 KubeCon, CloudNativeCon kicks off in Detroit on October 24th, and we're pleased to have Stu Miniman, who's the director of Market Insights for hybrid platforms at Red Hat, back in the studio to help us understand the key trends to look for at the event, Stu. Welcome back, like old, old, old homie. Thank you, Dave. It's great to, great to see you and always love doing these previews, even though, Dave, come on. How many years have I told you? CloudNativeCon, it's a hoodie crowd. They're going to totally call you out for wearing a tie and things like that. I know you want to be an ESPN sportscaster, but I still don't think, even after this show's been around for so many years, that there's going to be too many ties in Detroit. I know I left the hoodie in my off. I'm sorry, folks, but hey, we'll just have to go for it. Okay, containers generally, and Kubernetes specifically, continue to show very strong spending momentum in the ETR survey data. So let's bring up this slide that shows the ETR sectors, all the sectors in the taxonomy, with net score or spending velocity in the vertical axis and pervasiveness on the horizontal axis. Now that red dotted line that you see, that marks the elevated 40% mark. Anything above that is considered highly elevated in terms of momentum. Now for years, the big four areas of momentum that shine above all the rest have been cloud, containers, RPA and ML slash AI. And for the first time in 10 quarters, ML and AI and RPA have dropped below the 40% line, leaving only cloud and containers in rarefied air. Now, Stu, I'm sure this data doesn't surprise you, but what do you make of this? Yeah, well Dave, I did an interview with Deepak, who owns all the container and open source activity at Amazon earlier this year. And his comment was, the default deployment mechanism in Amazon is containers. So when I look at your data and I see containers and cloud going in sync, yeah, that's how we see things. We're helping lots of customers in their overall adoption and this cloud native ecosystem is still, we're still in that Cambrian explosion of new projects, new opportunities. AI is a great workload for these type of technologies. So it's really becoming pervasive in the marketplace. And I feel like the cloud and containers go hand in hand so it's not surprising to see those two above the 40%. Look, there's nothing to say that, look, can I run my containers in my data center and not do the public cloud? Sure, but in the public cloud, the default is the container. And one of the hot discussions we've been having in this ecosystem for a number of years is edge computing. And of course, I want something that's small and lightweight and can do things really fast. A lot of times it's an AI workload out there and containers is a great fit at the edge too. So wherever it goes, containers is a good fit, which has been keeping my group at Red Hat pretty busy. So let's talk about some of those high level stats that we put together in preview for the event. So it's really around the adoption of open source software and Kubernetes. Here's a few fun facts. So according to the State of Enterprise Open Source Report, which was published by Red Hat, although it was based on a blind survey, nobody knew that Red Hat was initiating it. 80% of IT execs expect to increase their use of enterprise open source software. Now the CNCF community has currently more than 120,000 developers. That's insane when you think about that developer resource. 73% of organizations in the most recent CNCF annual survey are using Kubernetes. Now, despite the momentum, according to that same Red Hat survey, adoption barriers remain for some organizations. Stu, I'd love you to talk about this, specifically around skill sets. And then we've highlighted some of the other trends that we expect to see at the event around Stu. I'd love to, again, get your thoughts on the preview. You've done a number of these events. Automation, security, governance, governance at scale, edge deployments, which you just mentioned among others. Now, Kubernetes is eight years old, and I always hear people talking about this, something coming beyond Kubernetes, but it looks like we're just getting started. Yeah, Dave, it is still relatively early days. The CNCF survey, I think said, 96% of companies, when CNCF surveyed them last year were either deploying Kubernetes or had plans to deploy it. But when I talked to enterprises, nobody has said like, hey, we've got every group on board and all of our applications are on. It is a multi-year journey for most companies, and plenty of them, if you look at the general adoption of technology, we're still working through kind of that early majority. We've passed the chasm a couple of years ago. But to a point, you and I, we're talking about this ecosystem. There are plenty of people in this ecosystem that could care less about containers in Kubernetes. Lots of conversations at this show won't even talk about Kubernetes. You've got a big security group that's in there, you've got certain workloads, like we talked about AI and ML that are in there, and automation absolutely is playing a good role in what's going on here. So in some ways, Kubernetes kind of takes a backseat because it is table stakes at this point. So lots of people involved in it, lots of activity still going on. I mean, we're still at a cadence of three times a year now. We slowed it down from four times a year as an industry, but there's still lots of innovation happening, lots of adoption, and oh my gosh, Dave, I mean, there's just no shortage of new projects and new people getting involved. And what's phenomenal about it is there's end user practitioners that aren't just contributing, but many of the projects were spawned out of work by the likes of Intuit and Spotify and many others that created some of the projects that sit alongside or above the container orchestration itself. So before we talked about some of that, it's kind of interesting. It's like Kubernetes is the big dog, right? And it's kind of maturing after eight years, but it's still important. I want to share another data point that underscores the traction that containers generally are getting in Kubernetes specifically have. So this is data from the latest ETR survey and shows the spending breakdown for Kubernetes in the ETR data set. It's cut for respondents with 50 or more citations by the IT practitioners. That lime green is new adoptions. The forest green is spending 6% or more relative to last year. The gray is flat spending year on year. And those little pink bars, that's 6% or down spending, and the bright red is retirements. So they're leaving the platform. And the blue dots are net score, which is derived by subtracting the reds from the greens and the yellow dots are pervasiveness in the survey relative to the sector. So the big takeaway here is that there is virtually no red, essentially zero churn across all sectors, large companies, public companies, private firms, telcos, finance, insurance, et cetera. So again, sometimes I hear these things beyond Kubernetes. You've mentioned several, but it feels like Kubernetes is still a driving force, but a lot of other projects around Kubernetes, which we're gonna hear about at the show. Yeah, so Dave, first of all, there was for a number of years, like, oh wait, don't waste your time on containers because serverless is gonna rule the world. Well, serverless is now a little bit of a broader term. Can I do a serverless viewpoint for my developers that they don't need to think about the infrastructure but still have containers underneath it? Absolutely, so our friends at Amazon have a solution called Fargate. They're a proprietary offering to kind of hide that piece of it. And in the open source world, there's a project called Knative. I think it's the second or third Knative cons gonna happen at the CNCF. And even if you use this, I can still call things over on Lambda and use some of those functions. So we know Dave, IT is additive and nothing ever dominates the entire world and nothing ever dies. So we have a long runway of activity still to go on in containers and Kubernetes. We're always looking for what that next thing is and what's great about this ecosystem is most of it tends to be additive and plug into the pieces. There are certain tools that span beyond what can happen in the container world and aren't limited to it and there's others that are specific for it. And to talk about the industries, Dave, I love, we have a community event that we run that's gonna happen at KubeCon, it's called OpenShift Commons. And when you look at who's speaking there, oh, we've got Ford, Lockheed, Martin, University of Michigan and ING Bank all speaking there. So you look and it's like, okay, Coalite got automotive, I've got public sector, I've got university education and I've got finance. So there is not an industry that is not touched by this and the general wave of software adoption is the reason why, not just adoption, but the creation of new software is one of the differentiators for companies and that is the reason why I do containers isn't because it's some cool technology and Kubernetes is great to put on my resume but that it can actually accelerate my developers and help me create technology that makes me respond to my business and my ultimate end users. Well, as you know, we've been talking about the super cloud a lot and the Kubernetes is clearly an abler to super cloud but I wanted to go back. You and John Furrier have done so many of the KubeCons but go back to DockerCon before Kubernetes was even a thing and so you sort of saw this grow. I think there's what, how many projects are in CNCF now? I mean, hundreds. Hundreds, okay. And so will we hear things in Detroit at things like new projects like Argo and capabilities around Sigstore and things like that? Are you gonna hear a lot about that or is it just too much to cover? So I mean, the good news Dave is that the CNCF really is a good steward for this community and new things got in, get in. So there's so much going on with the existing projects that some of the new ones sometimes have a little bit of harder time making a little bit of buzz. One of the more interesting ones is a project that's been around for a while that I think back to the first couple of KubeCons that John and I did, Service Mesh and Istio which was created by Google but lived under basically a, I guess you would say a Google dominated governance for a number of years is now finally under the CNCF foundation. So I talked to a number of companies over the years and definitely many of the contributors over the years that didn't love that it was a Google run thing and now it is finally part. So just like Kubernetes is, we have Istio and also Knative that I mentioned before also came out of Google and those are all in the CNCF. So will there be new projects? Yes, the CNCF is sometimes they do matchmaking so in some of the observability space there were a couple of projects that they said, hey, maybe you can go merge down the road and they ended up doing that. So there's still, you look at all these projects and if I was an end user saying, oh my God, there is so much change and so many projects, I can't spend the time and the effort to learn about all of these and that's one of the challenges and something obviously at Red Hat, we spend a lot of time figuring out, not to make winners but which are the things that customers need, where can we help make them run in production for our customers and help bring some stability and a little bit of security for the overall ecosystem? Well, speaking of security, security and skill sets, we've talked about those two things and they sort of go hand in hand. When I go to security events, I mean, we're at Reinforce last summer, we were just recently at the CrowdStrike event, a lot of the discussion is sort of best practice because it's so complicated and I presume you're going to hear a lot of that here because security, securing containers now, the whole shift left thing and shield right is a complicated matter, especially when you saw with the earlier data from the Red Hat survey, the gaps are around skill sets, people don't have the skills, so what should we expect to hear a lot about that, sort of how to take advantage of some of these new capabilities? Yeah, Dave, absolutely. So one of the conversations going on in the community right now is has DevOps maybe played out as we expect to see it, there's a newer term called platform engineering and how much do I need to do there? Something that I know your team's written a lot about, Dave, is how much do you need to know versus what can you shift to just a platform or a service that I can consume? I've talked a number of times with you since I've been at Red Hat about the cloud services that we offer. So you wanna use our offering in the public cloud, our first recommendation is, hey, we've got cloud services, how much Kubernetes do you really want to learn versus you wanna do what you can build on top of it, modernize the pieces and have less running the plumbing and electric and more taking advantage of the technologies there. So that's a big thing that we've seen, we've got a big SRE team that can manage that for you so that you have to spend less time worrying about what really is undifferentiated to heavy lifting and spend more time on what's important to your business and your customers. And that's through a managed service? Yeah, absolutely. It's really simplified, and that whole space is just taken up. All right, Stu, I'll give you the final word. What are you excited about for this upcoming event? Detroit, interesting choice of venue. Yeah, look, first of all, Easy flight. I've never been to Detroit, so I'm willing to give it a shot and hopefully, you know... Awesome airport. There's some good things there to learn. The show itself is really a choose your own adventure because there's so much going on. The main show of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon is Wednesday through Friday, but a lot of the really interesting stuff happens on Monday and Tuesday. So we talked about things like OpenShift Commons in the security space. There's CloudNative Security Day, which is actually two days, and a SIG Store event. There's a get-off show. There's, you know, K-Native Day. There's so many things that if you wanna go deep on a topic, you can go spend like a workshop. And some of those you can get hands on too. And then at the show itself, there's so much, and again, you can learn from your peers. So it was good to see. We had during the pandemic, it tilted a little bit more vendor heavy because I think most practitioners were pretty busy focused on what they could work on and less, okay, hey, I'm gonna put together a presentation and maybe I'm restricted at going to a show. We definitely saw that last year when I went to LA. I was disappointed how few customer sessions there were. It's back. When I go look through the schedule now, there's way more end users sharing their stories and it's phenomenal to see that. And the hallway track, Dave, I didn't go to Valencia, but I hear it was really hoppin', felt way more like it was pre-pandemic. And while there's a few people that probably won't come because Detroit, we think there's what we've heard and what I've heard from the CNCF team is they are expecting a sizable group up there. I know a lot of the hotels right near where it's being held are all sold out. So it should be a lot of fun, good thing. I'm speaking on an edge panel. First time I get to be a speaker at the show, Dave. It's kind of interesting to be a little bit of a different role at the show. Yeah, Detroit is super convenient. As I said, awesome airport, Stu. Good luck at the show. So it's a full week. The Cube will be there for three days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Thanks for coming back. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Sorry, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday is the Cube, right. So thank you for that. Also, and no ties from the hosts. No ties, only hoodies. All right, Stu, thanks. Appreciate you coming in. And thank you for watching this preview of KubeCon plus CloudNativeCon with Atstu, which again starts the 24th of October, three days of broadcasting. Go to thecube.net and you can see all the action. We'll see you there.