>>Ly from San Diego, California at the cube covering to clock in cloud native con brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem Marsh. >>Welcome back. This is the cube live coverage three days wall to wall coverage of CubeCon cloud native con in San Diego. I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost for these three days is John Troyer. And welcome to the program. First of all, from the keynote stage, Heather Kirksey, who is the vice president of community and ecosystem development with the Linux foundation for CNCF part of Linux foundation and from some of the technology behind the scenes joining her, Sandy Pennys are the SVP of strategic engagement at attorney. Thank you so much for joining us. Right. So Heather, this was a really cool demo with a lot of things going beyond the scene. Uh, if people actually go watch an interview we did yesterday, uh, with, uh, the people at red hat talk about, uh, it's a good thing. It was cloud native because there was a brownout cower was lost, had to rebuild the entire thing. Um, and everybody up on stage, you know, the next day, didn't know anything the wiser. So, uh, you know, really cool pot on stage. Uh, you know, talking about 5g global engagement, China mobile, uh, other banks. I like, um, I'm sorry, other mobile providers, uh, like from Canada and from Europe involved in this. Um, give us a little bit of the, the, the foundation view as to, you know, how something like this comes together and how you get participation from, you know, the technology providers, the telco providers. Uh, you know, it takes, it takes a village. >>First of all, you have to be slightly mad. Um, but I mean that's, that's really kind of the premise of open source, right? Is that people come together and they build things together. And so we done some demos in the past, um, where we looked at sort of, you know, the, the modernization of the central office. And so we had had some, you know, some tea, you know, some tapes of folks that had been building things. And then we, you know, we sent out a call basically to the community and said, yeah, we'd like to do another one. And what we're going to try to do is full five G full called native, if you're interested in joining, yo come on. And so it just ended up that basically 15 organizations said, yes, that sounds like something that we would like to prove out. And 80 volunteers across those organizations ended up working on it. >>My understanding was about four months, uh, to, to put all the pieces together, bring us, bring us through kinda, you know, how the stack gets built and. >>Yeah, well I mean, so amongst some of the issues where you have five G itself is fairly new. So we, we started with sort of the complexities of getting equipment, you know, and getting five G radio. You know, we had a partner in China who had a 5g handset that then wanted us to indemnify, you know, all of these things. Uh, to the extent that like we as a nonprofit didn't feel comfortable signing the agreement. So it was, you know, it started actually just, I mean, this was so cutting edge with in terms of the five G aspect that getting equipment was challenging. Um, yeah. And that's before you even get to sort of the challenges of building the stack. So, um, so, you know, it started kind of figuring out what pieces started building things, um, you know, found some yo gaps in Coobernetti's around supporting the, the, the sophistication of networking that we have to do. Um, so we figured out how to work around it for the demo, but what we want to do is start upstreaming some, um, some changes into, into some of the projects there. >>All right, so San Deepa, your company's one of the providers inside here. So tell us what, what drew you into it and how it is living on that bleeding edge was something like five. >>Well, it's, it's absolutely thrilling living on that leading edge. It's exciting, you know, lots of risks. But the payoff yesterday was fantastic. Be able to complete that call on stage. You know, from our perspective, we were invited in fairly early on into the project. Uh, and we're, we're thrilled to be part of it. And as once we understood the scope and what everyone's trying to do, we realized like we're providing the, the SD wan for this project, connecting the public cloud, the private cloud, and we're deploying, uh, using containers, Kubernetes. And we are able to bring the entire thing together by creating one virtual network so that it's seamless and all the underlying infrastructure, that layer, layer two, layer one, the underlay is just completely invisible to be able to transport that call, to do the signaling, to do everything that needs to be done. >>So for us to become part of this project was really powerful for one, for us to just, uh, just work with some of the companies that were there, like the Linux foundation and tell the Nobel all the other big name players that were out there. And so that was, that was amazing. An amazing experience. But then the community itself that came together, like the people that we met, we met them all at the show. It's all phone calls, we met them all at the show and it really is a community filled with love and a real drive and desire, uh, to build something new and different. Right. Sprinkled with a bit of crazy. >>Yeah. >>Well, so I mean this is a, is a great example of how the Linux foundation can be a catalyst here. I mean one of the Linux foundation is so broad, the CNCF is so broad and you're operating in many domains in this being, you know, bringing the telecom world together, being one of them. But I don't know, can you maybe just talk a little bit about the ecosystem and the unique challenges of, I mean there are some times open source approaches that are a little more strongly opinionated. Like this is going to be our, this is, this is what we're working on. This is going to be our stack. This is the projects in our stack. CNCF has a obviously a, a well documented and open, uh, process around bringing projects in and projects graduating. How does that make your >>life harder? >> Yeah. Well, I mostly focus on our networking projects and working with the telecom industry. And yeah, I mean Telekom definitely likes to be opinionated, you know, I mean that's, that's kind of, and our soul. Um, and so that is also is useful because really at the end of the day, interoperability for the type of scale that telecom operators has is very important. Right? It's um, yeah, some of the cloud providers, right? It's up to the people who want to run on them to like work with their API APIs. But the, the telecom operators, they're using all these applications to provide services to their customers so they have a business need to make sure everything really works end to end. And so there's actually an initiative right now between, um, the LF networking projects and the GSM, uh, where we're really trying to, not to prescriptively, because we do also understand that that doesn't know, you're not going to get the exact same pieces of software that worked for every single operator's network or business, but with a lot more sort of UPenn opinion around, you know, what should the cloud platforms, whether they are VM based or container based, what do they look like and how can we start doing things like compliance and verification programs around commercial implementations, whether it is the underlying platform or whether it's the applications on top. >>And so that's the thing that, you know, we're, we're working on right now because at the end of the day, we're really needing to help them accelerate their, their deployments and, um, get that agility. That's the promise of. >>So, Heather, I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier that there were some gaps in Coobernetti's speak to how fast the community rallied around to, you know, allow this, uh, solution to go forward. >>Yeah. So, um, I'll, I mean basically this is what happens when you get a bunch of engineers together, you know, for the demo itself, we weren't going to fork or make our own sort of changes Kubernetes. So we, we did some things to, to tie things together. Probably you've seen SD when I see Rampart. But yeah, one of the, one of the big issues is just being able to expose multiple interfaces. Um, which, you know, in a service writer network you have multiple interfaces, right? Um, fi six support is another big issue. And so being able to expose those natively in Kubernetes or natively just using cloud native, it's something that we're still working on. Um, there, there are a couple of projects that are looking at that um, network service mesh. Uh, you know, maybe there's some different CNI who are beginning to think through that problem. Um, none of them were quite there. So yeah, we didn't want to start forking and writing pseudo Kubernetes code. Um, so we kinda just use some of the tools and the players in place to work around that. But we, what we would love is to upstream that code and to main line. Sure. >>Yeah. So Sandy would love to hear a little bit more about how SD wind fits in the entire multicloud discussion. Um, we were, we had a pop here in San Diego. There's a lab in Montreal and then there is a, a lab in France and we use public, uh, a combination of, uh, the Alibaba cloud in North America and in Europe. And what we had to do is we had to create a way for the phones to reach each other. So we had to do this initial signaling where you do the request and you have to get to all of the different pods to make the, to make the request. So what we did is we put our, um, containers and all the, in all the cloud providers and also in the labs and we were able to create that private network. And that was what allowed for the call signaling to happen. >>And for the actual call to actually be completed from one to handset to the other. Cindy, you're uh, uh, you talked about community, you know, you're an engineer, a stye in our eyes, a word is SDN when a word, I suppose they usually hear more on an enterprise side of the show. Right. And, uh, you know, talk with lots of folks who provide, you know, in, in that space. This is a little bit different, right? As you, I don't know if you've had a chance to wander either in the sessions or on the floor, kind of curious. There is some, a little bit of networking out there, a little bit networking, security and a couple of other, certainly some service mesh stuff. Right. I don't know. What are your thoughts about how this is growing up on the, in this open source world? It's, listen, it's growing up very fast, right? >>That's, that's 100% sure. I mean, the show is, is, is growing like leaps and bounds every year. It's insane. And that, that, that debt, that performance yesterday was in front of, I don't know how many thousands of people, but I mean that was huge and it was amazing. Um, and you're right, you know, normally when you're thinking about this kind of stuff, you're not necessarily thinking about the networking, but at the end of the day, you know, Kubernetes is a platform or a tool. SD wan is a tool. Um, and if you take all of these tools and put them together, you can actually build something wonderful, right? And that's what we did in this project here. We were able to deliver a 5g call and you know, run it everywhere. So I think what's important in the community, even though this is really primarily a developer event and developer show, you are seeing some edge people here, you are seeing some networking people here and people are the awareness of, Oh wait, you know, we need edge and we need networking to actually build, you know, commercializable platforms or products, right. Is, it's that awareness that's just, I think this year at least is really starting to come out. And I think next year it's going to be even more prevalent and you're going to the show me evolve, you know? And that's why where I kind of see it going. >>Yeah. I mean, I think application developers and general tend to think networking is amazing. It just happens to be, they're sort of like plumbing and power. Um, but to actually deliver it is a fairly complicated challenge and it's part of the reason we want to do the demo yesterday was actually to kind of show some of the challenges and to kind of show what it takes to set up a mobile network. So the F we're going to use Kubernetes to do that. They, you know, the developers here would have a little bit more understanding so that when we were like, we need, you know, we need multiple interfaces or we need to be able to address things in a certain way. They, they, they have a better understanding of why so they can help us from the telecom industry, uh, design and build it out. >>Yeah. I guess the last thing is we've had the cube of the open source summit. We've been to the open networking summit. Uh, you know, when you get off the stage, you put, you know, there's so many different open source projects that Dan just give us a view as to how they span across all of these communities to make sure that we don't end up with a lot of fragmented things. How does everything kind of pull together in the networking? All right, so, so many projects across so many sources, how does, how does Linux foundation make sure that we don't just end up with, you know, siloed, uh, you know, places? >>Well, yeah, to be, to be honest, it's a little bit of a challenge because sometimes the reason that we end up with multiple projects serving what looks like similar needs is because there are different technical approaches. And so might be one will work better than the other. I mean, that's kind of the idea of open source that people can try different things. Um, and, uh, we just try to help people have more, less of a not invented here sort of mindset that if there's a good reason, uh, to try a different approach, go for it. And let's see what, what takes root and what flowers. Um, but you know, also other people are doing things, so just because you're not aware of them. So we, you know, there's a lot of stuff around education and, um, sharing of information that we try to do that, that helps with that. But I mean, yeah. >>Heather, Cindy, thank you so much for joining us regulations on, on the demo. A lot of hard work. >>Thank you. I just have to tell you, I feel as though a thousand pound weight has been lifted off my shoulders out, but it was extraordinarily fun to do actually. >>It was fun. Thank you for John Troyer. I'm Stu Miniman getting towards the end of our three days wall-to-wall coverage. They're running for the tee shirts that are left, but we've got a couple more interviews. Thank you for watching the queue.