 Good afternoon everyone and welcome back to theCUBE. I am Savannah Peterson here, coming to you from Detroit, Michigan. We're at KubeCon day three. Such a series of exciting interviews. We've done over 30, but this conversation is going to be extra special. Don't you think, John? Yeah, this is going to be a good one. Grafana Labs is here with us. We're going to get in the conversation of what's going on in the industry, management, watching the Kubernetes clusters. This is large scale conversations this week. It's going to be a good one. Yeah, yeah, I'm very excited. He's also got a fantastic Twitter handle, twitchyh. Please welcome Richie Hartman, who is the director of community here at Grafana. Richie, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. How's the show been for you? Busy. I mean, I have a ton of talks at KubeCon, like maintain everything and like the governing board sessions at the DLC panel. I run for me this day, so it's been busy. Monday I didn't have to run anything. That was quite nice. You have your hands in a lot. I'm not even going to cover it looking at your bio. There's so many different things that you're working on. I know that Grafana specifically had some announcements this week. Yeah, we had quite a few. The two largest ones is A, we now have a few Kubernetes integration on Grafana Cloud. So our approach is generally extremely open source first. So we try to push stuff into the exporters, like into the open source exporters, into mixings, into things which are out there as open source for anyone to use. But that's a little bit like a tool set, not a ready-made solution. So when we talk integrations, we actually talk about things where you get this one-click experience. You log into your Grafana Cloud, you click I have a Kubernetes, which probably most of us have, and things just work like you ingest the data, you have to write dashboards, you have to write alerts, you have to write everything to just get started with extremely opinionated dashboards, and send those alerts again. All those things made by experts, so anyone can use them, and you don't have to reinvent the wheel for every single user. So that's the one, the other is- It's a big deal. Oh yeah, it is, it is. It has been heavily in integrations, because while, I mean, I don't have to convince anyone that Prometheus is a steady factor standard in everything cloud native. But again, it's sometimes a little bit hard to handle or a little bit not easy to get into, so smoothing this path onto onboarding yourself onto this stack and onto those types of solutions is what a lot of people need. Of course, if you look at the statistics from KubeCon, and we just had this in the governing board session yesterday, like 60% of the people here are first time attendees. So there's a lot of people who just come into this thing and who need like, this is your path, this is where you should be going, or at least if you want to go there, this is how to get there. Here's your runway for takeoff. Yeah, I think that's a really good point, and I love that you had those numbers. I was curious, I had seen on Twitter, speaking of Twitter, I had seen that there were a lot of people here coming for the first time. You're a community guy. Are we at an inflection point where this community is about to continue to scale? That's a very good question, which I can't really answer. So I mean, obviously- I bet you're going to try. COVID changed a few things. Yeah. Probably most people- A couple things, I mean, you know, casually. It's like such a gentle way of putting that, that was beautiful. I'm going to say, yes, it's going to explode. All these new users are going to learn Prometheus, they're going to roll in with open metrics, open telemetry. I love it. But at the same time, like, KubeCon is ramping back up, but if you look at the registration numbers between Valencia and Detroit, it was more or less the same. Interesting. So it didn't go onto this full trajectory, which it was up to 2019. I expect this to take up again, but also with the mechonomic situation, everything, I don't think it's- I think the jury's still out on hybrid. I think there's a lot more hybrid. Let's see how the projects are going to go. That's what I think is going to be the tell sign. How many people are participating? How are the projects advancing? Some of the momentum? I mean, from the project level, most of this is online anyway. Of course, that's how open source has been working for ages. Of course, you don't have any travel budget or any office or anything. It's always been that way. Yeah, precisely. So the projects are arguably spearheading this, this development and the online numbers. I have some numbers in my head, but I'm not 100% certain to, but they are higher for this time in Detroit than in Valencia as far as somewhere. So that is growing and it's growing in parallel, which also is great because it's much more accessible, much more inclusive. You don't have to have a budget of at least, let's say, I don't know, two to five K to fly over the pond and attend this thing. You can just do it from your home. So that is a lot more inclusive. And I expect this to basically be a second, more or less orthogonal growth paths. But the best thing about coupon is the hallway track and just meeting people, talking to people. And that kind of thing is not really possible with online numbers. It's great to see people in person. No, and it makes such a difference. I mean, yeah, even interviewing people in person too. I mean, it does, it's, and this whole, I mean, CNCF, this whole community, every company here is community first. It's how these projects come to be. I think it's awesome. I feel like you got something to say, John. Yeah, and I love some of the advancements. Richie, we talked last time about, you know, open telemetry, open metrics you're involved in, gas boards. One of the themes here is ease of use, simplicity, developer productivity. Where do you see the ease of use going from a project standpoint? For me, since you mentioned everywhere, it's pretty much, it's almost all corners of the world. And new people coming in, how are you making it easier? What's going on? Give us the update on that. So we also, finally enough, had precisely this topic in the TOC panel just a few hours ago about ease of use and about how to make things easier to handle, how developers currently, like if they just want to get into the cloud native scene, they have like, we did some networking math, like maybe 10 tools at least, which you have to be somewhat proficient in to just get started, which is honestly horrendous. Of course, with a server, I just have my server, I install my thing and it runs. Maybe I need a database, but that's roughly it. And this needs to change again. Like it's nice that everything is unraveled and you don't have those service boundaries which you had before. You can do all the horizontal scaling, you can do all the automatic scaling, all those things that they're super nice, but at the same time, this complexity, which used to be nicely compartmentalized, was deliberately broken up. And so it's becoming a lot harder to, like we need to find new ways to compartmentalize this complexity back to human understandable levels. Again, in particular as we keep onboarding new and new and new and new people, of course it's just not good use of anyone's time to just like learn the basics again and again and again. This is something which should be just compartmentalized and automated away. We were talking to Matt Klein earlier, and he was talking about as projects become mature and all over the place and have reach and usage, you got to work on the boring stuff. And when it's boring, that means you have success, but then you got to work on the plumbing. What are some of the things that you guys are working on? Because people are relying on the product. Oh yeah, so with my Prometheus hat on, the highlight feature is exponential or native or sparse histograms. There's like three different names for one single concept. If you know Prometheus, you currently have hard bucket boundaries where I say my latency is lower equal to seconds, one second, 100 milliseconds, what have you. And I can put stuff into those histogram buckets according to those predefined levels, which is extremely efficient, but like on the code level. But it's not very nice for the humans, because you need to understand your system before you're able to choose good cutoff points. And if you add new ones, that's completely fine. But if you want to actually change them, because you figured out that you made a fundamental mistake, you're going to have a break in the continuity of your observability data, and you cannot undo this into the path. So this is just gone. Native histograms, on the other hand, allow me to, okay, I'm not going to get into the math, but basically you define a single formula, which there comes a good default. If you have good reasons, then you can change it. But if you don't, just don't talk about it. If people are just in the math, hit them up on Twitter, Twitter age, you'll get to that math. So the thing is- People want the math, believe me. Oh yeah, I mean- We don't have time, but hit them up. Yeah, there's Prometheus in two weeks, in Munich, and there will be a whole talk about the dirty details of all of this stuff. But the high level answer is, it just does what people would expect it to do. And with very little overhead, you get highly, highly, or high resolution histograms, which is really important for a lot of use cases. But this is not just Prometheus, with my open metrics head on. The 2.0 feature, like the breaking highlight feature of open metrics 2.0 will be, you guessed it, precisely the same with my open telemetry head on. Lo and behold, the same underlying technology is being put, or has been put into open telemetry and we've worked for month and month and month and even longer between all different projects to asserting that we have one single standard, which is actually compatible with each other. Of course, one of the worst things which you can have in the cloud-native ecosystem is, if you have subtly different things and they break in subtly wrong ways, like it's much better to just not work than to break in a way which is just a little bit wrong. Of course, you won't figure this out until it's too late. So we spend, like with all three heads, we spend insane amounts of time on making this happen and making this nice. Savannah, one of the things, we have so much going on at KubeCon. I mean, just, you're unpacking, like probably another day at Kube. We can't go four days. I know, I think the same thing. Open telemetry. Challenge accepted. Yeah. Sorry everyone, we're going to stay here all the bullshit break down. They shut the lights off on us last night. They're really going to pull the plug on us. They've done that before. It's not the first time. We go until they kick us out. We love doing this. But open telemetry has got a lot of news too. So we haven't really talked much about that. We haven't at all. So there's a lot of stuff going on that I won't call it boring. That's like code word. That's KubeTalk for it's working. So it's not bad, but there's a lot of stuff going on, like open telemetry, open metrics. This is the stuff that matters because when you go on large scale, that's key. It's just missing all the stuff. I know. What are we missing? What are people missing? What's going on in the show that you think that's not actually being reported on? I mean, it's a lot of hype. WebAssembly, for instance, got a lot of hype out of it. Yeah, I was going to say, I'm glad you're asking this because you've already mentioned about seven different hats that you wear. I can only imagine how many hats are actually in your hat cabinet. But you are someone with your fingers in a lot of different things. So you can kind of give us a state of the union. Yeah, so go ahead. Let's talk about it. So I think you already hit a few good points. Ease of Use is definitely one of them. And improving the developer experience and not having this like a valley of pain. That is one of the really big ones. It's going to be interesting because it is boring. It is janitorial. And it needs a different type of persona. Or maybe not most, but a large fraction of developers like the shiny stuff. And we could see this in Prometheus where like initially the people who contributed the most were like those restless people who needed to fix that one thing. This is impossible. I'm going to do it. Which changed over the years where the people who now contribute the most are more of the janitorial and like keep things boring, keep things running, still have substantial changes, but not like more on the maintenance level. I was just going to bring that up. On the keep things boring while still pushing them forward. And the thing about Ease of Use is a lot of this is boring. A lot of this is drudgery. A lot of this is toil. A lot of this takes lots of research. Also in areas where developers are not really good at like UX, for example, and UI. Like most software developers are really bad at those. Because they just think differently from normal humans, I guess. That's an interesting observation that you just made. We can unpack that on a whole other show as well. So the thing is, this is going to be interesting for the open source scene. Of course, this needs deliberate investment by companies who assign people to those projects and say, okay, fix that one thing or make it easier to use what have you. That is a lot easier with first party products and projects from companies. Of course, they can invest directly into the thing. And they see much more of a value prop. It's kind of normal by now to allow developers or even assign developers onto open source projects. That's not so much the case for the TPMs, for the architects, for the UX and UI people, like for the documentation people. There's not as much awareness of that. This is also driving value for everyone. And also there's not as much immediate connection. Yeah, that's a great point. This whole workflow production system of open source which has grown and keeps growing and will keep growing, needs to be funded. And one of the things we were talking earlier in another session is about the recession potentially we're hitting and the global issues of macroeconomics that might force some of these projects or companies not to get VC funding. Such a theme at the show. So to me, I said it's just not about VC funding. There's other funding mechanisms that's community oriented. There's companies participating. There's other mechanisms. Richie, if you could have your wish list of how things could progress in open source, what would you want to see happen in terms of how things are funded, how things are executed? Because developers are going to run businesses because ultimately if you follow digital transformation to completion, IT and developers aren't a department serving the business. They are the business and that's coming fast. What has to happen in your opinion if you had to wish magic wand, what would you snap your fingers to make happen? If I had a magic wand, that's very different from what is achievable. Let's go with the magic wand first because we'll riff on that. I'm here for dreams. Yeah, yeah. I've been in open source for more than two decades but now most of the open source is being driven forward by people who are not being paid for those. So for example, Grafana is the first time I'm actually paid by a company to do my community work. It's always been on the side. Of course I believe in it and I like doing it. I'm also not bad at it. And so I just kept doing it but it was like at night on the weekends and everything and to be honest, it's still at night and in the weekends but the majority of it is during paid company time which is awesome. Most of the people who have driven this space forward are not in this position. They're doing it at night. They're doing it on the weekends. They're doing it out of dedication to a cause which they believe in. Yeah, the commitment is the same, yeah. At the same time, you have companies mostly hyper scalers and either they have really big cloud offerings or they have really big advertisement business or both and they're extracting a huge amount of value which has been created in large part elsewhere. Like yes, they employ a ton of developers but a lot of the technologies they built on and the shoulders of the giants they stand upon are really poorly paid and there are some efforts to like, I think the core foundation like which redistribute a little bit of money and such but if I had my magic wand everyone who is an open source and actually drives things forwards get, I don't know, 20% of the value which they create just magically somehow or other companies don't extract as much value and redistribute more, like put more full-time engineers onto projects or whichever like that would be the ideal state where the people who actually make the thing out of dedication are not more or less left on the sideline. Of course they are too dedicated to just say, okay, I'm not doing this anymore. You figure stuff out and let things crumble and falter. So it's like with nurses and such who just like they know they have something which is important and they keep doing it because they believe in it. I think this is an opportunity to start messaging this narrative because now we're at an inflection point where there's a big community. There is a shared responsibility in my opinion to not spread the wealth but make sure that it's equally balanced. And I think there's a way to do that. I don't know how yet but I see that more than ever it's not just come in, raid the kingdom, steal all the jewels, monetize it and throw some token money around. And the burnout, yeah. I mean, the other thing that I'm thinking about too is it's the financial aspect of this. It's the cognitive load and I'm curious. Actually when I asked you this question, how do you avoid burnout? You do a million different things and I'm sure the open source community, that passion. He codes. Yeah. So it's... You're the right code. It's, oh my software engineering days are firmly over. I'm the cat herder and the janitor and like this type of thing. I don't really write code anymore. How do you avoid burnout? So A, I didn't, of course I had burnout a few years ago. It was not nice but that was still when I had like a full day job and that day job was super intense and on top I did all the things. Part of being honest, a lot of the people who do this are really dedicated and are really bad at setting boundaries between work and... That's why I bring it up. Literally why I bring it up, yeah. I'm firmly in that area and I don't claim I have this fully figured out yet. It's also even more risky to some extent because like it's good if you're paid for this and you can do it during your work time but on the other hand, if it's so nice and like if your hobby and your job are almost completely intersectional, it becomes really... The lines are blurry. And then you have work from home. You don't even commute anything or anymore, you just sit down at your computer and you just have fun doing your stuff and all of a sudden it's deep at night and you're still like, I want to keep going. Sounds like I have something to cue. I know, I was going to say. I was like, passion is something we all have in common here on this side. That is the key point. There is the passion project becomes the job but now the contribution is interesting because now this ecosystem has a commercial aspect. Again, this is the balance between commercialization and keeping that organic production system that's called open source. I mean, it's so fascinating and this is amazing. I want to continue that conversation. It's awesome. Yeah, this is great. Richie, this entire conversation has been excellent. Thank you so much for joining us. How can people find you? I mean, I give them your Twitter handle but if they want to find out more about Grafana, Prometheus and the 17 under things you do. For Grafana, Grafana.com for Prometheus, Prometheus.io for my own stuff, GitHub slash Richie H slash talks. Of course, I track all my talks in there and I currently don't have a personal website because I stopped bothering but that repository is where you can find what I do over. Like for example, the recording link will be uploaded to this GitHub. How fun. Yeah. It's a great following. You also run a lot of events and a lot of community activity. Congratulations Royce. You also, and I thought that was the last time the largest IRC network on earth you ran. Built a data center for scratch. What happened? I highlighted that too. You haven't built a cloud hyperscale to compete with Amazon. That's the next one. Why don't you put that on your plate? We'll be sure to feature whatever Richie does next year on theCUBE. Yeah. Fantastic, on that note Richie again. Thank you so much for being here. John, always a pleasure. And thank you for tuning in to us here live from Detroit, Michigan on theCUBE. My name is Savannah Peterson and here's to hoping that you find balance in your life this weekend.