 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, this is theCUBE's live coverage, three days wall-to-wall coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon in San Diego, I'm Stu Miniman. My co-host for these three days is John Troyer and welcome to the program. First of all, from the keynote stage, Heather Kirksey, who is the vice president of Community and Ecosystem Development with the Linux Foundation, of course, CNCF, part of the Linux Foundation, and from some of the technology behind the scenes, joining her, Sandeep Panasar, the SVP of Strategic Engagement at Ternium. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you for having us. All right, so Heather, this was a really cool demo with a lot of things going beyond the scene. People actually go watch an interview we did yesterday with the people at Red Hat, talk about, it's a good thing it was CloudNative because there was a brown-out, power was lost, had to rebuild the entire thing, and everybody up on stage the next day didn't know anything the wiser. So, really cool, pod on stage, talking about 5G, global engagement, China Mobile, other banks like, I'm sorry, other mobile providers like from Canada and from Europe involved in this. Give us a little bit of the foundation view as to how something like this comes together and how you get participation from the technology providers, the telco providers, it takes a village. First of all, you have to be slightly mad. But, I mean, that's really kind of the premise of open source, right? Is that people come together and they build things together. And so, we've done some demos in the past where we looked at sort of the modernization of the central office. And so, we had had some, you know, some teams of folks that had been building things and then we sent out a call basically to the community and said, you know, we'd like to do another one and what we're going to try to do is full 5G, full CloudNative, if you're interested in joining, you know, come on. And so, it just ended up that basically 15 organizations said yes, that sounds like something that we would like to prove out and 80 volunteers across those organizations ended up working on it. So. Yeah, and I understand what it was about four months to put all the pieces together. Bring us through kind of, you know, how the stack gets built and the projects involves. Yeah, well, I mean, so amongst some of the issues where, you know, 5G itself is fairly new. So, you know, we started with sort of the complexities of getting equipment, you know, and getting 5G radio. You know, we had a partner in China who had a 5G handset that then wanted us to indemnify, you know, all these things to the extent that like we as an on profit didn't feel comfortable signing the agreement. So, you know, it started actually just, I mean, this was so cutting edge with in terms of the 5G aspect that getting equipment was challenging, you know, and that's before you even get to sort of the challenges of building the stack. So, you know, it started kind of figuring out what pieces started building things, you know, found some, you know, gaps in Kubernetes around supporting the sophistication of networking that we have to do. So we figured out how to work around it for the demo, but what we want to do is start upstreaming some changes into some of the projects there. All right, so Sandeep, your company is one of the providers inside here. So tell us what drew you into it and how it is living on that bleeding edge with something like 5G? Well, it's absolutely thrilling living on that bleeding edge. It's exciting, you know, lots of risk, but the payoff yesterday was fantastic to be able to complete that call on stage. You know, from our perspective, we were invited in fairly early on into the project and we were thrilled to be part of it. And as once we understood the scope and what everyone was trying to do, we realized like we're providing the SD-WAN for this project, connecting the public cloud, the private cloud and we're deploying and using containers Kubernetes and we are able to bring the entire thing together by creating one virtual network so that it's seamless and all the underlying infrastructure, the layer two, layer one, the underlay is just completely invisible to be able to transport that call, to do the signaling, to do everything that needs to be done. So for us to become part of this project was really powerful for one, for us to just work with some of the companies that were there, like the Linux Foundation, Intel, Lenovo, all the other big name players that were out there and so that was an amazing experience but then the community itself that came together, like the people that we met, we met them all at the show, it's all phone calls, we met them all at the show and it really is a community filled with love and a real drive and desire to build something new and different, right? Sprinkle with a bit of crazy. Yeah. Well, so I mean, this is a great example of how the Linux Foundation can be a catalyst here. I mean, one of the Linux Foundation is so broad, the CNCF is so broad and you're operating in many domains and this being, you know, bringing the telecom world together being one of them but I don't know, can you maybe just talk a little bit about the ecosystem and the unique challenges of, I mean, there are sometimes open source approaches that are a little more like strongly opinionated, like this is going to be our, this is what we're working on, this is going to be our stack, this is the projects in our stack. CNCF has obviously a well documented and open process around bringing projects in and projects graduating but how does that make your life, you know, harder in terms of the breadth? So I mostly focus on our networking projects and working with the telecom industry and yeah, I mean, telecom definitely likes to be opinionated, you know? I mean, that's kind of in our soul and so, but it also is useful because really at the end of the day, interoperability for the type of scale that telecom operators has is very important, right? It, yeah, some of the cloud providers, right? It's up to the people who want to run on them to like work with their APIs but the telecom operators, they're using all these applications to provide services to their customers so they have a business need to make sure everything really works into end and so there's actually an initiative right now between the LF networking projects and the GSMA where we're really trying to not too prescriptively because we do also understand that that doesn't know, you're not going to get the exact same pieces of software that work for every single operator's network or business but with a lot more sort of opinion around, what should the cloud platforms, whether they are VM based or container based, what do they look like and how can we start doing things like compliance and verification programs around commercial implementations, whether it is the underlying platform or whether it's the applications on top and so that's the thing that we're working on right now because at the end of the day, we're really needing to help them accelerate their deployments and get that agility that's the promise of cloud. So Heather, I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier that there were some gaps in Kubernetes, speak to how fast the community rallied around to allow this solution to go forward. Yeah, so basically, this is what happens when you get a bunch of engineers together. For the demo itself, we weren't going to fork or make our own sort of changes to Kubernetes so we did some things to tie things together probably. You're using the SD-WAN. You're using the SD-WAN piece, but absolutely. Yeah, SD-WAN part, but one of the big issues is just being able to expose multiple interfaces which in a service provider network, you have multiple interfaces, right? V6 support is another big issue and so being able to expose those natively in Kubernetes or natively just using CloudNative, it's something that we're still working on. There are a couple of projects that are looking at that multis, network service mesh, maybe there's some different CNIs who are beginning to think through that problem. None of them were quite there, so we didn't want to start forking and writing pseudo Kubernetes code. So we kind of just use some of the tools and the players in place to work around that but what we would love is to upstream that code into mainline. Sandy, would love to hear a little bit more about how SD-WAN fits in the entire 5G multi-cloud discussion. So we were, we had a pop here in San Diego, there's a lab in Montreal, and then there is a lab in France and we used public accommodation of the Alibaba Cloud in North America and in Europe and what we had to do is we had to create a way for the phones to reach each other. So we had to do this initial signaling where you do the request and you have to get to all the different pods to make the request. So what we did is we put our containers in all the cloud providers and also in the labs and we were able to create that private network and that's what allowed for the call signaling to happen and for the actual call to actually be completed from one handset to the other. Sandy, you talked about community, you're an engineer, SD-WAN is a word, is SD-WAN a word? I suppose that you usually hear more on an enterprise side of the show, right? And, you know, talk with lots of folks who provide, you know, in that space. This is a little bit different, right? As you, I don't know if you've had a chance to wander either in the sessions or on the floor. Kind of curious, there is a little bit of networking out there, a little bit of networking security and a couple of other, certainly some service mesh stuff. I don't know, what are your thoughts about how this is growing up in this open source world? It's growing, listen, it's growing up very fast, right? That's 100% sure. I mean, the show is growing like leaps and bounds every year, it's insane. And that performance yesterday was in front of, I don't know how many thousands of people, but I mean, that was huge and it was amazing. And you're right, you know, normally when you're thinking about this kind of stuff, you're not necessarily thinking about the networking, but at the end of the day, you know, Kubernetes is a platform or a tool, SD-WAN is a tool. And if you take all of these tools and put them together, you can actually build something wonderful, right? And that's what we did in this project here. We were able to deliver a 5G call and run it everywhere. So I think what's important in the community, even though this is really primarily a developer event and developer show, you are seeing some edge people here. You are seeing some networking people here. And people are the awareness of, oh wait, we need edge and we need networking to actually build commercializable platforms or products. It's that awareness that's, I think this year at least, is really starting to come out. And I think next year, it's going to be even more prevalent and you're going to, the show may evolve. That's where I kind of see it going. Yeah, I mean, I think application developers in general tend to think networking is amazing. It just happens to be there, sort of like plumbing and power, but to actually deliver it is a fairly complicated challenge. And the other reason we wanted to do the demo yesterday was actually to kind of show some of the challenges and to kind of show what it takes to set up a mobile network so that if we're going to use Kubernetes to do that, the developers here would have a little bit more understanding so that when we're like, we need multiple interfaces or we need to be able to address things in a certain way, they have a better understanding of why so they can help us from the talk-on industry design and build it out. Yeah, I guess Heather, the last thing is we've had theCUBE at the open source summit, we've been at the open networking summit. When you got off at stage, you put, there's so many different open source projects that span, just give us a view as to how things span across all of these communities to make sure that we don't end up with a lot of fragmented things. How does everything kind of pull together in the networking? I can't hear you with the first person side. All right, so many projects across so many sources. How does Linux Foundation make sure that we don't just end up with siloed places? Well, to be honest, it's a little bit of a challenge because sometimes the reason that we end up with multiple projects serving what looks like similar needs is because they're different technical approaches and so maybe one will work better than the other. I mean, that's kind of the idea of open source is that people can try different things. We just try to help people have less of a not invented here sort of mindset that if there's a good reason to try a different approach, go for it and let's see what takes fruit and what flowers. But also, other people are doing things just because you're not aware of them. So there's a lot of stuff around education and sharing of information that we try to do. That helps with that, but I mean, yeah. Absolutely. Heather, Sandy, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much. Congratulations on the demo. Know a lot of hard work by a lot of people. Thank you. I just have to tell you, I feel a thousand pound weight has been lifted off my shoulders now, but it was extraordinarily fun to do. Yeah, it was fun. Thank you. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Getting towards the end of our three days wall-to-wall coverage. They're running for the t-shirts that are left, but we've got a couple more interviews. Thank you for watching theCUBE.