>>Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to the Cube. I am Savannah Peterson here, coming to you from Detroit, Michigan. We're at Cuban Day three. Such a series of exciting interviews. We've done over 30, but this conversation is gonna be extra special, don't you think, John? >>Yeah, this is gonna be a good one. Griffon Labs is here with us. We're getting the conversation of what's going on in the industry management, watching the Kubernetes clusters. This is large scale conversations this week. It's gonna be a good one. >>Yeah. Yeah. I'm very excited. He's also got a fantastic Twitter handle, twitchy. H Please welcome Richie Hartman, who is the director of community here at Griffon. Richie, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks >>For having me. >>How's the show been for you? >>Busy. I, I mean, I, I, >>In >>A word, I have a ton of talks at at like maintain a thing and like the covering board searches at the TLC panel. I run forme day. So it's, it's been busy. It, yeah. Monday, I didn't have to run anything. That was quite nice. But there >>You, you have your hands in a lot. I'm not even gonna cover it. Looking at your bio, there's, there's so many different things that you're working on. I know that Grafana specifically had some announcements this week. Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. We had quite a few, like the, the two largest ones is a, we now have a field Kubernetes integration on Grafana Cloud. So our, our approach is generally extremely open source first. So we try to push stuff into the exporters, like into the open source exporters, into mixes into things which are out there as open source for anyone to use. But that's little bit like a tool set, not a ready made solution. So when we talk integrations, we actually talk about things where you get this like one click experience, You log into your Grafana cloud, you click, I have a Kubernetes, which probably most of us have, and things just work like you in just the data. You have to write dashboards, you have to write alerts, you have to write everything to just get started with extremely opinionated dashboards, SLOs, alerts, again, all those things made by experts, so anyone can use them. And you don't have to reinvent the view for every single user. So that's the one. The other is, >>It's a big deal. >>Oh yeah, it is. Yeah. It is. It, we, we has, its heavily in integrations course. While, I mean, I don't have to convince anyone that perme is a DD factor standard in everything. Cloudnative. But again, it's, it's, it's sometimes a little bit hard to handle or a little bit not easy to get into. So, so smoothing this, this, this path onto onboarding yourself onto this stack and onto those types of solutions. Yes. Is what a lot of people need. Course, if you, if you look at the statistics from coupon, and we just heard this in the governing board session yesterday. Yeah. Like 60% of the people here are first time attendees. So there's a lot of people who just come into this thing and who need, like, this is your path. This is where you should be going. Or at least if you want to go, go there. This is how to get there. >>Here's your runway for takeoff. Yes. Yeah. I think that's a really good point. And I love that you, you had those numbers. I was curious. I, I had seen on Twitter, speaking of Twitter, I had seen, I had seen that, that there were a lot of people here coming for the first time. You're a community guy. Are we at an inflection point where this community is about to continue to scale? >>That's a very good question. Which I can't really answer. So I mean, >>Obviously I bet you're gonna try. >>I covid changed a few things. Yeah. Probably most people, >>A couple things. I mean, you know, casually, it's like such a gentle way of putting that, that was >>Beautiful. I'm gonna say yes, just to explode. All these new ERs are gonna learn Prometheus. They're gonna roll in with a open, open metrics, open telemetry. I love it, >>You know, But, but at the same time, like Cuban is, is ramping back up. But if you look at the, if you look at the registration numbers between Valencia Andro, it was more or less the same. Interesting. Which, so it didn't go onto this, onto this flu trajectory, which it was on like, up to, up to 2019. I expect this to take up again. But also with the economic situation, everything, I, I don't think >>It's, I think the jury's still out on hybrid. I think there's a lot, lot more hybrid. Let's see how the projects are gonna go. That's what I think it's gonna be the tell sign. How many people are in participating? How are the project's advancing? Some of the momentum, >>I mean, from the project level, Most of this is online anyway. Of course. That's how open source, right. I've been working for >>Ages. That's >>Cause you don't have any trouble budget or, or any office or, It's >>Always been that way. >>Yeah, precisely. So the projects are arguably spearheading this, this development and the, the online numbers. I I, I have some numbers in my head, but I'm, I'm not a hundred percent certain to, but they're higher for this time in Detroit than in volunteer as far somewhere. Cool. So that is growing and it's grown in parallel, which also is great. Cause it's much more accessible, much more inclusive. You don't have to have a budget of at least, let's say, I don't know, two to five k to, to fly over the pond and, and attend this thing. You can just do it from your home. So that is, that's a lot more inclusive. And I expect this to, to basically be a second more or less orthogonal growth, growth path. But the best thing about coupon is the hallway track. I'm just meeting people, talking to people and that kind of thing is not really possible with, >>It's, it's great to see people >>In person. No, and it makes such a difference. I mean, yeah. Even and interviewing people in person too. I mean, it does a, it's, it's, and, and this, this whole, I mean cncf, this whole community, every company here is community first. It's how these projects come to be. I think it's awesome. I feel like you got something you're saying to say, Johnny. >>Yeah. And I love some of the advancements. Rich Richie, we talked last time about, you know, open telemetry, open metrics. You're involved in dashboards. Yeah. One of the themes here is ease of use, simplicity, developer productivity. Where do you see the ease of use going from a project standpoint? For me, as you mentions everywhere, it's pretty much, it is, it's almost all corners of the world. Yep. And new people coming in. How, how are you making it easier? What's going on? Give us the update on that. >>So we also, funnily enough at precisely this topic in the TC panel just a few hours ago, about ease of use and about how to, how to make things easier to, to handle how developers currently, like if they just want to get into the cloud native seen, they have like, like we, we did some neck and math, like maybe 10 tools at least, which you have to be somewhat proficient in to just get started, which is honestly horrendous. Yeah. Course. Like with a server, I just had my survey install my thing and it runs, maybe I need a database, but that's roughly it. And this needs to change again. Like it's, it's nice that everything is, is un unraveled. And you have, you, you, you, you don't have those service boundaries which you had before. You can do all the horizontal scaling, you can do all the automatic scaling, all those things that they're super nice. But at the same time, this complexity, which used to be nicely compartmentalized, was deliberately broken up. And so it's becoming a lot harder to, to, like, we, we need to find new ways to compartmentalize this complexity back to, to human understandable levels again, in particular, as we keep onboarding new and new and new, new people, of course it's just not good use of anyone's time to, to just like learn the basics again and again and again. This is something which should be just compartmentalized and automated away. We're >>The three, We were talking to Matt Klein earlier and he was talking about as projects become mature and all over the place and have reach and and usage, you gotta work on the boring stuff. Yes. And when it's boring, that means you have success. Yes. But then you gotta work on the plumbing. What are some of the things that you guys are working on? Because people are relying on the product. >>Oh yeah. So for with my premises head on, the highlight feature is exponential or native or spars. Histograms. There's like three different names for one single concept. If you know Prometheus, you ha you currently have hard bucket boundaries where I say my latency is lower equal two seconds, one second, a hundred milliseconds, what have you. And I can put stuff into those histogram buckets accordingly to those predefined levels, which is extremely efficient, but like on the, on the code level. But it's not very nice for the humans course you need to understand your system before you're able to, to, to choose good cutoff points. And if you, if you, if you add new ones, that's completely fine. But if you want to actually change them, course you, you figured out that you made a fundamental mistake, you're going to have a break in the continue continuity of your observability data. And you cannot undo this in, into the past. So this is just gone native histograms. On the other hand, allow me to, to, okay, I'm not going to get get into the math, but basically you define a single formula, which there comes a good default. If you have good reasons, then you can change it. But if you don't, just don't talk, >>The people are in the math, Hit him up on Twitter. Twitter, h you'll get you that math. >>So the, >>The thing is people want the math, believe me. >>Oh >>Yeah. I mean we don't have time, but hit him up. Yeah. >>There's ProCon in two weeks in Munich and there will be whole talk about like the, the dirty details of all of the stuff. But the, the high level answer is it just does what people would expect it to do. And with very little overhead, you become, you get highly, highly or high resolution histograms, which is really important for a lot of use cases. But this is not just Prometheus with my open metrics head on the 2.0 feature, like the breaking highlight feature of Open Metrics 2.0 will be you guested precisely the same with my open telemetry head on. Low and behold the same underlying technology is being put or has been put into open telemetry. And we've worked for month and month and month and even longer between all different projects to, to assert that we have one single standard which is actually compatible with each other course. One of the worst things which you can have in the cloud ecosystem is if you have soly different things and they break in subtly wrong ways, like it's much better to just not work than to break in a way, which is just a little bit wrong. Of course you won't figure this out until it's too late. So we spent, like with all three hats, we spent insane amounts of time on making this happen and, and making this nice. >>Savannah, one of the things we have so much going on at Cube Con. I mean just you're unpacking like probably another day of cube. We can't go four days, but open time. >>I know, I know. I'm the same >>Open telemetry >>Challenge acceptance open. >>Sorry, we're gonna stay here. All the, They >>Shut the lights off on us last night. >>They literally gonna pull the plug on us. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They've done that before. It's not the first time we go until they kick us out. We love, love doing this. But Open telemetry is got a lot of news too. So that's, We haven't really talked much about that. >>We haven't at >>All. So there's a lot of stuff going on that, I won't call it boring. That's like code word's. That's cube talk for, for it's working. Yeah. So it's not bad, but there's a lot of stuff going on. Like open telemetry, open metrics, This is the stuff that matters cuz when you go in large scale, that's key. It's just what, missing all the, all the stuff. >>No, >>What are we missing? What are people missing? What's going on in the show that you think that's not actually being reported on? I mean it's a lot of high web assembly for instance got a lot >>Of high. Oh yeah, I was gonna say, I'm glad you're asking this because you, you've already mentioned about seven different hats that you wear. I can only imagine how many hats are actually in your hat cabinet. But you, you are someone with your, with your fingers in a lot of different things. So you can kind of give us a state of the union. Yeah. So go ahead. Let's talk about >>It. So I think you already hit a few good points. Ease of use is definitely one of them. And, and improving the developer experience and not having this like a value of pain. Yeah. That is one of the really big ones. It's going to be interesting cause it is boring. It is janitorial and it needs a different type of persona. A lot of, or maybe not most, but a large fraction of developers like the shiny stuff. And we could see this in Prometheus where like initially the people who contributed this the most where like those restless people who need to fix that one thing, this is impossible, are going to do it. Which changed over the years where the people who now contribute the most are off the janitorial. Like keep things boring, keep things running, still have substantial changes. But but not like more on the maintenance level. >>Yeah. The maintainers. I was just gonna bring that >>Up. Yeah. On the, on the keep things boring while still pushing 'em forward. Yeah. And the thing about ease of use is a lot of this is boring. A lot of this is strategy. A lot of this is toil. A lot of this takes lots of research also in areas where developers are not really good at, like UX for example, and ui like most software developers are really bad at those cause they just think differently from normal humans, I guess. >>So that's an interesting observation that you just made. I we could unpack that on a whole nother show as well. >>So the, the thing is this is going to be interesting for the open source scene course. This needs deliberate investment by companies who assign people to those projects and say, okay, fix that one thing or make it easier to use what have you. That is a lot easier with, with first party products and projects from companies cuz they can invest directly into the thing and they see much more of a value prop. It's, it's kind of normal by now to, to allow developers or even assigned developers onto open source projects. That's not so much the case for the tpms, for the architects, for the UX and your I people like for the documentation people that there's not as much awareness of that this is also driving value for everyone. Yes. And also there's not much as much. >>Yeah, that's a great point. This whole workflow production system of open source, which has grown and keeps growing and we'll keep growing. These be funded. And one of the things we were talking earlier in another session about is about the recession potentially we're hitting and the global issues, macroeconomics that might force some of these projects or companies not to get VC >>Funding. It's such a theme at the show. So, >>So to me, I said it's just not about VC funding. There's other funding mechanisms that's community oriented. There's companies participating, there's other meccas. Richie, if you could have your wishlist of how things could progress an open source, what would you want to see happen in terms of how it's, how things are funded, how things are executed. Cuz developers are going to run businesses. Cuz ultimately if you follow digital transformation to completion, it and developers aren't a department serving the business. They are the business. And that's coming fast. You know, what has to happen in your opinion, if you had the wish magic wand, what would you, what would you snap your fingers to make happen? >>If I had a magic wand that's very different from, from what is achievable. But let, let's >>Go with, Okay, go with the magic wand first. Cause we'll, we'll, we'll we'll riff on that. So >>I'm here for dreams. Yeah, yeah, >>Yeah. I mean I, I've been in open source for more than two, two decades, but now, and most of the open source is being driven forward by people who are not being paid for those. So for example, Gana is the first time I'm actually paid by a company to do my com community work. It's always been on the side. Of course I believe in it and I like doing it. I'm also not bad at it. And so I just kept doing it. But it was like at night on the weekends and everything. And to be honest, it's still at night and in the weekends, but the majority of it is during paid company time, which is awesome. Yeah. Most of the people who have driven this space forward are not in this position. They're doing it at night, they're doing it on the weekends. They're doing it out of dedication to a cause. Yeah. >>The commitment is insane. >>Yeah. At the same time you have companies mostly hyperscalers and either they have really big cloud offerings or they have really big advertisement business or both. And they're extracting a huge amount of value, which has been created in large part elsewhere. Like yes, they employ a ton of developers, but a lot of the technologies they built on and the shoulders of the giants they stand upon it are really poorly paid. And there are some efforts to like, I think the core foundation like which redistribute a little bit of money and such. But if I had my magic wand, everyone who is an open source and actually drives things forwards, get, I don't know, 20% of the value which they create just magically somehow. Yeah. >>Or, or other companies don't extract as much value and, and redistribute more like put more full-time engineers onto projects or whichever, like that would be the ideal state where the people who actually make the thing out of dedication are not more or less left on the sideline. Of course they're too dedicated to just say, Okay, I'm, I'm not doing this anymore. You figure this stuff out and let things tremble and falter. So I mean, it's like with nurses and such who, who just like, they, they know they have something which is important and they keep doing it. Of course they believe in it. >>I think this, I think this is an opportunity to start messaging this narrative because yeah, absolutely. Now we're at an inflection point where there's a big community, there is a shared responsibility in my opinion, to not spread the wealth, but make sure that it's equally balanced and, and the, and I think there's a way to do that. I don't know how yet, but I see that more than ever, it's not just come in, raid the kingdom, steal all the jewels, monetize it, and throw some token token money around. >>Well, in the burnout. Yeah, I mean I, the other thing that I'm thinking about too is it's, you know, it's, it's the, it's the financial aspect of this. It's the cognitive load. And I'm curious actually, when I ask you this question, how do you avoid burnout? You do a million different things and we're, you know, I'm sure the open source community that passion the >>Coach. Yeah. So it's just write code, >>It's, oh, my, my, my software engineering days are firmly over. I'm, I'm, I'm like, I'm the cat herer and the janitor and like this type of thing. I, I don't really write code anymore. >>It's how do you avoid burnout? >>So a i I didn't curse ahead burnout a few years ago. I was not nice, but that was still when I had like a full day job and that day job was super intense and on top I did all the things. Part of being honest, a lot of the people who do this are really dedicated and are really bad at setting boundaries between work >>And process. That's why I bring it up. Yeah. Literally why I bring it up. Yeah. >>I I I'm firmly in that area and I'm, I'm, I don't claim I have this fully figured out yet. It's also even more risky to some extent per like, it's, it's good if you're paid for this and you can do it during your work time. But on the other hand, if it's so nice and like if your hobby and your job are almost completely intersectional, it >>Becomes really, the lines are blurry. >>Yeah. And then yeah, like have work from home. You, you don't even commute anything or anymore. You just sit down at your computer and you just have fun doing your stuff and all of a sudden it's deep at night and you're still like, I want to keep going. >>Sounds like God, something cute. I >>Know. I was gonna say, I was like, passion is something we all have in common here on this. >>That's the key. That is the key point There is a, the, the passion project becomes the job. But now the contribution is interesting because now yeah, this ecosystem is, is has a commercial aspect. Again, this is the, this is the balance between commercialization and keeping that organic production system that's called open source. I mean, it's so fascinating and this is amazing. I want to continue that conversation. It's >>Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. This is, this is great. Richard, this entire conversation has been excellent. Thank you so much for joining us. How can people find you? I mean, I give em your Twitter handle, but if they wanna find out more about Grafana Prometheus and the 1700 things you do >>For grafana grafana.com, for Prometheus, promeus.io for my own stuff, GitHub slash richie age slash talks. Of course I track all my talks in there and like, I don't, I currently don't have a personal website cause I stop bothering, but my, like that repository is, is very, you find what I do over, like for example, the recording link will be uploaded to this GitHub. >>Yeah. Great. Follow. You also run a lot of events and a lot of community activity. Congratulations for you. Also, I talked about this last time, the largest IRC network on earth. You ran, built a data center from scratch. What happened? You done >>That? >>Haven't done a, he even built a cloud hyperscale compete with Amazon. That's the next one. Why don't you put that on the >>Plate? We'll be sure to feature whatever Richie does next year on the cube. >>I'm game. Yeah. >>Fantastic. On that note, Richie, again, thank you so much for being here, John, always a pleasure. Thank you. And thank you for tuning in to us here live from Detroit, Michigan on the cube. My name is Savannah Peterson and here's to hoping that you find balance in your life this weekend.