 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman. I co-host for three days of coverage is John Troyer. We're here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon in San Diego for 12,000 in attendance and happy to welcome back a CUBE alumni and veteran of generations of the stacks that we've seen come together and change over the time. Shang Liang, who is the co-founder and CEO of Rancher Labs, thanks so much, great to see you. Thank you Stu, very glad to be here. All right, so you know, Kubernetes flashed in the pan. Nobody's all that excited about it. I mean, we've seen all these things come and go over the year, Shang. No, but seriously, the excitement is palpable. Every year, it's so many more people, so many more projects, so much more going on. You've got to help set us the stage for you as to what you see and the importance today of kind of CloudNative in general and this ecosystem specifically. Yeah, you're so right, Stu. Community as a whole and Kubernetes has really come a long way. In the early days, Kubernetes was a, somewhat of a technical community, lot of Linux people, but not a whole lot of end users, not a whole lot of enterprise customers. I walking today and just the kind of people I've met, I probably talked to 50 people already, we're just really at the beginning of the show and there's a very, very large number of enterprise customers and this does feel like Kubernetes is across the chasm and headed into the mainstream enterprise market. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I talked to, you know, plenty of the people here, probably if you brought up things like OpenStack and CloudStack, they wouldn't even know what we were talking about. You know, the wave of containerization really seemed to spread far and wide. Rancher, you've done some surveys. Give us some of the insights. What are you seeing? You talk to plenty of customers. Give us where we are with the majority. Definitely, enterprise Kubernetes adoption is ready for prime time. So what we're really seeing is some of the early challenges a few years ago. A lot of people were having problems with just installing Kubernetes. They were literally just making sure to get people educated about container as a concept. Those have been overcome. Now we're really facing the next generation of growth and people solve, these days solve problems like how do I get my new applications onboarded into Kubernetes? How do I really integrate Kubernetes into my multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategy? And as enterprises need to perform computing in places beyond just the data centers and the cloud, we're also seeing tremendous amount of interest in running Kubernetes on the edge. So those are some of the major findings of our survey. That's great. So Shing, I'd love for you to kind of elaborate or elaborate for us where Rancher fits into this, right? Rancher, you've been around. You have a mature stack of technology and also some new announcements today. So I kind of love for you to kind of tell us how you fit into that landscape you just described. Absolutely. This is a very exciting and very, very fast-changing industry. So one of the things that Rancher is able to play very well is we're really able to work with the community, take the latest and greatest open-source technology and actually develop open-source products on top of it and make that technology useful and consumable for enterprise at large. So the way we see it, to make Kubernetes work, we really need to solve problem at three levels. At the lowest level, the industry need a lot of compliant and compatible and certified Kubernetes distros and services. So that's table stakes now. Rancher is a leader in providing a CNCF certified Kubernetes distro. We actually provide two of them. One of them is called RKE. It's Rancher Kubernetes Engine. Something we've been doing it for years. It's really one of the easiest to use and most widely deployed Kubernetes distributions. But we don't force our customers to only use our Kubernetes distribution. Rancher customers can use whatever CNCF certified Kubernetes distribution or Kubernetes services they want. So a lot of our customers use RKE, Rancher Kubernetes Engine, but they also use, when they go to the cloud, they use cloud hosted Kubernetes services like GKE and EKS. There are really a lot of advantages in using those because cloud providers will help you run these Kubernetes clusters for free. And in many cases, they even throw in the infrastructure it takes to run the Kubernetes masters and HCD databases for free. If you're in the cloud, there's really no reason not to be using these Kubernetes services. Now there's one area that Rancher ended up innovating at the Kubernetes distros, despite having these data center focused and cloud focused Kubernetes distros and services. And that is one of our big, one of the two big announcements today. And that's called K3S. K3S is a great open source project. It's probably one of the most exciting open source projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem today. And what we did with K3S is we took Kubernetes that's been proven in data center and cloud and we brought it everywhere. So with K3S, you can run Kubernetes on a Raspberry Pi. You can run Kubernetes in a surveillance camera. You can run Kubernetes in an ATM machine. You know, we have customers trying to run now Kubernetes in the factory floor. So it really helps us realize our vision of Kubernetes as a new Linux and you run it everywhere. Well, that's great because you talk about that simplicity that we need. And if you start talking about edge deployments, I don't have the people, I don't have the skill set and a lot of times I don't have the gear to run that. So, you know, help connect the dots as to, you know, what led Rancher to do the K3S piece of it and, you know, what did we take out or what's the differences between the K8S and the K3S? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, even the name K3S is actually some other word play on K8S, you know, we kind of cut half of eight away and then you're left with three. So it really happened with some of our early traction. We saw in some customer, I remember it wasn't, in retrospect, it wasn't really that long ago. It was like middle of last year. We saw a blog coming out of Chick-fil-A and a group of, you know, technical enthusiasts were experimenting with actually running Kubernetes in very, in like Intel Nook servers and they had, you know, they were talking about potentially running three of those servers in every one of their stores and at the time they were using RKE and Rancher Kubernetes Engine to do that and they run into a lot of issues. I mean, to be honest, if you think about running Kubernetes in the cloud in the data center, these servers have a lot of resources and you also have a dedicated operations team. You have an SREs to manage them, right? But when you really bring it out into branch offices and edge computing locations, now all of a sudden, number one, these, the software now has to take a lot less resource but also you don't really have SREs monitoring them every day anymore and since the Kubernetes distro really has to be zero touch and it has to run just like a, you know, a embedded window or Linux server and that's what K3S was able to accomplish. We were able to really take away a lot of the baggage that kind of came with having all the drivers that were necessary to run Kubernetes in the cloud and we were also able to dramatically simplify what it takes to actually start Kubernetes and operate it. Yeah, so unsolicited, I was doing an event right before this one and I asked some people what they were looking forward to here at KubeCon and independently, two different people said, I'm the one thing I'm most excited about is K3S and I think it's because it's the right slice of through Kubernetes that I can run it in my lab, I can run it on my laptop, I can run it on a stack of Raspberry Pis or Nooks but I could also run it in production if I, you know, I can scale it up and in fact they both got a twinkle in their eye and said well what if this is the future of Kubernetes like you could take this and you could run it on, you know, they were very excited about it. Absolutely, I mean, you know, I really think, you know, as a company, we survive and thrive by delivering the kind of innovation that pushes the market forward, right? I mean, we, otherwise people are not going to look at Rancher and say you guys are the originators of Kubernetes technology. So we're very happy to be able to come up with technologies like K3S that effectively greatly broaden the addressable market for everyone. Imagine you were a security vendor and before like all you really got to do is solving security problems. Or if you were a monitoring vendor, you were able to solve monitoring problems for data center and in the cloud and now with K3S you end up getting to solve the same problems on the edge and in branch offices. So that's why so many people are so excited about it. All right, so Shang, you said K3S was one of the announcements this week. What's the rest of the news? Yeah, so K3S, RKE and all the GKE, AKS, EKS, they're really the fundamental layer of Kubernetes everywhere. Then on top of that, one of the biggest piece of innovation that Rancher Labs created is this idea of multi cluster management. A few years ago it was pretty much of a revolutionary concept. Now it's widely understood. Of course an organization is not going to have just one cluster, they're going to have many clusters. So Rancher is the industry leader for doing multi cluster management and these clusters could span clouds, could span data centers, could now all the way out to branch offices and the edge. So we're exhibiting Rancher on the show floor. Everyone, most people I've met here, they know Rancher because of that flagship product. Now our second announcement though is yet another level above Rancher. So what we've seen is in order to really Kubernetes to achieve the next level of adoption in the enterprise, we're seeing some of the development teams and especially the less skilled DevOps teams, they're kind of struggling with the learning curve of Kubernetes. And also some of the associate technologies around service mesh, around Knative, around CICD. So we created a project called REO as in Rio de Janeiro, the city. And the nice thing about REO is it packaged together all these cloud native technologies and then we created a very easy to use, very simple to understand user experience for developers and DevOps teams. So they no longer have to start with the training course on Kubernetes, on Istio, on Knative, on Tecton just to get productive and you can pretty much get productive on day one. So that REO project has hit a very important milestone today. We shipped a beta release for it and we're exhibiting it at the booth as well. Well, that's great. You know, you think that it's a beta release of REO, pulling together a lot of these projects. Can you talk about some folks that have the early adopters that have been using them or some folks that have been working with the project? Yeah, absolutely. So I'll talk about some of the early adoption we're seeing for both K3S and REO. What we see the, first of all the, just the market reception of K3S as you said has been tremendous. Couple of people even mentioned to you guys today in your earlier interviews. And it is primarily coming from customers who want to run Kubernetes in places you probably haven't quite anticipated before. So I kind of give you two examples. One is actually an appliance manufacturer. So if you think, you know, they used to ship appliances and you can imagine these appliances come with Linux and then they would image their appliance with a AWS image or with their applications. But what's happening is these applications are becoming so sophisticated. They're now talking about running the entire data and the Linux stack and the AI software. So it actually takes Kubernetes not necessarily because it's one server in the situation of appliance. Kubernetes is not really managing cluster, but it's managing all these application components and microservices. So they ended up bundling K3S into their appliance. This is one example. Another example is actually an ISV. That's a very interesting use case as well. So they ship a microservice-based application software stack and again, their software involves a lot of different complicated components and they decided to re-platform their software on Kubernetes. We've all heard a lot of that, but in their case, they have to also ship, they don't just run the software themselves. They have to ship their software to their end users and most of the end users are not familiar with Kubernetes yet, right? And they don't really want to say to install a software you go provision a Kubernetes cluster and then you operate it from now on. So what they did is they took K3S and bundled it into their application as if it were an application server, like almost like a modern day web logic and web sphere. Then they shipped the whole thing to their customer. So I thought both of these use cases are really interesting. It really elevates the reach of Kubernetes from just being a almost like a cloud platform in the old days to not being really an application server. And then I'll also quickly talk about real. A lot of the interest inside real is around really DevOps teams who've had, I mean, we did a survey early on and we found out that a lot of our customers, they deploy Kubernetes in service, but they end up building a custom experience on top of their Kubernetes deployment just so that most of their internal users wouldn't have to take a course on Kubernetes to start using it. So they can just tell that this thing that this is where my source code is and then everything from that point on will be automated. So now with real, they wouldn't have to do that anymore. Effectively, real is the direct source to UIL type of one step process and they're able to adopt real for that purpose. Yeah, so Shang, I want to go back to when we started this conversation. We said, the ecosystem's growing. Not only so many vendors here, 129 end users are members of the CNCF, but the theme we've been talking about is to really, it's ready for production and people are all embracing it, but to get the vast majority of people, simplicity really needs to come front and center. I think K3S really punctuates that. What else do we need to do as an ecosystem? Rancher's looking to take a leadership position and help drive this, but what else do you want to see from your peers, the community overall to help drive this to the promise that it could deliver? We really see the adoption of Kubernetes is probably going to wing at three. I mean, we see like most organizations go through this three-step journey. The first step is you got to install and operate Kubernetes, day one, day two. And I think we've got it down. With K3S, it becomes so easy. With GKE, it becomes one API call or one simple UI interaction. I really think the, and CNCF has really stepped up and created a great, a compliance certification program. So we're not seeing the kind of fragmentation that we saw with some of the other technologies. So this is fantastic. Then the second step we see is which a lot of our customers are going through now is now you have all these Kubernetes clusters coming from different clouds, different infrastructure, potentially on the edge. You have a management problem. Now you're all of a sudden, because we made Kubernetes clusters so easy to obtain, you can potentially have a sprawl. You might, if you are not careful, you might leave them misconfigured. That could expose a security issue. So really it takes, you know, rancher, it takes our ecosystem partners like Twistlock, like Aqua, it takes, you know, all CICD partners like CloudBees, GitLab, just everyone really needs to come together and solve that management problem. So not only you build this Kubernetes infrastructure, but then you're actually going to get a lot of users and they can use the cluster securely and reliably. Then I think the third step, which I think a lot of work still remain, is we really want to focus on growing the footprint of workload, of enterprise workload in the enterprise. So there, the work is honestly really just getting started. You know, anywhere from, if you walk into any enterprise, you know, what percentage of their total workload is running on Kubernetes today? I mean, outside of Google and Uber, that percentage is probably very small, right? They're probably in the minority, maybe even in single digit percentage. So we really need to do a lot of work. You know, we need to, Rancher created this project called Longhorn, and we also work with a lot of our ecosystem partners in persistent storage area, like Portworx, StorageOS, OpenEBS. A lot of us really need to come together, solve this problem of running persistent workload. I mean, there was also a lot of talk about that at the keynote this morning. I was very encouraged to hear that. That could easily double, triple the amount of workload that could be onboarded into Kubernetes. And even experiences like Rio, you know, make it further simpler, more accessible. That is really in the DNA of Rancher. Rancher wouldn't be surviving and thriving without our insight into how to make our technology consumable and widely adopted. So a lot of work we're doing is really to adopt, to drive the adoption of Kubernetes in the enterprise beyond, you know, the current state and into something I really don't see in the future, Kubernetes wouldn't be as actually widely used as say AWS or vSphere. That would be my bar for success. Hopefully in a few years we can be talking about that. That is a high bar shang. We look forward to more conversation with you going forward. Congratulations on the announcements. Great buzz on K3S. And yeah, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you very much. Thanks for your... For John Troyer, I'm Stu Minin. Back with lots more coverage here from KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019 in San Diego. You're watching the Kube.