 Everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation here in the Palo Alto CUBE studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Vicky Chung, who's the engineering manager at Lyft and also the co-chair of CUBECon and CloudDativeCon, part of the CNCF, part of the awesome community that's doing all the cloud native. Been there from the beginning, you guys have been driving it. Vicky, welcome to the CUBE conversation. So I got to ask you, this year, more than ever cloud native is the biggest wave. You're starting to see everything emerge, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud right around the corner. All the stuff we were talking about is kind of playing out. It really is pretty exciting. Yeah, I'm super excited because I remember last time we talked about a lot of the enterprise stuff, more complicated use cases and developer productivity. And we're really seeing an uptick in all the talks in those areas. So I'm super excited to actually see what everyone else is doing. And yeah, more sophisticated at scale use cases, how to run efficiently, how to run in data centers, hybrid situations. The industry is growing up right in front of our eyes. Yeah, I know. It's exciting. Well, I want to just get the news out there. It's in Amsterdam. It's in a couple of weeks. Last week of March and going into April, the conference is happening. So in all the anxiety around the coronavirus, you guys are having as a policy of no shaking hands, coughing your elbow, be sensitive. Yeah. What are some of the things you guys are talking about? I'm sure you're feeling a lot of questions. Yeah, I think a lot of people are worried. The message is generally just don't panic and be reasonable in how you interact with people and know the context. So stay sort of a little bit, a respect personal space. Don't like shake hands, which I know will be awkward for a lot of people because we're like trained to do that, but yeah. I was just at the RSA conference and I tried to go with the fist pump, the elbow bump or like this. I still shaking hands. Okay, I'll shake your hand. I know, I always feel bad. I just like always carry on like hand sanitizer, but I think the conference it's going to have like hand sanitizing stations. So that's going to help a lot. Well, I'm looking forward to hearing all the great stories. More importantly, really to me, again, the big story we kind of talked about is the industry is growing up and you're starting to see visibility into the technology trend where it's really kind of applying into operations. You're seeing the business benefits start to unfold as well as excitement still for kind of the next journey. So I got to ask you, what are the most exciting talks you're seeing? What is some of the themes that we'll be expecting to hear? Well, so I think I continue to be pretty excited about your latest state of security as people start adopting more sort of sensitive or critical applications. Developer productivity is like very near and dear to my heart because, you know, why change the next generation of software if you're not going to be more productive? But I also am very interested in seeing a lot of sort of the combination of all these considerations coming together and just people running large scale clusters, trying to run them efficiently while handling like business isolation needs, compliance, you know, how to handle like multi-tenant when they have like different needs. And you have like one ops team that's like doing all of that. So I think all the like combination is really what I want to see. And there's a lot of day zero activities happening which has always been popular. So you guys are recommending that people come in if they want to enjoy some of the day zero activities come in a day early. Yeah, more and more I like have been recommending people to just go to day zero. There's a lot of good stuff there. I'm personally super interested in all the lightning talks. I think people always sort of like, especially new first timers to the conference, they sort of like miss the lightning talks because they're like, oh, it's day zero. I start at like one and you know. So I was going to ask you my next question. What's your advice for the new attendees because you guys do have a good in migration of new first timers as well as the mature, you know, people growing with the industry together. What's your advice for new attendees? Yeah, I would say definitely come in for day zero, go to all the lightning talks. There's going to be a new one on one track this time based on the feedback from last time. A lot of people said it was very overwhelming. And so we put together a like one day one on one track for people to have talks that help them like navigate both the conference itself and also the community. Has also clout like CNCF projects can also be very intimidating because there's like a lot of them now. Yeah, so I would definitely go check out the one on one track. Also, the advice that I give to most people is actually just like take your time because a lot of the talks are recorded and you can watch them later. So try not to like jam pack your schedule like all day because otherwise you're not going to last. Don't overdose, don't try to hit everything. Yeah. Face yourself, pick a groove and then identify talks you want to watch. Yeah, exactly. Also, I think like the value of these conferences is in the people. So the content obviously is great but I always, the strategy I take is like identify the topics I am interested in and also the speakers that I want to get to know. I go to their talks and I talk to speakers afterwards and start building out your conference network. So you guys get a lot of feedback. I know you guys take it seriously and you look at it. What are some of the new things or tracks that are coming this year at Amsterdam that was either part of the learnings or just new interest levels? Yeah, we have, so the one-on-one track is I think probably the biggest change we made but another thing is because the community is growing up so we had a lot of feedback about the distribution of like beginners versus intermediate versus advanced topics. I think the feedback for last time was like people wanted to see more like intense, deep technical dives into hard topics for people who've been using Kubernetes for a few years and so we sort of adjusted that a little bit this time so you should see some more interesting- Hardcore track. Yes, exactly. It's a hardcore track. Yeah, so people on our board are saying, oh, it's too lightweight. You can pick your spectrum a week or something. I think it is just like the conference is growing so there's like the audience demographics is also diversifying. If people are, obviously theCUBE will be there, we'll be broadcasting live so you guys can do keynotes. You'll be streaming live as well. The keynotes, is that going to happen? Yeah, I think so. Okay, so I think you guys are so I'm going to double check that. In terms of Amsterdam, I know, obviously you have the U.S., North America one, this is Amsterdam. What do you guys plan there? Anything local flavor there? Is there any twists to the event being in Amsterdam? Well, usually the like. More fun. Usually all the side like social events are themed to like the whatever region we're hosted in. So yeah, I think we'll see definitely like Amsterdam flavors there. I think we also try very hard to make sure to showcase the coolest speakers or like technology or projects coming from that area. So yeah, definitely I think a lot of the talks will be from. Definitely the buzz, certainly on Twitter and the scuttle button just kind of chatter is more fun. People love Amsterdam, it's a fun city. Yeah, I think just like, you know, generally people when they show up to like the conference they traveled from like elsewhere. So they're just like the vibe is like. It should be a good vibe. Looking forward to it. So this in the 2020 year, a lot's going on with CNCF. There's a lot of different things happening. You're in the machinery, you're in the room talking about all the plans. What's the big picture this year inside the community in terms of figuring out the tracks, the events. I mean, obviously there's growth here. How are you guys handling that? What's the conversation like? Yeah, I think definitely there's like a shift happening. You know, actually the tracks for Kupkan has been pretty stable since the inception of the conference. And this is, I think the first year where we've sort of started talking about maybe adjusting the tracks or splitting them because of how use cases have started shifting. For example, like application development has always been like a really large track. And it's intentionally vague. Like, you know, there's a lot of things that people are building on Kubernetes. So we don't want to be like too prescriptive. But because there is kind of like an explosion of use cases, we're thinking of like maybe potentially splitting that or, you know, I'll leave that up to the co-chairs for next conference. But we definitely like that sort of conversation is happening. What are some of the use cases that are exploding? I mean, obviously there's a diverse broad set of new use cases. Is there a pattern in what you're seeing? Yeah, there's, for example, for like HPC, that's, I think that's always been or high performance computing. That's always been like a topic that we see from time to time. But really for the last couple of conferences has been like very consistent and quite a few of them. And, you know, that ties into how people are using GPUs and, you know, even more exotic networking options. We're seeing some of that this time as well. So yeah, that's like its own category. I think another thing is like application development is sort of right now encompasses both like the application side, which is like, oh, HPC use case or like development, which is like developer productivity or developer experience. They're like very different. And so right now they're like sort of lumped together. You know, I got to have a confession for you because one of the reasons why I love KubeCon so much because it's really the perfect blend of, you know, geeking out and nerding out on the tech. So kind of that open source software. But you said HPC, it's like up and down the stack, a lot of kind of geekiness going on and you can dig in. Then you got the entrepreneurial vibe, right? So you have open source devs who are standing up, startups that have been there and they're there and there's a lot more entrepreneurship. Then you have the big companies who have the big wallets and they're either buying companies or, and so you have that confluence of, you know, the down and dirty, getting with the tech, open source startups and big companies. So it just makes it a real fun event. So I have to ask you as you look at trying to balance all the stakeholders, what's it like? You guys see that same kind of dynamic because everyone's playing well right now in the sandbox, so to speak. Yeah, I think it's been okay, like trying to balance that just because, you know, everyone is still, I think there's still more in common that people are trying to solve than they are different. And so there are a lot of topics that there, yes, people are like solving this problem for their specific use case, but actually like there's a lot of things in common for people in small companies as well as large enterprises as well. I think the interesting thing is like, you know, a lot of cloud providers, they give a lot of talks as well and you'd think, oh, that might be like two vendors specific, but actually what we're seeing is like, they just have a lot of experience operating many, many clusters and, you know, large infrastructure and their experience sort of like scaling that out is helpful to companies like Lyft or other startups that are just trying to scale their deployments. So, yeah. What's interesting, I look at the Amazon Azure and say Google, for instance, each one of those big tech companies has a commercial interest and they do have large power, but all the people that were running these clouds, they've been at the open source community. They know the contract that they have with the culture and plus it's so early. So I think there's a nice, I mean, I see Adrienne there. I see all the Google folks there. All awesome people, right? They're not like the greedy big bad guys. And I think that's what people don't understand about that part of it, although their validation in the business side can really pull, help pull through a lot of these great projects. Yeah, for sure. I see them contributing a lot to the community as well and they definitely are very open to initiating collaboration. I see that a lot in Kupkan, you know, in the vendor booth area. People are talking about like, oh, let's start a new project or like, oh, that could be open sourced. Like that's the type of conversation that's happening in the like sponsorship area and not like, oh, do you want to buy our stuff? So yeah. I mean, I definitely think both, all three of those clouds I mentioned all have awesome people over there when it comes to this community. And also they're, again, everyone's playing well, but because it, but I think that the unification around Kubernetes and what's going on with cloud native is so powerful because I think everyone agrees that there's a bigger win beyond the short term. Yeah. There's a bigger de facto standard kind of thing going on here around hybrid and multi-cloud. And all the, all the conversations that we have on theCUBE these days is about hardcore hybrid and then the promise of multi-cloud. So I got to ask you, is there any multi-cloud in here? Is that too off the radar on the hype side for you guys? I don't think it's too off. Yeah, there definitely talks about like hybrid and multi-cloud. And I've come from companies that have done that with Kubernetes. And so yeah, I don't think it's like that far fetched. So it's right now it's happening. There's good conversations happening there. Yeah, I think, you know, obviously it depends on the use case because it does come with its own complexity, but there's just, I think the demand on infrastructure teams just keeps growing. And so, you know, we get to a place where we need to be multi-cloud because like availability reasons or because of like regional issues, whatever. So yeah, it's not that far fetched. Yeah, you're hitting the sweet spot there because you talk about like the scale that's going on and the operations. And everyone's like always worried about, oh, change is going to make this happen. The fact of the matter is one, you have large scale and growth, skills gap and skills shortages going on. So the only way to solve that, by the way, and a huge data tsunami, you got cybersecurity, the only way to solve that's automation. I mean, software. Yeah. And a whole big picture. Yeah. And I think everyone's seeing the benefit of like sharing the problems we're solving on the infrastructure layer because that's not our business. Like we're not selling infrastructure. We just want to like get that into a good place so we can like actually do our business. So yeah, I think that's what's also fueling all the like community and open source. Final question. What's going to be the theme for you guys as you give your talks and you're in the hallways talking to folks. What's the posture this year from the group? What do you hope people walk away with from KubeCon and CloudNativeCon this year? Oh, that's a good question. Well, personally, I think a lot of what's on my mind right now coming into this conference is like, a lot of talks from San Diego were about like, okay, now that we're actually putting this in the production, a lot of teams are realizing how much complexity there is and how we can abstract the complexity away from the rest of the engineering team, like outside of infrastructure. And since then I think people have made a lot of contributions and have just thought a lot more about that topic. So that's what's on my mind is like, okay, that's what we were talking about a few months ago. Let's see where we're at now. So let's see the proof. Yeah. Let's see the use cases. Let's see the results. It's a proof it's a proof it world when you start talking about operations. Yeah. Right, rubber's hitting the road. Okay, Vicky's here inside the cube. We're giving us a breakdown of the upcoming KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. She's the co-chair, puts it all together with a great team over there and also a great community. Again, as it continues to grow and there's a lot more to go, CloudNative and Kubernetes is really at the center of what I see as a de facto standardization around a whole new cloud operating model that's going to create a lot of benefits and a lot of great stuff for the community. I'm John Furrier with the cube. Thanks for watching.