 from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live in Seattle. It's theCUBE's three days of coverage of our day two of the KubeCon CloudNative Conference. This is the rise of the Kubernetes, the ecosystem behind it, the CNCF, the CloudNative Computing Foundation. I'm John Furrier, Kube host. Stu Miniman here this week, analyzing everything. Our next guest is Cheryl Hung, who's the director of the ecosystem for the CNCF. Cheryl, great to have you back. We interviewed you in Copenhagen. Thanks for joining us again. Of course, I'm really happy to be back. Really happy to see you again. So you got a new role. Last time we talked, you were working for, I think, Storage IO? Storage OS, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now you're full time with the CNCF as the director of the ecosystem, which now is massively growing. What's going on? Tell us about your job and what you're working on. So the CNCF's overall mission is to support the development and the adoption of these open source projects. And I really focus on the adoption side. So I really care about talking to end users and making sure that they can be successful and productive and happy as they transition to this new world of CloudNative and Kubernetes and open source infrastructure. So it's a massive change. If you compare this to five or 10 years ago, where we are now, it's so different, but it's really exciting to be a part of it. One of the interesting things I remember speaking with you about in Copenhagen in Europe at KubeCon there was, you have your background at Google, and so you're CloudNative, the way you've been working at Google, and then now out here, this whole world is moving that way. And the CNCF is end user driven. It was really started by end user contributions, and they're all here. Now you have vendors coming in. So you have a dynamic ecosystem. You have contributors that are end users, vendors that are contributors, and now the consumption of Kubernetes and the related technology is growing. What's your take on it? What's the most important thing happening? What are you focused on? What's your focus? So I think it's, I don't want to, I think vendors do make a big contribution to the projects as well. So I definitely want to recognize that, hey, vendors are kind of part of our ecosystem as well. But I think it's really important that, at the end of the day, all of this good work is so that end users can be successful with what they're doing. There's no point in building these projects if you don't take into account what the community needs out of them. So I've talked to a lot of companies now, and there's three levels of engagement that I see about why they want to join this CloudNative world. One is that they have some concrete technical problems that they just need to be solved as soon as possible and they need to figure out the best way to do it. The second is around building engineering organizations that can handle this new culture where you're not talking to a vendor who can give you six months of products roadmap in advance. You have to interact with open source communities directly. And then the third set of technical executives who really want to put all of their business strategy behind CloudNative and Kubernetes. And they're really fully invested into making sure that this community succeeds because it ensures that they will succeed as well. And the end users also, we've seen a lot of recruiting here too, as well as contributing. This is a number one demand that we certainly see from the CUBE content side of the house here is that there's demand and a thirst for educational content for how-to's. The role of a cloud architect now is becoming a clear persona in enterprises. You've got an IT impact, you've got developer impact, you've got open source kind of all kind of coming together. Where is the action for the end user right now? If you look at the trends, obviously Kubernetes stability and naturalization is key. Is DOCs be hot? What are the kind of things that are emerging up from end users that you see demand for feature-wise and or just general trend? Lots of end users actually want the CNCF to just tell them, like, do it this way, you know? And the CNCF is not like that. You know, we're very neutral. We want companies to choose the best things for themselves. So we're not going to go out there and say, pick this product over this product or this vendor over this vendor. What we do try and do is create a community where companies can talk to other companies who are trying to solve the same problems. Because that's what community is. Let's do this collaboratively. Let's do it out in the open. So we're not all trying to solve the same problems over and over and over again. But right now I see a lot of questions about how do you, how do you work in more mature, not more mature, but say the finance industry or how do you work in heavily regulated environments where you have to deal with a lot of compliance. And then also, yeah, how do you deal with this explosion of tooling? You know, okay, we all kind of agree that Kubernetes is the way to go. But now there's another 500 tools that you could evaluate out there. And what's the best way to figure out the path through that for your company? That's a community guide that too. Let that be the part of the process. The community really is a driver. Yeah, yeah. Cheryl, I'm wondering how you bake that into the show itself as well as the community. Are there vertical places that, you know, I've got a Slack channel or I've got a community group that I can participate with. We know the whole way track is really bumping at a show like this. But you know, there's all of the project specific stuff. But right, how is it that I have that paradox of choice and there's so many different ways I can do it. I bet it would be tough for us to find two companies that have chosen all of the pieces and deployed it in a similar enough way. So yeah, how do you sort through that? It's something that I'm thinking about a lot for the next KubeCon where I hope I'll see you in Barcelona or perhaps the San Diego one after that. It's how to make sure that there is a place where end users can actually come together and do that face to face interaction with each other. So the moment like, especially KubeCon is now 8,000 attendees, it's insane, but now you have to have a more structured place where people can find each other. You talked to a lot of customers. I know you moderate panels with customers. You know, where are they today? It's, you know, I've talked to some people that were like there's 8,000 people here and half of them are really, really new to Kubernetes and need some of just the 101 stuff as opposed to last year, a lot of the users I talked to were like, oh, I'm just pulling down the stuff and I'm building all my components and I'm contributing. So, you know, we have such a big spectrum. You know, what are some of the big issues you're hearing from customers to help them move forward? So, a set put from, I'll come back to this in a second, but even before I joined the CNCF, I ran the, and I still run the Cloud Native London meetup group, which gets about two to 300 attendees each month. So obviously not the size of this, but a fairly healthy, sizeable community. And people ask, you know, and I thought about should we just focus on a particular segment like the people who are just getting started or the people who are actively contributing? And I actually think it's okay to have a place where you can have that mix of levels. Actually, I think it's really important that the more experienced or people who are further along that journey have a chance to talk to people who are at the beginning, kind of mentor them through it. But at the same time, we want to do things. So I'll give you a little teaser for next year. We're planning to run smaller, local, more regional events for places that don't necessarily have the ability to come to these huge giant conferences and want to talk to each other in a single day, single track. It's a regional, more community events where people can participate, not feel remote. You guys had a lot on the waiting list, 1500 people on the waiting list here. For this event. For this event, I mean, it's a demand. There's tons of demand. Like, this is my secret thought. If in a few years time we get to huge, huge sizes, I think we should get a cruise ship. Put everyone on a cruise ship for three days and just be like, let's go and sell together. We're seeing a lot of those crews on the cryptography side. ICOs, the much of Bitcoiners went and then watching their prices go down. But you guys could literally fill a ship. Yes, seriously. The pace that KubeCon is growing, it's getting hard to find a place that can hold this many people. Community is super important to you guys. We know that we've been watching it from the beginning. It's really kind of, I won't say sacred, but it's really a key nurturing point. What's the vision for enabling the community? Obviously, regional events would create sub networks in the community, allow for some interaction, face-to-face and contribution-wise. What else are you guys doing on the community side that's interesting, that's important, that people should know about? So I think, so I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about this and talking to a lot of companies. And I really think that there is no substitution for the face-to-face stuff. At least initially, there's actually a lot of online that you can get involved with now through the mailing list and Slack and GitHub and all these things. But I really think that if you don't know somebody who's already part of the community, it can be quite hard to know where to even begin. It can feel a bit overwhelming, just how to stay on top of it all. So I would really like to establish more places where people feel like they can talk to their peers and feel comfortable and not feel like they're being sold to from vendors or being... Genuine and authentic, basically, a place where it's not going to be sales pitch, they can dig in and learn. Yeah, exactly. I think it's really important to hold on to the technical quality and the excellence of what the CNCF provides as well. Without that, everything else, I love this community stuff, right? It's fantastic, it's really good fun, but it comes down to the technical, does this actually solve a technical and business problem? Yeah. Yeah, great social component, but you've got to keep your eye on the prize. Get the code out there. Yeah, well, I mean, it's not to say that code is the only thing that matters, but we want to make sure that people come to the... How many people here today spending three days of their lives with us because they get actual value out of what's happening here? And as long as people keep coming, that shows that there is value there. And then the success of the ecosystem, we want to look back and say, okay, these were startups, these are ecosystem partners, big, small, medium, and large. They've been successful. That success outcome is really key to what you're working on, making that successful. It's hard, right? You guys are growing so fast. Give a peek behind the curtain behind CNCF. You went from 4,000 people. I know you just was, the team was just in China, which is exploding with growth in China, open source, contribution, and consumption. You got that exploding. You got the event, 8,000 people. Is the team busting out at the seams right now? I mean, share some inside baseball around what's going on inside the CNCF. Are you guys running hot? I mean, what's it like? It's crazy, right? Nobody could have predicted how fast this has all grown. And the team is, so the reason that I joined the CNCF is because number one, yeah, the growth is there, but number two, I really think the team have really good intentions. And even though there's a lot of work to be done, I think people really have their heart in the right place and are trying to do the right thing for the community. And China is definitely an area that we're investing in on a personal level. I'm taking Mandarin classes to try and improve my Mandarin so that we can, I can actually go over to China and make sure that these companies are part of this as well. There's so many things in China that are really advanced and mature, but really sophisticated communities. They're doing amazing things there. Yeah, but it's so separate from, or it feels very separate from the stuff that we see in North America. So China's definitely an area that I'm looking out for. But in terms of the team, I really think that we want to do a lot, but at the same time, the CNCF is never going to be like a thousand person organization. Let's talk again in like 50 years time. Maybe it will be a huge organization. But at the moment, I don't believe the CNCF is going to be a huge organization. So we do rely really heavily on our volunteers, our community, the goodwill of partners, exactly. Well, we really appreciate the support of CNCF. Dan has been fantastic to work with. We've seen the vision from day one. We saw him in China at Alibaba event last year. We saw the work you guys doing. They're doing the work and it's shows. So congratulations and good luck in your new assignment. Thank you. Dan is my boss and he's always been incredibly, just an optimistic and energetic and has so much belief in what we're doing. He's smart. He gets it. Very smart. He's agile, bringing a little DevOps agility to the table. Exactly, exactly. No, he's great. And Chris as well is a super community minded. You guys got a great team. Congratulations and thanks for coming on and sharing your insight into the CNCF ecosystem. The ecosystem, the open source communities, is the key persona, the key target. But this is impacting IT and developers. This is why Kubernetes is rising. You're seeing real impact with cloud computing, cloud scale, cloud native. It's really interesting time and this is proof in the ecosystem. We're here in theCUBE coverage here in Seattle. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.