 Well, hello everyone. It's really good to see you and I think this is our first show of the new year and You know for many of you who have been getting dumped on with snow. We got a little bit here in Boston today But we'd like to welcome you to the KBE insider and there was actually a new release today with some new content on the KBE site You should definitely go check it out But we have you know as the kind of premise of the show What we do is like to tell you a little bit about what we think is going to be happening in the kubernetes community Kind of in the future and the way we do that is by interviewing the people who actually do the work as many of you know, especially if you've ever been involved with red hat, you know the In the open-source world, you don't always get the pizza that was ordered as they say you get the what the developers think is the most relevant things and It's it's always interesting right because the cool thing about open-source is that if you really want to see a feature happen You can work on it on nights and weekends Even if it's not strictly kind of where your You know kind of business model is going so that's always kind of fun until we end up with a lot of cool stuff So today I am welcoming Daniel. Oh once again to help me host the show And Chris short is our guest, but Dan Lu you want to introduce yourself real quick and then Chris. Do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's right. Hi, Daniel. Oh, I'm from Boston like Langdon And then I'm working for Red Hat as a developer advocate and also Yeah, former CNC investor. We got a bunch of new CNC investor I'm pretty sure that Chris will really be talk about the CNC investor stuff as well Yeah, I'm pretty much a focus on Java and the Kubernetes and the server less and a bunch of the new technology around Like a cloud native application stuff. I'm gonna hand over to Chris Hey, everybody. I'm Chris short. I live in Detroit And I work as a developer advocate for AWS right now on the EKS team If you're not familiar with EKS, it's our Kubernetes solution Much like OpenShift we have you know all the bells and trimmings that you could possibly want to plug in and so forth so But I'm also an upstream contributor and I've been around the community since 2017 so yeah been here a long time now Yeah, that's a bit. Yeah, I was I was really excited to go to Detroit whatever for KubeCon and Kind of I think was that would did we meet for the first time in person there? I think so. Yeah And but I was just I was really kind of struck by like how different the city was compared to when I was there Let's not date myself some time ago for some sales calls many companies ago But yeah, I was I was pleasantly surprised and had some really good food I really appreciate the city has changed a lot in the what six years now that I've lived here I mean yeah and compared to like 2007 when my wife graduated, you know college and moved down to North Carolina for a little while like it's completely different, right? Like blight is so early 2000s essentially it's been cleaned up revitalized and they're smart They're going from the core outward of the city and improving things, but yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff here in Detroit Yeah, like yeah, we're working. I really appreciate driving the whole nine yards. Yeah Yeah, I really appreciate the big move in cities in general for Kind of the local artists doing murals on the side of buildings. Oh, yeah And we're trying to really yeah has a really good example of that. I wish we had more of it We actually have a whole parking deck where every level is a different mural inside it. It's pretty cool. Oh, really? Oh, that's cool I didn't see that and then an artist came in and did the whole thing But like different murals on every level so you can remember which level you're on like one's all lemons or something Yeah, right, right one of the things they do in Boston actually is you know that like the trans I think they're transformers But you see they're on the street not the ones up on the towers, but the ones Yeah, they actually give a little bit of a stipend to local artists to paint those Which I think is pretty slick. Yeah, I'd like to see a lot more of those And they're they're a little you know, what's kind of cool is they they tend to be you know They're small right so you get a lot of them kind of in the same density But I really like the big murals as well So kind of moving on to Kubernetes Which is you know what we're here for But you know, we wanted to invite you to the show to talk a little bit about the contributor summit like yeah What is it and and what what when is it coming up? And and then I think there's some you know What I still love Fozdem's terminology that the Fozdem fringe You know and so there's some fringe conferences as well So, you know, once you have a pretty heavy-duty Conference you get some you get some my you know smaller ones that kind of start to wrap around it take advantage of all the people Yeah, so Cube County you this time it's gonna be a little bit different than previous cube cons if If you've been to a bunch of them, which I know a lot of people have not I'm fortunate in that way You might recall when all of a sudden we had these day zero events and then all of a sudden there were two day zeros Well, we're fixing that in EU Thankfully, we're going to squish it down to one day zero Most folks are doing their thing on Mondays or the Monday of the conference and then Tuesday the conference officially kicks off and We'll be doing contributor summit on that day, which is cool And I shared a link and thank you for sharing it and chat laying them If it's we're just getting started on this, you know, every cube con we try to do one of these The only time we haven't was obviously the pandemic year But prior to that in San Diego, it was this massive undertaking a lot of people, you know involved and we were actually doing like training classes and everything else and kind of post-pandemic realized a Few things one it would be a lot better if you were actually a Kubernetes org member Which we can talk about in a second to to go so we're you know because we only have limited seats and we were getting you know hundreds of waiting list people and You know, we're prioritizing org members first. What does it take to be a Kubernetes org member? A few PRs getting accepted and then getting sponsored in by two people and you can become an official Kubernetes contributor. It's It's not as hard as it seems on that same site that I just shared the link with there's a Resources section where you can start diving and how to contribute everything if you're interested So org members meet at this contributor summit to talk about all manners of things, right? And there's usually project meetings like all the other ancillary non-Kubernetes projects Container D at CD, you know need an insert cloud native landscape here kind of thing. They'll have those meetings During the conference, but this one day is dedicated to Kubernetes content for contributors. So we'll talk about We'll have a sit-down with steering committee for example We might talk to the technical oversight committee from CNCF some of those folks the the kind of agenda right now is very Unconference-like is how we're trying to set it up. So there'll be a CFP submission window that opens here soon but the next big step for us is to get registration open and That'll be my next communication out to the world about this. So if you're not subscribed to The Kubernetes dev mailing list and you want to get notifications for stuff like this highly recommend it it's on that contributor site the kates.dev site and What happens during these things is a lot of people just end up You know, we'll sit we'll listen to the steering committee and then we'll all have our meetings, right? because there's so many special interest groups SIGs and Kubernetes and they all have some Project underneath it. So some project sub project or working group or something like that So for example, I'm on the Kubernetes contributor comms team Which falls under SIG contributor experience. Our job is to kind of highlight the work being done upstream share the new features that are coming out You know keep the World kind of up to date on Kubernetes contributions and events and things like that. So Colleen that team has been a very rewarding experience and we have a hand in helping with communicating out things about The summit as well all this coming up So it's it's 100% volunteer driven by Kubernetes contributors, which is the other cool thing like yes We have CNCS help for space logistics and that kind of stuff, but it's otherwise 100% plan by contributors and Submissions are from contributors that want to talk about New thing or how to do thing better And you know if you're a contributor and you've got something you want to talk about even if it's something as simple as like You know stabilizing that CD like submit your unconference talk And you can talk about what you've done so far because I know there's been a lot of work In that CD lately to you know, make it more rigorous And then container D itself right like always has evolutions and things they might You know, we might talk about container runtimes in general We might talk about like Docker shim when that got deprecated that was a big topic for the you know for the whole community, but Oddly enough we put out an FAQ as part of the comms team I worked with a few folks on an FAQ and that FAQ is on our blog the kubernetes.io blog and everything on that blog gets marked out of date after a year So now I've got to do a contribution to make sure that Entry doesn't go out of date and then the associated things linked to it I need to put in there like hey, you know this links here make sure you update things if you change this So yeah, it's kind of this yeah, it's an interesting like ongoing process of Getting messaging out to the world Like making sure not just contributors, but even vendors understand the the changes happening upstream that will impact their customers and users You know because the last thing the community wants to do is push something that just breaks everything or completely Changes some model that you're used to without some kind of notice right through the alpha beta stages, right? so At the conference we talk about you know, what's to come, you know, it's a good place just to you know meet people discuss ideas I Know in Detroit. I was quite busy right like talking to folks Part of that was because I was a local but the other part of that because there's a lot of initiatives going on right like you know, there's a Lot of folks are gonna be talking about cost optimization this year and I know I just said that weird but Getting the price of everything down in Kubernetes. It's exactly trivial. Yeah, exactly I need to optimize my English, but my cluster is more expensive to you know, not optimized so a Lot of folks will be talking about that how to run Liener clusters that kind of thing. I feel like it'll be interesting to see what the topics are I'm very curious given You know the industry and where it's heading right now Yeah, the yeah, I think I think there's a few things One of the things we've talked about before is also the efforts that you've made within the Calm kind of community not you specifically but the organization somewhat you But about also trying to make it kind of more accessible for even You know kind of you know, some of the best communicators are also not the best programmers, right? Right, you know finding finding ways to make it so that they can Contribute content that gets distributed to the organization at large is a is it important in some ways difficult subject? Yeah, and we do We have a team that works on blog posts and we have a special series called six spotlights where we'll You know interview essentially the sig leads for like sig node, you know, I'm like what's your biggest challenge is? What big changes do you see coming forward? You know all kinds of questions and you can go to the Kubernetes blog and just search sig spotlight and they're all there I think they've done four or five of them now but they're not trivial right like you have to Interview a person and we've realized very quickly like the how to interview people for a product that is written Needs to be in a written format because it took like six months for us to get a blog post where I like Jumped on a call and recorded it for example and then got a transcript It still took a long time to do it So the best way to kind of do these things is via email which you go all back and forth a lot But then you get a great, you know finished product talking about everything the six done What they've been doing what they're going to be doing that kind of thing and That there's I mean there's something to be said for like kind of curated content, right? Like, you know, it's like I like the the kind of this aspect of like what we're doing here Which is kind of the streaming content? Where you know, it's not edited etc. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a place also for kind of edited content Right, you know, so I think there's it depends on what you're trying to find out it Also, you know, sometimes you want to mix up the kind of types of content you're consuming You know, so yeah, I definitely would agree. I was actually gonna add it's been kind of funny It's like, you know, now that I work in a place that has its own newspaper Actually, it has to right Because be use a is quite a big university, you know, it's like I feel like I'm getting interviewed a lot About various things that are going on in the organization And then I actually just had a student come by Yesterday, I think Who wants to interview me for one of his for a paper? He's writing in class. I was like, oh, okay Yeah, I guess that's a thing. So it's it's kind of it's been kind of entertaining But so what I did want to ask you though is that we had kind of in our notes We had kind of two different concepts. We have the Kubernetes contributor summit and then the Kubernetes community day What is the difference? Are they essentially the same thing? But they get nicknamed back and forth or are they no, so Kubernetes community days are Like local cube counts is kind of how I want to put it right like a group of people from say India can put one together for Mumbai and it could be a you know Check all these boxes and it's a CNCF, you know sponsored kind of thing where you can put together content in a programming and those community days are very helpful in Getting to the folks that can't make it to cube calm, right and like it's more Aligned towards a meet-up than a big conference, for example, it's an all-day thing But these community days are popping up more now post pandemic We had a ton of them right before the pandemic hit and they were great, right? I think I went to Somewhere in the south I forget but I went to one and it was just like this is Like the same vibe is cube calm, but like 250 people, right? So it's it's a much more localized much more kind of you know regional guest kind of focus thing and those events and like the cloud native space are awesome because you realize very quickly like who's doing what with different parts of the cloud native ecosystem in your region and you kind of build up this awesome network of folks that are just Utilizing kubernetes, which is a Lot of what I did here in Michigan when I first moved up here was link up with all the kubernetes people in Michigan And you know, right be buddy buddies with them and stuff, you know, it's kind of one of those Yeah, how do you make friends as an adult? Oh, this open-source project might help It's actually it's actually funny I I one of the things I need to do more of is kind of because You know like I've I've kind of changed Various gigs that I've worked on over the years and I need to like re-engage with the kind of Boston like tech community in general Because not only do I want to be able to supply students with like internships? But I also want to be able to have students go to some of these things because I don't think a lot of the kind of college students It they even in a lot of ways that they almost don't even see anything that happens off campus, right? Even even when we're in the middle of a big city like Boston But then on top of that, you know, it's like the best way to get into tech really Or one of the best ways is to get recruited, right? And one of the best ways to get recruited is to be involved in you know, some of the big open-source projects and You know trying to get you know, but trying to get a student to go to a you know A container meet-up right or a kubernetes meet-up or something like that is can be difficult Oh, I'm sure you got a kind of off-kiss playing the Y behind it. You know that kind of exactly. Yeah. Yeah One thing I was going to say about the community day one of the things I've really always liked a lot about how DevOps days was built Right was like, you know Because when we started the one in Boston some number of years ago again trying not to do myself now Yeah, you know, it was basically like the whole Setup was just kind of there and just kind of like picked it all up and then you know put your Boston local, you know configuration on it and then off you went It was it was also super handy that in those days, maybe still true I don't know, but there were just so many vendors who are interested in sponsoring DevOps days That you know, we could make the event free and you know and still supply food I think we ended up actually charging $25 I want to say and then but if you came you got it back Oh, nice, basically hold your ticket kind of thing. Yeah, right because you know It's like the problem with a free event right as you get the 50% fall off and they're like so hard to manage So so we were like why don't we do nominal fee? I don't even know if it was as much as 25, but then we'll you know We'll essentially give it back to you in like gift cards, you know For lunches or whatever. No, that's cool. I actually got like my big I don't know big moment in tech at a DevOps days in Detroit in 2017 It was actually part of my strategy of getting a job up here So we could move up here to be closer to my wife's family And as opposed to living in North Carolina and coming up here on vacation every vacation You know, I did a good talk at a DevOps days was my first talk public speaking wise ever after military service So that was kind of nice and cool and you know scary all at the same time, but it went well Got a job here, you know, like six or seven months later, and then we moved and You know shortly thereafter. I was at Red Hat and After Red Hat, I'm at AWS. It's pretty it's pretty cool I've talked at a lot of DevOps days now. I've organized DevOps days now It's yeah, I've done a lot of speaking in the DevOps day space and have a great appreciation for those events The last one I went to Seattle and they had that fall-off problem as well So it's like, how do you prepare for you know max capacity when you have no idea what the actual people are gonna show up Show up, right? Like I even hate the stupid, you know, like kind of the I think I think impactful like it's very impactful, but it's like something you don't even think about it's like I Just ordered 200 lunches and I only got a hundred people like what am I gonna do with a hundred lunches, right? Yeah, yeah The smartly the Seattle one had like all that set up with the local food bank so they could just drop it off kind of thing Yeah, if I remember that was Seattle but the Yeah, just the whole event coordination thing these days is hard like Really hard, so that's why it takes a team of folks to put on these contributor summits and same with the KCD is the community days they are They require a lot of effort that you don't necessarily see behind the scenes like hardly ever well, right preferably like when it goes Well, right seem like they're easy, right? Yeah, well Funny you say that I have somewhere Like some week a diagram I made of the setup We had to do in San Diego because the AV team was just like at a complete loss what to do as far as like We have a room with two projectors. How do you get the signal over to projector number two and that was when Apple released like the screen mirroring thing for iPad So I just plugged in I had the beta at the time just so I could have that feature for the conference So I plugged in my iPad. You know, it was 2019 plugged in my iPad on the alternate monitor You know projector and then we just casted it over there and like hey AV problems done But like right stuff like that happened. That was the that was the contributor summit where I actually Submitted a pull request via audio Hey Kinds broken. It's this problem fix It's like I found this last night One of the first every time I organize an event like that one of the first volunteers I find or try to find right is You know, somebody to do AP because it's always so hard and it is it is not my like skill set by default Yeah, and like, you know, we're putting on a container day event in Europe and we're trying to get it You know the AWS live streaming services that are out there and they're like How are you gonna give us a signal? Like that was like question number one. I'm like, oh, I know how How would you like it though? Do you even know all these acronyms me Yeah So then did you want to talk a little bit about? contributors Contributing to the kind of no-code kind of communication stuff or did you have another question you want to ask? Yeah, actually moving forward that I got to add the one comment around Kubernetes contributor summit. So just to be clear Contribute the contributor summit as a part of the colo event in the Qcon Which is really awesome because I've been doing a lot of time in the Qcon stuff Like a truck chair and then community program things like that. And I heard a lot of people are actually some struggle So finding right track for example, yeah, I made it right like a Chris already talked about that The sync meetup and the maintain your track and then it will call low event data bunch of stuff But the contributor the contributor summit is a really good place for them not only contributor But also like an user. Okay, I need to really learn something new around it You like a CNC project or some Kubernetes contributor stuff This is my be perfect call low event to find that kind of knowledge and then like a trend technology stuff And this is really cool stuff. I'm really encouraging a lot of people to join that this color event Yeah, and in previous years they did did something weird where like days your rose cost more Then whatever and like they fixed all that to where it's like you could just register to go to the summit and You're fine. Yeah, or exactly go to the whole thing. Yeah, there are many Technical or hard to core deep dive try like a maintainer and a secret stuff I'm pretty sure this contributor So me so pretty much like a general thing But also you can have some conversation in depth technology as well. Yeah And it's moving forward. I got a really more question. Just like a thanks for shouting out Random, so can you talk a little bit more about the cuba nice contributor communication project? Specifically to a non-code contributor, you know, so a lot of people saying I am cuba nice developer Which means like a play with the yellow files and then they still can say I am developers or even platform engineer However, you know, a lot of people have doesn't have any experience about that So so how do we handle like a non-code contributors with the dad contributor summit? Yeah, the No, this is not the container day for AWS the contributor summit is different. That's a different day zero or Pre-cube con event. So Something like the backstage call on the white get-ups call. This is a right even exactly. Yeah, it's it's considered a colo event It'll be on I looked at the date the 18th. I believe is what we're targeting right now I'm pretty sure. Yeah, that's fairly solid But sorry is the contributor summit? Yeah, the contributor some it'll be on the 18th all those days It was like like backstage con and cloud native security con Those are all beyond like AWS container day will be on day zero, which is Monday At least Container day so Dwayne Did you mean the the AWS container day? Did you mean a different the there's another one too, which I'm blanking on the name of Or were you talking about the contributors summit the the container day will be the 17th the contributors some it'll be Gotcha, when in doubt really confused many many there's so many just go for the whole week Yeah, just show up at the you know that that's exactly what I'm saying is that for any user I mean a tangent perspective is just really hard to find the right one with a limited time window And then yeah, I got a little bit more than 18 choices to go to the colo event at the same day Yeah, yeah, so we're Trying to not like have the colos overlap with the contributor summit this year That's that has been a complaint in the past I feel like where I would love to go to you know backstage con because we use that on our Kubernetes clusters extensively, but I really want to talk about this idea I have for a Kubernetes enhancement proposal at the contributor summit, you know So a lot of folks like set up their meetings for any enhancements. They want to you know kind of flesh out before actually submitting You know, they'll set that all up at the contributor summit. So it's like one central place No, there will not be virtual access this year just because It is very expensive to do live streaming From a big conference venue. It's not as simple as you would Think well, it's kind of it's kind of funny. It's like there's a there's almost like a step function It's like yeah, if you have a small conference, you know 500 or less people or something doing virtual. It's actually like all one room. No problem double right Yeah, it's not too big a deal But I think we have three rooms. So that would be tough, right? Yeah And the cost of it all because you have to use that right and use staff or whoever they have contracted out It's just a lot of money and it's just not an expense That we Think isn't necessary given all the other content and plus we have it in a you know There's two every year and then we try to do like a contributor awards at the end of the year But sometimes that happens virtually sometimes that happens at kube-com You know there One change this year I will say about the contributor summit and then I'll talk about contributor comms Which is to completely separate things not to be confusing or anything The SIG meet-and-greet which I have always found is the most beneficial for people is actually happening on Thursday this year So you can go to the contributor summit You know first half of the day. You don't want to do any on conferences You want you need to go to meet a customer or whatever? You can still go to a SIG meet-and-greet if you want to figure out what SIG I want to contribute to You know later in the week. So that was another thing a lot of people Learned what SIG they wanted to figure out to work with but the SIG meet-and-greet had already happened because they figured it out on Wednesday And the meet-and-greet was on Tuesday kind of thing, right? So right pushing it later a Thursday or Friday I can't remember which but yeah pushing it later in the conference gives people that opportunity to talk to other Attendees and say, you know talk to people like me and be like hey, this is what I do I would like to contribute where can I help? You know I try to steer as many people in the right direction as possible But contributor comms, you know, it's no code-esque right like we still use github We still have a process to approve tweets through github which is pretty cool. It's actually kind of broken right now because of some No JS issues, but the ideal state will be you know, your github issue turns into a PR Which then goes out to Twitter, right like There's actions github actions are involved. We're looking at integrating just straight up github with buffer The like aggregation scheduling tool for social media. So there's a lot of Use of those like Zapier or if this and that type things and like there's a lot of that going on within The entire SIG that in Trebek SIG that were under so Kind of my job as a co-lead is grease the skids for everybody's work, right? Like if I need to figure out, you know, you need a Zapier account I go reach out the CNCF figure out the process and then go do it kind of thing to make it happen And that just comes with time. I think in the community, right like At this point like I could probably lead contrabex. I feel like if I had the time You know, so this year I'm kind of high. Yeah, like this year I'm gonna try and you know, why myself up to help the next group folks when they step down So, you know, it's one of those things where it's like if you're in the community long enough You kind of know where everything is but if if you're not it could all just be over your head Well, this I mean, and we totally talking about that Well, it's the exact same thing you see in many organizations. It's what the this is the problem with like, you know, turnover, right? It's like, you know, it's even if you know in the best documented place in the entire world Like, you know, every time you you lose a person and have to replace that person There's so much to learn About the organization that's you know, it's kind of true in, you know, open-source communities It's probably true in other kinds of you know, I would say, you know external Communities, you know, I was involved in regional theater for a long time ago And and that for example was was another thing, you know, where you kind of had to know, you know How's this lightboard work, you know, that's slightly different from every other lightboard you've ever seen You know stuff like that. So I think that's You know, it's it's such It's often a very discounted but it really important component It's like, you know, once you know people who you know, once people know where all the bits are It's a big deal to make changes. You're to like have someone leave and replace them So I think it's really good to have, you know, if you've got a few contributors who can provide the continuity Even if they're not the leads they can be ridiculously valuable Yeah, so I dropped the link and chat to our our github directly essentially in the community repo for kubernetes, but I mean we have social media. We have Technical leads we have event leads that'll help with things that are happening in the community like contributor summit Blog coordinators just writers editors you name it and you know, we meet on Fridays at 11 a.m. Eastern and We discuss all the work that's in progress essentially right and a lot of it is one of those things where it's like We need to communicate these things out at a certain time of year like there's some of that that's scripted and then there's the kind of release related work and Then there's the event related work. So there's a lot of moving pieces, right? And we try to automate as much as that as possible So if you like to automate things From a content taking full request. Yeah, like feel free to join the meeting and be like yo I'm a Zapier expert. Y'all need some help like we would love it Right, right like or hey, I'm a great blog writer I would love to contribute a few blogs to the Contributor site or kubernetes.io blog You know, we can help you with that and kind of get that process going and for the longest time there was no Coordinating no, you know Coalescing of resources to do this and now that we have the functionality. It's it's really really beneficial when things like Dr. Sham deprecation happen or some release, you know needs to be Has a feature that needs to be communicated well in advance kind of thing We can get ahead of that and that's kind of the whole premise of the group was We need to get ahead of some of these things and like Dr. Sham was just like the big Fireworks moment for us where it was like yes, this group is vitally necessary and this is the things we should be, you know Communicated with about upcoming changes that kind of thing and we all try to keep aware of our various sections of you know kubernetes that were involved in But folks also know like Ping us in slack. We have a slack channel the whole nine yards whatever you need to get out Communications wise we can make that happen and you know, basically just if this is what you know, tell us what you want We do it done And if it's you know, very specific language that you need or you're not sure on the specific language that you need We can help you You don't necessarily have a style guide or anything fun like that yet but that would be cool if we did at some point have like a kubernetes contributor style guide But you know it's guys Yeah, yeah, exactly right like this is what you know a blog post looks like I mean right right it's been working. That's not that hard. So It's one thing I wanted to bring up That was new to me as a cube cube kind actually that I've been thinking about work using in our organization And you just mentioned it and I was kind of curious about your thoughts on it was backstage So we have you know, it's funny. I've been I've been talking about it You know within BU part of part of my job is to actually Be the technical director for this organization that does experiential learning for students And so we do third-party projects, you know We go get third parties who who want you know software built or whatever and then have student teams run them But one of the things that we struggle with right is is especially continuity I joke, you know that we're a Consultancy with the worst turnover in the entire world because we lose 300 employees every three months You know, but You know, I was looking at backstage as a way to kind of because we have projects that repeat even though the students don't repeat Right, so So it would be really nice to have kind of like a landing place for these project definitions So right now we have a mishmash of github and Trello and stuff like that. Oh, yeah And so what I was curious about is is what was your experience of backstage or can you tell us a little bit more about it? And where do you do you know or where are you interested in seeing it going? Because I think it's not a well-known I don't think it is well. What is a piece of Kubernetes called it like a sub project I was looking for this word the other day and I couldn't think of it like a sub-component Component Backstage is not kubernetes right like I think right it's kind of cncf in general that was released by Spotify originally right and Like I think their biggest thing for me at least is They just give folks like that are just they don't need to care about the back end, right? Yeah, like they know that they're writing a flutter app or Python and they need a database and they need all these components And you just create those specific things how you want to run them Within backstage and you just you know create these templates essentially And I'm probably using the wrong language because I'm not you know super first on the yeah I would say like you could run this ecosystem because it's a the Kubernetes stuff. Yeah, there you go And then you can bring up all your like a infrastructure not only Developers but also like a platform engineer. You can build up like a backstage you or the other Cncf project is all about kubernetes ecosystem So kubernetes kubernetes is not an option. It's a mandatory Fundamental technology that's how to say that Yeah, the one so kind of related like can I can I get like can I go click a button in AWS land and get a Backstage instance, or is this is this still pretty haven't looked at the marketplace. They got us with you on that I mean it could be so opportunity. I know there's a company that is providing There is like a SAS like company. Yeah Which made me feel better about investing in it because you know like You know one of the problems is open source, right? It's like if if there's no company that is actively kind of you know Making sure that it's it's kind of moving forward. Sometimes they can die And so you want to make sure that it's got some traction and one of the ways to do that I see if you can find somebody who's you know Willing to charge you money for it from support perspective Yeah, I mean I know So like the AWS Marketplace is vast So it would not surprise me if there's some vendor out there with the backstage solution I don't know that we're putting one together at AWS specifically on the e-guest team Can backstage do operators good question. I dropped a link For the plugins page that oh gotcha. Yeah, I mean that's always helpful for folks to kind of figure out What can I do with this tool? Doesn't support operators it supports the ML. So yes Right, I mean, you know and you know you can deploy whatever code you want through everything the The the catalog that you create is essentially a Bunch of work pieces that need to go together to make your thing happen and that can include things like CICD and security scanning and you know all those things that you would expect For your you know production enterprise app to go through you can kind of plug all those things in including monitoring the whole nine yards You can do some cost estimations with it as well, which is great, right? Like you kind of get a better view from your console of the expensive things But it integrates with so many different services that plugins link will tell you everything right gRPC We've works get ops. You name it. It'll work with it pretty much is what it seems like and there's been that wide adoption of People contributing their you know plug-in or whatever for backstage Even have one that'll like lighthouse for Google like if you're doing web page front-end releases You can totally have that as part of your you know Process before it goes out the door kind of thing or your test queue or however you want to set it up. It's essentially I Don't want to say it's like if this and that for Kubernetes because it's definitely not that simple, but it's close Right. It's a great developer platform. So if you're a platform engineer, you need to create consistency Backstages and open source project that'll allow you to do that. It's pretty great. Oh When you just shared a Lincoln chat here, so I mean, I'll check it out Oh, yeah, look at that digital alpha platform centralized software catalog for infrastructure services and documentation That sounds that sounds fancy. It doesn't sound fancy It's a yep, but yeah, it's an AMI based backstage application where user can directly use the backstage dashboard Yeah, I just tried to I also dropped the vendor who like they were at so they backstage had, you know, kind of a project booth, but then there's also a vendor booth at CubeCount and Rody.io was the oh, that's right. That's who they are. Yeah, you know for backstage is an awesome organization name, right? So yeah, I thought it was I thought it was really cool and I Didn't know like I have not heard very many people talk about it So, you know, if you're operating Kubernetes, it can be super handy and if you're Developers all at once this could really be like yo developer needs database that can do it themselves per your specs, right? Like we haven't had a you know, like Ansible can kind of do that and you know, it can kind of do that with tower But we haven't had like this open-source solution until backstage came along that integrated directly with Kubernetes the way it does Right, I really liked actually the kind of the dock side of it was that and and the kind of like here's all your links, right? Because you know right now I have a trailer Here you go. Yeah, right the first card is like here's all the links to you know Where the docks are and where the github is and you know all that stuff, you know But this is much more of kind of an integrated interface, you know with they kind of takes you all there Which I thought was really slick. I mean this this conversation might make me invest a little time and you know Spinning up. I've got new hard work coming shockingly So remember the server that I had for old live streams way back in the day where I would like burn down open-shift clusters of all different variety That is getting retired due to our power bill I'm donating a nonprofit so that'll that'll go a long way For them it's a great system, but it's just like overkill for you know, somebody that works at a cloud provider Right has like two zion CPUs 256 gigs of RAM an insane amount of you know, raid 10 storage It's a lot. I just need the storage part. So new parts and pieces are coming But I do intend to stand up a small cluster on that system Maybe extend it to another you know piece of hardware I have in the house and slap backstage on it because that'd be great if I could just glue some stuff together and have my fancy little app that I want to plug in from github done Yeah, well for me that even like kind of on the personal front Like I I'm really looking at it for and hopefully I'll be getting a student to be standing it up this semester We'll see how it goes, but even from kind of a personal perspective. It's like, you know My ability to kind of work on those personal projects is so erratic, right from yes perspective just having all that stuff in one place, you know, like that that whole You know context switching problem. It's like how do I get back to the context for for these little things? I want to build is super difficult. I'm hoping that backstage might be able to help me with that Yeah, it's gonna be the tool like if you're using kubernetes as your platform It's gonna be the tool that you're gonna want to grab if you need to help folks provision things on kubernetes Right like standing up a database and kubernetes isn't exactly trivial, right? So right having a template that does that for you and your own new space kind of deal a lot better But you know that involves like storage PVC's all these other, you know components of kubernetes that you have to kind of stand up to get a good You know solid database running under kubernetes because remember This was all done for stateless workloads and now we're doing state in it The right state is hard and I always remember the databases are the hardest There was like this protocol this hypertext thing That you know was also intended that way and then all of a sudden went very stateful That seems to be what happens So Dan, did you have more things you wanted to talk about or? No, it's good. It's good. Yeah, so Yeah, maybe just wondering. Yeah, so I mentioned a little bit earlier So the cncp investor program there was a new Era, so maybe you're gonna encourage people to join the new program. It actually we're gonna still open the Application the middle of February So, yeah, I am going there now and trying to find the ambassador page but yes cncf ambassadors have been a thing for a long time and George Castro from here in Michigan Suggested I become one at my first you've come and I applied and I got accepted and it's been five years, but the The group has just been ad only not like reduction at all, right? Like there's no way to phase somebody out kind of like driver. It is yeah Yeah, like it's like you just keep kicking the date down the road kind of thing so Twofold they want to a increased diversity as we all do and then be you know fresh faces There's a lot of new people in the Kubernetes space making great content They've applied to be cncf ambassadors, but they've never heard back because we have just so many, right like And so many of them say I'm working on this thing that might not be accurate. They might not be active Jobs change priorities change it happens, right? So they've revamped the program. So it's not in perpetuity you're a cncf ambassador because there is you know some work involved and You know after five years of doing it I would be okay with sitting out for a year and then reapplying for another year term So they're kind of doing it in two phases Everything's a year like you volunteer for a year of being a cncf ambassador and there's expectations and so forth so on But then like there's a group that's applying now And then there's a group that'll apply later in the year So you have some continuity there, right? There'll be like a six month period of where you'll have Existing and the new ambassadors so they can get spun up And there's you know that level of community growth Continues because now you can cycle people in and out as you see fit based on their skills and the needs and goals of the projects it's pretty cool and Then they're even revamping The newsletter that I used to contribute to which was Cube Weekly So they want to make sure that you know same kind of scenario It's not just the same people providing updates to Cube Weekly every week because that could get you know a little monotonous As you can imagine so the and it's a big burden on some people, right like Putting together a newsletter every week. I did it for sick for your straight. It's not easy and sourcing content for you know tech newsletters is just a deluge of data coming in at all times So yeah, the application window closes for the ambassador program on the 26th fall applications will open in July and They'll be announced or you'll be notified in October and Daniel this says mid-March 2023 now as is for notification for the new ambassador program So technically I'm still an ambassador until I think this is a Wednesday at QQ on EU. Yeah, so why? Yeah, so like I still feel like this Semi-obligation to keep covering you know Kubernetes work because that's the work. I'm doing every day But like I'm trying to figure out what does it look like after five years not doing And it it's it's gonna be a change like if I don't get accepted that kind of thing That's fine. I've done I've had a great run learned a lot met a lot of cool people done a lot of great stuff The The the evolution I think will be better overall for CNCF because diversity of ideas and opinions is Hard to gather unless you have a mechanism to do so And this new mechanism is I think much more Ready to bring in new people on a regular basis and also it gives folks an exit, right? That's that's been the biggest thing in the Kubernetes community. I feel like is you know, we have emeritus As a term that we use across the project But each sig has to have a method for doing that and it's usually the same right like somebody just volunteers and says I'm not working on this anymore But how many people actually do that right like if you stop watching a TV show do you tell the TV station? No And you change even priorities at work you're changing priorities at work. You're not necessarily worried about Unless you got PRs and flight kind of thing Well, it's also I mean it's super hard to actually to actually step back, right? Because like just because you announce that you're now emeritus, you know, yeah 50% of the community that was previously communicating with you about something didn't get the memo, right? Yeah, you know So it takes like five years, right? So, I mean, it's like even if you're if you're kind of stepping back from it a bit It's it's a very difficult Yeah, like area my biggest problem is that I have so many interests, right like I love physics. I love, you know Cost optimization. I love all these things, right that are kind of you know cloud adjacent or tech adjacent and somebody approached me at Cube con and I was kind of ready for the conversation, but not really they're like, hey, we're trying to set up like an environmental sustainability group Who do you know or would you be interested in doing it and it's like I Would love to be a part of it, but not leading it right like Because I have all these other roles now Yeah, so if the ambassadorship falls off, maybe I can go pursue that or maybe I could just take a break, you know But yeah, like the since we've last talked playing then I've had to shut down my newsletter for health reasons All those other stuff's going on kind of in the background. So I wouldn't mind a break to be honest with you It's been hard to kind of unwind to myself from all the things I used to do for my newsletter because it used to just be I would just work all the time I'd work it. I'd work at Red Hat. I'd work at AWS Done with work for the day have dinner with the family and then just start reading and I read till bedtime because I'm right all The tech news in my RSS reader. Yeah burning down your RSS feed every day is hard Right and if you'll yeah, the thing if you're running a newsletter, you can't share old news And just just trim like my other problem with with kind of news Especially tech news right is like you find an article and then it gets reposted with the exact same content in like 87 other places and you keep coming across all those when you're actually looking for like new content I did want to make a quick note before we wrap up though Which is that if you are interested in the optimization stuff, I'm gonna throw it in the chat There's actually a student here PhD candidate here who's been working on serverless optimization So basically looking at I have a workload or like a function, right? And I want to optimize where it's deployed based on cost In the various cloud providers and I was gonna throw one of his research papers in here Oh Yeah, I mean it's really interesting So like I love Kubernetes because it gives everybody kind of the standard set of APIs no matter where you are So like your your knowledge becomes transferable. It's not like you're at a No, I'm a XYZ vendor shop you can say I'm a Kubernetes shop and like it's a bigger pool of people You can pull from now as opposed to say like, oh, yeah, we use Oracle cloud or we use AWS Actually a lot of people Use a lot of clouds actually is what we've come to learn over the years so Having Kubernetes there is kind of the standard API layer we all work through is Liberating to an extent Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know vendor lock is a thing right and having a way to You know because like it goes it kind of goes both ways It's not only like I mean, do you really want to change providers all that much? Probably not Does it does it mean your pool of who you can hire? It goes down. That's my it's often my big concern. It's like, yeah, you know I want to have I want to have that openness because I want to also be able to say Hey, I have standard tools that I can teach or that I can hire for Which is super nice the way I like to say it is Linux did to Computing what Kubernetes is doing to cloud? Yes, that makes no degree. Yeah. Yeah, this is why I was really interested in Delta cloud 10 plus years ago Wow, that was a long Yeah, I was talking about SCSI terminators earlier this morning with social media Yeah, speaking of dating yourself, but yeah It was a it was a project way back in the day to try to You know kind of generic size the cloud access And we've had multiple projects like this. It's not like oh, he's a new idea It's just a new implementation of an idea, right? Like we had open stack, which a lot of folks still use great tool, but You know if you were standing up open stack Like I was at Duke research for example and we were talking about standing up open stack as a two-year project right like that's a Lot of effort. Yeah, and then like create that environment on a dev laptop. Good luck. Yeah Right, right Yeah, yeah Well, so on that note before we go off on some other tangent Thank you so much for being on the show. We really appreciate it Thanks for the invite. It's always happy. Yeah, likewise. Yeah, and hopefully Will you be at EU keep coming you in general? I hope so. That's hope so the General plan right now is to be right right unless something changes. Yeah, but there's a lot of time between now and April Exactly. Well, maybe I will see you there because I'm in the same boat. I'm hopeful that we'll be going there and you know, we'll be Maybe doing some more interviews and cars. We'll see how it goes Which would be entertaining There well, there's another But we were thinking maybe an Audi Yes, I like a lot so Yeah, but we'll see what happens. There was somebody who volunteered to provide their Porsche Like on a personal level. Wow. Okay, but Yeah, I'm not sure if that would fit with all the cameras and the people and you know, I mean, it would definitely be a squeeze for me, right? So, you know, we'll see how it goes, but thanks everyone for coming We are always excited to have everyone here and you know catch us up at you know It's the last Tuesday of the month is the show We will like said, hopefully be a cube con. We have lots of content at Cube by example calm or dot wait is it calm for sure now I just got Just a moment there and you know, so go check it out and the you know And there's lots of past episodes there as well and we're we're always excited to see y'all Thanks so much. Thank you. Have a great day