 Welcome to Amsterdam, and KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2023. Join John Furrier, Savannah Peterson, Rob Streche, and UPSCOG, as the Kube covers the largest conference on Kubernetes, CloudNative, and open source technologies together with developers, engineers, and IT leaders from around the globe. Live coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2023 is made possible by the support of Red Hat, the CNCF, and its ecosystem partners. Good morning, brilliant humans, and welcome back to Amsterdam. We are here at day three of KubeCon, if you can't tell from my voice, but it is a fabulous time. This is the largest open source conference in Europe. I'm joined by my co-host, Rob. I'm Savannah Peterson, and we've got Tom Squared over here on my left. Very pumped for this panel. We're fans of you. I'm wearing the cast in colors today. So grateful. Yeah. Always looking out for it, always looking out. How are you guys doing? How are you holding up? Very good, yeah. It's been a great conference so far. I think my voice has gone as well, so I apologize, but great energy, good conference. It sounds good to me, so I wouldn't know any different. As we always tell people, the audience doesn't know what they don't know, so you're a secret safe for us. Tom, you guys did a great party last night. How are you feeling? I'm feeling better than the last time you spoke, because then I did not have a voice, and I was screaming, but that has nothing to do with this show because it's been amazing. It's been super busy, tons of people, tons of conversations with partners activities. Our party was amazing yesterday. We went right upside down, museum. That was really, really fun. We had a great learning day with Cube Campus as well. Boot traffic was ridiculous. Yeah, I want to talk about that real quick, Tom. You had quite the line. What was your activation yesterday? Well, we were honored to be, well, to have a guest speaker, let's say. Kelsey Hightower was in the booth, and he gave a very good, well, it was in the presentation, it was an interview actually with Tom, so it was really good conversation with questions from the audience, so people loved that, that they got to ask their question to Kelsey on a stage, and then afterwards he was signing books, and people loved that experience, so that was one of our highlights of the show. Very community forward decision for you to make too, which is awesome. And I know that you're passionate about community, Tom. What does this open source community mean to you, and to Kaston? Oh my gosh, so much. I mean, Kaston really grew up in this community, right? We found it in 2017. Kubernetes was still pretty new, especially on the stateful side, but. Yes. Yeah, it was, for sure. Yeah. That's an understatement, I know. So a lot of stuff we had to do, kind of, you know, we were forging ahead, forging a path, but it's been really great to see the community really adopt Kubernetes for everything across the board, including for stateful applications. Do you feel, this has been a theme on the show this week, and I personally can kind of sense it. I feel like we're at a real new stage of maturity within the ecosystem. Every time we come to the QCon, there's, it's more people are in bigger deployments, bigger scale, and production is really good to see. Yeah, yeah. I think what has been interesting in a lot of the talk around this one has been the move from being DevOps, and SREs, more to a platform engineering, more an organized way for day two, and I think to the maturity aspect that Savannah was talking about, that seems to lead to more stateful apps coming over. Absolutely, yeah, totally agree. We're seeing the same exact thing. And I think it's been bigger apps. I mean, some of the discussions at the bars at night with some of the attendees. You've been going to bars at night? People are doing that in Amsterdam? I may have gone to one or maybe two parties or what have you. And then you see. Who's counting? Yeah, and then you see that like, there was a VP of development, he was talking about how do I, now I'm already carving up VMs into microservices, how do I take that next step? How do I get to a platform? And I think that's been interesting. And it's definitely gone beyond the early adopters, is what I'm seeing. If you look at the kind of companies that you're talking to and the profiles that are visiting the booth, it's really, it's a much wider adoption. It's no longer just like the highest intelligent people who are doing the cutting edge. I'm not talking about, I mean, I don't want to be a denigrating about those people, but it's really a wider audience that we're seeing versus before. That's exactly what I'm talking about with the maturity. I mean, I'm not quite as OG as you guys, but I started working in Kubernetes in 2020. And it was still kind of this thing, maybe we're going to try or maybe we'll make the investment, the complexity was a real barrier, people weren't, there's kind of a lot of ad hoc hybrid solutions that were going on. Now it feels like this is just the assumed platform. This is this assumed tool that you're going to be using, which I think is pretty, pretty awesome. You touch a lot of different customers, you have the number one backup for Kubernetes. Tom, talk to me about some of the trends that you're seeing across customers. Yeah, so I think what I've seen is- Tell us the secrets. You know, from our side, like we see with scale comes complexity and things. So our focus is really to make sure we simplify a lot. You know, tech has been pretty inaccessible in general for a lot of people. I think what's great about this is that there's a lot of community to support people getting into it and then transitioning to more, more larger scales, right? For us, I think we focus a lot on how do we really simplify this complexity down? If you notice- Number one complaint in this space. Oh my gosh, there's so many projects in this space. There's so many vendors and things. It's really overwhelming for a lot of people. I think that's part of coming with such a big community. But for us, when we go to different environments, you know, really making sure that we were able to support different customers is kind of our biggest challenge, I would say, right now. On that side. How do you approach that challenge? You're probably a very diverse customer list. Yeah, we have to- How do you keep everyone happy? Oh my gosh, it's a full-time job, let me tell you, but we, I'll give you an example, we have an open source project that helps you validate your storage and your environment, right? It's very easy to set up things in the incorrect way. So we have this project called CubeSir, which lets you do things like validate snapshots, lets you do things like take performance metrics from your system. And it's actually, you know, it's an open source project. Anyone can use it, contribute to it. But it's been very helpful for our sales teams, even who go to customer environments because the number one issue they face initially is, oh, I have this storage, you know, but maybe it's configured incorrectly. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think contributing back, because I think that bringing the open source that you have been for, you know, over the course of the company's existence, even before Veeam and all of that, I think it's been, that's how it's really, I think, been embraced. I think different from where OpenStack was. And OpenStack was like 99% vendors. And there was not a lot of community. And I think we saw even here, there's 25% of the contributors now are from end users, which I think is good to see that building. But I think to your point, it comes with complexity of where do I work, how do I get involved? Are you seeing that your customers looking for you to solve the problems or are they actually actively coming to you and saying, how do I get involved in some of this? You know, it's a good question. I think part of our initial kind of benefit was that we were somewhat the experts in the space. So we get questions that were unrelated to storage. You know, just how do I even set up deployed Kubernetes. And so part of our strategy has actually been supporting the community in that. You know, we've kept campus, which is an education platform. And I think part of that is, you know, we're really trying to support customers in any way they see fit. I would say that we also have a great partnership with many different companies. And you know, we try to bring in the best agreed for whatever situation you need. You mentioned CUBE Campus and you know, Tom, that I'm a big fan. What's going on with CUBE Campus? How many students have you educated? Tell the audience a little bit about that program. So it's been growing massively. You know that we launched, it has a new brand at the previous CUBEcon and the numbers of new learners has been going up very steadily at that point. I think we were close to, no, we were just over 10,000 at that point and it doubled in six months essentially. I just got goosebumps when you said that. I remember when we chatted about it on the show last time and a lot of people love to talk about community or pretend that it matters to their business but you're actually taking a lot of steps as one of the big players in this game to educate that next generation and to get people on boarded. Yeah, and I think not just CUBE Campus, I think what's nice or what's great about Casting by Theme is like our open source involvement where we're taking as much as we're giving or we might actually be giving even more than we're taking, especially with CUBE Campus. It's not just leveraging what's out there but we also have a team that's contributing to this project and give back to the community and with CUBE Campus what we're really trying to do, I mean it's a free platform to learn Kubernetes and we're really trying to help the community and this ecosystem to grow faster because it's complex technology to learn. Yeah, how did you, as a team, because you just started when we chatted last time, how do you prioritize what you're going to invest in in terms of community effort and dispatching people to work on these various projects? You know, we have so many fronts that we have to work with. I mean there's CUBE Campus, we have dedicated open source projects that we've released that we think are helpful but also contributing right back to the projects that exist already, especially Kubernetes. I mean, we're definitely cutting edge right now on the backup and protection side and I'll give you an example. Right now we're working on change block tracking which really helps you do backups when you're at scale and it's a pretty hard thing to put into Kubernetes specifically because you want to generalize it so you can use any storage vendor, right? You know, the current approach we take is actually we have direct integrations with storage providers that will provide change block tracking but we're really trying to get that into the community so it's not just specific vendors that are able to do this. Yeah, making it accessible for all. It's one of the things I love about JAL. One of the hallway conversations, I'm curious to get your hot take since we're talking about community, do you think that this big community is ready for where we're going with AI? Do you think we're going to help steer that conversation or at least safeguard some of the chaos that could potentially happen? You know, AI is going to disrupt everything. I mean, every industry is going to feel the impact from it. You know what? My team on the engineering side, I think there's a lot of questions around how development will happen in the future. I mean, you can get so much leverage out of it. At the same time, you have to be very careful because there's many implications of not knowing where the code comes from that you have to be very, very careful about and so I think at larger scales, you'll see a lot of hesitancy to get into it to start with, but I think pretty quickly, there'll be a lot of companies and vendors that will figure out how to tell you where this code came from for things like licensing and compliance that are honestly essential for developing secure software because you see a lot of other companies who are even really focusing on that from the security side, so things like S-bombs are really important and it's just much- You just talked about that in the panel just before this. Yeah, you're spot on. And it's so hard to do that if you don't know where the code came from. So what do you think? Well, AI is entering the marketing space as well. I see a lot of people creating content with AI and first few times I tried it or when I saw results from that, I was like, oh my gosh, the job of product marketing is no longer safe, but then when you start looking into the details and you quickly see that, okay, this is not unique content, these are, this is very generic. I was asking questions about, who's the number one backup, of course, and then- Oh, I love it. You're over there training chat, GPT. True marketer, Tom, true marketer, I just love that. It was just funny how generic it stayed and then only by asking more specific questions, a follow-up questions, it was getting better. I was like, okay, did I now help them? And then a few days later, I tried it again and it was from scratch, so it wasn't learning that fast. No, it was just humoring you while you were playing with it. That's great, I love it. We should all be training the AI to help promote us. We need to be doing that on theCUBE. We actually got a cool new feature, it's not out yet, but we've got some exciting stuff going on on that side. We're very much just at the surface though, tiered point, and I mean, it's so generic, it's washed out, it's a little bit, every time I can very much tell when something's written by a chat GPT, because it has no soul. It's just kind of this blend, there's not a lot of life. Chat GPT is not about to mimic me any time soon, let's at least put it that way. From the marketing point of view, the most interesting thing is we have to figure out how to see it as a new SEO. That's essentially, so how are we gonna be feeding it? Exactly, we totally agree on this side, we're just talking about this the other day. Well said, Tom, love having you on the show, it's why we love having you. Okay, so one of the things that I love about you guys, and you always make our swag segment because you take it seriously, because obviously you care about your community, you select swag with intent, you've got your lovely matching vest, you've got a Herschel backpack over there. How do you decide what swag you bring to the shows? I guess that's my question. That's yours. The biggest priority for me is that it needs to be durable. I don't like the swag, like the toys that will not be used a day after the show, like let me take five more for my kids, and then the kids don't care about it. So yeah, the backpacks need to be good quality. We had like luggage labels, for example, very useful for people, gets your brand out there. It's actually on my suitcase now. We did the chopsticks stuff, everybody needs those, that doesn't get thrown away. So durable is really what's key, durable and people need to be using it, not just the stuff that they're put somewhere and never use again. Right, sit on your desk and never get touched. You guys are very much on the pulse and we love having you on the show. What are we going to be talking about when we're in Chicago in six months, Tom? Oh my gosh, great question. I think the trend will continue with people getting more in production, more at larger scales. It's a good question, you know, like what's interesting for me too is seeing the difference in the markets a little bit, like US has a different trend. Totally, yeah, go build on that a little bit. What's different in Europe versus NA? I see a lot of really strong, kind of smaller bespoke partners in Europe, and it's great, we work with many of them and it's really good to see that kind of go to market. It's, you know, I think there's bigger partners certainly in the US and so you can definitely get more leverage out of that, but in some cases it might be a little more fun to work with small partners too here in Europe. It feels really collaborative here. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I definitely noticed that. What are you going to be telling me in six months? We might be talking about a cold weather because she's not going to be able to be interesting. I don't know, I'm going to need a vest for that show. That's going to be... Yeah, we know our swag for that one. I hope I'll be telling you that we doubled the KubeCampus Learners Database again in six months, but let's see if we can keep that trend. I love that, I'm rooting for you. You know, I'm a one fan on that side. Tom and Tom, thank you so much for being here with us. Oh, thank you for having us here. We love having you on the show, great insights, well summarized, just a joy and thanks for the great swag every show and the great parties. Y'all are just fan favorites. There's one way to bribe the hosts. Keep us drunk and give us nice treats. Rob, thank you so much for joining me. Wow, that was a classy line, folks. Thank you so much for joining me and thank you all for tuning in live to our KubeCon EU coverage here in beautiful Amsterdam. My name is Savannah Peterson and you are watching the Kube, the leading source for emerging tech news.