 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, the European show, which of course for 2020 is virtual. Always love when we get to talk to the practitioners as well as many of them heavily involved in what happens at the CNCF in all these open source communities. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Katie Gamangy. She is a cloud platform engineer with American Express and she's also a member of the CNCF's TOC, which is the Technical Oversight Committee. Katie, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me today. I'm quite excited to be here. Excellent. Well, you are, as I mentioned, you're part of the TOC, you also present at the show last year you presented at one of the KubeCon shows and this year, as I mentioned, you're with American Express now. I believe it was Kandey Nass. You shared some of the journey along those lines. Maybe for our audience, give us a little bit about your background and what's gotten you involved in some of these projects and communities. Absolutely. Oh, such a good question. I can talk forever about that. My passion about CloudNative. So my name is Katie Gamangy and I am one of the Cloud Platform Engineer for American Express. I've joined American Express around five months ago and I am part of the team that aims to transform the current platform by embracing the CloudNative principles and making the best use of the open source tools. As mentioned previously, I've been working for Kandey Nass. I've been in that role for almost two years and as part of that role, we aim to create a centralized, globally distributed platform that had Kubernetes as a centerpiece. And that was the role which actually got me involved more into the CloudNative tooling and I've been exploring them quite heavily since then. And that's why I wanted to get more in terms of more contribution to the community. I've been doing that previously through different talks and actual writing blog posts on different, giving different guides on how to start using some of the tooling. However, this year I decided to apply for TOC and I've been elected as a TOC from the end user perspective. Some representing pretty much the overview of what end users think that the next direction should be within the CloudNative landscape. And for the last, actually for the past five months, I've been on the TOC for the CNCF and it's only 11 of us and we are in charge to make sure that we can guide and set this technical vision for the CNCF landscape. Yeah, Katie, I definitely want to talk about the TOC piece but I want to back up a little bit and you talked about some of the tooling, you talked about the community. Help me understand a little bit, from a business standpoint, why Kondinast, American Express, looking towards using Kubernetes and all of these open source toolings, what was the charter, the challenge put before them that felt that doing things this new way would help them? I think this actually goes a couple of years back. In my previous soul, before Kondinast, I was in a team which aimed to provision infrastructure but it was in a more, how can I say, old-fashioned manner. We had to configure our data centers manually, configure the VMs and processes. We had a piece of automation but at the time, this was maybe three years ago, I started to look into Kubernetes and it was still baby steps, like there was interest from the community and I really wanted to kind of get my hands on it more. And when I was looking for a role, which was at Kondinast, I was looking for something which aimed to introduce containers in the entire infrastructure. And I think Kondinast actually was very appealing as a role because not many expect for a media company to invest in technology and actually the underlying infrastructure. So from my perspective, I thought it's actually quite a good use case to change this perspective in the community. As well with Kondinast, it was a very international company. We had different business units around the world. All of them had different text tags. So the challenge itself, how do we unify that? How do we centralize the deployment process of the application and serving our request? But at the same time, have this individualized layer for every single market to still personalize their content. So it was a very good project I think for me to further go into the cloud native tooling and actually definitely proved to be the right role for that. And currently I am in a different role. It's actually a financial company but I think this is my personal challenge. I think there is a perception of financial companies moving towards modernization of their infrastructure but it's still going quite slowly. And I think my personal challenge in this perspective is to make sure that actually fintech is a thing but fintech in cloud native actually using open source tooling is possible. Obviously we can transition that to some of the secondary base maybe not the core base of the business but this transition actually getting the change going is the most important bit. Once actual goes it's just a bolder like downhill you're just going to take everything around and refactoring bit by bit. Yeah, Katie you brought up a really important point in today's world especially this year 2020 with the global pandemic going on being able to react fast is so important regardless of what industry you're in. You talked about in your previous role you had a global rollout to work across a lot of environments. Help us understand a little bit underneath the covers. What using this tool said how does this help you move faster? How does it in some ways unify teams regardless of what challenges they have? I think for us at least that content as it was quite important to have one platform so actually centralized all of our requirements actually cover all our requirements and translate them within the platform. So what actually wanted to us to have Kubernetes as the gravitational point. Now with Kubernetes we'd have some of the main functionalities such as portability or flexibility we'll be able to scale to very easily without actually minimal effort but more importantly we'll be able to transport our platform to different regions so to actually replicate the entire tech tech stack. So once we have this centralized platform it was very easy for us to distribute them for example in regions across the US and that time I was working there at least there was an intentional strategy to replicate the tech stack in China and they'll be very easy because with Kubernetes you just have this lift and shift capabilities. As long as you have VMs you'll be able to compute you'll be able to run the entire content as tech stack. So that was a very big and kind of big point for us to move to Kubernetes. Whilst I think in American Express the strategy is completely different. It's still a lot of heritage infrastructure we have at the moment. There is still actually we are running on Kubernetes there is the provider itself is open-shift. This proven to be showcasing some of the issues for us moving forward and we'd like to transition to a more native way to run Kubernetes. And this potentially means but you haven't finalized the decision but it might be using a power cloud provider or it might be the case of actually running Kubernetes self-service. So we've actually gonna maintain our clusters. This is not defined but the underlying idea is we want a more kind of modern version of Kubernetes or managing Kubernetes moving forward. So this is one of the strategies but I think within American Express the main underlying idea is that we really want to inner source most of the configuration. Historically we had different contractors and vendors working on our bits and pieces. We'd like to actually get all of this in-house and have a centralized way to manage our infrastructure. So this is the underlying project which I think is going to take a while but again there is an intention to include cloud native to link and technologies. And I think this is a very healthy thinking in terms of technology. Now Katie you highlighted two really important topics that we've seen out there. Number one is exactly where my infrastructure is. It's gonna change and I don't need to think about it. So you talked about public cloud data centers that might change in the future. And number two, making sure that you have the skill set in-house. Something we definitely learned from the outsourcing trends of the path was when things need to be changed if I had to rely on someone else it became very difficult. So if you're leveraging Kubernetes and you have the developer chops to be able to respond to the business in an agile way you're gonna be much more ready to be able to handle whatever happens in the future. So important. I wanna switch, talk a little bit about your TOC work presenting at the show. It's great to see companies enabling their employees to participate in this sort of thing. Help me understand how much for kind of you personally and what is the support that you get from your last job, your current job to participate in these open source projects and communities? Right, I think both of the companies, Condenaz and American Express they quite interested in being part of the cloud native community. With Condenaz, they actually part of the end users. With American Express, I think there is a thinking to actually join the end user community. So this might be something which will happen in the future. Can I guarantee, but I'm hoping this is gonna be again one of my personal challenges making sure we get in the community and share some of our use cases. But for now, I think both of the companies actually understand the value of being part of actually using open source but more importantly understanding how other companies use that. Not one use case, especially when it comes to Kubernetes not one Kubernetes platform is gonna be the same. There's always gonna be different underlying technologies that plug into it. There's always gonna be different ways to use different tooling. And having this concentrated community and source of information, I think the companies actually understand the value in that and contributing to that. So I think this is something which I've been quite passionate about actually understand some of these trends to understand how some of the tooling are used and if there is an actual hope for a project or it's something which actually specializes into a very minimal kind of niche problem and it's gonna be useful for maybe one or two companies depends. So I think this is something I've been passionate about and I've actually had a support for out in my previous company and current company I have very strong support for my higher ups to actually contribute more in the part of the end user community and as such be a TOC as well which comes with a bunch of responsibilities as well. But I think in terms of the support definitely I had this necessary support all the way through which I'm quite thankful. Katie, you mentioned some of your passions I know from what I've read online that you're passionate about some of the tooling there and that's some of what you're sharing through your presentation. So love if you could share a little bit about what you'll be talking about at the KeepCon Europe show right now and any of the kind of tools that are getting your time and attention these days. So I think lately I've been exploring Cluster API the new release I've been waiting for new release for actually everyone has been waiting for the new release for a couple of months. Now we actually have view on alpha free endpoint with some of the cool features such as managed control planes for a cluster. And the second tool or set of tools I'm looking lately are the ones which concentrate on the GitOps model. So during the session at KeepCon in Europe this year I will be presenting Cluster API a guide on how to get started. So an overview of all the components necessary to create your own clusters in different cloud providers as well. But I will crown that presentation by delivering a demo of how can you provision your cluster with GitOps and I'm gonna use our go CD at the moment. And the end result is gonna be provisioning a cluster in AWS by having maybe one click and you have a cluster with free masters maybe five nodes and you just wait. Pretty much you can have a coffee while your cluster is provisioning but more importantly with Cluster API again we have reusable manifest which will allow us to have this one interface to integrate with different cloud providers. So we actually have this interoperability of manifests across different cloud providers. So look forward to that. Excellent, Katie last question I have for you what advice would you give your peers? Where do you see need for more participation as people that are getting into this environment? Where do you think they can help? Such a good question. I think contribution is necessary in most of the SIGs in the Kubernetes community. So I think depends on the passion everyone has if they quite passionate about the networking or storage or even service mesh there is gonna be a group of people that have the same passion and interest as you. So please reach out and contribute. I think another thing actually another thing I would like to mention you don't necessarily need to be an active coder to be part of the SIGs or to be part of the cloud native because being in technology of course it's an advantage. However, most of the ideas and actually making sure that we tailor or actually have use case cover use cases for different tooling comes from a diverse user base as well. So if you have an interest I think that's gonna be a very good engine for to further enable in different ideas within the SIGs. So I wouldn't be able to recommend a particular project. I think this is very specific to everyone's daily role. I would too. But yeah, I think within the CNCF we have a collection of SIGs for which you pretty much would find a place for yourself in your skills. Well, Katie, thank you so much for sharing your journey and participating so actively in the communities. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me today. All right, and stay tuned, launch more coverage from KubeCon Cloud NativeCon Europe 2020 virtual edition. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.