 Alessandro thank you so much for joining us in our Audi while we drive around Amsterdam for our little car interviews. Do you want to tell us a little bit about you know who you are and maybe some of your background? Yeah of course thanks it's my first car interview so there's a fish for everything. I'm Italian and I'm from the south of Italy and I moved to Amsterdam 20 years ago to get my PhD in chemistry of all things of course so I have a background in science and I'm a big science nerd and I also been around open source for a long time I was part of the Linux user group in my own town and been doing I remember installing Linux in 1999 those kind of things. Then I moved and I finished my PhD and then I reinvent myself as an IT professional okay all right and never since I never looked back it was a great decision right and I'm here now and since 10 years really I've been organizing tech communities meetups okay in Amsterdam started with DevOps days uh-huh 10 years ago yeah and DevOps wasn't quite so well known no it was the a year after the first DevOps days in Ghent yeah and then I quite like it like it's my thing the community is really what drives me like seeing people connecting to each other and being happy it was absolutely my my first the thing that I do best and I think that I enjoy the most and from there I move on to different communities I did OpenStack for a while joined Red Hat and then eventually I joined the I founded the Kubernetes Meetup in Amsterdam and that's where I am now I enjoy it so much that I can I don't want to stop so I have to ask because I'll tell you why in a minute but what kind of chemistry were you doing so I was a synthetic and spectroscopy okay yeah it was my stepfather was organic chemistry and did mostly fmri and you know spectroscopy yeah so that's why I had to ask it's fascinating I was doing ultra-fast lasers spectroscopy so I spent most of four years in a dark room with mirrors and lasers and really bright lights and I also like I mean now I like a lot techno music so also about DevOps days it's amusing because I thought it was like 10 years ago maybe it was more recent than that because it wasn't one of the earliest earliest but I actually co-founded the DevOps days in Boston yes so but it was yeah it was interesting it was the first embryo of a community of conferences yeah so united by the fact that we love the technology right but we love even more to be to be well and what I loved about what DevOps days really brought to the table that nobody else had really done was like a template and you know here here is a template for running your conference yeah you know here's all the things you need you need somebody doing vendor stuff here's how to build the website here's some promotion for it was just it was just so well organized yeah and I was so impressed you gotta give it to Patrick the one yeah yeah the you know group of DevOps pioneers right to start this whole thing it's amazing it's still going on yeah I did it for three four years yeah I did the same because you know it's I prefer the air meritous title to any sort of conference I start you know because there are a lot of work yeah we're still friends with these guys I mean they're amazing they help us a lot yeah they started with kubernetes community days after them uh-huh so it's like it's a you know I'm sort of the Netherlands it's 18 million people uh-huh we know each other I mean it's just uh just living in a big village oh interesting that's cool you see the same people all over the place and is it really neighborhoody or like why why does that quite neighborhood there are a few big events and big meetups so it's nice it's like being part of a community you're right so you see the same people you start to establish bonds right so it's it's good it's a very compact country and in the end it's it's very technological intensive yeah like all all big companies they're doing very cool interesting stuff that's why kubernetes and cloud native is so popular here yeah interesting yeah big communities of developers uh big companies investing so it's it's a lovely place yeah it's actually it's funny I was just having conversation with a prospective student too because I teach at Boston University now um and uh you know Boston University 30 000ish students and I was commenting on how how weird it is because it really does like they do a really good job of feel of making it feel like it's not anywhere near that big it has all these like sub-communities and clubs and sports and all stuff and and you really can find a group of people that I like hang out with which I like I'm I'm very impressed with doing that at you know like a 30 000 scale um and I find that you know it's a difficult thing to pull off um so it's it's always kind of cool when you can find it anywhere that's why I think kubernetes 10 000 people I think we we reach you know the ceiling that's it let's let's not grow more than this right so right uh yeah it's it's a big conference um so what was the thing that you were really hoping to see or what did you hear about or you know this this particular conference that was super interesting so this was a cathartic moment right so in 2020 kubernetes was supposed to come to amsterdam right so for me it was yeah ah finally I can be the chaperone I can show people around I was so proud of everybody was very really excited about it that was just a few weeks before we we had to close everything for for for covid so and then for three years we just waited right it was a it was a thing and then and now it's finally happening and it's you know when you have a dream you you really I think it's gonna be like this and then yeah it's even better than you expect right that's awesome yeah no I I could totally see why that would be you know I mean I've really enjoyed it you know I haven't I haven't actually been to the conference very much but you know because I've been driving around for years but but I'm hoping I'll have most of tomorrow free and maybe be able to go to some talks but it's been you know I I really like this city it's funny my my biggest exposure was because you know a lot of a lot of flights crossed through Amsterdam Amsterdam also often has a lot of weather so I got stuck here for three days because my flights got canceled you know and but I was with like a colleague and it was great I was like you know of all the places to get trapped for three days you know I'm like yeah I'll take it so yeah I've been doing a lot the very nature of the Netherlands and Amsterdam is one of trading it's not coincidental that we're the biggest internet exchange in Europe oh yeah all the all the gaming servers all the gaming company put their servers in Amsterdam because the latency is the lowest you can get right and that's what they do that they are at the center of a big trading routes and yeah and you can tell I mean so these people they really know how to interact with foreigners right so I hope everybody was feeling welcome here there's a very simple transportation right in general it's very very easy to live yeah I mean I went last night kind of last minute to finally get a metro pass because I just hadn't had a chance to get one yet and I think it took me you know like 15 seconds to get a four-day metro pass I was like Zach I was like great this is easy but it's interesting that you say that because you know in India Hyderabad is also traditionally a big trading center but it is now also a big tech hub yeah and I wonder if there's kind of some sort of correlation there they must be there must be yeah uh yeah I never really thought about it um but uh it's kind of you know interesting um so you're now at solo right yeah yeah it was a big how long yeah how long have you been there oh just for months oh wow okay after six years at Microsoft which I absolutely love every minute of it okay what were you doing at Microsoft I was a software engineer so like like inside engineering like building stuff yeah we were part of a team that is it's more like a customer customer phasing engineering oh okay yeah we were working with big customers and we were in big projects so really interesting you see production workloads you can really tell um but on the other end on the other side we were also interacting with engineering a lot I was there for six years I've seen AKS being created from nothing you know right the first container platform on Azure it was it was instructive I learned a lot and I'm glad I was there at that moment yeah and it's a great culture amazing people so I didn't left because I didn't like it I left because I needed a new challenge right and I was really inspired by the leadership at the solo the story that the the technical product fit was amazing that its service mesh I think is what Kubernetes felt like a few years ago was a lot of innovation they strived you to provide the best value and right the new cool things are happening there a dpf and and solo ticks all the box I mean and is always there when when there's a technical challenge to right to fix so that's that's why I joined so yeah and it's nice to be in a 200 ish organization right right talk to everybody it's yeah I really like uh I like startups you know um it's actually funny that you brought up about Microsoft um we actually have two people that I've uh kind of brought in to be instructors at uh Boston University of so some of our classes are focused around students doing software projects for like third parties and for those classes we try to get industry people to teach them um and so but that kind of means it falls to me to kind of make sure they know things like how to grade and stuff like that um and but two of them are from both from Microsoft and it's been really neat that um Microsoft actually um encourages them to participate in like teaching at university they give them like time off and stuff I thought it was a really cool like feature I had no idea it's a place like that yeah so they uh they encourage you to contribute to open source there's a big open source program office or it's part of this open source movement within Microsoft and it was and it's still and it's not just a facade it's really like a really really understand yeah open source and they they they know what is right maybe they don't do it all the time what is right because of course it's a slow-moving human right so but they do understand they they get open source that's why I joined I mean people well were asking me questions because I'm I'm a hardcore open source enthusiasts I'm a zealot right so for me open source is the way right so and when I joined Microsoft people were wondering what got into me what were you thinking but uh but yeah it's um um I I cherish my time and myself I hope maybe well I'll be back well I will say um like I you know very suspicious of the move towards open source by Microsoft until I read um Satya's uh autobiography and I was like okay you know I I think they get it like you know it's like maybe the whole organization hasn't gotten there yet but the CEO gets it you know and and it's gonna so they'll get there eventually yes uh and so I was super impressed uh by you know by not only kind of the book but then stuff that he's kind of said and thought you know or whatever uh since then has also been super interesting yeah when you have inspiring leadership you also inspire to be a leader right in your own way you know so all right so turning back to solo so what is it you're doing for solo I'm a dev rail so that's why also I joined because I I've been doing informally developer relations for a long time that's because it didn't exist until like 10 years ago even though we all did it before that I mean you know because I joined red hat actually is dev rail there was no title I mean you just do it right so you you you do your work in the community you talk about because you have passion for technology right right well and there's no other way like unless you have kind of developers talking to other developers about you know how to consume the products or whatever like how else you know do you kind of drive the change that you want to see you know so uh so dev rail um and are you focused on a particular set of solos products or you kind of no no we we we mostly focus on the open source side so okay solo as the roots in open source yeah we are big contributors to istio but those other ebpf and ceiling projects so so that our my our role is to brand awareness and helping uh helping developers and platform engineers to understand the technology it's it's uh it's um you talk about it because you love it and you want other people to understand it right and so they can get the benefit too yeah so you make a art technology easy to digest right it's amazing right so and when you see when people really get it because you explain to them yeah that's the most amazing feeling in the world right so and uh so that's what i do it's a lovely thing to do because you also you have to have an engineer in mind set because you have to talk to your internal engineers to tell them a that's how i got out of dev rail is my my long-running joke is uh they got tired of me complaining and pulled me into engineering so you know uh you complain twice now you have to fix it i was like oh so uh yeah but i actually when i before i left redhead i left engineering and i went to more like a dev rail role but specifically around service mesh uh and k native and um you know serverless etc because that's um it's fascinating to me i really like uh you know venture of in architectures and serverless functions and that whole realm and then service mesh is it's kind of the glue for all of that right it's uh what i say now is my tagline i'm on a mission to install a service mesh in every class because every cluster deserves a service mission right sorry because it'll be prettier um yeah easier to manage a little price to pay for sure but uh the the the advantage is the outweigh the the the little realm and CPU that you spend on it yeah my my my biggest uh it's one of the things that's really hard when we're doing these uh project for you know these third parties with the student teams or whatever is like the projects we're building many a time are nowhere near sophisticated enough uh to use a lot of these you know kind of newer things but we're starting to build more stuff that's like you know able to leverage like at least like serverless functions um and we're starting to get you know the students to get their heads wrapped around it um and uh you know it's just like it's the right way to build things yeah even though you know even though it's a very different way of building software than your traditional you know kind of serial execution yeah but you know you would not think to run a cluster without role-based access control today right right there was a time when yeah it was like add-on or something special right and i think eventually service mesh will be the default add-on yeah the thing that you run because you yeah you cannot live without this very important things right like security and and observability right i think that's i think that's we're still it's still kind of not easy enough in a sense like you know it's like right right exactly exactly right and uh but i completely agree with you it's that um it's it's kind of where it's going although the flip side of that some of the other things that have been going on like the solos involved with among others but like uh ebpf uh i also think is super interesting um especially um we were talking the other day about kind of low level control plane manipulation using ebpf really neat you know and i know solo is a big contributor there we do we do we do we do we again like we make ebpf a bit easier to consume and to use and to produce so we have a product called bumblebee it's a wrapper around the ebpf and it helps you get started because it's all about that right so if you get more developers on board smart developers they just don't have the time to go through the old documentation they give them the tools you know literally the tools to build and package distribute ebpf programs you got more people more eyes and more hands on on deck and the the thing will be will be faster adopted that's that's the right point right so it's uh it's interesting now application getting more complex there's application networking we we talk about a lot and of course you need more control and more security and ebpf is a technology that can give you that right right um so what are you so you know we call this the kbe insider show um and so the idea of it is like you know what are what are people who are kind of in the community or whatever see as the next big interesting thing so like what do you think's gonna you know what what are you most looking forward to six from months from now a year from now aside from a service machine every cluster and I guess people answer AI and GPT a lot yeah I'm not looking forward to that okay all right I'm a ludist in that sense I'm I'm for a moratorium on large language module but that's another story yeah no definitely see there is this enthusiasm doesn't seem to abide you know there's always there's even more people coming to into the the fold of cloud native right and I think definitely we need more education and more um more training right so there's it's this was a big problem in open stack there were not enough people that understood the project oh yeah the the limiting factor is always the um the the people right so the the the education so I think there will be and it's great what you're doing teaching students yeah it's a it's a crucial part of uh growing a good community well I mean it and it's it was it's so hard right because you know you really are changing how you have to think about your software like and and I think that's you know it like I said it you know using let's you're loosely call it why does that happen yeah um always the traffic information oh okay it's telling you yeah we are we are stopping line oh all right it's giving you the information that's right I yeah I can tell you all right um but so uh you know when you you know when you're taught to program or you're doing you know kind of traditional applications you know everything is very serial it's very you know kind of you know point a to point b and when you start introducing things like you know events or like service functions or um you know like kind of like a service mesh especially if you have like service meshes that uh crisscross clusters um like it's very hard to have a sense of what's going to happen next in your code and people find that very difficult to wrap their head around and I think that's what makes the education for it so challenging yeah yeah when we were doing DevOps and and we were thinking well we we like this stuff right so we are the one percent of the IT engineers around the world right so and it's the people that you know that they were nine to five and then they go home and yeah we we need to call for them because these are the people we need to make it easy for right so so just the make it just easy to consume it's not easy we don't have a magic wand to just make kubernetes disappear and be there and everything just work but it will be it will be big in the in the future so and of course like I just give a talk about gtops and it definitely a different way to think about the same thing right which is always the same you know application needs to be deployed yeah but that's uh how you do it right right and and I think people kind of understanding that you know I mean a lot of it is building intolerance for you know kind of change right you know either because you know somebody changes teams or you know or you know whatever like we just want to make sure that there's um you know we need more automation we need more you know computers doing the work that doesn't really need humans um we just have to tell it how to do it yeah and but that's a very different like experience you know what they say like declarative versus imperative it's just straight up I think a lot of people find very confusing yeah but then you know we do this automation thing because we want people to focus more on the application right so but then we we gotta do it enough enough automation now it's time to you know focus more on the applications I don't think so so sometimes it's just when is the automation too much that's yeah that's the yeah that one's also hard right it's like you know do you set it all up at the beginning right and make this huge investment in in kind of setting up all the automation and then discover that oh it's probably invariably going to be wrong somehow uh you know and trying to find I think that's kind of where the experience comes in is like trying to find that happy medium between enough automation and enough uh you know but not too much because you you know you know there's going to be change uh is it's a very hard balance maybe engineer should be more aware of the total cost of ownership right so which means yes okay it's easy to set up to set up but if you have to spend a lot of time maintaining it then you maybe better off with something a bit more complex in the beginning right where it requires less maintenance right um and you know it's but it's it's hard I think to uh to find that balance you know kind of either direction but it's fun I think I like it too it's one of the fun side of this job right so well one of the ways I used to convince people about um you know kind of doing you know things a little bit more properly um you know uh from GitOps to you know the venture event or whatever it's like hey just keep in mind right yes there's some current work here that you have to do to set all this stuff up but what it's going to give you is more time to write the fun code you know uh and I think that's where like that's that's the cell you know the emoji and the cut memes and all that stuff right so much time now no but it's um I always ask myself do I want to be walking up at three o'clock at night to fix this or uh I'd rather sleep you know yeah right so it's always yeah that's that's one of my kind of old jokes about DevOps is uh you know when we had the true advent of DevOps kind of coming in you know I was kind of like well you know as a developer I'm not sure I like this whole DevOps idea because the throwing it over the wall and then somebody else gets woken up I'm fine with that you know but if I have to get woken up that means I have to work on what about no one needs to work up right so what about like uh we we work together so softer words or self-feeling or self-correcting and uh and then we we can all enjoy our time because sleeping is very important by the way I realize that and maybe we don't get much sleeping this job right so yeah uh well the other part too is um you know it's kind of the you know you don't hear this that much anymore but like um internet gremlins um you know where just there's gremlins on the internet who go around and break your stuff we don't know who they are or what they are or why they happen you know but I think um they're often inexplicable unrepeatable um and so if you're kind of building your systems to tolerate the simple issues you also get to some of those as well and you know there's less internet gremlins waking you up in the middle of the night too um which is huge I was I was lucky enough I was at Tom Limoncelli lecture once and he he taught this story like okay you that's why you have to do the hard things more often and more more because the first time you're gonna fail so much yeah you're gonna have like 20 pages full of bugs yeah but the second time you're gonna have 10 pages and then a bit a bit less you're never gonna go away but the hard things has to be done first first yeah and foremost so it's a great lesson it's good for life as well but right especially good for IT infrastructure and development I uh I still remember one of my one of my professors in college told us as a class right that once we became real professionals we would stop having syntax errors in our code and I was like um no still still have them all the time yeah it's pretty funny I was like no you don't ever stop writing bugs you know it's just it's kind of like you just get used to it and you get really good at fixing them fast you know you but you don't ever actually get rid of them that's why github copilot is great because it's time but uh that you don't get it because somebody is fixing it for you right right yeah totally right uh so um what else you know what else do you see is next what what other interesting things do you see on the horizon uh well definitely we see the rise of APIs so and cloud native API is gateway so that's a big thing for us we think we believe that the world runs on API and it's time to tame the complexity and and put them under better control and better um better uh supported better yeah and I think cloud native gateway so Kubernetes expanding also into including also the API gateway so this is one thing we really care about making the developer experience better and uh having good self-describing APIs I think is makes your professional life much easier for a developer so that this is what we are investing as well yeah I can yeah I would definitely agree with that actually it was funny we um you know periodically as part of the program that supports the the student team projects um periodically we have these like ideation sessions where a student kind of comes and we have you know some expertise in the room and they say well I got this idea what could I do to you know do it right and uh you know and and we had this conversation with with uh student the other day um and you know I'm like trying to explain to them it's like no you want to write as little code as possible like you want to be trying to find some API or whatever that will do as much of the work of your tool as you can get and that it's that glue that is your value right uh and you know and I think when you're you know doing a computer science degree or something it's not obvious that that's what modern software development if not is should be you know true my my future wife we're gonna get married in in a month oh congratulations or almost congratulations are um she's learning she's learning coding and uh and she I thought you meant to put up with you no no but she she's learning coding and then she didn't get the old this whole API thing and she's like is that that's it I mean that's all I need to code just right just a wrapper around some API yeah that's it yeah that's all you need to but it's not it's it's one of those just right in the sense of you know but you have to know the API exists you have to know that what it does you have to know that it's going to fulfill the goal that you have right and so you know it's like a lot of things where if you can if you're a really serious expert you just do this one little thing there was actually a tiktok meme about this of like you know yeah I just charged you a thousand bucks to go fix your door and all I did was hit it once with a hammer and the thousand bucks is not the time it takes to hit it with the hammer it's knowing what to hit yeah and that's it's really like what I really like about modern software is that it's becoming more and more like that I mean it's always been a bit like that but you had to do a lot more hanging of the door uh than you than you do today the wrapper matters yeah the security right it really matters so sure there's an API but how you wrap it up right and glue it together our progress called glue by the way that's right right how you glue it together really matters so it's uh it's really important yeah that's uh that's something there are trends of course I mean this is one of course right we are so happy I'm happy I'm in the right place yeah yeah that's awesome I'm also eagerly waiting for something for what is going to happen right right as uh yeah that's that's I think what when you're seriously in the tech you're kind of always are um I still like feel like the kid will install linux from floppy disks yeah oh yeah and finally I was I was trying to remember earlier I blanked on slackware and I realized it was my first one yeah me too um and uh 0.9 you remember when you had to compile the kernel with I never I never had to compile it um but but I did have to be careful of the monitor resolution so it wouldn't like the monitor on fire yeah and uh so Vincent Bats who uh I know Vincent but yeah so he was a slackware maintainer yes like a top level with hilarious um but uh thank you so much for your time we really appreciate it I hope you enjoyed our little uh drive around Amsterdam although I think I think you you've seen it probably before yeah we were sorry but it was a great time okay from the past yeah I mean is great things like a slackware right right great uh yeah cool well thank you so much thank you very much and back to Koopa Gold yeah exactly