>> 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 Stuart Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, the European show, which of course for 2020 is virtual. Always love when we get to talk to the practitioners, as well as many of them heavily involved in what happens at the CNCF, you know, all these open source communities. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest Katie Gamanji. She is a Cloud Platform Engineer with American Express, and she's also a member of the CNCF's TOC, which is the technical oversight committee. Katie, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me today. I'm quite excited to be here. >> Excellent. Well, you are, as I mentioned, you're part of the TOC. You also present at the show last year. You presented at one of the KubeCon shows this year. As I mentioned, you were with American Express now. I believe it was Conde Nast, You shared some of the journey along those lines. Maybe for our audience, give us a little bit about, you know, your background, and what's got you involved in, you know, some of these projects in communities. >> Absolutely. Oh, such a good question. I can talk forever about that. My passion about Cloud Native. So, my name is Katie Gamanji, and I am one of the Cloud Platform Engineer for American Express. I joined American Express around five months ago, and I am part of the team that aims to transform the current platform, by embracing the Cloud Native principles, and making the best use of the open source tools. As mentioned previously, I've been working for Conde Nast. I've been in that role for almost two years. And as part of that role, we aim to create a centralized globally distributed platform that had Kubernetes as a central piece. And that was the role which actually got me involved more into the Cloud Native tooling, and I've been exploring them quite heavily since then. And that's why I wanted to get more in terms more contribution to the community. I've been doing that previously for different talks, and actually writing blog posts on different, giving different guides on how to start using some of the tooling. However, this year I decided to apply for TOC. And I've been elected as a TOC from the end user perspective, so I'm representing pretty much the overview of what end users think that the next direction should be within the Cloud Native landscape. And for the last, actually for the past five months, I've been on the TOC, with the CNCF, and it's only 11 of us. And we are in charge to make sure that we can guide, and set this technical vision for this year for the CNCF landscape. >> Yeah. Katie, I definitely want to talk about the TOC piece, but I want to back up a little bit. And you talked about some of the tooling, you talked about the community. Help me understand a little bit, you know, from a business standpoint, why you know, Conde Nast, American Express, looking towards using, Kubernetes and all of these open tours toolings. What was the charter, the challenge put before them, that felt that doing things this new way would help them. >> I think this actually goes a couple of years back. In my previous role before Conde Nast, I was in a team which aimed to provision infrastructure, but it was in a more, how can I say old fashioned manner? We had to configure our data centers manually, configure the VMs and processes. We had (indistinct) of automation. But at the time, this was maybe three years ago. I started to look into Kubertetes, and it was still baby steps, like, there was interest from the community, and I really wanted to, kind of get my hands on it more. And when I was looking for a role, which was at Conde Nast, I was looking for something which aimed to introduce containers in the entire infrastructure. And I think Conde Nast actually was very appealing as a role because not many expect for a media company to invest in technology, and actually the underlined infrastructure. So, from that perspective, I thought it's actually quite a good use case to change this perspective in the community. As well, with Conde Nast, it was a very international company. We had different business units around the world. All of them had different tech stacks. So, the challenge itself, how do we unify that? How do we centralize the deployment process of the application and serving our requests? But at the same time, have these individualized layer for every single market to still personalize their content. So, it was a very good project, I think, for me to further go into the Cloud Native to link, and actually definitely proved to be the right role for that. And currently I am in a different role. It's actually a financial company. But I think this is my personal challenge. I think there is a perception of financial companies moving towards modernization of their infrastructure, but it's still going quite slowly. And I think my personal challenge in this perspective is to make sure that actually FinTech is a thing, but FinTech in Cloud Native, actually using open source tooling is possible. Obviously, we can transition that to some of the secondary base, maybe not the core base of the business, but this transition, actually getting the change going is the most important bit. Once actual goes, it's just a boulder like, downhill, which is going to take everything around, and refactoring bit by bit. >> Yeah. Katie, you brought up a really important point. You know, in today's world, especially, you know, this year 2020 with the global pandemic going on, being able to react fast is so important regardless of what industry you're in. You talked about in your previous role, you had a global rollout to work across a lot of environments. Help us understand a little bit underneath the covers. You know, using this tool set, how does this help you move faster? How does it, you know, in some ways unify teams, regardless of what challenges they have? >> I think for us at least at Conde Nast, it was quite important to have one platform, so actually centralized all of our required, actually gather all our requirements, and translate them in within the platform. So, what we actually wanted, was to us to have Kubernetes as the gravitational point. Now, with Kubernetes, we'd have some of the main functionalities such as portability or flexibility. We'd be able to scale to very easily without, actually with minimal effort, but more importantly, we'll be able to transport our platform to different regions. So, to actually replicate the entire tech stat. So once we have these centralized platform, it was very easy for us to distribute them. For example, in regions across the US. And that time I was working there at least. There was an intentional strategy to replicate the tech stack in China. And that'll be very easy because with Kubernetes you just have this lifting shift capabilities. As long as you have BMs, you'll be able or compute, you'll be able to run the entire Conde Nast tech stack. So that was a very kind of big point for us to move to Kubernetes. Whilst I think in American Express, the strategy is completely different. It's still a lot of heritage infrastructure we have at the moment, actually we are running on Kubernetes. There is but the provider itself is Open shave This proving to be showcasing some of the issues for us moving forward, and we'd like to transition to a more neater way to run Kubernetes. And this potentially means, we haven't finalized the decision yet but it might we'd be using probably a cloud provider, or it might be the case of actually running Kubernetes self service. So we've actually got to maintain our clusters. This is not defined, but the underlying idea is that we want to be more kind of modern version of Kubernetes or managing Kubernetes moving forward. So this is one of the strategies. But I think within American express, the main underlying idea is that we really want to inner source most of the configuration. Historically we had different contractors and vendors working on our bits and pieces, we'd like to actually get all of these in house and have a centralized way to manage our infrastructure. So this is the underlying project which I think is going to take a while, but again there is an intention to include Cloud Native to link and technologies, and I think it's a very healthy thinking in terms of technology. >> Well Katie, you highlighted two really important topics that we've seen out there. Number one is exactly where my infrastructure is, it's going to change and I don't need to think about it. So you talked about public cloud, data centers, it might change in the future. And number two, making sure that you have the skill set in house. Something we definitely learnt from the outsourcing trends of the past was, when things need to be changed, if I had to rely on someone else it became very difficult. So if you're leveraging Kubernetes and you have the developer chops to be able to respond to the business in an agile way, you're going to be much more ready to be able to handle whatever happens in the future. >> Exactly >> So important. >> I want to switch and talk a little bit about your TOC work, presenting at the show. It's great to see companies enabling their employees to participate in this sort of thing. Help me understand how for you personally and what is the support that you get from your last job, your current job to participate in these open source projects in communities. >> Right. I think both of the companies, Conde Nast and American express, they're quite interested in been part of the Cloud Native community. With Conde Nast, they actually a part of end users. With American Express I think there is a thinking to actually join the end user community. So this might be something which will happen in future. I cannot guarantee but I'm hoping. This is going to be again one of my personal challenges, making sure we get in the community and share some of our used cases. But for now I think both of the companies actually understand the value of been part of actually using Open Source, but more importantly, understanding how other companies use that. Not one use case, especially when it come to Kubernetes, not one Kubernetes platform is going to be the same. There's always going to be different underlying technologies that plug in into it. There's always going to be different ways to use different tooling. And having these concentrated community and source of information, I think the companies actually understand the value in that and contributing to that. So I think, this is something which I've been quite passionate about to actually understand some of the strengths, to understand how some of the tooling are used, and if there is an actual hope for a project, or it's something which actually specialize into a very minimal kind of niche problem, and is going to be useful for maybe one or two big companies, it depends. So I think this is something I've been passionate about and I've actually had a support throughout. In my previous company and my current company I have very strong support from my higher ups to actually contribute more and be part of the end users community, and as such being a TOC as well. Which comes with a bunch of responsibilities as well. But I think in terms of either support, definitely I had the necessary support all the way through which I'm quite thankful. >> Katie, you mentioned some of your passions, I know from what I've read online that you're passionate about some of the tooling there, and that's some of what you're sharing through your presentations. So, I'd love if you could share a little bit about what we're going to be talking about at the Europe show right now and any other kind of tools that are getting your time and attention these days. >> So I think lately, I've been exploring Cluster API the new release. I've been waiting for new release. Actually everyone has been waiting for the new release for a couple of months. Now we actually have v1L for three end points with some of the cool features such as, manage control place for Cluster. And the second tool or set of toolings I'm working lately are the ones which concentrate on the Gitops model. So during the session at Kubecon in Europe this year, I will be presenting Cluster API, a guide on how to get started. So an overview of all the components necessary to create your own Clusters. In different cloud providers as well. But I will crown that presentation by delivering a demo of how can you provision your Custer with Gitops. And I'm going to use Argo CD at the moment. And the end result is going to be provisioning your Cluster in AWS by having maybe one click, and you have a Cluster refill masters, maybe five nodes and you just wait. Pretty much you can have a coffee while your Cluster is provisioning. But more importantly with Cluster API, again we have usable manifest which will allow us to have this one interface to integrate with different cloud providers. So we actually have this interoperobility Of manifest across different cloud providers. So look forward to that. >> Excellent. Katie, last question I have for you, what advice would you give your peers? Where do you see need for more participation, as people that are getting into this environment. Where do you think they can help? >> Oh such a good question. I think contribution is necessary in most of the sags In the Kubernetes community. So, I think it depends on the passion everyone has, if they're quite passionate about the networking, or storage or even service, there is going to be a group of people that have the same passion and interest with you. So please reach out and contribute. I think I never think I'll like to mention, you done necessarily need to be an active coder to be part of the sags or to be part of the Cloud Native. Because being in technology of course is an advantage, however, most of the ideas in actually making sure that we cover used cases for different tooling, comes from a diverse user base as well. So if you have an interest I think that's going to be very good engine for to further enable different ideas within the sags. So I wouldn't be able to recommend a particular project, I think this is very specific to everyone's daily role (indistinct) But yeah I think within the CNCF, we have a collection of sags for which you pretty much would find a place for yourself and your skills. >> Well Katie thank you so much for sharing your journey and participating so actively in the community. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me today. >> All right stay tuned much more coverage from Kubecon, CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 virtual edition, I'm Stuartt Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)