experiment, and they're done with it, and then maybe it's going to production. So how do I repeat that experiment in a year from now, so that I can build on top of it? And a container I think is the best solution to wrap something with its dependency, like freeze it, maybe even with the data, store it away, and then come to it back later and redo the experiment or share the experiment with some of my fellow researchers, so that they don't have to go through the process of setting up an equivalent environment on their machines, be it their laptop, via their cloud environment. So you go to the internet, download something doesn't work, container works. >> Well, you said something that really intrigues me you know in concept, I can have a, let's say a one terabyte data set, have a experiment associated with that. Take a snapshot of that somehow, I don't know how, take a snapshot of that and then share it with the rest of the community and then continue my work. >> Marcel: Yeah. >> And then we can stop back and compare notes. Where are we at in a maturity scale? Like, what are some of the pitfalls or challenges customers should be looking out for? >> I think you actually said it right there, how do I snapshot a terabyte of data? It's, that's... >> It's a terabyte of data. (both conversing) >> It's a bit of a challenge. And if you snapshot it, you have two terabytes of data or you just snapshot the, like and get you to do a, okay, this is currently where we're at. So that's why the technology is evolving. How do we do source control management for data? How do we license data? How do we make sure that the data is unbiased, et cetera? So that's going more into the AI side of things. But at dealing with data in a declarative way in a containerized way, I think that's where currently a lot of innovation is happening. >> What do you mean by dealing with data in a declarative way? >> If I'm saying I run this experiment based on this data set and I'm running this other experiment based on this other data set, and I as the researcher don't care where the data is stored, I care that the data is accessible. And so I might declare, this is the process that I put on my data, like a data processing pipeline. These are the steps that it's going through. And eventually it will have gone through this process and I can work with my data. Pretty much like applying the concept of pipelines through data. Like you have these data pipelines and then now you have cube flow pipelines as one solution to apply the pipeline concept, to well, managing your data. >> Given the stateless nature of containers, is that an impediment to HPC adoption because of the very large data sets that are typically involved? >> I think it is if you have terabytes of data. Just, you have to get it to the place where the computation will happen, right? And just uploading that into the cloud is already a challenge. If you have the data sitting there on a supercomputer and maybe it was sitting there for two years, you probably don't care. And typically a lot of universities the researchers don't necessarily pay for the compute time they use. Like, this is also... At least in Ghent that's the case, it's centrally funded, which means, the researchers don't have to worry about the cost, they just get access to the supercomputer. If they need two terabytes of data, they get that space and they can park it on the system for years, no problem. If they need 200 terabytes of data, that's absolutely fine. >> But the university cares about the cost? >> The university cares about the cost, but they want to enable the researchers to do the research that they want to do. >> Right. >> And we always tell researchers don't feel constrained about things like compute power, storage space. If you're doing smaller research, because you're feeling constrained, you have to tell us, and we will just expand our storage system and buy a new cluster. >> Paul: Wonderful. >> So you, to enable your research. >> It's a nice environment to be in. I think this might be a Jevons paradox problem, you give researchers this capability you might, you're going to see some amazing things. Well, now the people are snapshoting, one, two, three, four, five, different versions of a one terabytes of data. It's a good problem to have, and I hope to have you back on theCUBE, talking about how Red Hat and Ghent have solved those problems. Thank you so much for joining theCUBE. From Valencia, Spain, I'm Keith Townsend along with Paul Gillon. And you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Greetings from Los Angeles, Lisa Martin here with Dave Nicholson. We are on day three of the caves wall-to-wall coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon North America 21. We're pleased to welcome Mark Hinkle to the program, the co-founder and CEO of TriggerMesh. Mark welcome. >> Thank you, It's nice to be here. >> Lisa: Love the name. Very interesting TriggerMesh. Talk to us about what TriggerMesh does and what, when you were founded and what some of the gaps were that you saw in the market. >> Yeah, so TriggerMesh actually the Genesis of the name is in, cloud event, driven architecture. You trigger workloads. So that's the trigger and trigger mesh, and then mesh, we mesh services together, so cloud, so that's why we're called TriggerMesh. So we're a cloud native open source integration platform. And the idea is that, the number of cloud services are proliferating. You still have stuff in your data center that you can't decommission and just wholesale lift and shift to the cloud. So we wanted to provide a platform to create workflows from the data center, to the cloud, from cloud to cloud and not, and use all the cloud native design principles, but not leave your past behind. So that's, what we do. We're, very, we were cloud, we are cloud operators and developers, and we wanted the experience to be very similar to the way that DevOps folks are doing infrastructure code and deploying that we want to make it easy to do integration as code. So we follow the same design patterns, use the same domain languages, some of those tools like Hashi corpse, Terraform, and that that's what we do and how we go about doing it. >> Lisa: And when were you guys founded? >> September, 2018. >> Oh so your young, your three years young. >> Three years it's feels like 21 >> I bet. >> And startup years it's a lot has happened, but yeah, we my co-founder and I were former early cloud folks. We were at cloud.com worked through the OpenStack years and the CloudStack, and we just saw the pattern of, abstraction coming about. So first you abstract the hardware, then you abstract the operating system. And now at with the Kubernetes container, you know, evolution, you're abstracting it up to the application layer and we want it to be able to provide tooling that lets you take full advantage of that. >> Dave: So being founded in 2018, what's your perception of that? The shift that happened during the pandemic in terms of the drive towards cloud adoption and the demands for services like you provide? >> Mark: Yeah, I think it's a mixed blessing. So we, people became more remote. They needed to enable digital transformation. Biggest thing, I think that that for us is, you know, you don't go to the bank anymore. And the banking industry is doing, you know, exponentially more remote, online transactions than in person. And it's very important. So we decided that financial services is where we were going to start with first because they have a lot of legacy architecture. They have a lot of need to move to the cloud to have better digital experiences. And we wanted to enable them to, you know, keep their mainframes online while they were still doing cutting edge, you know, mobile applications, that kind of thing. >> Lisa: And of course the legacy institutions like the BFA's the Wells Fargo, they're competing with the fintechs who are much more nimble, much more agile and able to sort of disrupt the financial services industry. Was that part of also your decision to start in financial services? >> It was a little bit of luck because we started with our network and it turned out the, you know, we saw, we started talking to our friends early on, cause we're a startup and said, this is what we're going to do. And where it really resonated was PNC bank was our, one of our first customers. You know, another financial regulatory company was another one, a couple of banks in Europe. And we, you know, as we started talking about what we were doing, that we just gravitated there because they had the, the biggest need, even though everybody has the need, their businesses are, you know, critically tied to digital transformation. >> So starting with financial services. >> It's, it's counter intuitive, isn't it? >> It was counterintuitive, but it lends credibility to any other industry vertical that you're going to approach. >> Yeah, yeah it does. It's a, it's a great, they're going to be our hardest customers and they have more at stake than a lot of like transactions are millions and millions of dollars per hour for these folks. So they don't want to play around, they, they have no tolerance for failure. So it's a good start, but it's sort of like taking up jogging and running a marathon in your first week. It's very very grilling in that sense, but it really has made us a lot better and gave us a lot of insight into the kinds of things we need to do from not just functionality, but security and that kind of thing. >> Where are you finding these customers with respect to adoption of Kubernetes? Are they leading? Are they knowing we've got to get there eventually from an infrastructure perspective? >> So the interesting thing is Kubernetes is a platform for us to deliver on, so we, we don't require you to be a Kubernetes expert we offer it as a SaaS, but what happens is that the Kubernetes folks are the ones that we end up really engaging with earlier on. And I think that we find that they're in this phase of they're containerizing their apps, that's the first step. And then they're putting them on Kubernetes and then their next step is a security and integration path. So once she, I think they call it and this is my buzzword of the show day two operations, right? So they, they get to day two and then they have a security and an integration concern before they go live. So they want to be able to make sure that they don't increase their attack face. And then they also want to make sure that this newly deployed containerized infrastructure is as well integrated as the previous, you know, virtualized or even, you know, on the server infrastructure that they had before. >> So TriggerMesh, doesn't solely work in the containerized world, you're, you're sort of you're bridging the divide. >> Mark: Yes. >> What percentage of the workloads that you're seeing are the result of modernization migration, as opposed to standing up net new application environments in Kubernetes? Do you have a sense for that? >> I think we live in a lot in the brown field. So, you know, folks that have an existing project that they're trying to bridge to it versus the Greenfield kind of, you know, the, the huge wins that you saw in the early cloud days of the Netflix and the Twitter's Dwayne scale. Now we're talking to the enterprises who have, you know, they have existing concerns. So I would say that it's, it's mostly people that are, you know, very few net new projects, unless it's a modernization and they're getting ready to decommission an old one, which is. >> Dave: So Brownfield financial services. You just said, you know, let's just, let's just go after that. >> You know, yeah. I mean, we had this dart forward and we put up buzzwords, but no, it was, it was actually just, and you know, we're still finding our way as far as early on where we're open source folks. And we did not open source from day one, which is very weird when everybody's new, your identity is, you know, I worked, I was the VP of marketing for Linux foundation and no JS and all these open source projects. And my co-founder and I are Apache committers. And our project wasn't open yet because we had to get to the point where it could be open and people could be productive in the use and contribution. And we had to staff up engineers. And now I think this week we open-sourced our entire platform. And I think that's going to open up, you know, that's where we started because it was not necessarily the lowest hanging fruit, but the profitable, less profitable, lowest hanging fruit was financial services. Now we are letting our code out into the wild. And I think it'll be interesting to see what comes back. >> So you just announced that this week TriggerMesh integration platform as an open source project here at KubeCon, what's been some of the feedback? >> It's all been positive. I haven't heard anything negative. We did it, so we're very, very, there's a very, the culture around open source is very tough. It's very critical if you don't do it right. So I think we did a good job, we used enough, we used a OSI approved. They've been sourced, licensed the Apache software, a V2 license. We hired someone who was well-respected in the DevREL world from a chef who understands the DevOps sort of culture methodologies. We staffed up our engineers who are going to be helping the free and open source users. So they're successful and we're betting that that will yield business results down the road. >> Lisa: And what are the two I see on your website, two primary use cases that you guys support. Can you dig into details on that? >> So the first one is sort of a workflow automation and a really simple example of that is you have a, something that happens in one cloud. So for example, you take a picture on your phone and you upload it and it goes to Amazon and there is a service that wants to identify what's in that picture. And once you put it on the line and the internship parlance, you could kick off a workflow from TensorFlow, which is artificial intelligence to identify the picture. And there isn't a good way for clouds to communicate from one to the other, without writing custom blue, which is really what, what we're helping to get rid of is there's a lot of blue written to put together cloud native applications. So that's a workflow, you know, triggering a server less function is the workflow. The other thing is actually breaking up data gravity. So I have a warehouse of data, in my data center, and I want to start replicating some portion of that. As it changes to a database as a service, we can based on an event flow, which is passive. We're not, we're not making, having a conversation like you would with an API where there's an event stream. That's like drinking from the fire hose and TriggerMesh is the nozzle. And we can direct that data to a DBaaS. We can direct that data to snowflake. We can direct that data to a cloud-based data lake on Microsoft Azure, or we can split it up, so some events could go to Splunk and all of the events can go to your data lake or some of those, those things can be used to trigger workloads on other systems. And that event driven architecture is really the design pattern of the individual clouds. We're just making it multi-cloud and on-prem. >> Lisa: Do you have a favorite customer example that you think really articulates that the value of that use case? >> Mark: Yeah I think a PNC is probably our, well for the, for the data flow one, I would say we have a regular to Oracle and one of their customers it was their biggest SMB customer of last year. The Oracle cloud is very, very important, but it's not as tool. It doesn't have the same level of tooling as a lot of the other ones. And to, to close that deal, their regulatory customer wanted to use Datadog. So they have hundreds and hundreds of metrics. And what TriggerMesh did was ingest the hundreds and hundreds of metrics and filter them and connect them to Datadog so that, they could, use Datadog to measure, to monitor workloads on Oracle cloud. So that, would be an example of the data flow on the workflow. PNC bank is, is probably our best example and PNC bank. They want to do. I talked about infrastructure code integration is code. They want to do policy as code. So they're very highly regulatory regulated. And what they used to do is they had policies that they applied against all their systems once a month, to determine how much they were in compliance. Well, theoretically if you do that once a month, it could be 30 days before you knew where you were out of compliance. What we did was, we provided them a way to take all of the changes within their systems and for them to a server less cluster. And they codified all of these policies into server less functions and TriggerMesh is triggering their policies as code. So upon change, they're getting almost real-time updates on whether or not they're in compliance or not. And that's a huge thing. And they're going to, they have, within their first division, we worked with, you know, tens of policies throughout PNC. They have thousands of policies. And so that's really going to revolutionize what they're able to do as far as compliance. And that's a huge use case across the whole banking system. >> That's also a huge business outcome. >> Yes. >> So Mark, where can folks go to learn more about TriggerMesh, maybe even read about more specifically about the announcement that you made this week. >> TriggerMesh.com is the best way to get an overview. The open source project is get hub.com/triggermesh/trigger mesh. >> Awesome Mark, thank you for joining Dave and me talking to us about TriggerMesh, what you guys are doing. The use cases that you're enabling customers. We appreciate your time and we wish you best of luck as you continue to forge into financial services and other industries. >> Thanks, it was great to be here. >> All right. For Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin coming to you live from Los Angeles at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 21, stick around Dave and I, will be right back with our next guest.

(bright music) >> Welcome to this Kube Conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson. And today we have a very special guest from Red Hat, Nick Barcet. Nick is the Senior Director of Technology, Technology Strategy at Red Hat. Nick, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. It's always a pleasure to be visiting you here virtually. >> It's fantastic to have you here. I see a new office surroundings at Red Hat. Have they taken a kind of a nautical theme at the office there? Where are you joining us from? >> I'm joining from my boat now, I've been living on my boat for the past few years, and that's where you'll find me most of the time. >> So would you consider your boat to be on the Edge? >> It's certainly one form of Edge. You know, there are multiple forms of Edge and a boat is one of those forms. >> Let's talk about Edge now. We're having this conversation in anticipation of KubeCon CloudNativeCon that's coming up North America 2021, coming up in Los Angeles. Let's talk about specifically the Edge, where the Edge, Edge computing and Kubernetes come together from a Red Hat perspective. Walk us through that, talk about some of the challenges that people are having at the Edge, why Kubernetes is something that would be considered at the edge. Walk us through that. >> Let's start from the premises that people have been doing stuff at the Edge for ages. I mean, nobody has been waiting for Kubernetes or any other technology to start implementing some form of computing that is happening in their stores, in their factories, wherever. What's really new today is when we talk about Edge computing, it's reusing the same technology we've been using to deploy inside of the data center and expand that all the way to the Edge. And that's what, from my perspective, constituents, Edge computing or the revolution it bring. So that means that the same GitOps, DevSecOps methodology that we were using into that center are now expandable all the way to those devices that leaves in where locations and that we can reuse the same methodology, the same tooling, and that includes Kubernetes. And all the efforts we've been doing over the past couple of years has been to make Kubernetes even more accessible for the various Edge typologies that we are encountering when discussing with our customer that have Edge projects. >> So typically when we think of a Kubernetes environment, you're talking about containers that are contained in pods, that live on physical clusters, despite all of the talk of a no-code and serverless, we still live in a world where applications and microservices run on physical servers. Are there practical limitations in terms of just how small you can scale Kubernetes? How far, how close to the Edge can you get with the Kubernetes deployment? >> So in theory, there is really no limit. As the smallest devices are always bigger than Kubernetes itself. But the reality is you never use just Kubernetes, you use Kubernetes with a series of other projects that makes it complete, or for example, stuff that is going to be reporting telemetry, components that are going to help you automatically scale, et cetera. And the further you go into the Edge, the less of these competence you can afford. So you have to make trade-offs when you reduce the size of the device. Today, what Red Hat offers, is really concentrated to where we can deliver a full OpenShift experience. So the smallest environments on which we would recommend to run OpenShift at the Edge is a single node is roughly 24 gigabytes of RAM, which is you could buy it, sorry, which is already a relatively big Edge device. And when you go a step lower then, that's where we would recommend using a standard rail for Edge configuration or something similar. Not Kubernetes anymore. >> So you said single node, are you let's double click on that for a second. Is that a single physical node that is abstracted in a way to create some level of logical redundancy? When you say single node, walk us through that. We've got containers that are in pods, so what are we talking about? >> You have, based on your requirements, you can have different way of addressing your compute need at the Edge. You can have those smallest of clusters. And this would be three nodes that are delivered, with is the control plane and the worker nodes integrated into one. When you want to go a step further, you could use worker nodes that are controlled remotely via a central control plane that is at a central site. And when you want to go, even one step further deploy Kubernetes on a very small machine, but that remains fully functional even if disconnected that's when you would use the thing that is not anymore a cluster, which is a single note, Kubernetes where you still have access to the full Kubernetes API, regardless of the connectivity of your site, whether it's active or not, whether you're at sea or in the air or not. And that's where we still offer some form of software high vulnerability, because Kubernetes, even on a single node, it'll still detect if a container dies and restarted and provide similar functionality like this, but it won't provide hardware availability since we are a single node. >> And that makes sense. Yeah, that makes, yeah, it makes perfect sense. And I would suggest that we refer to that as a single node cluster, just because we like to mix it up with terminology in our business and sometimes confuse people with it. >> Technically, that was the choice we made, actually. You like to call it a cluster because it's not a cluster >> Exactly. No, I appreciate that. Absolutely. So what's be explicit about what the trade-offs are there. Let's say that I'm thinking of deploying something at the Edge, and I'm going use Kubernetes to orchestrate my container environment and pretend for a moment that space and cost aren't huge limiting factors. I could put a three node cluster in, but the idea of putting in a single node is very, it's attractive. Where does, where's the line drawn in terms of what you would recommend from, you know, what are the trade offs? What am I losing, going to the single node cluster? See I just called that. >> Well, in a nutshell, you're losing hardware high availability. Meaning if one of your server fails since you only have one server, you lose everything. And there is no way around that. That's the biggest trade-off. Then you have also a trade-off on the memory used by the control plane, which you won't be able to use to do something else. So if I have a site with excellent connectivity and the biggest loss of connectivity might be counted in hours, maybe a remote worker use a better solution because this way, I have a single central-side that carries my control plane, and I can use all the RAM and all the CPU's on my local site to deploy my workloads, not to carries a control plane. To give you an example of these trade-off in the telco space, for example, if you're deploying an antenna in a city, you have plenty of antennas covering that city. And therefore, the loss of one antenna is not a big deal. So in that case, you will be tempted to use a remote worker because you will be maximizing your use of the RAM on the sites for the workload, which is let's have people establish communication using their phones. But now, we take another antenna that we are getting to locate in a very remote location. There, if this antenna fail, everybody fails. There's nobody that is able to make calls, even emergency vehicles cannot discuss together very often. So in that case, it's a lot better to have an autonomous deployment, something where the control plane and the workload itself are being run in one box. And this one box in fact can be duplicated. There could be a another box that is either seating in a truck in case of emergency or off, but on the antenna site, so that in case of a major failure, you have a possibility to re to restore it. So it really depends on what's your sets of constraints in terms of availability in SIM of efficiency of your RAM use is going to be that it's going to make you choose between one or the other of the deployment models. >> No, that's a great example. And so it sounds like it's not a one size fits all world, obviously. Now, from the perspective of the marketplace, looking in at Red Hat, participating in this business, some think of Red Hat as the company that deployed Linux 20 years ago. Help us make that connection between Red Hat today and what you've been doing for the last 20 years and this topic of Edge computing, 'cause some people don't automatically think of Red Hat an Edge computing. I do, I think they should, (chuckles) but help us understand that. >> Yeah, obviously a lot of people consider that Red Hat is Red Hat, Linux, and that's it. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux is what we've been known since our beginnings 25 years ago, and what has made our early success. But we consider ourselves more of an infrastructure company. We have been offering for the past 20 years, the various component that you need to deploy server, run and manage your workloads across data centers and make sure that you can store your data, and that you can automate your operations on top of this infrastructure. So we really consider ourselves much more of a company that offers everything that enables you to run your servers and run your workloads on top of your server. And that includes a tool to do virtualization, that includes tool to do continuous deployment of containers. And that's where Kubernetes entered in play about 10 years ago. Well, first it was OPAs that then became Kubernetes and the OpenShift offering that we have today. >> Yeah. Thanks for that. So I have, I've got a final question for you. It's a little bit off topic, but it's related, this is in the category of Nick predicts. So when does Nick predict that we will get to a point where we tip beyond the 50/50 point cloud versus on-premises IT spending, if you accept today that we're still in the neighborhood of 75 to 80% on-premises. When will we hit the 50/50 mark? I'm not asking you for the hundred percent cloud date, but give us a date, you give us a month and a year for 50/50. >> Given the progression of cloud, if there was no Edge, we could said two to three years from now, we would be at this 50/50 mark. But the funny thing is that at the same time, as the cloud progresses, people start realizing that they have needs that needs to be solved locally. And this is why we are deploying Edge-based solution, solution which reliably can provide answers, regardless of the connectivity to the cloud, regardless of the bandwidth. There are things that I would never want to do, like feeding a size on feeds from 4K cameras, into my cloud environment that won't scale, I won't have the bandwidth to do so. And therefore, maybe the answer to your question is, it's going to be asymptotic, and it's almost impossible to predict. >> So that is a much better answer than giving me an exact date and time, because (chuckles) because it reveals exactly the reality that we're living in. Again, there is, you know, it's fit for function. It's not cloud for cloud's sake, compute resources, data, resources have a place that they naturally belong oftentimes. And oftentimes that is on the Edge, whether it's on the edge of the edge of the world in a sailboat or out in a single server, not node, or I keep wanting to single node cluster, it's killing me. I dunno why, I think it's so funny, but a single node implementation of OpenShift where you can run Kubernetes on the Edge, it's a fascinating subject. Anything else that you want to share with us that we didn't get? >> I think one aspect that we never talk enough is how do you manage at the scale of Edge? Because even though each Edge site is very small, you can have thousands, even hundreds of thousands of these single node something that are running all over the place. And I think that what you're seeing in advent cluster management for Kubernetes, and particularly the 2.4 version that we are going to be announcing this week and actually releasing in November is I think a pretty good answer to that problem on how do I deploy with zero touch these devices? How do I update them, upgrade them? How do I deploy the workloads on top of that? How do I ensure to have the right tooling to deploy that at the scale? And we've done the testing now of ACM with up to 2,000 clusters, connected to a single ACMs. And in the future, we are planning on building federation of those, which really gives us the possibility to provide the tooling needed to manage at its scale. >> Excellent. Excellent. Yeah. That's whenever we start talking about anything in the realm of containerization and Kubernetes scale starts to become an issue. It's no longer a question of a human being managing 10 servers and 50 applications. We start talking about tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of instances where it's beyond human scale. So that's obviously something that's very, very important. Well, Nick, I want to thank you for becoming a Kube veteran once again. Thanks for joining this Kube Conversation from Dave Nicholson, this has been a Kube Conversation in anticipation of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2021. Thanks for tuning in. (bright music)

(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 theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, and welcome to another CUBE Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman coming to you from our Boston area office. We've been in the cloud native ecosystem for many years. We know many open source projects, really helping to drive innovation, help companies modernize what they're doing. And one of the companies that leads one of those initiatives, happy to welcome to the program, we're going to be talking to the co-founder and CTO of Styra, that is Tim Hinrichs. First time on theCUBE, of course, company behind OPA. Tim, thank you for joining us. Welcome to the program. >> Hi Stu, thanks for having me. >> All right, so we've had the CEO of Styra, Bill Mann, on the program before, he's many time CUBE alum, it's your first time, and I always love when I get the founder on the program. Of course the question is, give us the why Tim. There's no shortage of tools out there in the industry, but as we've seen in the ecosystem, there's always companies, I wish something could happen, I wish we had something there. Often they've built it for themselves, and then, create a project. So bring us back a little bit to that origin story and what you and the team, what was the inspiration? >> So when we... the first thing to know is that really at Styra what we're focused on is helping enterprises that are embracing cloud native technology, sort of enforce and control the authorization policies across all their different Cloud native software. So I remember authorization is that problems of which people and which machines can perform which actions on software. And so the way this all got started was we were at DIEMware, before we founded Styra, and we were talking to a number of our customers from finance and tech, and what they did was they had built one of these things. They had built a unified solution policy to manage their authorization needs across many different pieces of software. So at that point we knew that the problem was very real, cause people had to solve it themselves. And so when- >> I'm sorry Tim. Just one thing to make sure I understand this. So in the policy management you talk about there, help me understand how that fits into say identity management which is one of the top things we think about when I'm managing my IT, when I go to the Cloud. It seems related but different, yes? >> Absolutely, yeah. So identity management is really this problem of who are you? It's often solved, from a user's point of view, by providing a username and a password, or a thumbprint, or a multi-factor authentication. That's an important problem that needs to be solved. That's authentication or identity. And it's really about proving who you are. But authorization is the next step, it's about what actions can you perform once you've convinced the machine who you are. And so really that's the piece that we focus on. >> All right, yeah, once can we get people in we need... It's usually you want to give them the least amount of access possible. We understand that from a security standpoint, we need to do this. So you've said what the kind of problem was, and that this is there so how open source?... I mean we know often it's, there's many reasons why projects end up open source. So give us the journey here. >> So it started, we've really got two pieces of software, So one of which, as you say is completely open source, it's become the open policy agent project, we decided to open source it and then eventually donate it to the CNCF because it's sort of mission in life is to make authorization decisions make decisions about if an action that a user or machine is trying to take a safe or not. And, that project is really designed to be a decision maker across all the different kinds of software in the cloud native ecosystem. And so naturally, there's a need for a lot of expertise about a whole bunch of different areas, about a whole bunch of different pieces of software and the best way to sort of leverage all of the world's knowledge about all those different pieces of software is to put that project out into the open. And so for us, it was just an easy, very easy thing to do. Every single line of OPA of code that goes into OPA has been done. >> Well, absolutely it's a project I know I've seen the stickers, I've seen people talking about it in the breakout at KubeCon CloudNativeCon shows. Let's not leave everybody, waiting for the news though Tim, it had been an incubating project, believe you've got some news for us. Yeah, absolutely so OPA has now officially graduated, it's now moved from incubation into the graduation portion the CNCF. And for us, it's really exciting because it really is a reflection of the maturity of the project. Right? There's so many people using OPA and using it to solve all kinds of different use cases. We're even seeing vendors pick it up and offer native integrations with their homegrown software. So it's really exciting to see the progress of the project has made >> It just for audience that might not be familiar. What does this mean now that it's graduated as a maturity level? Is it production? Ready? What what are those criteria that allowed to go from that incubating stage to the graduation? Yeah, so there are a bunch of criteria, but I think the biggest one really is really users in production, right? It has been proven at scale for many different users all over the world, right? CNCF just did a survey recently there, a couple hundred different organizations all across the world who were using open in some way, shape or form. We see it all the time and KubeCon and CloudNativeCon talks, you can hear all about all the folks who were using it. >> Yeah, so maybe it would help if you've got a customer example or use case that you can walk us through as to how exactly that fits. >> For sure yeah. So the nice thing about OPA and more generally Styra is that you can apply it to all different kinds of use cases. So there are a couple of very popular ones using it for Kubernetes admission control or micro service authorization, those are the two most popular right now. And they both work roughly the same way but I'll give you a concrete example. For Kubernetes, anytime some end users trying to spin up any resource, whether the pod or an Ingress or anything on the Kube cluster, you can integrate OPA with that Kube API server and allow open make a decision, is this new resource safe to deploy on the cluster? Or is it not? Micro service authorization works almost exactly the same way, every time one of those micro services receives an API call, it can ask OPA is this API call safe for me to off to execute or not? And so both of those are going to work in basically the same way and that's true for all the other applications and use cases for OPA. >> Okay, and give us some of the stats if you would, how many people how many companies and people contribute to it? What was the customer base look like? >> So think they're a bunch of interesting metrics I think that was the one that's most interesting to me is that number of downloads a week. Right now, we're at roughly a million downloads a week, which is super exciting. I remember those days when we hit that one million mark total and we were very excited. And so now we're at a point where it's every week, we're hitting a million downloads, all kinds of contributors as well and I think, another good metric there to think about are, talks I think we had nearly 50 talks, organic talks from end users on OPA that we ran across it last year. >> Well it's wonderful is the thing we love in that ecosystem there is it's not just using it contributing, to the code, sharing with the community. Tim, what are the challenges in this ecosystem? if you go to the CNCF website and you look at the landscape, it's a little bit scary and taunting just because there's so many different pieces. What I understand from OPA is, are there any dependencies there when you think about, the other services that it interacts with? Or does it just, kind of do its own thing enables customers? >> Yeah, so OPA is, wasn't designed to be a standalone project, right? It doesn't depend on really any other CNCF or really any other project. It was designed to make these policies of these authorization decisions and but at the same time, it's also designed to make it very easy to integrate with a wide range of software systems. And so, I think on the OPA website we've got over 25 different integrations that we are the community have built around OPA, to go ahead and give you and deliver on that vision of unified authorization. >> You mentioned that styro has kind of two pieces help us understand, what is graduating mean for customers in general? And for Styra? Help us understand a little bit more of the business that goes along with it. >> So like I said, that first piece that we build that first piece of software we built was the policy agent project open source, the second piece of software that we built is a control plane for OPA. The idea architecturally behind OPA is that you don't have one copy of OPA running, typically, you might have 10, or 100, or thousand copies of OPA running. And you do that for availability and performance aid for decision making. And so Styra second piece of software is what we call the declarative authorization service. It is a control plane and management plane, a single pane of glass that allows you to operationalize OPA at scale for the enterprise. So it really is designed to give you that ability to control and manage distribute policy, right policy log all the policy decisions for all those Opus. And so that's really where we're, that's the second piece of software that we're putting a lot of effort energy into. >> All right, now that the great graduation is there, what does this mean? Give us a little bit of the roadmap, you're the CTO, we know, there's always, feedbacks and other updates coming. So what should we be expecting to be seeing going forward? >> So there a couple of things I'll mention here, one of which is that with OPA we did a survey recently, just trying to get a sense as to what the community needs and how they're using OPA and so one of the things we found was that the fastest growing use case for OPA, it looks to be application authorization, right? So if you're building a custom application, maybe it's a banking application, that application needs to decide every time a user performs an action is this authorized or not? So if I'm trying to withdraw money from an account, is it safe or not? And so that's the fastest growing use case for OPA that we saw on that and so what I expect to see is more and more people talking about using OPA for that application level authorization. On the Styra side, I think what we're looking forward to is just continuing to chat with the community and understand what they need around operationalizing OPA and making that control plane, that management plane do all the things that enterprises need to operationalize OPA at scale. >> Tim, you've reached the graduation, which is a phenomenal milestone in the project there, there's so many other projects out there wonder what advice you would give to other people starting business, starting a project engaging with the open source community? What have you learned along the way? Any lessons learned? And what feedback would you give others? >> Absolutely, so if I'm talking to somebody else who's interested in, starting an open source project, I'll give them a little bit of advice. So the first of which is that certainly the code matters a lot, it's codes got to be technically sound, it's got to be solving real problems. Everybody understands that. I think what a lot of people understand less of is that when you start a project, you need to put a lot of energy into growing, that community that communication, you need to focus a lot, you need to reach out to end users, and actively engage with them. Help them understand what the project's good for. Help them be successful with it. And so I think that piece is what a lot of people don't really understand, and it's something that I think we that if more people did, we'd see a lot more successful open source projects. >> Alright, Tim, I'll let you have the final word and any final things you want to feed back to the community or, potential customers for Styra? >> Sure, so first of all, I'd like to say thank you to all of our community members, all the users who've worked with us, all the vendors who are taking her doing integrations with OPA, we'd love to see it, we'd love to see more of it. And at the end of the day, I got to say I'm super excited to be working both with OPA and our commercial declared authorization service really deliver on that vision of unified authorization and deliver that to the vote to the world at large. >> Tim, congratulations to you and the OPA team and Styra definitely looking forward to seeing you at the next gathering of the community. And we'l hear more updates in the future. >> Thanks so much for having me. Steve, this is great. >> All right, and be sure to check out the cube.net for all the back catalog of interviews that we've done, including with the CEO Styra as well as upcoming events that we will be at including, of course KubeCon CloudNativeCon North America happening later this year virtually. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2020 virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Hi, and welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Joep Piscaer, I'm covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon here remotely from the Netherlands. And I'm joined by Commvault, Mathew Pearson, he's a Senior Product Manager, as well as David Ngo, Vice President of Metallic Products and Engineering to talk about the cloud native space and data protection in the Cloud Native space. So both, welcome to the show. And I want to start off with kind of the why question, right? Why are we here obviously, but also why are we talking about data protection? I thought we had that figured out. So David, can you shed some light on how, data protection is totally different in the cloud native container space? >> Sure, absolutely, thank you. I think the thing to keep in mind is that, containers are an evolution and a revolution actually in the virtualization space in the cloud space. What we're seeing is that customers are turning more and more to SaaS based applications and infrastructure in order to modernize their data centers and their data state in their compute environments. And when they do that, they're looking for solutions that match how they deploy their applications. And SaaS for us is an important area of that space. So, Metallic is Commvault portfolio of SaaS delivered and SaaS native data protection capabilities and offerings to allow customers to take the advantage of the best SaaS that is easy to try, easy to buy, easy to deploy, no infrastructure required and combine that with the technology and experience of Commvault. It'll build over last 20 years to deliver an enterprise grade data protection solution delivered as SaaS. And so, with Kubernetes and deploying in the cloud and modernizing applications I think that's very appealing to customers to also be able to modernize their data protection. >> Yeah, so I get the SaaS part. I mean, SaaS is an important way of delivering services. It is especially in the mid-market, something customers prefer, they want to have that simplicity, that easy onboarding as well as the OPEX of paying a subscription fee instead of longer term fees. So, the delivery model makes sense that fits into, the paradigm of making it simple, getting started easily. I get that, but Metallic isn't a traditional backup solution in that sense, right? It's not backing up necessarily just physical machines or just virtual machines. It has a relevance in the cloud native space. And the way I understand it, and please, if you can shed some light on that, Matt, is how is it different? What does it do that kind of makes it stand apart? >> Yeah, look, what we've found is the application developers can be in control now. So it's not like a traditional backup, that's what's changed. At this point, the application developer is free to create the infrastructure that he or she needs. And that freedom has meant that a bunch of stateful applications, the apps that we didn't think were going to live in Kubernetes have made their way to Kubernetes and they're making their way fast. So why is Metallic different? Because it's taking its lead from the developer. So it's using things like namespaces and label selectors. So basically take input from the developer on what information is important and needs to be protected and then protecting it. So it's your easy button to keep that Kubernetes development protected while you keep pace with the innovation within the organization. >> So you raise a valid point, cloud native has many advantages. It also has an extra challenge to account for which is fragmentation, right? In the olden days, let's call it that. We had a virtual machine, maybe a couple dozen that made up an application. And it was fairly easy to pinpoint the kind of the sort of conference of an application. This is my application. But now with cloud native, applications data can basically live anywhere. In a single cloud vendor, in many different cloud accounts, across different services, even across the public clouds themselves, like in a true multi-cloud scenario and figuring out what is part of an application in that enormous fragmentation is a challenge I think is understated and underestimated in a lot of operational environments with customers, with their applications in production. And that's where I think a product needs to figure out how to make sure an application is still backed up, is still protected in the way that is necessary for that given application. So I wonder how that works with Metallic. How do you kind of figure out what part of that enormous fragmentation is part of a single application? >> Yeah, so Metallic effectively integrates and speaks natively with the kube-apiserver. So it's taking its lead from the system of truth which is the orchestrator, which is Kubernetes itself. So for example, if you say everything in your production namespace needs protection, every night or every four hours, whatever that may be, it steps out and asks Kubernetes what applications exist there. It then maps all of the associated API resources associated with that application including the persistent volumes and persistent volume claims, man throws up and grabs the data from them as well. And that allows us to then reapply or reschedule that application either back to that original cluster or to another one for application mobility, where they are. >> So how do you make sure you, it kind of, what's the central point where everything comes together for that given application? Is that something the developer does as part of their release process or as part of their CICD? How do you figure out what components are part of an application? >> That is definitely a big challenge in the industry today? So, today we use label selectors predominantly. We find developers have been educating us on what works for them. And they've said, "Our CICD system is going "to label everything associated with this app, "as namespaced, then non-named space resources. 'So just here, take my label, grab everything under that, "and you will be good." The reality is that doesn't work for every business. Some businesses drop things into a specific namespace. And then you've got the added challenge that all of your data doesn't actually just live in Kubernetes. What about your image registries? What about it HCD? What about your Source Code Control and CICD systems? So we're finding that even VMs as well are playing a part in this ecosystem right now until applications can fully migrate. >> Yeah, and then let's zoom out on that a little bit. I mean, I think it's great that developers now kind of have flipped the paradigm where backup and data protection used to be something squarely in the OPS domain. It's now made its way into the .dev domain where it's become fairly easy to tag resources as application X, application Y, and then it automatically gets pulled into the backup based on policies. I mean, that's great, but let's zoom out a little bit and figure out, why is this happening? Why are developers even being put in a position of backing up their applications? So David, do you want to shed some light on that for me? >> Sure, I think data protection is always going to be a requirement and you'll have persistent data, right? There are other elements of applications that will always need to be protected and data protection is often something that is an afterthought, but it's something that needs to be considered from the beginning. And Metallic in being able to support deployments, not just in the cloud, but on-premises as well. We support any number of certified distributions of Kubernetes, gives you the flexibility to make sure that there was apps and that data is protected no matter where it lives. Being able to do that from a single pane of glass, being able to manage your Kubernetes deployments in different environments is very important there. >> So let's dive into that a little bit. I hear you say, Certified Kubernetes Distributions. So what's kind of the common denominator we need to use Metallic in an environment? Because I hear On-Prem, I hear public cloud. So it seems to me like this is a pretty broad product in terms of what it supports in its scope. But what's the lowest common denominator for instance, in the On-Prem environment? >> Sure, so we support all CNCF certified distributions of Kubernetes today. And in the cloud, we support Azure with AKS and AWS with EKS. So you can really use the one Metallic environment, the one interface to be able to manage all of those environments. >> And so what about that storage underneath? Is that all through CSI? >> Yes. So we support CSI on the backend of the Kubernetes applications, and we can then protect all the data stored there. >> And so how does this, I mean, you acquired Hedvig about a year ago, I want to say. Not sure on the exact date, but you acquired Hedvig a little while ago. So how does that come into play in Metallic offering? >> Sure, the Hedvig distributed storage platform is a fantastic platform on which to provision and scale Kubernates's applications and clusters. And that having full integration with Kubernetes on the storage side, we support that natively and really builds on the value that Commvault can bring as a whole with all of its offerings as a platform to Kubernetes. >> All right. So, zooming out just a little more, I want to get a feel for the cover of the portfolio of Commvault, as we're ushering into this cloud native era, as we're helping customers make that move and make that transition. What's the positioning of Metallic basically in the transformation customers are going through from On-Prem kind of lift and shift cloud into the cloud native space? >> Yeah, so with today's announcements, our hybrid cloud support and our hybrid cloud initiatives really help customers manage data wherever it lives as I've mentioned earlier. Customers can start with workloads On-Prem and start protecting workloads that they either have migrated or starting to build in the cloud natively and really cover the gamut of infrastructure and hypervisors and file systems and storage locations amongst all of these locations. So from our perspective, we think that hybrid is here to stay, right? There are very few customers who are either going to be all on-premises or all in the cloud. Most customers have some requirement that keeps them in a hybrid configuration, and we see that being prevalent for quite some time. So supporting customers in their transformation, right? Where they are moving applications from on-premises to the cloud, either refactoring or lift and shift, or what have you. It's very important to them, it's very important for us to be able to support that motion. And we look forward to helping them along the way. >> Awesome, so one last question for Matt. I mean, Metallic is a set of servers, right? That means you run it, you operate it, you build it. So I wonder, is Metallic itself cloud native? How does it scale? What are kind of the big components that Metallic has made up of? >> So Metallic itself is absolutely cloud native. It is sitting inside Azure today. I won't go into all the details. In fact, David could probably provide far more detail there. But I think Metallic is cloud native with respect to the fact that it's speaking natively to your applications, your cloud instances, your Vms. And then it's giving you the agility and the ability to move them where you need them to be. And that's assisting people in that migration. So in the past, we helped people get from P to V. Now that there are virtualized, applications like Metallic can protect you wherever you are and get you to wherever you need to be, especially into your next cloud of choice. And there's always another cloud. What I'm interested to see and what I'm hoping to see out of KubeCon is how are we doing with KubeVirt and Kubernetes becoming the orchestrator of the data center. And how are we doing with some of these other projects like application CRDs and hierarchical namespaces that are truly going to build a multi-tenanted software defined, distributed application ecosystem, that Metallic I can speak natively to via Kubernetes. >> Awesome. Well, thank you both for being with me here today. I certainly learned a ton about Metallic. I learned a lot about the challenges in cloud native that'll certainly be an area of development in the next couple of years. As you know, that the CNCF will continue to support projects in this space and vendors to work with us in that space as well. So that's it for now. I'm Joep Piscaer, I'm covering for KubeCon here remotely from the Netherlands. I will see you next time, thanks. (bright upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and ecosystem partners. >> Hi, and welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2020 in Europe, the virtual edition of course. We're talking to practitioners, we're talking to contributors, we're talking to end users from around the globe where they are, and of course when we talk about the CNCF, it's not just Kubernetes, there's a lot of projects in there, and it's not just for building things in the cloud, one of the interesting use cases that we've been talking about the last year or two has been about how edge computing fits into this whole ecosystem. To help us dig in a little bit deeper into that conversation, welcome on board one of our CUBE alumni, Nick Barcet, he is a senior director of technology strategy at Red Hat. Nick, great to see you again, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for inviting me again. >> All right, so as I teed up, containerization and Kubernetes, a lot of times people think about it's the big public cloud that's my data center, but of course, cloud is not a destination, there's so much happening with the containerized world, and of course these lightweight environments, when we can make them lightweight, makes sense to go to the edge, so if you could, just tell us where we are with the state of containerization and the cloud-native ecosystem, and where does that fit with edge computing today? >> So what we're seeing currently is every ISV, every customer we talk with, are converting to developing their application with container as a target. This is making it so much simpler for them to be able to establish their application wherever they want. Of course, when we add, for example, the operator framework that we just got accepted into the CNCF, and normalize how you're going to do day one and day two of the life cycle of this container, this is making things a lot simpler. And this is allowing us to have the same principle reapplied for deployments happening in the cloud, on your private data center, and anywhere at the edge. And that's really the core of our strategy, whether in the open source community, or as a commercial company. It is to make all these different footprints absolutely equal when you are writing code, when you're deploying code, when you're managing it. >> Yeah, Nick, we talk about the edge from my standpoint, tend to think that it is going to need a lighter weight, smaller footprint than if I'm thinking about my data center or the environment, reminds me some ways of of course Red Hat, but CoreOS was how do we build something that can be updated faster and be a thinner operating system. When we think of Kubernetes, Kubernetes today isn't as simple, there's obviously a lot of managed services out there, of course with OpenShift you've got an industry leading solution out there, but is there something different I need to do to be able to do containerization and Kubernetes at the edge? How does that fit? >> As a developer, as a user, I hope you have nothing different to do. It's our job to make our platform suit the requirement that are very specific to the edge. For example, if you're going to put Kubernetes inside of a plane, you're not going to be able to use all the space you want. You're very space-constrained. Or if you put it in a train, or if you put it in a boat, you're going to have different types of constraints. And we need to be able to have a implementation of Kubernetes that fits the smallest requirement, but still has the components that enables you as a developer or you as the administrator to feel at home regardless of the implementation of it. And that's the real beauty of what we are trying to do, and that's why we are not rushing it. We are trying to do it upstream so that we have something that is as smooth as possible across different points. >> All right, when we talk about going to the edge, one of the considerations of course is the network to get there. So help us connect what the impact is of 5G, where we are with the rollout, and are there any industries maybe that are leading the pack when it comes to this discussion? >> Yeah, so when I talk about 5G, I like to distinguish two things. There is 5G as the network that the carriers are currently deploying to support all kinds of terminal endpoints. And it happens that in order to have an efficient 5G deployment, operators use edge technology to deploy computing power as close as possible to the tower. So that the latency between your device and what is connecting you to the internet, the time packets take to go across that last mile, is as short as possible. There is a second case, which is also very interesting in the edge part. Which is private 5G, because private 5G enables the customer to establish his, let's say his own antenna, his own local 5G network completely secure, that will enable connecting sensors or devices of all kinds, without having to run wire, and in a much more reliable way than if you're using Wi-Fi or similar kinds of connectivity. So these two aspects are crucial to edge, one because edge is enabling the deployment of it, the other one because it's enabling the growth of the number of sensors without multiplying the cost like crazy. In terms of deployments, well, you know our largest reference is Verizon, and Verizon is moving forward with its plan. This is going very well, I believe they have communicated around this so I will point you around what Verizon has stated on their deployment, but we have multiple other customers starting their journey and clearly, the fact that we have the ability to deploy the stack on the version of Kubernetes that is basically the same regardless of where you're deploying it. That has the ability to support both containers and VM for those applications that are not yet containerized, makes a huge difference in the simplicity of this transition. >> Yeah, it's interesting, you talk about the conversion between virtual machines and containers. One of the big use cases often talked about for edge computing is in industrial manufacturing, and there you've got the boundary between IT and OT, and OT traditionally doesn't want to even think about all those IT conversions and challenges that they've got their proprietary systems for the most part, so is that something, speak to what you're seeing in that segment. >> So, it's interesting, because we just released last week our first inclination about the industrial blueprint that we are proposing. And for us, the convergence between IT and OT comes at when you have automation in the interpretation of data provided by sensors. This automation generally takes the form of machine learning algorithms, that are deployed on the factory floors, that analyzes the sensor data in real time, and will be able to predict failure, or will be able to look at video feed to verify that employees are respecting safety measures, and many many other applications. So because of the value this brings to the operational people, this bridge is very easily closed once you've resolved the technical difficulty, and the technical difficulty are mostly what I call plumbing. Plumbing that takes the form of norms being widely different between the industrial world and the IT world so far. Difficulties because you don't speak the same language. Let's take an example. In the industrial world, CAN is the way you're synchronizing time resources. In the IT world, we have been using other protocol, and more recently, especially in the telco space, we're using PTP. But it seems that PTP is now crossing over to the industrial world, so things are slowly but very safely evolving with something that is enabling this next wave of revolution into the factories. >> Yeah, Nick, it's been fascinating always to watch when you have some of those silos, and when is the right time that things pull together. Curious, one of the big questions in 2020 of course is with the global pandemic going on, which projects get accelerated, and which ones might be pushed off a little bit, where does edge computing fall in the conversations you're having with customers, is that something mission-critical that they need to accelerate, or is it something that might take a little bit longer, possibly even a delay with the current pandemic? >> So it's quite hard to answer this question because we are in an up slope. Is the slope less up now than it would have been without the pandemic, I have no way to tell. What I'm seeing is a constant uptick of people moving forward with their projects, in fact some projects are made, for example for worker safety, are made even more urgent than they were before, because by just analyzing video feed, you can ensure that your processes prevents too close contact between coworkers, and making them vulnerable in this way. So it really depends on the industry, I imagine, but right now we see the demand growing regardless of the pandemic. >> All right, Nick, you mentioned earlier that when I think about the edge, it should be the same code, I hopefully shouldn't have to think about it differently no matter where it is. That begs the question, help connect OpenShift for us as to what is Red Hat offering when it comes to the edge solution with OpenShift? >> So, you have, what we say is the edge is like an onion, where you have different layers. And every time I look at the onion in the perspective of a given customer, the layers are very different. But what we are finding is, similar requirements in terms of security, in terms of power consumption, in terms of space allocated for the hardware, and in order to satisfy these requirements, we found out that we need to build three new ways of deploying OpenShift, so that we can match all of these potential layers. The first one that we have released and are announcing this week is OpenShift deployable on three nodes, that means that you have your supervisors, your controllers, and your workers, on the same three physical machines. That's not the smallest footprint that we need, but it's a pretty good footprint to solve the case of a factory. In this environment, with these three nodes, we have something that is capable of being fully connected or working disconnected with. The second footprint that we need to be able to satisfy for is what we call single node deployment. And single node deployment from our perspective need to come in two flavors. The easy way, the one we're going to be releasing next quarter, is what we call remote worker node. So you have your controllers in a central site, and you can have up to 2000 remote worker nodes spread across as many site as you want. The caveat with this is that you need to have full time connectivity. So in order to solve for this connected site, then we need something that is a standalone single node deployment, and that's something that a lot of people have prototypes so far, and we are currently working on delivering a version that we hope is going to be satisfying 99% of the requirement, and is going to be fully upstream. >> All right, last piece on this, Nick, how should I be thinking about managing my environment when it comes to the edge, seen a lot of course from Red Hat at Red Hat Summit and talked to some of your peers, some recent announcements, so how do we plug in what's happening at the edge and make sure we've got full visibility and management across all of my environments? >> So if I had one word to explain what we need to do, it's GitOps. Basically, you need immutable deployments, you need to be pulling configuration and all information from a central site and adapt it to the local site, without manual intervention. You need full automation. And you need a tool to manage your policies on top of it, and of course aggregate information on how things are going. What we don't want is to have to sit one administrator per site. What we do not want is to have to send people on each site at the time of deployment. So you need to be abiding by this completely automated model in order to be edge compliant. Does that make sense? >> It does, and I'm assuming the ACM solution, Advanced Cluster Management, is a piece of that overall offer. >> Absolutely, ACM is the way we present, we organize policies, the way we get reporting information, and the way we do our GitOps automation. >> All right, so Nick, final question for you, give us a little bit of a look forward, you just mentioned earlier one of the things that's getting worked on is that single node disconnected type of solution. What else should we be looking at in the maturity of edge solutions in this containerizing Kubernetes world? >> So it's not only about the architecture that we need to support. It's a lot more about the workloads that we are going to have running there. And in order to help our customer make their choice, in how they design the network, we need to provide them with what we call blueprints. And in our mind, a blueprint is more than just a piece of paper. It's actually a complete set of instruction, abiding with this GitOps model that I described, that you can pull from a Git repository, that enables automation of the deployment of something. So for example, the first blueprint we are going to be releasing is the one for industrial manufacturing using AIML, and this is going to be something that we are going to be maintaining over time, accepting contribution from outside, and is an end to end example of how to do it in a factory. We are going to follow up with that with other blueprints for 5G, for private 5G, for how do you deploy that in maybe a healthcare environment, et cetera, et cetera, the idea here is to exemplify and help people make the right choices and also ensuring that the stack we provide at one point in time remains compatible given the complexity of the components we have in there over time, and that's really the thing that we think we need to be providing to our customers. >> All right, well Nick, thank you so much for giving us the update, in regards to edge computing, really important and exciting segment of the market. >> Thank you very much, 'twas a pleasure being with you once again. >> All right, and stay with us, lots more coverage from KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2020 in Europe, the virtual edition. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (calm music)

>> Voice over: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 virtual, brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Mittleman, and welcome back to theCUBE's Coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe for 2020. Get to talk to the participants in this great community and ecosystem where they are around the globe. And when you think back to the early days of containers, it was, containers, they're lightweight, they're small, going to obliterate virtualization is often the headline that we had. Of course, we know everything in IT tends to be additive. And here we are in 2020 and containers and virtual machines, living side by side and often we'll see the back and forth that happens when we talk about virtualization in containers. To talk about that topic specifically, happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Steve Gordon. He's the director of product management at Red Hat. Steve, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks so much Stu, it's great to be here. >> All right, as I teed up of course, virtualization was a wave that swept through the data center. It is a major piece, not only of what's in the data center, but even if you look at the public Clouds, often it was virtualization underneath there. Certain companies like Google, of course, really drove a container adoption. And often you hear when people talk about, I built something CloudNative, that underlying piece of being containerized and then using an orchestration layer like Kubernetes is what they talk about. So maybe stop for a sec, Red Hat of course, heavily involved in virtualization and containers, how you see that landscape and what's the general conversation you have with customers as to how they make the choice and how the lines blur between those worlds? >> Yeah, so at Red Hat, I think we've been working on certainly the current iteration of the next specialization with KVM for around 12 years and myself large portion of that. I think, one thing that's always been constant is while from the outside-in, specialization looks like it's been a fairly stable marketplace. It's always changing, it's always evolving. And what we're seeing right now is as people are adopting containers and even constructs built on top of containers into their workflows, there is more interest and more desire around how can I combine these things, recognizing that still an enormous percentage of my workloads are out there running in virtual machines today, but I'm building new things around them that need to be able to interact with them and springboard off of that. So I think for the last couple of years, I'm sure you yourself have seen a number of different projects pop up and the opensource community around this intersection of containers and visualization and how can these technologies compliment each other. And certainly KubeVirt is one of the projects that we've started in this space, in reaction to both that general interests, but also the real customer problems that people have, as they try and meld these two worlds. >> So Steve, at Red Hat Summit earlier this year, there was a lot of talk around container native virtualization. If you could just explain what that means, how that might be different from just virtualization in general, and we'll go from there. >> Sure, so back in, I think early 2017, late 2016, we started playing around this idea. We'd already seen the momentum around Kubernetes and the result the way we architected OpenShift, three at a time around, Kubernetes has this strength as an orchestration platform, but also a shared provider of storage, networking, et cetera, resources. And really thinking about, when we look at virtualization and containers, some of these problems are very common regardless of what footprint the workload happens to fit into. So leveraging that strength of Kubernetes as an orchestration platform, we started looking at, what would it look like to orchestrate virtual machines on that same platform right next to our application containers? And the extension of that the KubeVirt project and what has ultimately become OpenShift virtualization is based around that core idea of how can I make a traditional virtual machine to a full operating system, interact with and look exactly like a Kubernetes native construct, that I can use from the same platform? I can manage it using the same constructs, I can interact with it using the same console, all of these kinds of ideas. And then on top of that, not just bring in workloads as they lie, but enable really powerful workforce with people who are building a new application in containers that still need some backend components, say a database that's sitting in a VM, or also trying to integrate those virtual machines into new constructs, whether it's something like a pipeline or a service mesh. We're hearing a lot of questions around those things these days where people don't want to just apply those things to brand new workloads, but figure out how do they apply those constructs to the broader majority of their fleet of workflows that exist today. >> All right, so I believe back at Red Hat Summit, OpenShift virtualization was in beta. Where's the product that solution sets till today? >> Right, so at this year's KubeCon, we're happy to announce that OpenShift virtualization is moving to general availability. So it will be a fully supported part of OpenShift. And what that means is, you, as a subscriber to OpenShift, the platform, get virtualization as just an additional capability of that platform that you can enable as an operator from the operator hub, which is really a powerful thing for admins to be able to do that. But also is just really powerful in terms of the user experience. Like once that operator is enabled on your cluster, the little tab shows up, that shows that you can now go and create a virtual machine. But you also still get all of the metrics and the shared networking and so on that goes with that cluster, that underlies it all. And you can again do some really powerful things in terms of combining those constructs for both virtual machines and containers. >> When you talk about that line between virtualization and containers, a big question is, what does this mean for developers? How is it different from what they were using before? How do they engage and interact with their infrastructure today? >> Sure, so I think the way a lot of this current wave of technology got started for people was whether it was with Kubernetes or Docker before that, people would go and grab, easiest way they could grab compute for capacity was go to their virtual machine firm, whether that was their local virtualization estate at their company, or whether that was taking a credit card to public Cloud, getting a virtual machine and spinning up a container platform on top of that. What we're now seeing is, as that's transitioning into people building their workloads, almost entirely around these container constructs, in some cases when they're starting from scratch, there is more interest in, how do I leverage that platform directly? How do I, as my application group have more control over that platform? And in some cases, depending on the use case, like if they have demand for GPUs, for example, or other high-performance devices, that question of whether the virtualization layer between my physical host and my container is adding that much value? But then still wanting to bring in the traditional workloads they have as well. So I think we've seen this gradual transition where there is a growing interest in reevaluating, how do we start with container based architectures? To, okay, how has we transitioned towards more production scenarios and the growth in production scenarios? What tweaks do we make to that architecture? Does it still make sense to run all of that on top of virtual machines? Or does it make more sense to almost flip that equation as my workload mix gradually starts changing? >> Yeah, two thoughts come to mind on that. Number one is, are there specific applications out there, or I think about traditional VMs, often that Windows environments that we have there, is that some of the use case to bring them over to containers? And then also, once I've gotten it into the container environment, what are the steps to move forward? Because I have to expect that there's going to be some refactoring, some modernization to take advantage of the innovation and pace of change, not just to take it, containerize it and leave it. >> Yeah, so certainly, there is an enormous amount of potential out there in terms of Windows workloads, and people are definitely trying to work out how do they leverage those workloads in the context of OpenShift and Kubernetes based environment. And Windows containers obviously, is one way to address that. And certainly, that is very powerful in and of itself, for bringing those workloads to OpenShift and Kubernetes, but does have some constraints in terms of needing to be on a relatively recent version of Windows server and so on for those workloads to run in that construct. So where OpenShift virtualization helps with that is we can actually take an existing virtual machine workload, bring that across, even if it's say Windows server 2012, run it on top of the OpenShift virtualization platform as a VM, And then if or when you start modernizing more of that application, you can start teasing that out into actual containers. And that's actually something, it is one of our very early demos at Red Hat Summit 2018, I think was how you would go about doing that, and primarily we did that because it is a very powerful thing for customers to see how they can bring those, all the applications into this mix. And the other aspect of that I'll mention is one of our financial services customers who we've been working with, basically since that demo, they saw it from a hallway at Red Hat Summit and came and said, "Hey, we want to talk to you guys about that." One of the primary workload, is a Windows 10 style environment, that they happened to be bringing in as well. And that's more in that construct of treating OpenShift almost as a pool of compute, which you can use for many different workload types with the Windows 10 being just one aspect of that. And the other thing I'll say in terms of the second part of the question, what do I need to do in terms of refactoring? So we are very conscious of the fact that, if this is to provide value, you have to be able to bring in existing virtual machines with as minimal change as possible. So we do have a migration solution set, that we've had for a number of years, for bringing our virtual machines to Linux specialization stacks. We're expanding that to include OpenShift virtualization as a target, to help you bring in those existing virtual machine images. Where things do change a little bit is in terms of the operational approaches. Obviously, admin console now is OpenShift for those virtual machines, that does right now present a change. But we think it is a very powerful opportunity in terms of, as people get more and more production workloads into containers, for example, it's going to become a lot more appealing to have a backup solution, for example, that can cater to both the virtual machine workloads as well as any stateful container workloads you may have, which do exist in increasing numbers. >> Well, I'm glad you brought up a stateful discussion because as an industry, we've spent a long time making sure that virtual machines, have storage and have networking that is reliable in performance and the like. What should customers be thinking about and operators when they move to containers? Are there things that are different you manage bringing into, this brings them into the OpenShift management plane. So what else should I be thinking about? What do I need to do differently when I've embraced this? >> Yeah, so I think in terms of the things that virtual machine expects, the two big ones that come to mind to me are networking and storage. The compute piece is still there obviously, but I think is a little less complicated to solve just because the OpenShift and broader Kubernetes community have done such a great job of addressing that piece, and that's really what attracted us to it in the first place. But on the networking side, certainly the expectations of a traditional virtual machine are a little bit different to the networking model of Kubernetes by default. But again, we've seen a lot of growth in container based applications, particularly in the context of CloudNative network functions that have been pushing the boundaries of Kubernetes networking as well. That's resulted in projects like Motus, which allow us to give a virtual machine related to networking interface that it expects, but also give it the option of using the pod networking natively, for some of those more powerful constructs that are native to Kubernetes. So that's one of those areas where you've got a mix of options, depending on how far you want to go from a modernization perspective versus do I just want to bring this workload in and run it as it is. And my modernization is more built around it, in terms of the other container based things. Then similarly in storage, it's an area where obviously at Red Hat, we've been working close with the OpenShift container storage team, but we also work with a number of ecosystem partners on, not just how do we certify their storage plugins and make sure they work well both for containers and virtual machines, but also how do we push forward upstream efforts, around things like the container storage interface specification, to allow for these more powerful capabilities like snapshots cloning and so on which we need for virtual machines, but are also very valuable for container based workloads as well. >> Steve, you've mentioned some of the reasons why customers were moving towards this environment. Now that you're GA, what learnings did you have during beta? Are there any other customer stories you could share that you've learned along this journey? >> Yeah, so I think one of the things I'll say is that, there's no feedback like direct product in the hands of customer feedback. And it's really been interesting to see the different ways that people have applied it, not necessarily having set out to apply it, but having gotten partway through their journey and realized, hey, I need this capability. You have something that looks pretty handy and then having success with it. So in particular, in the telecommunications vertical, we've been working closely with a number of providers around the 5G rollouts and the 5G core in particular, where they've been focused on CloudNative network functions. And really what I mean by that is the wave of technology and the push they're making around 5G is to take what they started with network function virtualization a step further, and build that next generation network around CloudNative technologies, including Kubernetes and OpenShift. And as I've been doing that, I have been finding that some of the vendors are more or less prepared for that transition. And that's where, while they've been able to leverage the power of containers for those applications that are ready, they're also able to leverage OpenShift virtualization as a transitionary step, as they modernize the pieces that are taking a little bit longer. And that's where we've been able to run some applications in terms of the load balancer, in terms of a carrier grade database on top of OpenShift virtualization, which we probably wouldn't have set out to do this early in terms of our plan, but we're really able to react quickly to that customer demand and help them get that across the line. And I think that's a really powerful example where the end state may not necessarily be to run everything as a virtual machine forever, but that was still able to leverage this technology as a powerful tool in the context of our broadened up optimization effort. >> All right, well, Steve, thank you so much for giving us the updates. Congratulations on going GA for this solution. Definitely look forward to hearing more from the customers as they come. >> All right, thanks so much Stu. I appreciate it. >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU 2020, the virtual edition. I'm Stu Stu Mittleman. And thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Man: from around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with coverage of "Kubecon" and "CloudNativeCon Europe 2020", virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is "theCUBE's" coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, the virtual edition of course, it, this ecosystem has been bustling, a lot of activity in the five years that we've been covering it with "theCUBE" we've watched very much the maturation of what's going on. Remember, in the early days, it was open source projects, companies pulling all the pieces together. Now, there's a lot more things to choose from lots of projects, not just Kubernetes, but all the other pieces, and still lots of new innovations and new startups coming into the space. So happy to welcome to the program, have two first time guests from Spectro Cloud, first of all, we have the co founder and CEO Tenry Fu, and also Tina Notle who's the Vice President of product, Tina and Tenry, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Likewise. >> All right, so Tenry, as one of the co founders, I want to understand, you know, why Spectro Cloud? Why now, you know, many outsiders, would they have said for a while, you know, Kubernetes, it's just getting baked into all of the environment. They looked at all the platforms, whether you're talking, you know, Google and AWS or VMware, they all have their platforms, they all have their managed services offering. So help us understand, what your team does and how you differentiate from what's already existing. >> Absolutely yeah, so I actually used to work at VMware, I, and then, I saw clouds taking off right and then I left VMware, to start my first startup called CliQr Technologies, which focus on multicloud management. But at that time, really, multicloud management through a single pane of glass is obviously right, and then clicker later acquired by Cisco. So at Cisco, I kind of witness The Container and Kubernetes taking off, right? And it makes a lot of sense, right for the first time both the application workloads and infrastructure became truly portable across multiple environments, but also very interestingly at Cisco I observed there are many developer teams, right? That is adopting Kubernetes and everyone is doing a little bit different things, that because different teams, they have a different stack constructor requirements, like some for AI/ML, some, they need a different base OS, some they just don't want to have a different version, and a lot of existing solutions doesn't really provide this kind of flexibility to satisfy all the different needs, right? one size fit all, typically is a one size fit for nothing. So we asked ourselves, why can't we try to create a platform that will give people the flexibility, but not turning it into a DIY project, right, still have a full manageability, so that user don't need to worry about the upgrade, Day Two operations, governance so and so forth. >> Yeah to Tina, I know when I've looked at your product, it's discussed as layers, which my background's in networking. So I love seeing things visually and understanding the pieces as they lay out the stack. So maybe help us understand a little bit as to, you know, that the flexibility that you give and how it's not just the Paradox of Choice, just too many options out there and you know, developers left to create their own mess that they can't then support. (laughing) >> Yeah, so you know, as Tenry mentioned, offering folks flexibility without turning into a do it yourself, you know, hot mess is what we're what we're helping People do at Spectrol Cloud, the core of our solution, the core of the differentiation within our solution is around this concept of a cluster profile, and as you mentioned, cluster profile basically allows people to define in a layered fashion, what's part of their Kubernetes infrastructure stack? So at the bottom, you're talking, what's the base operating system? What's the version of Kubernetes, that's going to be part of clusters that uses profile? What's your networking and storage interface look like? And then on top of that, you have a number of optional layers. So again, you know, back to flexibility manageability, we give people options around what those other layers look like on top. They include everything from security, logging, monitoring, etc, just anything that you want to go ahead and kind of bake into a definition, a profile of what a cluster should look like in one of your deployed environments. >> All right, well, Want to make sure I understand when you talk about Kubernetes in there, can it be, you know, say VMware with Vsphere7, now has Kubernetes support. Red Hat open shift is an option, all of the cloud players have their, you know, AKS, EKS. And they're like, can I bake that Kubernetes in or are you taking a different approach? >> We're going with upstream vanilla Kubernetes today, that allows us to go ahead and provide what's newest within the ecosystem, and let people go ahead and have a really open, really open solution that's replying. >> Okay, so when I talk to, when you look out there, a lot of companies are saying how can I manage multiple clusters? So if you look at what Google, Microsoft and VMware, they're talking about, we can manage our clusters and we can also help you with those other clusters. How does that impact Tenry, your Solution, doesn't it need to be, it's just the upstream solution that I put into that cluster profile, or can I connect to, say a managed cloud solution? >> Yeah, so I think in terms the multi class management or the consistency is really the key, right. So through this class profile concept, not only it can be used as the initial template to deploy a cluster, but it can also use as a single source for choose, to drive the cluster Lifecycle Management income upgrade. So right now, as Tina mentioned, we primarily focus on upstream, so that we want to provide the maximum flexibility in terms of our end to end Kubernetes stack. But we do also have a plan, that down the road that we go into in Brownfield existing clusters. So that enterprise, existing investment to their Kubernete infrastructure can be under managed by us. >> Well there always reaches a time when the brand new technology gets called Brownfield. I think that's the first time I've heard something like, you know, EKS or the like, you know, referred to as Brownfield. Tina, you know, when I think back to my history with integrated solutions, obviously, if I have the various pieces, it should be easier for me to stay on the latest make upgrades, roll things forward or roll things back, but you know, what, give us if you could some of the, the key values of, you know, building these cluster profiles, what that enables for your customers. >> So the key around cluster profiles, we offer this policy based management, so you describe as an administrator, what it is that those clusters need to look like, right? And we've got, we adopt a declarative desired state, you know, management approach along what Kubernetes does itself, and so what you're able to get through adopting, utilize cluster profiles, is this guarantee that from deployment and then into day two as well, what you've described in this profile, winds up maintaining itself, it remains true of the clusters that have been deployed. So what it is that you require as far as the operating system, what is required as far as some configuration options, etc. So the profile itself winds up being ground source of truth and around what it is that you've got running at all these various locations, across clouds, across different clusters, etc. >> All right. Tenry, you mentioned that having things more standardized is going to help customers, absolutely, we saw that in data centers for a long time, and standardized, how do you help customers make sure that the configuration that they build are going to work, are going to be stable, if they make changes that they're not going to get things out of sync. Is there you know, interoperability matrix or some other ways that we're trying to make sure that customers, you know, stay on the rails, if you will. >> Absolutely right, So through our system, right, all the integration points, we carry the additional metadata, right to basically give the hint about compatibility, resource constraints, right, and also the upgradability, in terms of moving from one version to another. So this way, we can kind of give you some guidance, when they initially construct a class profile, what will work together nicely and then what will not, right. And then on top of that, when upgrading from one existing cluster to a new version of a class profile definition, then we can look at the environment, right to understand, right, if there's something that potentially incompatible will popping up right, so we call that pre pilot integration, check right and also post deployment, we also allow user to run additional conformance tests. So that make sure the cluster everything is actually is still acting as as it's supposed to be. >> Another way to explain that is that you know, the cluster profile concept has a lot of flexibility attached with to it, right? That's a lot of power, it can get you into trouble if you don't have the right safety nets and safety harnesses underneath you. So we have a multi layered approach to helping make sure that people are getting benefit out of that flexibility. >> Wonderful and I'm wondering did, when you've had more customers using this, is their shared information, and if there're community guidelines that help, you know, understand when it's going to be okay, hey, 1.19's out, we're looking at 1.20. You might want to do this or hey, if you're using this piece of networking, you might want to wait a little bit before you go to the next version. >> That's definitely the idea over time, folks that are engaging with us, are very interested in the fact that, because of the fact that we're SaaS management platform, SaaS space management platform today, that it offers them the opportunity to learn from their peers, if you will, right, and their peers experiences. On top of that, we also have the ability to watch just what's been going on in other deployments in the Kubernetes ecosystem and we can make sure that all that's available, as Tenry mentioned, you know, in the form of the metadata that's on top of those packs. >> All right, how about how do you price this solution? When I look out there, I talked about Kubernetes baked into all the platforms, oftentimes, it can be baked into ELA, It's part of, you know, my just general cloud spend from that platform. So how do you do the pricing and, you know, are you plugged into any of the cloud marketplaces yet? >> Yeah, so flexibility is really part of our DNA. So even for pricing, we want to provide the maximum flexibility to our customer. So unlike some traditional solution typically is priced based on number of pause, right, a year, or even number of nodes, right. So we actually price based on number of CPU cores of all workers node under management by hour. So what we call those, core hour under management, right, and then every thousand core hours at one unit, we call kilo core hours. So kind of similar to how electricity is consumed, right, so this way, based on these core hour consumption, we allow user to either pay as you go as amongst the on demand plan, or you can do an annual commitment. >> And we are in process on the marketplaces. >> Yeah. >> All right, how about, we talked about Kubernetes, I think service mesh are part of it. What in this Kube, kubecon cloud native con ecosystem, which projects are the most tied into what you're doing anything that specter cloud is particularly contributing to that you can share? >> Yeah, so our system is built on top of Kubernetes cluster API project. So we are one of the contributor to class API, we are actively adding additional functionality to enhance class API, especially by in some other VMware environment for some custom use case, such as static IP or some special placement behaviors, and also adding additional contribute on different cloud support. >> Yeah, and as far as things that we're watching, and clearly we're, we've seen a dramatic increase in the number of people on our customer front that are interested in actual deployment, of service mesh now. So that's something that you know, we're going to be more engaged in over time. And another one that we're hoping to see, check out more talks around Kubecon is AI ML, right? A lot of interest on the part of customers around AIML use cases. >> Yeah, absolutely edge and AI and ML. Definitely very hot topics to conversation this year at the, at the Europe show, expect that to continue. Tina, I'm wondering, do you have any customer examples, maybe even anonymized that could kind of just explain the key values that your customers are seeing using your solution? >> Yeah, sure, so we've got one of our earliest customers is a Canadian financial, who came to us because, they were looking to figure out how to manage consistently at scale, and they have the problem that Tenry described earlier, around, I've got different development teams, they have different needs, and you know, how do you satisfy all those guys without going crazy, right? They've got an AIML use case, that's a special snowflake they've got two separate teams in different groups that would like to be under an IT management umbrella. That's a convergence use case that they're looking at, so kind of a typical example of somebody that we think of is, you know, a really good set of people for us to be having conversations with. We've also been working with a telecom provider that it's in a similar, similar vein actually, there's an AIML, there are multiple teams of different infrastructure, and they want to be able to consistently manage it's a story that we're seeing over and over again, thankfully. >> Yeah, we also see right from I think, at individual group or team level, right. There are a lot of, kind of a product owner or data scientists that they really want to have a kind of an easy button to quickly be able to provision Kubernetes clusters that suit for their need, right. And a lot of these groups, their primary focus is really the application, right? It's not their interest to spend a lot of time and resource on Kubernete management, in terms of deploying update, or secure an operation. So through us, they can very easily spin up a Kubernetes cluster, whether it's for AIML or for developing experiment, they can very quickly do that But with the flexibility, because a lot of existing solution, they may limit the version of Kubernetes clusters, they may limit the what kind of integration they can do. >> Yeah, Tenry you, we talked a little bit earlier about, you know, potential integration down the road. I'm curious, just there's so many companies creating innovations out there, you know, say for example, one that I hear a lot of feedback on is AWS now has far gate support for their EKS offering. Is that Something down the line you should look at or do you have some guidance as to how customers should be thinking about that, and if they want that kind of functionality, how they would get that with a solution like yours? >> Yeah, actually, we really share the same vision as AWS, right. So we believe, ultimately is the infrastructure really should be transparent to application developers, right, and it should be boundary-less. So our goal is not only manage Kubernetes, across multiple environment, but eventually we will be able to link all these cluster together, to make them acting as a single infrastructure. So developers, they can still use their familiar Kubernetes interface to deploy and manage their application, but without worrying about the how infrastructure underneath is operated or managed, right. So this in a way will eventually become kind of a phallic model, but across multiple cluster and multiple clouds. >> Alright, Tina, if maybe if you could give us the final takeaway, people attending Kubecon, cloud native con, what's the one thing that if you know they have a problem, they should be coming to Spectro cloud to hear more about? >> Yeah, sure so what Spectrol cloud aims to do is help enterprises not have to trade off between flexibility and control of their infrastructure, and manageability of use that stuff's that's the main, the main thing that we would like people to remember. >> All right, well Tenry and Tina, thank you so much for sharing with our community a little bit about Specter Cloud great talking to you and look forward to hearing more in the future. >> Thanks so much. >> Thank you too. >> All right, and stay tuned more coverage from Kubecon Cloud Native Con 2020. I'm Stu MiniMan and thank you, for watching "theCUBE." (light music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, Virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is CUBEs coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2020 in Europe, the virtual edition and of course one of the things we love when we come to these conferences is to get to the actual practitioners, understanding how they're using the various technologies especially here at the CNCF show, so many projects, lots of things changing and really excited. We're going to talk about security in a slightly different way than we often do on theCUBE so happy to welcome to the program from Sera4 I have Jeff Klink who's the Vice President of Engineering and Cloud. Jeff, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks too, thanks for having me. >> All right so I teed you up there, give us if you could just a quick thumbnail on Sera4, what your company does and then your role there. >> Absolutely so we're a physical hardware product addressing the telco markets, utility space, all of those so we kind of differentiate herself as a Bluetooth lock for that higher end space, the highest security market where digital encryption is really an absolute must. So we have a few products including our physical lock here, this is a physical padlock, it is where door locks and controllers that all operate over the Bluetooth protocol and that people can just use simply through their mobile phones and operate at the enterprise level. >> Yeah, I'm guessing it's a little bit more expensive than the the padlock I have on my shed which is getting a little rusty and needs a little work but it probably not quite what I'm looking for but you have Cloud, you know, in your title so give us if you could a little bit you know, what the underlying technology that you're responsible for and you know, I understand you've rolled out Kubernetes over the last couple of years, kind of set us up with what were the challenges you were facing before you started using that? >> Absolutely so Stu We've grown over the last five years really as a company like in leaps and bounds and part of that has been the scalability concern and where we go with that, you know, originally starting in the virtual machine space and, you know, original some small customers in telco as we build up the locks and eventually we knew that scalability was really a concern for us, we needed to address that pretty quickly. So as we started to build out our data center space and in this market it's a bit different than your shed locks. Bluetooth locks are kind of everywhere now, they're in logistics, they're on your home and you actually see a lot of compromises these days actually happening on those kind of locks, the home security locks, they're not built for rattling and banging and all that kind of pieces that you would expect in a telco or utility market and in the nuclear space or so you really don't want to lock that, you know, when it's dropped or bang the boat immediately begins to kind of fall apart in your hands and two you're going to expect a different type of security much like you'd see in your SSH certificates, you know, a digital key certificate that arrives there. So in our as we grew up through that piece Kubernetes became a pretty big player for us to try to deal with some of the scale and also to try to deal with some of the sovereignty pieces you don't see in your shed locks. The data sovereignty meeting in your country or as close to you as possible to try to keep that data with the telco, with the utility and kind of in country or in continent with you as well. That was a big challenge for us right off the bat. >> Yeah, you know Jeff absolutely, I have some background from the telco space obviously, there's very rigorous certifications, there's lots of environments that I need to fit into. I want to poke at a word that you mentioned, scale. So scale means lots of things to lots of different people, this year at the KubeCon CloudNativeCon show, one of the scale pieces we're talking about is edge just getting to lots of different locations as opposed to when people first thought about, you know, scale of containers and the like, it was like, do I need to be like Google? Do I have to have that much a scale? Of course, there is only one Google and there's only a handful of companies that need that kind of scale, what was it from your standpoint, is it you know, the latency of all of these devices, is it you know, just the pure number of devices, the number of locations, what was what was the scale limiting factor that you were seeing? >> It's a bit of both in two things, one it was a scale as we brought new customers on, there were extra databases, there was extra identity services, you know, the more locks we sold and the more telcos we sold too suddenly what we started finding is that we needed all these virtual machines and sources in some way to tie them together and the natural piece to those is start to build shared services like SSO and single sign on was a huge driver for us of how do we unite these spaces where they may have maintenance technicians in that space that work for two different telcos. Hey, tower one is down could you please use this padlock on this gate and then this padlock on this cabinet in order to fix it. So that kind of scale immediately showed us, we started to see email addresses or other on two different places and say, well, it might need access into this carrier site because some other carrier has a equipment on that site as well. So the scale started to pick up pretty quickly as well as the space where they started to unite together in a way that we said, well, we kind of have to scale to parts, not only the individuals databases and servers and identity and the storage of their web service data but also we had to unite them in a way that was GDPR compliant and compliant with a bunch of other regulations to say, how do we get these pieces together. So that's where we kind of started to tick the boxes to say in North America, in Latin America, South America we need centralized services but we need some central tie back mechanism as well to start to deal with scale. And the scale came when it went from Let's sell 1000 locks to, by the way, the carrier wants 8000 locks in the next coming months. That's a real scalability concern right off the bat, especially when you start to think of all the people going along with those locks in space as well. So that's the that's the kind of first piece we had to address and single sign on was the head of that for us. >> Excellent, well you know, today when we talk about how do i do container orchestration Kubernetes of course, is the first word that comes to mind, can you bring us back though, how did you end up with Kubernetes, were there other solutions you you looked at when you made your decision? What were your kind of key criteria? How did you choose what partners and vendors you ended up working with? >> So the first piece was is that we all had a lot of VM backgrounds, we had some good DevOps backgrounds as well but nobody was yet into the the container space heavily and so what we looked at originally was Docker swarm, it became our desktop, our daily, our working environment so we knew we were working towards microservices but then immediately this problem emerged that reminded me of say 10, 15 years ago, HD DVD versus Blu-ray and I thought about it as simply as that, these two are fantastic technologies, they're kind of competing in this space, Docker Compose was huge, Docker Hub was growing and growing and we kind of said you got to kind of pick a bucket and go with it and figure out who has the best backing between them, you know from a security policy, from a usage and size and scalability perspective, we knew we would scale this pretty quickly so we started to look at the DevOps and the tooling set to say, scale up by one or scale up by 10, is it doable? Infrastructure as code as well, what could I codify against the best? And as we started looking at those Kubernetes took a pretty quick change for us and actually the first piece of tooling that we looked at was Rancher, we said well there's a lot to learn the Kubernetes space and the Rancher team, they were growing like crazy and they were actually really, really good inside some of their slack channels and some of their groups but they said, reach out, we'll help you even as a free tier, you know and kind of grow our trust in you and you know, vice versa and develop that relationship and so that was our first major relationship was with Rancher and that grew our love for Kubernetes because it took away that first edge of what am i staring at here, it looks like Docker swarm, they put a UI on it, they put some lipstick on it and really helped us get through that first hurdle a couple years ago. >> Well, it's a common pattern that we see in this ecosystem that you know, open source, you try it, you get comfortable with it, you get engaged and then when it makes sense to roll it into production and really start scaling out, that's when you can really formalize those relationships so bring us through the project if you will. You know, how many applications were you starting with? What was the timeline? How many people were involved? Were there, you know, the training or organizational changes, you know, bring us through under the first bits of the project. >> Sure, absolutely. So, like anything it was a series of VMs, we had some VM that were load balanced for databases in the back and protected, we had some manual firewalls through our cloud provider as well but that was kind of the edge of it. You had your web services, your database services and another tier segregated by firewalls, we were operating at a single DCs. As we started to expand into Europe from the North America, Latin America base and as well as Africa, we said this has got to kind of stop. We have a lot of Vms, a lot of machines and so a parallel effort went underway to actually develop some of the new microservices and at first glance was our proxies, our ingresses, our gateways and then our identity service and SSL would be that unifying factor. We honestly knew that moving to Kubernetes in small steps probably wasn't going to be an easy task for us but moving the majority of services over to Kubernetes and then leaving some legacy ones in VM was definitely the right approach for us because now we're dealing with ingressing around the world. Now we're dealing with security of the main core stacks, that was kind of our hardcore focus is to say, secure the stacks up front, ingress from everywhere in the world through like an Anycast Technology and then the gateways will handle that and proxy across the globe and we'll build up from there exactly as we did today. So that was kind of the key for us is that we did develop our micro services, our identity services for SSO, our gateways and then our web services were all developed in containers to start and then we started looking at complimentary pieces like email notification mechanisms, text notification, any of those that could be containerized later, which is dealt with a single one off restful services were moved at a later date. All right. >> So Jeff, yeah absolutely. What to understand, okay, we went through all this technology, we did all these various pieces, what does this mean to your your business projects? So you talked about I need to roll out 8000 devices, is that happening faster? Is it you know, what's the actual business impact of this technology that you've rolled out? >> So here's the key part and here's a differentiator for us is we have two major areas we differentiate in and the first one is asymmetric cryptography. We do own the patents for that one so we know our communication is secure, even when we're lying over Bluetooth. So that's kind of the biggest and foremost one is that how do we communicate with the locks on how do we ensure we can all the time. Two is offline access, some of the major players don't have offline access, which means you can download your keys and assign your keys, go off site do a site to a nuclear bunker wherever it may be and we communicate directly with the lock itself. Our core technology is in the embedded controllers in the lock so that's kind of our key piece and then the lock is a housing around it, it's the mechanical mechanism to it all. So knowing that we had offline technology really nailed down allowed us to do what many called the blue-green approach, which is we're going down for four hours, heads up everybody globally we really need to make this transition but the transition was easy to make with our players, you know, these enterprise spaces and we say we're moving to Kubernetes. It's something where it's kind of a badge of honor to them and they're saying these guys, you know, they really know what they're doing. They've got Kubernetes on the back end, some we needed to explain it to but as soon as they started to hear the words Docker and Kubernetes they just said, wow, this guys are serious about enterprise, we're serious about addressing it and not only that they're forefront of other technologies. I think that's part of our security plan, we use asymmetric encryption, we don't use the Bluetooth security protocol so every time that's compromised, we're not compromised and it's a badge of honor we were much alongside the Kubernetes. >> Alright, Jeff the thing that we're hearing from a lot of companies out there is that that transition that you're going through from VMs to containerization I heard you say that you've got a DevOps practice in there, there's some skill set challenges, there's some training pieces, there's often, you know, maybe a bump or two in the road, I'm sure your project went completely smoothly but what can you share about, you know, the personnel skill sets, any lessons learned along the way that might help others? >> There was a ton. Rancher took that first edge off of us, you know, cube-cuddle, get things up, get things going, RKE in the Rancher space so the Rancher Kubernetes engine, they were kind of that first piece to say how do I get this engine up and going and then I'll work back and take away some of the UI elements and do it myself, from scheduling and making sure that nodes came up to understanding a deployment versus a DaemonSet, that first UI as we moved from like a Docker swarm environment to the the Rancher environment was really kind of key for us to say, I know what these volumes are, I know the networking and I all know these pieces but I don't know how to put core DNS in and start to get them to connect and all of those aspects and so that's where the UI part really took over. We had guys that were good on DevOps, we had guys are like, hey how do I hook it up to a back end and when you have those UI, those clicks like your pod security policy on or off, it's incredible. You turn it on fine, turn on the pod security policy and then from there, we'll either use the UI or we'll go deeper as we get the skill sets to do that so it gave us some really good assurances right off the bat. There were some technologies we really had to learn fast, we had to learn the cube-cuddle command line, we had to learn Helm, new infrastructure pieces with Terraform as well, those are kind of like our back end now. Those are our repeatability aspects that we can kind of get going with. So those are kind of our cores now is it's a Rancher every day, it's cube-cuddle from our command lines to kind of do those, Terraform to make sure we're doing the same thing but those are all practices we, you know, we cut our teeth with Rancher, we looked at the configs that are generated and said, alright, that's actually pretty good configure, you know, maybe there's a team to tolerance or a tweak we could make there but we kind of work backwards that way to have them give us some best practices and then verify those. >> So the space you're in, you have companies that rely on what you do. Security is so important, if you talk about telecommunications, you know, many of the other environments they have, you know, rigid requirements. I want to get to your understanding from you, you're using some open source tools, you've been working with startups, one of your suppliers Rancher was just acquired by SUSE, how's that relationship between you know, this ecosystem? Is that something that is there any concerns from your end user clients and what are your own comfort level with the moves and changes that are happening? >> Having gone through acquisitions myself and knowing the SUSE team pretty well, I'd say actually it's a great thing to know that the startups are funded in a great source. It's great to hear internally, externally their marketing departments are growing but you never know if a startup is growing or not. Knowing this acquisitions taking place actually gives me a lot of security. The team there was healthy, they were growing all the time but sometimes that can just be a face on a company and just talking to the internals candidly as they've always done with us, it's been amazing. So I think that's a great part knowing that there's some great open source texts, Helm Kubernetes as well that have great backers towards them, it's nice to see part of the ecosystem getting back as well in a healthy way rather than a, you know, here's $10,000 Platinum sponsorship. To see them getting the backing from an open source company, I can't say enough for. >> All right, Jeff how about what's going forward from you, what projects you're looking at or what what additions to what you've already done are you looking at doing down the road? >> Absolutely. So the big thing for us is that we've expanded pretty dramatically across the world now. As we started to expand into South Africa, we've expanded into Asia as well so managing these things remotely has been great but we've also started to begin to see some latencies where we're, you know, heading back to our etcd clusters or we're starting to see little cracks and pieces here in some of our QA environment. So part of this is actually the introduction and we started looking into the fog and the edge compute. Security is one of these games where we try to hold the security as core and as tight as you can but trying to get them the best user experience especially in South Africa and serving them from either Europe or Asia, we're trying to move into those data centers and region as well, to provide the sovereignty, to provide the security but it's about latency as well. When I opened my phone to download my digital keys I want that to be quick, I want the administrators to assign quickly but also still giving them that aspect to say I could store this in the edge, I could keep it secure and I could make sure that you still have it, that's where it's a bit different than the standard web experience to say no problem let's put a PNG as close as possible to you to give you that experience, we're putting digital certificates and keys as close as possible to people as well so that's kind of our next generation of the devices as we upgrade these pieces. >> Yeah, there was a line that stuck with me a few years ago, if you look at edge computing, if you look at IoT, the security just surface area is just expanding by orders or magnitude so that just leaves, you know, big challenges that everyone needs to deal with. >> Exactly, yep. >> All right, give us the final word if you would, you know, final lessons learned, you know, you're talking to your peers here in the hallways, virtually of the show. Now that you've gone through all of this, is there anything that you say, boy I wish I had known this it would have been this good or I might have accelerated things or which things, hey I wish I pulled these people or done something a little bit differently. >> Yep, there's a couple actually a big parts right off the bat and one, we started with databases and containers, followed the advice of everyone out there either do managed services or on standalone boxes themselves. That was something we cut our teeth on over a period of time and we really struggled with it, those databases and containers they really perform as poorly as you think they might, you can't get the constraints on those guys, that's one of them. Two we are a global company so we operate in a lot of major geographies now and ETC has been a big deal for us. We tried to pull our ETC clusters farther apart for better resiliency, no matter how much we tweak and play with that thing, keep those things in a region, keep them in separate, I guess the right word would be availability zones, keep them make redundant as possible and protect those at all costs. As we expanded we thought our best strategy would do some geographical distribution, the layout that you have in your Kubernetes cluster as you go global for hub-and-spoke versus kind of centralized clusters and pods and pieces like that, look it over with a with an expert in Kubernetes, talk to them talk about latencies and measure that stuff regularly. That is stuff that kind of tore us apart early in proof of concept and something we had to learn from very quickly, whether it'll be hub-and-spoke and centralize ETC and control planes and then workers abroad or we could spread the ETC and control planes a little more, that's a strategy that needs to be played with if you're not just in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, those are my two biggest pieces because those are our big performance killers as well as discovering PSP, Pod Security Policies early. Get those in, lock it down, get your environments out of route out of, you know, Port 80 things like that on the security space, those are just your basic housecleaning items to make sure that your latency is low, your performances are high and your security's as tight as you can make it. >> Wonderful, well, Jeff thank you so much for sharing Sera4 for story, congratulations to you and your team and wish you the best luck going forward with your initiatives. >> Absolutely, thanks so much Stu. >> All right, thank you for watching. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman. And this is theCUBE coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2020, the Europe virtual edition. Happy to welcome back to the program, fresh off the keynote stage, Priyanka Sharma. She's the general manager of the CNCF. Priyanka, thanks so much for joining us. Great to see you. And we all get to be together even while we're apart. >> That's absolutely right. Thank you so much for having me Stu and great energy in the interwebs today with my keynote and everybody engaging and attending KubeCon. So, very happy to be here. >> All right, so I want to dig into your keynote a little bit. I had a bunch of key themes, a lot of pieces, and of course, community at the heart of it. When I spoke with you when you first took the job, of course, you've got strong background, you know this community really well. We've loved covering it for the last five years, but you talked about the foundation of doers and how that's powering the end user driven open tour. So talk to us a little bit about that, how is this community different from everything else. You know, open source always is community, but this feels a little bit special. >> Well, I'm glad to hear you say that, it is special. Yes, so when you think about the Cloud Native Ecosystem, right? There's so many people who've come together to create this amazing field that we all get to create. The awesome technology that people use to be part of this whole technology creation and deployment process. Those people are the end users first and foremost, they utilize the technology every day. And as time has grown, as time has gone by, they have played a bigger and bigger role. Over time they've become very sophisticated, they're contributing their own projects such as you know, I mean, you all know Envoy and a Jaeger came from Lyft and Uber respectively, but there's many more like Spotify and Wayfair, the furniture company. They have all submitted projects for the sandbox. So there was a lot of momentum, but not only are they creating their own technologies very needed and donating them. They're becoming the guider. They're becoming the guidance for the project that exists. They're giving feedback, they're sharing requirements. It's a very collaborative process and that's what is end-user-driven open source. Now this end user-driven-open source cannot happen by one contributor alone by one maintainer or alone by one company. No, it takes a lot of people. I mean, CNCF, as you know, has invested in its global community since day one. That's why we have the KubeCon EU, we have China events, we have North America. And just the other day I was speaking on a virtual Brazil event. There's just the geographic diversity is amazing. And by being able to reach out to a very large ecosystem and by especially having a formal role for end users, by having an end user member program with their own special interest groups and working groups, we've created a safe space where there is a neutral IP zone, open governance, and also a clear directive and shared partnership with the end users. So that ends up being a large group of people who are all doers, everybody's collaboration matters, and together they create end user-driven-open source. >> Well, Priyanka, I'm not sure that that most people understand really the full charter of what the CNCF does. So maybe you could talk a little bit about, obviously there's all the projects involved. You just brought up some of the end users and how you get engaged. There's also help along career development, when you talk to the individual developers and participants. So help us understand beyond the big events that we gather people at any given time with the smaller events, just, you know, what the CNCF its charter as these days. >> Absolutely, so as some of you know, the CNCF stands for Cloud Native Computing Foundation. And our objective is to host and proliferate technologies that support development, infrastructure development that is cloud native. Now what does cloud native mean, cloud native is when you develop, when you utilize cloud computing, which is the big clouds you must have heard of such as, Alibaba cloud, AWS, Google cloud platform, Azure, IBM, all these hyperscalers. They provide these offerings by which you don't need to have your own server farm, and you can buy compute from them and run your applications on that. When you do that, the way you develop software changes, it should change in order to maximize the value you get. So you started developing with micro services, containerization happens once that happens you need to orchestrate the containers, which is where Kubernetes our founding project comes in. And then you go from there because you have different complexities and observability, you have different complexities and storage and all the cloud native tech comes together to support you in that journey. So from a technology perspective that's what we do. As we have been so fortunate to develop this large ecosystem that so many people joining in of all kinds, we believe it is part of our responsibility to support this community in skill development and always like knowledge sharing. So knowledge sharing community empowers education. And that's how we talked about the events, right? Like KubeCon et cetera. But also these days, we are focusing a lot on our programs with the certifications we offer such as a CKA, which stands for a Certified Kubernetes Admin and CKAD, which stands for Certified Kubernetes Application Developer. To date, 15,000 plus people have taken these certifications successfully. So we have more and more people joining in these ranks. And we are here to support people as they build their careers, as they get more knowledgeable on cloud native, from in formal ways, such as training edX and in informal ways, such as KubeCon and the Meetups and the Webinars, you name it, and we're here for you. >> Well, you used a word that I want to touch on, responsibility, obviously in 2020, there's a lot going on Priyanka. So first of all, you talk about the global pandemic. Some of my favorite interviews I've done for this shows and others talking about how open source and communities are contributing to it. One of the interviews I have coming up for the KubeCon show is out of the Pronto area with how's my flattening, which uses data and visualization, really phenomenal to see how, you know, Kubernetes and collaboration allowed people to rally fast and share data and get information from the right people. The other piece is social justice. You announced a new working group for racial terminology, talk about, how's the CNCF dealing with, all the changes and all the things that are happening in 2020. And how are you helping the community get engaged and participate? >> Absolutely. 2020s is a very unique year. It's had very unique challenges. We've all been through it out together as a global community. So in that way, it has brought us all together, but the fissures and cracks that maybe were overlooked before have gotten deeper this year. And we are committed to bringing the open source cloud native way to help support this full global push to overcome 2020 as a year. (laughs) So part of that as you said, we have a working group to eradicate racially charged tech, sorry, I am really not speaking well to that. So part of our initiatives is a working group to eradicate racially charged terminology from code we're working on it, not just on the CNCF level, but on the entire Linux foundation level, by bringing together various folks, such as companies projects, regardless of where they stand, they don't need to be an LF project or a CNCF project, but we're sharing best practices on What should be the terminology we agree upon? What is the change management look like? And soon we want to really encourage the people who are making these positive steps with and enablement and incentive programs, such as prizes, et cetera. So I'm very committed to this. I think anyone and everyone has a home in open source. This cannot be, you know, the take ground of one type of person or one type of community. And we're going to do our very best to welcome each and every one. This world of technology has been built by the blood, sweat, and tears off many people, and we honor them all. And we also open our arms to more and more of you, no matter how few of people from your ecosystem or community you see in open source, join in, we welcome you.. we are here for you and this working group and this initiative hopes to voice exactly just that. >> Well, yeah, the KubeCons absolutely. I can speak from the event I've gone to, you know, strong diversity. We've really appreciated being able to hear those voices. When you talk about the collaboration, the community activity, we'd love when we can help support those from our team's standpoint, when we can, we want to be able to help those nonprofits, help those communities get their messages and do their call to actions. All right, Priyanka so much to cover. This week when I look at all the breakouts, when I look at the interviews and the technologies, there's a lot of emerging themes also in edge computing has been something we've been talking about for the last year or two, of course, IOT, DevSecOps, what are some of the hot technologies that you're seeing and making sure that the show covers. >> Well, you send them all. (laughs) No, but these are the key themes. Yes, absolutely. As you know, devices are proliferating across the globe. So many people have cell phones, with the coming of 5G things will be even more rocket ship. And these folks need to go cloud native to support development as this change happens, and Kubernetes and CNCF is here to support. We have projects such as KubeEdge. We have k3s from Rancher and the sandbox, all these are meant for edge deployment. So there's that focus that we have. There's always going to be DevSecOps. The minute there is this complexity, the minute there's this growth, new security vulnerabilities, pop up, new interfaces become exposed. And so we have to be on a constant watch. So DevSecOps is a theme that we are going to see a lot of innovation and development in. For anyone who may not be familiar with DevSecOps, DevSecOps does for security, what DevOps did for operations, which is shifted left into the application developers workflow, so that things have got faster so that there is a better collaboration between security teams and application development team. So these are absolutely trans, I think a trend we briefly touched upon is, end-user-driven open source. I think the voice of end users is going to grow bigger and more louder and just that much more critical. The ship has left the dock. And now it's just going to gain steam and gain steam. I think we're going to see more technology contributions from them. We're going to see much more utilization of cloud native from them. And we also will get lots of feedback and advice from them. And there'll be interwoven into the fabric of cloud native in a way like never before. >> Yeah, Priyanka, you've known this community, but now you're very steeped into it. You had to work with a lot of people. I'm curious, does anything, especially from those end users, you know, a big focus of what you've been talking about. Absolutely, it's so important that they not just use the technology, but are participate in it. It's been one of those big waves we've been watching in the open source community for a number of years. So any insight you can give us as to why it is so important to those end users, what is encouraging them, not just to, use these projects, but, you know, assigned people and sponsor events and have much deeper integration with this community. >> They don't integrate with this community. They are part of this community. That's one key thing to remember. I would say, when we all, like, I mean, CNCF is relatively young, it started end of 2015. I started working on a project in it in 2016. And back then we were talking about things like, what are microservices? How to do a lift and shift to the cloud, or what are containers, things like that, right? And there was maybe a bit of a gap in the knowledge that people had to acquire to get good at deploying containers, that's using microservices, et cetera, et cetera. Now, in the last four years, huge leaps have been made by an users just because they were in the trenches, they were doing the work, right? So now their knowledge level has gone really up. And they've also started like knowing where the gaps are, what they need, because they're doing the building, they're the doers here. And so in that environment, it is a natural thing that they will have the best sense of where things should go next. They will have the best sense of what their own requirements are. And so it's an evolution of the end user community. It's an evolution of the doers. And I think that's why this trend is going to continue. And I would like to take like, not a credit, but I would say a tiny shoutout to the CNCF ecosystem program, which is run by Cheryl on my team. She's done a phenomenal job having been a developer herself to bring people and create safe spaces where the enhancers or the vendors are not like necessarily breathing down their neck and they can discuss amongst each other, the topics that matter. And I think that's gone a really long way. >> Yeah. There's, Cheryl's been doing some great work. I know I'm having a conversation with Liz Rice to talk about some of the new pooling, helping customers understand. It's such a broad ecosystem out there that, you know, we didn't even touch on. We're going to talk in many of the other interviews I have Priyanka. There's so many projects, new ways for sandbox and incubation and everything like that. It is definitely a challenge for everybody to look at this space. Want to give you the final word though. What do you want people to have as their takeaway from the event this time? >> Absolutely. Hi everybody. I am so happy. You all took the time and engaged with the community you joined in and attended KubeCon EU virtual, stay with us, partnering with us, come to our events, give us feedback, share ideas. We're all a foundation of doers. We're all team cloud native, and we're in this together. We will go through 2020, we'll come out strong. And this is just the beginning. >> Well, Priyanka, thank you so much. We love the partnership with the CNCF and definitely happy to be able to participate in the event again this year. >> Absolutely. Thank you so much Stu. >> All right, and stay tuned. Lots of coverage here from KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2020 Europe the virtual edition. I'm Stu Minimam. And thank you as always for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2020 in Europe. Of course the event this year was supposed to be in the Netherlands, I know I was very much looking forward to going to Amsterdam. This year of course it's going to be virtual, I'm really excited theCUBE's coverage, we've got some great members of the CNCF, we've got a bunch of end users, we've got some good thought leaders, and I'm also bringing a little bit of the Netherlands to help me bring in and start this keynote analysis, happy to welcome back to the program my cohost for the show, Joep Piscaer, who is an industry analyst with TLA. Thank you, Joep, so much for joining us, and we wish we could be with you in person, and check out your beautiful country. >> Absolutely, thanks for having me Stu, and I'm still a little disappointed we cannot eat the (indistinct foreign term) rijsttafel together this year. >> Oh, yeah, can we just have a segment to explain to people the wonder that is the fusion of Indonesian food and the display that you get only in the Netherlands? Rijsttafel, I seriously had checked all over the US and Canada, when I was younger, to find an equivalent, but one of my favorite culinary delights in the world, but we'll have to put a pin in that. You've had some warm weather in the Netherlands recently, and so many of the Europeans take quite a lot of time off in July and August, but we're going to talk about some hardcore tech, KubeCon, a show we love doing, the European show brings good diversity of experiences and customers from across the globe. So, let's start, the keynote, Priyanka Sharma, the new general manager of the CNCF, of course, just some really smart people that come out and talk about a lot of things. And since it's a foundation show, there's some news in there, but it's more about how they're helping corral all of these projects, of course, a theme we've talked about for a while is KubeCon was the big discussion for many years about Kubernetes, still important, and we'll talk about that, but so many different projects and everything from the sandbox, their incubation, through when they become fully, generally available, so, I guess I'll let you start and step back and say when you look at this broad ecosystem, you work with vendors, you've been from the customer side, what's top of mind for you, what's catching your attention? >> So, I guess from a cloud-native perspective, looking at the CNCF, I think you hit the nail on the head. This is not about any individual technology, isn't about just Kubernetes or just Prometheus, or just service mesh. I think the added value of the CNCF, and the way I look at it at least, looking back at my customer perspective, I would've loved to have a organization curate the technology world around me, for me. To help me out with the decisions on a technology perspective that I needed to make to kind of move forward with my IT stack, and with the requirements my customer had, or my organization had, to kind of move that into the next phase. That is where I see the CNCF come in and do their job really well, to help organizations, both on the vendor side as well as on the customer side, take that next step, see around the corner, what's new, what's coming, and also make sure that between different, maybe even competing standards, the right ones surface up and become the de facto standard for organizations to use. >> Yeah, a lot of good thoughts there, Joep, I want to walk through that stack a little bit, but before we do, big statement that Priyanka made, I thought it was a nice umbrella for her keynote, it's a foundation of doers powering end user driven open-source, so as I mentioned, you worked at a service provider, you've done strategies for some other large organizations, what's your thought on the role of how the end users engage with and contribute to open-source? One of the great findings I saw a couple years ago, as you said, it went from open-source being something that people did on the weekend to the sides, to many end users, and of course lots of vendors, have full-time people that their jobs are to contribute and participate in the open-source communities. >> Yeah, I guess that kind of signals a maturity in the market to me, where organizations are investing in open-source because they know they're going to get something out of it. So back in the day, it was not necessarily certain that if you put a lot of effort into an open-source project, for your own gain, for your own purposes, that that would work out, and that with the backing of the CNCF, as well as so many member organizations and end user organizations, I think participating in open-source becomes easier, because there's more of a guarantee that what you put in will kind of circulate, and come out and have value for you, in a different way. Because if you're working on a service mesh, some other organization might be working on Prometheus, or Kubernetes, or another project, and some organizations are now kind of helping each other with the CNCF as the gatekeeper, to move all of those technology stacks forward, instead of everyone doing it for themselves. Maybe even being forced to reinvent the wheel for some of those technology components. >> So let's walk through the stack a little bit, and the layers that are out there, so let's start with Kubernetes, the discussion has been Kubernetes won the container orchestration battles, but whose Kubernetes am I going to use? For a while it was would it be distributions, we've seen every platform basically has at least one Kubernetes option built into it, so doesn't mean you're necessarily using this, before AWS had their own flavor of Kubernetes, there was at least 15 different ways that you could run Kubernetes on top of it, but now they have ECS, they have EKS, even things like Fargate now work with EKS, so interesting innovation and adoption there. But VMware baked Kubernetes into vSphere 7. Red Hat of course, with OpenShift, has thousands of customers and has great momentum, we saw SUSE buy Rancher to help them move along and make sure that they get embedded there. One of the startups you've worked with, Spectro Cloud, helps play into the mix there, so there is no shortage of options, and then from a management standpoint, companies like Microsoft, Google, VMware, Red Hat, all, how do I manage across clusters, because it's not going to just be one Kubernetes that you're going to use, we're expecting that you're going to have multiple options out there, so it sure doesn't sound boring to me yet, or reached full maturity, Joep. What's your take, what advice do you give to people out there when they say "Hey, okay, I'm going to use Kubernetes," I've got hybrid cloud, or I probably have a couple things, how should they be approaching that and thinking about how they engage with Kubernetes? >> So that's a difficult one, because it can go so many different ways, just because, like you said, the market is maturing. Which means, we're kind of back at where we left off virtualization a couple years ago, where we had managers of managers, managing across different data centers, doing the multicloud thing before it was a cloud thing. We have automation doing day two operations, I saw one of the announcements for this week will be a vendor coming out with day two operations automation, to kind of help simplify that stack of Kubernetes in production. And so the best advice I think I have is, don't try to do it all yourself, right, so Kubernetes is still maturing, it is still fairly open, in a sense that you can change everything, which makes it fairly complex to use and configure. So don't try and do that part yourself, necessarily, either use a managed service, which there are a bunch of, Spectro Cloud, for example, as well as Platform9, even the bigger players are now having those platforms. Because in the end, Kubernetes is kind of the foundation of what you're going to do on top of it. Kubernetes itself doesn't have business value in that sense, so spending a lot of time, especially at the beginning of a project, figuring that part out, I don't think makes sense, especially if the risk and the impact of making mistakes is fairly large. Like, make a mistake in a monitoring product, and you'll be able to fix that problem more easily. But make a mistake in a Kubernetes platform, and that's much more difficult, especially because I see organizations build one cluster to rule them all, instead of leveraging what the cloud offers, which is just spin up another cluster. Even spin it up somewhere else, because we can now do the multicloud thing, we can now manage applications across Kubernetes clusters, we can manage many different clusters from a single pane of glass, so there's really no reason anymore to see that Kubernetes thing as something really difficult that you have to do yourself, hence just do it once. Instead, my recommendation would be to look at your processes and figure out, how can I figure out how to have a Kubernetes cluster for everything I do, maybe that's per team, maybe that's per application or per environment, per cloud, and they kind of work from that, because, again, Kubernetes is not the holy grail, it's not the end state, it is a means to an end, to get where we're going with applications, with developing new functionality for customers. >> Well, I think you hit on a really important point, if you look out in the social discussion, sometimes Kubernetes and multicloud get attacked, because when I talk to customers, they shouldn't have a Kubernetes strategy. They have their business strategy, and there are certain things that they're trying to, "How do I make sure everything's secure," and I'm looking at DevSecOps, I need to really have an edge computing strategy because that's going to help my business objectives, and when I look at some of the tools that are going to help and get me there, well, Kubernetes, the service meshes, some of the other tools in the CNCF are going to help me get there, and as you said, I've got managed services, cloud providers, integrators are going to help me build those solutions without me having to spend years to understand how to do that. So yeah, I'd love to hear any interesting projects you're hearing about, edge computing, the security space has gone from super important to even more important if that's possible in 2020. What are you hearing? >> Yeah, so the most interesting part for me is definitely the DevSecOps movement, where we're basically not even allowed to call it DevOps anymore. Security has finally gained a foothold, they're finally able to shift lift the security practices into the realm of developers, simplifying it in a way, and automating it in a way that, it's no longer a trivial task to integrate security. And there's a lot of companies supporting that, even from a Kubernetes perspective, integrating with Kubernetes or integrating with networking products on top of Kubernetes. And I think we finally have reached a moment in time where security is no longer something that we really need to think about. Again, because CNCF is kind of helping us select the right projects, helping us in the right direction, so that making choices in the security realm becomes easier, and becomes a no-brainer for teams, special security teams, as well as the application development teams, to integrate security. >> Well, Joep, I'm glad to hear we've solved security, we can all go home now. That's awesome. But no, in all seriousness, such an important piece, lots of companies spending time on there, and it does feel that we are starting to get the process and organization around, so that we can attack these challenges a little bit more head-on. How 'about service mesh, it's one of those things that's been a little bit contentious the last couple of years, of course ahead of the show, Google is not donating Istio to the foundation, instead, the trademark's open. I'm going to have an interview with Liz Rice to dig into that piece, in the chess moves, Microsoft is now putting out a service mesh, so as Corey Quinn says, the plural of service mesh must be service meeshes, so, it feels like Mr. Meeseeks, for any Rick and Morty fans, we just keep pressing the button and more of them appear, which may cause us more trouble, but, what's your take, do you have a service mesh coming out, Kelsey Hightower had a fun little thing on Twitter about it, what's the state of the state? >> Yeah, so I won't be publishing a service mesh, maybe I'll try and rickroll someone, but we'll see what happens. But service meshes are, they're still a hot topic, it's still one of the spaces where most discussion is kind of geared towards. There is yet to form a single standard, there is yet a single block of companies creating a front to solve that service mesh issue, and I think that's because in the end, service meshes are, from a complexity perspective, they're not mature enough to be able to commoditize into a standard. I think we still need a little while, and maybe ask me this question next year again, and we'll see what happens. But we'll still need a little while to kind of let this market shift and let this market innovate, because I don't think we've reached the end state with service meshes. Also kind of gauging from customer interest and actual production implementations, I don't think this has trickled down from the largest companies that have the most requirements into the smaller companies, the smaller markets, which is something that we do usually see, now Kubernetes is definitely doing that. So in terms of service meshes, I don't think the innovation has reached that endpoint yet, and I think we'll still need a little while, which will mean for the upcoming period, that we'll kind of see this head to head from different companies, trying to gain a foothold, trying to lead a market, introduce their own products. And I think that's okay, and I think the CNCF will continue to kind of curate that experience, up to a point where maybe somewhere in the future we will have a noncompeting standard to finally have something that's commoditized and easy to implement. >> Yeah, it's an interesting piece, one of the things I've always enjoyed when I go to the show is just wander, and the things you bump into are like "Oh my gosh, wow, look at all of these cool little projects." I don't think we are going to stop that Cambrian explosion of innovation and ideas. When you go walk around there's usually over 200 vendors there, and a lot of them are opensource projects. I would say many of them, when you have a discussion with them, I'm not sure that there's necessarily a business behind that project, and that's where you also see maturity in spaces. A year or so ago, in the observability space, open tracing helped pull together a couple of pieces. Storage is starting to mature. Doesn't mean we're going to get down to one standard, there's still a couple of storage engines out there, I have some really good discussions this week to go into that, but it goes from, "Boy, storage is a mess," to "Oh, okay, we have a couple of uses," and just like storage in the data center, there's not a box or a protocol to do anything, it's what's your use case, what performance, what clouds, what environments are you living on, and therefore you can do that. So it's good to see lots of new things added, but then they mature out and they consolidate, and as you said, the CNCF is help giving those roadmaps, those maps, the landscapes, which boy, if you go online, they have some really good tools. Go to CNCF, the website, and you can look through, Cheryl Hung put one, I'm trying to remember which, it's basically a bullseye of the ones that, here's the one that's fully baked, and here's the ones that are making its way through, and the customer feedback, and they're going to do more of those to help give guidance, because no one solution is going to fit everybody's needs, and you have these spectrums of offerings. Wild card for you, are there any interesting projects out there, new things that you're hearing about, what areas should people be poking around that might not be the top level big things? >> So, I guess for me, that's really personal because I'm still kind of an infrastructure geek in that sense. So one of the things that really surprised me was a more traditional vendor, Zerto in this case, with a fantastic solution, finally, they're doing data protection for Kubernetes. And my recommendation would be to look at companies like Zerto in the data protection space, finally making that move into containers, because even though we've completed the discussion, stateful versus stateless, there's still a lot to be said for thinking about data protection, if you're going to go all-in into containers and into Kubernetes, so that was one that really provoked my thoughts, I really was interested in seeing, "Okay, what's Zerto doing in this list of CNCF members?" And for that matter, I think other vendors like VMware, like Red Hat, like other companies that are moving into this space, with a regained trust in their solutions, is something that I think is really interesting, and absolutely worth exploring during the event, to see what those more traditional companies, to use the term, are doing to innovate with their solutions, and kind of helping the CNCF and the cloud data world, become more enterprise-ready, and that's kind of the point I'm trying to make, where for the longest time, we've had this cloud-native versus traditional, but I always thought of it like cloud-native versus enterprise-ready, or proven technology. This is kind of for the developers doing a new thing, this is for the IT operations teams, and we're kind of seeing those two groups, at least from a technology perspective, being fused into one new blood group, making their way forward and innovating with those technologies. So, I think it's interesting to look at the existing vendors and the CNCF members to see where they're innovating. >> Well, Joep, you connected a dotted line between the cloud-native insights program that I've been doing, you were actually my first guest on that. We've got a couple of months worth of episodes out there, and it is closing that gap between what the developers are doing and what the enterprise was, so absolutely, there's architectural pieces, Joep, like you, I'm an infrastructure geek, so I come from those pieces, and there was that gap between, I'm going to use VMs, and now I'm using containers, and I'm looking at things like serverless too, how do we built applications, and is it that bottom-up versus top-down, and what a company's needs, they need to be able to react fast, they need to be able to change along the way, they need to be able to take advantage of the innovation that ecosystems like this have, so, I love the emphasis CNCF has, making sure that the end users are going to have a strong voice, because as you said, the big companies have come in, not just VMware and Red Hat, but, IBM and Dell are behind those two companies, and HPE, Cisco, many others out there that the behemoths out there, not to mention of course the big hyperscale clouds that helped start this, we wouldn't have a lot of this without Google kicking off with Kubernetes, AWS front and center, and an active participant here, and if you talk to the customers, they're all leveraging it, and of course Microsoft, so it is a robust, big ecosystem, Joep, thank you so much for helping us dig into it, definitely hope we can have events back in the Netherlands in the near future, and great to see you as always. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, stay tuned, we have, as I said, full spectrum of interviews from theCUBE, they'll be broadcasting during the three days, and of course go to theCUBE.net to catch all of what we've done this year at the show, as well as all the back history. Feel free to reach out to me, I'm @Stu on Twitter, and thank you, as always, for watching theCUBE. (calm music)