 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 to San Diego, I'm Stu Min, and my co-host is Justin Warren, and coming back to our program, one of our CUBE alumni, and the co-chair of this KubeCon CloudNativeCon, Brian Lyles, who is also a senior staff engineer at VMware. Brian, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me on. And do you want to have a shout out, of course, to Vicky Chung, who is your co-chair. She has been doing a lot of work. She came to our studio ahead of it to do a preview, and unfortunately, she's supposed to be sitting here, but a little under the weather, and we know there's nothing worse than doing travel and fighting an illness. Yeah, she's a little sick today, but she knows that we'll still handle it. All right, so Brian, 12,000 people here in attendance, more keynotes than most of us can keep track of. So first of all, congratulations. Things seem to be going well, other than maybe choosing the one day of the year that it rained in San Diego, which we can't necessarily plan for. I'd love you to bring us a little bit inside, as to some of the goals and the themes that you and Vicky and the community were looking at for this KubeCon. So you're right, with 12,000 people and so many sponsors and so many ideas and so many projects, it's really hard to have a singular theme, but a few months ago, what we came up with was, well, if Kubernetes and this cloud software make us better or basically advances, then we can do more advanced things and then our end users can be more advanced and it was like a three-pong thing. And if you go back and look at our keynotes, she would say, hey, we're looking at our software, hey, we're looking at amazing things that we did, especially capped by that 5G keynote yesterday. And then notice that we had, it was me talking about how we could look forward and then notice we had Ian talking about security and then we had Walmart and Target talking about how they're using it. And that was all on purpose, just trying to tell a story that people can go back and look at. Yeah, I liked the message that you were trying to put out there around how we need to make Kubernetes a little bit easier, but how we need to change the way that we talk about it as well. So maybe you could fill us in a little bit more about your thoughts there. Unfortunately, Kubernetes is not going to get any easier. That's like saying, we wish Linux was easier to use. Linux has a huge ABI and API interface. It's not going to get easier. So what we need to do is start doing what we did with Linux. And Linux is the kernel. Distribution wars happen over the years and you notice some distributions are easier to use than others. So if you use the current Fedora or use the current Ubuntu or even like Mint, it's getting really easy to use. And I'm not suggesting that we need Kubernetes distributions. That's actually the furthest thing. But we do need to work on building our ecosystem on top of Kubernetes because I mentioned like CI, CD, observability, security, audit management and who knows what else. We need to start thinking about those things as pretty much first class items, just as important as Kubernetes. Kubernetes is the kernel. Yeah, in the keynotes, there's, as you said, there's such a broad landscape here. I've heard some horror stories of people like, oh, hey, where do I start? And they're like, well, here's the CNCF landscape. And they're like, I can't start there. There's too much there. You picked out and highlighted some of the lesser known pieces. There's some errors that are a little bit mature. What are some of the more exciting things that you've seen going on the ecosystem? In this ecosystem, I'm not even going to, I highlighted Open Policy Agent as an interesting product. I don't know if it's the right answer. Actually, I kind of wish it was a competitor just so I could determine if it was the right answer. But things like OPA and then open telemetry. Two projects coming together and having even bigger goals. Let's make observability easy. What I would also like to see is a little bit more maturity in the workflow space. So the CI and CD space. And I know with Argo and Flux merging to Argo Flux, that's very interesting. And just a little bit of a tidbit is that I also co-chair the CNCF SIG application delivery special interest group. But we're thinking about that, that space right there. So I would love to see more in the workflow space. But then also I would like to see more security tools and not just old school, check, check, check. But think about what Aqua Security is doing. And I don't know if they're now SNCC or, I don't know how to say it, but there's companies out there rethinking security. Let's do that. Yeah, I spoke to SNCC a couple of days ago and I'm pretty sure it's SNCC. Apparently it stands first, so now you know. Which, that was news to me, but. Oh, so now I know. So now I know. TIL, SNYK. That was interesting, but they have a lot of good projects coming up. Yeah. You mentioned the EGIS instrument that you like that there's competitors for particular projects to kind of explore which way is the right way of doing things. We have a lot of exhibitors here and we have a lot of competitors out there trying to come into this ecosystem. It seems to actually be growing even bigger. Are we going to see a period of consolidation where some of these competing options, we decide that actually no, we don't want to use that. We want to go over here. I mean, according to crossing the chasm, yes. But we need to figure out where we are on the maturity chart for the whole ecosystem. So I think in a healthy ecosystem, people don't succeed and products go away, but then what we see is in maybe six months or a year or two later, those same founders are out there creating new products. So not everyone's going to win on their first shot. So I think that's fine because you know what? We've all had failures in the past, but we're still better for those failures. Yeah. I've heard it described as a kind of Cambrian explosion at the moment. So hopefully we don't get an asteroid that comes in and craters our ecosystem. Yeah. One of the things we really, really noticed is if you went back a year or even two years ago, we were talking about very much the infrastructure, the building blocks of what we had. I really noticed front and center, especially in the keynotes here, talking a lot about the workloads, talking about the application. We're talking about much more up the stack and from kind of that application piece down, some friends of mine that were new to this ecosystem was like, I don't understand what language they're talking. I'm like, well, they're talking to the app devs. That's why they're not speaking to you. Is that, was that intentional? Well, for me it is because I like to speak to the app devs and I realized that infrastructure comes and goes. I've been doing this for decades now and I've seen the rise of Cisco as a networking platform and when I've seen their ups and downs, I've worked in security. But what I know is fundamentals are just that and I would like to speak to developers now because we need to get back to the developers because they create the value. I mean, the only people who went at selling Kubernetes are vendors of Kubernetes. So I work for one and then there's the clouds and then there's other companies as well. So the thing that stays constant are people are building applications and ultimately if Kubernetes and the cloud native landscape can't take care of those application developers, remember happened, remember OpenStack? And not in like a negative way, but remember OpenStack? It got to be so hard that people couldn't even focus on what gave value. And unlike OpenStack lives on, it's still being used a lot in service providers and so on. Technology never really goes away completely. It just may fade off and live in a corner and then we move on to whatever's the next newest and greatest thing and then end up reinventing ourselves and having to do all the same problems again. It feels a little bit like that with sometimes with Kubernetes where we haven't we already solved this before? But Linux is still here. Linux is still here. And Linux is still growing. I mean, Linux is over version five right now and Linux is adapting and bringing in new things in a kernel and moving things out to user land. Kubernetes needs to figure out how to do that as well. No, Brian, I think it's a great point. I'm an infrastructure guy and we know the only reason infrastructure exists is to serve up that application. What manage the business, my application, my data, you and your team have some open source projects that you're involved in. Maybe give us a little bit about Octant. Right, so Octant is a, so let me tell you the quick story. Joe Bada and I talked about how do we approach developers where they are? And one thing came up really early in that conversation was, well, why don't we just tell developers where things are broken? So come to find out using Kubernetes object model and a little bit of computer science like just a tiny little bit. You can actually build this graph where everything is connected. And then all you need to do then is determine if for any type of object is it working or is it not working? So now look at this. Now I can actually show you what's broken and what's not broken. And what makes Octant a little bit different is that we also wrapped it with a dashboard that shows everything inside of a Kubernetes cluster. And then we made it extensible. And just a crazy thing. I made a plug in API one weekend because I'm like, oh, that would be kind of cool. And just at this conference alone, nine to 10 people have walked up to me and said, oh, we use Octant and we use your plug-in system and now we've done things that I can't imagine. And I think I might have said this. I know I've said it somewhere recently, but the hallmark of a good platform is when people start creating things you could never imagine on it. And that's what Linux said. That's what Kubernetes is doing. And Octant is doing it in the small right now. So kudos to me and it's me really and my team. That's really exciting. So, right, Octant, Kubernetes and Tanzu, both are seven-sided, was that moving to eight? So no, marketing, and I don't press to understand what marketing is. Someone just named it and I said, you know what, I'm a developer. I don't really mind. As long as we can call it something, that's fine. I do like the idea that we should evolve the number of platonic solos that we have in here. And actually there's another answer too. So if you think about what seven is, people were thinking ahead and said, well, someone could actually take that and use it as another connotation. So I was like, all right, we'll just get out of that. That's why it's called Octant. But still nautical theme. Okay, great. Brian, so much going on. Even outside of this facility, there's things going on. Any hidden gems that just, our audience that's watching or people that will look back at this event and say, hey, here's some cool little things there. I mean, they hit the Twitters. I'm sure they'll see the therapy dogs and whatnot. But for the people geeking out, some of those hidden gems that you'd want to share. Some of the hidden gems, I'll throw up too. Watch what these end user companies are doing and watch what the advanced companies like Walmart and Target and Capital One are doing. I just think there's a lot of lessons to be learned and think about this. They have a crazy amount of money. If they're actually investing time in this, it might be a good idea. And other hidden gems are companies that are embracing the extension model of Kubernetes through custom resource definitions and building things. So the other day I had Vitesse on this stage and they're not the only example of this, but running MySQL and Kubernetes and it pretty much works. All right, well, let's see where we can run with this. So I think that there's going to be a lot more companies that are going to invest in this space and actually deliver on these types of products. And I think that's a very interesting space. Yeah, we spoke to Bloomberg just before and we spoke to Vitesse, we spoke to Sugur from Vitesse yesterday, seeing how people are using Kubernetes to build these systems, which can then be built upon themselves. I think that's probably for me, one of the more interesting things is that we end up with a platform and then we build more platforms on top of it, but we're creating these higher levels of abstraction, which actually gets us closer to just being able to do the work that we want to do as developers. I don't need to think about how all of the internals work, which again, to your keynote today, is like, I don't want to write machine code, I just want to solve this sort of business problem. If we can embed that into this ecosystem, then it just makes everyone's lives much, much easier. So you basically, that is my secret. Really, I know people hate abstractions and they say they will, but no one hates an abstraction. You don't actually turn the crank in your motor to make your car run. You press accelerator and it goes. So, we need to figure out the correct abstractions and we do that through iteration and failure, but I'm liking that people are pushing the boundaries and Joe Beta and Kelsey Hightower have said, is that Kubernetes is a platform of platforms. It is basically an API for writing APIs. Let's take advantage of that and write APIs. All right, well, Brian, thank you, thank Vicki. Please share our congratulations to the team for everything done here. And while you might be stepping down as co-chair, we do hope you'll come and join us back on theCUBE at a future event. No, I enjoy talking to you all, so thank you. All right, thanks so much, Brian, for Justin Warren. I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more of our wall-to-wall coverage, KubeCon, CloudNativeCon here in San Diego. Thanks for watching theCUBE.