 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2020 in Europe. Of course, the event this year was supposed to be in the Netherlands. I know I was very much looking forward to going to Amsterdam. This year, of course, is going to be virtual. I'm really excited the Kube's coverage. We've got some great members of the CNCF. We've got a bunch of end users. We've got some good thought leaders. And I'm also bringing a little bit of the Netherlands to help me bring in and start this keynote analysis. Happy to welcome back to the program. My co-host for the show, Upe Piscar, who is an industry analyst with TLA. Thank you, Upe, so much for joining us. And we wish we could be with you in person and check out your beautiful country. Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Stu. And I'm still a little disappointed we cannot eat the Chinay Sarai's Tafel together this year. Yeah, can we just have a segment to explain to people the wonder that is the fusion of Indonesian food and the display that you get only in the Netherlands, Raj Tafel. I seriously had checked all over the U.S. and Canada when I was younger to find an equivalent, but one of my favorite culinary delights in the world. But we'll have to put a pin in that. You've had some warm weather in the Netherlands recently and so many of the Europeans take quite a lot of time off in July and August, but we're going to talk about some hardcore tech. KubeCon, a show we love doing. The European show brings good diversity of experiences and customers from across the globe. So let's start. The keynote, Priyanka Sharma, the new general manager of the CNCF. Of course, they're just some really smart people that come out and talk about a lot of things. And since it's a foundation show, there's some news in there, but it's more about how they are helping corral all of these projects. Of course, the theme we've talked about for a while is KubeCon was the big discussion for many years about Kubernetes. Still important, and we'll talk about that, but so many different projects and everything from the sandbox, their incubation through when they become fully generally available. So I guess I'll let you start and step back and say, when you look at this broad ecosystem, you work with vendors, you've been from the customer side, what's top of mind for you? What's catching your attention? So I guess from a cloud native perspective, looking at the CNCF, I think you hit the nil on the head. This is not about any individual technology, CNCF isn't about just Kubernetes or just Prometheus or just service mesh. I think that at value of the CNCF and the way I look at it at least, looking back at my customer perspective, I would have loved to have a organization kind of curate the technology world around me for me to help me out with the decisions on a technology perspective that I needed to make to kind of move forward with my IT stack and with the requirements my customer had or my organization had to kind of move that into the next phase. And that's where I see the CNCF come in and do their job really well to help organizations both on the vendor side as well as on the customer side kind of take that next step, kind of see around the corner what's new, what's coming and also make sure that between different maybe even competing standards, the right ones kind of surface up and become the de facto standard for organizations to use. Yeah, a lot of good thoughts there, you but I wanna walk through that stack a little bit but before we do a big statement that Priyanka made, I thought it was a nice umbrella for her keynote, it's a foundation of doers powering end user driven open source. So as I mentioned, you worked at a service provider, you've done strategies for some other large organizations. What's your thought on the role of how the end users engage with and contribute to open source? One of the great findings I saw a couple of years ago as you said it went from open source being something that people did on a weekend to the sides to many end users and of course lots of vendors have full time people that their jobs are to contribute and participate in the open source communities. Yeah, I guess that kind of signals a maturity in the market to me where organizations are investing in open source because they know they're gonna get something out of it. So back in the day, it was not necessarily certain that if you put a lot of effort into an open source project for your own gain, for your own purposes, that that would work out. And now with the backing of the CNCF as well as so many member organizations and end user organizations, I think participating in open source becomes easier because there's more of a guarantee that what you put in will kind of circulate and come out and have value for you in a different way. Because if you're working on a service mesh, a model organization might be working on Prometheus or Grinities or another project. And so organizations are now kind of helping each other with the CNCF as a gatekeeper to move all of those technology stacks forward instead of everyone kind of doing it for themselves, maybe even being forced to reinvent the wheel for some of those technology components. So let's walk through the stack a little bit and the layers that are out there. So let's start with Kubernetes. The discussion has been Kubernetes that won the container orchestration battles, but whose Kubernetes am I gonna use? For a while it was would it be distributions? We've seen every platform basically has, at least one Kubernetes option built into it. So it doesn't mean you're necessarily using this. Before AWS had their own flavor of Kubernetes, there was at least 15 different ways that you could run Kubernetes on top of it. But now they have ECS, they have EKS, even things like Fargate now work with EKS. So interesting innovation and adoption there. But VMware baked Kubernetes into vSphere 7. Red Hat of course with OpenShift has thousands of customers and has great momentum. We saw SUSE by Rancher to help them move along and make sure that they get embedded there. One of the startups that you've worked with, SpectroCloud helps play into the mix there. So there is no shortage of options. And then from a management standpoint, companies like Microsoft, Google, VMware, Red Hat, how do I manage across clusters because it's not going to just be one Kubernetes that you're going to use. We're expecting that you're gonna have multiple options out there. So it sure doesn't sound boring to me yet or reach full maturity you. What's your take? What advice do you give to people out there when they say, hey, okay, I'm gonna use Kubernetes, I'm using, I've got hybrid cloud or I probably have a couple things. How should they be approaching that and thinking about how they engage with Kubernetes? So that's a difficult one because it can go so many different ways just because like you say, the market is maturing, which means we're kind of back at where we kind of left off virtualization a couple of years ago where we had managers of managers, managing across different data centers, doing the multi-cloud thing before it was a cloud thing. We have automation during day two operations. I saw one of the announcements for this week will be a vendor coming out with day two operations automation to kind of help simplify that stack of Kubernetes in production. And so the best advice I think I have is don't try to do it all yourself, right? So Kubernetes is still maturing, it is still fairly open in a sense that you can change everything which makes it fairly complex to use and configure. So don't try and do that part yourself necessarily either use a managed service which there are a bunch of spectro crowd for example, as well as platform nine even the bigger players are now having those platforms because Indian Kubernetes is kind of the foundation of what you're gonna do on top of it. Kubernetes itself doesn't have business value in that sense. So spending a lot of time especially at the beginning of a project figuring that part out, I don't think makes sense especially if the risk and the impact of making mistakes is fairly large like make a mistake in a monitoring product and you'll be able to fix that problem more easily but make a mistake in a Kubernetes platform and that's much more difficult is especially because I see organizations kind of build one cluster to rule them all instead of leveraging what the cloud offers which is just spin up another cluster even spin it up somewhere else because we can now do the multi-cloud thing we can now manage applications across Kubernetes clusters we can manage many different clusters from a single pane of glass. So there's really no way or no reason anymore to kind of see that Kubernetes thing as something really difficult that you have to do yourself hence just do it once. Instead my recommendation would be to look at your processes and figure out how can I figure out how to have a Kubernetes cluster for everything I do maybe that's per team maybe that's per application or per environment per cloud and then kind of work from that because again Kubernetes is not the holy grill it's not the end state it is a means to an end to get where we're going with applications with developing new functionality for customers. Well I think you hit on a really important point if you look out in the social discussion sometimes Kubernetes and multi-cloud get attacked because when I talk to customers they shouldn't have a Kubernetes strategy they have their business strategy and there are certain things that they're trying to how do I make sure everything is secure and I'm looking at DevSecOps I need to really have an edge computing strategy because that's going to help my business objectives and when I look at some of the tools that are going to help and get me there well Kubernetes, service meshes some of the other tools in the CNCF are going to help me get there and as you said I've got managed services cloud providers, integrators are going to help me build those solutions without me having to spend years to understand how to do that. So yeah I'd love to hear any interesting projects you're hearing about edge computing, security space has gone from super important to even more important if that's possible in 2020, what are you hearing? Yeah so the most interesting part for me is definitely the DevSecOps movement where we're basically not even allowed to call it DevOps anymore security has finally gained a foothold and they're finally able to kind of shift lift the security practices into the realm of developers simplifying it in a way and automating it in a way that it's no longer a trivial task to integrate security and there's a lot of companies supporting that even from a Kubernetes perspective integrating with Kubernetes or integrating with networking products on top of Kubernetes and I think we finally have reached a moment in time where security is no longer something that we really need to think about again because the CNCF is kind of helping us select the right projects helping us in the right direction so that making choices in the security realm becomes easier and becomes a no brainer for teams, both the security teams as well as the application development teams to integrate security. Well, I'm glad to hear we've solved security we can all go home now, that's awesome but no, in all seriousness, it's such an important piece lots of companies spending time on there and it does feel that we are starting to get the process and organization around so that we can attack these challenges a little bit more head on. How about service mesh? It's one of those things that's been a little bit contentious the last couple of years of course ahead of the show, Google is not donating Istio to the foundation instead, well the trademarks open. I'm gonna have an interview with Liz Rice to dig into that piece. In the ever, the chess moves, Microsoft is now putting out a service mesh so as Corey Quinn says the plural of service mesh must be service meches so it feels like Mr. Meeseeks for any Rick and Morty fans, we just keep pressing the button and more of them appear which might cause us more trouble but what's your take? Do you have a service mesh coming out? Kelsey Hightower had a fun little thing on Twitter about it, what's the state of the state? Yeah, so I won't be publishing a service mesh maybe I'll try and re-crawl someone but we'll see what happens. But service meshes are, they're still a hot topic. It's still one of the spaces that's where most discussion is kind of geared towards. There is yet to form a single standard, there is yet a kind of single block of companies creating a front to kind of solve that service mesh issue. And I think that's because in the end service meshes are from a complexity perspective. They're not mature enough to be able to kind of commoditize into a standard, right? I think we still need a little while and maybe ask me this question next year again and we'll see what happens. But we'll still need a little while to kind of let this market shift and let this market innovate because I don't think we've reached the end state with service meshes. Also kind of gauging from customer interest and actual production implementations. I don't think this has trickled down from the largest companies that have the most requirements into kind of the smaller companies, the smaller markets which is something that we do usually see. Now Kubernetes is definitely doing that. So in terms of service meshes, I don't think the innovation has reached that endpoint yet and I think we'll still need a little while which will mean for the upcoming period that we'll kind of see this head to head from different companies trying to gain a foothold, trying to lead a market, introduce our own products. And I think that's okay. And I think the CNCF will continue to kind of curate that experience up to a point where maybe somewhere in the future we will have a non-competing standard to finally have something that's commoditizing easy to implement. Yeah, it's an interesting piece. One of the things I've always enjoyed when I go to the show is just wonder and the things you bump into are like, oh my gosh, wow, look at all of these cool little projects. I don't think we are going to stop that Cambrian explosion of innovation and ideas. When you go walk around, there's usually over 200 vendors there and a lot of them are open source projects. Now I would say many of them when you have a discussion with them, I'm not sure that there's necessarily a business behind that project and that's where you also see maturity in spaces. A year or so ago in the observability space, open tracing helped pull together a couple of pieces. Storage is starting to mature. Doesn't mean we're going to get down to one standard. There's still a couple of storage engines out there. I have some really good discussions this week to go into that, but it goes from, boy, storage is a mess to, oh okay, we have a couple of uses and just like storage in the data center, there's not a box or a protocol to do anything. It's what's your use case, what performance, what clouds, what environments you're living on and therefore you can do that. So it's good to see lots of new things added but then they mature out and they consolidate and as you said, the CNCF is help giving those road maps, those maps, the landscapes, which boy, if you go online, they have some really good tools. Go to CNCF, the website and you can look through, Cheryl Hung put one, I'm trying to remember, which it's basically like a bull's eye of the ones that, here's the one that's fully baked and here's the ones that are making its way through and the customer feedback and they're gonna do more of those to help give guidance because no one solution is gonna fit everybody's needs and you have these spectrums of offering. You, wild card for you, are there any interesting projects out there, new things that you're hearing about, what areas should people be poking around that might not be the top level big things? So I guess for me, and that was really personal because I'm still kind of an infrastructure geek in that sense. So one of the things that really surprised me was a more traditional vendor, Zerdo in this case, with a fantastic solution. Finally, they're doing data protection for Kubernetes and my recommendation would be to look at companies like Zerdo in a data protection space, finally making that move into containers because even though we've kind of had, we've completed the discussion stateful versus stateless, there's still a lot to be said for thinking about data protection if you're gonna go all in into containers and into Kubernetes. So that was one that really provoked my thought, I really was interested in seeing, okay, what's Zerdo doing in this list of CNCF members? And for that matter, I think other vendors like VMware, like Red Hat, like other companies that are kind of moving into this space with a regained trust in their solutions is something that I think is really interesting and absolutely worth exploring during the event to see what those more traditional companies to use a term are doing to innovate with their solutions and kind of helping the CNCF and the cloud native world become more enterprise ready. And that's kind of the point I'm trying to make where for the longest time, we've had this cloud native versus traditional but I always thought of it like cloud native versus enterprise ready or proven technology. This is kind of for the developers doing a new thing. This is for the IT operations teams and we're kind of seeing those two groups, at least from a technology perspective being fused into kind of one new blood group making their way forward and kind of innovating with those technologies. So I think it's interesting to look at the existing vendors and the CNCF members to see where they're innovating. Well, you connected a dotted line between the cloud native insights program that I've been doing. You were actually my first guest on that. We've got a couple of months worth of episodes out there and it is closing that gap between what the developers are doing and what the enterprise was. So absolutely, there's architectural pieces, you like you, you know, I'm an infrastructure geek so I'd come from those pieces and there was that gap between, you know, I'm gonna use, you know, I use VMs and now I'm using containers and I'm looking at things like serverless too. You know, how do we build applications? And is it that bottom up versus top down and what a company needs? They need to be able to react fast. They need to be able to change along the way. They need to be able to take advantage of the innovation that ecosystems like this have. So I love the emphasis the CNCF has making sure that the end users are gonna have a strong voice because as you said, the big companies have come in, not just, you know, VM or Red Hat, but, you know, IBM and Dell are behind those two companies and, you know, HPE, Cisco, you know, many others out there that, you know, the VMits out there, not to mention, of course, the big hyper scale clouds that helped start this. You know, we wouldn't have a lot of this without Google kicking off with Kubernetes, AWS, front and center and an active participant here and if you talk to the customers, they're all leveraging it and, of course, Microsoft. So it is a robust, big ecosystem. You, thank you so much for helping us dig into it. Definitely hope we can have events back in the Netherlands in the near future and great to see you as always. Thanks for having me. All right, stay tuned. We have, as I said, full spectrum of interviews from theCUBE. They'll be broadcasting during the three days and of course go to theCUBE.net to catch all of what we've done this year at the show as well as all the back history. Feel free to reach out to me, I'm at Stu on Twitter and thank you as always for watching theCUBE.