 Thank you, everybody, for coming here. And thank you to the AV team for helping us figure out this hybrid speaking situation. Super delighted to do a first, a very different kind of session. What we are doing here is take a sneak peek into the governance of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. For those who don't know much about me, as Jillian said, I am Priyanka Sharma, and I'm the executive director of the CNCF. And what that means is, basically, if anything's wrong, it's my problem. I love working in this community and supporting it every day. And I do that with the help of a wonderful board of directors. Today, we have about 28 people, I think, on the board. And they are a very diverse set of folks. Some people are from startups. Many are from large companies who are Platinum members. And then many are somewhere in the middle. So good, diverse audience. Now, here today with me, I have two very key board members in CNCF. First is Arun Gupta, who is our representative from Apple and also our latest CNCF board chair. And the second is Aparna, who is on the Zoom. And she is our board member from Google. And she used to be chair until a week ago. And she had a tenure of two awesome years. So Arun and Aparna, I'd love for you to introduce yourself. Do you want to go first, Aparna? Sure, happy to. Hi, everyone. I'm Aparna Sinha. I have been part of the CNCF since I joined the Kubernetes project, which was in 2016. And the CNCF was just getting started. I'm a director of product at Google Cloud, where I run the developer platform. And it's been a real privilege working with Dan Kohn initially, and then of course, Priyanka and everyone else on the governing board. The CNCF is an extremely important organization for the entire cloud-native computing industry. And I think that it's been a privilege to be a part of this board. Thank you, Aparna. All right. Yeah, my name is Arun Gupta. I head the open source program office at Apple. I've been doing cloud-native for a while. I was a person who made Amazon join the cloud-native computing foundation, was their primary board representative over there, joined Apple about a year and a half ago and since then have been their primary representative. Aparna has done a fantastic job of being the board chair for the last two years. And last week, the elections happened and I got the new chair seat for at least a year. And then Priyanka gets to evaluate, how am I doing? And then hopefully one more year. So that's sort of the way it works. We discuss together if he's liking it too, so. It's a mutual thing. And just clarification, we are a governing board. We are not a board of directors. Board of directors is for the Linux Foundation. We are a governing board in that sense because the NCF is a subsidiary of Linux Foundation. No, I mean, I've been doing cloud-native for a very long time at Apple. Of course, anything around open source efforts where I get deeply involved, my team gets deeply involved. Tim and Paris are from my team. They're here. They're deeply involved in the Kubernetes community. So we do a lot of internal events, a lot of internal enablement, education, cloud-native principles. We did a Kubernetes summit last year. We did an infrastructure summit earlier this year. End of this month, we are getting ready for an inner-source summit. So all that concept of principles that are available out in the public, we're trying to bring inside Apple as well. It's a lot of fun things that are happening at Apple today. Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing about your journey and your experiences. So today, folks, this is a first, as I said. This is the first time we're doing a GB session. And what I thought might be nice is just for me to interview our two board members, ask about their experiences and generally introduce the board to you folks. And I would love to welcome audience participation. Questions from y'all are very much welcomed. I think if Jill's okay with it, we can actually sprinkle them as we are going. That might be more fun. Is that cool? Whatever you want to do. Great, awesome. So yeah, no pressure, but think if you want to ask something, this is a great opportunity. So... Maybe let's ask them. How many of you understand how in terms of CNCF that there is a vendor, there's a end user, there's a TOC, there's a governing board? How many of you understand that structure in general? Oh, good stuff. Some of you, yeah, some of you. You want to give an overview of that? Sure, yes. So the way CNCF is structured is that there is the Technical Oversight Committee, which is made up of elected volunteers who are sort of our technology taste makers. They are the folks who are determining what projects join into the CNCF, what projects go through the various stages of sandbox, incubated, graduated, and then maybe some projects that get retired. So that is the technology taste makers. They, on a parallel level, there is the end user community, which is the community of end users that are members of CNCF and supporters, we have two categories, and they get together in bi-weekly sessions to talk through the various projects in CNCF, how our technologies are being utilized, and it's a safe private space for end users without any vendors to go have conversations about how to go cloud-native. So for example, Apple is an end user, Amazon and Google would be a vendor. Exactly. And by safe space means no vendor can do the selling to those end users. They're just not there at all. Exactly, they're not there at all. So the end users get to participate in that discussion and we talk about what are our concerns, what matters to us. So there is really no hard selling. We are truly sharing our genuine engineering problems. And just to keep it safe, and I said no vendors talk over there. Yeah, and this end user community has representation in other parts of CNCF. I'll get to that in a hot second after I describe the GB or the governing board. So the governing board, Aparna and Arun, are members of it alongside other folks such as Dan over here who represents Oracle. And Paris at the back. Oh, right, Paris who's the developer representative as well. So you hear me, I said Oracle, Apple, Google, and then developer representative. So our board is made up of different kinds of folks. And we have two developer reps to always stay close to our roots to the engineers. And then in addition, of course, various companies either by election or by benefit of membership are part of the board. The board's focus is on the strategic direction of CNCF. And I work for me and my staff, we work closely with the board on our yearly objectives, how we are doing, the budget that we pass, all that stuff. And keep in mind that the technical oversight committee is a separate committee and they do their totally independent body. And users have representation in both these bodies. So in TOC, there are some seats that are for end users which has turned out to be a really successful move on our part. And then also in the board, we have end users represented as well. And another point to highlight is governing board has no influence on the TOC, the technical oversight committee because governing board is purely for administrative financial functions and no say in the technical matter that, oh, Kubernetes should go this direction. No, that's purely like a Kubernetes steering committee decision, but then again influenced by the TOC. So we keep those functions like a separation of concerns very clear. Yeah, Aparna, I know you're on Zoom but just checking in, if you wanna add anything here, any color that we have missed. Yeah, I would love to. I think a little bit of the historical perspective is perhaps useful as well. I think that the CNCF sort of originated with the Kubernetes project. The Kubernetes projects really needed a home not just for the trademark but also for the project itself such that it would have a very rich and diverse thriving community. And so that is why Google, which was the company that the Kubernetes project came from originally, worked with at the time, the Linux foundation for the founding of the CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. And I think it has really grown and evolved. Part of the reason I think in the beginning, and I don't really like the word vendor, I think a lot of the original, even today, the companies that are involved in the governing board and in the community, they're providers, many of them are cloud providers like AWS and Azure and Google. And then there are other types of providers like VMware and Red Hat. But part of the reason why all these companies are involved is because a lot of the contributions and the maintainers are from these companies. And so that's kind of at least for the Kubernetes project. And then as the CNCF grew up really around Kubernetes as a core at the nucleus, there are so many more projects. And one of the biggest, there are so many different services and so many different benefits that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation provides. But one of the early ones was to really organize and provide a landscape of how these different technologies and how these different projects fit together. And that is the kind of central purpose in the beginning of the technical oversight committee. So they dealt with how do we figure out which projects should move from a sandbox stage to a graduated stage. And initially there were no graduated projects and then Kubernetes graduated and then Prometheus graduated. And so the technical oversight committee really came up with the principles for what constitutes Cloud Native. And what are the projects that should be part of the landscape and how do we graduate these projects? And that is still a process that's an ongoing process. Of course, more recently, the technical oversight committee has, as the Cloud Native community has grown, they have specialized with these tags or technical advisory groups into various areas. But I think it's also important just to point out that the projects themselves are self-governing. It is not that the CNCF is governing the projects, each of the projects has, for the appropriate size and stage of the project, they have their own code of conduct, they have their own governance rules and they have their own steering committees. And the CNCF does an excellent job of providing a basic infrastructure and guidance on all of these, this is what the code of conduct should be. This is how the governance model should look like. But there's a lot of freedom that the individual projects have in doing all of that. So just to add some color into the explanation. And then of course, over time, we have had a incredibly diverse and important end user group that actually very actively the CNCF has elevated. And one of the benefits, I think, for the end user group is that this is an excellent place to recruit, as well as an excellent place to really start to contribute to open source, which many, many companies are doing. Thank you, that was, I thought that was super helpful. So I know we threw a lot of information at you folks here in the audience. Let's take a pause, let's take a pause and see if there are any questions. Any questions, yeah. Yes? What are you doing? Yeah, you know, it's interesting you ask this question and it's great timing for it because just yesterday, we did a board strategy session. And this was one of the major topics that kept coming up, which is that as the complexity grows off the landscape, but to be honest, I feel like two years ago, we were in the same, the question was the same, the projects were lesser, but the question was the same. But it's like, how do we help folks? And there is talk of figuring out maybe some kind of reference architectures and materials like that. For us, it is tricky because we have to stay true to a few things. One is you can't recommend one stack for everybody, it's definitely not going to work, right? Different workloads, different issues, et cetera, et cetera. Second is that CNCF is never going to be a kingmaker. And so we have to ensure we do it in a vendor agnostic manner. And so that just brings with it its own complexity. So that's one of the things that we've been discussing amongst others. Arun and Aparna, if you wanna go for it. Yeah, so for example, if you look at the overall landscape, I think a constant that somebody was showing it yesterday or Cornelia actually was showing it, how we have placed tags on top of those. So let's say observability is an area that mattered to you. So you can start attending the tag observability and start getting some guidance over there. Share from my perspective, like we talked to a lot of teams inside Apple who are trying to adopt cloud native stack. Do they wanna adopt the same stack? No, each conversation is very unique, very nuanced. And this goes back to my Amazon days when I was talking to a lot of customers that, hey, we wanna adopt cloud native. Okay, what is cloud native to you? So let's help them understand that. I think each conversation in that sense, we cannot give like a here is my prescription that will work for everybody. So I think that each conversation is very unique, very nuanced. And she was right that there is no kingmaker here. There is a different stages. CNCF in that sense does provide guidance in terms of, hey, what is the maturity of the project? Is the project used heavily? Is it graduated? Is it meeting a certain bar? Is it just an experimental project? Yeah, it's a sandbox project. So be willing that it may break backwards compatibility. So things like those matter to you. So at least in that sense, we are providing guidance. I would love to hear what do you think we should do in terms of providing guidance given such a wide spectrum of customers, developers that we need to cater to. Let's see if Aparna is adding a perspective. Yeah, after Aparna, yeah. Yeah, I'd like to add that, one of the things that's really important is to provide choice because cloud native computing is still a very nascent and fast moving area of technology. So when I was first starting out with Kubernetes, everything would change every six months, completely different. The architecture of various things. And so you would see different types of container runtimes. You would see many different types of network plugins, networking plugins you'd see. And it has, in general cloud native computing involves a modular architecture where many different components can plug in. So that's why there is so much variety. I think that it's a good thing. Certainly the no king making principle is important. However, allowing that variety is also important. Now the CNCF and I think other open source foundations play a critical role in guiding users. And one of the things that they do is when you look at a project that is part of the CNCF, there is a certain amount of assurance that you can have around it depending on the stage of maturity. So there are three stages of maturity. There's incubation projects, there's sandbox projects, and then there's graduated projects. And when a project moves from one stage of maturity to another, there are certain metrics that are associated with that. For example, they need to have a healthy community, a governance structure, a code of conduct to be a basic stage. By the time you move to graduation, the CNCF is fairly confident that this is a project that's there to stay because there's a significant amount of end user adoption and there's a lot of diversity in terms of the contributor base. We look at things like what's the level of contribution, what's the longevity of the companies that are contributing. So if you have major companies like Red Hat, Google, et cetera, and they're actively contributing, then you know that that project is important and you have companies like Apple that are using that project. You know that that's something that's there to stay. So that's kind of a sign for end users. And then finally, there's this concept of conformance and that's really when a project becomes quite mature, enabling interoperability of other cloud native technologies with it. And that's something that also, I think gives customers and users a level of assurance around that, around the stability of it. Thank you, Aparna. Any other questions from the audience before I move on? Sure, and then you, okay. Yeah, go for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, definitely, 100%. Yeah, right. Right, you're aware. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right, of course. Yeah, that makes sense. So I'll share just some things that are happening, which I think may lead to good stuff. Bianca, can you repeat the question for the folks on the live stream, please? Oh, yes, absolutely. So if I, tell me if I get this right. The question is that from the end user perspective, verticalization is super important because the needs of the automotive industry may be very different from the needs of the web scalers. And so how do we accommodate for that? Is there a way for reference architecture specific to different types of industry verticals? And what I wanted to say was that I think this is in its early stages, so you know, be patient, but I am starting to see a verticalization of the SIGs and working groups that are happening in the end user community and around it. So I'll give you two examples. One is in the telco operator world, right? From what I have heard from each and every telco I talk to, they're very excited to go cloud native and they are at different stages of maturity in that process. As they are trying to do their best to get going with it, defining what is a cloud native network function is a bit of a, everybody thinks slightly different things and everybody wants their thing to be the way it is, but no one's really got it right. And so that's an area where the community is getting together in the cloud native network function CNF working group and they're writing down a list of best practices and use cases that they think define a CNF. Now alongside that working group, there is a CNF test suite testbed where you can actually run a CNF and get like, you know, this passes or this does not pass. And our plan is to work, once we're starting to feel good about these best practices, our plan is to work to do a certification around that. So that is, and we wanna do it in a cloud native way. So we wanna keep it very low footprint so all the providers can do their thing and have awesome stuff on top, but there's a small kernel of truth, metaphorically speaking, not literal kernel, that the providers can rely on. So that's one example. And that one is I think somewhat advanced. The second example is something that just recently came up which is I was actually in Europe a month, month and a half ago and I met a bunch of automotive companies and it just really coalesced in the conversation that we need a working group that's specific to these types of companies. Since we have realized that the plain people and the trained people are also in similar boats, so maybe it'll be a mobility working group still figuring that out. Oh wait, Telco thinks mobility is something else. Anyway, we'll figure out the naming but that is a different type of working group that's gonna spin up for these folks to come together. So I see this, my hunch is that this will continue to happen. I will tell you a very practical challenge that we are going to face from being successful with these working groups is getting the right folks in the room and creating self-governance structures so that these groups can multiply without linearly needing to increase C&CF staff to host and manage them. So that's something I have to figure out but that's the direction that I'm seeing things go in. And we would love to hear if there are any areas that matter because one person saying doesn't really help too much so potentially gather people from your industry. For example, yesterday at the strategy meeting we were discussing IOT strategy. What does it mean to run Kubernetes in a cloud native way on the edge? So there are folks around that. There is a working group around that. So I think there are pockets where the work is happening. And people who are key to that story didn't know about it. That was like my biggest like, oh my goodness. So that's getting those right people in the room is like half the challenge. And then them staying motivated is because you need that thread that's gonna drive that discussion, take it forward. And it's gotta kind of think from a person who's participating their company perspective it needs to kind of tie it back to the business somehow. Because if you're doing this for the fun of it then it just becomes a passion and a hobby. Yeah. I think one thing I would add there as an example financial services is a really important industry and for them security is paramount. And for a while in the early days containers were not considered extraordinarily secure. There were many concerns. So that's a group that actually did get together some major financial institutions. And a lot of it I think was driven by the providers because several providers Red Hat, Google, et cetera had financial services customers who wouldn't adopt the services without having a real roadmap around security. And so one of the outcomes of that was a security audit which of course the CNCF has helped with for Kubernetes and helps with for other projects and other was CIS benchmarks and best practices sharing across financial services institutions of how to adopt Kubernetes in that case. And I think that really helped. Now we find that there's tremendous adoption in financial services because really has security container security has I would say across the chasm. No, that's it. So different things matter to different industries and this is one way of influencing. So folks, we have about four minutes left. I want to get to your question and then I have one question each for you folks that I'm dying to ask. So I really hope I get to. So why don't you start us off? So first of all, thank you so much for being so transparent and opening to us. My question is in regards to the Meetup organizers. I'm one of the Meetup organizers, co-organizers for an official CNCF Meetup in Bucharest in Romania. And I'm curious a bit about your vision on the Meetup organizers and like your plan. How do you see this fitting in the CNCF community? Yeah, absolutely. I think the Meetups happening around the world have been so pivotal to team cloud natives being so global. So I personally really enjoyed attending them over the years. I enjoy speaking at them and now I'm just so happy they exist. And CNCF is really happy to support them financially with Shrag or whatever is necessary. So I think they're absolutely critical because they like localize the community experience. I think the past year and a half, right? Everything's been virtual and slowly we are moving things to bevy the community groups. I'm not sure if you saw that. And the whole idea there is to bring the community in one place where we can then cross-populate them to different cloud native interests. Like let's say there is a meetup about or even a KCD happening locally or there's a meetup about a technology topic that two, three other meetup members might be interested in. So the hope is that by bringing in this bevy technology we can enhance the experience of the Meetup organizers as well as all the attendees who join in. So that's something we're doing on a very tactical level. But I think the 100% the must do for us strategically is to make sure organizers like yourself we keep rewarding you and creating a positive feedback mechanism for you so that your ranks grow and the numbers keep growing. And one second piece is, this is something just I'm toying with in my head is I'm trying to think of end user specific type meetups that could happen on a localized way which might bring out more people than we have traditionally seen. So those are just some of the thoughts that I have. Anything you folks wanna add? No, I think meetups are really essential for any these grassroots technology industry. Super important, super critical role because not everybody can come to KubeCon, not everybody can go to a community day. Having those meetups in each and every street essentially where it's like a bar. You just hang out and talk about, hey, I'm building my Kubernetes architecture like this. What do you think about this? And having those discussions over a pizza and a beer are much more meaningful as opposed to like going to KubeCon sometimes because you know you can talk to that person if you need to because that creates that much personal connection. For sure. Now, because I know we're short on time, I wanna ask my questions if you focused on mine. So Aparna, I'll start with you. So you've served on the board for a long time. You've been chair for two. What would you say you are the proudest of having accomplished in your tenure as chair? In my tenure as chair, great question. Well, I think one of the things I'm proudest of is when I joined, I wanted to work on two things. One is to work on strategy and I have a framework for the board to come together to work on strategy. As you can imagine, it's a lot of different companies. Not all of them are co-operative. But bringing them together in the context of the CNCF and I think that we have accomplished that well, especially in partnership with Priyanka. The second was really, this was a transitional time between Dan Kohn and Priyanka and I think we were looking for a really energetic, fresh leader and I am very glad to have been chair when Priyanka joined and very glad to have been a partner. I think one of the things that you have done, Priyanka, is that you've made the CNCF governing board more open. So we've started publishing our minutes, actually a year or so ago. And now we're having these type of panels that we will continue to have and it's been much more inviting. When I first joined as chair, one of the problems was that the community felt disconnected from the governing board. And I think that we have come a long way towards addressing that. We've also built up the end user community quite a bit and which is why I'm so happy that Arun Gupta from the end user community has taken on the chair position. So those are maybe the three things that I'm most proud of from the last two years. Thank you so much, Aparna. Your words are so kind and your support and partnership has been essential for me to ramp up in this role and then work with you to execute on all these things we wanted to do with the board. And I agree that the feel and the vibe in the board meetings is completely different now from when we started off. So thank you for everything you did. Arun, I have a similar question, but different in that, what are you most excited to work on and accomplish in your upcoming tenure as chair? I think Aparna set me up for success here already because she built that framework around transparency over there. I wanna extend that forward. I wanna bring that empathy. That's the word that I wanna use. I wanna have that empathy for each one of you, whether you were a provider, as she would correct me, or an end user. I wanna have an empathy for each one of you. I wanna be able to talk to end user members. I wanna be able to talk to gold members, silver members, all of them, whether you are a paid member or an unpaid member. Tell us, tell us more and more. Priyanka and I were talking about how we wanna have this kind of a session at each KubeCon going forward. You should have the right, you are a CNCF member, you should be able to tell us what is happening, what is not happening. So that's one thing that I'm excited about, empathy. The second one is bringing more neutral end user voice. Hopefully, Apple is an end user. We are a large consumer of cloud native technologies. I wanna bring more people like Apple, more teams like companies like Apple to CNCF. So hopefully educate them that why did we join? Why it matters to us? Why we join at the top tier? Join at whatever tier works for you financially, people-wise, whatever it is. But I think those are the two things that I'm excited about. And I am so excited to work on them with you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. All right, I think we're over time. Is that right, Jill? Okay, awesome. Any final questions from, yes? Hi, I'm Yuen Chen from Apple, yeah. I run Skonica. So first thanks and for the great work. I think in particularly the CNCF, KubeCon has done a great job and overcoming the pandemic challenges. But moving forward and with all these travel restrictions, still the pandemic challenges, right? Like this year, I haven't met anyone from China and sponsorship. I'm not sure, yeah. I see any company from China. So I know that will be upcoming virtual conference in China. But still, I just wondering how we will CNCF and to address continued these challenges in particularly we don't want to create, we won't have a single community, right? So my talk and I have co-present and the author in the community from Anibaba, we're collaborating. But still, I'm missing the person interaction, right? So far, it looks like we have completed two different words. I know a lot of the political other thing. But just from CNCF community perspective, I want to listen to the leadership, what's your vision, strategy or thoughts about this address this challenge? Yes, this has become a bigger challenge than I hoped it would ever be. Of course, for all of us, we couldn't meet until right now, right? And most people from outside the US, some countries have been able to attend. But generally speaking, it's mostly all US attendees here. And so we have been kind of nationally isolated in some ways and that is really a COVID effect. We are doing the virtual event in China end of the year. And we are just waiting to see what happens next year. I am a little nervous because from what I've heard is that the restrictions for travel going into China might not ease by Q3 next year, which would be a problem for us to host an in-person event. So it's one of those things where there is literally nothing we can do. The only thing we could do, which we are talking about is potentially folks in China meeting in person, but just kind of like we did here. It is definitely a little bit better scenario for the Europe US situation because as you heard, borders are opening up a little bit more and I'm expecting, you know, I shouldn't even say who knows what's going to happen, but hopefully. Just to add color to that, like yesterday, one of the topics was exactly on that, that what's going to be the event strategy for FY22. And Angela, she runs all of the events for LF. She was deeply engaged in that strategy and she's been thinking far ahead. And we don't know what the next three, six months, nine months are going to look like. So really constantly like keeping a tab on it and evolving. And one thing that I'm assured of looking at how we have handled events, I think we're going to do an excellent job and provide the most immersive and the inclusive experience. Safety of speaker, staff and attendees is of utmost priority though. So I think we're going to always keep that at the top priority, everything else after that. Yeah, we're all in this together really because we are being pulled by our forces beyond ourselves, but until then we just use Zoom as best as we can. I think we are, oh yeah, we are definitely over time now. I want to thank everybody who came. Thank you so much. And I want to thank my panelists, Aparna and Arun for such a great session. Yay. Thank you.