 Everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of CNCF's KubeCon EU, CloudNativeCon in Valencia, Spain. I'm John Furrier. This is a preview interview with the co-chairs versus we have Jasmine James, senior engineering manager of developer experience and KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU co-chair and Ricardo Rocha, computing engineer at CERN and KubeCon co-chairs as well at EU. Great to have you both on. Great to see you, both of you. Thank you for having us. Thank you, alumni. So, you know, KubeCon just continues to roll and get bigger and bigger and watching all the end user action, watching the corporations and the prices come in and just all the open source projects being green-litted and just all the developer onboarding has been amazing. So, it should be a great EU in Valencia, Spain, great venue, a lot of people I'm talking to are very excited. So, let's get into it. As co-chairs, take us through kind of the upcoming scheduled at a very high level. Then I want to dig into some of the new insights into selection and programming that you guys had to go through. I know every year it's hard. So, let's start with the overall upcoming schedule for KubeCon. Yeah, so I'll dive into that. So, the schedule represents a quite diverse set of topics, I would say. I personally am a fan of those more personal talks from an user perspective. There's also a lot of the representation from a community perspective and how folks can get involved. As most of you know, our tracks, the types of tracks has evolved over the year as well. So, we now have a community track, student track. So, it's going to be very exciting to hear content within those tracks through in Valencia. So, a very exciting schedule. Yeah. And just real quick for the folks watching, it's virtual and physical, it's hybrid event, May 4th through 7th. Ricardo, what's your take on the schedule? How do you see it breaking down from a high level standpoint? Yeah, so I'm pretty excited. I think the fact that it's hybrid will help keep, build on the experiences we had during the pandemic times to give a better experience for people not making it to Valencia. I'm pretty excited also about the number of co-located events. So, the two days before the conference will include a large number of co-located events focusing on security, peer ops, and some new stuff for like batch and HPC workloads that I'm pretty close to as well. And then some really good consolidation in some tracks like piece value, which I think will be quite interesting as well. So you mentioned this is going to be like watch parties, people going to be creating kind of satellite events. Is that what you're referring to in terms of the physical space can be an event, obviously. What's going on around outside the event either online or as part of the program? So yeah, all the sessions from the co-located events will be available virtually as well. I don't know if people will actually be setting up parties everywhere. I'm sure some people will. Yeah, there'll definitely be some. And then for the conference itself there will be dedicated rooms where for the virtual talks people can just join in and sit for a while and watch the virtual talks and then go back to the in-person ones if you like. Yeah, it's always a good event. Jasmine, we talked about this last time and Ricardo we always get into the hood as well. What's the vibe on the programming? And obviously people want to give talks as a virtual component which opens up more aperture for more community and more actions as Ricardo pointed out. What was the process this year because we're seeing a lot of big trends emerge. Obviously securities front and center and user projects are growing. Data engineering is a new persona that's just really emerged out of kind of the growth of data and the role of data that it plays and containers and with Kubernetes. Just a lot of action. What was it like this year in the selection process for the program? Yeah, I mean, the selection process is always lots of fun for the co-chairs. Huge shout out to program committee, track chairs. You put in a lot of great work in reviewing talks and it's just a very, very thorough process. So kudos to all of us for getting through it for this year. I think that lots of things emerge but I still feel like security is top of mind for a lot of folks. Like security really has provided one of the biggest submissions from a quantity perspective. There are tons of talks submitted for a security track and that just kind of speaks for itself, right? This is something that the cloud native community cares about and there's still a lot of innovation and people want to voice what they're doing and share it. Ricardo, what's your take? We've had a lot of chats around not only some of the hardcore tech but some of the new waves that are emerging out of the growth, the maturation of the segment. What are you seeing in terms of the key things that came out during the process? Yeah, exactly. So I think I would highlight something that Jasmine said which is the emergence of some new tracks as well. She mentioned the student track but also we added the research track which is actually the first time we'll have it. So I'm pretty excited about that, of course. Then for the trends, clearly security observability are massive, the tracks for active operations, extending Kubernetes had also a lot of submissions. I think the main things I saw that gained a bit of more consistency is the part for the business value and the fact that people are now looking more at the second step, like managing cloud costs, how to optimize spot usage and the usage of GPUs for machine learning, things like this. I'm pretty excited on all these hybrid deployments also is something that keeps coming back. So those are the ones that I think came out from the submission this time. You know, it's interesting as the growth comes in, you see these cool new things happen but there are also signs of problems that need to be solved to create opportunities. Jasmine, you mentioned security, there's a lot of big trends, scale, Ricardo, you're kind of hinting at the scale piece of it. But there's all this now new things, the security posture changes as you shift left. You know, it's not over when you shift left and security in the pipelining there but it's the audits. There's the size of the security elements. There's a bill of materials now, people who have supply chain. These are huge conversations right now in the industry, supply chain, security, scale, data, optimization, management, notifications. All this is building into a whole nother level. What do you guys see in the key trends in the cloud native ecosystem? I always say that a lot of the key trends, like you said it, right? These things are not going anywhere, it's actually coming to a point of maturation. I see more of a focus on how consuming, how companies go about consuming these different capabilities. What is that experience like? There's a talk that's going to be offered as a keynote, just about that security and leveraging developers to scale security within your environment. And not only is it a tool problem, it's a mindset thing that you have to be able to get over and partner, bridge gaps between teams in order to make this a reality within certain organizations. So I see the experience part of it coming a big thing. There's multiple talks about that. Ricardo, what's your take on these trends? Cause I look at the paragraph of the projects now, it's like this big. It used to be like a couple of sentences. Now you've got more projects coming on. You've got the rookies in there and you've got the veterans. The veteran projects in there. So this speaks volumes to kind of things like notaries new, right? So this is cool. What does that mean? So okay, security, auditing, all this is happening. What are the big trends that you're excited about that you see that people are going to be digging in in the event? Yeah, I think we talked about spy chain just before. I think that's a big one. We saw a keynote back in North America already introducing this and we saw a lot of consolidation happening, not only in projects, but also companies supporting this project. I'm also quite interested in the evolution of Kubernetes in the sense that it's not just for what was, it was traditionally used for like traditional IT services and scaling. We start seeing there will be a very cool keynote from deploying Kubernetes at the edge, but really at the edge with the low earth orbit satellites running Kubernetes in basically space. So those things I think are very cool. Like we start seeing really a lot of consolidation, but also people looking at Kubernetes for pretty crazy things, which is very exciting. Yeah, if you mentioned space, that really takes us to a whole edge, another level of edge thinking. You know, I've had many conversations around how do you do break fix in space with some folks in the space industry and public sector? Software is key in all this. And again, back to open source. Open source has to be secured, has to be able to managed effectively. At least be optimized into the new workflows. Space is one of them. You know, you're seeing 5G edge is huge with new kind of apps that are being built there. So open source plays a big role in all this. So the question I want to ask you guys is as open source continues to grow and it's growing, we're seeing startups emerge with the playbook of you play an open source or actually create a project and then you get funding behind it because I know at least three or four VCs here in Silicon Valley that look at the projects and say, they're looking for deals. And they're saying, keep it open, a whole another level. Can you guys share your insights on how the ecosystems evolving with entrepreneurship and startups? I guess I'll start. I think that it's such a healthy thing to have such innovation occurring. It's really just a testament as to how the cloud native community, right? Nurtures and cultivates these ideas and provides a great framework for them to develop over time. Going from the sandbox and incubating and graduated and having the support of a solid framework, I think is a lot of the reason why a lot of these projects grow so quickly and reach these high levels of adoption. So it's a really fantastic things to see. I think that VCC and opportunity and there's a lot of great innovation that can be operationalized and scaled and applied to a lot of industry. So I feel like it's a very healthy thing. It also creates a lot of opportunities about something I'm passionate about, which is like people getting involved in open source as a step into the world of tech. So all of these projects coming about provide an opportunity for folks to get involved in a particular component they're interested in and then grow their career in open source. So really great thing, in my opinion. And you mentioned the student track, by the way, I kept to point that out. I mean, that's huge. That's going to be a lot of people who have, in computer science programs or self-learning. I mean, the ability to get up to speed from a development standpoint as a coder. You can be a rural comp sigh or just a practitioner just coding. I mean, data is everywhere. So data engineering coding. I mean, Ricardo, this is huge student. And then just every sector is opening up. I mean, the color codes on the calendar is larger than ever before. Yeah, I think, yeah, the diversity of the usage and the communities is something that is really important and it's been growing still. So I think this will not stop. I'm pretty excited to see also how we'll handle this growth. Because as you mentioned, like everything is increasing in numbers, number of projects, number of startups around this project. So one thing that I'm particularly interested in as an end user is to understand also how to help other end users that are jumping in, not only the developers or the people wanting to support this project, but also the end users, how do they choose their staff? How should it look like for their use cases? Much more than just going from the selection of individual projects to understand how they work together. So I think this is a challenge for the next couple of years. Yeah, I mean, roll your own and building blocks, whatever you want to call it. You're starting to see people build their own stacks and that's not a bad thing. It might be a feature, not a bug. Yeah, I would agree that I think it's something that we have to work on together to help, especially people starting in this ecosystem, but also for the experienced ones that start looking at other use cases as well. Okay, Jasper, we talked about this last time. You got to pick a favorite child in the agenda. What's your favorite session? And you got to pick one or three or maybe put it with a handful. As you guys look through this year, what's the theme? I mean, people, you can kind of sense what's happening. When you look at the agenda, obviously observability's in there, all these great stuff's in there, but what's your favorite project or topic this year that you're jazzed about? For me, I said there's such diverse topics that are being presented both on the keynote stage and throughout the various tracks. I will just reference the talk that I sort of alluded to earlier about leveraging developers to scale Kubernetes. It's a talk given by Red Hat on the keynote stage. I just think it, the abstract's all in me because it talks about bridging two different roles together and scaling what we all know to be so important within the cloud native space security and Kubernetes. So it's something that's very real for me in my current role and previous role. So I think that that's the one that spoke to me. Awesome, Ricardo, what's your favorite this year? What do you, if you had to put a little gold star in it that you're interested in, what it would have been? I think I hinted on it just before, which is I'm kind of a space enthusiast. So all this idea of running Kubernetes in space makes me very excited. So I'm really looking forward to that one, but as an end user, I'm also very interested in talks like the one Mercedes will be doing, which is the transition from kind of a more traditional company to this more modern world of cloud native. I'm quite interested to hear how, what their experience has been like in the last few years. Well, you guys do a great job. I love chatting with you and I love the CNC app and following from the beginning. We were there when it was created and watched it grow from an insider perspective, the hyperscalers, people who are really kind of eating glass and building scale, you know, SREs. Now you have the SRE concept going kind of global, mainstream, seeing enterprises, and end users contributing and participating enterprises getting connecting those two worlds, Jasmine, and you said, as you look at that, you start to see the scale piece become huge. You mentioned it a little bit earlier, Jasmine. The SRE role was specific to servers and cloud. You're kind of seeing that kind of role needed for this kind of cloud native layer. We're seeing it with data engineering. It's not for the faint of heart. It may not be a persona that's got zillions of people, but it scales. It's like an SRE role. You're seeing that with this kind of monitoring and with containers and Kubernetes, where it's got to get easier and scale. How do you guys see that? Do you see that emerging in the community, this kind of new scale role and what is it? What is this trend? Or maybe I'm misrepresenting it or maybe I'm sensing it wrong, but what do you guys think about the scale piece? How is that falling into place? Yeah, I think that is adoption, like there's more saturation of cloud native technologies within any environment. Most companies realize that you have to have that represented right within the role that is managing it. If you want to have it be reliable. So I think that a lot of roles are adopting those behaviors, right? In order to be able to sustain this within their environment and learning as they start to implement these things. So I see that to be something that just happens. We saw it was like DevOps, right? Engineers were starting to adopt, working on the systems versus just working on software. So it's sort of like encompassing all the things, right? We're seeing a shift in the role and the behaviors that are within it in order to maintain these cloud native services. So. Ricardo, what's your take? We've been seeing engineers get to the front lines more and more. You guys mentioned business value is one of the tracks and focus topics this year. It's happening. Engineers and developers, they're getting in the front lines because as you move up that stack, whether it's a headless system for retail or deploying something in another sector, they got to be in the front lines. If you're going to be doing machine learning and have data, you got to have domain scales about what the business is, right? Yeah, I agree very much with what Jasmine said. And if we add this for kind of the business value and this opportunistic usage of all types of resources that can come from basically anywhere these days, I think this is really becoming a real role to understand how to best use all of this and to make the best of all these available resources. When we start talking about CPUs, it's already important. If we start talking about GPUs, which are more scarce or some sort of specialized accelerators, then it becomes really like something you need people that know where to go and fish for those because you can't just build your own data center and scale that anymore. So you really need to understand what's up there. Applications got to have the security posture nailed down. They got to have it automation built in. You got to have the observability. You got to have the business value. I mean, it sounds like a mature industry developing here. Finally, it's happening. Good job guys. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. Thank you, thank you for having us. And we'll see theCUBE here at KubeCon, Cloud NativeCon May 16th to the 20th in Valencia, Spain. theCUBE will be there. We'll have some online coverage as well. Look for the virtual from CNCF. theCUBE will bring all the action. I'm John Furrier, your host. See you in Spain and see you on the 16th.