 Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage live here in Austin, Texas for the CNCFs, two conferences, CloudNativeCon, which was yesterday and two days today and tomorrow of KubeCon for Kubernetes conference. This is theCUBE, of course, from SiliconANGLE Media. I'm John Furrier, my co-student man and our next guest, Dan Cohn, who's the executive director of the CNCF, the man who put it all together. Congratulations, welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. Oh, absolutely, thrilled to have you guys back here again. So you're kind of doing a victory lap here now, you know, pretty high-five in each other. Great event, great event. Glad it's a good event, and I am hearing fantastic feedback that folks are thrilled to be here. But we sort of describe this moment for the organization and the community as being the end of the beginning, where we now have all the major cloud vendors, all of the biggest enterprise software companies. We have a core group of 14 projects anchored by Kubernetes, but tons and tons of work in front of us. And tons of success, so I'm just going to read a couple of the highlights from yesterday and there's a lot today. Baidu joins the CNCF, a lot of scaling production application examples, 31 new silver end user members joined, Alibaba Cloud update to Platinum, Core DNS 1.0, Container D, Fluent D, Jager, tons of news, obviously we've been pumping out the coverage and today, again, more and more great goodness. But really interesting is that you guys have put a frame around this community to allow it to grow, to fertilize the open source vibe, which is all cloud, but yet scale. And you put up a slide, I want to get your reaction to, but I thought it was compelling yesterday during your keynote, it was the flywheel circle, and it said, Projects, Products, Profit. And not that you're promoting profit, but you're not hiding the ball either, saying, hey, you know what? There's a lot of commercial interest in cloud, obviously we saw AWS success last week, and that is, if you create good products in this community framework, there's profit to be had. Right, now first of all, I should admit to plagiarizing that slide from Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. And similarly, I think you can look at a lot of aspects. It's an open source piece that you guys are using. Three to commons, yeah, copy left. Right, and similarly, I think there's a lot of ways in which Kubernetes is trying to build on the success of Linux, and Jim even describes Kubernetes as the Linux of the cloud. Yeah, and that's a good point. Dan, one of the things we've been talking around Kubernetes is you talk about scale. Talk about scale of the CNCF, four to 14 projects. People are a little worried when you get, oh wait, all the vendors around here, and there's all these projects. It's a foundation thing, it's going to go off the rails, customers aren't going to have a voice. How do we make sure we kind of learn from some of the things that other projects have had challenge with in the past? And I think that's our huge advantage, which is the great thing about coming later than some of the other foundations, is we can look at where they had successes and where they had issues, and our aspiration for CNCF is to get to go make entirely new mistakes rather than replicating some of the issues that have come before. And so really from the beginning of CNCF, we had a somewhat unusual, and frankly a little bit cumbersome charter where I describe it at times as a three-ring circus. We have a governing board made up of the vendors that are putting a lot of money into the community, but they don't get to run the projects and they don't even get to pick the projects. Instead they appoint six of the nine members of an independent technical oversight committee, kind of like a Supreme Court, and then we have a third group, an end user community that I'm thrilled to say is now up to 28 members in it. They appoint one of those folks. We finally got that working. We have Sam Lambert, the Director of Infrastructure GitHub, who has just made a huge commitment to Kubernetes, is moving all of their infrastructure over it to it. Those seven appoint the last two. And so that body, and they just had their public meeting a couple hours ago, they feel very strongly about their independence, about their reputation, that they're trying to make very good judgments based on what they're seeing in the marketplace. That's interesting, the three-ring circle, I like how you put it there, but let's talk about the end user piece, because I think that's critical. One of the things we were commenting earlier with, from the Lyft folks, was you have a lot of end users who are built some large-scale systems out of their own sheer necessity. Definitely. And that is now being donated in. We saw Kubernetes come in, which you shepherded beautifully even from Google, but you got Lyft donating amazing product with Envoy. So this project Envoy has a huge amount of excitement, and what was fun was actually on the same stage that they contributed it back in LA in September, Uber contributed a separate project. Now, unlike Uber, the two projects are in no way competitive. Yeager is a really fantastic tracing one. But what they have in common is that their companies that have had to grow from nothing to extremely high-scale and then had problems that they solved, and they wanted to share that expertise with others. I want to get your thoughts on this, because we've been speculating on the key, we've been kind of taking an editorial position that this is all goodness. That's pretty obvious, right? You're starting to see this kind of contribution. The gifts that keep on giving, at least a significant code. Not like, hey, let's get started a little group and huddle and build something organically. You have real goodness coming in from Google, Uber, Lyft, and a million others. How is that changing the game, certainly accelerating it? That's really bringing goods to the table. Right. I think the whole thing. You're the manager. I think the whole, and for what it's worth, I don't actually manage the projects, and so we do provide a set of services to them, and we help them, we market them, but one of the unusual aspects of CNCF is that the projects do actually manage themselves. A little bit of guidance from the TOC, but we really are unusual in that sense, and that's one of the reasons that the projects have been. And what's interesting is to connect the dots, though, one step further, you're talking about a commercial entity donating massive intellectual property in the open for all the goodness of everyone else, but yet, that flywheel's continuing. They're still using it, so there's inherent commercial dynamic. Right. Well, and back to that circle, I think really the underlying concept is that companies agree that sharing key parts of their infrastructure adds a huge amount of value to the whole ecosystem to each other, and then they're absolutely eager to compete above that. And so you can look at it with the public clouds where we have now Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, IBM, Oracle, all at the table, they are absolutely fierce competitors, but they're saying that this specific software infrastructure layer isn't the area that they want to compete, they want to compete on all the value added services, customer service, et cetera. Dan, I wonder if you can speak to how kind of CNCF connects to some of the broader communities out there. Think like Cata Containers got announced coming out of the OpenStack Group. You've got a serverless track happening here kind of extends some of where Kubernetes is going. How does CNCF kind of fit into the kind of the broader ecosystem? Sure, and it's definitely the case that all the innovation out there cannot happen in CNCF. Most obviously everything that we do, almost everything depends on Linux, and so that's in our parent organization, the Linux Foundation. But we've had a good collaboration with Jonathan Price from OpenStack. They have two booths on the floor here at the show, and we've spoken to Clear Containers and RunV, the two predecessors in the past. But the part that I'm particularly pleased with for Cata Containers is that it is an OCI compliant runtime that's another sister organization and is really designed to work well for Kubernetes. And then they can pitch that and let the market go aside which container runtimes they find most valuable. Obviously a lot of traction here in terms of the sentiment around service meshes and pluggable architectures, that's been very cool. But security came up. So I want to get your thoughts around security, obviously storage and some of these older models around how to deal with storage and networking obviously always in the action. But security is the top of mind for everyone and how's that being addressed? Toph was out there. Sure, so our philosophy on this is that moving to cloud native and particularly the continuous integration and continuous development that goes along with that is the most important step that you can do to help secure your infrastructure. And Equifax is the example everyone always brings up, but there was a case where they were using known and secure software and they didn't have the processes up to place where instead of doing quarterly updates or monthly updates, you want to be doing dozens of updates per day and a cloud native infrastructure allows you to do that. What's next for you because you got a great traction with both community response and the community has been absolutely amazing, the quality of people, participant level has been great. But also at the funding sponsors, you got a lot of people are involved. What's next? I mean, what happens next? I mean, what do you envision happening? What's the plan and how do you view that evolving? Well, I sort of hate to fall into the buzzword inclusion here, but if you go back to the crossing the chasm metaphor, I think we're still very much just in the early adopter phase. 2018 could very well be the moment that we jump over to the early majority. I do feel like this whole community now has the velocity to do that and that we're on track for it. But as that happens, there's just far, far more people who need to be educated in the space, understand the projects and the options and how to work with them. And then hopefully they go from just being consumers of these technologies to contributors and that we can welcome them into our community and hopefully get the advantage of their expertise as well. I want to get your thoughts on a comment that Stu and I were talking about. Stu, you and I were talking about the notion of value creation above the stack and then how Kubernetes, although some could say being commoditized, but it's also creating value because with that consistency of Kubernetes, you can now create value. So we believe, and I want to get your reaction to this because we think a whole new ecosystem dynamic will emerge of a new kind of ecosystem. And if this new app developer, combined with software engineering, which is really going on, and he's talking about cloud, the app developers who are just building value, that value creation will be rewarded. That's where monetization will be happening. And if I could build off that, Dan, I loved one of your opening comments that you quoted, exciting times are boring, infrastructure may be too exciting. So this week we've been teasing out, there's a lot of work to make that infrastructure boring. You've got everybody on this floor, the CNCF board, lots of new projects making that. Where the action is and what this is going to create is that application modernization, that speed and agility would be great. These cool new cloud native applications out there. So it's interesting dynamic, kind of spans a broad pieces of the layers of the stack there. Yeah, well I will point out that there was an odd level of unanimity of just a ton of different leaders in the community and keynotes from Craig Mclucky and Ken Goldberg and others, but where they all agree that Kubernetes is not by any means the ultimate answer or the final answer. I think everybody now expects to see Kubernetes as a core aspect of the infrastructure for software for the next decade or more, but there's a belief that there's a whole ton of value that needs to be added above it, particularly to try and show for a regular application developer who just has a PHP app or the Node.js microservices or anything else, what's the easiest way to go from having a piece of software and deploying it effectively? Dan, so it's interesting, you watch the people on the outside, they're like, oh, look at the Kubernetes, they're all holding hands and saying, cool, I mean, we know there's some spirited debates that happen in the code, some projects that are sometimes competing up there. Why has the community come together and where are some of the areas that we still need to kind of work on and improve to kind of help customers going forward? And again, I think they have the big advantage of having watched other communities that didn't value community and consensus and ability to work through their issues. And so, thankfully, we just have a ton of really capable engineers but who also have some of those social or personal qualities that they care about working these things out. And to date at least, I think most of those disagreements have been settled pretty amicably and in a positive direction. In terms, I think there's still huge swaths of the space that are still up in the air. And so, storage is an obvious one where there's a ton of work going on in the storage working group of CNCF. A serverless is another where I think that everyone agrees that the application deployment model of AWS Lambda is really exciting and has some things that people should replicate and should be brought over to Kubernetes, but how that should happen, what the software is, et cetera. They're still, in fact, we have our first serverless track today here at KubeCon where several different competing approaches are all talking about what they'd like to do. Awesome stuff, and you also announced some dates for next year, December 11th and 13th in Seattle. Yes, that's a year from now. November 14th and 15th in Shanghai. Now, you and I met in Hangzhou in the lobby, which was just amazing, but I certainly am hoping to convince you to go back to China with us. This will be our first event. Oh, good, yeah, that's exactly the right one. But this will be our first event in China, which I think there's just a huge opportunity. We now have Baidu, Tencent, Huawei, ZTE, a number of startups. There's just so much excitement for this space over there that we're really excited to satisfy it. And Copenhagen in May. And that's the last one, thank you. May 2nd to 4th in Copenhagen, and that we're really excited for the event to bring it to Europe and the rest of the world. Okay, so you've been working like a dog, you've been working hard. I've seen in China, it's serendipitous, but it's not without being mentioned that this has been a great effort by your team in the Linux Foundation and Jim and the whole team. So congratulations. Are you having a pinch me moment? I know it's too early to do a victory lap, but you're really pretty excited. Thank you, yeah, it really has been a great thing for the Foundation that we sort of accomplished many of our 2018 and 2019 goals this year. But I'm sure we're going to find plenty of stuff to do next year. And your goals for the next six to 12 months, what's on your top three to do, continue the momentum, share your KPI? Yeah, I mean what's great is that we really have plenty of members. We'd always like to add new ones and serve the ones we have better. But right now, the focus is really about providing services, better services to our projects. All of them are feel overworked. They would love help on documentation, on marketing, on messaging about it, and some of them need help with test development and other things. So that's really what we're buckling down on. Great community, I can attest from being here on the ground, firstly, President at Creation. And I was standing there with JJ and Lou Tucker, open stack three years ago, talking about Kubernetes, we're kind of riffing, we kind of imagined then obviously they bolted on last year with your event. Now, second year here, huge community, congratulations. But to have 4,100 folks here is more than the previous four events combined. So it really is exciting. The Cube always on the ground, sometimes the squirrel finds a nut. We found the Cloud Native Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation, CNCF, the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, really a new, growing, and relevant community for Cloud and a new way to do software and re-imagine the future from software engineering to full application development and new way, this is the Cube's coverage. We're here live in Austin, more live coverage after this short break, we'll be right back.