 Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018, brought to you by the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back, everyone. This is theCUBE's exclusive live coverage here in Copenhagen, Denmark for KubeCon 2018. I'm John Hurd, my co-host this week, Lauren Cooney, and our next guest head, we're going to have a distinguished consulting engineer with Cisco Systems, CUBE alum, great to see you. Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to be back. So, great developer action. End of day one, we're going to be here all day tomorrow. So, one day one's kind of coming into the books, your thoughts on what's happening here, different crowd, but active? No, extremely active. Actually, one of the things I've noticed, and this is sort of a subtle point when you've been around a lot of open source projects, is you have a lot of people who are new to the Kubernetes community you're coming in. And one of the things I found extremely heartening is, they've got a really organized approach to it. When they did their developer summit, they had an entire track for bringing new contributors on. They've just revamped their documentation to help people get here, and they're finding better and better ways to articulate the things that people need to hear to help them make the leap to Cloud Native. Because one of the underappreciated things about Cloud Native is, that is different from the move to Cloud 1.0 that we made a few years ago, is that Cloud Native is not a lift and shift behavior. You have to change the way you think about doing your job. And that's a global platform. So, this is like not a, you know, just a transformation project. It's like a lifetime transformation. Absolutely. Huge personnel issue. People process technology. Technology the last one. Have you accepted Cloud Native into your heart? I have come to terms with my lift and shift problem that I have, and I'm now aware, self-aware of Cloud Native. The first step is to admit that you have a problem. The making amends to your infrastructure takes longer. I mean, look at the look. Well, Ed, you would know. So, we're all working on it. So, you know, I have a question for you here. You know, as you were talking about how, you know, you're seeing a lot of new developers coming in and things along those lines. I'm also running into a lot of new developers at the hotel, at dinner, just walking around and having discussions. You know, where do you see these guys coming from? I see them coming from banks, from, you know, large technology companies that are based in Europe. Where are you seeing these folks? So, that ends up matching very closely what I'm seeing as well. I mean, like, from all over the place. From people who finance large energy projects, right? From all areas of finance. Basically, you know, all the sorts of people who have big compute problems are starting to turn up in the Cloud Native world because this is literally where you solve those problems. And I think that's part of what's driving the ecosystem is the folks in Kubernetes made a number of incredibly intelligent decisions early on about how their architecture was built in terms of the modularity and expandability of it. And the result is that you get lots of people with lots of energy coming in saying, I have a problem like this. There's an obvious well-worn path to try and put together a proposed solution for solving problems like this. And they engage with the community. You know, one of the things that you're seeing just in terms of how the community grows itself is they've got special interest groups. SIGs for various areas in Kubernetes. They've now had to spawn working groups that come under them. You're just seeing things like Kubernetes proposals for how you're going to do things coming to form. So there's a lot of the maturity process that you expect to deal with the scale of people who want to solve their problems this way. So you're actually not seeing sprawl. You're seeing highly organized groups coming together in a way that can make the platform more positive. Yeah, absolutely. Not only am I seeing sprawl, but I'm starting to see highly intelligent things being said, but the people who work at what we think of is the core of Kubernetes. So I've heard a number of people make the comment that they expect the Kubernetes core to actually shrink in terms of what it offers. Because the broader ecosystem is picking up so much of the slack. So the sort of core APIs of this is what is Kubernetes without having picked out some options that meet your needs is keeping itself very tight while having architected it in a way where you can have this broad ecosystem without the kinds of problems you sometimes get with sprawl in other communities. So you want to get bigger, but you got to get smaller to be bigger. In some sense, yeah. You have to decide what's really important to get right in the core and really nail it. What are they getting right in your opinion? What's right about it that's going on? You mentioned some of the smart decisions that they're making. So a couple of the things that they've gotten really, really right are a relentless focus on developer needs. So I see this particularly in networking. And I think we've talked about this before. Developers don't want to know about subnets. They don't want to know about L2 segments. They don't even want to know about IP addresses, frankly. What they really care about is two things, reachability and isolation. Everybody can talk to everybody unless they decide you should be isolated. And service discovery and service routing. Those are the only two things they care about. And wouldn't you know it? In Kubernetes, you have network policies that control the reachability and isolation and services that do services discovery and service routing for you. So they've absolutely nailed the fundamental developer needs. Made your pain point. Yeah. So what's your take on just the ecosystem? Obviously we've commented, and this is always a dangerous game with communities, is logo farm. Everyone's here, right? Yeah, I mean, they took the CNCF logos and probably I think they broke them into three categories now. I'm not exactly sure what that would be. They have a whole new sponsorship level for... I'm not sure. But Ed, maybe you could provide some clarity here. Well, I mean, there is a certain risk in being loved to death, right? Kubernetes is full blown into what I will sometimes call crisis of success, which is you're succeeding so wildly that it's getting to be a problem. And that's good to see. But I think you're starting to see certain categories of things that are emerging. And there was a good set of readouts from the various SIGs to Kubernetes yesterday in the developer summit. So you've got a bunch of stuff around networking. You have a bunch of things around storage. These are sort of fundamental infrastructure issues. Then you have a bunch of things literally about how do we expand the Kubernetes platform? How does that work, right? And different, you know, how do we produce the constructs we need to solve the various problems that are arising? And those things are all sort of progressively moving forward. And we're getting to sort of the interesting point where the people who did the original turn of the APIs are being really blunt and honest saying, look, these are the things we got, right? And these are the things we got wrong. And there's a lot to be said for having that level of honesty with yourself on stage in public, right? When you're the guy who wrote the code, it's unequivocally your mistake. And being able to stand up and say, look, we got this one wrong. But that's the community trust that you have and that's what makes the community. And that trust goes both ways. It's the trust of the community in that leader standing on the stage. But it's also the trust of that leader that we're going to move fast, we're going to do things right, but there's always a turn of the crank to do things better. And we've got to be straightforward about that. And their self-awareness around the iteration is key. They're putting their egos at the door, checking in at the door, focusing on the advancement. I got to get your thoughts for both of you guys. I want to ask you guys both of questions. I know that you're doing a lot of work with some startups and you're with Cisco, the big company. What's interesting about this ecosystem is the balance between the big players and the enablement for the small startups to be successful. We had a variety of startups here with news on theCUBE. So this is the give-get between sharing and projects where there's a balance and everyone can thrive and survive and grow together. Thoughts on that balance. Startups have needs, but they're not as big as the big guys. So what's your thoughts on- Why don't you start, Ed? Well, to begin with, we can't do everything much as we would like to. And back to the self-honesty, you have to be honest with yourself about that. And nobody has a monopoly on the good ideas. And so you really have to engage with the ecosystem and figure out how different aspects of the problem knit together. So I've had a lot of interesting conversations. I personally have some interest in what I sort of call unified IO. So converged networking storage. So I'm talking to a lot of folks who are doing storage stuff, a lot of little startups that are doing really cool things for storage about things we can do to help them there from the network side. And they're excited about that, right? And that's the sort of open source spirit that makes it possible to have all these startups because I'll be really frank, most of these startups, if they were having to try and build the thing themselves are simply not resource to do it. But with so much support from the community and the broad on a relatively thin startup budget, you can move mountains. Yeah, if you tap the formula properly, that's the key. Well, and the startups are getting more and more sophisticated about tapping that formula because only getting a good product is only a very small part of the equation. You also have to get the integration with the community because you have to make sure, even if you're entirely self-interested, if you build a thing, there will be a thing in the open source that does that. And it is a fundamental truth in the modern era that 80% of the value or more of all software is its connection to everything else in the ecosystem. Lauren, I want to get your thoughts on this. You're doing this now as a new startup, you're a founder of and running, but you've built programs, modern architectures that play here. You're seeing microservices growth, phenomenal, cloud native is just a whole nother ball game, going to a whole nother level. As you're engaging out there, what are you seeing for this modern community formula, playbook, whatever you want to call it, there's a way to do things now at a whole nother level that this is going. No, I definitely agree. I think the developer experience is really key, making it simple, making it just seamless, right? So folks don't have to wait to download something or they don't have to wait for, they could just click a couple buttons through a GUI and make it really, really simple, especially those onboarding. What I see from the startup side is a lot of, this is interesting because I think it's important, a lot of startups coming from companies that wouldn't allow them to do open source inside the companies. So they're leaving these larger companies and they're doing startups and they're raising pretty good capital for seed rounds and A rounds. And I think this is something that's pretty hot right now and we want to take a look at and the VCs are definitely looking. What about the big companies? We know all of these, South Francisco, IBM, you see Amazon here, they have huge scale. Even Microsoft has had developer programs been successful over the years. We all know that. What's the modern tweak that they're making that you're seeing work? Well I think it's a small teams. Like Adrien was on here earlier talking about microservices and microteams. And I think he's absolutely right. You have to have teams that are building these services that are moving quite quickly and doing it in a way that's rapid enough to keep up or be ahead of the market. Yeah, the microteam point I think is actually really apropos because this is going to sound very engineering for probably your head, but the management overhead gets to be quite steep when you're trying to do anything with big teams. Right, so you've got to have very loose coupling to everything else in the system which is exactly what CloudAid was about. And that's what you see not only in the startups but you see these sort of hybrid approaches that emerge where you have a startup that has a small team and another startup that has a small team that's nearby and a large company like Cisco that has a small team and there's an interaction between all of these. And we're sort of operating as the growing up of this larger team completely across boundaries in order to solve actual user problems. I mean I think it's historic time. I mean I think you guys are right on. I mean it's just, this is such an exciting time for if you're an engineer, software developer or anyone in large scale systems and building applications is going to a whole new level. I mean you look at blockchain right around the corner, decentralized applications is coming soon. We won't go there in this interview because it's KubeCon but I got to take what's your view so far of what's working here, hallway conversations you're having, what are some of the things going on here that someone who's not here might want to know about? Well so I mean I tend to be very focused on networking things so the thing that I'm most excited about this happening here is the entire world seems to be getting meshy, right? So there's a huge excitement around service mesh and Istio which I think is extremely well placed. And the fundamental thing that's really happening there is they're progressively taking parts of the problem that you're not good at if you're writing a microservice and they're pulling them out into a sidecar, Envoy. So that you don't have to worry about service discovery and service routing, you don't have to worry about the policies for how you're going to figure out what things you do about getting to the next guy in the chain of the work. You don't have to worry about even things as simple as making sure that you respond to faults well, right? And there's a whole new set of ways that you think about problems in this space that's emerging there. One of the things that I'm actually really excited about that's also meshy is when you get to things like people who have less common network problems. So the operators with Envoy, people who have more sophisticated network needs, we're starting to reimagine that stuff in the language of service mesh, right? So rather than trying to force all the legacy thinking about networking into cloud native where it's not wanted, we try and recast the problems we have into cloud native ways of thinking about them. And I think that ends up being intensely powerful and it's frankly almost overwhelming because there's so much conceptually going on in this space that you want to be able to draw on for the palette for the things that you're painting. Yeah. I mean, it's your point earlier about, you know, and you were kind of joking about serious, it's a mind meld, you got to buy in to the philosophy of this new era of, I was joking. Yeah, just got to buy into, the cloud native is a global platform. It is a fundamental new thing. It's not just a methodology, it's a new way. I mean, it's a new way of thinking about things. The C in cloud native does not stand for container. Container is the smallest possible chunk of this. If you just slap all your applications containers and try and do a lift and shift, you're going to fall in your face really hard. In what areas? Like just like what? I'll give you a really simple example. Let's say that I have an application that I'm running in VMs, right? And I've got my big database VM, I've got my big web front in VM. So I pick them up, I containerize them, I drop them into Kubernetes. So I've got one replica of my database VM and one replica of my web front in VM. And that's going to break sometime in the first 24 hours. Because I need to basically pick them up and say, okay, I need a bunch of replicas that are dynamically coming up for all of these things. I need to have the services to wire mesh them together so that for whatever reason I lose some number of my replicas that everything comes back up and goes forward and we never even notice, right? In some sense the ideal situation is you have a major bug in your code, right? Let's say you have a piece of code that's leaking memory and it dies every 24 hours. You want, if you think about it writing you to play because you don't know you have this bug, you won't even notice that you screwed up that bug because the infrastructure will protect you from it. But if you just try and lift and shift, you're not going to have a happy experience because it's not going to work the way you expect it to. And the monitoring tools are getting better too. So even if you're coming in on the other side, well, Ed, thanks so much for the commentary. Great summary of the event. Any surprises here for you? Any aha moments or revelations or epiphanies or any kind of surprises, good or bad or ugly? So one of the things I was very impressed with is I'm very impressed with what you can do with NoCode. I don't know if you saw that keynote this morning. With Kelsey. But in response to Dan Cohen's point about all the sort of total attack surface area, you know, Kelsey got on stage and did the NoCode project, which has perfect security for whatever it is you deploy it for. So the fact that you can get on code, do something like that, move an entire audience of thousands of people, that's impressive. You don't see speakers who can do that very often. That was, I wouldn't say shocking, but very much a pleasant surprise. And it speaks very much to the tone of the community. The keynotes today were some of the best I've ever seen. I am not a keynote person. I seldom attend them. The keynotes today were extremely well done. They had good energy and they were relevant. The walking through of the evolution of the community in brief punctuated explanations of what's going on and why they're important. Yeah, I've never seen it done better. Yeah, they were hitting their marks well. Well, great. Thanks for coming on, Ed. Great to see you. Yep. Thank you, Ed. This is commentary from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's the CUBE coverage of the CNCF Cloud Native Compute Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. CUBECon 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, Lauren Cooney. Thanks for watching. Be right back.