>> [] 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 the ecosystem partners.
>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman.
And this is theCUBE coverage
of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2020 in Europe the virtual edition
and you've reached the final stage.
This is our last interview so hopefully,
learned a lot talking to the CNCF members.
We've had a few great practitioners,
of course, some of the important vendors
and startups in this space.
And when we talk about what's happening in this,
this cloud native space,
one of the things that gets bandied about a lot is scale.
What does that mean?
You know, when it first rolled out, of course,
there is only one Google out there,
and only a handful of true hyperscalers.
But there absolutely are some companies
that really need scale, performance global
and so happy to bring in he is the final boss.
It is Alexandria McLean.
He's a technical architect at Ubisoft.
And yes, I do have a little bit of background in gaming.
But here's someone that is helping enable in one
of the largest gaming companies in the globe.
So Alexandra, thanks so much for joining us.
>> Hey, thanks for the invitation, happy to be here.
>> All right, so you're no novice to this ecosystem.
I know you and I have both been at many of the Docker cons,
the KubeCons over the years.
So if you could just give our audience a little bit
of your background and
what is your team responsible for Ubisoft?
>> Okay, sure, so I am part of the one
of the IT teams inside Ubisoft.
So we're responsible mainly
to provide cloud computing resources
and Kubernetes infrastructure for the whole company.
So again, and if you want to know more about basically,
I've been, I've been leading the Kubernetes initiative,
the past few years right now.
So we started the journey maybe in 2016.
We're already pretty busy, you know,
working on the growth for the cloud,
the cloud industry to stand Ubisoft,
for the growth of the expansion, different data centers
and supporting the needs of the different teams
and development teams inside Ubisoft.
And one thing we wanted to do back then was really to enable
and accelerate the adoption of cloud native,
the cloud native mindset and cloud native architectures.
So what we did back then is did,
we did a short analysis of our different technologies
that was available at the time,
and we decided to jump full head on Kubernetes
and make this as the foundation
for the different workloads,
container workloads that will be
that will enable drive adoption inside Ubisoft
to grow and boost the productivity of many things.
>> Alright, I'm really glad you brought up
that cloud native mindset,
if you could just up-level a little bit for,
you know, the business leaders out there,
they hear about, you know, Kubernetes
and they won't know how to spell it.
They hear something like a cloud native mindset,
and they say, you know, I don't understand,
what does this mean for our business?
So what architecturally are you doing
and what does that mean for you know, your games
and ultimately your end users?
>> Yeah, so I would say that basically, I mean,
if you want to have a cloud native architecture,
really want to make your application,
first of all, very portable,
very easy to deploy and manageable,
and at the same time very resilient to failure.
So you want to make sure
that your application once it's deployed,
that it's highly resilient to failure,
that it was built for failures
and that you can manage the project and the service
to meet the expectation of either the gamers
or the service owners basically.
>> Yeah, you know, absolutely.
I'm curious, here in 2020, we see the ripple effects
of what the global pandemic has.
I have to imagine that from a gaming standpoint,
that has had an impact.
So maybe if we use that as an analogy,
if it's valid from your standpoint,
I have to imagine more people are using it.
What did this mean to your infrastructure?
How were you ready from an IT's perspective
to support that, you know, increased usage,
kind of rippling around the globe
as more people are home all the time?
>> Hmm, yeah, that's a good question I guess.
I mean, we really have like two kind of,
I would say, audience inside Ubisoft
in the IT team that I serve.
So we have the people who are building the softwares
and the applications to help the developers to,
I mean the game developers in general,
so we have different services, internal services,
and tooling that needs to be hosted somewhere.
And we need to enable these people in these teams
to have a way to manage applications efficiently.
And the other side we are looking at right now, I mean,
we the game server and the gaming industry, is really,
I think there's a shift right now in the way
that she prefer doing, the way that you're going
to manage the game servers in the future.
And I would say that back then,
there was a lot of in house tooling,
things that were really, I mean,
appropriately proprietary to each gaming company.
But right now, what we wanted to do in the past few years,
we work for instance on a solution called hygienist.
So we were involved in the beginning
to design this kind of next gen game server,
dedicated server hosting infrastructure
that was all built around communities.
So, in the future, we were already started to work on that,
and the next gen of games are going to be difficult
to stay on top of Kubernetes,
which is going to enable a lot more efficiency
of resource usage and now at the same time,
we'd say manageability
and the profitability about all these services.
Because I think that one key thing
about cloud native and Kubernetes is that,
once you know Kubernetes, I mean, basically, it's very easy
to onboard new people in the team, the project,
because they know what is Kubernetes
how to operate it.
So it will be much more efficient in the future
for all the workflows that we have internally
and the next game server infrastructure
as well to be hosted in Kubernetes,
it's going to be much more easy
to standardize and unify that whole stack.
>> Well, the skill sets are so critically important.
And it's great to hear you say
that onboarding somebody in Kubernetes,
is easier than it might have been a couple of years ago.
If you could bring us inside a little bit, you know,
what's your stack look like?
You know, you know, can you say what cloud or cloud you use?
When it comes to Kubernetes, you know,
what are the key tools that you're using
and partners that you have?
>> Yeah, sure.
So early on, I would say,
almost 10 years ago, we really started
to focus on adding on prem cloud infrastructure
and the technology that we chose back then was OpenStack.
So we have a large footprint
of OpenStack called install, installed internally
and different data centers all over the world
so people and different teams
and anyone at Ubisoft can easily have computers
or compute resources available for them.
And with Kubernetes, we initially we wanted to have,
you know, to make your Kubernetes a commodity.
We wanted to ask people be very I mean in a position
to easily experiment new things,
new applications on top of Kubernetes.
And for that we decided to go with Rancher.
So Rancher is an open source solution made by Rancher labs,
and we, initially after we started
to build and in our solution, the first year
because we talked back then
the landscape was quite different
and we thought it was the best choice for us to do.
But we realized shortly after, I mean,
when Rancher 2.2 came out,
I think it was in something like April 2018,
that we will benefit a lot go
with this kind of solution which was open sourced,
there was a lot of traction behind it
and it will enable us to
I mean, accelerate, accelerate the adoption of Kubernetes
and cloud native in general,
much more faster, than the you know solutions
that we had built at that time.
So we went with Rancher
and right now we have, I would say, I mean,
we have maybe 10 data centers
with the cloud installed on top of it,
much more data centers was going
to grow in the next couple of months and years,
and we have over 200 clusters
and 1000 nodes that are managed
by Rancher and people can just deploy on demand,
to own Kubernetes cluster
and get started with it if they want to.
>> Okay, so if I heard you right,
it's Rancher on top
of the OpenStack solution in your data centers.
>> Yes.
>> You talk about how many clusters you have,
you know, what's the state of managing those environments?
You said, you're using Rancher
that's one of the things we've seen a lot
of discussion over the last couple of years is you know,
went from managing containers to managing you know,
part or cluster to now, multi clusters around multi sites,
you know, what's the maturity today?
Anything that you're looking for
that would make your life easier
to manage such a broad environment?
>> Yeah, well, I would say that's one of the drawback,
I mean, when we enabled that solution with Rancher
we didn't see, I mean,
here's the views of launching provisioning new clusters,
is that right now, we have a lot of clusters,
maybe too many, because we try to consolidate,
I mean, the next, the next logical step
for us is we try to consolidate the workloads maybe
as much as possible,
and see if there's really a need
for people to have their own dedicated cluster for them.
And initially, there was a lot of demand for that,
because people basically they came to us and they said,
you know, we want to use Kubernetes.
And what we want to do is we want to have films
which we have access to it,
we want to be able to do whatever we want with it,
upgrade it at our own pace.
And I don't want to have any neighbor on it.
I want to be completely isolated in terms
of computer resources.
So we said all right, we're going to make a solution
that is going to provision new clusters on demand
for everyone.
And the intro stuff may very well.
But now, after a while some people
and we as especially as an IT provider and operator,
we realized that, you know,
maybe people don't have to be completing alone to cluster,
maybe we should try to consolidate that a little bit.
So we're trying to migrate workloads from certain services
and tooling and say maybe you can,
instead of running your own cluster, you can use this one
that is going to be shared.
And there will be a team dedicated
I mean dedicated to support and operate is faster for you
because we want to in the end,
we want to offload the burden of infrastructure
and Kubernetes although it's I mean,
it brings a lot of abstraction in simplicity,
you still have to manage your cluster in the end.
So we'd rather have people focus on the application side
than on the Kubernetes infrastructure side.
So we will start a path
of maybe try to consolidated friend workloads,
and see if we can reduce the amount of clusters
that we have and also to unify the way
that people are using the different providers
because although we have,
a huge open OpenStack cloud offering internally on prem,
there are still people who need to use GKE or EKS
and a couple of other external cloud providers.
So for these people,
some of them are not using really Rancher,
although it's possible with Rancher
to just directly using the providers.
But what we want to do is try to unify the way
that you're going to get access to this cluster,
try to make a central governance model
for people to pass through a central team to get access
and prevent the cluster.
So they will be standardized,
we will be able to add more maybe security policies
and compliance and rules and everything.
So the cluster will be created in certain ways
and that too much fragmented as they are today.
>> Yeah, that's ultimately what I was trying
to understand is most customers I talked to,
they have hybrid environments,
they're using multiple clouds,
if you're using Kubernetes you know,
how do you get your arms around that.
So I'd love to get your viewpoint just
'cause you've been involved since,
kind of the early Kubernetes days,
you know, what's,
what's better now than it was a few years ago?
You know, I heard you say
that you looked at possibly,
you know, creating a solution to yourself
so a company like Rancher helps simplify things.
So when you look at the maturity,
you know, how happy are you
with what you have now?
And are there any things
that you say, boy,
I'd love my team to not have to worry about this.
You know, maybe the industry as a whole would be able to,
you know, standardize or make things simpler?
>> Well, you know,
when we started to use Rancher maybe there were a couple
of things that we wanted to simplify for the users
because what Rancher does is essentially is that,
there's a lot of configuration options.
It's very flexible because it's first mining providers.
So the first few things that we did was try
to simplify the user experience
who we will extend we modified ventures in some ways
to make It's simpler to be consumed.
And also, the experience is much more simpler than it was,
let's say two years ago when we started,
we still want to simplify it even further,
we want to ideally provide a fully manage experience.
So peoples don't even have
to worry about the control plane components
that is currently being deployed
with their competitors clusters.
We want to remove that away from them so that we,
once again fully focus on the application side
of development.
And I think one other aspect
that we need to maybe improve in the future is that,
when you want to deploy your application
and make it resilient
and geographically distributed,
then you need to manage multiple clusters,
and you need to deploy your applications
and performance cluster.
So, the whole multi cluster aspect
of things like,
how do I deploy my application from a version?
How do I make it like consistent
between the different clusters
that where it needs to be deployed.
How do I make service discovery possible?
Or do I mesh everything all the application together
to make sure that it's easy to operate,
it's easy for the developers,
and that it's resilient in the end.
So we will start to look at the, I mean,
the multi cluster multi region aspect for Kubernetes.
Because that's a big challenge to us.
>> All right, well, Alexandre, want to shift for a second,
let's talk about the conference, KubeCon, CloudNativeCon,
obviously, it's virtual this year,
so there is a little bit of shift but you know,
you've attended many of these in the past.
What are their projects
that you're interested in learning more
or are there you know, peers of yours
that you're looking to collaborate with?
What have you seen in the past that
that you're hoping you still get,
from a virtual event like we have this year?
>> Well, you know,
I think that it has become so big, it's hard to keep up
with everything that's happening at the same time,
you know, nowadays, but,
things that we're looking at really, is maybe like,
I think chapters maybe, in terms of service mesh
to a lot of technologies, I think it's maturing slowly.
So we'll have, we'll always try to have a look about
what is the most, the best fit for us
and the use cases that we have.
And some people thought you're using Kubernetes,
some other people are using,
you know more traditional stacks,
So we try to bridge that together
and see what's possible to migrate the existing workloads
from the traditional cloud VMs,
and call applications toward Kubernetes and everything.
So maybe try to see if it's possible to bridge that path
and migrate gradually for the users that we have.
And other things in general,
I think that it will be very interesting
to see the whole bear setups, I mean, evolving to run out
and see are we can try to add conformance
and compliance rules to different clusters
that we have to manage
to make sure that it's no longer like,
just add a matter of I want to create a cluster,
I get access to it.
We need to centralize the governance.
We need to centralize that,
the rules of our everything's going to be managing the end
and make sure that security is a big aspect to it
so make sure that there's no vulnerabilities
and everything's being audited.
And especially for the game students is going
to be a big factor for us.
So we definitely our interested
into all the security discussion
that's happening right now.
>> All right, no shortage of lots of information.
Alexandre, by the way, that there's no way
that anybody can keep up on everything
that's happening in this very robust community.
But thank you so much for sharing your journey.
It's always great to hear from the practitioner.
Thanks so much for joining us.
>> Thanks for having me, awesome.
>> All right, and thank you for joining us,
for all the coverage.
Be sure to go to theCUBE.net,
you can see not only all the interviews from this show,
you can go search find previous shows
as well as see what events we will be at,
of course right now all virtually,
so, am Stu Miniman and thank you as always
for watching theCUBE.
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