 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back. We're at the end of three days wall-to-wall coverage here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019 in San Diego. I am Stu Miniman. My co-host for this week has been John Triar and we figured no better way to cap our coverage than bring on a CUBE alumni who has likely educated more people about containers and Kubernetes, you know, maybe second only to the CNCF. So Nigel Poulton now, the head of content at MSB.com. Nigel, pleasure to see you and thanks for coming back on the program. Honestly, gents, the pleasure is all mine as always. All right, so Nigel, first of all, love to get your gestalt of the week, you know, takeaway, you know, what's the energy, you know, how is this community doing? Yeah, so it's the end of the week and my brain is a mixture of fried and about to explode, okay? Which I think is a good thing. That's what you want at the end of a conference, right? But I think if we can dial it back to the first day at that opening keynote, something that really grabbed me at the time and has been sort of a theme for me throughout the conference, is when they asked, can you raise your hand if this is your first CUBECon? And it's a room of 8,000 people and I don't have the data at hand, right? But I'm sat there, I've got my brother on this side, it's his first ever CUBECon. And he kind of goes like this. And then he realizes that nearly everybody around us has got their hands up, so he's kind of like, oh yeah, I feel like I'm in the in-crowd now. And I think from the people that I've spoken to, it seems to be that the community is maturing, the conference or the event itself is maturing. And that starts to bring in kind of a different crowd and a new crowd. People that are not necessarily building Kubernetes or building projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem, but looking to bring it into their organizations to run their own applications. Yeah, no, absolutely. The rough number I heard was somewhere two-thirds to three-quarters of that room were new, 12,000 here in attendance, right? There were 8,000 here last year. You think about the somebody, oh, I sent somebody this year, I sent somebody different the next year, and all the new people. So Nigel, luckily that keeps you busy because there is something I've said for a long, long time is there is always a need for that introductory and then how do I get started and how do I get in here? And luckily the ecosystem and all the projects and everything, somebody could pick that up in five or 10 minutes if they just put their mind to it, right? I say this a lot of the time that I feel like we live in the golden age of being able to take hold of your own career and learn the technology and make the best of what's available for you. We don't live in the day where to learn something new you would have to buy infrastructure. I mean, even to learn Windows back in the day or Netware or Linux, you'd need a couple of dusty old PCs in the corner of your office or your bedroom or something, it was hard, whereas now with cloud, with video training, with all the hands-on labs and stuff that are out there, with all of the sessions that you get at events like this, if you're interested in pushing your career forward, not only have you not got an excuse not to do it anymore, but the opportunities are just amazing, right? I feel like we live in such an, I feel like we're living in exciting time for tech. Well Nigel, you do books and you've done training courses, you have a platform, like a lab platform, MSB.com, and one of the challenges in this space is that it is moving so fast, right? Yes, you can, anything's at your fingertips, but Kubernetes changes every quarter. Here at the show, both scale of people's deployments, but also scale of the number of projects and everybody thing has a different name. So, how are you, what should people be looking for? How are you changing your curriculum? What are you adding to it? What are you duplicating? So, that's super interesting. I think, right, as well, so it's a golden age for learning, right? But if you're in the technology industry in the sort of areas that we are, right, if you don't love it, and if you're not passionate about it, I almost feel like you're in the wrong industry because you need that passion and that sort of, it's my hobby as well as my job, just to keep up. Like I feel like I spend an unhealthy amount of time in the cloud-native ecosystem and just trying to keep track of everything that's going on. And all that time that I spend in, I still feel like I'm playing catch-up all the time. So, I think you have to adjust your mentality. Like, if you thought that you could learn something, a technology or whatever, and be comfortable for five years in your role, then you really need to adjust that. Like just an example, right? So, I write, I author a book as well. And I would love nothing better than to write that book, stick it on a shelf on Amazon and what have you and let it be valid for five years. I would love that because it's hard work, but I can't, so like I do a six-monthly update, but that applies to way more than that. So, for your career, you know, if you wanna, it sounds cheesy, if you wanna rock it in your career, you have got to keep yourself up to date. And it's a race, but I do think that the kind of things we're doing with tech now, they're fun things, right? Little scary because, you know, while we were at this show, I hope you kept up with all the Amazon announcements, the Google announcements, and everything going because it is non-stop out there. Nigel, we last had you on theCUBE two years ago at this show. And at every show for a bunch of shows, it seemed like there was a project or a category du jour. Yeah. I don't know that I quite got that this year. There were some really cool things at edge computing. There was, you know, the observability of something we spent a bunch of time talking on. But, you know, I'd love to just kind of, you know, throw it out there as to what you're seeing in the ecosystem, the landscape, some of the areas that are interesting, important, and what's growing, what's not. Okay, so if I can take the event first off, right? So, KubeCon itself, loads of new people, okay? And when I talk to them, I'm getting three answers from them. Like, number one, they're like, some people are like, I just love it, you know? Which is great. And I've loved it and it's an amazing event. Other people are like, kind of overawed by it, the size. So I don't know, maybe we should send them to re-invent and then come back here and they'll be like, oh yeah, it's not so bad. But the second thing is that like some of the sessions are going over the first time as heads. So I'm hoping, and I'm sure it will, that like going forward in Amsterdam and Boston next year that we'll start to be able to pitch parts of the conference to that new user base. So that was kind of a theme from speaking to people at the event from me. But a couple of things from the ecosystem, like we talked about service mesh, right? Two years ago. And it felt like it was a bit of a buzzword, but everyone was talking about it and it was a real theme. And I don't get that at this conference, but what I do feel from the community in general is that uptake and adoption is actually starting to happen now. And thanks a lot to, well look, Linkadee's pretty easy these days. Istio is making great strides to being easier to deploy. But I also think that the cloud providers, those hosted cloud providers, really stepping up to the plate. Like they did with hosted Kubernetes, when it was hard to get Kubernetes for your environment, we're seeing a similar thing with the service mesh. You can spend something up in GKE, Kubernetes cluster, click the box, and I'll have a service mesh. Thank you very much. Well, it's funny, I think back to Austin, when I talked to the average customer in the show floor and said, what are you doing? They were all on their own. I'm picking all of the pieces and doing it. When I talked to the average customer here is, I'm using managed services. Seems to have matured a lot. Of course, some of the managed public cloud services were brand new or a couple months there. Is that the general direction you see things going? So yes, but I almost wonder if it will be like cloud in general, right? Where there was like a big move to the cloud and I understand why people will want to do hosted Kubernetes and things because it's easy and it gets you, I'm careful when I use the term production grade because I know it means different things to different people, but you get something that we can at least loosely term production grade. And actually, just to be clear, we had a lot of discussions about on-premises, so I guess it's more the managed service rather than the I'm going to roll all the pieces myself. Yeah, but I wonder, will we start, and because of price and maybe the ability to tweak the cluster towards your needs and things, whether we might see people taking their first steps on a managed service or a hosted Kubernetes. And then as they skill up, then they start to say, well, tell you what, we'll start rolling our own because we're better at doing this now. And then run like, you know, you still have your hosted stuff but you have some stuff on-premises as well and then we move towards something that's a bit more hybrid. I don't know, but I just wonder if that will become a trend. Well, Nigel, I mean, it's been a busy week. You started off with workshops, I don't know. What did you miss? What's the first, when you go home, back to England, are you going to, and you pop open your browser and start looking at all the session videos and stuff. What's, I don't know, what didn't you get a chance to do here this week? So I was kind of, for me, it's been the busiest KubeCon I've had and it's robbed me of a lot of sessions, right? And I remember when I looked at the catalog at the beginning, it was like, you know, it was one of those conferences where almost every slot, there's three things that I want to go to, which is a sign of a good conference. I'm quite interested at the moment in K3S. I actually haven't touched it for a long time but outside of KubeCon, I've had a lot of people talk to me about that. So I will go home and I will hunt down, right, what are the K3S sessions to try and get myself back up to speed? Because I know there are other projects that are similar, right? But I find it quite fascinating in that it's one of those projects where it started out with like this goal of will be for the edge, right? Or for IoT or something. And the community are like, we really like it. And actually I want to use it for loads of other things. Now I have no idea whether it will go on to be like a roaring success. But it, I don't know, so often you have it where a project isn't planned to be something but it naturally in the community, take it on and say, we're going to do something with it. It wasn't originally planned, yeah? So I'll be looking up K3S as my first thing when I go home. But it is the first thing on a long list, right? All right, Nigel, tell us a little bit about latest things you're doing, msb.com. I know you had your book signing for your book here, huge lines here, great to see. So tell us about what you're doing overall. Thank you, yeah. So I've got a couple of books and I've got a bunch of video training courses out there and I'm super fortunate that I've reached a lot of people. But a real common theme when I talk to people are like, look, I love your book, I love your video courses, whatever. How do I, yeah, how do I take that next step? And the answer was always look, get your hands on as much as possible, okay? And I would send people to like Minikube and to play with Docker or play with Kube netties and various other solutions. But none of them really seemed to be like a real, something that looked and smelled and tasted like production. So I'm working with a startup at the moment, msb.com where we have curated learning content, everybody gets their own fully functioning, private three node Kube netties cluster, ingress will work, internet-facing load balances will all work on it. And the idea is that instead of having like a single node development environment on your laptop, which is fine, but you can't really play with scheduling and things like that, then msb.com takes that sort of learning journey to the next level because it's a real working cluster plus we've got this amazing visual dashboard so that when you're deploying stuff and scaling and rolling updates, you see it all happening in the browser. And for me as an educator, right, it's sometimes hard for people to connect the dots when you're reading a book or and I spend hours on like PowerPoint animations and stuff, whereas now in this browser to augment like reading a book and to augment taking a training video, you can now go and get your hands on and have this amazing sort of rich visual experience that really helps you like sort of, oh, I get it now, yeah? All right, so Nigel, final question I have for you. I've known you back when we were just a couple of infrastructure guys, you've done phenomenal things. The glory days. With kind of the wave of containers, your Docker captain, really well-known in the Kubernetes. Why don't you reflect back on kind of this journey we've been on, you look at 12,000 people here. Docker has some recent news here, so give us a reflection back on this journey the whole industry's on. So I had breakfast with a guy this morning who I wrote my first ever public blog with. He had a blog site and he loaned me some space on his blog site because I didn't even know how to build a blog at the time. And it was a storage blog, yeah? We're talking about EMC and HDS and all that kind of stuff. And I'm having breakfast with him 14, I think, years later in San Diego at KubeCon. And I think, and I don't know if this really answers your question, but I feel like that Kubernetes is almost so, if ubiquitous is the right word, or it's so pervasive and it's so all-encompassing almost that it is bringing almost the entire community. I don't want to get too carried away with saying this, right? But it is bringing people from all different areas to like a common platform for whatever better term, right? I mean, we were infrastructure guys yourself as well, John. And here we are at an event that as a community and as a technology, I think it's just, it's changing the world, but it's also bringing things almost under one hood. So I would say anybody that like, whatever you're doing to all roads lead to Kubernetes at the moment, I don't know. Yeah, well, we know software can actually be a unifying factor. Best term I've heard is Kubernetes is looking to be that universal backplane. And therefore, both southbound to the infrastructure, northbound to the application, Nigel Poulton. Congratulations on the progress. Definitely everybody make sure to check out. His training online. And thank you for helping us to wrap up our three days of coverage here. For John Troyer, I am Stu Miniman. TheCube will be at KubeCon 2020 in both Amsterdam and Boston. We will be at lots of other shows. Be sure to check out thecube.net. Please reach out if you have any questions. We are looking for more people to help support our growing coverage in the cloud native space. So thank you so much for the community. Thank you to all of our guests. Thank you to the CNCF and our sponsors that make this coverage possible. And thank you to you, our audience, for watching theCube.