 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. In mid-2014, announced the world coming out of Google, led by Joe Beta, sitting to my right, Brendan Burns and Craig McLachy, all CUBE alumni, Kubernetes, which is the Greek for governor, or helmsman or captain. And here we are five years later at the show. I'm Stu Minim and this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon here in Barcelona, Spain. Joe, you know, you've got your title today, is that you are a principal engineer at VMware, of course, by way of acquisition through Heptio, but you are one of the people that helped start this journey that we are all on, on Kubernetes. Thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. All right, so the cake and the candles and the singing will hold for the parties later. We have Fippy and the gang have been watching our whole thing for people don't know. There's a whole cartoon, you know, books and stuffed animals and everything like that. So, you know, Joe, when you started this merchandising, that was, you know, what you were starting to know. And all seriousness though, you know, bring us back a little bit. Give us a little bit of historical context as to, you know, we've had you on the program a few times, but you know, yeah, here we are five years later. Was this what you were expecting? I mean, you know, when I remember Craig and Bren and I sitting around and we're like, hey, we should do this as an open source project. This was before we got approvals and got the whole thing started. And I think there was like an idea in the back of our head of like, this could be a big deal. But you know, you know, you dream big a lot of times, you know, and you know that there's a reality and that it's not always going to end up being this. And so I don't think anybody involved with Kubernetes in the early days really thought it was going to turn into what it has turned into. Yeah, so when we look at open source projects, you know, I remember back a few years back, it was like to succeed, you must have a fanatical dictator that will make sure that the community does this or like, we don't want too much vendor, we're just going to let the user community take over. And you know, there's all of these extremes out there, but these are complicated pieces. The keynote this morning, you know, the discussion was, you know, Kubernetes is a platform of platforms. It's like, I've got all of these APIs and you know, by itself, Kubernetes doesn't do a lot. It is what it enables and what things put together. So walk us through a little bit of that, you know, the mission, how it changed a bit and you know, a little bit of the community and we'll go from there. Yeah, I think so early on, I mean, a big one of the goals with Kubernetes from Google's point of view was to essentially take a lot of the ideas that had been incubated over about a decade with respect to Borg and other things. And so a lot of the early folks who got involved in the project had worked on those systems and really bring that to the outside world as a way to actually start bridging the gap between what Googlers did and what the rest of the world did. We had a really good idea of what we were looking to get out of the system and that was widely shared based on experience across a bunch of relatively senior engineers. We brought in some of the Red Hat folks early on, Clayton Coleman, some of the other folks who are still super involved in the project. And I think there was enough of an understanding that we looked and said, okay, we got a lot of work to do, let's just get this done. And so we didn't really need sort of the benevolent dictator because there was a shared understanding and we had senior engineers that were willing to make trade-offs to be able to go and move forward. And so that I think was a key bit of the success early on. All right, so you talked, it was pulling in some other vendor community there. Talk a little bit about how that ecosystem grew and when was user feedback part of that discussion? Yeah, well, I mean, when you say we pulled in the vendor, we pulled in people who worked for vendors, but we never really viewed it as like, there was really, from the beginning, this idea of like, well, what's good for the project? What's going to actually create sustainability and for the project over, sort of project over vendors, really something that we wanted to establish. And that even came down to the name, right? Like when we named the project, we could have called it Google XYZ or some sort of XYZ, but we didn't want to do that because we wanted to establish it as an independent thing with a life of its own. And so yeah, so we wanted to bring in those external ideas. And I think early on, we did have some early users, we did listen to them, but it really resonated with folks who could actually see where we were going. I think it took time for the rest of the world to really catch on with what the vision was. Okay, when you look at today, there's a lot at the show that is on top of her next to or with Kubernetes. It's not all about that piece. How do you balance what goes in it versus what goes with it? One of my favorite lines last year overall was from you saying Kubernetes is not a magic layer. It is not the be all and end all. It is set with very specific guidelines. How do you avoid scope creep? I mean, as engineers, it's always like, I don't know, we know how to do that piece of it better. So this is, I mean, so when we started out the project, we didn't actually have a governance model. It was just a bunch of engineers that sort of worked well together. Over time, and as the project grew, we knew that we needed to actually get some sort of structure in place. And so a bunch of us who had been there from the start got together, formed a steering committee, held elections. There's a SIG architecture that we formed. And these are the places where we can actually say, well, what is Kubernetes? What is Kubernetes not? How do we actually keep, make sure that we maintain sort of good taste with how we actually approach this stuff? And that's one of the ways that we try to contain scope creep. But also, I think everybody realizes that a thriving ecosystem, whether officially part of the CNCF or adjacent to it, is good for everybody. Trying to hold on too tight is not going to be good for the project. So Joe, tremendous progress in five years. Look forward for us a little bit. What does Kubernetes 2024 look like for us? Well, a lot of folks like to say that, in five years, Kubernetes is going to disappear. And sometimes they come at this from the sort of snarky angle. But other times I think it's going to disappear in terms of like, it's going to be so boring, so solid, so assumed that people don't talk about it anymore. I mean, we're here at something that, the CNCF is part of the Linux Foundation, which is great. But how often do people really focus on the Linux kernel these days? It is so boring, so solid. There's new stuff going on, but like clearly all the exciting stuff, all the action, all the innovation is happening at higher layers. And I think we're going to see something similar happen with Kubernetes over time. Yeah, that being said, the reach of Kubernetes is further than ever. I was talking to the special interest group looking at edge computing and IoT, you know, people making the microcades version of this stuff, when the team first got together, I mean, you must look at, said there were many fathers, many parents of this solution, but could you imagine kind of the family and ecosystem that would have grown out of it? I think we knew that it could go there. I mean, Google had some experience with this. I mean, when Google bought YouTube, they had a problem where they had to essentially build out something that looked a little bit like a CDN. And so there were some examples of sort of like, how does technology like Borg adapt to an edge type of situation. And so there was some experience to borrow and we definitely knew that we wanted this thing to scale up and down. But I think that's a hallmark of these successful technologies is that they can be used in ways and in places that you really never thought about when you got started. And so that's definitely true. All right, Joe, I want to give you the final word, the contributors, the users, the ecosystem community. What do you say with five years of Kubernetes now in the world? I just want to send a huge thank you to everybody who made it happen. This is, it was started by Google. It was started by a few of us early on, but we really want to make it so that everybody feels like it's theirs. I mean, a lot of times, Brendan Burns and me and Kelsey wrote a book together and I'll do signing. And a lot of times I'll sign that and I'll say thank you for being a part of Kubernetes because I really feel like every user, everybody who bets on it, everybody who shares their knowledge, they're really a big part of it. And so thank you to everybody who's a big part of Kubernetes. All right, well, Joe, thank you as always for sharing your knowledge with our community. Thank you so much. We've been happy to be a small part in helping to spread the knowledge and everything going on here. So congratulations to the community on five years of Kubernetes and we'll be back with more coverage here from KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE.