>> Live from San Diego California, it's theCUBE.
Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon.
Brought to you by Red Hat,
the Cloud Native Computing Foundation,
and its ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back.
We're at the end of three days of wall-to-wall coverage
here at KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019 in San Diego.
I am Stu Miniman and my co-host for this week
has been John Troyer,
and we figured no better way to cap our coverage
than bring on a CUBE alumni who has likely
educated more people about containers
and Kubernetes, you know, may be second only to the CNCF.
So, Nigel Poulton now the head of content at msb.com.
Nigel, pleasure to see you
and thanks for coming back on the program.
>> Honestly gents, the pleasure is all mine, as always.
>> All right, so Nigel, first of all I'd love to get
your just gestalt of the week.
You know, take away, what's the energy.
You know, how is was this community doing.
>> Yeah, so it's the end of the week
and my brain is a mixture of fried
and about to explode, okay.
Which i think is a good thing.
That's what you want at the end of a conference, right.
But I think if we can dial it back
to the first day at that opening keynote,
something that really grabbed me at the time
and has been sort of a theme for me
throughout the conference,
is when they asked, can you raise your hand
if this is your first KubeCon,
and it's a room of 8,000 people,
and I don't have the data at hand right,
but I'm sat there, I've got my brother on this side,
it's his first ever KubeCon, and he kind of goes like this,
and then he realizes that
nearly everybody around us has got their hands up,
so he's kind of like, whoa yeah,
I feel like I'm on the in the in-crowd now.
And I think from the people that I've spoken to
it seems to be that the community is maturing,
the conference or the event itself is maturing,
and that starts to bring in kind of a different crowd,
and a new crowd.
People that are not necessarily building Kubernetes or
building projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem,
but looking to bring it into their organizations
to run their own applications.
>> Yeah, no absolutely.
You know, the rough number I heard was
somewhere two-thirds to three-quarters
of that room were new.
>> Nigel: I can believe that.
>> 12,000 here in attendance, right.
There were 8,000 here last year.
>> Nigel: Yeah.
>> You think about the, you know,
somebody, oh I sent somebody this year,
I sent somebody different the next year,
and all the new people.
So, you know, Nigel, luckily that keeps you busy,
because there is something I've said for a long,
long, time is there is always a need for that introductory
and then how do I get started and how do I get into here,
and luckily the the ecosystem
and all the projects and everything,
somebody could pick that up in five or 10 minutes
if they'd just put their mind to it, right.
>> So I say this a lot of the time,
that I feel like we live in the Golden Age
of being able to take hold of your own career
and learn a technology and make the best of
what's available for you.
Now we don't live in the day where we used,
you know, to learn something new
you would have to buy infrastructure.
I mean even to learn Windows back in the day,
or NetWare or Linux you'd need a couple of
dusty old PCs in the corner of your office
or your bedroom or something, and it was hard.
Whereas now with cloud, with video training,
with all the hands-on labs and stuff that are out there,
with all of the sessions that you get at events like this,
if you're interested in pushing your career forward,
not only have you not got an excuse not to do it anymore,
but the opportunities are just amazing, right.
I feel like we live in such an,
I feel like we're living in a exciting time for tech.
>> Well Nigel, you do books,
said you've done training courses,
you have your platform of like a lab platform, msb.com.
And one of the challenges in this space
is that it is moving so fast, right.
Yes, you have, anything's at your fingertips, but.
>> Nigel: Yeah.
>> Kubernetes changes every every quarter.
Here at the show, both scale of people's deployments,
but also scale of the probably number of projects,
and everything has a different name.
>> Nigel: Yeah.
>> So, how are you, what should people be looking for?
How are you changing your curriculum?
What are you what are you adding to it,
what are you replicating?
>> Yeah, so that's super interesting.
I think, right, as well,
so it's a Golden Age for learning right,
but if you're in the technology industry
in the sort of areas that we are, right,
if you don't love it and if you're not passionate about it,
I almost feel like you're in the wrong industry,
because you need that passion,
and that sort of it's my hobby as well as my job,
just to keep up.
Like I feel like I spend an unhealthy amount of time
in the Cloud Native ecosystem
and just trying to keep track of everything that's going on.
And all that time that I spend in,
I still feel like I'm playing catch-up all the time.
So I think you have to adjust your mentality.
Like if you thought that you could learn something,
a technology or whatever,
and be comfortable for five years in your role,
then you really need to adjust that.
Like just an example, right.
So I write, I offer a book as well,
and I would love nothing better than to write that book,
stick it on a shelf on Amazon and what-have-you
and let it be valid for five years.
I would love that because it's hard work,
but I can't so like I do a six monthly update,
but that applies to way more than that.
So for your career, you know, if you want to,
it sounds cheesy, if you want to rock it in your career,
you have got to keep yourself up to date.
And it's a race, but I do think that
the kind of things were doing with tech now,
they're fun things, right.
>> Yeah, a little scary,
because while we're at this show
I hope you kept up with all the Amazon announcements,
the Google announcements.
>> Nigel: Yeah.
>> And everything going, because it is it is non-stop.
>> Nigel: It is.
>> Out there.
Nigel, we last had you on theCUBE
two years ago at this show,
and at every show for a bunch of shows
it seemed like there was a project or a category du jour.
>> Nigel: Yeah.
>> I don't know that I quite got that this year.
There were some really cool things at edge computing.
There was the observability,
something we spent a bunch of time talking on.
But we'd love to just kind of throw it out there
as to what you're seeing in the ecosystem,
the landscape, some of the areas that are interesting.
>> Nigel: Yeah.
>> Important, and what's growing, what's not.
>> Okay, so if I can take the event first off,
right, so KubeCon itself.
Loads of new people, okay, and when I talk to them
I'm getting three answers from them.
Like number one, they're like,
some people like, I just love it, you know,
which is great, and I've loved it and it's an amazing event.
Other people are like kind of over awed by it, the size.
So I don't know, maybe we should send them to re:Invent
and then come back here and then they'll be like,
oh yeah, it's not so bad.
But the second thing is that some of the sessions
are going over the first timers heads.
So I'm hoping, and I'm sure it will,
that going forward in Amsterdam and Boston next year
that we'll start to be able to pitch
parts of the conference to that new user base.
So that was kind of a theme
from speaking to people at the event from me.
But a couple of things from the ecosystem,
like we talked about service mesh, right, two years ago,
and it felt like it was a bit of a buzzword,
but everyone was talking about it and it was a real theme,
and I don't get that at this conference,
but what I do feel from the community in general
is that uptake and adoption
is actually starting to happen now,
and thanks a lot to, well look,
Linkerd pretty easy these days,
STO is making great strides to being easier to deploy,
but I also think that the cloud providers,
those hosted cloud providers,
really stepping up to the plate,
like they did with hosted Kubernetes,
you know when it was hard
to get Kubernetes for your environment.
We're seeing a similar thing with the service mesh.
You can spin something up in GKE, Kubernetes cluster,
click the box, and I'll have a service mesh,
thank you very much.
>> Well, it's funny.
I think back to Austin,
when I talk to the average customer in the show floor
and said, "What are you doing?"
they were rolling their own.
Picking all of the pieces and doing it.
When I talk to the average customer here, is,
I'm using managed services.
>> Nigel: Yeah.
>> Seems to have matured a lot.
Of course, some of the manage public cloud services
were brand new or a couple months there.
Is that's a general direction you see things going?
>> So, yes, but I almost wonder
if it will be like cloud in general, right,
where there was a big move to the cloud.
And I understand why people will want to do
hosted Kubernetes and things,
'cause it's easy and you know it gets you.
I'm careful that when I use the term production grade,
because I know it means different things
to different people, but you get something
that we can at least loosely turn production grade.
>> Yeah, and actually just to be clear,
we had a lot of discussions about on-premises,
so I guess it's more the managed service rather than the,
I'm going to roll all the pieces myself.
>> Yeah, but I wonder will we start,
and because of price and maybe the ability to
tweak the cluster towards your needs and things,
whether we might see people taking their first steps
on a managed service or a hosted Kubernetes,
and then as they scale up then they start to say,
well, tell you what we'll start rolling our own,
because we're better at doing this now,
and then run like, you know,
you still have your hosted stuff,
but you have some stuff on premises as well,
and then we move towards something that's a bit more hybrid.
I don't know, but I just wonder if that will become a trend.
>> Well Nigel, I mean it's been a busy week.
You started off with workshops.
I don't know, what did you miss?
What's the first, when you go home,
back to England, are you going to,
and you pop open your browser
and start looking at all the session videos and stuff,
I don't know,
what didn't you get a chance to do here this week?
>> So I was kind of, for me it's been
the busiest KubeCon I've had
and it's robbed me of a lot of sessions, right,
and when I remember when I looked at the catalog
at the beginning it was like,
you know it's one of those conferences where
almost every slot there's three things that I want to go to,
which is a sign of a good conference.
I'm quite interested at the moment in K3s.
I actually haven't touched it for a long time,
but outside of KubeCon
I have had a lot of people talk to me about that,
so I will go home and I will hunt down, right,
what are the K3s sessions to try
and get myself back up to speed,
'cause I know there are other projects
that are similar right,
but I find it quite fascinating in that
it's one of those projects where it started out
with like this goal of we'll be for the edge, right,
or for IOT or something, and the community are like,
we really like it, and actually I want to use it
for loads of other things.
You have no idea whether it will go on to be
like a roaring success, but it.
I don't know, so often you have it where
a project isn't planned to be something.
>> Announcer: Good afternoon attendees.
Breakout sessions will begin in 10 minutes.
>> But it naturally in the community.
>> Announcer: Session locations are listed.
>> Take it on and say.
>> Announcer: On the noted schedule.
>> We're going to do something with it.
>> Announcer: On digital signage throughout the venue.
>> That wasn't originally planned, yeah.
So I'll be looking up K3s as my first thing when I go home,
but it is the first thing on a long list, right.
>> All right.
Nigel, tell us a little bit about, you know,
latest things you're doing, msb.com.
I know you had your book signing for your book here,
had huge lines here.
>> Yeah. >> Great to see.
So, tell us about what you're doing overall.
>> Thank you, yeah.
So, I've got a couple of books
and I've got a bunch of video training courses out there,
and I'm super fortunate that I've reached a lot of people,
but a real common theme when I talk to people
are like, look, I love your book, I love your video courses,
whatever, how do I take that next step,
and the answer was always, look,
get your hands on as much as possible, okay.
And I would send people to like Minikube
and to play with Docker or play with Kubernetes
and various other solutions,
but none of them really seem to be like,
a real something that looked and smelled
and tasted like production.
So I'm working with a start-up at the moment,
msb.com, where we have curated learning content.
Everybody gets their own fully functioning
private free node Kubernetes cluster.
Ingress will work, internet-facing load balancers
will all work on it, and the idea is that
instead of having like a single node
development environment on your laptop, which is fine,
but you know, you can't really play with scheduling
and things like that, then msb.com takes
that sort of learning journey to the next level
because it's it's a real working cluster,
plus we've got this amazing visual dashboard
so that when you're deploying stuff and scaling
and rolling updates you see it all happening in the browser.
And for me as an educator, right,
it's sometimes hard for people to connect the dots
when you're reading a book or,
and I spend hours on like PowerPoint animations and stuff,
whereas now in this browser to augment like reading a book,
and to augment taking a training video,
you can go and get your hands on
and have this amazing sort of rich visual experience
that really helps you like, sort of, oh I get it now, yeah.
>> All right, so Nigel, final question I have for you.
I've known you back when we were just
a couple of infrastructure guys.
You've done phenomenal things.
>> Nigel: The glory days.
>> With kind of the wave of containers,
you're a Docker captain.
You know, really well known in the Kubernetes.
When you reflect back on something,
on kind of this journey we've been on,
you look at 12,000 people here,
you know Docker has some recent news here,
so give us a reflection back on that this journey
the whole industry's on.
>> Yeah, so I had breakfast with a guy this morning
who I wrote my first ever public blog with.
He had a blog site and he loaned me some space
on his blog site 'cause I didn't even know
how to build a blog at the time,
and it was a storage blog, yeah,
we're talking about EMC and HDS and all that kind of stuff,
and I'm having breakfast with him,
14 I think years later in San Diego at KubeCon.
And I think, and I don't know if this
really answers your question,
but I feel like that Kubernetes is almost so,
if ubiquitous is the right word or it's so pervasive,
and it's so all-encompassing almost,
that it is bringing almost the entire community.
I don't want to get too carried away with saying this, right,
but it is bringing people from all different areas
to like a common platform for want of a better term, right.
I mean we were infrastructure guys,
yourself as well John,
and here we are at an event that as a community
and as a technology I think it's just,
it's changing the world,
but it's also bringing things almost under one hood.
So I would say anybody, like whatever you're doing,
do all roads lead to Kubernetes at the moment, I don't know.
>> Yeah, well we know software
can actually be a unifying factor.
Best term I've heard is Kubernetes
is looking to be that universal back plain.
>> Nigel: Yeah.
>> and therefore, both you know,
southbound to the infrastructure,
northbound to the application.
Nigel Poulton congratulations on the progress.
Definitely, everybody makes sure to check out
his training online, and thank you for helping us
to wrap up our three days of coverage here.
For John Troyer, I am Stu Miniman.
TheCUBE will be at KubeCon 2020
in both Amsterdam and Boston.
we will be at lots of other shows.
Be sure to check out thecube.net.
Please reach out if you have any questions.
We are looking for more people to help support
our growing coverage in the cloud native space,
so thank you so much for the community,
thank you to all of our guests,
thank you to the CNCF and our sponsors
that make this coverage possible,
and thank you to you our audience for watching theCUBE.
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