 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Kube by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. Welcome back, this is theCUBE getting towards the end of two days live, wall-to-wall coverage here at KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019 in Barcelona. I'm Stu Minim, my co-host for this week has been Corey Quinn, and happy to have on one of our hosts for this week from the CloudNative Computing Foundation, Dikumar, the Vice President of Marketing, also helps with developer relations. D, welcome back to the program. Thanks for having me. And thank you for having us. We've been having a great time this week. A lot of buzz, a lot of people, and obviously always a lot of enthusiasm at the show here, thanks so much. All right, so your team's been super busy. I've talked with a lot of them leading up to the show. Anybody that knows any show of this kind of magnitude know we're usually pretty exhausted before we get on planes and change all the time zones. So thank you for holding strong. Give us a little bit about, when we talk marketing, you have a big annual report that came out recently from 2018, give us some of the highlights of some of the things you've been saying. Yeah, sure. I mean, like you mentioned, you're seeing all the excitement and buzz here. So this is our largest open source developer conference when compared to the last year, we did an open Copenhagen. So we have close to, I would say, 8,000 attendees. So we're really excited about that. And you're absolutely right. With that comes, we're so exhausted, but we really appreciate, I think the reason the conference has been so successful is primarily just because of the community engagement, which I highlight in the annual report. So it's a combination of our community, which is the developers, the contributors, also our end users. And the third part, the third significant portion of our ecosystem is our members. So we recently just announced that CNCF has crossed over 400 members. Our end user community is growing. I think Cheryl mentioned this morning in the keynote, we have about 81 end users. And this is phenomenal because end of the day, end users are companies who are not commercializing cloud native, but essentially they're using these products or technologies internally. So they're essentially the guinea pig of cloud native technologies. And it's really important to learn from that. Well, it actually, it's interesting, celebrating the five years of Kubernetes here. I happen to talk to a couple of the OGs of the community, Joe Beta, Tim Hocken, and Gabe Monroyon. And I made a comment to Joe, and I'm like, well, Google started it, but they brought it to the ecosystem and pulled in a lot of other vendors as well. It's people. And Gabe said, he's like, yeah, I started Diaz and I was one of the people that joined in. So we said, this community is, it's people more than just the collection of the logos on the slides. Absolutely, I completely agree. And the other thing I also want to point out is a neutral home like CNCF. It definitely increases contributions. And the reason I say that is having a neutral home helps the community in terms of engaging. And what is really interesting again, going back to the annual report is Google had a leadership role and most of the contributors were from Google. And now with having a neutral home, I think Google has done a phenomenal job to make sure that the contributors are not just limited to Google. And we're seeing like all the other companies participating. We're also seeing a new little graph of independent contributors who are essentially not associated with any companies. And they've been, again, very active with their comments or the engagement with overall in terms of not just limiting to Kubernetes, but all the other CNCF projects. So this is sort of a situation of being a victim of your own success to some extent. But I've mentioned a couple of times today with various other guests that this could almost be called a conference about Kubernetes and friends, where it feels like that single project casts a awfully long shadow. When you talk to someone who's vaguely familiar with the CNCF, it's, oh, you mean the Kubernetes people. Cool, we're on the same page. How do you, I guess, from a marketing perspective begin to move out from under that shadow and become something that is more than a single project foundation? Yeah, that's a great question. And the way we're doing that is I think Kubernetes has become an economic powerhouse, essentially. And what it has done is it's allowed for other startups and other companies to come in and start creating new projects and technologies built around Kubernetes. So essentially now you're no longer talking about one single project. It's no longer limited to containers or orchestration or just microservices, which was the conversation three years ago at KubeCon. And today what you will see is it's about talking about the ecosystem. So the way from a marketing perspective and it's actually the reality as well is Kubernetes has now led to other growing projects. It's actually helped other developers come on board. So now we are seeing a lot more code, a lot more contributions. And now CNCF has actually become a home to 35 plus projects. So when it was founded, we had about four projects and now it's just grown significantly. And I think Kubernetes was the anchor tenant. But now we're just talking about the ecosystem as a whole. Yeah, D, I'm wondering if it might be too early for this, but do you have a way of measuring kind of success? If I'm someone that has rolled out Kubernetes and some of the associated projects, when I talk to the early Kubernetes people, it's like Kubernetes itself is just an enabler and it's what we can do with it and all the pieces that go with it. So I don't know that there's spectrums of like how are we doing on digital transformation? And it's a little early to say that there's a trillion dollars of benefit from this environment. But do you have any measure today or thoughts as to how we can measure the success of everything that comes out of here? Yeah, so I think there was Redmond, they published a report last year and it looks like they're in the process of updating, but it is just phenomenal to see just based on that report, like over 50% of Fortune 100 companies have started to use Kubernetes in production. And then I would say more than, I think to be accurate, 71% of Fortune 100 companies are using containers. So I think right there is a big step forward. It's no, and also if you look at it last year, Kubernetes was the first project to graduate. So one of the ways we also measure in terms of the success of these projects is the stages that we have within CNCF and that is completely community driven. So we have a project that's very early stage. It comes in as a sandbox and then just based on the community growth, it moves on to the next stage, which is incubating and then it takes a big deal to graduate and to actually go to graduation. So we often refer to these stages of the projects to Jeffrey Moore in terms of crossing the chasm. You've talked about that a lot. And again, to answer your question in terms of how you exactly measure success, it's just not limited to Kubernetes. So we had this year, a few other projects graduate. So we have six projects that have graduated within CNCF. How do you envision this unfolding in the next five years? Where you continue to accept projects into the foundation. At some point, you wind up with what will only be described as a sarcastic number of logos on a slide for all of the included projects. How do you effectively get there without having the Cheesecake Factory menu problem? Of the short answer is just yes, rather than being able to list them off because no one can hold it all in their head. Great question. We're still working on it. We do have a trail map that is a representation of where do I get started? So it's definitely not prescriptive, but it kind of talks about the 10 steps and it not only talks about it from a technology perspective, but it also talks about processes and people. So we do cover the DevOps CICD cycle or pipeline. The other thing I would say is again, we are trying to find other creative ways to move past the logos and the landscape and absolutely right. It's now becoming a challenge with our members with 400 plus members within CNCF. The other way to actually look at it is back to my earlier point on ecosystem. So one of the areas that we're looking at is, okay, now what next after orchestration, which is all about Kubernetes, is now I think there's a lot of talks around security. So we're going looking at use cases and then also cloud native storage is becoming another big theme. So I would say we now have to start thinking more about solutions. Solution, the terminology has always existed in the enterprise world for a long time, but it's really interesting to see that become come alive on the cloud native side. So now we are talking about Kubernetes and then a bunch of other projects. And so now it's like that whole journey from start to finish. What are the things that I need to be looking at? And then I think we're doing our best with CNCF, which is still a part of a playbook that we're looking to write in terms of how these projects work well together. What are some common use cases or challenges that these projects together can solve? So Dee, we're here at the European show. You think back a few years ago, it was public cloud, well, it's very much adoption in North America and starting to proliferate throughout the world and Alibaba's doing well in China and everything. CNCF now does three shows a year. Through North America, do Europe, and we've got the one coming up in China. We actually did a segment from our studio previewing the OpenSack Summit and CubeCon show there. So maybe focus a little bit about Europe. Is there anything about this community and this environment that maybe might surprise people from your annual data? Yeah, so if you look at, we have a tool called DevStats. It's open source, anyone can look at it. It's very simple to use. And based on that, we kind of monitor what are the other countries that are active or not just in terms of consuming, but who are actually contributing? So if you look at it, China is number two and therefore our strategy is to have CubeCon in China. And then from a Europe perspective, I think the third leading country in terms of contributions would be Europe. And therefore we have strategically figured out where do we want to host our CubeCon? And in terms of our overall strategy, we're pretty much anchoring to those three regions which is North America, Europe, as well as China. And the other thing that we're also looking at is we want to expand our growth in Europe as well. And now we've seen the excitement here at CubeCon Barcelona. So we are looking to offer some new programs or I would say new event types outside of CubeCon. We're kind of, you want to look at it as mini CubeCons. And so those would explore more in terms of different cities in Europe, different cities in other emerging markets as well. So that's still in the works, but really excited to have, you know, I would say two new event types that we're exploring to really get the community to run and drive these events forward as well outside of their participation in CubeCon. Because oftentimes I hear that a developer would love to be here, but due to other commitments or they're not able to travel to Europe. So we really want to bring these events local to where they are. So that's essentially a plan for the next five years. It's fascinating hearing you describe this because everything you're saying aligns perfectly with what you would expect from a typical company looking to wind up building adoption, building footprints, et cetera. Only you're a foundation. Your fundamental goal at the end of it is user engagement of people continuing to participate in the community. It doesn't turn into a and now buy stuff. The only thing you have for sale here that I've noticed is a t-shirt. There's no, okay you also have other swag as well, not the important part of the story. I'm curious though as far as as you wind up putting all of this together, you have a corporate background yourself, was that a difficult transition to navigate as far as getting away from getting people to put money towards something in the traditional sense and more towards getting involved in a larger ecosystem and community? That was a big transition for me to be just having worked on the classic B2B commercial software side which is my background and coming in here I was just blown away with how people are volunteering their time and this is not where they're getting compensated for their time. It's purely based on passion, motivation and when I've talked to some key community organizers or leaders who have done this for a while, one of the things that has had an impact on me is just the strong core values that the communities can exhibit and I think it's just based on that, that the way they take a project and then they form a working group and then there are special interest groups that get formed and then there is a whole process actually under the hood that takes a project from where Kubernetes was a few years ago and where it is today and I think it's just amazing to see that it's no longer corporate driven but it's more like how communities have come together and it's also like a great way to be here. Oftentimes gone are the days where you try to set up a meeting, people look forward to being at KubeCon and this is where we actually get to meet face to face so it's truly becoming a networking event as well and to build these strong relationships. It goes even beyond just users. I mean calling this a user conference would not be doing a bit of a disservice. You have an expo hall full of companies that are more or less in some cases sworn enemies from one another, all coexisting peacefully. I have seen no fistfights in the two days that we've been here and it's fascinating watching a community effort get corporate decision makers and stakeholders involved in this and it seems that everyone we spoke into has been having a good time. Everyone has been friendly. There's not that thousand yard stare where people are depressed that you see in so many other events. It's just something I've never experienced before. You know that's a really amazing thing that I'm experiencing as well. And also when we do these talks we really make it a point to make sure that it's not a vendor pitch and I'm not being the cop from CNC if policing everyone and trying to tell them that hey you can't have a vendor pitch but what I'm finding is even vendors, today I just did a serverless talk with AWS and he's a great speaker and when he and I were working on the content he in fact was putting on that hat and he's like I don't want to talk about AWS. I really want to make sure that we talk about the underlying technology, like focusing on the projects and then we can always build on top the commercial aspect of it and that's the job for the vendor. So I think it's a really great collaboration to see how even vendors put on the hats of saying I'm not here to represent my products or my thing and of course they're here to source leads and stuff but end of the day they're underlying common protocol that's already just established without having like explicit guidelines say this is what you need to be following or doing it's just like an implicit understanding everyone is here to promote the community, to work with the community and again I think I really want to emphasize on the point that people are very welcoming to this concept of a neutral home and that really has helped with this implicit understanding of the community is knowing that it's not about a vendor pitch and you really want to think about a project or a technology and how to really use that project and what are the use cases? It's very clear that message has resonated well. All right, so Dee, thank you. We've covered a lot of ground. I want to give you a final word, anything else we covered the events, we covered potential little things and the annual report. Any last words you have for us that you want people to take away? I'm not really, I think, like I said, it's the community that's doing the great work and CNCF has been the enabler to bring these communities together. We are also looking at creating a project journey in terms of how these projects come into CNCF and how CNCF works with the communities and how the project kind of goes through different stages. Yeah, so there are a lot of great things to come and looking forward to it. All right, well, Dee, thank you so much for all of the updates and a big thank you actually to the whole CNCF team for all they've done to put this together. We really appreciate the partnership here for Corey Quinn. I'm Stu Minnan. We're back to wrap two days live coverage here, KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE. Thank you.