 Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's the Cube, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018, brought to you by the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to the live coverage of the Cube here in Copenhagen, Denmark for KubeCon, KubeCon, KubernetesCon 2018, part of the CNCF, CloudNative Compute Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, the founder of Spark Labs, breaking down day two, wrapping up our coverage of KubeCon and all the success that we've seen with Kubernetes. I thought it'd be really appropriate to bring on the co-founder of KubeCon originally, Joseph Jacks, known as JJ in the industry, good friend of the Cube, and part of the early formation of what is now CloudNative. We were all riffing on that at the time. Welcome back to the Cube, great to see you. Thank you for having me, John. So, for the story, for the folks out there, CloudNative was really seen by the DevOps community and infrastructure code was no secret to the insiders in the timeframes from 2010 through 2015, 16 timeframe, but really it was an open-stack summit. A lot of people were kind of like, hey, Google's got Kubernetes, they're going to open it up and this could be a real game changer container. Docker was flying off the shelves, so we saw it and you were there and we were talking. So there was a group of us, you were one of them, and you founded KubeCon and bolted it into the, at that time, the satellite Linux Foundation events and then you passed it off as a good community citizen to the CNCF. So I wanted to just make sure that people knew that. What a great success, what's your impression? I mean, are you blown away, you know? I am definitely blown away. I mean, I think the size and scale of the European audience is remarkable. We had something like slightly less than half this in Austin last year. So to see more than that come here in Europe, I think shows like the global kind of growth curve as well as like, I think Dan and someone else who was asking sort of raise your hand if you've been to KubeCon Austin and very few actually. So there's a lot of new people showing up in Europe. I think it just shows the demand is huge. And Dan's been traveling around, I've seen him in China at some events I've been to. He's really working hard, so props to him. We gave him some great props earlier, but he also told us Shanghai's coming online. So you got Shanghai, you got Barcelona next year for the European show and of course Seattle. This is a community celebrating right now because there's a lot of high fives going on right now because there's a lot of cool. We got some sort of core standard, just doctor standard. Now let's go to work. Right. What are you working on now? Are you working on getting a stealth startup? Share a little bit. I know you don't want to give the details out, but where's it kind of above the stack? Where are you going to be playing? Sure. So we're not talking too much in terms of specifics and we're pretty stealthy, but I can tell you what I'm personally very excited about and in terms of where Kubernetes is going and where this kind of ecosystem is starting to mature for practitioners, for enterprises. So one of the things that I think Kubernetes is starting to bring to bear is this idea of commoditizing distributed systems for everyday developers, for everyday enterprises. And I think that that is sort of the first time in sort of maybe the history of software development, software engineering and building applications were standardizing on a set of primitives, a set of like building blocks for distributed system style programming. We had in previous eras, things like Erlang and fault tolerant programming and frameworks, but those were sort of like pocketed into different programming communities and different types of stacks. I think Kubernetes is the one sort of horizontal technology that the industry is adopting and it's giving us these amazing properties. So I think some of the things that we're focusing on are excited about involve sort of the programming layer on top of Kubernetes and simplifying the experience of kind of bringing all stateful and enterprise workloads and different types of application paradigms natively into Kubernetes without requiring a developer to really understand and learn the Kubernetes primitives themselves. That's next level infrastructure's code. Yeah, so as Kubernetes becomes more successful as Kubernetes succeeds at a larger and larger scale, people simply shouldn't have to know or understand the internals. There's a lot of people, I think Kelsey and a few people started to talk about Kubernetes as the Linux kernel of distributed computing or distributed systems. And I think that's a really great way of looking at it. Do programmers make file system calls directly when they're building their applications? Do they script directly against the kernel for maybe some very high performance things, but generally speaking, when you're writing a service or you're writing a microservice or some business logic, you're writing at a higher level of abstraction in a language that's doing some IO and maybe some reading and writing files, but you're using higher level abstractions. So I think by the same token, the focus today with Kubernetes is people are learning this API. I think over time, people are going to be programming against that API at a higher level. And what are you doing here at the show? Obviously, you're a stealth service, you're doing some market intelligence. Conversations you've been in, can you share your opinion of what's going on here? Your thoughts on the content program, the architecture, the decisions they've made? I think we've just, I mean, so lots of questions in there. What am I doing here? I just get so energized and I'm so, I just get reinvigorated kind of being here and talking to people and it's just super cool to see a lot of old faces, people who've been here for a while and one of the things that excites me and this is just like proof that the event's gotten so huge. I walk around and I see a lot of familiar faces, but like more than 80, 90% of people have never seen before and I'm like, wow, this is like really gotten super huge mainstream. Talking with some customers, getting a good sense of kind of what's going on. I think we've seen two really huge kind of trends come out of the event. One is this idea of multi cloud sort of as a focus area and you've talked with Basam at UpBound and the sort of multi cloud control plane kind of need and demand out there in the community and the user base. I think what Basam is doing is extremely exciting. The other, so multi cloud is a really big paradigm that most companies are sort of prioritizing. Kubernetes is available now on all the cloud providers but how do we actually adopt it in a way that is agnostic to any cloud provider service? That's one really big trend. The second big thing that I think we're starting to see just kind of across a lot of talks is taking the Kubernetes API and extending it and wrapping it around stateful applications and stateful workloads and being able to sort of program that API. And so we saw the announcement from Red Hat on the operator framework. We've seen projects like KubeBuilder and other things that are really about sort of building native custom Kubernetes APIs for your applications. So extensibility using the Kubernetes API as a building block and then multi cloud. I think those are really two huge trends happening here. What is your view on, I'm going to actually put you on a test here. So Red Hat made a bet on Kubernetes years ago when it was not obvious till a lot of the other big whales. You know, inside of it. From the very beginning really. Yeah, from the very beginning and that paid off huge for Red Hat as an example. So the question is what bets should people be making? If you had to lay down some thought leadership on this here because you obviously are in the middle of it and been part of the beginning. There's some bets to be made. What are the bets that the IBMs and the HPs and the Cisco's and the big players have to make and what are the bets that the startups have to make? Well yeah, there's two angles to that. I mean, I think the investment startups are making our different set of investments and motivated differently than the multinational huge technology companies that have billions of dollars. I think in the startup category, startups should just really embrace Kubernetes for speeding the way they build reliable and scalable applications. I think really from the very beginning, Kubernetes is becoming kind of compelling and reasonable even at a very small scale like for two or three node environment. It's becoming very easy to run and install and manage. Of course it gives you a lot of really great properties in terms of actually running, building your systems, adopting microservices and scaling out your application. And that's sort of like a direct end user use case startups, kind of building their business, building their stack on Kubernetes. We see companies building products on top of Kubernetes. You see a lot of them here on the expo floor. That's a different type of vendor startup ecosystem. I think there's lots of opportunities there. For the big multinationals, I think one really interesting thing that hasn't really quite been done yet is sort of treating Kubernetes as a first class citizen as opposed to a way to commercialize and enter a new market. I think one of the default ways large technology companies tend to look at something hyper growth like Kubernetes and TensorFlow and other projects is wrapping around it and commercializing in some way. And I think a deeper, more strategic path for large companies could be to really embed Kubernetes in the core kind of crown jewel IP assets that they have. So I'll give you an example like for, let's just take SAP, I'll just pick on SAP randomly for no reason. This is one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world. I would encourage the co-CEO's of SAP, for example. There's only one CEO now. Is there one CEO now? There's not made left. It's now done. Okay, gotcha. I haven't been keeping up on the SAP policies. But let's just say a CEO boardroom level discussion of replatforming the entire enterprise application stack on something like Kubernetes could deliver a ton of really core meaningful benefits to their business. And I don't think deep, super strategic investments like that level are being made quite yet. I think at a certain point in time in the future that they'll probably start to be made that way. But that's how I would look at smart investments of the bigger scale. We're not seeing scale yet with Kubernetes, just with the toes in the water. I think we're starting to see scale, John. I think we are. What's the scale number in the process? I'll give you the best example which came up today and actually really surprised me, I think was super compelling example. The largest retailer in China, so essentially the Amazon of China, JD.com is running in production for years now at 20,000 compute nodes with Kubernetes. And their largest cluster is a 5,000 node cluster. And so this is pushing the boundary of the sort of production readiness of Kubernetes. I think that might be the biggest one I've heard. Yeah, that's certainly, I mean, for a disclosed user, that's pretty huge. We're starting to see people actually talk publicly about this, which is remarkable. And there are huge deployments out there. We saw Tyler Jewel come on from WSO2. He's got a new thing called ballerina, new programming language. Have you seen that? I have, I have. What's your thoughts on that? You know, I think that, so, I won't make any particular specific comments on ballerina. I'm not extremely informed on it. I did play with it a little bit. I don't want to give any of my opinions, but what I'd say is, and I think Tyler actually mentioned this, one of the things that I believe is going to be a big deal in the coming years is, so trying to think of Kubernetes as an implementation detail, as the kernel. Do you interact directly with that? Do you learn that interface directly? Are you sort of optimizing your application to be sort of natively aware of those abstractions? I think the answer to all those questions is no. And Kubernetes is sort of delegated as a compiler target. And so, frankly, like directionally speaking, I think what ballerina's sort of design is aspiring towards is the right one. Compile time abstraction for building distributed systems is probably the next logical progression. I'd like to think of, and I think Brendan Burns has started to talk about this over the last year or two, everyone's writing assembly code because we're swimming in YAML and configuration-based designs and systems. You know, sort of pseudo declarative, but more imperative in static configurations. When in reality, you know, we shouldn't be writing these assembly artifacts. We should be delegating all of this complexity to a compiler in the same way that, you know, we went from assembly to C to higher level languages. So I think over time that starts to make a lot of sense and we're going to see a lot of innovation here in Publix. What's your take on the community formation? Obviously, just growing. Any observations and any insight for the folks watching? What's happening in the community? Patterns, trends you'd see, like, don't like? I think we could do a better job of reducing politics amongst the really sort of senior community leaders, particularly who have incentives, you know, behind their sort of, you know, agendas and sort of opinions since they work for various, you know, large and small companies. Yeah, who will have a portion this race? Sure, and there's, you know, whether they're perverse incentives or not. I think, net, net, the project has such a high quality, genuine, like, humble, focused group of people leading it that there isn't much pollution and negativity there, but I think there could be a higher standard in some cases. Since the project is so huge and there are so many very fast moving areas of evolution, there tends to be sort of a fast curve toward many cooks being in the kitchen when, you know, when new things materialize, and I think that could be better handled, but positive side, I think, like, the project is becoming incredibly diverse. I just get super excited to see a Parna from Google, you know, leading the project at Google, both on the hosted SaaS offering and the Kubernetes project. People like Liz and others, and I mean, I just think it's an awesome, welcoming, super diverse community and, you know, people should really highlight that more because I think it's a unique asset of the project. Well, you're involved in some deep history. I think we were going to be looking at this as a moment where, you know, there was once a KubeCon, KubeCon that was not part of the CNCF. Yeah, that's true. And you know, you did the right thing, did a good thing, you could have kept it yourself and made some good cash. It's definitely gotten really big. And way beyond, way beyond me now at this point. Yeah, those guys did a good job with CNCF. They're doing a phenomenal, I think vast majority of the credit at this scale goes to Chris Anasic and Dan and Dan Kahn and the events team at the Linux Foundation, CNCF and obviously Kelsey and Liz and Michelle New Raleigh and many others, Blood Sweat and Tears. It's no small feat pulling off an event like this. You know, corralling the CFP process, coordinating speakers, setting the themes. It's a really huge job. And now they've got to deal with all the community licenses, Lauren, your thoughts. Well, they're consistent across Apache V2 I believe is what Dan said. So all the projects under the CNCF are consistently licensed. So I think that's great. I think they actually have it together there. You know, I do share your concerns about the politics that are going on a little bit back and forth, the high level. I tend to look back at history a little bit. And for those of us that remember J Boss and the J Boss fork are, you know, we're a little bit nervous, right? So I think that, you know, it's important to take a look at that. And make sure that that doesn't happen. Also, you know, OpenStack and the stuff we've talked about before, which are distros coming out are too many distros going to be hitting the street. And how do we keep that more narrow focus so that this can go across providers? I started this, I like to list rank and iterate things. I started with this sheet of all the vendors, you know, all the Kubernetes vendors and then Linux Foundation or CNCF took it over and they've got a phenomenal sort of conformance testing and sort of sort of compliance versioning sheet, which lists all the vendors and certification status and updates and so on. And I think there's 50 or 60 companies. On one hand I think that's great because it's more innovation, lots of service providers and offerings, but there is a concern that there might be some fragmentation and, but again, this is a really big area of focus and I think it's being addressed. Yeah, I think the right ones will end up winning. Yeah, for sure. And that's what's going to be key. Healthy competition. Yes. Final question, let's go around the horn. We'll start with you, JJ. Wrapping up, KubeCon 2018, your thoughts, summary, what's happened here? What will we talk about next year about what happened this week in Denmark? I think this week in Denmark has been a huge turning point for the growth in Europe and the sort of proof that Kubernetes is on this like unstoppable inflection growth curve. We usually see a smaller audience here in Europe relative to the domestic event before it and we're just seeing the numbers get bigger and bigger. I think looking back we're also going to see just the quality of end users and the end user community and more production success stories starting to become front and center, which I think is really awesome. There's lots of vendors here, but I do believe we have a huge representation of end users and companies actually sharing what they're doing pragmatically and really changing their businesses from financial times to CERN and physics projects and JD and other huge companies. I think that's just really awesome. That's a unique thing of the Kubernetes project. There's some hugely transformative companies doing awesome things out there. Lauren, your thoughts, summary of the week. I think it's been awesome. There is so much innovation happening here and I don't want to overuse that word because I think it's kind of BS at some point, but really these companies are doing new things and they're taking this to new levels. I think that hearing about the excitement of the folks that are coming here to actually learn about Kubernetes is phenomenal and they're going to bring that back into their companies and you're going to see a lot more actually coming to Europe next year. I also, true multi-cloud would be phenomenal. I would love that if you could actually glue those platforms together per se. That's really what I'm looking for, but also security. I think security, there needs to be a security seg. We talked to customers earlier. That's something they want to see. I think that needs to be something that's brought to the table. That's awesome and my view is very simple. I think they've done a good job in CNCF and Linux Foundation, the team, building the ecosystem, keeping the governance and the technical and the content piece separate. I think they did a good job of showing the future state that we'd like to get to which is true multi-cloud workload portability, those things still out of reach in my opinion, but they did a great job of keeping the tight core and to me when I hear words like de facto standard, I think of major inflection points where industries have moved big time. You think of internet working, you think of the web, you think of these moments where that small little tweak which created massive new brands and created a disruptor enabler that just created change the game. We saw Cisco come out of that movement of IP with routers, you're seeing 3Com come out of that world. I think that this change, this new little nuance called Kubernetes is going to be absolutely a de facto standard. I think it's definitely an inflection point and you're going to see startups come up with new ideas really fast in a new way and a new modern global architecture, new startups and I think people are going to be blown away. I think you're going to see fast-rising growth companies. I think it's going to be an investment opportunity whether it's token economics or a venture-backed or private equity play, you're going to see people come out of the woodwork, real smart entrepreneurs. I think this is what people have been waiting for in the industry. I'm just super excited and so thanks for coming on. Thank you for everything you do for the community. I think you truly extract the signal from the noise. I'm really excited to see you keep coming to the show. So it's really awesome. Appreciate your support and it's again, with co-developing content in the open. Lauren, great to host with you this week. Thank you, it's been awesome. And you got a great new venture, high five there, high five to the founder of KubeCon. This is theCUBE. Not to be confused with KubeCon when we're theCUBE, CUBE, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. A wrap of day two global coverage here exclusively for KubeCon 2018 CNCF and the Linux Foundation. Thanks for watching.