(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, a KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe, 2022. I'm your host, Keith Townsend alongside Paul Gillon, Senior Editor, Enterprise Architecture for SiliconANGLE. We are, I think at the half point way point this to be fair we've talked to a lot of folks in open source in general. What's the difference between open source communities and these closed source communities that we attend so so much? >> Well open source is just it's that it's open it's anybody can contribute. There are a set of rules that manage how your contributions are reflected in the code base. What has to be shared, what you can keep to yourself but the it's an entirely different vibe. You know, you go to a conventional conference where there's a lot of proprietary being sold and it's all about cash. It's all about money changing hands. It's all about doing the deal. And open source conferences I think are more, they're more transparent and yeah money changes hands, but it seems like the objective of the interaction is not to consummate a deal to the degree that it is at a more conventional computer conference. >> And I think that can create an uneven side effect. And we're going to talk about that a little bit with, honestly a friend of mine Alex Ellis, founder of OpenFaaS. Alex welcome back to the program. >> Thank you, good to see Keith. >> So how long you've been doing OpenFaaS? >> Well, I first had this idea that serverless and function should be run on your own hardware back in 2016. >> Wow and I remember seeing you at DockerCon EU, was that in 2017? >> Yeah, I think that's when we first met and Simon Foskett took us out to dinner and we got chatting. And I just remember you went back to your hotel room after the presentation. You just had your iPhone out and your headphones you were talking about how you tried to OpenWhisk and really struggled with it and OpenFaaS sort of got you where you needed to be to sort of get some value out of the solution. >> And I think that's the magic of these open source communities in open source conferences that you can try stuff, you can struggle with it, come to a conference either get some advice or go in another direction and try something like a OpenFaaS. But we're going to talk about the business perspective. >> Yeah. >> Give us some, like give us some hero numbers from the project. What types of organizations are using OpenFaaS and what are like the download and stars all those, the ways you guys measure project success. >> So there's a few ways that you hear this talked about at KubeCon specifically. And one of the metrics that you hear the most often is GitHub stars. Now a GitHub star means that somebody with their laptop like yourself has heard of a project or seen it on their phone and clicked a button that's it. There's not really an indication of adoption but of interest. And that might be fleeting and a blog post you might publish you might bump that up by 2000. And so OpenFaaS quite quickly got a lot of stars which encouraged me to go on and do more with it. And it's now just crossed 30,000 across the whole organization of about 40 different open source repositories. >> Wow that is a number. >> Now you are in ecosystem where Knative is also taken off. And can you distinguish your approach to serverless or FaaS to Knatives? >> Yes so, Knative isn't an approach to FaaS. That's simply put and if you listen to Aikas Ville from the Knative project, he was working inside Google and wished that Kubernetes would do a little bit more than what it did. And so he started an initiative with some others to start bringing more abstractions like Auto Scaling, revision management so he can have two versions of code and and shift traffic around. And that's really what they're trying to do is add onto Kubernetes and make it do some of the things that a platform might do. Now OpenFaaS started from a different angle and frankly, two years earlier. >> There was no Kubernetes when you started it. >> It kind of led in the space and and built out that ecosystem. So the idea was, I was working with Lambda and AWS Alexa skills. I wanted to run them on my own hardware and I couldn't. And so OpenFaaS from the beginning started from that developer experience of here's my code, run it for me. Knative is a set of extensions that may be a building block but you're still pretty much working with Kubernetes. We get calls come through. And actually recently I can't tell you who they are but there's a very large telecommunications provider in the US that was using OpenFaaS, like yourself heard of Knative and in the hype they switched. And then they switched back again recently to OpenFaaS and they've come to us for quite a large commercial deal. >> So did they find Knative to be more restrictive? >> No, it's the opposite. It's a lot less opinionated. It's more like building blocks and you are dealing with a lot more detail. It's a much bigger system to manage, but don't get me wrong. I mean the guys are very friendly. They have their sort of use cases that they pursue. Google's now donated the project to CNCF. And so they're running it that way. Now it doesn't mean that there aren't FaaS on top of it. Red Hat have a serverless product VMware have one. But OpenFaaS because it owns the whole stack can get you something that's always been very lean, simple to use to the point that Keith in his hotel room installed it and was product with it in an evening without having to be a Kubernetes expert. >> And that is and if you remember back that was very anti-Kubernetes. >> Yes. >> It was not a platform I thought that was. And for some of the very same reasons, I didn't think it was very user friendly. You know, I tried open with I'm thinking what enterprise is going to try this thing, especially without the handholding and the support needed to do that. And you know, something pretty interesting that happened as I shared this with you on Twitter, I was having a briefing by a big microprocessor company, one of the big two. And they were showing me some of the work they were doing in Cloud-native and the way that they stretch test the system to show me Auto Scaling. Is that they bought up a OpenFaaS what is it? The well text that just does a bunch of, >> The cows maybe. >> Yeah the cows. That does just a bunch of texts. And it just all, and I'm like one I was amazed at is super simple app. And the second one was the reason why they discovered it was because of that simplicity is just a thing that's in your store that you can just download and test. And it was open fast. And it was this big company that you had no idea that was using >> No >> OpenFaaS. >> No. >> How prevalent is that? That you're always running into like these surprises of who's using the solution. >> There are a lot of top tier companies, billion dollar companies that use software that I've worked on. And it's quite common. The main issue you have with open source is you don't have like the commercial software you talked about, the relationships. They don't tell you they're using it until it breaks. And then they may come in incognito with a personal email address asking for things. What they don't want to do often is lend their brands or support you. And so it is a big challenge. However, early on, when I met you, BT, live person the University of Washington, and a bunch of other companies had told us they were using it. We were having discussions with them took them to Kubecon and did talks with them. You can go and look at them in the video player. However, when I left my job in 2019 to work on this full time I went to them and I said, you know, use it in production it's useful for you. We've done a talk, we really understand the business value of how it saves you time. I haven't got a way to fund it and it won't exist unless you help they were like sucks to be you. >> Wow that's brutal. So, okay let me get this right. I remember the story 2019, you leave your job. You say I'm going to do OpenFaaS and support this project 100% of your time. If there's no one contributing to the project from a financial perspective how do you make money? I've always pitched open source because you're the first person that I've met that ran an open source project. And I always pitched them people like you who work on it on their side time. But they're not the Knatives of the world, the SDOs, they have full time developers. Sponsored by Google and Microsoft, etc. If you're not sponsored how do you make money off of open source? >> If this is the million dollar question, really? How do you make money from something that is completely free? Where all of the value has already been captured by a company and they have no incentive to support you build a relationship or send you money in any way. >> And no one has really figured it out. Arguably Red Hat is the only one that's pulled it off. >> Well, people do refer to Red Hat and they say the Red Hat model but I think that was a one off. And we quite, we can kind of agree about that in a business. However, I eventually accepted the fact that companies don't pay for something they can get for free. It took me a very long time to get around that because you know, with open source enthusiast built a huge community around this project, almost 400 people have contributed code to it over the years. And we have had full-time people working on it on and off. And there's some people who really support it in their working hours or at home on the weekends. But no, I had to really think, right, what am I going to offer? And to begin with it would support existing customers weren't interested. They're not really customers because they're consuming it as a project. So I needed to create a product because we understand we buy products. Initially I just couldn't find the right customers. And so many times I thought about giving up, leaving it behind, my family would've supported me with that as well. And they would've known exactly why even you would've done. And so what I started to do was offer my insights as a community leader, as a maintainer to companies like we've got here. So Casting one of my customers, CSIG one of my customers, Rancher R, DigitalOcean, a lot of the vendors you see here. And I was able to get a significant amount of money by lending my expertise and writing content that gave me enough buffer to give the doctors time to realize that maybe they do need support and go a bit further into production. And over the last 12 months, we've been signing six figure deals with existing users and new users alike in enterprise. >> For support >> For support, for licensing of new features that are close source and for consulting. >> So you have proprietary extensions. Also that are sort of enterprise class. Right and then also the consulting business, the support business which is a proven business model that has worked >> Is a proven business model. What it's not a proven business model is if you work hard enough, you deserve to be rewarded. >> Mmh. >> You have to go with the system. Winter comes after autumn. Summer comes after spring and you, it's no point saying why is it like that? That's the way it is. And if you go with it, you can benefit from it. And that's what the realization I had as much as I didn't want to do it. >> So you know this community, well you know there's other project founders out here thinking about making the leap. If you're giving advice to a project founder and they're thinking about making this leap, you know quitting their job and becoming the next Alex. And I think this is the perception that the misperception out there. >> Yes. >> You're, you're well known. There's a difference between being well known and well compensated. >> Yeah. >> What advice would you give those founders >> To be. >> Before they make the leap to say you know what I'm going to do my project full time. I'm going to lean on the generosity of the community. So there are some generous people in the community. You've done some really interesting things for individual like contributions etc but that's not enough. >> So look, I mean really you have to go back to the MBA mindset. What problem are you trying to solve? Who is your target customer? What do they care about? What do they eat and drink? When do they go to sleep? You really need to know who this is for. And then customize a journey for them so that they can come to you. And you need some way initially of funneling those people in qualifying them because not everybody that comes to a student or somebody doing a PhD is not your customer. >> Right, right. >> You need to understand sales. You need to understand a lot about business but you can work it out on your way. You know, I'm testament to that. And once you have people you then need something to sell them that might meet their needs and be prepared to tell them that what you've got isn't right for them. 'cause sometimes that's the one thing that will build integrity. >> That's very hard for community leaders. It's very hard for community leaders to say, no >> Absolutely so how do you help them over that hump? I think of what you've done. >> So you have to set some boundaries because as an open source developer and maintainer you want to help everybody that's there regardless. And I think for me it was taking some of the open source features that companies used not releasing them anymore in the open source edition, putting them into the paid developing new features based on what feedback we'd had, offering support as well but also understanding what is support. What do you need to offer? You may think you need a one hour SLA for a fix probably turns out that you could sell a three day response time or one day response time. And some people would want that and see value in it. But you're not going to know until you talk to your customers. >> I want to ask you, because this has been a particular interest of mine. It seems like managed services have been kind of the lifeline for pure open source companies. Enabling these companies to maintain their open source roots, but still have a revenue stream of delivering as a service. Is that a business model option you've looked at? >> There's three business models perhaps that are prevalent. One is OpenCore, which is roughly what I'm following. >> Right. >> Then there is SaaS, which is what you understand and then there's support on pure open source. So that's more like what Rancher does. Now if you think of a company like Buoyant that produces Linkerd they do a bit of both. So they don't have any close source pieces yet but they can host it for you or you can host it and they'll support you. And so I think if there's a way that you can put your product into a SaaS that makes it easier for them to run then you know go for it. However, we've OpenFaaS, remember what is the core problem we are solving, portability So why lock into my cloud? >> Take that option off the table, go ahead. >> It's been a long journey and I've been a fan since your start. I've seen the bumps and bruises and the scars get made. If you're open source leader and you're thinking about becoming as famous as Alex, hey you can do that, you can put in all the work become famous but if you want to make a living, solve a problem, understand what people are willing to pay for that problem and go out and sell it. Valuable lessons here on 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)

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's theCUBE covering DevNet Create, 2018, brought to you by Cisco. (techy music playing) >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're live here in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley for Cisco's DevNet Create. This is their new developer outreach kind of cloud, devops conference, different than DevNet their core, Cisco Networking Developer Conference is kind of an extension, kind of forging new ground. Of course theCUBE's covering, we love devops, we love cloud. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, my cohost today. Our next guest is Alex Ellis, project founder of OpenFaas, F-A-A-S, function as a service. That's serverless, that's Kubernetes, that's container madness. You name it, that's the cool, important trend, thanks for joining us. >> Yeah, thanks for having me, it's great to be here. >> So, talk about the founding of the project. So, you're the founder of the project-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> And you now work for VmWare, so let's just get this-- >> Yeah. >> On the record, so-- >> Alex: Yeah, I think this is-- >> Take a minute to explain. >> This is important just to set a bit of context now. I started this project from the lens of working with AWS Lambda as a Docker captain. I was writing these Alexa skills and I found that I had to hack in a web editor and click upload, or I had to write a zip file, put dependencies on my laptop, and upload that to the cloud every time I changed it. It just didn't feel right because I was so bought into containers. It's the same everywhere, there's no more, "It works on my machine." >> John: You're going backwards. >> Right? (laughing) So, I put a POC together for Docker Swarm and nobody had done it at that point, and it got really popular. I got to Docker Concourse Hacks Contest and presented to 4,000 people in the closing keynote, and I kind of thought it would just blossom overnight, it would explode, but it didn't happen, and actually, the months... We're going back 14 now, I grew a community and spent most of my time growing the community and extending the project. Now, that has been really fruitful. It's led to over 11,000 stars on GitHub, 91 individual contributors, and much, much more. It's been a really rich experience, but at the same time-- >> So, rather than going big rocket ship you kind of went, hunkered down and got a kernel of core people together. >> Alex: Yeah. >> Kind of set the DNA, what is the DNA of this project if you had to describe it? >> Yeah, so I think at the heart of it it's serverless functions made simple for Docker and Kubernetes. >> Great, and so how does Amazon play into this? You were using Amazon cloud? >> Yeah, I was using AWS and I was using Lambda, and that flow was not what I was used to in the enterprise. It wasn't what I was used to as a Docker captain. You know, I wanted a finite image that I could scan for vulnerabilities. >> John: Yeah. >> I could check off and promote through an environment. >> John: Yeah. >> Couldn't do it, so that was what OpenFaas aimed to do, was to make those serverless functions easy with Docker as a runtime. >> Well, congratulations, it's a lot of hard work. First, building a community's very difficult, and certainly one that's relevant. Cool and relevant, I would say, is serverless and functions. We'll certainly be seeing that now at the uptake. Still early on, but people are working on it. So, then now, let's forward to today. You work for VMWare, so-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> How did they get involved, are you shipping the project to VMWare, do they own it? Do you maintain the independence? What's the relationship between VMWare, yourself, and the project, if you can talk about that. >> Yeah, I think that's a great question. So, I got to the point where I had demands on my time around the clock. I couldn't rest, open source project, weekends, nights, the lot. >> John: You need the beer money, too, by the way. >> Right, yeah. >> You need some beer money. >> And I was working at ADP and just doing all of this in my own time, and then had a number of different options that came up and people saying, "Look, how are you going to sustain this, "how are you going to keep doing what you love?" You know, you should be working on it full time. One of the options that came up was from VMWare to work in the Open Source Technology Center. It's relatively new-- >> John: Mm-hmm. >> And the mission of the OSTC is to show VMWare as a good citizen in the community and to contribute back to meaningful projects, right, that relate to their products. >> Yeah, and they have good leadership, too, at VMWare. A lot of people don't know that. We did a couple CUBE interviews with them last year, and there is a group inside VMWare that just does that, not with the tentacles of VMWare and Dell Technologies in there. It's an independent group. >> Alex: Yeah. >> They probably go to some meetings and do some debrief, but for the most part it's kind of decoupled from VMWare, right. >> Yeah, right. So, the mission is not necessarily to make money and to produce products. It's to contribute to open source. Help with inbound so when we need to consume a project in a product, and outbound when we want to make the world a better place. >> So, I'm not going to put words in VMWare's mouth, but I will speculate covering VMWare since theCUBE started. We've been to every VMWorld and everyone knows we've got the good presence there, but if I'm VMWare I'm like, "Hey, you know what, we just "did a deal with Amazon, our enterprise "group is not so cloud savvy." I mean, the enterprise, there are operators, not true cloud native, but they're bridging that gap. The world of cloud native and enterprise is coming together. Does this project fit into that spot? Is that kind of where they saw it? Did I get that right or what was their interest other than doing-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> Helping the world out and solving world peace in the open source community. >> Yeah, so the mission of OSTC is slightly different. It's to contribute back to meaningful projects and to have this presence in the community. You know, I think OpenFaas is particularly attractive because it has such a broad community. There's people all around the world that are contributing to it, very active. For VMWare it makes a lot of sense because it runs natively on Kubernetes or Docker Swarm, and it's gained a lot of traction, people are using it. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> I had a call with BT Research before I came out and they said, "We've been using it for seven months. "We absolutely love it, it's transforming "how we're doing our microservices," and so I think that's part of it, as well as already have kind of a lead. Already have a lot of momentum with this project. >> So, are you looking to, you know, I know that the organization that you work for is really focused on driving this outbound, right? >> Alex: Yeah, yeah. >> Is VMWare using this internally as well? >> So, I think there's been a number of people who've shown an interest. You can think, "Right, there's a problem "we could solve with this," and I'm just getting my feet under the table, but really my mission is to make serverless functions simple to build this community-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And to have something that people can turn to as an alternative. So, one of the things that I did in the talk yesterday was, "How do you explain OpenFaas to your boss," and one of the points there was to unlock your data. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And I think we talked about this briefly before, now with controversies recently about data and who owns it, what's happening with it, I think it's even more relevant that-- >> John: Yeah. >> You can have full control over the whole stack if you want-- >> John: Yeah. >> Or use a product like Microsoft AKS, their Kubernetes service-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Or GKE and actually treat OpenFaas like a very thin layer of automation. >> Lauren: Really, okay. >> Or go full stack and have everything under your control. >> I mean, that's a great conversation to have, too, because obviously you're kind of referring to the Facebook situation. Zuckerberg's testifying it front of Senate yesterday, Congress today, and it's funny because watching him talk to senators in the US, they really don't know how stuff works, and so if you think about what Facebook does... I mean, granted they took some liberties. They're not the perfect citizen, they got slapped. They took it to the woodshed, if you will, but their mission is to use the data, and this is where cloud native's interesting and I think I want to get your reaction to this, you need to use the data, not treat it as a siloed, fenced in data warehouse. That model's old, right-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> It's now horizontal and scalable. Data's got to move and you've got to have data to make other things happen. That's the way these services are working. >> Yeah. >> So, it's really important to have addressability of the data and you know, GDPR takes an attempt at, you know, kind of hand waving that simple argument away. I'm not really a big fan of that, personally, but the role of data's super important. You've got to make it pervasive, so the challenge is how do you manage those controls. Is that an opportunity for functions? What's your reaction to that whole paradigm of data? >> Yeah, so we're talking about anonymous usage data, like Facebook situation or-- >> Just data in general... Oh, no, just data in general, if I'm an application and I have data-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> That I'm generating, same development of service-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> I need, you might want to leverage that data. So, I'm going to have to have a mechanism for you to share that data to make your service better-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> Because data makes data, you know-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> The alchemy side of it is interesting, but then there's all... You get trapped in regulation, licensing, it can be destructive. >> Yes, so as an engineer, and as an open source engineer, you find people that have no clue about what an MIT license is to a GPL or why you'd use one or the other. I think there's a lot we can do to educate the wider community and help them to learn the basics of these issues. When I was at university we had a course on ethics and legal issues and licensing, and I heard on the radio earlier on the Uber that they're starting to try and up the level of that again, and I think it really needs to start at a ground level. We need to educate people about these issues so that they're aware of how to handle the data. I mean, if you look at common tools like Docker and VS Code and Atom, popular editors, they collect anonymous usage statistics and you have to opt out. You know, should OpenFaas collect data as well, because it can be super helpful for us to know the right thing to do. >> Yeah. >> And when you come to open source you get no feedback until somebody wants support from you and it has to be done yesterday for free. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> And so, yeah, getting data can be super powerful. >> Well, Alex, you bring up a great point. I think this is something that's worthy of an ongoing conversation. I think it will be, too, because GPL, Apache license, all these licenses were built when open source was a Tier 2 citizen, so the whole idea of these-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> Licenses was to create a robust sharing economy of code, and you know, with the certain nuances of those licenses. But just like stacks get updated and modernized with what we've seen the containers and now Kubernetes is serverless, the stack is changing and modernizing. The licenses have to, as well, so I think this is something that... I don't, I think it's kind of like we've got to get on it. (laughing) It's like I think we should just, this is a work area. It's not necessarily... It's game changing if you don't do it, right, because it could-- >> Yeah. >> It could flip it either way. So, to me that's my opinion. >> Well, I think you're under MIT, correct, is that-- >> So, it's under MIT right now. >> Lauren: Okay. >> One of the things that I didn't realize when I started the project is if you want to get into a big foundation like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation you need an Apache 2.0 license, and the main difference is that it offers some protections around patent claims, but it's basically-- >> Lauren: Okay. >> Compatible, so it is a minefield, and it's-- >> Lauren: So, that's just for the CNCF? >> Right, and the Apache Foundation, obviously as well. >> Lauren: Yes. >> And probably many others follow suit because I think it, we talk about the-- >> John: It's the dual source, it's the dual source. >> A refresh... >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> Right, it's a compatible license, it seems to help a lot of people. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> That's a huge issue because you could be well down the road with committing code and then the lawyers will make you take it out. >> Right, so that's why organizations like the Open Source Program Office exist within VMWare, to help these issues and to monitor and do compliance. They may use software like Black Duck to check stuff-- >> Lauren: Yep, mm-hmm. >> Automatically because you don't want to be doing checks on your aircraft once it's in the air. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> John: Yeah. >> You want to sort out everything out on the ground. >> You'll be grounding your fleet, that's for sure-- >> Right. >> When it comes to that, how do you handle that with licensing? How do you guys handle that when people contribute? >> Yeah. >> Are they aware of the license or they don't understand the implications? >> So, with OpenFaas we follow a model very similar to the Linux kernel, which is a sign off developer certificate of origin. What you're saying is I'm allowed to give you this code, I'm allowed for this to be a part of the project and I wrote it, I originated it. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And that's pretty much a good balance between a full contributor license agreement and nothing at all. >> John: Yeah. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> But look, there's a lot of projects in this space right now. I don't know if you've noticed that, Kubernetes serverless projects. >> Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of really interesting, it's why I like this show here. I think what Cisco's smart to do here at DevNet Create is identify the network programmability, which really takes devops, expands the aperture of what devops is, so-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> You know, as you got new applications coming online some developers want nothing to do with the infrastructure. Kubernetes has got a much more active and more prominent role with layer seven primitives, for instance, or-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> Managing things down to the network layer. You're talking about policy services inside services on the fly, so this is really a big, a good thing, in my opinion. So, you know, I think, Kubernetes, most people look at as a kind of generic orchestration, but I think there's so much more there. >> Alex: Yeah. >> I think that to me is attracting some really rockstar developers. >> Yeah, well I think, you know, the fact that you are open, you're under the MIT license, which I am a fan of-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> And you know, it is, you're on a very successful trajectory in terms of, you know, what you're building and who's engaged and the fact that VMWare is behind you means that they're going to put some money into it, hopefully, and help you guys along as it works, but it is also a project that is not... You know, it doesn't have folks just from VMWare. >> Alex: Yeah. >> It's really, really diverse in terms of who's committing the code. So, I think there's a lot of things that are really going for you. Now, who do you see, you mentioned competitors... >> Alex: Yeah. >> So, can you talk a little bit about what the ecosystem there looks like? >> Yeah, so there's a number of projects that I think have made some really good decisions about their architecture and their implementation. They all vary quite subtly, and one of the questions I get asked a lot is, you know, how is this different from X, cubeless nucleo, and if you look at the CNCF landscape there used to be a very small section with OpenFaas, Lambda, and a couple of others. It's now so big it has its own PDF just about serverless, and I think that's super confusing for people. So, part of what we're trying to do is make that simple and say, "Look, there may be many options. "Here's OpenFaas, here's how it works. "You can get it deployed in 60 seconds. "You can have any binary or any programming language "you want and it will scale up over Kubernetes." We'll just make a really deep integration, give you everything you'd expect, really nice developer experience. >> Lauren: That's great. >> What are some of the use cases you see right now, low hanging fruit for developers that want to come in and get involved in the project? Have you guys identified any low hanging fruit use cases? >> So, what I've seen, and I talked about this a bit yesterday in the talk, is three big use cases, really. The first one was Anisha Keshavan at University of Washington. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Now, she's doing a lot of data science with neuroinformatics, medical images. She's able to take scans of brains and give them to people like you and me, who don't know anything about medical science. We just draw around the lesions and we train her model, and then she makes it competitive like a game, gamefies it, you get more points, but actually, what we're doing is making the world a better place by training her medical imaging database. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> She'll then use that as an OpenFaas function to test real images as part of her postdoctorate. >> So, she's crowd sourcing, wisdom of crowds. >> Alex: Right. >> Collect some intelligence for her research. >> Now, one of the other things that I think's really cool is in the community we built out a project with two 17 year olds. Two 17 year olds built a really cool project, and when I think back to when I was 15, 16, I was playing with something like PHP on Windows Lamp Stack. You know, I had to do everything myself. >> John: Yeah. >> They got, like, this scaffolding built up and they could just go to the tenth story and just keep adding on. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> And they didn't have to worry about managing this infrastructure at all. >> Or architecture, foundation architecture. >> Alex: Right, right. >> Yeah, and that's exactly the reason why you want to do that. >> So, they wrote some small blocks of Python that we found this machine learning code that could convert a black and white image to color, wrapped it in a box and said, "There's a function," then dropped it into OpenFaas and started feeding tweets in, and that was pretty much it. >> John: Yeah. >> Now we have @ColorizeBot, a bit of a strange spelling but you'll find it on Twitter, and it's been in Le Monde newspaper, all round the world. It was pronounced at CubeCon as well, and it's just a super interesting way of showing how you can take something very complex, right, and democratize it. >> Yeah, we'd love to get those people working for theCUBE and put the little cube box and throw all the tweets in there. >> Alex: Right, yeah. >> Alex, thanks for coming on, congratulations. What's next on your project, tell us what's going on, what's next for you, what are you guys conquering next? >> So, I'm really focused on growing the team and community. We've got an open recruitment position open right now and a small team that's building internally. I think the more people we can get contributing on a regular basis the more support there's going to be for the community, the more people are going to want to use this Actually had 26 people join a call last week. "How to contribute to OpenFaas," that was the name of it. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Around the world, and the best part for me was where we got to the testimonies and I had people just sharing their tips and experiences. How rewarding it is to contribute something bigger, something that you as a developer will actually want to use. >> Yeah, and the value opportunities, to extract value out of the group-- >> Yeah. >> It's phenomenal, functions as a service. Super relevant in cloud and devops as the middleware, if you want to call it that, expands more capabilities in devops are coming. It's theCUBE coverage here at DevNet Create. We'll be back with more live coverage here in Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California, after this short break. (techy music playing)