 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studio for a CUBE conversation. The crazy conference schedule is just about ready to break over our heads, but we still have a little time to do CUBE conversations before we hit the road. But one show we're doing this summer that we've never done before is CUBECon, CloudNativeCon. I got to get all the words that used to be CloudNative, now CUBECon's up front. But we're going to go to the European show first time ever. It's May 2nd to 4th at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. We're really excited to go because obviously a ton of activity around containers and CUBECon and Kubernetes. And we're excited to have a little preview of the show with two folks. We've got Wendy Cardi. She is the Senior Director, CloudNative Applications Marketing for VMware. Welcome. Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. And also giving us a little preview on her keynote. Maybe we can get something out of her, I don't know. Aparna Sinha, she is a Group Product Manager for Kubernetes and Google's Kubernetes Engine at Google, long title. Just see the Kubernetes shirt. That's all we need to see. Welcome. Thank you. Glad to be here. Absolutely. So for the folks that have not been to CUBECon before, let's go through some of the basics. How big is it? Who can they expect to be there? Do you have the fancy letter for them to give to their boss to get out of work for a week? It's going to give us the basics. Yeah, this is going to be our biggest event in Europe yet. So we're expecting actually 4,000 plus people. We expect that it'll be sold out. So folks should register early. And who should go? Actually, it tends to be a mix of developers who want to contribute to the project, as well as users. I think in Austin, which was our last conference, there was about 50-50 mix of folks that were using Kubernetes. So it's a really great place to meet others that are using the software. Are there a couple of new themes this year? Or is it just kind of generic training and moving the platform along? Or are there some big announcements that we can expect? Yeah, I expect some big announcements. And I expect that there will be a couple of themes around security, around serverless. That's a major area. And around developer experience. And of course, machine learning. So those are some of the things that are top of mind for the community. And probably Server Smash will be another round of hot topics this year as well. Which one? Server Smash. So what is that? It's a project that is part of CNCF around Envoy. And it's essentially the notion of having a stack of services that provide everything from connectivity to API access for microservices. I ask, because we had an old customer of service measuring that got bought by some services companies. That's a little bit of a case. I think the term is an old term. So obviously, when you start using Kubernetes, it's really around breaking down your applications and having microservices. You get a proliferation of microservices. Service Smash essentially enables you to manage those. So set up security and communication between those services and then manage them at scale. So that's really what a Service Smash is. And Envoy is at the heart of that. And then there's a project called Istio. There will definitely be, and there was a lot of discussion around that at KubeCon in Austin. And there'll be some training before the conference, so this time. There's several co-located events. There'll be some training beforehand, so for folks that want to learn. They're new to Kubernetes. They're new to the concept of Service Smash. I would recommend coming a day early or two days early, 30th and first. There's a number of different workshops. It's pretty amazing, just the growth and the momentum of containers and serverless. And obviously, a Docker kind of came out of nowhere a couple, three, four years ago. And then Kubernetes really kind of seemed to jump on the scene in terms of, please, me paying attention a couple, two, three years ago. And it's phenomenal. And I even went just to check it out. Google's putting on all these little development workshops. This one was at Santa Clara Convention Center probably a month ago that I went down. And the place was packed, packed. And it was, you know, get out your laptop, get out your notes, and let's start going through and developing applications and really learning. I mean, why does this momentum continue to grow so strongly? From what we see, we have enterprises that are in the journey of digitally kind of going on the digital transformation. And to drive that faster business model, they need technologies like Cloud Native to help them with faster development, to help them with driving new innovations in their application. And I think that that's what we see in the Kubernetes community. I think we see developers and contributors coming to conferences like KubeCon, especially to really learn from each other and find out what are some of the latest innovations in this space and how they can bring that back into their companies to drive faster development and at the end of it, essentially driving better services, better experience for their end users as well. And it's really been interesting watching the VMware story, particularly because, you know, people were a little confused when the merger happened with Dell and EMC and how is that going to affect Pat and VMware? And yet, you know, the ecosystem is super vibrant. We do VMworld every single year. It's one of our biggest shows. The thing is packed with a really excited ecosystem. Obviously, you guys made big moves with Amazon last year, making moves with Google and Kubernetes, and it was funny. People were concerned a couple of years it's almost this rebirth of what's going on at VMworld and this adoption of really public health technologies as well as open source technologies. Has the culture changed inside? Is this something that you guys figured you have to do or was it always there under the covers and maybe we just weren't paying enough attention? Yeah, I think it was always there. I think, you know, we are very close to the transformation and the journey that our customers are on. And obviously, you know, the customers themselves have a full stack solution deployed in their environment today. Many of them are using FeSphere or FeSan or NSX be realized portfolio to build their business and they're looking at how to transform and add containers as another layer on top of their software defined data center to essentially bring some of these newer technologies into their environment as well. And Aparna, Google's been sharing open source stuff for a while even back to early Hadoop days. So, you know, as big and powerful as a company that it is and as much as scale is such an important piece of the competitive advantage it's wild that you guys are opening things up and really embracing an open source developer kind of ethos to acknowledge as smart as you are, as big as you are, as much power as you have. You don't have all the smartest people inside the four walls at Google. Well, Google has always contributed to open source. I think we have a very long and rich history of sharing software and, you know, really doing joint development. So, Android is open source, Chromium is open source, TensorFlow is open source and Kubernetes really is, I think, different in that sense and that there's a thriving community around it and Google's been very, very active and I've been very active personally in developing that community and in engaging in the project. And I think that goes back to what you were saying about, you know, the meetups. There are several meetups all around so it's not just in one location, I think globally. And I think the reason it's so diverse and so many people are involved is because it does lead to, you know, Kubernetes enables a benefit that is meaningful in enterprises large and small where you can start rolling out applications multiple times a day. And it just gives developers that productivity. It's very accessible. And over the years, especially as the project has matured, it's become, you know, it's like my daughter or my son can go and they can use it. It's really easy to use. So it's not hard to pick up either. And it's also interesting because we do a lot of shows, as you know, the cube goes to a ton of shows and everybody wants the attention of the developer. If they haven't had it traditionally, right? Everybody's got a developer track, a developer this, a developer that. Everybody wants to get to developers, very competitive. As a developer, you have a lot of options of where you want to spend your time. But really, especially Google kind of comes at it and always has development first, right? It's kind of developer first. So I'm curious, you talked about the community that's going to be gathered in Denmark and you've got contributors as well as users and contributors all kind of blended together, not really forced together, but coming together around this universal gravity that is Kubernetes. What does that enable that you don't get if you're traditionally either a developer show or, you know, kind of a user show? Yes, I think that's really important. And one of the beautiful things about open source is that you get what you see and you can actually change it and own it. And it's not some other entity that owns it. So we'll have many companies presenting. So bookings.com, Spotify, New York Times, eBay, Lyft. These are all companies that are using Kubernetes and also contributing to Kubernetes. And so it's a nice virtuous cycle. And what you get from that is you're in touch, you're in constant touch with your users. So a lot of them actually use Google Kubernetes engine and I know what they're looking for. And so we can then shape the project and shape the product accordingly. And then the other just kind of question I always think is interesting when you're working in with open source projects and contributors, right? A lot of times it's a big part of whom they are, especially if they're a good contributor, you know, it's part of their identity. It's part of the way they connect with their community. But they got to get work done for the company too. So in terms of kind of managing in the development world with contributing people, you know, people contributing to open source projects as well as you got to get your work done that we're working on too. How do you manage that? How is, you know, kind of best practices for having a vibrant open source contributing staff that's also being very productive and getting their day job done? Yeah, I think engineers love to learn from other engineers and developers. And I think that community is the reason why they come. And, you know, it's not only at conferences when everybody gets together at a conference like KUKON, but there's a tremendous amount of activity day-to-day offline over conference calls like Zoom and, you know, amount of some of the calls that Aparna is on. And it's amazing, you have people, you know, from all over the world, developers from everywhere who will meet on a weekly basis and they'll slack each other. And I think that that sense of community, that, you know, sharing of information and really learning some of the best practices and learning what others have done is why people come. And it's great to have a conference like KUKON where people can finally come together and meet in person. And, you know, just kind of just enjoy each other's presence and communicate face-to-face and really connect in person. So, you know, we're very excited about KUKON and kind of being part of that energy, that enthusiasm that is in the community. It's interesting, the slack, the kind of cross-enterprise slack phenomenon, which I hadn't been really exposed to until a couple of projects we got involved with. And I got invited into these other companies, Slack, which I like, wow, I didn't really know that that was a thing to open up that wall in between the two companies and enable a very similar type of interaction and engagement that I have with my peers inside the walls as I do with now my peers outside the wall. So that's a pretty interesting twist in enabling these tools to build community outside of your own company. Yes, it is, and Slack is a great tool for that. But even aside from the tooling, I think that, you know, the pace of software innovation is very, very fast these days. And if you stay within the walls of your company, you miss out on so much innovation that is available. And I totally agree with Wendy, you know, contributors and developers in general, they like to know what's next and they like to contribute to what's next. And you said you went to some of the meetups so you can sort of see that you're actually benefiting from that, from both contributing as well as from meeting with and absorbing what others are doing. You're directly benefiting your company, you're directly benefiting in your own job because you're innovating. Right, okay, so before we let you go, any particular session or something is happening at the show in Denmark that either you're super excited about or maybe is a little bit, you know, kind of flying underneath the radar that people should be aware of that maybe they didn't think to go to that type of session. Well, I think there are a variety of just, you know, excellent sessions at the KubeCon that's coming up, you know, there are user topics. Our partner talked about some of the companies that will be there to share their experience. I've seen talks about communities and contributors and how they can contribute and build a community. I think there are sick updates that I think would be very informative. And I also think that, you know, there are a lot of announcements that will be made at the event as well. So I think that's exciting for everybody to see the new innovations that's coming out that impact the community, the users, and in general the ecosystem as well. Yeah, yeah, so if I were to lay it out, I mean, definitely folks should register early because it's going to sell out. There were a thousand plus submissions and 125 talks have been accepted. There are 31 Google talks. There's all manner of content. I would suggest users go a little bit early if they want to get the hands-on training in the workshops. And then as Wendy mentioned, I think on May 2nd, there's a contributor summit, which is actually, that's the thing that's flying under the radar. There's, it's a free event. And if you want to learn how to contribute to Kubernetes, that's where a lot of the training will be. And the SIGs, the special interest groups in the community, each of them will be giving an introduction to what they do. So it's a really good event to meet maintainers, meet contributors, become one yourself. And then in terms of the agenda, I think I mentioned the topics. I'm giving a keynote. I think I'm giving the opening keynote there. It'll be about developer experience because that's a big deal that we're working on in Kubernetes. And I think there's many new innovations in improving the developer experience with Kubernetes. I'll also be giving an overall project update. And then some of the other keynotes, there's a keynote on Kubeflow, which is a machine learning framework on top of Kubernetes. And then there's a series of talks on security and how to run securely in containers. All right, well, I think we're almost ready. We've got to register, we've got to study up and make a couple of contributions before we head in over there, right? Absolutely. All right, Wendy, thanks for taking a few minutes and look forward to seeing you across the pond. In a month or so, it's May 2nd through 4th in Denmark at the Bella Center Copenhagen Denmark. Thanks again for stopping by. Thank you. Thank you. All right, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Palo Alto. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.