 The Cube presents KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2022, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Welcome to Valencia, Spain in KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2022. I'm Keith Townsend along with my co-host, Paul Gillen, who's been putting in some pretty good work talking to incredible people. And we have, I don't want to call, heard the face of CNCF, but you kind of introduced me to, you don't know this, but you know, I'm going to be Sharma, Executive Director of CNCF. You introduced me to KubeCon at KubeCon San Diego, who's one of my first Kubecons. And I was trying to get my bearings about me and you're on stage and I'm like, okay, she looks like a reasonable person. This might be a reasonable place to learn about CloudNative. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. And that's so nice to hear. It is an amazing show, roughly 7,500 people? Yes, that's right, sold out. So it's a big show and with that comes, you know, someone told me, CNCF is an outstanding organization, which it is, you're the Executive Director. And I told them, you know what, that's like being the President of the United States without having Air Force One. Like, you get all- I don't know about that. No, you get all of the, I mean, 7,500 people from across, literally across the world. That's true. We're in Europe, we're coming out of times that have been, you know, it can't be overstated. This is unlike any other times. Yes, absolutely. Difficult decisions. There was a whole, I don't know the term, cufflough or blow-up about mass versus no mass. How do you manage just the diversity of the community? That is such a great question, because as I mentioned in my keynote a little bit, right? At this point, we're a community of what, 7.1 million developers? That's a really big group. And so when we think about how should we manage the diversity, the way I see it, it's essential to treat each other with kindness, professionalism, and respect. Now, that's easy to say. Yeah, because it sounds great, right? Yeah, paper is awesome. 7.1 million people later. Exactly. And so this is why, like, I phoned a friend on stage and Van Jones came and spoke with us, who's the renowned CNN contributor, commentator, sorry. And his advice was very much that in such a diverse community, there's always going to be lots of perspectives, lots of opinions. And we need to, A, always bring the version of ourselves which we think will empower this ecosystem. What we are doing, if everybody did that, is that going to be a good thing or a bad thing? And the other is we need to give each other space and grace. Space to do what we need to do, grace if there are mistakes, if there are challenges. And so those are some good principles for us to live by. And I think that in terms of how CNCF tries to enable the diversity, it's by really trying to hear from everybody possible, the vocal loud voices, as well as the folks who you need to reach out a little bit, pull in a little bit. So it's an ongoing challenge that we do our best with. How do you balance, and I've been to a lot of trade shows and conferences over the years, the trade show organizers are very coin-operated. They're there for the money. And you have traditional trade shows. And you have a situation here with an open-source community that is motivated by very different principles. But you need to make money. You need the show to be profitable. You need to sell some sponsorships. But you also need to keep it available and open to the people who don't have the big budgets. How are you balancing that? So I would actually like to share something that may not be obvious, which is that we don't actually do the shows to make money. We, as you said, a lot of trade shows are coin-off. And the goal there is like, well, actually there are different kinds of, I think if it's an independent events organization, it can be like, hey, let's make as much revenue as possible. If it's part of a large company, like cloud provider, et cetera, the events tend to be loss leaders. Because they're like lead gen, I think. But they're loss leaders, but they're profit makers. Long term, yeah, it's like top of the funnel, I guess. For us, we are only doing the events to enable the community and bring people from different companies together. So our goal is to try and break even. Well, that's laudable. How big does it get, though? I mean, you're at the point with 7,500 attendees here, where you're on the cusp of being a really big event. Would you limit its size, eventually, or are you just going to let this thing run its course? So our inherent belief is that we want to be accessible and open to more and more and more people because the mission is to make cloud native ubiquitous, right? And so that means we are excited about growth. We are excited about opening the doors for everyone. But I think, actually, the one good thing that came out of this pandemic is that we've become a lot more comfortable with hybrid. So we have a virtual component and an in-person component. So combining that, I think, makes it, well, it's very challenging, it's like running to events, but it's also like, it can scale a little bit better. And then if the numbers increase, like if they double, for example, I think we're still not in the realm of, by Southwest, which feels like, oh, that's the step function difference. So linear increases in number of attendees, I think is a good thing. If and when we get to the point where it's, you know, exponential growth, at that point we have to think about a completely different event, really. So seven billion people in the world, approaching eight billion, 7.1 members in the community. Technology is obviously an enabler. Where I, it's enabled me to be here in Valencia, Spain, experiencing this beautiful city. There's so much work to be done. What is the role of CNCF in providing access to education and technology for the rest of the world? Absolutely. So, you know, one of the key areas we focus on is learning and development. In supporting the ecosystem in learners, beginners, to start their cloud-native journey or expand their cloud-native journey with training, certifications, and actually shared this in the keynote. Every year, the increase in number of people taking certifications grows by 216%, year over year growth. It's a lot, right? And every week, about 1,000 people are taking a certification exam. So, and we set that up primarily to bring people in. And that's one of our more successful initiatives, but we do so many. We do mentorship programs, internship programs. We, a lot of diversity scholarships, these events. It all kind of comes together to support the ecosystem to grow. The, turning away from the events, you're toward the CNCF at large, you have a growing number of projects. The number of projects within CNCF is becoming kind of overwhelming. Is there an upper threshold at which you would, do you tighten the limits on what projects you will incubate or how big does that tent become? Right. I think, you know, when we had 50 projects, we were feeling overwhelmed then too, but we seem to have coped just fine. And there's a reason for that. The reason is that cloud native has been growing so fast with the world. It's a representative of what's going on in our world. Over the course of the pandemic, as you know, every company became a technology company. People had to like double their engineering staffs over, without anybody ever having met in person, right? And when that kind of change is going around the world, cloud needing being the scaffolding of how people build and deploy modern software, which is grew really quickly with it, and the use cases we needed to support grew. That's why the types of projects and kinds of projects is growing. So there's a method, there's a reason to the madness, I should say. And I think as the world and the landscape of technology evolves, cloud native will evolve and keep developing in either into new projects or consolidation of projects and everything is on the table. So I think one of these perceptions, rightly or only, is that CNCF is kind of where the big people go to play. If you're a small project and you're looking at CNCF, you're thinking one day I'll get big enough. Like how should small project leaders or leaders of small projects, how should they engage CNCF? Totally, and you know, I want to really change this narrative because in CNCF we have three tiers of projects. There's the graduated ones which are at the top, these are the most mature ones, we really believe and put our stamp behind them. Then there's the incubating projects which are pretty solid technologies with good usage that are getting there. And then there's the sandbox, which is literally a sandbox and open ground for innovation. And the bar to entry is low in that. It's easy to apply, there's a mass vote to get you in, and once you're in, you have a neutral IP zone created by being a CNCF project that you can attract more pro-mentainers, more companies can start collaborating, so we become an enabler for the small projects. So everybody should know that, FYI. Yeah, so I will be interested to know how that, so I have an idea, so let's say I don't have an idea, but let's say that I did have an idea. I'm sure you have an idea. I'm sure I have an idea. And I just don't have the infrastructure to run a project. I need help, but I think it's going to solve a problem. What's that application process like? So you apply after you already have a GitHub repo. Okay, I have a GitHub repo. Yeah, you've started the project, you've started the coding, you've put it out there on GitHub, you have something going. And so it's not at just idea level, it's at like early stage of execution level. And then your question was, how do you apply? Yeah, so how do I, so I have, let's say that, let's talk about something that I'm thinking about doing and I'll actually do is that we're thinking about doing a open store, a cloud native framework for people migrating to the public cloud or to cloud native. There's just not enough public information about that. And I'm like, you know what? I want to contribute what I know to it. So that's a project in itself, not necessarily a software project, but a IP project. Or let's say I have a tool to do that migration and I put that up on my GitHub repo but I want people to iterate on that tool. Right, so it would be a simple process of literally there is when you go to our online materials, there's a simple process for sandbox where you fill a Google form, where you put in your URL, explain what you're doing, who are some basic information, hit submit, and we batch process these about every once a month, I think, and the TOC looks at what you've filled in, takes a group vote and goes from there. What is your operating model? I mean, you mentioned you don't look to make a profit in this show. Do you look, I want to be sure, CNCF is a non-profit, is that correct? Do you look, what models do you look at in determining your own governance? Do you look at a commercial business? Do you look at a non-profit? Like ourselves? Yeah, what's your model for how you run CNCF? Oh, okay, so it's a non-profit, as I said, and our model is very simple. We want to raise the funds that we are able to raise in order to then invest them into community initiatives that play the supporter, enabler role to all these projects we just talked about. We're not, we're never the project, we're the top cheerleader of the project. Think of us like that. And in terms of, but interestingly, unlike, I don't know much about the non-profit session compare, but interestingly, the donating companies are relevant not just because of their cash that they have put in, but because those companies are part of this ecosystem and they need to, them being in this ecosystem, they help create content around cloud native. They do more than give us money and that's why we really like our members. They'll provide contributing engineers to projects, they will help us with marketing with case studies and the interviews and all of that. And so it becomes this like healthy cycle of it starts with someone donating to become a member, but they end up doing so many different things. And ultimately, the goal is make cloud native ubiquitous and all this goes towards that. So talk to me about conflict resolution because there are some really big projects in CNC, I mean, some stuff that is changed, literally changing the world, but there's competing interests between some of the projects. I mean, there's, if you look at service mesh, there's a lot of service mesh. And there's just different visions. Where's the CNCF and kind of just making sure the community expert is thought across all of the different or considered across all of the different projects as they have the, let's say, inevitably bump heads. Yeah, so by design, CNCF was never meant to be a kingmaker where you pick one project, right? And I think that's been working out really well because one is when you accept a project, you're not 100% sure that specific one is going to take over that technology space, right? So we're leaving it open to see who works it out. The second is that as every company is becoming a technology company, use cases are different. So a service mesh A might work really well for my company, but it really may not be a fit for your code base. And so the diversity of options is actually a really good thing. So talk to me about, saw an interesting note coming out of the keynote yesterday, 65% of the participants here at KubeCon are new to KubeCon. I'm like, oh, I'm a vet. You are. I went to two or three before this. OG. I think that's what I tweeted, OG of KubeCon. But who are they? Like, what's making up? Are they developers? Are there traditional enterprises? Are they contributing companies? Who's the 65%? Who's the 65% of you? The new. Well, it's all kinds of companies that are sending their developers, right? It's sometimes, there's a lot of them are end users. I think at least half or a third at least of attendees are end user companies. And then there is also like the new startups around town. And then there is like, every big company or small has been hiring developers as fast as possible. And even if they've always been a player and cloud native, they need to send all these people to this ecosystem to start building the relationships, start like learning the technology. So it's all kinds of folks are collecting to that here. As I think about people starting to learn the technologies, learn the communities, one thing, the market change for this KubeCon for me over others is the number of customers sharing stories in user organizations. Much of the KubeCon's that have been through many of the open source conferences, it's always been like vendors pushing their message, et cetera, what, tell me about that sea change. One thing that's like just immediate, and the case right now is that all the co-chairs for the event who are in charge of designing the agenda are end users. So we have Emily Fox from Apple, we have Jasmine James from Twitter, and we have Ricardo Roja from CERN. So they're all end users. So naturally they're like, you know, picking talks that they're like, well, this is very relevant, I'm a go for that. And I'm here for it. So that's one thing that's just happening. The other though is a greater trend, which is as I was saying in the pandemic, so many companies has to get going and quickly. That they have built expertise and users are no longer the passive recipients of information, they're equal contributors. They know what they need, what they want, they have experiences to share and you're seeing that reflected in the conference. One thing I've seen at other conferences in the past that started out really for practitioners is that invariably they want to go upscale and they want to draw the CIOs and the executive, the top executives. Is that an objective for you or do you really want to keep this kind of a t-shirt crowd for the long term? Hey, everyone's welcome. That's really important, you know, right? And so we, and that's why we're trying to expand. It's like, you know, middle out as they had in the Silicon Valley show. The idea being, sorry, I just meant this a little bit. Okay, so the idea being that we've had the core developer crews, developer DevOps, SRE crowd, right? Over the course of the last virtual events, we actually expanded in the other direction. We put in a business value track which was more for people in the business but not as a developer or DevOps engineer. We also had a student thing where it's like you're trying to get all the university crowd people and it's been working phenomenally. And then, actually, this event, we went in the other direction as well. We hosted our inaugural CTO summit which is for senior leadership and user companies. And the idea is they're discussing topics of technology that are business relevant. So our topic this time was resiliency and multi-cloud. And we're producing a research paper about it that's going to come out in some weeks. So for us, it's about getting everybody under this tent, right? But it will never mean that we deprioritize what we started with, which is the engineering crowd. It's just an expansion. Stay true to your roots. Well, Priyanka, we're going to talk to a lot of those startup communities tomorrow. Tomorrow's coverage is all about startups, why should CTOs, the new startups talk to these upstarts as opposed to some of the bigger players this year on the show floor. Over 170 sponsoring companies, the show floor has been vibrant, engaging. And we're going to get into that community tomorrow's coverage on theCUBE. From Villanquillas, Spain, I'm Keith Townsend along with Paul Gillan. And you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage.