>> 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.
>> Okay, welcome back, everyone.
This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage live here
in Austin, Texas for the CNCF's two conferences,
CloudNativeCon, which was yesterday, and two days,
today and tomorrow, KubeCon for Kubernetes' conference.
This is theCUBE, of course, from SiliconANGLE Media.
I'm John Furrier with my cohost, Stu Miniman.
Our next guest, Dan Kohn, is the executive director
of the CNCF, the man who put it all together.
Congratulations. Welcome back to theCUBE.
Good to see you.
>> Oh, absolutely. Thrilled to have you guys back here again.
>> So you kind of doing a victory lap here now,
high fiving each other?
>> Dan: Great hugs. >> John: Great event.
>> Laughing: I'm glad it's a good event,
and I am hearing fantastic feedback
that folks are thrilled to be here.
But we sort of describe this moment
for the organization and the community
as being the end of the beginning.
>> John: Yeah.
>> Where we now have all the major cloud vendors,
all of the biggest enterprise software companies.
We have a core group of 14 projects anchored by Kubernetes,
but tons and tons of work in front of us.
>> And tons of success, so I'm just
going to read a couple of highlights from yesterday.
There's a lot today. Baidu joins the CNCF,
a lot of scaling production application examples,
31 new silver end-user members joined,
Alibaba Cloud update to platinum,
CoreDNS 1.0, Containerd, Fluentd, Jaeger, tons of news.
Obviously, we've been pumping out the coverage.
Today, again, more and more great goodness.
But really interesting is that you guys
have put a frame around this community
to allow it to grow, to fertilize the open source vibe,
which is all cloud but yet scaled.
And you put up a slide I want to get your reaction to
that I thought was compelling yesterday during your keynote.
It was the flywheel, circle, and it said
projects, products, profit.
>> Dan: Right.
>> And not that you're promoting profit,
but you're not hiding the ball, either,
saying, hey, you know what?
There's a lot of commercial interest in cloud, obviously.
We saw AWS' success last week.
And that is if you create good products
in this community framework, there's profit to be had.
>> Right. So first of all, I should admit
to plagiarizing that slide from Linux Foundation
Executive Director Jim Zemlin.
>> And similarly, I think you can look at a lot of aspects...
>> It's an open source feature.
>> Dan: Yes. >> Free for you to use.
>> John: Right.
>> Similarly, I think there's a lot of ways
in which Kubernetes is trying to build
on the success of Linux.
And Jim even describes Kubernetes as the Linux of the cloud.
>> John: Yeah. >> Stu: Yeah.
>> John: That's a good point.
>> Dan, one of the things we've been talking
around Kubernetes is you talk about scale.
>> Dan: Right.
>> Talk about scale of the CNCF. You have 4 to 14 projects.
People are a little worried when you get
all the vendors around here and there's all these projects.
It's a foundation thing, it's going to go off the rails.
>> Dan: Yeah.
>> Customers aren't going to have a voice.
How do we make sure we kind of learn from some of the things
that other projects have had challenges with in the past?
>> And I think that's our advantage,
which is the great thing about coming later
than some of the other foundations,
is we can look at where they had successes
and where they had issues.
And our aspiration for CNCF is to get to go make
entirely new mistakes rather than replicating
some of the issues that have come before.
And so really from the beginning of CNCF,
we had a somewhat unusual and frankly
a little bit cumbersome charter
where I describe it at times as a three-ring circus.
We have a governing board made up of the vendors
that are putting a lot of money into the community,
but they don't get to run the projects
and they don't even get to pick the projects.
Instead, they appoint six of the nine members
of an independent technical oversight committee,
kind of like the Supreme Court.
And then we have a third group in the end-user community
that I'm thrilled to say is now up to 28 members in it.
They appoint one of those folks.
We finally got that working.
We have Sam Lambert, the director
of infrastructure at GitHub,
who has just made a huge commitment to Kubernetes
and is moving all their infrastructure over into it.
Those seven appoint the last two.
And so that body, and they just had
their public meeting a couple hours ago.
They feel very strongly about their independence,
about their reputation, that they're trying
to make very good judgments based on what
they're seeing in the marketplace.
>> That's interesting, the three-ring circle.
I like how you put it.
But let's talk about the end-user piece
because I think that's critical.
One of the things we were commenting earlier
from the Lyft folks was you have a lot of end users
who have built some large-scale systems
out of their own sheer necessity.
>> Dan: Definitely.
>> And that is now being donated in.
We saw Kubernetes come in with,
you shepherded beautifully, went from Google,
but you've got Lyft donating an amazing product convoy.
>> This first convoy has a huge amount of excitement.
And what was fun was, actually, on the same stage
that they contributed back in LA in September,
Uber contributed a separate project.
Now, unlike Uber and Lyft,
the two projects are in no way competitive-
>> John: Yeah.
>> Like Jaeger is really fantastic tracing one.
But what they have in common is that
they're companies that have had to grow
from nothing to extremely high scale
and then had problems that they solved.
And they wanted to share that expertise with us.
>> I want to get your thoughts on this.
Because we've been speculating, on theCUBE,
we've been kind of thinking, an editorial,
but just that this is all good business.
Now, that's pretty obvious, right?
You're starting to see this kind of contribution,
the gifts that keep on giving.
These are significant code.
>> Dan: Yeah.
>> Not like, okay, let's start a little group
and huddle and build something organically.
You have real goodness coming in
from Google, Uber, Lyft, and there's a million others.
>> Dan: Right.
>> How is that changing the game?
Certainly accelerating it.
That's really bringing goods to the table.
>> Right. I think the whole...
>> You have to manage it.
>> Well, and for what it's worth,
I don't actually manage the projects.
And so we do provide a set of services-
>> John: The community?
>> -to them and we help them, we market them.
But one of the unusual aspects of CNCF
is that the projects do actually manage themselves.
A little bit of guidance from the TOC,
but we really are unusual in that sense.
And that's one of the reasons the projects have been...
>> And what's interesting is, to connect the dots, though,
one step further, you're talking about a commercial entity
donating massive intellectual property
in the open for all the goodness of everyone else.
But yet that flywheel is continuing.
They're still using it.
So it is inherently commercial dynamic.
>> Right. And back to that circle,
I think really the underlying concept
is that companies agree that sharing key parts
of their infrastructure has a huge amount
of value to the whole ecosystem, to each other.
And then they're absolutely eager to compete above that.
And so you can look at it with the public clouds
where we have now Amazon, Microsoft, Google,
Alibaba, IBM, Oracle all at the table.
They are absolutely fierce competitors.
But they're saying that this specific
software infrastructure layer
isn't the area that they want to compete.
They want to compete on all the value-added services,
customer service, et cetera.
>> Dan, I wonder if you can speak to how CNCF connects
to some of the broader communities out there.
Things like Kata containers got announced
coming out of the OpenStack group.
You've got a serverless track happening here,
kind of extends some of where Kubernetes is going.
How does CNCF fit into the broader...
>> Sure. And it's definitely the case
that all the innovation out there cannot happen in CNCF.
Most obviously, everything that we do,
almost everything depends on Linux.
And so that's our parent organization, the Linux Foundation.
But we've had a good collaboration
with Jonathan Bryce from OverStack.
They have two booths on the floor here at the show.
And we've spoken to Clear Containers and RunV,
the two predecessors in the past.
But the part that I'm particularly pleased with
for Kata containers is that it is an OCI-compliant runtime,
that's another sister organization,
and is really designed to work well for Kubernetes.
And then they can pitch that and let the market go decide
which container runtimes they find the most valuable.
>> Obviously a lot of traction here
in terms of the sentiment around service meshes
and pluggable lock-in textures.
That's been very cool. But security came up.
So I want to get your thoughts around security,
obviously storage and these older models
around how to deal with storage and networking.
Obviously, always in the action.
>> Yeah.
>> But security is top of mind for everyone.
How is that being addressed?
You know, talk is out there...
>> Sure. I mean our philosophy on this
is that moving to cloud-native
and particularly the continuous integration
and continuous development that goes along with that
is the most important step that you can do
to help secure your infrastructure.
And Equifax is the example everyone always brings up.
But there was a case where they were using known
insecure software and they didn't have
the processes up to place where
instead of doing quarterly updates or monthly updates,
you want to be doing dozens of updates per day.
And a cloud-native infrastructure allows you to do that.
>> What's next for you?
Because you've got great traction
with both community response,
and the community has been absolutely amazing,
the quality of people, level has been great,
but also at the funding sponsors.
You've got a lot of people that are involved.
What's next? What happens next?
What do you envision happening?
What's the plan, and then how do you view that evolving?
>> Well, I hate to fall into the buzzword implosion here,
but if you go back to the crossing the chasm metaphor,
I think we're still very much
just in the early adopter phase.
2018 could very well be the moment
that we jump over to the early majority.
And I do feel like this whole community
now has the velocity to do that
and that we're on track for it.
But as that happens, there's just far, far more people
who need to be educated so they understand the projects
and the options and how to work with them.
And then hopefully they go from just being consumers
of these technologies to contributors
and that we can welcome them into our community
and hopefully get the advantage of their expertise as well.
>> I want to get your thoughts on a comment
that Stu and I were talking about.
Stu, you and I were talking about the notion
of value creation above the stack,
and then how Kubernetes,
although some could say being commoditized,
but it's also creating value because
with that consistency of Kubernetes,
you can now create value.
So we believe, and I want to get your reaction to this,
because we think a whole new ecosystem dynamic
will emerge of a new kind of ecosystem.
And if this new app developer
combined with software engineering,
which is really going on, you're talking about the cloud,
the app developers will just build in value,
that value creation will be rewarded.
That's where monetization will be happening.
>> And if I could build off that...
>> John: Yeah.
>> Dan, I loved one of your opening comments.
You quoted, "exciting times for boring infrastructure,
"maybe too exciting."
So this week we've been teasing out
there's a lot of work to make that infrastructure boring.
You've got everybody on this floor, the CNCF board,
lots of new projects making that.
Where the action is and what this is going to create
is that application monetization
and the speed and agility of being able
to create these cool new
cloud-native applications out there.
So it's interesting dynamic, spans broad
pieces of this, layers of the stack there.
>> Yeah. Well, I will point out
that there was an odd level of unanimity
of just a ton of different leaders
in the community, in keynotes
from Craig McLuckie and Chen Goldberg and others
where they all agree that Kubernetes is not
by any means the ultimate answer or the final answer.
I think everybody now expects to see Kubernetes
as a core aspect of the infrastructure
for software for the next decade or more.
But there's a belief that there's a whole ton of value
that needs to be added above it,
particularly to try and show for
a regular application developer who just has a PHP app
or no-GS microservices or anything else
what's the easiest way to go from having
a piece of software and deploying it effectively.
>> Dan, so it's interesting.
You watch the people on the outside.
They're like, oh, look at Kubernetes.
They're all holding hands and saying Kumbaya.
We know there's some spirited debates that happen-
>> Dan: Definitely.
>> In the code, some projects that are sometimes
competing up there.
Why has the community come together,
and where are some of the areas that we still need
to work on and improve to help customers going forward?
>> And again, I think they have the big advantage
of having watched other communities
that didn't value community and consensus
and the ability to work through their issues.
And so thankfully, we just have a ton
of really capable engineers
who also have some of those social or personal qualities
that they care about working these things out.
And to date, at least, I think most of those disagreements
have been settled pretty amicably
and in a positive direction.
I think there's still huge swathes
of this space that are still up in the air.
Storage is an obvious one where there's a ton
of work going on in a storage working group of CNCF.
Serverless is another where I think everyone agrees
that the application deployment model of AWS Lambda
is really exciting and has things that people
should replicate and should be brought over to Kubernetes.
But how that should happen, what the software is,
et cetera, there's still, in fact,
we have our first serverless track today here at KubeCon
where several different competing approaches
are all talking about what they'd like to do.
>> Awesome stuff. And you also announced some dates
for next year, December 11 and 13 in Seattle.
>> Dan: Yes. >> Okay.
>> Dan: That's a year from now.
>> November 14 and 15 in Shanghai.
>> Now, you and I met in Hangzhou
in the lobby, which was just amazing.
But I certainly am hoping to convince you
to go back to China with us.
This will be our first event...
>> I got a three-year visa.
>> Good, yeah, that's the exactly right one.
But this will be our first event in China,
which I think is just a huge opportunity.
We now have Baidu, Tencent, Huawai,
ZTE, a number of startups.
There's just so much excitement for this space
over there that we're really excited to satisfy.
>> Stu: And Copenhagen in May.
>> And that's the last one. Thank you.
May 2 to 4 in Copenhagen,
and we're really excited for the event,
to bring it to Europe and the rest of the world.
>> Okay. So you've been working like a dog,
you've been working hard.
I've seen you in China. It's serendipitous.
But it's not without being mentioned
that this has been great effort by your team
and the Linux Foundation and Jim and the whole team.
But congratulations. Are you having a pinch me moment?
I know it's too early to do a victory lap.
>> But you've got to be pretty excited.
>> Yeah. It really has been a great thing
for the foundation that we sort of accomplished many
of our 2018 and 2019 goals this year.
But I'm sure we're going to find plenty of stuff
to do next year.
>> And your goal for the next 6 to 12 months,
what's on your top three to-do's, continue the momentum?
Share your API for...
>> Yeah. What's great is that we really
have plenty of members.
We'd always like to add new ones
and serve the ones we have better.
But right now, the focus is really
about providing better services to our projects.
All of them feel overworked.
They would love help on documentation,
on marketing, on messaging about it,
and some of them need help
with testing development and other things.
So that's really what we're buckling down on.
>> Great community are going to test them,
being here on the ground, personally present at creation.
And I was standing there with J.J.
and Lew Tucker, OpenStack three years ago,
talking about Kubernetes. We were kind of ripping.
We couldn't have imagined, then, obviously,
they bolted it on last year with your event.
Now second year here, huge community...
>> But you have 4,100 folks here,
is more than the previous four events combined.
>> Yeah, awesome.
>> So it really is exciting.
>> TheCUBE, always on the ground.
And sometimes the squirrel finds a nut.
We found a cloud-native foundation,
part of the Linux Foundation.
CNCF, Cloud-Native Compute Foundation,
really a new, growing, and relevant community
for cloud and a new way to do software
and reimagine the future from software engineering
to full application development, a new way.
This is theCUBE's coverage, and we are here live in Austin.
More live coverage after this short break.
We'll be right back.
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