 TheCube presents KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2022, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Welcome to Valencia, Spain. In KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe 2022, I'm Keith Townsend and we're continuing the conversations with amazing people doing amazing things. I think we've moved beyond a certain phase of the hype cycle when it comes to Kubernetes and we're going to go a little bit in detail with that today. On all the sessions, I have today with me, Taylor Doazelle, new head of CNCF ecosystem. So first off, what does that mean new head of, you're the head of CNCF ecosystem? What is the CNCF ecosystem? Yeah, yeah, so the, it's really the end user ecosystem. So the CNCF is comprised of really three pillars and there's the governing board, they oversee the budget and fun things, you know, make sure everything's signed and proper. Then there's the technical oversight committee, TOC, and they really help decide the technical direction of the organization through deliberation and talking about which projects get invited and accepted, you know, projects get donated and the TOC votes on who's going to make it in based on all this criteria. And then lastly is the end user ecosystem that encompasses a whole bunch of different working groups, special interest groups, and that's been really interesting to kind of, you know, get a deeper sense into as of late. So there are groups like the developer experience group and the user research group and those have very specific focuses that kind of go across all industries, but what we've seen lately is that there are really deep wants to create, you know, whether it be a financial services user group and things like that, because end users are having trouble with going to all of the different meetings. If you're a company, a vendor member company that's selling authentication software or something in networking makes sense to have a SIG network, SIG auth and those kinds of things. But when it comes down to, you know, like Boeing that just joined, does that make sense for them to jump into all those meetings or does it make sense to have some other kind of thing that is representative of them so that they can attend that one thing that's specific to their industry, they can get that download and kind of come up to speed or find the best practices as quickly as possible in a nice synthesized way. So you're 10 weeks into this role, you're coming from a customer environment. So talk to me a little bit about the customer side of it. When you're looking at something that's, it's odd to call CNCF massive, but it is 7.1 million members and the number of contributing projects, et cetera. Talk to me about the view from the outside versus the view now that you're inside. Yeah, so honestly, it's been fun to kind of, for me it's really mirrored the open source journey. You know, you start to, I've gone to KubeCon before, gotten to enjoy all of the booths and trying to understand what's going on and then worked for HashiCorp before coming to the CNCF and so get that vendor member kind of experience working the booth itself, so kind of getting deeper and deeper into the stack of the conference itself. And I keep saying vendor member and end user members, what the difference between those is end users are not organizations that sell cloud native services and those are the groups that are kind of more consuming. The Airbnb is the Boeing's, the Mercedes, these people that use these technologies and want to kind of give that feedback back to these projects. So, but yeah, very incredibly massive and just sprawling when it comes to working in all those contexts. So I have so many questions around like the differences between having you as an end user and interoperating with vendors and the CNCF itself. So let's start from the end user lens. When you're an end user and you're out discovering open source and cloud native products, what's that journey? Like how do you go from saying, okay, I'm primarily focused on vendor solutions to, let me look at this cloud native stack. Yeah, so really with that, there's been, I think that a lot of people have started to work with me and ask for, can we have recommended architectures? Can we have blueprints for how to do these things? And when the CNCF doesn't want to take that position, we don't want to kind of be the king maker and be like, this is the only way forward. We want to be inclusive. We want to pull in these projects and kind of give everyone the same bootstrap and jump and just like jump, I'm missing the word, but just ability to kind of like springboard off of that, create a nice base for everybody to get started with and then see what works out, learn from one another. I think that when it comes to Kubernetes and Prometheus and some other projects, being able to share best practices between those groups of what works best as well. So within all of the separations of the CNCF, I think that it's been, that's something I've found really fun is kind of like seeing how the projects relate to those verticals and those groups as well. I guess how you run a project might actually have a really good play inside of an organization. Like, oh, I like that idea. Let's try that out with our team. So I like this idea of springboarding. You know, it's when an entrepreneur says, you know what, I'm going to quit my job and springboard off into doing something new. There's a lot of uncertainty, but for an enterprise that can be really scary. Like we're used to, you know, our big vendors, HashiCorp, VM, where Cisco kind of guiding us and telling us, like, what's next? What is that experience like springboarding off into something as massive as cloud native? So I think that it's really, it's a great question. I think that it's, so I think that's why the CNCF works so well is the fact that it's a safe place for all these companies to come together, even companies of competing products. You know, having that common vision of we want to make production boring again. We don't want to have so much sprawling, have to take in so much knowledge at once. Can we kind of work together to create all these things to get rid of our administrative or maintenance tasks? I think that when it comes to open source in general, there's a fantastic book. It's called Working in Public. It's by Stripe Press. I recommend it all over the place. It's orange, so you'll recognize it. Yeah, it's easy to see. But it's really good because it talks about the maintainer's journey and what things make it difficult. And so I think that that's what the CNCF is really working hard to try to get rid of is all this, you know, all these monotonous things, filing issues, best practices. How do you adopt open source within your organization? We have tips and tricks and kind of playbooks in ways that you could accomplish that. So that's what I find really useful for those kinds of situations. Then it becomes easier to adopt that within your organization. So I asked Priyanka, CNCF executive director last night, a pretty tough question. And this is kind of in the meat of what you do. What happens when, you know, let's pick on service mesh because everyone likes to pick on service mesh. What happens when there's differences at that vendor level on the direction of a CIG or a project or, you know, the ecosystem around service mesh? Yeah, so that's the fun part, honestly, because people get to hash it out. And so I think that's been the biggest thing for me finding out was that there's more than one way to do thing. And so I think it always comes down to use case. What are you trying to do? And then you get to solve after that. So it really is, I know it's like, it depends which is the worst answer. But I really do think that's the case because, you know, if you have people that are using something within the automotive space or in the financial services space, they're going to have completely different needs once. You know, some might need to run cobalt or Fortran, others might not have to, you know. So even at that level, just down to what your tech stack looks like, audits and those kinds of things that can just really differ. So I think it does come down to something more like that. So the CNCF loosely has become kind of a standards body and it's centered around the core project Kubernetes. So what does it mean when we're looking at larger segments such as service mesh or observability, et cetera, to be Kubernetes compliant? Like where's the point if any that the CNCF steps in versus just letting everyone hash it out? Like is it Kubernetes, you just need to be Kubernetes compliant and everything else is free for all? It's honestly, in many cases, it's up to the communities themselves to decide that. So the groups that are running OCI, the open container interface, open storage interface, all of those things that we've agreed on as ways to implement those technologies. That's where, I think that's where the CNCF, that's the line, that's where the CNCF gets up to and then it's like we help foster those communities and those conversations and asking, does this work for you? If not, let's talk about it, let's figure out why it might not and then really working closely with the community to kind of help bring those things forward and create action items. So it's all about putting the right people in the rooms and not necessarily playing referee, but to get people in the right room to have and facilitate the conversation? Absolutely, absolutely. Like all of the booths behind us could have their own conferences, but we want to bring everybody together to have those conversations. And again, sprawling can be really wild at certain times, but it's good to have those cross understandings or to hear from somebody that you're like, oh my goodness, I didn't even think about that kind of context or use case. So really inclusive conversation. So organizations like Boeing, Adobe, Microsoft, from an end user perspective, it's sometimes difficult to get those organizations into these types of communities. How do you encourage them to participate in the conversation? Because their voice is extremely important. Yeah, at that, I'd also say it really is the community. I mean, I really liked the Kubernetes documentary that was put out, they're working with some of the CNCF folks and core and beginning Kubernetes contributors and maintainers, and it just kind of blew me away when they had said what we thought was success was seeing Kubernetes in an Amazon data center. That's when we knew that this was going to take root. So, and you'd rarely hear that, it's like, oh, when somebody that we typically compete with, it's success is seeing them use that. And so I thought that was really cool. You know, I like to use this technology for my community of skipping rope. You see the girls and boys jumping, double dutch, rope, and you think, I can do that, like it's just jumping, but there's just, you know, hesitation to actually, how do you start? How do you get inside of it? The question is, how do you become a member of the community? We've talked a lot about what happens when you're in the community, but how do you join the community? So really there's a whole bunch of ways that you can. Actually, the shirt that I'm wearing, I got from the 114 release. This is just a fun example of that community and just kind of how welcoming and inviting that they are. Really, I do think it's kind of like a job breaker almost. You start at the outside, you start using these technologies, even more generally, like what is DevOps? What is production? How do I get the infrastructure, architecture or software engineering? Once you start there, you start working your way in, you develop a stack, and then you start to see these tools, technologies, workflows. And then after you've kind of gotten a good amount of time spent with it, you might really enjoy it like that and then want to help contribute. Like, oh, I like this, but it would be great to have a function that did this or I want a feature that does that. At that point in time, you can either take a look at the source code on GitHub or wherever it's hosted and then start to kind of come up with some ideas to contribute back to that. And then beyond that, you can actually say, no, I kind of want to have these conversations with people, join in those special interest groups and those meetings to kind of talk about things. And then after a while, you can kind of find yourself in a contributor role and then a maintainer role. After that, if you like really like the project and want to kind of work with the community on that front. So I think you would ask before, you know, like Microsoft, Adobe and these others, really it's about steering the projects. It's these communities want these things and then these companies say, oh, okay, this is great. Let's join in the conversation with the community and together, again, inclusivity and bringing everybody to the table to have that discussion and push things forward. So Taylor closing message, what would you want people watching this show to get when they think about ecosystem and CNCF? So ecosystem, it's a big place. Come on in. The water's just fine. I really want people to take away the fact that, I think really when it comes down to, it really is the community. It's you, you know, we are the end user ecosystem. We're the people that build the tools and we need help no matter how big or small. When you come in and join the community, you don't have to rewrite the Kubernetes scheduler. You can help make documentation that much more easy to understand and then doing so helping thousands of people. You know, if I'm going through the instructions or reading a paragraph, it doesn't make sense. That has such a profound impact. I think a lot of people miss that. It's like even just changing punctuation can have such a giant difference. Yeah, I think people sometimes forget that community, especially community-run projects, they need product managers, they need people that would help with communications, people that help with messaging, websites updating, just reachability. Anywhere from developing code to developing documentation, there's ways to jump in and help the community. From Valencia, Spain, I'm Keith Townsend and you're watching The Cube, the leader in high-tech coverage.