 Welcome to Amsterdam and KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2023. Join John Furrier, Savannah Peterson, Rob Streche, and UPscot as the Kube covers the largest conference on Kubernetes, CloudNative, and open source technologies together with developers, engineers, and IT leaders from around the globe. Live coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2023 is made possible by the support of Red Hat, the CNCF, and its ecosystem partners. Good morning, brilliant humans, and welcome back to Amsterdam. We are at KubeCon EU, CloudNativeCon as well, and I am here with my fabulous co-host for our morning segment to give you all of our hot takes from day one. My name's Savannah Peterson. I'm joined here with you. We've got Rob and we've got John. I'm surrounded by brilliance. Gentlemen, how are you doing this morning? Awesome. Great. How are you? I am fantastic, obviously. Rob, what was the most interesting thing you learned yesterday? I think the big thing from yesterday was platform engineering is real. A lot of the people, not only the projects, but the vendors are aiming at that, and I think we're going to hear a lot more about that today as well as we go through the day. What about you, you? Yeah, I agree. So platform engineering, definitely a thing, but for me, it really means that we've kind of gone into, we're not really sure what we're doing into, we're maturing this ecosystem, and so we're seeing solutions that are becoming more mature, becoming more production-ready, and it's good to see that we've entered this phase where we start to figure this whole thing out, and I think that's just a good spot to be in, and it's exciting to see where this is going. I love that you said that. The ecosystem, I think, was definitely a real theme. This isn't just an orchestrator or a platform. It's not just about containers. It's about all the things that support what's going on here and all the open source projects. John, you had your finger on the pulse yesterday. What are your thoughts? I mean, looking at yesterday and then what's lined up for today, I think the big thing I took away was that we're back to steady-state events. I mean, this is 10,000 people. For Cuba and Europe, it's not the tier one show. It's North America. It is packed. It's a 2,000-person waiting list. RSA next week in the U.S. is going to be absolutely packed. I expect North America, KubeCon to be, again, jam-packed. So we're back to face-to-face steady-state, and this community, this is what it's all about. So I thought that's a huge, huge accomplishment back to that standard. The other one is, is that this industry is about to get disrupted by AI, and they have no idea what's coming down the tracks. I think they're so focused on their blocking and tackling of infrastructure Kubernetes as that progresses to mainstream platform engineering you mentioned. But a lot of the gaps are being filled in, binary support, compiler support for, say, Watson, we talked about yesterday. So a lot of the ball's moving down the field, but the AI surge is going to come. I think that's going to be a real wild card in next year, this year. Let's talk about it, John. Where do you think we're off at with that right now? Well, I think this is not a data-centric community. They're very infrastructure. They're gears, boxes, protocols, and they have data, but it's data around machine, machine blogging, not like a chat GPT, large language model. So I think it'll be pretty straightforward for this community to adopt AI because they're automating already. So automating is a big feature. So I don't think it's going to be a disaster. I think it's going to be a good thing. You agree, Rob? Yeah, I think it's going to be more prevalent as we go through the next couple of years, especially in observability space. I think there's a lot of things in this, and I think this actually ties in really well with the platform engineering discussion because you have so much logs and data and traceability that you have to go and figure out, and that's where the AI actually fits in. You can model the data because they know the data patterns. I think where it gets blurry is when you get to security and some of the other things, where are you putting your code in there? Is it a public model? Is it a private model? Do you have enough of data in your private model to actually go and look at that? There's still some big chasms to bridge. Well, the other thing too, you were talking about yesterday, platform engineering with Portworx, it's kind of evolved the definition. When you go back three years ago, platform engineering was, I want to be like Google. Yeah. SREs, and then it's evolved to what is DevOps? I'm a DevOps engineer. What the hell does that mean? We're in the DevOps department. So DevOps is kind of being abused and DevSecOps comes in. So it kind of moved essentially to be the new IT. So platform engineering is essentially modern IT. And then we heard from merely yesterday from Portworx that the core old definition kind of drops down into the infrastructure and abstracted away. So I think that's a nuanced point that I noticed yesterday is that platform engineering is the modern version of basically IT. Interesting. I think my, you know, I just came off five weeks in the rainforest. So my take on where we're off at with AI and with some of this is of perspective a little more removed from the Silicon Valley bubble and from this community a little bit. And I have to say I'm a little worried about the governance and the ethics of what's going on. I think that actually the open source community is perhaps one of the only gate checks that we're going to have with this with some of the, you know, you've got the biggest companies in the world in an arms race right now to own this space. And that's exciting because it's pushing innovation forward. But it also makes me a little bit nervous because we all know how biased some of those models can be given their data sets or some of the darker side of this. There's a lot of customer privacy issues depending on what you're loading in and how private that is. And I do think security is a big deal. I think it all is very appropriate that we're having this discussion, we're hearing it in the hallways. No one knows what's going on yet. We're only about day 100 in this whole motorcycle. Yeah, you're right on the money. This chat GPT phenomenon is kind of, everyone's been playing with it. But what people don't know is, and Basam talked about yesterday was, you're putting your stuff in the public web. And people are missing that. So there are companies here have been putting in their code. We know the Samsung story is public. They had IP in there. They were putting company private information. Some companies are putting in their own customer information. So they think it's a tool to help them rewrite memos or rewrite code. But that's IP. So then it brings up all kinds of issues like, okay, it's out in the open. What's the IP rights? Competition stealing it. So like, this is like slippery slope. So I think, you know, you're going to see a pullback, not from that ethics. Oh, it's going to rule the world. But more from a, oh shit, what's our liability, privacy, huge. Well, exactly. And also the kind of operational security angle of this. I mean, we are in the infrastructure, so that's right. This is not a data engineering community. This is an infrastructure community. And so seeing how this group will start to deal with and recognize how this works, that's going to be super interesting to see. Because we're only scratching the surface. We're just beginning. We're literally just experimenting. We're making mistakes. Samsung's making mistakes. We all are. Everyone's making mistakes. And that's fine. But it's interesting to see where is this going to take us. What's the evolution of the role of platform engineering like Rob said, a year from now, what did it have evolved to a place where we as a community are the gatekeepers of these policies, of this compliance, to make sure companies don't repeat these mistakes? Totally. And I was thinking too, yesterday on the AI conversation, we were kind of groping to try to get a feel for where it would kind of go. It went boring on some conversations. It didn't really kind of stick. But then I knew it would be me andering around a little bit. But what we asked yesterday was, where will AI lock in in this community? And I think what I walked away with was, automation for sure, but security will be huge. I mean, you mentioned the security aspect of it. I think you're going to see the actors, both good and bad, dig into this. And you're going to see some new stuff that we haven't seen before on the offense and defense side. So that's where I expect to see that kind of first strike of kind of like cool, weird AI. And I think that's going to be interesting to see where that lands. Because I mean, you talk about S3 buckets that are open, court scanning, scanning on containers, container security, writing code from chatbots. You're going to have code pollution. I mean, who's going to watch the code that was written by bots and monitor that? So I think observability is going to get turned upside down. I think it's going to be kind of a shit show for a while there. That's a good technical term for it. I think code pollution, one of my favorite terms in the world. I think when you look at it, it was funny because I was just at the keynote and they were talking about the project update for confidential computing and things of that nature. So to your point, from an infrastructure perspective, there are some things that are competing to help anonymize things, not just encryption, but how do you tag things and use them in a more general way? And I think that's going to be interesting. I don't think that gets enough airtime here. I think a lot of the scanning, container bloat from a security perspective gets a lot of airtime, but there's things that are happening. I also thought what was interesting and it'll be interesting to hear today is it was a big talk, like a really good talk by one of the presenters from CMCF this morning about how not enough people are stepping up and really becoming leaders of projects and they're having a gap, like a real talent gap in leading these projects. And I think that to me is super interesting given the community and how big it's gotten with 190 plus projects going on. And they're also talking about contributor burnout with 54. I was just going to say it's a lot of work and I think, and that's just it. I mean, it's open source. A lot of this stuff is unpaid. Folks are doing this because they want to see these projects moving forward and that's actually why I think it's really cool that we're here and we had a conversation with Red Hat and how they helped support a lot of these projects as well. It's going to take, I mean, it takes the village, this whole community is about community, which I love, but it's your spot on there in the sense that if we're going to see this evolution move forward, whether we're talking about AI or Kubernetes or any of this stuff, it's going to take some leaders who are going to have to take a lot of flak to step up into that role because it's hard. We're in uncharted waters right now. And I think the complicating factor to that too is that makes it harder, is that I was just out with some European VCs last night. There's a lot more active investment in Europe than ever before. Just go back to the past 10 years, that last cycle. It's on the upward slope big time on Europe. So one, how are you going to get burnout on contributors that when the alpha VCs are poaching the best talent to build companies? So, you know, the question is going to be can the open source funding model which was beautiful last cycle, because you start a project, you do it in open source, it's kind of a freemium and you turn it into a company, can that continue? That's going to be the real wild card. I think if they get that right, if the greed pulls them out of the community, you know, that could put more stress on the system. You're a token European, what's your hot take here? No, I mean, I completely agree that the market here in Europe is hot. It is still very much moving. We see it around us, right? You can tell just from the energy in this room, right? The energy, the buzz in this room at this event this week has been astounding. I did not expect it. I am very pleasantly surprised by it. But it does show that Europe is leading in this open source realm. And we're seeing VCs jump on that. We're seeing, like John said, we're seeing a lot of activity here. And I think, you know, part of it is the active role of the foundations behind this community, ridging that gap, driving this effort. The other thing too, the other Savannah that you point out is that we were talking about this last night riffing on this, what trade shows, and they used to be in the business you had like independent events for the conferences and trade shows. It's not like that anymore. It's AWS re-invent, that's Amazon, CNCF's Linux Foundation. I heard they're making so much cash on this event. This is a de facto open source community and industry event at the same time. So that's interesting. Europe's booming on the DC side, but coming back and looking at cloud growth in the anemia, Europe, Middle East and Africa and Asia Pacific. You have Europe in particular on the enterprise side that's starting to start to grow, but it's growing by country. And so you have kind of sovereignty issues. You mentioned compliance and governance. This is kind of like boring tech enterprise stuff, but it's actually very relevant in this market. So unlike North America, where a cloud growth is slowing down and cost optimizations to focus, it's actually expanding in Europe, but it's not expanding as obvious because it has different country dynamics. So localization, channel marketing, channel partners are going to develop. So I think a lot of people are looking at Europe as a massive growth and certain the cloud players are Amazon's ahead, Azure's here. You're going to start to see a whole nother ballgame I think this year in the next five with cloud. You're here, you're living it. Yeah, we're going to see a lot of sovereign clouds, a lot of smaller clouds. I'm not saying on-prem's going to make a comeback, but self-hosted is going to become a thing again. And so the pendulum, we went all the way to cloud and now the pendulum is starting to swing back. And especially in Europe, that whole sovereign aspect of it, that's going to be a big differentiator for everyone, in the community, the vendors, everyone. But going to your point on the data and the cloud, I mean, just look at the, just because I came from the data side of things, most recently, you start to look at that Google Analytics has been outlawed in five countries in Europe because the data goes outside of Europe from a GDPR. You start to look at how it's being torn apart a little bit from a big conglomerate perspective. I do think things are coming back on-prem a lot more, especially in the dev and test area where people are looking for that cloud on-prem experience. And there was a lot of talk about that yesterday, even. And I think that's going to be huge because it's a cost savings aspect. I think there's a swing of the CFOs and these major companies back to Capax. And I think that's going to be interesting. I mean, cost optimization is a huge thing across the board, no matter the industry right now. I mean, we're seeing things like the collapse of banks, Silicon Valley Bank. Was that as big of a story here as it was for us in the US? It was, it was, it, you know, yeah. What's the EU hot take on that? Well, people started to get really, really quickly. Yeah. And so even though it was a little further from our situation, still we were looking at it as a tech industry and saying, this is, this isn't, this can go a lot, you know, either way. Which bank do they run on there? And I think it's all good conversation. I think your product that, that, the Google analytics thing is interesting because that, only because it's an American company, but I think the white space from a product mark, from a product standpoint, the opportunity in Europe to get these differentiated, localized clouds by region, it's going to be a very interesting dynamic because if you just, that Google is one example, there's many others. Well, they'll pull out dates flying out of the area. So you got regions. So, so it's going to be a question of, will the product market fill in those white spaces? I think that's the opportunity that I see here is for entrepreneurs and businesses to fill the void, saying, hey, we don't, you don't, we don't need Google analytics. We'll have our own analysts. In fact, now they won't have clouds. Amazon will do that. But I think it's going to be very interesting to see how the cloud hyperscalers enable the market here in Europe. That's going to be a very interesting thing. And how does open source feel that goal? Because if more web assembly like projects continue, the idea of developer productivity continues to get better, it's going to be faster coding time, it'll be faster MVPs built. It'll be very interesting. It will be. And one of the things that I think is really interesting, I mean, since we're kind of doing this EUNA comparison right now, I find, and this is a perception thing. I don't have any data behind this is my personal opinion. The community here is so inclusive. And I mean, the open source community as a whole is extremely inclusive. But a lot of the conversations that we've had between the big brands and some of the smaller startups that are here, it's experts helping that next generation along. So perhaps there's not that traditional leadership role, but there is a desire for everyone to educate everyone else right now, especially because we're moving at scale, at velocity with a lot of different technology all piling into one. Which is kind of, it's an interesting intersection. It's an exciting time to be alive. Absolutely. Rob, what did you do last night? Did you have fun? I had dinner and I then just dealt with emails and other stuff. Not fun, maybe a little more fun tonight, but I think we'll keep you happy, come on. Yeah. Don't hold back. Don't hold back. I mean, today is April 20th. I went back to my room and worked. And I said a prayer, and it was at 11, you know. Bless you, John. Bless you. I was very good last night. You were a good boy. I went out with one of our favorite guests. I went out with Kaston last night and had an absolute blast. I know you had some fun at Karaoke. Karaoke, yeah, all night long. Yeah. And then you showed up wet and hungover, which is just a great place to be. That's just the great start of the day. Yeah. On that note, ladies and gentlemen, joined by these fabulous gentlemen. My name is Savannah Peterson. It is 420. We are in Amsterdam. And you are watching our live broadcast of KubeCon EU. This is theCUBE, the leading source for emerging tech news.