>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Brought to you by RedHat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Stu: Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost for three days of coverage is John Troyer. We're here at KubeCon CloudNativeCon in San Diego, over 12,000 in attendance and happy to welcome back a CUBE alumni and veteran of generations of the stacks that we've seen come together and change over the time, Sheng Liang, who is the co-founder and CEO of Rancher Labs. Thanks so much, great to see you. >> Shang: Thank you Stuart, is very glad to be here. >> All right, so you know Kubernetes, flash to the pan nobody's all that excited about it. I mean, we've seen all these things come and go over the years, Sheng. No but seriously, the excitement is palpable. Every year, you know, so many more people, so many more projects, so much more going on. Help set the stage for you, as to what you see and the importance today of kind of CloudNative in general and you know, this ecosystem specifically. >> Yeah you're so right though, Stuart. Community as a whole and Kubernetes has really come a long way. In the early days, Kubernetes was a uh, you know, somewhat of a technical community, lot of Linux people. But not a whole lot of end users. Not a whole lot of Enterprise customers. I walk in today and just the kind of people I've met, I've probably talked to fifty people already who are just really at the beginning of the show and uh there's a very very large number Enterprise customers. And this does feel like Kubernetes has crossed the chasm and headed in to the mainstream Enterprise market. >> Yeah it's interesting you know I've talked to you know plenty of the people here probably if you brought up things like OpenStack and CloudStack they wouldn't even know what we were talking about. The wave of containerization really seemed to spread far and wide. At Rancher you've done some surveys, give us some of the insight. What are you seeing? You've talked to plenty of customers. Give us where we are with the maturity. >> Definitely, definitely. Enterprise Kubernetes adoption is ready for prime time. You know the So what we're really seeing is some of the early challenges a few years ago a lot of people were having problems with just installing Kubernetes. They were literally just making sure to get people educated about container as a concept. Those have been overcome. Now, uh, we're really facing next generation of growth. And people solve these days solve problems like how do I get my new applications onboarding to Kubernetes. How do I really integrate Kubernetes into my multicloud and hybrid-Cloud strategy? And as Enterprise's need to perform computing in places beyond just the data centers and the cloud, we're also seeing tremendous amount of interest in running Kubernetes on the Edge. So those are some of the major findings of our survey. >> John: That's great. So Sheng I'd love for you to kind of elaborate or elaborate for us where Rancher fits into this. Right. Rancher is, you've been around, you've a mature stack of technology and also some new announcements today so I'd kind of love for you to kind of tell us how you fit in to that landscape you just described. >> Absolutely. This is very exciting and very very fast changing industry. So one of the things that Rancher is able to play very well is we're really able to take work with the community, take the latest and greatest open source technology and actually develop open source products on top this and make that technology useful and consumable for Enterprise at large. So the way we see it, to make Kubernetes work we really need to solve problems at three levels. At the lowest level, the industry need at lot of compliant and compatible certified Kubernetes distros and services. So that's table stakes now. Rancher is a leader in providing CNCF certified Kubernetes distro. We actually provide two of them. One of them is called RKE - Rancher Kubernetes Engine. Something we've been doing it for years. It's really one of the easiest to use and most widely deployed Kubernetes distributions. But we don't force our customers to only use our Kubernetes distribution. Rancher customers can use whatever CNCF certified Kubernetes distribution or Kubernetes services they want. So a lot of our customers use RKE(Rancher Kubernetes Engine) but they also use, when they go to the cloud, they use cloud hosted Kubernetes Services like GKE and EKS. There are really a lot of advantages in using those because cloud providers will help you run these Kubernetes clusters for free. And in many cases they even throw in the infrastructure it takes to run the Kubernetes masters and etcd databases for free. If you're in the cloud, there's really no reason not to be using these Kubernetes services. Now there's one area that Rancher ended up innovating at the Kubernetes distros, despite having these data center focus and cloud focus Kubernetes distros and services. And that is one of our, one of the two big announcements today. And that's called K3S. K3S is a great open source project. It's probably one of the most exciting open source projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem today. And what we did with K3S is we took Kubernetes that's been proven in data center and cloud and we brought it everywhere. So with K3S you can run Kubernetes on a Raspberry Pi. You can run Kubernetes in a surveillance camera. You can run Kubernetes in an ATM machine. You know, we have customers trying to run now Kubernetes in a uh, factory floor. So it really helps us realize our vision of Kubernetes as a new Linux and you run it everywhere. >> Well that's great 'cause you talk about that simplicity that we need and if you start talking about Edge deployment, I don't have the people, I don't have the skillset, and a lot times I don't have the gear, uh, to run that. So you know, help connect the dots as to you know, what led Rancher to do the K3S piece of it and you know, what did we take out? Or what's the differences between K8S and the K3S? >> That's a great question, you know. Even the name "K3S" is actually somewhat a wordplay on K8S You know we kind of cut half of 8 away and you're left with 3. It really happened with some of our early traction we sawing some customers. I remember, in retrospect it wasn't really that long ago. It was like middle of last year, we saw a blog coming out of Chick-fil-A and a group of technical enthusiasts were experimenting with actually running uh, Kubernetes in very, in like Intel Nook servers. You know, they were talking about potentially running three of those servers in every one of their stores and at the time they were using RKE and Rancher Kubernetes Engine to do that. And they run into a lot of issues. I mean to be honest if you think about running Kubernetes in the cloud in the database center, uh these servers have a lot of resources and you also have a dedicated operations teams. You have an SRE to manage them, right? But when you really bring it out into branch offices and Edge computing locations, now all of the sudden, number one, these uh, the software now has to take a lot less resource but also you don't really have SREs monitoring them every day anymore. And you, since these, Kubernetes distro really has to be zero touch and it has to run just like a, you know like a embedded window or Linux server. And that's what K3S was able to accomplish, we were able to really take away lot of the baggage that came with having all the drivers that were necessary to run Kubernetes in the cloud and we were also able to dramatically simplify what it takes to actually start Kubernetes and operate it. >> So unsolicited, I was doing an event right before this one and I asked some people what they looking forward to here at KubeCon. And independently, two different people said, "The thing I'm most excited about is K3S." And I think it's because it's the right slice through Kubernetes. I can run it in my lab. I can run it on my laptop. I can on a stack of Raspberry Pis or Nooks, but I could also run it in production if I, you know I can scale it up >> Stu: Yeah. >> John: And in fact they both got a twinkle in their eye and said well what if this is the future of Kubernetes, like you could take this and you could run it, you know? They were very excited about it. >> Absolutely! I mean, you know, I really think, you know, as a company we survive by, and thrive by delivering the kind of innovation that pushes the market forward right? I mean, we, otherwise people are not going to look at Rancher and say you guys are the originators of Kubernetes technology. So we're very happy to be able to come up with technologies like K3S that effectively greatly broadened the addressable market for everyone. Imagine you were a security vendor and before like all you really got to do is solving security problems. Or if you were a monitoring vendor you were able to solve monitoring problems for a data center and in the cloud. Now with K3S you end up getting to solve the same problems on the Edge and in branch offices. So that's why so many people are so excited about it. >> All right so Sheng you said K3S is one of the announcements this week, what's the rest of the news? >> Yeah so K3S, RKE, and all the GKE, AKS, EKS, they're really the fundamental layer of Kubernetes everywhere. Then on top of that one of the biggest piece of innovation that Rancher labs created is the idea of multi-cluster management. A few years ago it was pretty much of a revolutionary concept. Now it's widely understood. Of course an organization is not going to have just one cluster, they're going to have many clusters. So Rancher is the industry leader for doing multi-cluster management. And these clusters could span clouds, could span data centers, now all the way out to branch offices and the Edge. So we're exhibiting Rancher on the show floor. Everyone, most people I've met here, they know Rancher because of that flash of product. Now our second announcement though is yet another level above Rancher, so what we've seen is in order to really Kubernetes to achieve the next level of adoption in the Enterprise we're seeing you know some of the development teams and especially the less skilled dev ops teams, they're kind of struggling with the learning curve of Kubernetes and also some of the associated technologies around service mesh around Knative, around, you know, CICD, so we created a project called Rio, as in Rio de Janeiro the city. And the nice thing about Rio is it packaged together all these Cloud Native technologies and then we created very easy to use, very simple to understand user experience for developers and dev ops teams. So they no longer have to start with the training course on Kubernetes, on Istio, on Knative, on Tekton, just to get productive. They can pretty much get productive on day one. So that Rio project has hit a very important milestone today, we shipped the beta release for it and we're exhibiting it at the booth as well. >> Well that's great. You know, the beta release of Rio, pulling together a lot of these projects. Can you talk about some folks that, early adopters that have been using them or some folks that have been working with the project? >> Sheng: Yeah absolutely. So I talk about some of the early adoption we're seeing for both K3S and Rio. Uh, what we see the, first of all just the market reception of K3S, as you said, has been tremendous. Couple of even mentioned to you guys today in your earlier interviews. And it is primarily coming from customers who want to run Kubernetes in places you probably haven't quite anticipated before, so I kind of give you two examples. One is actually appliance manufacture. So if you think they used to ship appliances, then you can imagine these appliances come with Linux and they would image their appliance with an OS image with their applications. But what's happening is these applications are becoming so sophisticated they're now talking about running the entire data analytics stack and AI software. So it actually takes Kubernetes not necessarily, because it's one server in a situation of appliance. Kubernetes is not really managing a cluster, but it's managing all the application components and microservices. So they ended up bundling up K3S into their appliance. This is one example. Another example is actually an ISV, that's a very interesting use case as well. So uh, they ship a micro service based application software stack and again their software involves a lot of different complicated components. And they decided to replatform their software on Kubernetes. We've all heard a lot of that! But in their case they have to also ship, they don't just run the software themselves, they have to ship the software to the end users. And most of their end users are not familiar with Kubernetes yet, right? And they don't really want to say, to install our software you go provision the Kubernetes cluster and then you operate it from now on. So what they did is they took K3S and bundled into their application as if it were an application server, almost like a modern day WebLogic and WebSphere, then they shipped the whole thing to their customers. So I thought both of these use cases are really interesting. It really elevates the reach of Kubernetes from just being almost like a cloud platform in the old days to now being an application server. And then I'll also quickly talk about Rio. A lot of interest inside Rio is around really dev ops teams who've had, I mean, we did a survey early on and we found out that a lot of our customers they deploy Kubernetes in services. But they end up building a custom experience on top of their Kubernetes deployment, just so that most of their internal users wouldn't have to take a course on Kubernetes to start using it. So they can just tell that this thing that, this is where my source code is and then every thing from that point on will be automated. So now with Rio they wouldn't have to do that anymore. Effectively Rio is the direct source to URL type of, one step process. And they are able to adopt Rio for that purpose. >> So Sheng, I want to go back to when we started this conversation. You said, you know, the ecosystem growing. That not only, you know, so many vendors here, 129 end users, members of the CNCF. The theme we've been talking about is to really, you know, it's ready for production and people are all embracing it. But to get the vast majority of people, simplicity really needs to come front and center, I think. K3S really punctuates that. What else do we need to do as an ecosystem, you know, Rancher is looking to take a leadership position and help drive this, but what else do you want to see from your peers, the community, overall to help drive this to the promise that it could deliver. >> We really see the adoption of Kubernetes is probably going to wing at three, I mean. We see most organizations go through this three step journey. The first step is you got to install and operate Kubernetes. You know, day one, day two. And I think we've got it down. With K3S it becomes so easy. With GKE it becomes one API call or one simple UI interaction. And CNCS has really stepped up and created a great, you know, compliance certification program, right? So we're not seeing the kind of fragmentation that we saw with some of the other technologies. This is fantastic. Then the second step we see is, which a lot of our customers are going through now, is now you have all the Kubernetes clusters coming from different clouds, different infrastructure, potentially on the Edge. You have a management problem. Now you all of the sudden because we made Kubernetes clusters so easy to obtain you can potentially have a sprawl. If you are not careful you might leave them misconfigured. That could expose a security issue. So really it takes Rancher, it takes our ecosystem partners, like Twistlock, like Aqua. CICD partners, like CloudBees, GitLab. Just everyone really needs to come together, make that, solve that management problem. So not only, uh, you build this Kubernetes infrastructure but then you actually going to get a lot of users and they can use the cluster securely and reliably. Then I think the third step, which I think a lot of work still remain is we really want to focus on growing the footprint of workload, of enterprise workload, in the enterprise. So there the work is honestly just getting started. Anywhere from uh, if you walk into any enterprise you know what percentage of their total workload is running on Kubernetes today? I mean outside of Google and Uber, that percentage is probably very small, right? They're probably in the minority, maybe even in single digit percentage. So, we really need to do a lot of work. You know, we need to uh, Rancher created this project called LongHorn and we also work with a lot of our ecosystem partners in persistence storage area like Portworx, StorageOS, OpenEBS. Lot of us really need to come together and solve this problem of running persistent workload. I mean there was also a lot of talk about it at the keynote this morning, I was very encouraged to hear that. That could easily double, triple the amount of workload that could bring, that could be onboarded into Kubernetes and even experiences like Rio, you know? Make it further simpler, more accessible. That is really in the DNA of Rancher. Rancher wouldn't be surviving and thriving without our insight into how to make our technology consumable and widely adopted. So a lot of work we're doing is really to drive the adoption of Kubernetes in the enterprise beyond, you know, the current state and into something I really don't see in the future, Kubernetes wouldn't be as actually widely used as say AWS or vSphere. That would be my bar for success. Hopefully in a few years we can be talking about that. >> All right, that is a high bar Sheng. We look forward to more conversations with you going forward. Congratulations on the announcement. Great buzz on K3S, and yeah, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you very much. >> For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more coverage here from KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019 in San Diego, you're watching theCUBE. [Upbeat music]