 From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE's live coverage in Seattle for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, Stu Miniman, breaking down all the action, talking to all the thought leaders, all the experts, all the people making it happen. We're here with the partners, and now it's the group product manager, Kubernetes, Google Cloud, also one of the power women of the cloud at Google, as according to Forbes, I wrote the story. Great to see you again. Thank you, great to be here with you. Thanks for coming on Kube Alumni. Great to have you on. I want to get your perspective on, you're seeing a lot of action, certainly overseeing the group engineering team at Google and all the Kubernetes action. A lot of contribution, a lot of activity that you guys are leading and quite frankly enabling and contributing to the community. So congratulations and thanks for that work. Kubernetes certainly looking good. People have pumped up. Very much. 8,000 people. A lot of activity. A lot of new things around that you guys are always kind of bringing into an Istio, K-native, a lot of things. You gave a keynote. What's your focus here this year? What's the message from Google? Yeah, well, as you pointed out, this is the largest KubeCon ever. 8,000 people, 2,000 on the wait list. And people are telling me here that, you know, this is here to stay, right? It's in the early majority going to the mainstream, very much like, you know, you kind of think about virtualization was 10 years ago. So that's the momentum that I'm seeing here, that I'm hearing here. My keynote was about the community, thanking the community first of all. So I talked about how open source really success is contingent on contribution. And so I started by showing, you know, the contribution over the last one year, the companies that are contributing and 80% of contributions are by these 10 entities. One of them is individual contributors. 40% I think was Google, which is still staggeringly high. And then the next highest was Red Hat. And so I think in many of the keynotes, we've been calling out, you know, the contributors because it's really important. 1.13, the 13th release of Kubernetes shipped last week. A lot of stability, a lot of GA features. And the uptake in the enterprise. The other thing I called that was just the amount of job opportunity in Kubernetes. 230% growth in the last year. You see here so many customers that are here to talk about their experience, but also they're here to hire and their recruiters on the floor. So it's been, I think, a huge economic value add. And we feel very proud of that. Yeah, I'm proud of that. It's a great point. We've been talking about the end users. I always love, there's a job board right outside the hall here. And it just covered big giant whiteboard there. It can bring us inside a little bit. I mean, you know, Google's always fascinating, you know, people, you know, what's the hiring situation there? You know, what's your team looking like? You know, is anybody smart enough to actually go work there? You know, Google, I think we've been very, very fortunate in that we've had the original Borg team that started the Kubernetes project. And so we have a really, really deep bench because we've been running containers since the beginning. So now 15 years of experience with that, which, you know, many people tell me, you know, I think that the reason that Kubernetes is so successful is because it's not new actually, right? It's been tried and true at scale. So, you know, we have quite a bit of that, but we've been building this community and a lot of folks have been hired in through the community, into Google. And really amazing, amazing people, you know. So yeah. The thing about, we had about Brian Grant on yesterday and Tim Hocken who's talking about some of those early Borg days. I want to ask you a point about the hiring, because I think this is an interesting dynamic. Open source is key to your strategy. We've talked many times about how you guys are committed to open source. But what's interesting is not just net new jobs are available. We're seeing a revitalization around traditional roles, like the network engineer under Kubernetes, looking at the policy knobs that your folks pointed out that they think is underutilized. And then on top of Kubernetes, new things are going on that's getting the app kind of server guy kind of energized. So it's kind of enabling a lot of thing actions that's transforming existing jobs. That's right. And bringing new ones. Talk about that dynamic, because you see it from both sides. Because again, you've run, you've got SRE, site reliable engineers, you've got developers, but now enterprises now are trying to adopt. You guys are hitting that note. Talk about that dynamic. That's right. So I've been talking to a lot of customers here. Like it's been nonstop. I've not been able to attend any talks or keynotes. And I'm seeing two things. One, there's the kind of operations now called platform teams. And they're under tremendous pressure. They're doing incredible work. And they're energized. Like they're really there. So one of the customers I was talking to was moving from VMs on EC2 to containers on GCE, on Kubernetes, Google Cloud. And in the last one year, they, I mean, they looked, honestly they looked miserable because they have worked so hard in doing that transformation, churning their application from a VM based application into containers. But you could also see that they were so happy and so successful because of the impact that it's had. And so, and then I asked them, you know, so like what is driving that? This is a different customer. And what is driving that? And it's really as soon as they, as soon as they get that environment, you know, up and running. And this is a large enterprise bank that I was talking to this other one. Their developers are just all over it. And they have, they have, you know, hundreds of services running within six months. And they're like, well, we just got this platform up. We still have to figure out how we're going to upgrade it. But it's, it's, so those are the two constituents. The developers are super happy. The continuous delivery changes the makeup of how teams work. So that's one thing we're seeing here. And the other one is just scale. So, so that seems to be the area. Now I got to ask you, as you guys look at, as you guys are doing the work on the enterprise side, you guys are, I know you're working hard. I talked to Jennifer a lot, Jennifer Lynn as well. And we talked before, you used to do in the work, but there's still a lot more work to them. Where do you guys see the work of this community value opportunities for participants in the ecosystem to fill white spaces? Where are the value lines starting to be drawn? Can you comment? I see two or three different areas. One of the areas is, of course, hardening. And that's why, you know, Janet Quill gave the keynote about Kubernetes is boring and that's a good thing. And that's been something we've been working on for the last year at least. You know, adding a lot more security capabilities, adding a lot more just moving everything to GA, right? And adding a lot more hooks into enterprise storage and to enterprise networking, building up the training and building up the partners that'll do the implementation. All of those things I think are very, very healthy. As I see them, you know, you probably talked to the CNCF, they're helping a lot with the certification and the training. So that's one piece of enterprise adoption. I think the other piece is the developer experience. And that's where, you know, a lot of the talks here, my keynote as well, you know, I demoed Istio and then Knative on top of GKE. The developer experience, you know, is ultimately this whole thing, my perspective, this whole thing is about making your developers more productive and developers have been driving this transition, again, going back to those customer examples. So that's getting a lot easier. Yeah, Parna, I'd love you to talk a little bit about Knative. So, you know, I know the excitement is there. Project's only been around for five months. You know, I remember your show last summer, you know, it was like announced and we're all trying to understand exactly what it is. It's like, wait, wait, serverless going to kill Kubernetes and how does this fit, you know, how does this work with all the various services in the cloud, maybe just understand, you know, where we are, what it is, what it isn't. Right, again, so, you know, the heritage of serverless, I'm going to go back to Google, right? Like we had the first serverless offering in the world, like 10 years ago. And so, it's based on containers. Underneath, it's based on containers. That's why we knew that with Kubernetes, that's the right foundation for building serverless. And it actually, I think, we sort of held back for the longest time and a couple of years ago, there were, you know, one, two, and then 15, and then 17 serverless frameworks that just kind of all popped up around Kubernetes. On top of Kubernetes, I remember the first demo in the community, you know, here's this serverless piece. And at some point, you know, a little bit over a year ago, we decided that, you know, actually serverless is really important to our customers, to our users. The majority of Kubernetes tends to be on-prem, actually. And so, it's important to them to have serverless capabilities on-prem. So then we need to make sure that it's stable and that it's something that's standard. I think that it's a really important point. I talked to some people that are in the serverless ecosystem, that is living on AWS. And they say, you can't build serverless on-prem because then you're racking and stacking and dealing with it. And it's not the, we know there's servers underneath of it and it's just system calls and, you know, how we consume that, but maybe explain the nuances to how this is important. And, you know, we understand it's, there's not like just a solution out there. I mean, service meshes, there's a lot of options out there right now. So. A lot of things, because this is an open source community, a lot of things comes from the users. So it's when the user says, you know what? I actually need the serverless capability on-prem. Why? Because I've got this developer group and I don't want them to have to muck with the infrastructure. I don't want them to have access to the infrastructure. I want to give them just a simple interface where they're going to write their applications and the rest is taken care of for them, right? And then I want to be able to build them on a per-use basis. And so it's, yeah, there's someone managing the server. Someone building actually the serverless capability and that's the platform team. That's the guys I talked about that are working very hard these days. Happily, but working very hard. And these are new personas, by the way, in the enterprise. This is a new kind of re-architecting of how enterprises are creating value. These new platform teams. This is the opportunity. Well, I got to ask you, you know, everyone who watches theCUBE knows I'm a big fan of scale. Love Amazon scale. I love Google scale. I love the enterprise market. And I want to get your thoughts. I want you to take a minute to explain the culture at Google Cloud, because it's a separate building. Give you an opportunity to share that you guys are working hard to go after the enterprise. It's not like a new thing. But the enterprise is interesting. You know, it's not so much the best technology that wins. It's grit. It's almost like a street fight. You got to go out. You got to go win those battles, get all the work done, hit those features. You can't just roll into town and say, you know, we got great technology. We're Google. You guys recognize this. I want you to share the culture you guys are building and how you guys are attacking the enterprise. What's the guiding principles? What are some of the core tenants? Yeah, yeah. So, you know that my entire life has been spent in enterprise software. I do think that enterprises respect Google Cloud. I mean, I work very closely with them and they respect certainly the engineering pro-est like, wow, I need that, right? Especially, you see all these enterprises that are being transformed by technology. Their industry is being transformed by technology, whether that's in transportation or it's in retail or it's in media, and they want the best. They want the latest, right? And they also don't necessarily have the skills, like you said, right? So they're looking for a partner that'll both help them skill up but also provide them all of that guidance. And the one thing you asked about culture at Google, I think we are a revolutionary company. We are willing to do lots of things, like lots of things that you wouldn't expect. And that's why you saw GKE on-prem from my team, right? The first kind of Kubernetes on-prem offering from a cloud provider, managed by a cloud provider. And that's really, I mean, we've seen tremendous, tremendous interest in that, tremendous feedback from our users and new customers, people that hadn't thought about it, hadn't thought about Google necessarily before that have said, wow, if you're going to come and help me on-prem with this, I'm ready. Give it to me now, because I trust you and I know that I want to go to the cloud. So it's the right step for me. You have the right incentives, right? And you're the open cloud, which is important to me because I may want to be multi-cloud. So that's the piece that is, you know. So you've got the enterprise chops, you know your whole career there, I know Jennifer as well, a lot of people you guys have hired. The good news is you've got a market that's changing. So you don't have to come in and replicate the old IT. So that's an opportunity for Google. How are you guys attacking that beachhead? Because you have the tech, what's the vibe? What's the grit? What's it like there? How are you guys attacking the enterprise? What do you see as opportunities knowing the enterprise of old as it shifts to a new kind of method? What's the core? Well, I think about the problems that the users are having. I think about what is the problem that the customer is facing. And so, and then breaking that down and solving it for them. I mean, that's what's important, right? And so some of the problems I see is one, they need a developer platform and this developer platform sometimes cannot be in the cloud. When I talk to large financial institutions, there is so much compliance and regulation and just things that have to be on-prem that it has to be on-prem and they try to move to the cloud and some things move to the, but the majority like 90% is on-prem. And so they need an agile development environment and there's no holding it back because like I said, there's all this transformation. Their developers need that environment today. So you have to provide. That's one use case like, you know, we provide an on-prem development and agile development environment best in class. Your developers are super happy. Your business is going to do well. The other thing I see and I see this a lot in retail but also in hospitality, you know, some of these very kind of, you know, brick and mortar enterprises is that the edge, they need a solution at their edge location. Thousands of, these are thousands of branch locations. You know, we got this use case with Chick-fil-A, right? And a lot of times this is, a lot of different use cases but a lot of times the common thing is that they're collecting data, they're doing some processing at that site and then they're doing further processing in the cloud. And so it's a connected, but intermittently it's not always connected. Intermittently connected environment. So that's the second big use case, edge retail or just edge. There are so many, for me it's one of the most exciting, there's so many examples of that. Yeah, awesome. I mean, Aparna, first of all, just so many goodness, I want to say thank you to Google because everything from, I heard at the show, Google wasn't giving out swag because it actually went to charitable, you know, givings instead of spending that money. One of the things we always look is open source is, how much more value is being created for the ecosystem, not just the vendor that started it. And it is a really tough balance and we've seen it fail many times of, do you step too far back? How much are you engaged? How do you strike that balance? For the last five to 10 years, we've been saying, where is the independent place where we can have that conversation about cloud? We think we found it at this show. I mean, we've been here for three years now. Google Cloud, phenomenal event. Our team loves to be there, but this feels like overnight has turned into, oh wait, here's the show we were looking at to have that conversation, have that commons where we can come together and there's so many, the diversity of people, the diversity of projects in here, many which have very disconnected from original Kubernetes and everything. So it's been fascinating to watch and I have to imagine your team is, when you watch that first piece go and then everything that's built around it has got to be amazing. My team loves this event. We have literally, I think, 300 people here. And a lot of them are core maintainers. Everybody is a contributor, but they're core maintainers of the Kubernetes project, the Istio project, the Knative project. And I think the best thing here is just interacting with our users because this is a developer conference primarily. There's a lot of businesses here with their kind of director level executives, but primarily it's an action-oriented hands-on audience and these customer meetings that I have, we review their architecture and we're like, it's an engineer-to-engineer conversation and so how can we make that better and then sometimes they're contributing back and then it makes the whole project better. Yeah, and the thing too is that it's an engineering, it's a developer conference, true, but what's interesting about the evolution of open source as it modernizes, those end-users are developers and so the end-user aspect of the show is the developer piece. It never used to be like that. It used to be Comdex or some big event and then people just selling their stuff, doing business. The end-user participation is not a consumption conversation, it's a contribution. Right, and these are great. I mean, the end-users are all over the spectrum of sort of really, really hands-on, very, very smart to just give me something that works and I respect all of that, right? And we're actually very far here in terms of GKE, giving you something that you really don't need to get into the guts fully managed, right? But then on the other hand, we had Uber on stage earlier today in their keynote talking about how they've built all of this advanced capability on GKE and that's a power user, that's using all the, they've built custom additions and an operator and it's just really gratifying, I think for us to work with them and for us to see the user base, as well as the community. So the ecosystem, Google, I think it's very important to us to have and create economic opportunity for our partners. And you'll see that with GKE on-frame, we're partnering heavily on that one and then you'll see that also in our marketplace, our Kubernetes marketplace. So many of the companies that have come out of this ecosystem are now part of selling through Google Cloud. Aparna, thank you for your time. I know you had to move some things around to come here. Great to have you on. I love your leadership at Google, it's phenomenal. You got the enterprise chops building out heavily over there, congratulations. And, you know, for more, she's on CUBE interviews, check out theCUBE.net. You can check out Aparna's other interviews, of course, search her name on Forbes. I wrote a story about her featuring her, talking about her background and her passion. Always great to have on theCUBE and get some commentary here from Google. Of course theCUBE is breaking down live coverage, been there from the beginning at KubeCon and now CloudNative, the Linux Foundation, bringing you all the analysis and insight. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.