 Hello, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here for a KubeCon CloudNativeCon preview for the North America show in Los Angeles here in person and a virtual event. Two of the co-chairs are with me again this year, Constance Caramanolas, principal engineer at Splunk, and of course, Stephen Augustus, head of open source at Cisco. Great to see you guys. Hey, thanks for coming on virtually for the preview. Great to be had. Great to see you again, John. So I love, KubeCon has gotten, it's my favorite event every year. This is where the DevOps actions, where the people are reading the tea leaves connecting the dots, but also meeting up and doing what communities do best, which has set the agenda for the next generation that's happening in person. Last year was virtual. We had the European virtual, KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. This year, Mix, give us a taste of updates that you want to share. Let's get into it. Sure. So I think, you know, I think seeing this event in particular, and one, we've got this hopeful return to some semblance of normalcy. I know that over the last year in change, we've been kind of itching to see each other in person. And I think I say on a lot of interviews that one of my favorite parts of any conference is the hallway track, right? It's really hard to, and we've made strides to replicate it, but there's, I don't think there's anything, you know, close to being in person, right? And getting to bounce ideas off of your co-conspirators, and co-conspirators are compatriots. So I'm really excited for that. I love the mandates that we've put in place to make sure that people are a little bit more safe. And, you know, overall, like seeing, I think one of the things that gets me most excited is the set of day-zero events, right? I think the increase in the day-zero events, we've got a, Constance, what's the count at now? I'm looking over it, and it's massive, right? You know, Supply Chain, Security Con, the, you know, Cloud Native for Eclipse Foundation, EDPF. Too many to count right off the bat when I'm looking at it. Too many to count. And it's also like, this is a reduced number because some people decide, or some, not people, like, projects decide to do virtual day-zero or a non-conference outside of the normal co-con cycle because of... Yeah, well, let's get into some of the data. I want to jump into the trends, but just for the folks watching, this is a hybrid event that's going to be this day-zero, which is the pre-programming, which, by the way, I think has evolved into a format that's just tremendous. You got the pre-game, pre-event, action, very dynamic, very ad hoc, ephemeral, and the people getting together and making things happen, then you got the structured event. It's the 11th to the 12th on the pre-programming, day-zero stuff, which you talked about, and then the 13th to the 15th, the main conference. It's in-person and virtual, so it's going to be a hybrid event, which should be dynamic because you have an in-person dynamic where it's a scarce resource of the face-to-face working and trying to create synchronicity with the asynchronous environment on virtual, so it should be an action-packed and a must-watch event, so I'm personally excited, we'll be there in-person, but I got to ask you guys, the co-chairs, how are you guys handling this? How are the papers coming? What's the call for talks? How are you structuring things? Can you just give a quick overview of what's happening on the talks? Talks, I feel like it went really well this round. Really like a wide variety. I know it's very vague, but there's a wide variety of topics. Things are getting, I think, I feel like more popular, like security is getting more popular. Business value, one thing that I'm really passionate about is getting a lot more traction. Student track, one-on-one is also, as always, I guess, ever since it's been, since inception has been popular. It's definitely getting to the point where it actually, well, not to the point, but maybe it's just being more highlighted that a lot of the like, some of the like great content from the day zero is also showing up in Kupkan, and it's like vice versa, and they're kind of everywhere. Yeah, the talks are really... The sessions are always driving it, Steven. I'm like, from a meturization standpoint, you have the people developing, and then you got the things are getting hardened. Can you talk about the trends around what's kind of hardening out from a project basis on these sessions, and what's forming relative to the trend line this year? Yeah, so to Constance's point, I think that we're starting to see some diversity in our continued diversity and kind of the personas that are coming into the conference, right? So whether you're talking about that continuing 101 track or the student track, which a lot of people have kind of jumped in and seeing that as an opportunity to not only start becoming part of the community, but also to immediately contribute to content, and then you've got that, for me, it's security all day, right? I think there's not a week that passes that I don't have a chat with someone around what's happening in security lately. And I think you'll see that highlighted in all of the keynotes that we have planned. There's not one, not two, but three keynotes around software supply chain security and some of the different things that you have to consider as we're kind of walking into the space of protecting your build pipeline, protecting your production artifacts. So that's something that really, that goes to my work on Kubernetes for SIG Release, Release Engineering. That's something that we know that there are countless downstream consumers, right? So some that we may not have even had contact with yet from the upstream perspective, right? So it's paramount for us to make sure that everything that we're pushing out to the community and to the wider world is safe to consume. So security is definitely top of mind for me. I would say for lots of things around, continuing to talk about GitOps observability. And I think that each of these, what's fun about each of these topics, each of these areas is that they're all interconnected, right? So more and more you're seeing, you're seeing, oh, well, the Tecton folks are talking to the Flux folks and they're talking to the folks who are working on SIG Store and Recor and all of these fun tools about how to integrate into, how to integrate into those respective areas. So it's really a time of collaboration underscored by protecting the community and the end users. Yeah, we're seeing a lot of security discussions. I mean, how far can you shift left before it becomes like standard, right? So like, we're seeing that being built in. I got to ask you guys also on the trend of DevOps, there's been a lot of conversations around cloud native around hostly management and observability, but data, the role of data has been different approaches on how people are leveraging machine learning and AI. Can you, did that come up a lot in some of the discussions and the analysis because everyone's slapping machine learning on things these days. And there's a little bit of that going on, but it seems to be data and machine learning and horizontal scale, classic DevOps, things are happening. What's your reaction to some of those things that are happening? Can you guys, does there anything happen in there? I feel like this year wasn't that big of a machine learning year in terms of submissions. I don't see if you can agree with that, but it wasn't as, I think like security took a lot of, and it's might also just be like thinking about hostly now, like security was, had such amazing submissions, that it probably took a little bit of the spotlight off of when we were looking at machine learning ones. So security dominated more than everyone else. Yeah, I think for this year, security is dominating. I think we even talked about this in the last chat we had. Kind of from the AI side, I think you were running and there have been discussions around the bias in AI models and how we work through that. I'm not sure that we have any content for that this time around, but I think, yeah, but I think as we start to talk about like, how we collect data, are we collecting the right types of data, how we serve it, especially as those relate to like collecting data at the edge, right? Like how do we even deploy applications at the edge? We have a lot of potential solutions for that, but when you combine that with, well, how do we, how do we scrape information from the things that we're deploying from the edge, right? Or some of the things you'll see in the program. Constance and Steven, talk about the community vibe right now, because that's the biggest part of this conference is seeing how people come together, but it's also the vibe sets the tone. What's the current vibe in the community that you're seeing? What we expect this year at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. Yeah, I'm going to say, I imagine the community is tired and it's been a long few, two years. You say 10 years, it feels like forever and a lot of the in-person aspect that it used to be like social validation we just got is lacking. So, but that being said, there's still been amazing like collaboration from like the observability and open telemetry part, like I am seeing so many projects within the tag observability collaborate together and making that a focus. And so even though we are tired, it's still, we're still doing good work and we're still making a point of trying to keep that community tight, even though it's much harder on Zoom and right, you know, it's going to try and do the awkward like Zoom handshake. It just doesn't do the same thing there. But to like Steven's keynote, I can't remember how long ago it is about like resiliency. We are pretty resilient and we're also, I think we're all learning to work at a slower pace because maybe we were working too fast beforehand. And I think that, I think that's a really good takeaway from all of this. So, I think it's going to, for as safe as it can be to have some variations can probably just be like, it's going to be a big party because we're going to finally get to see each other after a long time then. I hope we get to do that in a safe way. Steven, you always got the energy certainly on camera, but in person as well. This in-person dynamic this year is huge. What do you think is going to happen? What can we sure take? Yeah, so I mean, I would echo Constance in saying that, you know, we're all tired. We're all very tired at this point. But, you know, the conference tagline for North America is resilience realized, right? I think that, you know, throughout this year, the contributors, maintainers of all of these, you know, CNCF projects have made incredible strides to empower the communities to be together, to be family, to work better together in spite of, you know, in spite of location boundaries, in spite of, you know, health concerns, like we've really made the effort to show up for each other. So I think that, you know, what we'll see in the conference and, you know, one of my favorite tracks personally is the community track. So lots of content around, you know, around community building, around, I think more of the meta of maintaining communities, right? So the, you know, the Code of Conduct Committee as well as Steering Committee for Kubernetes got together last conference to talk about the values and principles of the community, right? And I think that, you know, that needs to continue to be highlighted, you know, some of the conversations that we've had around how you maintain groups, you know, how you maintain groups, especially as, especially as the size of the group grows, right? Once you escape that kind of like done bars number area, like it gets harder and harder to have the same bandwidth conversations that you would in a smaller group, right? So making sure that we're continuing to have valuable conversations but also be inclusive while we're doing that is something that will continue to be highlighted over the next year and change really. Well, I'm really impressed by what you guys do. And I know we're all tired and we want to get back and hats off to pulling this together and creating great program because your group and your community is social construct. We're all social animals and this whole COVID virtual now hybrid really is going to show in real world is all playing out and we're going to see how it evolves and evolution is part of social communities. And I think the progress that's been made and you know, with the team and you guys putting together as a great event. So hats off to you guys. Thanks for doing that. Appreciate it, great stuff. Thank you, thank you. Final question. What do you expect given this is a social organization, things evolve, we're social organisms, we're going to be face to face, we're going to have virtual, we have great talks, security, outside prime time, mainstream enterprise adoption, in Kubernetes and cloud native. This is crunch time. So what do you guys expect for this event? Share your thoughts. Yeah, I think there's going to be lots of fun, I think more social conversations less structured. You know, if you have had the opportunity to kind of hang out on CNCF Slack while one of these events are happening, we've spun up something of like a hallway track. So people are hanging out there giving their takes during the, you know, in between talks, there was also a kind of after conference hangout for the hallway track that we did. So we definitely want to continue some of that stuff. As you know, between the last few conferences, we've launched cloud native TV and lots of great producers and content over there. So you'll see kind of a start to break the wall between that virtual content that we've created across the last few months, as well as, you know, seeing that turn physical, right? So how do we, you know, how do we manage that? And how do we make that seamless for people who may be participating virtually, as opposed to physically, right? That there's going to be a bit of, there's an aspect of like, you're almost running two conferences, right? Simultaneously, so. It's a total experiment in the real world that it's all important, it's super important. Constance, your thoughts on the event what people are expecting to see and surprises that might emerge. What are your thoughts? I'll actually see if you're saying something. I have an idea that I think we can make it more connected. So I just throw that down. I have some silly ideas when it comes to the conference stuff, which is why Steven's laughing while everyone can't see it. I'm trying to go with no expectations, mostly because I'm so excited that I don't want to be disappointed. And I don't want to put it this out. I think, I actually think that probably a lot of discussions are just going to be like, hi, like it's so nice to actually meet you and just talk about random things, maybe not as much technology discussions that maybe there would be a normal, I'd like, I don't want to say normal, right? Cause we aren't a new normal. I've watched coupon was several years ago. I think that, I do, I think that it'll be probably a little painful, this hybrid part, since we don't know what to expect. I think there's going to be so many things that we're going to look back and be like, Facebook and be like, oh, we should have thought about these things. So for anyone that's attending virtually, apologies in advance and please give us feedback. There's so many things I know we're going to have to improve, we just, we don't know them yet. So please be patient with us and know that we wish that you could be there in person with us too. I don't know. Well, that's the thing. I'm just going to go in there with an open mind. Well, that's the thing. It's new. It's all new virtual. So it's, we're learning together. That's, I think people put too much pressure. I think people like expecting, you know, some magics to happen, but it's all evolving. I think the magic is the event. And I think, I think it's going to work out great. And by the way, there's no downside. It's, you know, learn. Yeah, so, you know, so one of the things that I, I have this spiel that I give to the release team, the Kubernetes release team, every time we start a new cycle, right? You've got a set of returning contributors. You've got a set of net new contributors, right? And moving into the release team, you're kind of like thrown right into the fire of Kubernetes, right? So it's one of those things. I come in and essentially say, be curious, question everything. This is like, it's very much like a human experience, right? And I think that, you know, to Constance's point, we're all here to learn and grow, make this a better experience for everyone. So bring yourself to the conference, right? I think it's, you know, in terms of offering feedback, we have, you know, feedback forms for every one of the, you know, every one of the talks that you attend, you can feel free to reach out to Constance and myself and Jasmine. If you have feedback that you wanna give personally, you know, there are ways to get in touch with us. There are ways to make the event better. And I think that every time we incorporate, like we incorporate a lot of this feedback into the next conference. So every time you provide some piece of information for us, that gives us an opportunity to make it better. So this conference is built by the community, right? It's not just, you know, it's not a body just making decisions kind of off the cuff. It's, we are taking your ideas and we're trying to turn them into a program, right? So it's the maintainers, it's the end users, it's the students, it's people who have never used Kubernetes in their lives or never used cloud-native technology in their lives. It's folks who are coming from the corporate IT kind of classic background and just trying to understand how to be effective in this new world for them. So it's like, it takes all kinds and we don't get it done without your feedback. So please, as you're coming to the conference, whether it's in person or virtually, like bring yourselves, be curious, ask questions, provide that feedback. And then, and I think, you know, from the, you know, kind of from the, yes, we need to be human but we also need to recognize some of the requirements that we have going into this conference. So a reminder that, you know, all of the events are under, you know, under a code of conduct. Please make sure to familiarize yourself with code of conduct. I think that, you know, I think that coming back into a physical space for a lot of people, the, some of the social skills can erode over time. So please not just bring yourself, bring your best self and, you know, be sure to review all of the policies around health and safety as we go into this. Constance, Steve, that's great stuff. Love talking with you guys. Constance, you want to add something? Go ahead. I want to also be gentle with yourself and like be really kind to yourself and others because this is going to be really overwhelming. I haven't been around more than 10 people at once in almost two years. And so just remember to be kind as well. All those be curious and question everything. Yeah. That's great stuff. Great reminder. This is what it's all about face to face, face to face, presence, being together but also having the openness and the community around you, a lot of mentoring. You guys have a great community for people coming in that are new and this great mentors, people are open and cool, great community. Thanks for coming on for this special preview for KubeCon CloudNativeCon. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. Okay. Thank you. This is the cubes coverage of KubeCon CloudNative. We've been every year of KubeCon. It's been in fantastic growth, going to the next level again in person, lot of security, real time adoption, should be great, virtual and in person. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.