>> Narrator: 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 this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon the 2020 European show of course happening virtually and that has put some unique challenges for the people running the show, really happy to welcome to the program she is one of the co-chairs of this event, and she is also a Principal Software Engineer at Splunk, Constance Caramanolis thank you so much for joining us. >> Hi, thank you for having me, I'm really excited to be here, it's definitely an interesting time. >> Alright, so Constance we know KubeCon it's a great community, robust everybody loves to get together there's some really interesting hallway conversations and so much going on, we've been watching, the four or five years we've been doing theCUBE at this show, just huge explosion of the breadth and depth of the content and of course, great people there. Just, if we could start with a little bit, your background, as I mentioned you're the co-chair, you work for Splunk by way of an acquisition, of Omnition try saying that three times fast, and Omnition you were telling me is a company that was bought really before it came out of stealth, but when it comes to the community itself, how long have you been involved in this community? What kind of led you to being co-chair? >> Yeah, I guess I've been involved with the community since 2017, so, I was at Lyft before Omnition Splunk, and I was lucky enough to be one of the first engineers, on Envoy you might've heard of Envoy, sorry I laugh at my own jokes. (laughing) Like my first exposure to KubeCon and seeing the CNCF community was KubeCon Austin and the thing that I was amazed by was actually you said it the hallway tracks, right? I would just see someone and be like, "Hey, like, I think I've seen your code review can I say hi?" And that started back on me at least a little bit involved in terms of talking to more people then they needed people I would work on a PR or in some of the community meetings and that was my first exposure to the community. And so I was involved in Envoy pretty actively involved in Envoy all the way until from 2016 until mid 2018 and then I switched projects and turning it left and did some other stuff and I came back into CNCF community, in OpenTelemetry as of last year, actually almost exactly a year ago now to work on making tracing, I'm going to say useful and the reason why I say useful is that usually people think of tracing as, not as important as metrics and logs, but there is so much to tracing that we tend to undervalue and that's why I got involved with OpenTelemetry and Omnition, because there's some really interesting ways that you could view tracing, use tracing, and you could answer a lot of questions that we have in our day-to-day and so that's kind of that's how I got involved in the second-round community and then ended up getting nominated to be on the co-chair and I obviously said yes, because this is an amazing opportunity to meet more people and have more of that hallway track. >> Alright, so definitely want to talk about OpenTracing, but let's talk about the event first, as we were talking about. >> Yeah. >> That community you always love the speakers, when they finish a session, they get mobbed by people doing questions. When you walk through the expo hall, you go see people so give us a little bit of insight as to how we're trying to replicate that experience, make sure that there's I don't know office hours for the speakers and just places and spaces for people to connect and meet people. >> Yeah, so I will say that like, part of the challenge with KubeCone EU was that it had already been meant to be an in person event and so we're changing it to virtual, isn't going to be as smooth as a KubeCon or we have the China event that's happening in a few weeks or at Boston, right that's still going on, like, those ones are being thought out a lot more as a proper virtual event. So a little bit of the awkwardness of, now everything is going to be online, right? It's like you can't actually shake someone's hand in a hallway but we are definitely trying to be cognizant of when I'm in terms of future load, like probably less content, right. It's harder to sit in front of a screen and listen to everything and so we know that we know we have enough bandwidth we're trying to find, different pieces of software that allow for better Q and A, right? Exactly, like the mobbing after session is go in as a speaker and one as attendee is sometimes like the best part about conferences is you get to like someone might've said something like, "Hey, like this little tidbit "I need to ask you more questions about this." So we're providing software to at least make that as smooth, and I'm putting this in quotation and as you'll be able to tell anyone who's watching as I speak with my hands. Right, so we're definitely trying to provide software to at least make that initial interaction as smooth as possible, maybe as easy as possible we know it's probably going to be a little bit bumpy just because I think it's also our first time, like everyone, every conference is facing this issue so it's going to be really interesting to see how the conference software evolves. It is things that we've talked about in terms of maybe offering their office hours, for that it's still something that like, I think it's going to be really just an open question for all of us, is that how do we maintain that community? And I think maybe we were talking or kind of when I was like planting the seed of a topic beforehand, it's like it's something I think that matters like, how do we actually define community? 'Cause so much of it has been defined off that hallway track or bumping into someone, right? And going into someone's booth and be like, like asking that question there, because it is a lot more less intimidating to ask something in person than is to ask it online when everyone gets to hear your question, right. I know I ask less questions online, I guess maybe one thing I want to say is that for now that am thinking about it is like, if you have a question please ask questions, right? If recording is done, if there's a recording for a talk, the speakers are usually made available online during the session or a bit afterwards, so please ask your questions when things come up, because that's going to be a really good way to, at least have a bit of that question there. And also don't be shy, please, even when I say like in terms of like, when it comes to review, code reviews, but if something's unintuitive or let's say, think about something else, like interact with it, say it or even ask that question on Twitter, if you're brave enough, I wouldn't but I also barely use Twitter, yeah I don't know it's a big open question I don't know what the community is going to look like and if it's going to be harder. >> Yeah, well, one of the things I know every, every time I go to the show conferences, when the keynote when it's always like, okay, "How many people is this your first time at the show?" And you look around and it's somewhere, third or half people attending for the first time. >> Yeah. I know I'm trying to remember if it was year and a half ago, or so there was created a kind of one-on-one track at the show to really help onboard and give people into the show because when the show started out, it was like okay, it was Kubernetes and a couple of other things now you've got the graduated, the incubated, the dozens of sandbox projects out there and then even more projects out there so, cloud-native is quite a broad topic, there is no wrong way where you can start and there's so many paths that you can go on. So any tips or things that we're doing this time, to kind of help broaden and welcome in those new participants? >> Yeah so there's two things, one is actually the one to attract is official for a KubeCon EU so we do have like, there's a few good talks in terms of like, how to approach KubeCon it was meant to originally be for a person but at least helping people in terms of general terms, right? 'Cause sometimes there's so much terminology that it feels like you need to carry, cloud-native dictionary around with you, doing that and giving suggestions there, so that's one of the first talks that's going to be able to watch on KubeCon so I highly suggest that, This is actually a really tough question because a lot of it would have been like, I guess it would have been for me, would have been in person be like, don't be afraid to like, if you see someone that, said something really interesting in a talk you attended, like, even if it's not after the question, just be like, "Hey, I thought what you said was really cool "and I just want to say I appreciate your work." Like expressing that appreciation and just even if it isn't like the most thoughtful question in the world just saying thank you or I appreciate you as a really good way to open things up because the people who are speaking are just as well most people are probably just as scared of going up there and sharing their knowledge as probably or of asking a question. So I think the main takeaway from that is don't be shy, like maybe do a nervous dance to get those jitters out and then after (laughing) and then ask that question or say like, thank you it's really nice to meet you. It's harder to have a virtual coffee, so hopefully they have their own teapot or coffee maker beside them, but offered you that, send an email I think, one thing that is very common and I have a hard time with this is that it's easy to get overwhelmed with how much content there is or you said it's just like, I first feel small and at least if everyone is focusing on Kubernetes, especially like a few years ago, at least and you're like, maybe that there are a lot of people who are really advanced but now that there's so many different people like so many people from all range of expertise in this subject matter experts, and interests that it's okay to be overwhelmed just be like, I need to take a step back because mentally attending like a few talks a day is like, I feel like it's taking like several exams 'cause there's so much information being bombarded on you and you're trying to process it so understand that you can't process it all in one day and that's okay, come back to it, right. It's a great thing is that all of these talks are recorded and so you can watch it another time, and I would say probably just choose like three or four talks that you're really excited about and listen to those, don't need to watch everything because as I said we can't process it all and that's okay and ask questions. >> Some great advice there because right, if we were there in person it was always, attend what you really want to see, are there speakers you want to engage with? Because you can go back and watch on demand that's been one of the great opportunities with the virtual events is you can have access on demand, you can poke and prod, personally I love that a lot of them you can adjust the speed of them so, if it's something that it's kind of an intro talk, I can crank it up to one and a half or 2X speed and get through more content or I can pause it, rewind if I'm not getting it. And the other opportunity is I tell you the last two or three years, when I'm at an event, I try to just spend my time, not looking at my phone, talking to people, but now there's the opportunity, hey, if I can be of help, if anybody in the community has a question or wants to get connected to somebody, we know a lot of people I'm easily reachable on Twitter and I'm not sitting on a plane or in the middle of something that being like, so there is just a great robust community out there, online, and it were great be a part of it. So speaking of projects, you mentioned OpenTelemetry, which is what, your day job works on it's been a really, interesting topic of course for those that don't know the history, there were actually two projects that merged, it was a OpenTracing and OpenCensus created OpenTelemetry, so why don't you bring us up to speed as to where we are with the project, and what people should be looking at at the show and throughout the rest of 2020? >> OpenTelemetry is very exciting, we just did our first beta release so for anyone who's been on the fence of, is OpenTelemetry getting traction, or is it something that you're like at, this is a really great time to want to get involved in OpenTelemetry and start looking into it, if it's as a viable project, but I guess should probably take a step back of what is OpenTelemetry, OpenTelemetry as you mentioned was the merging or the marriage of OpenTracing-OpenCensus, right? It was an acknowledgement that so many engineers were trying to solve the same problem, but as most of us knows, right, we are trying to solve the same problem, but we had two different implementations and we actually ended up having essentially a lot of waste of resources because we're all trying to solve the same problem, but then we're working on two different implementations. So that marriage was to address that because, right it's like if you look at all of the major players, all of the players on OpenTelemetry, right? They have a wide variety of vendor experience, right even as of speaking from the vendor hat, right vendors are really lucky that they get to work with so many customers and they get to see all these different use cases. Then there's also just so many actually end users who are using it and they have very peculiar use cases, too, even with a wide set of other people, they're not going to obviously have that, so OpenTelemetry gets to merge all of those different use cases into one, or I guess not into one, but like into a wide set of implementations, but at least it's maintained by a larger group instead of having two separate. And so the first goal was to unify tracing tracing is really far ahead in terms of implementation,, or several implementations of libraries, like Go, Java, Python, Ruby, like on other languages right now but quite a bit of lists there and there's even a collector too which some people might refer to as an agent, depending on what background they have. And so there's a lot of ways to one, implement tracing and also metrics for your services and also gather that data and manipulate it, right? 'Cause for example, tracings so tracing where it's like you can generate a lot of traces, but sometimes missing data and like the collector is a really great place to add data to that, so going back to the state of OpenTelemetry, OpenTelemetry since we just did a beta release, right, we're getting closer to GA. GA is something that we're tracking for at some point this year, no dates yet but it's something that we're really pushing towards, but we're starting to have a very stable API in terms of tracing a metric was on its way, log was all something we're wrapping up on. It is a really great opportunity to, all the different ways that we are that, we even say like service owners, applications, even business rate that we're trying to collect data and have visibility into our applications, this is a really great way to provide one common framework to generate all that data, to gather all that data and generate all that data. So it was really exciting and I don't know, we just want more users and why we say that is to the earlier point is that the more users that we have who are engaged with community, right if you want to open an issue, have a question if you want to set up a PR please do, like we really want more community engagement. It is a great time to do that because we are just starting to get traction, right? Like hopefully, hopefully in a year or two, like we are one of those really big, big projects right up on a CNCF KubeCon and it's like, let's see how much has grown. And it's a great time to join and help influence a project and so many chances for ownership, I know it's really exciting, the company-- >> Excellent well Constance, it's really exciting >> Yeah. >> Congratulations on the progress there, I'm sure everybody's looking forward to as you said GA later this year, want to give you the final word, yourself and Vicky Cheung as the co-chairs for the event, what's your real goal? What do you hope the takeaway is from this instance of the 2020 European show? Of course, virtual now instead of Amsterdam. I guess like two parts one for the takeaway is that it's probably going to be awkward, right? Especially again going back to the community is that we don't have a lot of that in person things so this will be an awkward interaction, but it's a really great place for us to want to assess what a community means to us and how we interact with the community. So I think it's going to be going into it with an open mindset of just knowing like, don't set the expectations, like any other KubeCon because we just know it won't be right, we can't even have like the after hours, like going out for coffee or drinks and other stuff there so having that there and being open to that being different and then also if you have ideas share it with us, 'cause we want to know how we can make it better, so expect that it's different, but it's still going to provide you with a lot of that content that you've been looking for and we still want to make that as much of a welcoming experience for you, so know that we're doing our best and we're open to feedback and we're here for you. >> Excellent, well Constance thank you so much for the work that you and the team have been doing on. absolutely, one of the events that we always look forward to, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright, lots more coverage of theCUBE at KubeCon-Cloud Native on Europe 2020, I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching. 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