>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California,
it's theCUBE, covering Kubecon and CloudNativeCon
brought to you by Redhat, a CloudNative computing
foundation and its ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are here in San Diego
where we are keeping CloudNative classy.
I'm Stu Miniman, and my cohost is John Troyer,
and we are happy to welcome back to the program,
our host, Dan Kohn, who is the executive director
of the CloudNative computing foundation,
or the CNCF.
Dan, thank you so much for having us.
>> Thrilled to be back again.
>> All right, and, yeah, so our fourth year
doing this show, the big shows--
>> Dan: Nothing's really changed.
You just tear right along the same level.
One year to the next, you can just confuse them
pretty easily..
>> So, you know, Dan, we actually did a prediction
show yesterday, and I said, maybe it's my math
background, but I look back two years ago,
it was four thousand, then eight thousand,
now twelve thousand, so I predict Boston
must be sixteen thousand because I was used
to those standardized tests, but with the growth,
you never know, and it is very difficult,
you know, we talk about planning, we've talked,
this facility was booked before--
>> Dan: Two years ago.
>> --the curve really started taking off.
So, help us set the stage a little bit,
we're getting towards the end of the event,
but you know, tons of day zero things,
so many sessions, so many people,
there were pre-show events I heard that started
like the end of last week, so, it's a small city
in this community in so many pieces,
and the CNCF helps enable all of it.
>> It does, and what's fun for us is just that,
the community is out there adopting
these technologies and contributing to it
and growing, and being able to come together,
this is always our biggest event in North America
but also in Europe and China.
It's just a really nice snapshot
of the point of time, in saying, okay,
where are things, how many companies
are interested in having sponsor booths,
how many developers are there,
how many track, but, I think maybe my favorite
anecdote from Kubecon CloudNativeCon San Diego
is that there was a, so we offer, a CFP track,
a call for proposals that's extremely competitive,
only 12% of the talks get accepted.
And then we have a maintainer track,
where the different providers can have either
an intro, a deep-dive, or both.
So the deep dive for the project Helm,
which is not even a graduated project yet,
I mean, it's very widely used, package manager
for Kubernetes, but the deep dive for Helm
had more than 1600 people inside their session,
which is more than we had at all of attending
Kubecon 2015 and 2016 combined.
>> So, Dan, one of the words that gets mentioned
a lot in this space, and it has lots of different
meanings, is "scale".
You know, we talk about Kubernetes built
for big scale, we're talking about Edge computing
which goes to small scale.
This event, you look at the ecosystem.
There's a thirty foot banner with all
of the logos there, you look at the landscape--
>> Dan: They're not that big, either.
>> --there are so many logos on there.
Actually, I really thought you had an enjoyable
yet useful analogy in your opening keynote.
You talk about Minecraft.
I've got a boy, he plays Xbox, I've seen Minecraft,
so when he pulls up the little chart
and there's like, you know, all of these
little things on the side, my son can tell you
how they're used and what you can build
with them, I would be completely daunted
looking at that, much like many of the people
coming to this show, and they look around
and they're like, I don't even know
where to start.
>> And that was fun keynote for me
to put together, because I did need to make sure,
both on the Minecraft part, that all the formulas
were correct, I didn't want anyone...
But then I drew the analogy to Kubernetes
and how it is based on a set of building blocks,
hundreds of them, that have evolved over time,
and for that, I actually did some software archeology
of reaching out to the people who created
the original IPFW, Linux firewall 20 years ago
based on PSD and then the evolution since then,
made sure that they were comfortable
with my description of it.
But now, bringing it out to Kubecon, CNCF,
we have a lot of projects now, so we're up to 43.
When we met in Seattle four years ago, it was 2.
And so it's definitely incumbent on CNCF
to do a good job, and we can probably do
an even better one on trying to draw
this trail map, this recommended path
through understanding the technologies,
deciding on which ones people might want to adopt.
>> Yeah, I think that would be really interesting.
In fact, the words trail map kind of came up
on Twitter, today, I saw.
And one of the things that struck me
was how the first rule of Kubecon is,
well, Kubernetes is not maybe in the center
of everything, it's underneath everything,
but, like you said, 42 projects in the CNCF,
many more projects, open-source projects,
of course, from different vendors,
from different coalitions, that you can see
here on the show floor as well,
if not in a session, so, without giving
a maybe a CNCF 101, what does the path
forward look like in terms of that,
the growth of projects within the CNCF umbrella,
the prominence of Kubecon, are we headed
towards CloudNativeCon?
>> Well, we've always been calling it Kubecon
CloudNativeCon, and we could reverse the names,
but I don't see any particular drive to do that.
But I would really emphasize, and give credit
to Craig McLuckie and some of the other people
who originally set up CNCF, where Google had
this technology, if they'd come
to the Linux Foundation and said,
we want to call it the Kubernetes Foundation,
we probably would've said yes to that.
But the impact, then, would be that all
of these other technologies and approaches
would have come in and said, we need
to become part of the Kubernetes project,
and instead, there was a vision
of an ecosystem, and the reality is that
Kubernetes is still by far the largest project.
I mean, if you look at the total number
of contributors, I believe it's approximately
the same between Kubernetes and our other
42 projects combined.
So, and of course, there's overlap.
But in that sense, in some ways,
Kubernetes sort of represents the sun,
and the other projects are orbiting around it,
but from the beginning, the whole idea
was to say that we wanted to allow a diversity
of different approaches, and CNCF has had
this very clear philosophy that we're not king makers,
that if you look at our landscape document,
where we look at different functions
like key management or container run times
or databases or others, there can be multiple
CNCF hosted projects in each box.
And so far at least, that approach seems
to be working quite well.
>> Yeah, Dan, having been to a number of these,
the maturity and progress is obvious.
Something we've said is Kubernetes is really
table sticks at this point, no matter where I go,
there is going to be Kubernetes,
and therefore, I've seen it some
over the last year or so, but very prominent
on this show, we're talking about work loads,
we're talking about applications, you know,
it's defining and explaining that CloudNative
piece of it, and the tough thing is, you know,
modern applications and building applications
and that AppDev community.
So, you know, speak a little bit--
You've got a very diverse audience here,
talk about the personas you have to communicate
with, and who you're attracting to this.
I know they put out lots of metrics
as to the surveys and who's coming
and who's participating. >> Well, we do,
and we'll be publishing those,
and I love the fact.
I think some people misunderstand
in the thinking that Kubecon CloudNativeCon
is all infrastructure engineers, and something
like a third or more of the attendees
are application developers, and so I do think
there's this natural move, particularly
towards AppDev.
The difference is that on the infrastructure side,
there's just a really strong consensus
about Kubernetes, as you're saying,
where on the application development side,
it's still very early days.
And I mean, if anything, I think really
the only area that there is consensus on
is that the abstractions that Kubernetes provides
are not the ones that we want to have regular
application developers at most enterprises
working with, that they shouldn't actually need
to build their own container and then write
the YAML in order to configure it.
Brian Liles hit that point nicely
with his keynote today around Rails.
But so we can agree that what we have
isn't the right outcome, we can agree
that whatever are the winning solutions
are very likely underneath going to be building
those containers and writing the YAML.
But there are so many different approaches
right now, at a high layer on what
that right interface is.
>> Yeah, I mean, just, one example I have,
I had the opportunity to interview
Bloomberg for the second time.
And a year ago, we had talked very much
about the infrastructure, and this year
we talked about really, they've built internally
that PaaS layer, so that their AppDevs,
they might know that there's Kubernetes,
but they don't have to interface with that at all.
I've had a number of the CNCF end user members
participate, maybe, speak to that, the community
of end users participating, and end user usage overall.
>> Yeah, so when we first met in Seattle
four years ago, we had three members
of our end user community.
We appreciated them joining early,
but that was a tough call.
But to be up to 124 now, representing almost
every industry, all around the world,
just a huge number of brand names,
has been fantastic.
What is interesting is, if you go talk to them,
almost all of them are using Kubernetes
as the underlying layer for their own internal PaaS,
and so the regular developers in their organizations
can often just want to type get push,
and then have the continuous integration run
and the things built and then deployed out and everything.
But it's somewhat surprising there hasn't
yet been a level of consensus on what
that sort of common PaaS, the common set
of abstractions on top should be.
There's a ton of our members and developers
and others are all working to sort of
build that winning solution, but I don't have
a prediction for you yet.
>> And of course, skill interoperability
and skill transferability is going to be key
in growing this ecosystem, but I thought
the stats on you know, the searches you can do
on the number of job openings for Kubernetes
is incredible.
>> Yeah, so on the interoperability,
we were very pleased to announce Tuesday
that we've now passed 100 certified vendors,
and of all the things that CNCF does,
probably even including Kubecon,
I might say that that certified Kubernetes program
is the one that's had the biggest impact.
To have implementations from over 100 different
organizations that you can take the same
workloads and move them across and have
the confidence, those APIs will be supported,
it's just a huge accomplishment, and in some ways,
up there with WiFi or Bluetooth or some
of the best interoperability standards.
And then you mentioned the job support,
which is another--
>> Yeah, I want to transfer engineers too,
as well as workloads. >> --area that we're thrilled,
and we just launched that, but we now have
a couple hundred jobs listed on it
and a bunch of people applying,
and it's just a perfect example of the kind
of ecosystem development that we're thrilled to do,
and in particular the fact that we're not
charging either the employers or the applicants,
so it's jobs.CNCF.io to get access to that.
>> Great.
Dan, you also mentioned in your keynote,
Kubernetes has crossed the chasm.
That changes the challenges that you have
when you start talking about you know,
the early or mid majority environment,
so I know you've been flying around the globe,
there's not only the three big events,
but many small events, talk about how CNCF6
mission helps you know, educate and push,
I guess not push,
but educate and further innovation.
>> Yeah, and just enable.
So, one of the other programs we have
is the Kubernetes Certified service provider,
these are organizations, essentially consulting
firms, that have a deep expertise
that have had at least three of their engineers
pass our certified Kubernetes administrator exam,
and it is amazing now that we've passed 100
of those, but they're in over 30 different countries.
So we're just thrilled to see businesses all
around the world be able to take advantage of that.
And I do get to go to a lot of events
around the world; we're actually,
CNCF is hosting our first ever events
in Seoul and in Sydney in two weeks,
that I'm quite excited for,
and then in February, we're going to be back
in India, and we're going to be in Bengaluru,
where we had a very successful event in March.
We'll be there in February 2020 and then
our first one in New Delhi, those are both
in the third week of February.
And I think it does just speak to the number
of people who are really eager for these
to soak this up, but one of the cool things
about it is we're combining both local experts,
half of our speakers are local,
half are international, and then we do
a beginner track and an advanced track.
>> Yeah, Dan, you know, I'd just love
a little bit of insight from you as to,
there's a little bit of uncontrolled chaos
when you talk about open source.
Many of the things that we're talking
about this year, a year ago, we would've been,
oh my gosh, I would've never thought of that.
So give us what it's like to be kind of
at the eye of the hurricane, if you would.
>> A lot of criticism, to be honest.
An amazing number of people like to point out
the things that we're not quite doing correctly.
But you know, the huge challenge
for an organization like CNCF, where,
we're a non-profit, these events
are actually spinning off money
that we're then able to reinvest
directly into the projects, so doing things
like a quarter million dollars
for a security audit for Kubernetes
that we were able to publish.
Or a Jepson testing for NCD,
or improving documentation and such.
So a big part of it is trying to create
those positive feedback loops,
and have that, and then another huge part
is just, given all the different competing
interests and the fact that we literally
have every big technology company in the world
on our board and then all of the, I mean,
hundreds of start ups that tend to be
very competitive, it's just really important
that we treat organizations similarly.
So that all of our platinum members
are treated the same, all our gold,
all our silver, and then within the projects,
that all the graduated projects
are treated similarly, incubating, sandbox,
and people really notice.
I have kids, and it's a little bit there,
where they're sort of always believing
that the other kid is getting extra attention.
>> Yeah, right, you can't be the king maker,
if it will, you're letting it out.
Look out a little bit, Dan, and you know,
we still have more growth to go in the community,
obviously the event has room for growth.
What do you see looking forward to 2020 and beyond?
>> Yeah, I would love to predict some sort
of amazing discontinuity where everyone
adopts these technologies and then CNCF
is not necessary anymore, something like that.
But the reality is, I mean, I love that
crossing the chasm metaphor, and I do think
it's very powerful, and we really do say
2018 was the year that Kubernetes
crossed the chasm from the early adopters
to the early majority, but I would emphasize
the fact that it's only the early majority.
We haven't reached in to the entire second half
of the curve, the late majority and the laggards.
And so there are a ton of organizations here
at the event who are just getting up to speed
on this and realizing, oh, we really need
to invest and start understanding it.
And so, I mean, I don't, we also talk about
there will be some point of peak Kubecon,
just like peak Loyal, and I don't yet see
any signs of it being 2019 or 2020,
but it's something that we're very cognizant
of and working hard to try and ensure
that the event remains useful for people
and that they're seeing value from it.
I mean, there was a real question
when we went from one thousand Seattle
four years ago to four thousand in Austin
three years ago, oh, is this event even
still useful, can developers still interact,
do you still have conversations,
is the hallway track still valuable?
And thankfully, I'm able to chat
with a lot of the core developers,
where this is their fifth North American Kubecon
and they're saying, no, I'm still getting
value out of it.
Now, what we tend to hear from them is,
"but I didn't get to go to any sessions,"
or "I have so many hallway tracks and private
meetings and interactions and such,"
but the great thing there is that we actually
get all of these sessions up on YouTube
within 48 or 72 hours, and so, people ask me,
"oh, there's 18 different tracks, how do I
decide which one to go to?"
And I always say, "go to the one
where you want to interact with the speaker
afterwards, or ask a question,"
because the other ones, you can watch later.
But there isn't really a substitute
for being here on the ground.
>> Well, there's so much content there, Dan,
I think if they start watching now,
by the time you get to Amsterdam,
they'll have dented a little bit.
>> I'll give a quick pitch for my favorite
Chrome extension, it's called Video Speed Player.
And you can speed people up to 120, 125%,
get a little bit of that time back.
>> Yeah, absolutely, we have at the backend
of ours, there is YouTube, so you can
adjust the speed and it does help
most of the time, and you can back up
a few seconds if needed.
Dan, look, congratulations, we know you have
a tough role, you and the CNCF,
we really appreciate the partnership.
We love our community, it has had a phenomenal
time this week at the show, and look forward
to 2020 and beyond.
>> I do as well, I really want to thank you
for being with us through this whole way,
and I think it is just an important part
of the ecosystem.
>> And I know John Furrier also says thank you
and looks forward to seeing you next year.
>> Oh, absolutely.
>> Dan, thank you so much.
John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman,
getting towards the end of our
three days, wall-to-wall coverage here
in sunny San Diego, California,
thanks for watching theCUBE.