 Hey guys, welcome back to Detroit, Michigan. TheCube is live at KubeCon, by NativeCon 2022. You might notice something really unique here. Lisa Martin with our newest co-host of theCube, Savannah Beers and Savannah. It's great to see you. It's so good to be here with you. I know, I know. We have a great segment coming up. I always love talking, a couple of things, cars. One, two, with companies that have been around for a hundred plus years and how they've actually transformed. Ford is here. You have a great story about how you... Ford brought me to Detroit the first time. I was here at the North American International Auto Show. Some of you may be familiar and the fine folks from Ford brought me out to commentate just like this as they were announcing the Ford Bronco. Oh wow. Which I am still lusting after. You don't have one yet? For the record. No, I don't have one. My next car has gotta be an EV. Although ironically, there's a Ford EV right behind us here on set today. I know, I know. Which we were both just contemplating before we went live. It's really shiny. Yeah, I gotta check it out. Yeah, we'll do that. Well, please welcome our two guests from Ford. Satish Parana, Miss here, the technical leader of Cloud and Rebecca Riss, Principal Architect Developer Relations. We are so excited to have you guys on the program. Thanks for joining us. Clearly. Thank you for having us. I love your Ford enthusiasts. Yeah, that's awesome. I drive a Ford. Awesome, thank you. I can only say that's one car company here. That's great. Yes, that's great. Well, thank you for your business. Absolutely. So, Satish, talk to us a little bit about, I think, I mean, I think of Cloud as a car company but it seems like it's a technology company that makes cars. Yes. Talk to us about Ford as a cloud first technology driven company and then we're going to talk about what you're doing with Red Hat and Boston University. Yeah, I'm like everything that all these cars that you're seeing beautiful right behind us, it's all built around and with technology, right? So there's so much code. There's so much code goes into these cars these days. It's probably, it's mind boggling to think that probably your iPhones might be having less code as opposed to these cars. Everything from control systems, everything is code. We don't do any more clay models. Everything is done digital, 3D, virtual reality and all that stuff. So all that takes code. All of that takes technology. And we have been in that journey for last since 2016 when we started our first mobile app and all that stuff. And off late we have been like heavily invested in Google, moving a lot of these experiences, data acquisition systems, AIMM modeling for like all the autonomous cars, it's all technology. And like from the day it is conceived to the day it is marketed to the day when you show up for a servicing and hopefully soon how you can buy and provide feedback to us is all technology that drives all of this stuff. So it's amazing for us to see everything that we immerse ourselves in the technology. There is a real life thing that we can see what we all do for a bit that, right, so. Yes, we're only sorry that our audience can't actually see the car but we'll get some B-roll for you later on. Rebecca, talk a little bit about your role. Here we are at KubeCon. Savannah and I and John were talking when we went live this morning that this is huge, that the show floor is massive, a lot bigger than last year. The collaboration and the spirit of the community is not only alive and well as we heard in the keynote this morning, it's thriving. Talk about developer relations at Ford and what you are helping to drive in your role. Yeah, so my team is all about helping developers work faster with different platforms that my team curates and produces so that they don't, so our developers don't have to deal with all of the details of setting up their environments to actually code. And we have really great people, kind of the top software developers and the company are part of my team to produce those products that other people can use and accelerate their development. And we have a great relationship with the developers and the company and outside with the different vendor relationships that we have to make sure that we're always producing the next platform with the next tech stack that our developers will want to continue to use to produce the really great products that we are all about making at Ford. Let's dig in there a little bit because I'm curious and I suspect you both had something to do with it. How did you approach your cloud native transformation and how do you evaluate new technologies for the team? It's sometimes, many a times I would say it's like dog-fooding, I'm like experimentation. Yeah, isn't anything an innovation. Yeah, a lot of experimentation we started over as I said the cloud native journey back in 2016 with Cloud Foundry and technologies around that. Soon realized that there was like a lot of buzz around that time, 12 factor was a thing, stateless was a thing, and then all those stateless, the stateful needs to drive the stateless. So where do we do that thing? And the next logical iteration was Kubernetes was bursting upon the scene at that time. So we started doing a lot of experimentation with that. Like the Kool-Aid, I just got a Kubernetes scene. Exactly, right, so the question is like, why can we do, I think we were like crazy enough to say that Kubernetes people were talking about serverless or 12 factor on Kubernetes. We were crazy enough to do stateful on Kubernetes and we've been doing it successfully for five years. So it's a lot about experimentation. I think good chunk of experiments that we do do not yield the results that we get, but many a times some of them are like gangbusters. Like other aspects that we've been doing off late is like partnering with Becky and rest of the organization, right? Because they are the people who are like closest to the developers. We are somewhat behind the scenes doing some things, but it is Becky and rest of the architecture teams who are actually front and center with the customers, right? So it is the collaborative effort that we've been working through the past few years that has been really, really been useful and coming around and helping us to make some of these products really beautiful. Yeah, well you make a lot of beautiful products. I think we've all seen them. Something that I think is really interesting and part of why I was so excited for this interview and kind of nudged John out was because you've been, Ford has been investing in technology in a committed way for decades and I don't think most people are aware of that. When I originally came out to Dearborn, I learned that you've had a head of VR who happens to be a female for what it's worth, Elizabeth. She's been running VR for you for two and a half decades or 25 years. That is an impressive commitment. What is that like from a culture perspective inside of Ford? What is the attitude around innovation and technology? So I've been a longtime Ford employee. I just celebrated my 29th year. Oh, wow. Congratulations! Wow, congrats, that's a huge deal. It's a huge deal. I'm so proud of my career and all that Ford has brought to me. And it's just a testament. I have many colleagues like me who've been there for their whole career or have done other things and come to Ford and then spent another 20 years with us because we foster the culture that makes you want to stay. We have development programs to allow you to upscale and change your role and learn new things and play with the new technologies that people are interested in doing and really make an impact to our community of developers at Ford or the company itself and the results that we're delivering. So to have that culture for so many years that people really love to work, they love to work with the people that they're working with, they love to stay engaged and they love the fact that you can have many different careers within the same umbrella which we call the Blue Oval. And that's really why I've been there for so long. I think I probably have 13 very unique and different jobs along the way. It's as if I left and shopped around my skills elsewhere but I didn't ever have to leave the company. It's been fabulous. The cultural change and adoption of embracing modern technology, cloud-native automotive software is impressive because a lot of history companies, you guys have been there a long time, have challenges with that because it's really hard to get an entire moving, you'll call it the Blue Oval, to change and adapt and be willing to experiment. So that is impressive. Talk about, you go by Becky, yes I'll call you Becky. The developer culture in terms of, the developers really being at the center of the nucleus of influencing the direction in which the company's going. I imagine that they probably are fairly influential. Yeah, so I had a very, one of the unique positions I held was the culture change for our department, Information Technology in 2016. As the teach was involved with moving us to the cloud, I was responsible. You really are the transformation team. This is beautiful, I love this. We've got the right people in this show. We do. I was responsible for changing the culture to orient our employees to pay attention to what do we want to create for tomorrow? What are the kind of skills we need to trust each other to move quickly? And that was completely unique. Like I had been in the trenches delivering software before that and then plucked out because they wanted someone who had authentic experience with our development team to be that voice. And it was such a great investment that Ford continues to do is invest in our culture transformation because with each step forward that we do, we have to refine what our priorities are and you do that through culture transformation and culture management. And that's been, I think, really the key to our successful pivots that we've made over the last six years that we've been able to continue to refine and hone where we really want to go through that culture movement. Absolutely, I think if I could add another spotlight to it, it's like the biggest thing about Ford has been among various startup like culture. Right, so the idea is that we encourage people to think outside the box. Right, so it's- Or outside the oval? Right, outside the oval as well, absolutely, right? So the question is like you can experiment with various things, new technologies and you will get all the leadership support to go along with it. I think that is very important and like we can be in the trenches and talk about all of these nice little things but who the heck would have thought that Kubernetes was announced in 2015? In late 2016, we have early dev of Kubernetes clusters already running. 2017, we are live with workloads on Kubernetes and it all- Early adopters over here. Yeah, I'm like all of this thing doesn't happen without a lot of foresight and support from the leadership but it's also the grass-root efforts that is encouraged all along to be on the front end of all of these things and try different things. Some of may not work, but that's okay. But how do we know we are doing something if you're not failing? We have to fail in order to do something, right? So I think that's been a great thing that is encouraged very often and otherwise I will not be doing, I have done a whole bunch of stuff at Ford without that kind of ability to support and have an appetite for some of those things would not have been here at all. I always say failure is not a bad F word. But what you're talking about there is kind of like driving this flywheel of experimentation. You have to have the right culture and the mindset to do that try, fail, move on, learn, iterate, go. You guys have a great partnership with Red Hat and Boston University. You're speaking about that later today. Unpack that for us. What, from a technical perspective, what are you doing? Resulting in. Yeah, I think the biggest thing as Becky was talking about as during this transformation journey, this lot has changed in very small amount of time. So we have been traditionally been like, hey, here's a spreadsheet of things I need you to deliver for me. To hear is a thing of things, is a catalog of things you can get it today and be successful with that. That is frightening to several of our developers. The goal, one of the things that we've been working with, Cube by Example, Red Hat and all the thing is that how can we lower the bar for the developers, right? Kubernetes is great. It's also a wall of yaml. It's extremely complex. Number one complaint. The question is, how can I zero on? I'm like, if you go back to things like when we talk about in cars with human machine interfaces, which parts do I need to know? Here's the steering wheel, here's the gas pedal, or here's the brake. As long as you know these two, three different things, you should be fairly be okay to drive those things, right? So the idea of some of the things with enablement thing we are trying to do is like reduce that barrier. Reduce, lower the bar so that more people can participate in it. One of the ways that you did that was Cube by Example, right? Can you tell us a little bit more about that as you finish this answer? Yeah, I think the biggest thing with Cube by Example is like Cube by Example gives you the small bite-size things about Kubernetes, right? But what we wanted to do is that we wanted to reinforce that learning by turning it into a real-world living example app. We took part in four. We said, hey, what does it look like? How do I make sure that it is highly available? How do I make sure that it is secure? Here is an example, YAML of it, that you can literally verbatim copy and paste into your editor and click Run. And then you will get an instant gratification feedback loop page. I was going to say, they feel like you're learning too. Yes, right? So the idea would be is like, and then instead of giving you just a boring prose text to read, we actually drop links to a relevant blog post saying that, hey, you can just go there. And that has been inspirational in terms of like, and reinforcing the learning. So that has been where we started working with Boston University, Red Hat, and the community around all of that stuff. Talk a little bit about, Becky, about some of the business outcomes. You mentioned things like upskilling the workforce, which is really nice to hear that there's such a big focus on it. But I imagine, too, there's more participation in the community, but also from an customer perspective. Obviously, everything Ford's doing is to serve the end customers. How does this help the end customer have that experience that they really, these days, demand with patience being something that I think is gone because of the pandemic? Right, right. So one of the things that my team does is we create the platforms that help accelerate developers to be successful. And it helps educate them more quickly on appropriate use of the platforms and helps them by adopting the platforms to be more secure, which inherently lead to the better results for our end customers because their data is secure, because the products that they have are well created and they're tested thoroughly. So we catch all those things earlier in the cycle by using these platforms that we help curate and produce. And that's really important because, like you had mentioned, the steep learning curve associated with Kubernetes, right? So my team is able to kind of help with that abstraction so that we solve kind of the higher complex problems for them so that developers can move faster. And then we focus our education on what's important for them. We use things like Cube by example as a source instead of creating that content ourselves, right? We're able to point them to that so it's great that there's that community and we're definitely involved with that. But that's so important to help our developers be successful in moving as quickly as they want and not having 20,000 people solve the same problems each individually. You don't need to. And sometimes differently. Exactly, exactly. The water level rises together and Ford is definitely a company that illustrates that. My example, yeah. Yeah, I'm like, we can't make a better round wheel, right? So we have to build upon what we have been, already been built ahead of us. And I think a lot of it is also about how can we give back and participate in the community, right? So I think that is paramount for us as like, here we are in Detroit. So we're trying to recruit and show people that everything that we do is not just old car and sheet metal and everything and all right? There's a lot of tech goes on. Sometimes it is really, really cool to do that. And biggest thing for us is like, how can we involve our community of developers sooner, earlier, faster without actually encumbering them and saying that, hey, here is a book. Go master it. We'll talk two months later. So I think that has been on the journey. I think that has been a biggest uphill challenge for us is that how can we actually democratize all of this, thanks for everybody. Yeah, well no one better to try than you. What's the spec? We can only try and hope everything goes turn, turn well, right? Hey, you know, as long as there's room for the bumpers on the lane for if you fail, it sounds like you're driving the program in the right direction. Closing question for you, what's next? Is electric the future? Is Kubernetes the future? What's Ford all in on right now looking forward? Data is the king, right? So data is a new currency. We use that for several things to improve the cars, improve the quality, autonomous driving. Is level five driving here? Maybe, we'll see. But we're all working towards it, right? So machine learning, AI, feedback. How do you actually post-sale experience, for example? So all of these are all areas that we are working to. We are, may not be getting like Kubernetes in a car, but we are putting Kubernetes in plants. Like you order a Maki or you order a Bronco. You see that here's where in the assembly line your car is, it's taking pictures. It's actually taking pictures on Kubernetes platform. That's pretty cool. And it is treating for you on the Twitter and the social media platform. So there's a lot of that. So it is real and we are doing it. We need more help. A lot of the community efforts that we are seeing and a lot of the innovation that is happening on the floor here, it's phenomenal. The question is how we can incorporate those things into our workflows. Yeah. Well, you have the right audience for that here. You also have the right attitude, the right appetite and the right foundation. Becky, last question for you. Top three takeaways from your talk today. If you're talking to the developer community, you want to inspire, come work for us. What would you say? If you're ready to invest in yourself and upskill and be part of something that is pretty remarkable, come work for us. We have many, many different technical career paths that you can follow. We invest in our employees. When you master something, it's time for you to move on. We have career growth for you. It's been a wonderful gift to me and my family and encourage everyone to check us out, careers.forward.com or stop by our booth if you're happen to be here in person. We have our curated job openings that are specific for this community available. Absolutely, yeah. Love it, perfect clothes, nailed pitch there. I'm sure you're all going to check out their job page. Exactly. And what you talked about, the developer experience, the customer experience are inexorably linked and you guys are really focused on that. Congratulations on all the work that you've done. We got to go get a selfie with that car, girl. Yes, we do. We got to show them, we got to show the audience what it looks like on the inside too. We'll do a little IG video. Absolutely. We will show you that for our guests and my co-host Savannah Peterson, Lisa Martin here, live in Detroit with theCUBE at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2022. The one and only John Furrier, who you know gets FOMO, is going to be back with me next, so stick around.