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SAAD ALI: Hello, everyone.
We're here at KubeCon Barcelona with Bryan Liles.
Brian is senior staff engineer at VMware
and also the co-chair of KubeCon.
Bryan, can you talk to us a little bit
about what that role is and what it involves?
BRYAN LILES: So the co-chairs, we
plan this whole entire conference sans the vendor
stuff.
So all the sessions, all the keynotes,
we coordinate the people who do the reviews,
we make the final reviews, we create the schedules,
we get everybody in line.
As you know, we sit down with our keynote speakers,
and we help them make better talks.
Everything you see at the conference that
makes you happy, we had a hand in it, most likely.
SAAD ALI: That's awesome.
So how did you get involved with this,
and why did you think that this was something
that you really wanted to do?
BRYAN LILES: CNCF contacted me last year.
I had already done work with Linux Foundation,
helping planning the OS summit for a while.
And I think that they saw that I was good on stage
and I was able to do planning for conferences.
It was actually a good fit for a position
that opened up late last year.
SAAD ALI: In terms of how you've seen KubeCon evolve over time
and what's different at this KubeCon, what do you see?
BRYAN LILES: So one thing we highlight this morning,
there is 7,700 people here.
This is literally the biggest open-source conference
in Europe.
And when we do our next one in the United States,
it will be the biggest open-source conference
in the world.
That comes very far from whenever
we met in San Francisco and then when we did Berlin.
SAAD ALI: How do you make sure that this is
happening in a sustainable way?
BRYAN LILES: It's all about the open source,
not about your company.
You work at Google.
I work at VMware.
But you notice that we're not selling anything.
We're basically talking about the benefits
of the open-source community.
Really, what this conference is about
is showing what everyone has to offer,
offering open-source content to our people,
and making sure that it's just not a sell fest because this
is not a vendor event.
SAAD ALI: So it sounds like the future
is moving beyond Kubernetes and figuring out
what we can do with the building blocks
that Kubernetes has offered.
BRYAN LILES: Yeah.
I think that's actually it.
Kubernetes was never supposed to be end all be all.
It's-- basically, it's compute, network, and storage.
Everything else needs to be provided outside.
And I'll speak for VMware in a little bit
because we've been doing this literally for 20 years now,
basically the software defined data center.
What we're seeing is now, growing
in this cloud-native way, it just opens up so much space.
And then looking at what Google did,
Google starts in the ad space, and then got
really good at compute.
But now you're seeing that we all
need to move in a different direction
because, unfortunately, none of us have cracked this nut yet.
And that's great.
That's amazing.
That means we're making progress and we haven't stagnated yet.
SAAD ALI: So one of the really cool things
I've seen at the conference was the mental health session.
I think it was borne out of the realization
that folks are starting to burn out in the community.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
BRYAN LILES: When we did Seattle back in December,
we always have a retrospective session.
It's really the last session, the last day,
anyone who wants to come.
There's a lot of sentiment in that room where this is hard,
and you want to go to all the talks,
and you want us to meet all the people.
And we're humans, and we can't handle that.
So we always were paying attention to it.
But Cheryl Hung, who works with the CNCF,
she actually went the extra step.
And they coordinated with people, that they can actually
have a booth downstairs in the sponsor showcase
that you could talk to if you get burnt out.
But I also want to encourage anyone--
if you think about this, a conference is just that.
It's a conference.
And there's going to be-- there's
going to be hallway track, there's keynotes,
there's tutorials, and then there's general sessions.
The best thing about a conference like this
is generally almost everything is recorded.
SAAD ALI: So, last question-- what are you looking forward to
at KubeCon?
BRYAN LILES: So this year, what I'm looking forward to is--
there's a lot of software being announced
and people talking about these projects that
go above and beyond.
So what I'm looking for is something that I didn't expect.
And it's kind of weird to say, but we go to these talks.
And you're like, oh someone's going
to talk about service mesh.
Oh, I know you're going to talk about--
I want someone to go further than that,
and maybe take service mesh, or anything else
even further than it is, or even storage further than it is now.
That's what I'm looking for.
I'm looking for the things that will probably
hit main line in the next year.
But I want to hear about it now so I can start following along.
SAAD ALI: Awesome.
Thank you very much, Bryan Liles.
BRYAN LILES: All right.
Thank you, Saad.
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