 Good morning, y'all, and welcome back to Chicago. We're here for KubeCon Cloud NativeCon, and it has been an already thrilling show so far. Day one was absolutely packed. John Furrier, my co-host, we've got our analysts here. John, I'm going to go to you first. What's your take on day one? What are you looking forward to, day two? First of all, day one was great. First of all, the crowd's perfect, and the place has spread out, so it looks like it's not as many people here as it seems, but it's definitely packed. They've got good numbers. The booths are great. The companies are representing well. You can see it's thriving from an ecosystem standpoint, so check the box on that, and that's a good sign, especially in this market, where there's no IPO there and there's growth VC funding kind of gap challenges, but just overall, great ecosystem. You know, I think day two is going to be a great lineup, and I think the trend is platform engineering in practice starting to show more things that are next level, security challenges, observability, best practices, things on how to recover and roll back, DataDog was on the keynote this morning. I saw their best practice. So seeing people who have the experience with Kubernetes put into action, and I think that's the theme you want to start to see more of, is okay, when it becomes invisible or under the covers, the other stuff will be enabled, so I think we're going to see a lot more of that today. Yeah, I think so, and speaking of expertise and very smart people, we have a brand new guest analyst with us, Joe Peterson, welcome. Joe, how you doing today? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me. We are so lucky to have you. We feel very lucky. We've got two women on the stage, folks, and two Petersons. This is a world record for you. Woo, woo, woo, very excited to be repping here in Chicago. Joe, give us a little bit of your background. You've got a lot of security experience. Yeah, so my day job is Vice President of Cloud and Security for Clarify 360, and we predominantly work with the holdings of two large private equities, Post-M&A, and we go in and we do a benchmarking and a baselining of what their current footprint looks like, so lots of great experience across a number of verticals. Yeah. Super fun. And then in my spare time, I am the Chief Analyst at ClearTech Research. So, yeah. Do you sleep? Wasn't wild, a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. Yeah, occasional nap. Well, we're lucky to have your brain and your insights, and Dustin, day two here as an analyst with us officially. How are you doing this morning? Doing well, just came out of the keynote. I would think, highlight from the keynote today, the Datadog session was incredible. Really transparent post-mortem on the March 8th, 48-hour Datadog outage, which was- Yeah, 60% of their cluster, right? I saw something like that, or their nodes, yeah. Now, I'm going to confess, I missed it the first time around because on March 8th of this year, I was in the middle of hiking the Camino de Santiago across Spain. Casual flex. Casual flex. Yeah, Cindy. Whoa, got a good life there. That was so much fun. But yes, I came back to, it's a good one. We should talk about that sometime. But yeah, it was great to actually get the deep dive into the post-mortem, what happened, why it happened. I will tell you this, I would attend an entire conference agenda, all day agenda of post-mortems. Real companies talking about what they've seen in the fire, in the furnace, when the stuff hits the fan. What do you do about that? And look at that in like, how do we fix that? That was a highlight, it was a 10-minute highlight of a hour and a half. Take us through the use case for the hooks that didn't see the keynote, it's online, YouTube, you'll get to watch it later. But what was the net net, what was the highlight, what was the thing that they learned, and how does it speak to the Kubernetes journey? Yeah, so basically, Datadog admins woke up one morning and had this tremendous outage. They weren't getting responses from a number of their, this is Kubernetes, from a number of their Kubernetes clusters. They said within minutes, there were 493, was the note, I took 493 people on a Zoom meeting as they're trying to root cause and figure this out. And they walked us through step by step what they did to identify, they first, they thought it was a network problem, turned out to be in the network area. They found that if they were, that it was only certain nodes on reboot, that when they would reboot those nodes, those nodes would come out without internet access. They were able to narrow it down to system D and specifically system D networking. And then further root cause analysis showed that it was the unattended upgrade function that there was an upgrade that runs every night and kudos to Datadog, I would say, for running upgrades, for doing their updates on a daily basis, for using an unattended upgrade function. This is on Ubuntu, I worked on that by the way. There was a bad update that went in there around system D. And the real root cause was that system D upgrade, that system D network upgrade removed any other network configuration that wasn't coming from that package. And Cilium, which is part of the Kubernetes Network Stack, actually installed some of their own IP tables, rules as part of the Cilium upgrade, and system D ignored those, deleted those, and that brought us to a state where these machines would come out, or these nodes would come up without networking access. So once they'd identified that, they were able to walk this back, reinstate their rules, disable that reboot, and they were back up and running full scale within a day. They also went through some of the cascading effects of then trying to immediately stand up 50% in scale, massively to respond to this. And there were some second order lessons learned. Fascinating talk. I think to me, I think that speaks to what Savannah, we were saying earlier about how architecting the future, which is the theme of the show, the platform engineering conversation is about systems architecture. Consequences, rollbacks, if something fails, it's going to be collateral damage. That's a whole discipline. That's not just a dev thing. The application development is going to do their thing. AI will be a great thing for them, but I think this is like the nerd infrastructure, like dream scenario. Kubernetes is getting better. Still needs work to get done. You got security challenges cropping up. So it's kind of like a builder mode, kind of architect mode. How do you build that operating system? And I think that's a good sign for Kubernetes because that means it's going to the next level. Right, and you bring up a really good point because we're starting to see as it matures that the platform, the platform ubiquity across the BU's is pretty important. So everybody was kind of doing their own thing and silos now, right? And they're realizing that this is an important component of their architecture. So they need to sort of get on the same page. Joe, what's your research point to when you look at the market customers as you've done benchmarking. This is a big conversation around how the transformation journeys are. What does a customer go through when you look at a customer environment, when you get to look at that holistic view and then set the table for platform engineering or an environment that has set up for governance, set up for automation, set up for good network functionality. What are some of the things that you see here emerging from the show that points to maturity? Well, so first of all, adoption. According to markets and markets, we're going to triple the spend in Kubernetes in the next five years. Almost triple. So it's going to go up to about 7.5 billion in spend. What I'm seeing, and I'd be curious to hear what your take is as well, is that, you know, we're still doing lift and shift, right? So older environments are moving as is to public cloud and where we're seeing innovation occur is the net new environments being built and those are being built in containers. Absolutely, and look, lift and shift, everything that's easy has been lifted and shifted, right? So we're down to, you know, the hard stuff, the long tail, there are some solutions out there. There are, there's plenty of technology here that helps you run a great Kubernetes on your own on-prem infrastructure, right? So I think that era of the easy lift and shift has been shifted. Net new, you're absolutely right, is cloud native from the start. And in fact, many that I've seen at least are architected such that they can go to any cloud. You know, you just came from the super cloud event, right? The idea that you can treat almost any cloud infrastructure, you know, take advantage of some advantages here or there, but to architect an application such that it can run in any of the hyperscalers or on-prem, you know, that's one of the huge advantages you get from net new development when you adopt cloud native methodologies. And you know, the conversation around abstraction layers too is interesting because if you take that multi-cloud or super cloud approach, it's not easy, right? And it's like, no vendor can own that, right? So the question is, is that, are we going to see a platform of platforms? It reminds me of the old mini computer days when you had network operating systems, SNA was IBM, DECNet was digital, and then you had proprietary NOSs, network operating systems for the environment. So like, what I worry about with cloud is, you have Amazon stack, you got Azure. Who's going to own the control plane? Who's going to control the semantic layer? Who's going to control the abstraction across clouds? Or do the companies build them? So I mean, this is like a kind of a middleware kind of vibe going on here. Who's going to control the middleware between clouds if you assume the clouds are the hardware? I mean, not to oversimplify the cloud, but they're kind of the hardware. I mean, this is a big conversation that no one's really kind of settled on yet. Do the ISVs, like the snowflakes of the world, build their own end-to-end across clouds? Or is it some merging standard emerges? Good question. What do you guys think? Yeah, I think snowflakes super interesting and that they're coming at it from a purely software perspective, obviously depend on lots of hardware, but coming at it from a purely software perspective, that's quite different than IBM right behind you, Dell right behind you, Dell EMC and so forth. There is plenty of incentive for the hardware vendors to invest in Kubernetes in that control plane. Call it middleware if you want, but that helps ensure that the best of that hardware gets deployed. Snowflake, though, I think is interesting in that they said bring us any of your hardware, you know? What's interesting, I watched watching the OpenAI first developer day happened on Tuesday or Monday, I should say, and OpenAI got a major kudos what they're doing with the chat GPT, but one interesting thing on Dustin on that point is maybe it's a feature, not a bug, maybe this idea of a plugin or some AI code that could be low code, no code to handle switching between environments intelligently because what chat GPT did this week as interesting was our OpenAI is they're adding plugins to the interface, so you don't have to change context. If you want to tap a data source or Canva, for instance, you can hit Canva and it'll do images for you inline into the user interface. So question is, does the interfaces dictate what comes in? We had people on theCUBE yesterday saying press a button and infrastructure just develops. Like that's the dream scenario with AI and generative capabilities on the infrastructure. It kind of opens up the kind of a new way of thinking. This is kind of interesting concept when you think startup opportunities. I think so, yeah, I mean, I think I think what we're going to see is a lot of collaboration in this ecosystem to your question, I don't think we know the answer yet. I think it's going to be a lot of different players that are going to build the little pieces and whether or not there's a grand monolith that owns that ecosystem. I do think the players in the space are going to be a lot of these rising startups and a lot of the projects that we see here at CNCF that are going to help build the ecosystem. Well, I got a question I want to ask you guys, you know, mine, because I got a text from a friend. He said, John, ask people where the white space is. This is entrepreneurs, so the startup culture. Where's the white space for opportunities for entrepreneurs in this market? And we kind of talked about that yesterday. What is this market, right? So if you're an entrepreneur, where are the opportunities to get a position and build value? Oh my gosh, I'm going to go first because I know you're going to have a richer answer given your background. So I think cloud security and container security is still a space to play. You know, I did a primer on cloud security for a bunch of cloud people and they were asking me to explain what the acronyms were, right? So cloud security is still evolving and you're starting to see platforms evolve that are making siloed tooling become a thing of the past, right? So that's the trend in that space. Reading this really interesting report from Red Hat on the Kubernetes state of security and they were saying that lack of security investment is slowing down development in the space that is underfunded, you know? Underfunded and one of the recommendations meaning enterprise-wise and one of the recommendations was to look more holistically at your environment which I thought made sense, like look not only at the security of your CICD pipelines but look at the security of your infrastructure side and see if you could get a tool that sort of bridges both sides. But I'd love to hear what you have to say. I'm glad you covered the security space because I think that would have been my number one. Absolutely, lots of opportunity to innovation around security, money to be spent which I think is super important if you're going into a VC pitch you want to show that path to revenue. I think you covered that really well. You can't not say AI. I think the next step for AI we have now laid the infrastructure for artificial intelligence through Kubernetes as that scheduler call it the large language models and all the open source on top of that. Now bringing that to other industry verticals I think there is a ton of hundred million dollar to billion dollar businesses to be built around taking those nuggets of AI and that insight and applying it to ed tech to health tech, you know, elsewhere. Okay, I think that one. Now if you really want the next frontier the thing that we'll be talking about in the next five years, at the end of the decade it's quantum computing. I was just going to bring up quantum, I love the use of that. And as that sounds, yeah, yeah, yeah. So did AI sound science fiction yeah, yeah. 10 years ago. Well actually open AI is only seven years old. Yeah. And they were nothing on the radar. We are still in such an early stage. I mean people are talking about being experts in this, we are, it's the landscape is still being created by the earthquakes and the movement of the tectonic plates in the technology sector. Jeepers that was an analogy. I wanted to ask you a question that you just said that was really interesting. So one of the, in our morning moment yesterday we were talking about the how Priyanka was saying Kubernetes is maybe having its Linux moment right now. Do you think that AI is the reason or part of the catalyst for why that Linux moment may be happening for Kubernetes right now? Not necessarily. I wouldn't draw that as a direct correlation. Look AI is a, it's almost a predetermined outcome of 20, 30, 40 years of computing. I went to, I got a computer science degree 25 years ago, right? And I took AI classes in the 90s, okay? So that technology has been around. What hasn't been around is the incredible GPU and hardware. The compute baby, yep. What hasn't been around are the exabytes, petabytes and exabytes of data that we need to solve some of these, in the marriage of those two, it's now practical. Some of the algorithms that we're using for AI, 30 years old, you know, that's 30 year old. And Kubernetes helps with the dynamic scale out. I wouldn't draw that as like, you know, the exclusive driver of Kubernetes Linux moment. Yeah, and I think the Kubernetes growing up is a proof point that it's going to be part of the machinery, right? Under the hood, behind the curtain. The antel inside is what I was saying. And I think the opportunity for startups, again, I've been through multiple innovation ways. I've seen kind of these major inflection points and there's a common theme that crops out of all of them. When you have an interface and a user expectation shift, like we're seeing with AI right now, the innovation is the interface, not so much the magic of degenerative content so much. PC was interface shift. Accessibility, I think. The web was an interface shift. Bubble, you could argue, and then Dave and I have already done podcasts, I would say is an interface shift, although that's less relevant now. In all those markets, there was three things that made people successful. Make it simpler, faster and easy to use, don't understand. So if you look at anything, whether it's Kubernetes or AI, if you just make it simpler, faster, and easier to intuit or use, then that could be the single pane of glass model for observability. It could be a security integration play. It could be setting up automated data pipeline. I mean, there's opportunities everywhere. So I think it's going to be a renaissance. I think that would be a great answer to your friend that texted you about where is the clear space to innovate? The first, I would ask a clarifying question. Are we talking about innovation on the order of tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions, billions or more? The quantum computing revolution, that's not a small problem that a couple of kids in a garage, I don't think, are going to crack in the near term. There's going to have to be a whole lot of it. If they are, that's some garage. And they've got some serious hardware in there. The quantum disruption of the quantum. That's Dave Brown's garage. I would like to go visit that garage if that's the case. The quantum disruption is going to be radical, what's scary about quantum in a good way is the upside, but the other side of that coin is, will it scare people to death on crypto, encryption, cracking, does it become too good of technology that, remember the old OS2 DOS days, right? Better operating system, but no one ever used it. Because the standard was inferior. But to me, I think that's going to be an interesting challenge. The point is that their interface point, I think, is the really salient here, which is there's lots of opportunities to innovate by just making things a little bit easier to use, a little bit more accessible, a little bit more available. De-increasing complexity. There's always a market for it. Remove complexity. It's embryonic. I mean, it's going to grow faster. As more people use AI, they're going to figure it out. That's why I was honed in on this plug-in concept that the open AI guys introduced. Essentially, it means you can just plug in a GPT model into their system and be the go-to resource for that versus switching out of it. It just completely game-changes it. I think we're going to see a lot of those little bridges. No, I think you touched on something there. So my answer to your friend's question, now that you asked me, John, but I'm going to go ahead and give it anyway, is I think you just hit it there. It's going to be on that ease of use, that education side. So to your point, we're tripling down on investment in the Kubernetes space. We know that adoption's been slow here. A few years ago, Gartner was saying only 15% of companies had even established their strategy for container management. So I think there's going to be an opportunity for that zero to 10 moment for new users, whether they be new to the space or wanting to learn how to integrate Kubernetes into their system and make it operate better. If you can be the red pill that you can take that all of a sudden you can get up and go with Kubernetes, I think that's actually a big opportunity. We see Kastin by Beam doing that. They've got an educational program. We've had Cassandra on the show with her dad at JFrog who teaches teenagers how to use Kubernetes. These are tiny little examples, but if you can do that level of education at scale for more people to understand how to leverage this technology and leverage AI, I think there's a massive opportunity that will increase the diversity of players in that tech space as well. Yeah, it's awesome, it's awesome. And I think this event's going to be bigger. I did a tweet last night. It's getting bigger every year. Joe, I'd love to get your take since your first time as an analyst attending. Yeah. What's your take of KubeCon? I love it. I think it's, I love the energy. I would agree with some of what you said about this being a great big space, but there's lots of people here. There's 200 sessions. Wow, I didn't realize it was that many. 200 sessions, and what I thought was interesting is that almost 100 of them fall into four buckets, right? AIML, security, observability, and darn it, I forgot the last one. Four buckets. Puffer engineer. I know. That's a great analysis. Yeah. You must be an industry analyst. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. What are you working on? Give a quick plug of some of your work because we're big fans of you, what you do, and we appreciate you coming on. Give a quick plug of what you do. Oh, thank you so much. I'm going to say it here, and I really would like to get your take on it. To your friend's question, I would say that AI security, hashtag AI security and or governance could be the next bacon in AI. Next bacon. All right. I love bacon. That's a great call. Great call. Sizzle, sizzle. Now I want some bacon. On that note, folks, I think it's time we wrap this morning segment and get to our guests for the rest of the day. Justin, Joe, thank you both so much for being here. Your expert analysis is priceless. John, always a pleasure to sit and giggle next to you all day long. And thank you for tuning in, fellow cloud native community friends. My name's Savannah Peterson. We're here in Chicago. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for emerging tech news.