>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas.
It's theCUBE, covering KubeCon
and CloudNativeCon 2017.
Brought to you by Red Hat,
the Linux Foundation,
and theCUBE's ecosystem partners.
>> Hello everyone.
Welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage,
here live in Austin, Texas for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon.
I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media
with my co-host Stu Miniman,
Next is Nigel Poulten, who's the author of
the Kubernetes book, also container guru, trainer,
been in the business for a long time in the community.
Great to have you on for our intro.
>> Thank you
>> Stu, keynote, let's get down to it.
What was the big highlights?
>> Yeah, well, first of all John,
we've officially entered KubeCon Days here.
So CloudNativeCon was yesterday.
We've got two more days of KubeCon.
Kelsey Hightower, you know, we had him on theCUBE yesterday.
Phenomenal speaker, everybody's looking forward to him.
Lines to talk to him.
Made sure that there was a standing ovation
before and after his.
Very demo heavy.
I mean, you know, this group loves it.
There were a lot of, you know, great pithy lines.
Arguments over, you know, which is the best language,
which is the best way to do things?
Knocking on things like YAML.
So, it was definitely a fun, geeky discussion.
I'm a big Game of Thrones fan.
So I loved to see season seven delivered on Kubernetes.
>> What was the summary of the keynote?
What was the take?
>> So I think from my perspective,
the summary was Kubernetes is boring.
Which translates to us generally, as in it's maturing.
It's something that you might want to be able to trust
in your production environment, if you're an enterprise.
I mean, look, as a technology guy we always think
we like to know the details, the weeds.
And we like to play with YAML and stuff like that.
But at the end of the day, business is down
and developers tend not to want to.
They want a smooth pipeline.
And that's boring, and so boring is good.
>> Yeah, and I do want to poke at it a little bit, Nigel,
I definitely want your opinion on this,
because there are certain technologies we say,
"Oh right, it's reached that boring phase",
which means it's kind of steady state.
Kubernetes is not like One Dot Nine.
Coming into the show it was like, how complex it is.
Oh my God, there's all these things above and below.
Yin gave a really nice keynote showing kind of
a layer cake there. >> Yeah.
>> I think maybe the Kubernetes layer might be,
it's stable enough and used, and people can use it.
But this ecosystem by no means is it boring.
>> No >> And there's lots of things
to make out.
What are you seeing?
>> Totally, and it's that definition of boring, really.
So I would say boring would translate into usable.
But you're right, in no way is it boring in any sense.
In fact, it's exciting and it's dangerous as well.
>> Yeah, and ...
>> So I'll give you an example, right.
So Kubernetes is massively successful.
I think we all grock that at the moment, okay.
But it's almost potentially going to be
a victim of it's own success.
It's always at one of the many summits that was going on
before KubeCon and CloudNativeCon started,
and it was about networking
and there was a bunch of guys here from big carriers
and they really want to take this simple networking model
that Kubernetes currently has and make it fit their needs,
which would make it really complex, dare I say,
almost OpenStack Neutron.
(laughing)
And I think there's so many people here at this conference
right now that want to take Kubernetes
and use it for their own purposes.
And as successful as it is, and as much uptake as it's got,
there is a potential danger there, I think,
that it explodes out of control,
and I don't want to knock OpenStack,
but becomes difficult and not what we want it to be,
and that's dangerous for them.
>> Nigel, you bring up a great point here,
because something we've been looking at
is every time we abstract or make this new design model,
it's "Oh well".
We want to make sure the developer
doesn't have to worry about that infrastructure.
Clayton from Red Hat, we had him on theCUBE,
and he talked about it in the keynote,
boring means when I write my code
I don't have to think about the infrastructure,
but networking and storage.
Networking some of the basis pieces are done
but there's a lot of activity in that space,
and storage, we're still arguing over
what Container Native Storage should be,
what CloudNative storage should be.
So it's still to my definition, it's not boring.
That's the direction, and I like it.
Kind of was where we talked about
invisible infrastructure. >> Yeah
>> What do you see?
You've got a heavy background on that side too.
>> So I think I quite like this space
that networking is at within Kubernetes.
It's simple, and that works for me, right.
Storage is certainly, it's still playing catch up there,
and I think a lot of decisions still need to be made.
The future, in my opinion, is still not clear there.
But I think a lot of games have got to be played
to say, now how far do we take networking,
and how far do we take storage and things like that
so that it, in the one sense doesn't balloon out of control,
but on the other side you do want it to meet
more use cases than just the very basic use cases.
So, I mean, that plays back to my idea that
that danger aspect of Kubernetes, it seems to have won
in the orchestration space at the moment,
but I think the road ahead, there still loads of potholes,
and there's tight bends, and there's cliff edges
and things that we still could fall off,
and that's exciting.
>> Nigel, your dangerous comment reminds me
of some of the early days of V-M-ware.
>> Nigel: Right >> You know,
people that would get in there,
they'd do some really cool things,
they'd write it up, share it with the community.
And absolutely, it feels like that, almost even bigger.
>> Yeah, like the top layer that interfaces
with the developers and things like that,
that's getting pretty stable.
But underneath, I mean, that is a happening place
underneath right now, and I imagine it's going to be
a happening place for quite a few years.
>> What about service meshes
and also pluggable architectures?
Because that seems to be the answer
to the dangerous question.
Oh don't worry about it, carriers and what not.
You can just build pluggable architectures,
no one's going to get hurt.
>> Nigel: Yeah >> Not ready for prime time?
What's your thoughts?
>> So I think service mesh is almost certainly
in my opinion, the hot topic of the conference so far.
I like this idea of it getting born and stuff,
and that's good for the project.
But if there's one take away,
if it's something that you're not quite
clued upon at the moment,
go away and look into service mesh.
I've got to do a lot of that myself, to be perfectly honest.
But this whole idea of running like sidecar containers
and what have you, inside of the pods,
alongside your application to look at your ingress traffic,
your incoming traffic, your outgoing traffic.
It's all cool and it can add so much functionality
and make it so much more usable to a lot of users.
But at the same time there's not ...
I don't know, right, look I'm a little bit old fashioned.
I remember the days of deploying agents on servers.
And we would have server bills that had
agent upon agent upon agent.
And we have this backlash in the industry of like,
you're not bringing your product in vendor x, y or z, okay.
If it deploys an agent, we're going fully agentless here.
We're sick of managing all these different agents
in our stack, and I wonder again,
playing to the danger topic here,
that like, are we going to end up having loads of these
sidecar containers in our pods
that are affectively the modern day agents
that we then have to manage, and consume resources
>> Explain the sidecar generation, it's important.
Take a minute to explain the dynamic because
containerization has been around for awhile, Google and
everyone else knows that. >> Nigel: Yeah.
>> But Docker really put it on the map.
Now the commoditization of containers with Kubernetes.
What's this sidecar thing about?
>> Nigel: Okay >> Quick, take a minute
to explain to the folks.
>> Right, so in the Kubernetes world
I guess the atomic unit of deployment,
the equivalent of a V-M from the V-M World space
would be the pod, which is effectively a container, right?
But within that pod you run your application container.
And I think for most people you run one container
inside of that pod, it's your application, right?
What we're starting to see now is,
and Kubernetes has always had this ability
to run multiple containers inside of a pod.
Most people don't do it.
And it seems that a lot of the external projects,
and a lot of the third party vendors
are starting to pick up on this and say,
"Alright, well let's run another container
"Inside of that pod".
It's not your actual application
and we call it a sidecar container.
And it adds functionality and what have you,
but is also potentially eats through resources,
it makes your deployments maybe more complicated.
I mean it's always a trade off,
isn't it? >> Yeah
>> You get additional functionality but it's never for free.
>> Yeah it's overhead.
Alright, talk about the customer guys.
What we saw in keynote, we saw HBO on stage.
How are customers using Kubernetes?
Because I'm trying to put my finger on it.
I love Orchestrate, I know what that does,
and I understand the benefits,
but how are actually people using it today?
>> So I think it's a little bit like
the whole container thing, right?
The early adopters of the Netflix's and the HBOs
and the people like that
that have got large engineering teams,
that have a lot of developers on staff,
they're really just comfortable going
and taking these new technologies,
and rolling them themselves,
and they've got this appetite for danger,
again within their organization almost.
Their risk taking organizations, right.
They're all over the containers and the Kubernetes.
The more traditional enterprises
I think are still kicking the tires.
They're still throwing out the occasional
new project within the organization and saying,
"Let's test the waters with this new feature
"That we want to add to our main product",
or "We've got something new,
"Let's try containers and Kubernetes."
They're certain, at least the ones that I speak to,
certainly not at the phase where they're
taking their legacy apps.
>> HBO was using it for like traffic, identifying ingress,
you mentioned that earlier, I mean basic stuff.
Not a lot of heavy lifting, or is it?
>> Well, I think the HBO, I mean ...
How much they ran the season seven
of Game of Thrones on Kubernetes.
I mean, I'm sure there was some
non-Kubernetes stuff in there as well,
but it seemed like from the presentation pretty much,
well, a lot of that stuff was
running containers and Kubernetes,
and lets be fair, when it comes to HBO,
Game of Thrones is like their,
it's their killer product at the end of the day, isn't it?
And so they've taken a risk there with that.
>> Yeah
>> But again you know HBO, a rare...
>> There's a lot of online viewers,
by the way on that too. >> Yeah.
>> With HBO Go. >> Oh, an insane number!
But I would say compared to a traditional enterprise
they're a risk taking organization.
They live in the Cloud.
They like living on the edge.
They're willing to take risks with new technologies
to push the product forward.
>> Alright, so I want to get your guys' thoughts
on a tweet I saw out there.
"Think of Kubernetes as the colonel
"For modern distributed systems.
"It's not about zero ops, it's about op power tools
"to unlock developer productivity."
Craig McLuckie from Heptio mentioned that on stage.
Really kind of rallying around Kubernetes.
Thoughts on that quote?
What does that mean?
>> So I mean John, you know there was for a while
people saying, "How do we deprecate?
"Or even go to kind of noOps?"
Absolutely, many of the keynotes talked about
who's deploying them and who's running them.
We're not talking about eliminating ops.
Even when I can have a voice assistant help roll things out,
they're still absolutely a major piece of
who needs to run this, but the right things
to the right part of the organization.
>> Yeah, I think instead of using the word colonel
maybe use the word Linux, you know.
Looking at Kubernetes as the Linux of the Cloud,
and that's not my term, I've heard other people say it.
But it's open source for a start like Linux is,
it's got a great thriving community
of people contributing to it.
You can fork it, you can do what ever you want with it,
but if you're going to deploy a CloudNative application
right now, then Kubernetes is that substrate.
You've just got to look at what came out of re:Invent.
So A-W-S is now offering a native Kubernetes hosted service,
obviously Google does it, Azure does it with Microsoft.
They're all picking up on this realizing
that people deploying CloudNative apps,
they're going to be deploying it on Kubernetes.
>> Thoughts about Red Hat.
I just saw Gabe Monroy, the keynote, Stu.
Red Hat's contribution to hardening Kubernetes
cannot be overstated.
C-C OpenShift
And we had Bryan Gracie on yesterday.
I mean OpenShift, what a bet.
Microsoft betting heavily on Kubernetes.
Google obviously sees this as an opportunity.
Multi-Cloud fantasies out there somewhere,
but that's what customers are kind of asking for,
not yet in tangible product, but this is interesting.
You've got Red Hat, the king of the enterprise, OpenSource.
>> Nigel: Absolutely, yeah. >> No debate about that.
Microsoft and Google, old guard with Microsoft
and then new guard in Google.
Really if they don't throw a line
at the main Cloud trend with Kubernetes,
they could be left in the dust.
So I see a lot of things at play.
How is the Red Hat and the Kubernetes investment paying off?
How do you guys see that playing out?
Good strategic move, headroom to it?
What comments and caller commentary on that?
>> Well I think if you compare Red Hat to Microsoft,
if you don't mind me doing that,
Microsoft has a cash cow in Windows in the past
and I think it quickly realized that
the cash cow was not going to live forever,
and they invested heavily in Azure.
Red Hat live a lot, I guess as well,
off support contracts and things like that,
the Red Hat enterprise Linux.
How long of a tail that has, I'm not sure.
So certainly they're doing at least,
they're looking in the right direction at least
by investing heavily in Kubernetes.
If they want to go in and be the enterprise's
trusted Kubernetes partner,
I think they've got a great story.
They've contributed a ton to it.
They're already in the door at most enterprises,
and I think you couple those two things together if
the enterprise is going to adopt Kubernetes at some point.
I'm not saying they've go the best story,
but they've got a pretty decent story.
>> Alright, in the last minute I want to ask both you guys
this question because it's been kind of on my mind,
I've been thinking about it.
Maybe I'm overstretching here but three day conference,
one day to CloudNative, two days to Kubernetes, KubeCon.
Why?
More important?
Growing community?
CloudNative I think, would be probably stronger sessions.
Is it because there's more emphasis on the Kubernetes?
>> Kubernetes is the core, Kubernetes is what started
the C-N-C-F. >> John: Yeah
>> All the other projects really build off to it.
I think it's pretty... >> It needs more attention.
>> Kubernetes, I mean, while there's ...
You know I love Kelsey's line this morning.
He looked out at the audience he says,
"I think everyone that's running Kubernetes
"In the globe is here."
So, there's jokes about how many people are actually
running in production >> Yeah, they're probably here.
>> So look, there's still so many people
that are getting the Kubernetes 1-0-1.
The whole CloudNative, all of these other projects
are all building off of it.
I think it's really straight forward on there.
We even heard, do we call it the C-N-C-F?
Do we rename it to something that's
a little more Kubernetes focused?
Because CloudNative gets talked about some,
there's service mesh, absolutely Nigel,
it was the buzz coming into the show.
I hear those sessions are overflowing here.
We didn't even get to talk about,
there's like another alternative to Istio that's there.
>> And Lou Tucker, by the way,
affirmed that same thread yesterday about the service mesh.
Nigel, final word for you on this segment.
How big order of magnitude and important is Kubernetes?
I mean given you've seen,
talk about agent-ism in the old days,
and all the ways that have come,
that's been kind of incremental proving balls been moved
down the field here and there.
And some big chunk yardage, if you will,
use this football analogy.
How big, because I've seen Kubernetes
just go from here to here.
>> Yeah
>> Really move the need along the community, it's galvanized.
How important is Kubernetes, from an order of magnitude,
when we look back a few years from now,
what are we going to be saying?
"Hey, remember KubeCon in 2017?"
How important is Kubernetes?
>> Well, can I say I think it's really early days, okay?
And I like the analogy that it is the Linux of the Cloud
or of CloudNative, okay?
But I think there's danger in that as well
because the world is changing so fast now.
I mean Linux has lived for a very long time, okay.
Will Kubernetes live that long
or will it be replaced by something else?
It probably will be, but I do feel these are early days,
and I think it has got a long stretch ahead.
A long stretch as in like... >> John: Yeah.
>> Good four or five years.
And within two to three years, you know,
just about every organization in my opinion
is going to have some Kubernetes in it.
>> And the beginning signs of maturity's coming.
Stack Wars too, all the vendors really trying to figure out,
strategically it's like a 3-D chess match right now.
Open source is kind of like arbiter of this,
really good stuff.
I think it's going to be super important.
Thanks for the commentary.
kicking off day two of Cube exclusive coverage
here at KubeCon.
CloudNativeCon was yesterday.
Two days of KubeCon.
We'll be back with more live coverage.
From theCUBE, I'm John Furrier.
Stu Miniman and Nigel Poulten after this short break.
(light techno music)