>> Narrator: Welcome to Amsterdam
and KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2023.
Join John Furrier, Savannah Peterson,
Rob Strechay, and Joep Piscaer as theCUBE covers
the largest conference on Kubernetes,
cloud native, and open source technologies
together with developers, engineers,
and IT leaders from around the globe.
Live coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2023
is made possible by the support of Red Hat,
the CNCF, and its ecosystem partners.
>> Good afternoon and welcome back to KubeCon Europe.
We are in fabulous Amsterdam, and we are theCUBE.
I am joined with Joep.
How are you doing today?
>> I'm very well.
The sun's out again.
>> I know, I feel like you brought the sun
when you came back on set.
>> It's what I do.
It's what I do.
>> You just bring the heat no matter where you go.
I love that about you.
It's wonderful.
We are joined by a very fabulous guest
and we are going to talk about some exciting projects.
Liz, welcome to the show.
>> Thank you very much.
Pleasure to be here.
>> Yes, it's wonderful to have you here.
We're going to talk about your role in a second.
Isovalent, Cilium, talk to me.
Give the lay of the land to the audience.
>> Yeah, so Isovalent is the company that originally
created the Cilium project, which I think most people here
will know as a networking solution for Kubernetes.
It's an incubating project in the CNCF.
And then this week, well, for a while,
we've had the ability to connect
multiple Kubernetes clusters together.
This week we've been talking about Cilium Mesh
which is the ability to also connect not just
multiple clusters, but also connect to external workloads.
So if you have hybrid cloud, legacy workloads,
things running in VMs, being able to seamlessly
connect those into your set of services that are distributed
over Kubernetes or not Kubernetes, or with Cilium Mesh.
>> So you make life easier for everyone here.
>> Liz: Absolutely.
It's all about simplifying things at the networking level.
>> Joep: Well, especially because no application
is actually just containers, just cloud, just SaaS.
Application span the whole gamut of solutions that we have.
>> Absolutely, and there's also the question
of a legacy workload that at some point
needs to migrate into the cloud.
And how do you take that VM-based workload?
There's that whole lift and shift concept
but you've got to have the connectivity between
where it's running today and where it's going to run tomorrow.
And Cilium makes that very easy to do.
It all looks like a Kubernetes service
and that makes things very familiar
for Kubernetes operators.
>> Yeah, and that consistent experience, I think is
what we need when we're going from on-prem
or legacy applications into the cloud
into containers because we still need to
have it running in production, have it be stable.
So we need that observability.
So what I wonder is what Cilium Mesh adds
to having that consistent experience across all of those.
>> Yeah, so Cilium is based on eBPF, which is
a fantastic technology that I'm extremely excited about
and could talk about all afternoon.
And we can use that to really simplify the networking path
between workloads and do really efficient load balancing
between the pods that back a service
or between pods and VMs that might be running externally.
And we also use eBPF for that observability angle
that you mentioned which is critical
that you can see where your network packets are flowing.
You can see how your services are connected.
We've also been doing some really great work with Grafana.
There's a new Hubble.
Hubble is the observability component of Cilium.
There's a new Hubble plugin for Grafana.
>> I like that name.
Little telescope reference, yeah.
>> Exactly.
>> Yeah, that's awesome.
>> Yeah, so you can get these fantastic graphs
and visualizations of how your services are mapped together,
how your network packets are flowing, what the latency is,
where your DNS problems are, because it's always DNS.
>> Joep: It always is.
>> So can we just bottle your energy and sell it
in the sidebar, because I love how excited you are.
Observability has been such a hot topic here.
We definitely see the future shifting there a lot.
I want to talk about the event though.
You had your first Cilium Con.
>> Yes, we did.
Yes, so they're co-located events,
the day before the main show started.
We had the first ever Cilium Con.
It was fantastic. >> Congratulations.
That's really exciting.
>> It really is.
We had so many amazing submissions.
We had a really tough job to choose
which talks we were going to have.
I think we picked some excellent talks.
We had really great, New York Times, Robinhood, Datadog.
>> A couple brands folks may have heard of.
>> Exactly.
Ikea, they're really household names
coming and talking about how they've been using Cilium.
We had a fantastic talk about a murder mystery
solved using Cilium.
It basically came down to, it was DNS, doggonit, but so.
>> Talk about great customer applications though.
>> Yeah, yeah.
Fantastic to see people with these real world use cases
and they're not just coming along going,
"Da, da, da, yeah, it all works."
They're telling us about some of the challenges they had
and how they've overcome them
and what they're looking for next.
So it's been really, really great to have them involved
and have that half a day where we just focused on Cilium.
And I think the attendees loved it.
We had a lot of really great energy in the room.
>> Oh, well that's what community is all about
is sharing those stories about just being successful
with a piece of technology, but sharing that knowledge
and finding out what's new, what's next in the community.
>> And you'll be more successful with that technology
if you have that community who share the enthusiasm and-
>> And then they feel like they're part of the journey.
>> Yes, yes.
And they're our best advocates.
They're telling the story and sharing their success.
And we love that.
>> Did you have a favorite customer example
or one that's been on your mind since Cilium Con?
>> I did love this murder mystery, particularly because-
>> Savannah: Who doesn't love a good murder mystery?
>> You know how you get in a TV drama
you have a pin board with lines and pictures?
>> Savannah: Oh yeah, yeah.
Trying to figure out who done it?
>> Yeah.
There was a slide with that and that was amazing.
We also had Ikea with some really great
Ikea furniture references.
We had an IKEA instruction manual
for how to build a private cloud with Cilium
but all styled like an IKEA assembly manual.
Beautiful.
>> So how do we get one of those?
>> The slides are available, so, yeah.
>> How are your IKEA furniture skills?
>> They are, like IKEA furniture, 80% done.
>> Yes.
You have a very cool job title
and one that we have not seen.
You've been on the show before,
although we haven't had the chance to talk about it.
What does it mean to be the chief open source officer?
>> It's a great question.
And Isovalent is very much an open source first company.
And the engineering that we do is probably 90% open source.
But really my role and what my team do
is involves interfacing with organizations like the CNCF,
helping build the community, helping ensure
that we've got all the governance things in place
and encouraging the contributions from outside.
So although I have an engineering background,
it becomes also a lot about how we evangelize the technology
and how we encourage participation in the community.
>> That's exciting.
Was the position created because of your presence
or was it a position that, was it advertised that way?
>> It was not advertised that way. (laughs)
>> Just thought maybe there was a little sneakiness.
Little birdie just told me you recently
went on a big bike ride.
>> Yes, I did.
>> Is that where you get all the energy from?
It's from cycling?
>> If you see me moving around,
I move more slowly right now than normal.
I cycled here from London to get here to Amsterdam
and I have to cycle back again
at the end of the week, so yeah.
>> Savannah: How long did that take you?
>> It took two days and an overnight ferry.
It was just under 250 kilometers to get here.
And I have been raising some money
for Doctors Without Borders, Medecins Sans Frontieres.
So if people want to look me up on Twitter
and find that link, that would be awesome.
>> We had Audi on to start yesterday
and we're talking about the e-tron.
We've got EV vehicles, but I think
you might have come here the most sustainable way.
>> Yeah, I'm not the only person who's cycled here.
Bill from my team also cycled most of the way.
He came from Berlin, took a train to Bremen,
and then cycled even further than me.
There's a chap called Yohan, who's cycled,
took seven days to cycle from Switzerland.
Another chap called Andrea, who's cycled from London.
So there's a few of us about.
Sig bike, it's a community.
>> So, is cycling a big part of your culture then?
>> Yeah.
Yeah, yeah
>> I heard so, yeah.
>> Yeah, yeah, no, apparently.
So, did you cycle here?
>> I did not.
Even though I'm Dutch.
>> Liz: There are a lot of cyclists
around here in Amsterdam.
>> Savannah: There's a couple bikes outside.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay, so outside of Cilium, you're a trend watcher.
You've been working in this space for a while.
You got a technical background, you got love for community.
What are you most excited about?
What do you hope we get to talk about
the next time we have you on the show?
>> Oh, that's a really great question.
I've been so excited about eBPF, and a few people
are like, "What's next after eBPF?"
And I think we've still got a quite a long way to go
to build more things using eBPF.
I was just moderating a panel with
a great bunch of people for analysts.
We were talking about the future
of cloud native and what's next.
A lot of that related to multicloud, hybrid cloud,
how we support stateful applications, what's coming with
artificial intelligence based,
how that's going to influence how we develop in cloud native.
So I think there's a lot of really interesting things
happening across this whole space.
It's such an exciting place to be.
>> And especially the overlap between observability and AI.
You've mentioned that the cat's out of the bag now.
How do you think observability
is going to change in the next year or so
given this enormous push for AI and LLMs?
>> Yeah, it's a really great question.
I think there's a lot of potential for AI
and this ability to interpret natural language
and convert that into, if I want to solve a problem,
how do I ask the right questions of my system?
And that's really what observability is.
So if AI can help us ask those questions,
make it easier for us to ask those questions
in a way that the machines understand,
then that could be really helpful.
I don't know what the answer is,
but I think that's a really interesting direction.
>> Well, I think that's a good point
because interpreting whatever the observability system
observes is still a very manual thing,
but also it's a super complex thing to do right.
And getting value out of an observability system
is not installing it.
It's actually being able to answer those questions.
>> Yes, yes.
You've got all these data points at your fingertips,
but how do you pick the right ones to look at to answer
the question that's really going to solve your problem?
>> And maybe even start answering questions
that you didn't even know you wanted to ask.
That maybe the next frontier for observability
is getting answers to things
that you hadn't even thought of.
>> Absolutely.
>> I think you're touching on this.
I don't think we know, this is going to sound a bit daft,
but I don't think we know where we're going yet.
We're at an intersection of a bunch of
different technology coming out.
From our conversations about observability with AI,
with security, with everything.
The ecosystem has finally matured
and we have all this momentum.
And I don't think five years from now,
who knows what we'll be talking about?
>> Yeah, it's never finished, right?
No project is ever finished.
>> Yeah, yeah.
That's definitely the truth.
So with the future of your community,
how many people actually do you think
are in the Cilium community?
>> So while we were live during Cilium Con,
we passed the milestone of 5,000 stars on GitHub,
which was a pretty nice milestone.
>> Hey, that is a milestone.
That's fun that that was happening here too.
>> Exactly, and we have a similar number
in our Slack channel as well.
So yeah, that's about the size of it.
We have several hundred contributors to the project,
people who've contributed code or also documentation.
We've been working quite a lot
to help people contribute in non-code ways.
So if they want to, not just creating docs,
but maybe they're going and doing talks, presentations,
creating videos, and we have ways to acknowledge them
now in the Cilium project officially
so that we have this contributors can feel valued.
We want people to feel that whatever it is
they're adding to the project is valued.
>> Well, and clearly from your enthusiasm, it definitely is.
>> Yes, absolutely.
>> So, talk to us a little bit about eBeeDex.
I've been reading upon it.
It seems like a great way for people
to actually share what they've created for eBPF
so that people don't have to recreate the wheel.
>> Yeah, so we had this very cool bee character.
So the symbol for eBPF is a bee, and then we have this
amazing artist who's part of Isovalent called Vadim,
and he was creating all these wonderful bees, characters
in various situations doing various different things
like astronauts and detectives and travelers
and all sorts of characters.
And then we thought we should bring them together.
We created the eBeeDex.
Very much influenced by what GitHub
have done with their Octodex.
And all those bees are available
for people to use Creative Commons.
So we have-
>> It's cute, I'm actually creeping on the bees right now.
>> See the hive flying.
>> And it's a long list.
>> Oh, that's awesome.
And we need bees.
We need them for so many reasons.
That's great.
>> That's cute.
>> Yeah, that is.
That is very cute.
If people want to work with you, what should they do?
>> So if they want to get involved with the Cilium project,
they can go to cilium.io.
That's probably the best place to start.
Find all the Slack, the weekly developer meetings,
all the different ways that they can
interact with the project.
And of course, Isovalent is hiring.
>> Savannah: I had a feeling you might enjoy
a little opportunity to plug in.
>> Yeah, so yeah, isovalent.com/careers
has some really interesting opportunities, and yeah.
And the broader eBPF community is also really exciting.
So ebpf.io is another community resource for people
to learn more about eBPF and there's several other projects
that are using that technology as well
that people might want to-
>> And an upcoming documentary.
>> Yes, yes.
Don't know how public that is, but yeah,
there's been a few documentaries starting
with the Kubernetes story, and yeah,
we want to tell the story of eBPF as well.
>> Well, I know that you and I will be there
with some popcorn to watch that one.
>> We sure will.
>> There's no doubt about that.
Woo, it is actually getting bright in here.
Production has told me we're a little blown out
so I'm going to put the shades back on after.
I had my sunglasses on the entire day.
It's like a little greenhouse.
And there were little tulips growing.
We're in the daffodil section.
Do the ducks really love the flowers
as much as we think you do?
>> Let's say yes.
Okay, that's absolutely fantastic.
Liz, this has been really nice.
>> Thank you for having me.
It's been fun.
>> Thank you so much.
I think you might be our most enthusiastic guest
and I love that.
You also have the best nails, which I don't say lightly.
>> You have great nails too.
>> Thank you.
That's why they pay me the big bucks.
Joep, how about your nails?
>> My nails have finally worn off.
So I have kids that love to apply
fingernail polish to my hands.
>> So you get regular manis.
I love that.
>> I do, I do.
>> Are they here?
Will they come and do mine?
>> Can we just bring them next time and touch us all up?
>> Definitely.
>> That's fantastic.
Joep, thanks for being here with me.
Liz, you're the best.
I'm going to literally just take an IV and stick it in my arm
to get through the rest of the next two days.
Thank all of you, most importantly, for tuning into theCUBE.
Without you, we're not here.
We're live from KubeCon EU in Amsterdam.
My name is Savannah Peterson and you're watching theCUBE,
the leading source for technology coverage.