SAAD ALI: Hello, everyone.
My name is Saad Ali.
I am an engineer on Google Kubernetes Engine,
and I'm joined here by Aparna Sinha.
She is the group program manager--
product manager for all of Kubernetes and our Google
Kubernetes Engine.
Pleasure to have you, Aparna.
APARNA SINHA: Thank you, Saad.
Pleasure to be here.
SAAD ALI: So you have been deeply involved
with the strategy for GKE and defining the product vision.
What do you think sets the offering
that GKE has today in terms of what customers are asking for?
APARNA SINHA: Yeah.
Sure, yeah.
I've been with the project for the last 3 and 1/2 years.
So really seeing it grow from a baby
until I would say much broader enterprise
adoption both in the open source as well as, of course,
on our cloud with GKE and really have been with the GKE service
from the beginnings as well as we
worked through first introducing it as a service
and building all of these enterprise grade features
into it for enterprise readiness,
making sure upgrades are much more automated and low impact
for the customers, and moving into the future,
providing GKE On-Prem.
So what I've heard from customers and users,
both open source users and customers,
is that they want to be able to use
GKE in their own on-prem environment, which is why we're
introducing GKE On-Prem and why we introduced it at GCP Next
and, we're moving forward with that.
And they want to have Google's expertise from having managed
it in production as a service for the last 3 and 1/2 years
as well as the expertise that comes
from being directly involved deeply with the open source
projects.
So you probably saw in my keynote,
I showed the distribution of contributions
to Kubernetes open source over the last year
based on the CNCS statistics.
Google is contributing 40-plus percent of that.
And so what that means is that we're very current with all
of the issues with Kubernetes.
We're building solutions.
And so when you partner with Google,
you have that partnership with the core maintainers.
And so, for example, on GKE, we're
always ahead in knowing what's coming up for our users
both in the open source and on the cloud.
With the security vulnerabilities
that are happening, we're always patching them ahead of time
and then bringing them into GKE, making sure
that the most secure version is there.
Same thing with the versions and upgrades finding the problems
and making sure that the customers
don't have to worry about it.
So that's the second piece.
Customers love Kubernetes I would
say for all of the feature functionality, the resiliency,
the productivity, the higher utilization
that you get when you run your applications on Kubernetes.
But they also don't always want to manage Kubernetes and have
to keep up with all of the capabilities and program
all of the capabilities.
So we try and provide a much more managed distribution.
We'll be providing it on prem.
We've been providing it in the cloud for several years,
not only managing your masters--
obviously managing the sizing and the backup of your FCD
and scaling of the masters--
but also managing much more of your cluster
itself with node upgrades and node auto
repair and node auto scaling.
These are some of the features that over time we've
brought in to make sure that customers can worry less
about the infrastructure.
And then I think I talked about in my keynote today.
We're building also up the stack,
providing now node auto provisioning.
So you can be hands free.
You don't have to worry as much about is the cluster running.
You can focus on what do you want to run in the cluster.
And so we've actually just this week in fact earlier today
announced that Istio on GKE is moving to beta,
and it's available for existing clusters as well
as new clusters.
And we're going to be providing it with a single click
install, which I demoed in the keynote
and also providing basic lifecycle operations so
upgrading SGO.
So it's really a lot easier to use Istio.
You don't have to know a lot of the guts of it yourself.
But you can get the benefit of being
able to monitor and view and discover all of your services
across your clusters and then also be
able to set security policies, ensure encrypted traffic
and authentication and then also be
able to use the basic functionalities of a proxy
like for load balancing obviously and also for traffic
control.
So those are the capabilities you
get for not entirely for free but much more easily in GKE.
And then lastly is bringing that developer experience
with Knative and the GKE serverless
add on, which is still an alpha, but that
is also something customers have been looking for.
They love Kubernetes, but then they
want to give their developers a hands free experience where
they can just go use all of the functionality,
write their code, focus on their code,
and not have to worry about all the rest,
not have to worry about setting up ingress,
not have to worry about exposing their services
and how to expose the services, not have to worry about how
to auto scale.
And those are the things that Knative does really well
under the covers.
So I would say those are the three things
that customers been asking for.
Give me something in my own environment,
give me something that I don't have to manage a lot of,
and give me a good developer experience for my developers.
SAAD ALI: So is it fair to summarize it as with GKE, we've
built this massive open source ecosystem with Kubernetes,
Istio, Knative, and we've now made it very, very dead simple
to use on the cloud side and we're
bringing that simplicity over to people's data centers
and completing the story, and is that
what customers are asking for?
APARNA SINHA: Yeah, well, so I think the ecosystem is actually
one of the best parts of working on this project,
and one of the best parts of working with an open source
community.
The way that the project is architected,
it's very much amenable to extensions.
And you know that.
You've been working on CSI, which just moved to GA
and 1.13, so congratulations.
We got a lot of such interfaces.
And what that does is it really opens the project up
to an ecosystem, a very rich ecosystem that
can build and not just build but also customize Kubernetes
for specific environments, customize it
for the on-prem environment that has
a particular type of storage or particular type of networking
preference or particular type of security preference.
So all of those things are plugable.
And from a business perspective, what it means
is that we can bring that ecosystem into our cloud.
So Kubernetes, I tried to think of it--
I like to think of it and call it a Kubernetes First Cloud.
Google is a Kubernetes first cloud.
It is because GKE is one of the most popular services
on our cloud.
The vast majority of our customers
use GKE in some form or another.
Everyone from "New York Times," Paypal, eBay,
these are some of the--
and every major retailer, that's fresh in our minds
because we just went through Black Friday, Cyber Monday,
and we scaled all these retailers to new heights
in terms of their business, all with zero outages.
So very, very proud of that.
Really coming to maturity.
So Google is really a Kubernetes First Cloud.
We think about well how can Kubernetes run well?
What kind of networking features can we
build like network end point groups
as an example, IP aliases as an example.
What can we do to make the experience better
for Kubernetes users on Google Cloud.
And when you have the Kubernetes First Cloud,
I think it makes sense as an ecosystem provider
to really come in and provide your offering on Google Cloud.
And so that's what we've done with the Kubernetes
marketplace.
But then the rich thing here, the really rich aspect
is that we're providing that GKE experience now in your own data
center on prem.
So that same ecosystem that's in the Kubernetes marketplace now
carries over and now has much broader
reach even beyond Google Cloud to on prem.
SAAD ALI: That sounds awesome.
Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about KubeCon.
You have been to quite a few KubeCons.
How does this feel different from others
that you've been to?
APARNA SINHA: I love KubeCon.
KubeCon has a real special place in my heart.
And this is my fifth or sixth KubeCon.
And I've been comparing and contrasting.
Seattle is of course a very special location.
We have a big presence in Seattle.
A lot of my team-- a lot of the Kubernetes team is based here.
And I've been here--
I think this is the second or third time
that we've been in Seattle.
And this is the obviously the largest KubeCon
that we've had with 8,000 or 9,000 attendees.
SAAD ALI: 8,000, right.
APARNA SINHA: And this is the first time
we've been in this huge venue.
I think it's been very well done.
It seems very approachable.
A lot of people, a lot of familiar
faces, the whole community is here.
So it's really great to meet everyone.
Yeah.
It's a real tradition.
And I think in particular the Google team
is out here in full force.
I think they got more than 300 people.
SAAD ALI: Absolutely.
What are you looking most forward
to this week in terms of activities going on at KubeCon?
APARNA SINHA: Well, I'm really looking forward to the keynotes
by Brian Grant and Tim Hockin and Clayton.
SAAD ALI: The stories of the old days.
APARNA SINHA: Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know what the content will be,
but that is something that I'm really looking forward to.
And then the Sig meet ups tend to be-- the Sig meetings tend
to be very popular as well.
There's a diversity luncheon I believe,
if it hasn't already passed, so I'm looking forward to that.
And then just catching up with all
of the familiar faces in the community and meeting folks
from other companies, especially all of these companies
on security and networking, the whole ecosystem that
has sprung up, I always really enjoy
meeting them and hearing from them.
And then, of course, there are a lot of users.
There are a lot of users and customers here,
so that's always the best part.
SAAD ALI: And to wrap it up, put you
on the spot, what's your favorite KubeCon memory?
APARNA SINHA: Oh, well, I don't know if it's my-- yeah,
I guess it is my favorite.
So two years ago in 2016 when we came to Seattle,
that was on November 7th I think or November 6th,
and it was election day.
And the KubeCon after party on November 6th,
we were all in this like wonderful venue,
all kinds of candles and beautiful lights
and great snacks and everybody was watching the election
and everybody was expecting it to go a certain way
and it went a different way.
And then the morning after just being
with-- it's kind of like being with your family a little bit,
but it's a much more extended family.
And I felt like it was nice being with the cloud native
community.
SAAD ALI: Yeah, I was talking to Tim earlier today,
and he says even though this is scaled
to the scale of 8,000 people, it still feels like a big family.
And I think that's the beauty of KubeCon.
So thank you very much for your time, Aparna.
APARNA SINHA: Thank you.
SAAD ALI: We're going to hand it off.
APARNA SINHA: Yeah, great talking to you.
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