 Welcome to Amsterdam. And KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2023. Join John Furrier, Savannah Peterson, Rob Streche, and UPScon. As the Kube covers the largest conference on Kubernetes, CloudNative, and open source technologies together with developers, engineers, and IT leaders from around the globe. Live coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2023 is made possible by the support of Red Hat, the CNCF, and its ecosystem partners. Good morning and welcome back to Fabulous Amsterdam. We are at KubeCon EU, and we are the Kube, ironically. It's a beautiful serendipitous coincidence we were just talking about on the show. My name is Savannah Peterson. Joined today with Rob. How you doing? I'm doing great. Having a lot of fun already. I know. I feel like your energy is actually up today versus yesterday, which is an accomplishment. It is. Second day, more energy. You're feeding off the community a little bit? Absolutely. It's been fabulous. I'm feeding off our great guests that we have. Should we talk about them, or should we just make them feel awkward sitting on the table with us? No, I think we should talk about them. Gentlemen, Fabian and Andrew, thank you so much for joining us. You're both with Red Hat. You both care about community, and you're here to talk to us about KubeVirt. What is KubeVirt? Just to start off. So, KubeVirt, KubeVirt is a community project, right? In the CNCF. There's a few of them here, yes. There's a few of them. It's so many, but we'll get to that later. So, KubeVirt allows you to run virtual machines and Kubernetes alongside pods, right? So, it's empowering Kubernetes to not only run containers. Containers are great, right? But it's also enabling you to run virtual machines. And maybe we have some time to talk about why. We absolutely have time. Cool. I think understanding the value of that, because we have a lot of people who are trying to make that transition. Containers, VMs, there's a lot going on. It's been very popular for a while. They're trying to get to microservices, but maybe they can't get all the way there. So, maybe, I don't know, is that where this really fits in and helps? Yes. I think, I mean, what we've seen in the past years, specifically with Kubernetes, I mean, Docker created the containers, right? And Kubernetes came around to make it easy to orchestrate them. Is that there's no more choice to deliver applications. That's great on the one hand side, because containers are so well-suited, right? To improve all the workload flows that we have about delivering applications. And organizations have to choose how do we get there, right? How do we use it efficiently? And the problem is, they have to choose between containers and VMs. And we've cubered, and by the way, it's not only containers and VMs. It's also that we have functions as a service, so we have Vasem, right, a new thing. Yep. So there's more more... We talked about Vasem yesterday here, yeah. There's more and more workload types which come up, and all of them unite in Kubernetes. And why is that a benefit? Because we say, once you talk about the same platform, right, you already know how the platform behaves, how you provide resources to that platform, how you manage it, how you operate it, right? Operating Kubernetes is another nice topic. And that's why we said, let's bring VMs to Kubernetes as well, so that all the knowledge that you already have to build up for Kubernetes, because you want to use Kubernetes, can be reused for VMs as well, to a large extent. Not completely, but to a large extent. So that's the core idea of why we want to run VMs on Kubernetes. We do it already, right, for a while. Yeah. I think it makes a lot of sense. Again, my background, I was at AWS for a little bit, building services there, and I've been at a couple startups building SaaS-delivered products. And when you start to look at it, the complication of running a Kubernetes environment or going from one Kubernetes environment to another really complicates being able to build that up. I think it goes to an expertise-type thing, where maybe you don't have the expertise for Kubernetes straight out of the gate. Can this help people bridge into that? Is this a way where they can have some Kubernetes, they can find a platform, but they can move over some of the VMs that they're currently used, get used to the management frameworks around that? Is that kind of the value you guys are driving at? Yes. I think the main point is... You can also say no. If I'm wrong, feel free to tell me. We told you about this last night, right? Maybe I misunderstand your question about what you're going on about, but it is, and one of the value that Qvert provides is it's all in Kubernetes. You're not looking after multiple infrastructure stacks. You're not looking after virtual machines in virtualization and containers in Kubernetes. It's all together. There is a, if I'm allowed to name-drop a burden in the way, which is that someone coming from traditional virtualization will have to learn Kubernetes. And potentially that's a blocker for people. But once they have jumped into that, and I think a lot of people here will probably agree that that's the future, or at least the present, then they can look after their pet virtual machines. And bring them over from your virtualization stacks. And then it's just the same way of dealing with VMs as you would containers or anything else. What I would just like to add, I think the fact that you have to know Kubernetes anyhow, regardless of VMs, is the point that makes Qvert survivable. Because we're saying we want to run applications. We want to run them in the introduction. We want to make them stable. We need the whole life cycle around the applications. So you have to create that expertise in addition to your virtualization platform. So you have two domains that you need to become an expert of. Complex domains, too. Exactly. And then you have interactions between them. And if we speak about the hybrid cloud, you have them in different places. You have Kubernetes in the public cloud, but you also have them on trends. You have them on bare metal. It's everywhere. It's everywhere, exactly. And with Qvert, you can at least try to reduce some of these barriers, unify the domains to a certain extent so that you don't have to double the knowledge you need to operate with. So where is Qvert in the sandbox incubation, graduation stage right now? We're very happy to say that we're in the incubated stage. And that happened about, what, 11 months ago? On a monthly basis, roughly a year. Roughly a year. That's good to know, because I think when I was in the keynote this morning and they were describing, and I think it was really good for them to go through and describe how different projects move and giving a path, a pathway. I was involved with Global Grid Forum, Open Grid Forum and OpenStack in previous life. And it was always a complication about how you move things through to be from a research group to an ongoing group and sustaining group and all of these different things. Are you finding that you're getting new contributors to come in that are end users and they were talking about that 25% are end user contributors now? Is Qvert one of those that you see end users coming in or is it more the companies like Red Hat that are sustaining it at this point? Go ahead. Yeah, I mean that's a tricky one. In the last 12 months, we've added, I'll see if I can remember, six new adopters. Not all of them are end users. Some of them are integrated, some of them are vendors. But if I'm allowed to see if I can run through the list. Are you kidding me? You're allowed to do whatever you want here. I give you permission. I validate, you can name drop, you can run through the list, whatever you want, sweetheart. Tell you what, I'm even going to bring out my book so I don't miss it. You're allowed to have notes. You did your homework today for class. I love this. Keep going, Andrew. So we've got Killicota, Puzzle, OS build operator, Trilio Vault, Deckhouse, and yes, no, Tuesday, we merge Castlem into that list as well as an official... Hey, that's exciting. Super exciting. They're friends of the Cube as well. Oh yeah. And they're throwing a party tonight. Hopefully we'll see you guys there. That is great. Good reminder. Yeah, hey, you know. I still need to get my ticket. I do my homework on the important things. You brought your notebook out to make sure you could hit your talking points. I'm here making sure we're hitting the right parties. I just want to add to that. So it's... Always. What we've seen, like with the Cube project meeting and we expected like 20 people. In the end, the room was over full. The people were standing on the hallway. This is great. And many of those were... How validating was that? It was... I thought that was a special moment. It was a special moment. You know, it's... For me, it's the first... I feel it as a community builder just talking to you. In person, CubeCon, right, after COVID. And so it's like, it's a huge jump. Yeah. We were sitting, I don't know where it was. It was like, you know, there were like 10 people in the room, right? And like, I don't remember who it was, but it's so great to see it being validated. Many of those, by the way, are end users. But what we see is the barrier. So we have... These big companies coming up, like we have Platform9, we've got Susie, we've got Redhead, we've got many who contribute to CubeBird and they are skilled, right? They know how to be... Not behave, but how to act in open source and how to step up. Yes. You know how to own parts. But we see that a lot of the newcomers of end users, they need to get adjusted to that ecosystem, right? They need to understand, they have a role, and they have a voice, right? And we want to hear them. I think it's our responsibility to help them to raise their voice in our community. So this meeting was great because we know there are a lot more people out there who want to actually learn about us, they want to use it, and we want to see how we can connect them to us. Yeah, you mentioned the ecosystem there. It feels like the Kubernetes ecosystem is really matured and it feels like dramatically over the last 6 to 12 months, it seems like so many different players. Do you guys agree? Definitely. Definitely. Yeah, definitely. We're in a whole new ballgame. So how long has Kubert been a project? We just spoke about that last yesterday, right? Since potentially the end of 2016. I love the interpretive date here, just kind of. Kind of, like, that well, Savannah. But yeah, I think I was correct that yesterday was 2016. Yeah, 2016 to 2017 is when the first work on Kubert started. That's pretty early in the Kubernetes game. It is. Yeah. I mean, back then, I mean, back then, I mean, I come from a virtualization background where I was working over it before, and we have good friends in OpenStack, and we're working with the whole open-source word stack, like Livered, KVM, Q-Move, which is all in Kubert, by the way, today, right? So, for example, if you take Kubert from Reddit, we surfaced it in OpenStack virtualization. The stack that you're going to use with your workload is actually the very same that we're using in our other virtualization project. In upstream, it's the very same, right? We're using Livered, Q-Move, and KVM as it's produced by these ecosystems, or these communities, and we've been working with them since then to make sure that these virtualization components work nice in Kubernetes, but at the same time, we actually had a good run with Kubernetes itself. I mean, who remembers TPRs from Kubernetes in the very early days, like very early extension mechanisms and webhooks, CRDs, all of this was not there, and we were able to work with Kubernetes to see that these extension points were added so that we can be good citizens of Kubernetes. And why do you tell all of that? Because yes, I think we've grown so much, Kubernetes is such a nice, extensible platform, and what we saw in the last year, I believe is that, I mean, we have so many projects here, right, and so many companies, and we see that there's more collaboration, right, towards maturity, right, to see, I mean, there are gravity points, right, on certain topics. You see that, like the tags and the zigs, right, they reform, and we see what is, you know, what is emerging, what do we see, we see more stabilization in these areas. And I think Kubernetes connects to that as well, like on Monday, we had a session with NVIDIA, NVIDIA is running G-Force now, on Kubernetes for years, not for years, but no, actually, plural, years. And we have customers at Red Hat running Kubernetes production, so that's all a good validation. This event is a lot about validation, I think, and especially with the sense of community, we're all here, it's buzzing, everyone's excited. Oh, it's just great vibes. I just want to call out, you have the best mustache that we've had on theCUBE. Is that a big, is that a part of your look? Is that, is that been a long time aesthetic, as long as Kubevert, or is this a newer aesthetic? No, this is a, I shaved it off from 2015 and a lot of my close friends were like, what did you do? What happened to your face? Whatever you, whatever it is that you're doing, get rid of it. And I recently got married and my wife has never actually seen me without the mustache. And I almost shaved it off for the wedding just to like, mess with that. But thankfully, or else it might not have gone through. That would not have been the case. Yeah, I was going to say, you don't really want to chance things when you're getting close to that aisle there. That's a... Sometimes you just got to shake it up a little bit. Yeah, no. I love it. I like to call out the fashion here at Kubevert, well, at CNCF and all of our nerdy conferences because why not? Well, while we're doing that, I just have a little bit of a, we've got the Kubevert going on here. Oh, you can, you can go ahead. There you go. Show it off. Very nice. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. Fabian, you're a fabulous guest. It's been awesome. Rob, love co-hosting with you and thank all of you for tuning in to our live broadcast here from KubeCon EU in wonderful Amsterdam. My name is Savannah Peterson and you are watching The Kube, the leading source for emerging tech news.