 Good morning nerd fam, and welcome to Chicago. We are at KubeCon day one. I am absolutely thrilled. This is where it all began for me with theCUBE. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by three fantastic co-hosts this week. We've got Rob, we've got Dustin, and my usual right arm here, John Furrier. John, how are you feeling? We're back at our favorite event. Great to see you. We've missed you. I've seen you since Amsterdam. It's been great in North America. KubeCon continues to be the best show in terms of developer innovation. We've been to every single KubeCon in existence, both in Europe and North America. Rob, you know this, Dustin. Since the beginning, we've just, and new people are coming in. Fresh faces are coming in, younger crowd. Just the overall growth of the community at large has been phenomenal. And again, open source continues to power the innovation. And as AI hits center stage, we're going to talk a lot about that here. AI and open source, big conversation. Do you go closed? Do you go proprietary? Do you stay open? I've never heard that word kicked around in a show like this, but open source continues to dominate. It's gonna be amazing. Rob, you were at this morning's opening keynote. What's your vibe on what we should expect this week? Well, AI, AI, more AI, and then a little bit on sustainability and green compute. That was kind of the two big themes coming across this morning was how are we going to do this responsibly? And I think part of it is, if you start to look at AI, it's not exactly the greenest of technologies where you have chat GBT using 16 ounces of water for every five prompts that it takes in. So, that's not exactly the most sustainable piece of it. I think they're leaning in and trying to get more developers into some of the incubation. They talked about Kepler going into incubation. And I think those were the two big themes I heard this morning as well. Yeah, Dustin, you're giving me a nice nod. Also welcome back veteran Cube alumni. We're very lucky to have you as a guest analyst this week. I'm happy to be back. It's always a lot of fun. Yeah, on the AI front, I think we were less than three minutes into the opening keynote, very first slide. Not that you were timing it. Not that I was timing it. Nvidia open AI hugging face. So, right out of the gate, noting that all three of those run on top of Kubernetes. I've balanced a little bit with, I don't know, some content about the power consumption of these things. Security and developer experience with the other sort of key pieces, key things I saw. What I find interesting guys is last KubeCon's event, we were talking about AI, but they missed that talk track in Amsterdam. So a lot of the talks were already pre-programmed. ChatGPT launched, and then there's been a wave yesterday. Open AI had their first developer day. I watched the keynote as I flew in, and it was very Apple-esque in the vibe. People were cheering. It's a generational shift. And again, back to the comment earlier about the crowd here. Dustin, we saw it at Google Next. When the story hits AI right, it activates this community because developers love AI because it's just the productivity's big conversation. And so you bring that open AI vibe into open source where all the action is on these models. It's going to be very interesting to see how this community translates into AI. I mean, this isn't going to be the big hallway conversation. What does AI actually do for infrastructure? And then what are the apps going to be running on? So it's a huge conversation. I thought one of the most salient points made, and I don't want this to get buried. It was only a one-liner, but it came from Tim Hawken when he was on stage during one of the panels. And he said that, it's important to note that Kubernetes was not originally designed with AI in mind. Kubernetes, where it comes from, very much a web app driven service hosting platform. However, it has been, and it is being retooled to run large language models, machine learning workloads and AI in general. So I think that'll be an interesting outcome of this conference, especially if you make it around some of the talk tracks. Do we emerge with the Kubernetes that's even in a better position to run the future of AI? Rob, the whole conversation, Kubernetes is boring, right? It's good news, but now you've got AI, can't be boring with AI, but yet what does platform engineering do with AI? Because that's the real issue, like what does it look like? I mean, I think some of the discussion this morning was around that, was around how do you build it? And I mean, again, we kind of chuckled about architect your future being the kind of tagline again here, but it's like, how do you take advantage of Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, all of the hardware there, which people who came out of IT into platform engineering, they kind of understand that, but they looked at it as the OS taking care of that. Now they're looking at how do we actually go straight from microservice into a GPU, for instance. And I think that's going to take some time for those organizations to build up that muscle memory to really get there. I think to your point, they talked about how ChatGPT actually used Kubernetes under the hood to train the original models for ChatGPT, I think it was 3.5 or maybe even four, and they used 7,500 containers to go and do that. So you start to look at the scale at which some of these things are needed. That's where platform engineering is really going to come in. I think that's really exciting too. I mean, I'm really glad you brought up that point about Kubernetes being created pre this being the biggest application thereof in terms of weight of processing, and I mean, 7,500 containers is no small amount. We're not, do you think that this retooling moment, this transformation that we're a part of right now is the penultimate step before we take off into an insane AI universe? Are we just about there? Dustin, I'll start with you, you're smiling. Yeah, well, there was another piece where Priyanka asked, is this Kubernetes Linux moment, when Kubernetes becomes as universally applicable as the Linux, and I think that's a really salient question. It's probably, we're in the moment right now, it's hard to examine what it looks like from the outside. And there was another piece that I think was, I had to be reminded about, I don't know who here was in KubeCon in Berlin six, seven years ago, OpenAI was on stage and they showed a picture of the OpenAI team on stage, talking about how they were using Kubernetes even then. So, I'll back it up a little bit and say, even though Kubernetes was built to run one class of workloads, it's showing quite a bit of malleability into other domains. I think that's quite powerful. I mean, that's a good point. OpenAI does have to run on something. Microsoft helped out there, but every query barely has a cost. And so if you want to run your retrieval augmentation generation, again, it's going to cost money. But I think the enterprise conversation versus consumers is a big question. When does it get baked to the enterprise? And I think to me, the AI conversation is not about a product. It's like, it's everywhere. It has to be everywhere in every process. And the end of the day here at this community, they're still caring about building and launching applications, right? So building and shipping and deploying applications has been this show. Not so much a nerd fast on infrastructure, although Kubernetes is there for you. It's definitely a room full of doers here, for sure. Well, I mean, Rob and I were talking about Discover. You got end users here and you got vendors. So it's really about building and deploying apps at the end of the day. So if you're doing that, you got to have AI. So you can't ignore AI if you're talking about applications and scales is another point of, hey, if I can use AI to take best practices and deploy them with automation, it's a winning hand either way, Rob. I mean, that's like, whatever is part of the stack you want to look at, it's a winner. Yeah, and I think also they, if you roll it back even a day yesterday to what was going on here, they had a whole lot of breakouts. Like they had BackstageCon, they had ObservabilityCon, they had a couple others here, and they were trying to bring people into those groups. And I think one of the key themes coming out of BackstageCon was the fact that it was just too hard for people to get in. And that's supposed to be the developer portal. Build your own developer portal. I think there's been renewed interest in that, especially with HashiCorp having their challenges with their BSL licensing and what that looks like from a platform engineering perspective, but how do you make that UI really easy for people to get up and running? I was actually talking to a pharmaceutical company about this yesterday. They told me that it was too hard. It was just too far out there that they could not get up and running on Backstage. And they tried. And they said it was just too many plugins that they had to build. There wasn't everything in the community. They still have a lot of legacy. Oh, by the way, they have to be compliant with the FDA, which is not an easy task. So are you going to really build your own or are you going to go and buy from somebody kind of thing? You just touched on something that I think is really interesting. We're at a stage where we've got a lot of emerging players in the AI space. We've obviously got a few monoliths that have been around and key technology players forever. Your hot take, since it's a little too early to tell, I'm going to start with you, John. Do you think we're going to see some of these smaller players coming together and forming alliances and partnerships to either battle the big boys? Do you think the big boys are going to come in and gobble some of the hot attack in the beginning? Oh, it's a good, it's a loaded question. I think- I mean, it is, it's a builder-buy dilemma for a whole movement, but yes. Look, in this market, I think you're going to see a couple of big things. The rich are going to get richer. The picks and shovels are going to come from the cloud players. I mean, you mentioned NVIDIA on stage. You know, you got sustainability as the green theme and, hey, we're going to be go green. Meanwhile, the biggest anti-green kind of players are the hardware guys who's sucking all that, all that energy out with the NVIDIA cards, for instance. So you need to have that before you can be green. So it's like a car before the horse. So I think NVIDIA has done well on this wave of AI. I think Amazon, Azure have dominated. Google's going to do well, Oracle's going to do well. So the rich get richer. I think the little guys are going to actually punch above their weight class instantly with technology. I think the middle guys get squeezed because you've got to be sucked between, do I fight the big guys at scale or, and the smaller people are being more productive. So I think it's going to be a reclassification of the pecking order of who's going to be a winner. So I would imagine smaller players forming Karitsus and you're getting opportunities to share and a communal vibe to take territory. And I think if you're a meat-sized company, you've got to challenge, you've got to figure out where you want to play if you can play in the white space of the whales, Rob. I mean, so that's the way I see it, the rich get richer and the smaller companies are going to grow faster and probably be more profitable. That's where the innovation is going to be, you know, and I'll say that coming from, now I'll be it back into startup mode, but I've worked at three of the world's biggest companies and a handful of smaller growth mode startups. The innovation happens at the startups and even the largest companies understand that and some do get acquired, gobbled up, some are funded by strategic investments. The VC network is quite active here. I've seen multiple venture capitalists around. You've seen a lot of vests and flat shirts. It's the Patagonian. That's the African cancel. Yeah. But I agree, I think also one of the places to watch is who are the chairs of the different projects that are coming up and coming and incubation. It was very- People are logos. I would say logos. Yeah. So is Google in there? Is Red Hat in there? Is Canonical in there? Is Suisse in there? I think that's going to really be the tell sign for, hey, we're looking for to bring, you know, we have a big tent, but we're going to bring all of these startups in and then we're going to pick some winners and we're going to go gobble them up. It's kind of, I think we're getting to that maturity with this, where there's so many different projects, a lot of overlapping ones with competing companies, kind of funding the two different competing projects. Well, I think we're seeing low key friendly war in this space. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that'll be an interesting to see at the end of the week where that kind of plays out. Okay, so I got to ask you guys all this question, what's the hottest story you see emerging at a day one on stage in the presentation and the hallway track. So when I say hallway track, what's the buzz and the hallways at the parties? We were talking a bunch of folks last night. So what's the top story in your mind on the stage that's formal? And then what are people talking about in the hallways? I mean, I see it as Kubernetes itself has gotten to a point where it's not a science project, but I think there's a lot of science projects around it and it's still all about how to make it easier and how is AI going to be a path to making it easier? Is AI going to be a path to helping build some of these, you know, with co-pilots and things of that nature, build the software to make it easier? That I think is an interesting tact I've been hearing. And the hallway, what are people talking about? What's the scuttlebutt? It's, I think they're seeing how is it actually embraced? I mean, if you look at today, they talked a lot about it. A lot about AI and building for AI, but they didn't even talk about using AI at all. And I think that was pretty, like almost a little bit of a tell where maybe there's some licensing issues that they're looking at and things of that nature. Yeah, I mean, I've seen this over the course of a number of years. I think in the early days, I think it was really just about, is Kubernetes going to become the standard for building, deploying applications? And in the early days, there was, you know, Pivotal Cloud Foundry was in the mix. You had Heroku, you had App Engine, you had, you know, all of these sort of apps as a service, as well as the infrastructure plays, the open stacks and EC2s, GCPs and so forth. And Kubernetes came out of Google, but then sort of emerged. And I'd say the first couple of Kubecons, we were all talking about the management and deploying deployment of Kubernetes, how to do that, who to do it with, on what platforms, which Linux to choose, which partner, years later, I think that's more or less a solved problem. So we're not talking about that nearly as much anymore. I think it's now much more about the workloads they're in, how to secure those, definitely how to scale those, and how to, you know, build resilient infrastructure. Once you've already got that Kubernetes there, then you can start, you know, solving some much more interesting problems. So the evolution shows the progress. When you talk about securing workloads, software supply chain, you kind of, that's progress, that means we're getting close to the final stage of baked, where you go. Yeah, I mean, I think we've laid, I think we've laid, you know, the highways, you know, the highway system down on the landscape, and now you've got interconnected cities, and you can actually, you know, start building out, you know, different parts of the infrastructure. Savannah, what are you hearing in the hallways? What are you seeing here? What's your vibe on this? Well, I do want to comment quite literally in the hallways as they've opened the doors. Can you guys feel the energy that the city left up behind us? I mean, just take a look. I do think this is actually an important note, not just because it's an audio shift for everyone listening, but because, you know, I mean, I met theCUBE at KubeCon in 2021, we were in LA, nobody was there, quite frankly, this first event post pandemic, there was maybe 1,300 people in the room, then we saw it last year in Detroit, I think we had about 7,500, and we were talking this morning, 15,000 people, that's double what we had hypothetically last year, it's 5,000 more than we saw when we were in Amsterdam, so that means we're here, we're in force, we care, people are showing up, the community is all in, and I really like Priyanka, I'm going to build off of her statement, is this Kubernetes Linux moment? We've been trying to simplify container management and make Kubernetes easier for a long time, that's been the conversation, I feel like at every single KubeCon, and I think what we're going to, we're talking less about the functional application there, and much more about, is this going to be the central nervous system, the spine, or AI? Is this what we're going to be using to communicate out on these roadways and things that we're doing, or is there going to be another tool that emerges, and I think if there's nothing that pops up, we're here, I think it's already happening right now in front of us. I think one of the things I want to end on this segment is, are we too close to the action, being in the industry for so long, when you think about people who are just coming in, out of college, I was talking to folks last night, what's the story that's not being talked about? And I think, I'll just weigh in with my view on this, which is, open source has won, it is the software industry, it's no longer open source, it's that thing, it's actually big vendors, big companies, developers, the DevRel, so it is the software industry now, so open source is no longer the thing, it is the thing. You know what I'm saying, it's like, okay, so what does that mean? That means this is where things get done, and so if you're a young person coming in, what is the story of open source? I mean, keep it open, obviously, right? Yeah. Keep the community engaged, I mean, open source is nothing without the community of contributors. That's the big part. I think you're 100% on it, and I think that's the interesting part, is engagement of the community, and how many of these big companies are writing 95% of the code for some of these projects? For sure. That to me has always been the test, is it really a project? Okay, yeah, we contribute 65% of it, but 35% is coming from other people, that's pretty healthy. You start to get above 50% contributions, that's really healthy. I think when you see it, and you look at 95% coming from one vendor, I started to worry, is it really open source or not? I think that is the other side of that story. I'll jump in and take this a slightly different angle and say that I think the emergence of successful business models around open source has helped it succeed as well, and I say that as a developer, having written and maintained a whole bunch of open source code, but also as an entrepreneur and startup person, we were trying to raise money around an open source encrypted file system and key manager in 2011 and 12, and we were explaining to VCs our open source business model, and it just didn't necessarily resonate. We were up against the wall against a number of investors, okay? That landscape has changed tremendously, and part of open source succeeding here, I think, is that we've seen a number of successful business models enable open source to succeed. And evolution's a good thing. It's the changing nature of the business model is a signal of maturation and the next level. And acceptance thereof too, you know? Generally enterprises investing in software that is open source once they understand and appreciate the business model around them. You got to make money. I mean, you got to fund it somehow. That's right. On that note, I am so excited to see what we have to say at the end of this week compared to today to see what other conversations we hear. If you've got a hot tip, be sure and find one of us in the hallways and give it to us. Also, if you've got some sexy swag, you know that we do a swag segment here at theCUBE. Rob, Dustin, John, thank you so much for opening the day with me. My name is Savannah Peterson. We are here in Chicago at KubeCon. 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