(upbeat music)
>> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE here,
in Palo Alto, California for a Cube Conversation.
I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE.
This is a KubeCon preview conversation.
We got a great guest here,
in studio, Madhura Maskasky,
Co-Founder and VP of Product,
Head of Product at Platform9.
Madhura, great to see you.
Thank you for coming in and sharing this conversation about,
this cube conversation about KubeCon,
a Kubecon conversation.
>> Thanks for having me.
>> A light nice play on words there,
a little word play,
but the fun thing about theCUBE is,
we were there at the beginning when OpenStack
was kind of on its transition,
Kubernetes was just starting.
I remember talking to Lou Tucker back in,
I think Seattle or some event
and Craig McLuckie was still working at Google at the time.
And Google was debating on putting the paper out
and so much has happened.
Being present at creation,
you guys have been there too with Platform9.
Present at creation
of the Kubernetes wave was not obvious only a few insiders
kind of got the big picture.
We were one of 'em.
We saw this as a big wave. Docker containers
at that time was a unicorn funded company.
Now they've went back to their roots a few years ago.
I think four years ago, they went back
and recapped and now they're all pure open source.
Since then Docker containers and containers have really
powered the Kubernetes wave.
Combined with the amazing work of the CNCF and KubeCon
which we've been covering every year.
You saw the maturation, you saw the wave,
the early days, end user projects being contributed.
Like Envoy's been a huge success.
And then the white spaces filling
in on the map, you got observability,
you've got run time, you got all the things,
still some white spaces in there
but it's really been great to watch this growth.
So I have to ask you, what do you expect this year?
You guys have some cutting edge technology.
You got Arlo announced
and a lot's going on Kubernetes this year.
It's going mainstream.
You're starting to see the traditional enterprises embrace
and some are scaling faster than others,
manage services, plethora of choices.
What do you expect this year at KubeCon
North America in Detroit?
>> Yeah, so I think you summarize kind
of that life cycle or lifeline of Kubernetes pretty well.
I think I remember the times when, just
at the very beginning of Kubernetes, after it was released
we were sitting I think with box,
box dot com and they were describing to us
why they are early adopters of Kubernetes.
And we were just sitting down taking notes
trying to understand this new project and
what value it adds, right?
And then flash forward to today
where there are Dilbert strips written about Kubernetes.
That's how popular it has become.
So, I think as that has happened, I think one
of the things that's also happened is the enterprises
that adopted it relatively early are running it
at a massive scale or looking to run it at massive scale.
And so I think at scale cloud-native
is going to be the most important theme.
At scale governance, at scale manageability
are going to be top of the mind.
And the third factor, I think that's going to be top
of the mind is cost control at scale.
>> Yeah, and one of the things that we've seen is
that the incubated projects a lot more being incubated now
and you got the combination
of end user and company contributed open source.
You guys are contributing RLO >> RLO.
>> and open source. >> Yeah.
>> That's been part of your game plan there.
So you guys are no stranger open source.
How do you see this year's momentum?
Is it more white space being filled?
What's new coming out of the block?
What do you think is going to come out of this year?
What's rising in terms of traction?
What do you see emerging
as more notable that might not have been there last year?
>> Yeah, so I think it's all about
filling that white space,
some level of consolidation, et cetera.
That's usually the trend in the cloud-native space.
And I think it's going to continue to be on that
and it's going to be tooling that lets users
simplify their lives.
Now that Kubernetes is part of your day to day.
And so it is observability, et cetera, have always been top
of the mind, but I think starting this year, et cetera
it's going to be at the next level.
Which is gone other times
of just running your Prometheus at individual cluster level,
just to take that as an example.
Now you need a solution- >> Yep.
>> that operates at this
massive scale across different
distributions and your edge locations.
So, it's taking those same problems
but taking them to that next order of management.
>> I'm looking at my notes here
and I see orchestration and service mesh, which Envoy does.
And you're seeing other solutions come out as well
like Linkerd and whatnot.
Some are more popular than others.
What areas do you see are most needed?
If you could go in there and be program chair for a day
and you've got a day job as VP of product at Platform9.
So you kind of have to have that future view
of the roadmap and looking back at where you've come,
what would you want to prioritize
if you could bring your VP
of product skills to the open source and saying, hey,
can I point out some needs here?
What would you say?
>> Yeah, I think just the more tooling
that lets people make sense and reduce some of the chaos
that this prowling ecosystem of cloud-native creates.
Which is tooling, that is not adding more tooling
that covers white space is great, but introducing abilities
that let you better manage what you have today is probably
absolutely top of the mind.
And I think that's really not covered today
in terms of tools that are around.
>> You know, I've been watching the
top five incubated projects
in CNCF, Argo cracked the top five.
I think they got close to 12,000 GitHub stars.
They have a conference now, ArgoCon here in California.
What is that about? >> Yeah.
>> Why is that so popular?
I mean, I know it's kind of about obviously workflows
and dealing with good pipeline,
but why is that so popular right now?
>> I think it's very interesting
and I think Argo's journey
and it's just climbed up
in terms of its Github stars for example.
And I think it's because as these scale factors that we talk
about on one end number of nodes and clusters growing,
and on the other end number of sites you're managing grows.
I think that CD or continuous deployment of applications
it used to kind of be something
that you want to get to, it's that north star,
but most enterprises wouldn't quite be there.
They would either think that they're not ready
and it's not needed enough to get there.
But now when you're operating at that level of scale
and to still maintain consistency without sky
rocketing your costs, in terms of ops people,
CD almost becomes a necessity.
You need some kind of manageable, predictable way
of deploying apps without having to go out
with new releases that are going out every six months
or so you need to do that
on a daily basis, even hourly basis.
And that's why.
>> Scales the theme again, >> Yep.
>> back to scale. >> Yep.
>> All right, final question.
We'll wrap up this preview for KubeCon in Detroit.
Whereas we start getting the lay of the land and the focus.
If you had to kind of
predict the psychology of the developer
that's going to be attending
in person and they're going to have a hybrid event.
So, they will be not as good as being in person.
Us, it's going to be the first time kind of post pandemic
when I think everyone's going to be together in LA
it was a weird time in the calendar
and Valencia was the kind of the first international one
but this is the first time in North America.
So, we're expecting a big audience.
>> Mhm.
>> If you could predict
or what's your view on the psychology
of the attendee this year?
Obviously pumped to be back.
But what do you think they're going to be
thinking about? what's on their mind?
What are they going to be peaked on?
What's the focus? Where will be the psychology?
Where will be the mindset?
What are people going to be looking for this year?
If you had to make a prediction
on what the attendees are going to be thinking about
what would you say?
>> Yeah. So there's always a curiosity
in terms of what's new,
what new cool tools that are coming out
that's going to help address some of the gaps.
What can I try out?
That's always as I go back to my development roots,
first in mind, but then very quickly it comes down to
what's going to help me do my job
easier, better, faster, at lower cost.
And I think again, I keep going back to that theme
of automation, declarative automation, automation
at scale, governance at scale, these are going to be top
of the mind for both developers and ops teams.
>> We'll be there covering it like a blanket
like we always do from day one,
present at creation at KubeCon
we are going to be covering again
for the consecutive year in a row.
We love the CNCF. We love what they do.
We thank the developers this year,
again continue going mainstream closer and closer
to the front lines as the company is the application.
As we say, here on theCUBE
we'll be there bringing you all the signal.
Thanks for coming in
and sharing your thoughts on KubeCon 2022.
>> Thank you for having me.
>> Okay. I'm John Furrier here
in theCUBE in Palo Alto, California.
Thanks for watching.
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