 Hey everyone back here live in Austin for Linux Foundation open source summit You know, we haven't really spoken about it, but there's a large Expo floor up on floor four. We're on floor two some great companies Exhibiting up there talking to people joining in the conversation. I want to introduce you to a company. We haven't covered Before on tech strong on any of our brands and that is layer five and I'm here with Lee Calico from layer five We get that right. Oh, that's that's correct layer five. Lee Calico. You're speaking of great companies. Okay, let's talk about layer five All right, man. Let's jump in. Well before we go. What's your position with layer five? Yeah founder and CEO so Excellent, you're the right person to talk to that. Yeah, I think so. All right. So tell talk to me What what's layer five about? Yeah? Well, I've been been around for a couple of years now been focused on Open source community first some of we built a couple of open source projects from scratch. They're cloud native centric. They're actually Service mesh centric in nature There's about three of them two of them have recently landed into the CNCF Actually, now that I think of it, there's an annual review of one of them coming up To step back for a moment and say like a layer five is sort of mission and vision in general is Well is a recognition that like the Infrastructure is quite capable these days and we aim to Enable service teams to expect more from their infrastructure To help them extract more value than maybe they recognize that's there Okay, we really think that we've had an initial focus and start toward Service mesh as an intelligent layer that you can program and tell it to do various things we think that there's a lot of untapped power in the Network and that's really important to microservices and lots of requests transiting the network and so we're here to Will help people wield that power in a self-service way? excellent, so Look when we look at Service mesh right so I've been going to cube cons and everything well before COVID and all and you know before COVID it really seemed like service mesh was where The action was right people were using kubernetes, but now as we layered on Security and network and all these services. We needed a way for them to communicate talk to each other Interact and and that service mesh became the sort of the API hub if you will lack of a better word Where all that action was taken place and then we saw several different kind of service mesh right Istio, which only recently became part of CNCF right it was Google Is it link or D is another yeah, right and you mentioned a couple that your company have yeah There's well actually it's kind of interesting just within the CNCF as actually one of the roles that I play is the Chair for the technical advisory group for network for the CNCF and so with Istio's recent donation or It being donated as a recent project rather is Well, if I get the count right, I think that that's Depends on how you count, but it's either five or six service mesh is just in the CNCF Right and that excludes service mesh implementations that are outside of the CNCF and so Yeah, it's a crowd now one may look at that and say well obviously that is just or not justification But proof that the service mesh area is a really big area that's very Important to people and and you know It's gonna need a good solution The flip side is the fact that there's so many of them means none of them are doing great right now They're all kind of works in progress and we'll have to see what What comes out of this yeah, how they're how the adoption how the adoption how they mature, right? It's it's still relatively immature networking is a deep deep kind of a deep and wide area that you know I don't know that that I guess I'll commonly say that if you were to Like reflect on this this position that service meshes are in with the number of them that there are if you look at Something relevant like container orchestrators and so Kubernetes having Is enjoying the most popularity but by by far But previously with a litany of others that I won't I won't prattle off But there's a whole bunch of them right that you know the road to perdition is littered with the best of intentions Yeah, right and from Docker on on down and I think we'll eventually eventually we might see something similar happen with service match and it It's I Guess I would put it this yeah I think that that's totally true that you could we could step ourselves outside of the tech industry and just Look at soft drinks, you know and use some other relevant examples, right? There are winners and losers in every one, but but here's the other thing. I think You know taking a uniquely open source view of this whole thing is when you have So you're gonna have some open source solution or maybe there'll be two or three solutions that are really popular and they'll be the de facto Winners standards that people use but then you'll have commercial companies that are Harnessing those leveraging those but but that's the way of open source, right? So we all start here and then commercial companies build on top of it And is that sort of where layer five wants to be yeah, that's about yeah, it captures it pretty well that Well, we were kind of said these things are kind of deep and complex They're more capable than some people choose to use or really comprehend can be a big scary old thing to Be running well Kubernetes any of this infrastructure at at scale or or or even not at scale to I know that if I were in the operator's seat Gosh, I might have to just change my shorts if I as I go to like make a change in Absolutely, this traffic supposed to go there and it's crazy what goes on the amount I mean the kinds of traffic that we see now and it is just crazy So you mentioned another role that you have though besides being CEO of layer five and that is chairman of the of the attack of Technical advisory committee for network for CNCF. So that includes service mesh is a big part of it What else is a part of that there are other kind of well the term network gets expanded from there, but kind of well things like Core DNS g rpc It's gonna stretch my the Other network centric projects that I'm drawing a blank on at the moment Well, don't don't knock yourself down. Let's talk DNS. It was just so funny. I actually had a I Call me young guy. They're all young young researcher here who is the Dan Kaminsky Fellowship Winner and of course Dan is the guy who discovered the huge DNS Vulnerability that kind of broke the internet, right and as a result of that we DNS as a As a thing became real right people started. Hey, we better make sure our DNS is Tight right lockdown secure Scalable what what what's going on in the world of CNCF around DNS Yeah, there's well core DNS as a project specifically has become in the earlier days of Kubernetes there was a different DNS implementation and core DNS has Been sort of a cloud native implementation from from scratch and become the de facto DNS offering within your group at least your vanilla distributions of There's been it's to your point that gets DNS is a is a wonderful Like makes for a wonderful attack vector for getting into organizations being able to slip in the middle and kind of redirect some of that traffic with without people knowing and You know, it's one of the older Like like TCP early like a lot of what the internet is comprised of it DNS is one of your older inherited and Well like a lot of the infrastructure that we keep around it Needs to needs to continue to evolve to with a real security centric perspective Absolutely, we end up within the CNCF tag network. There are a couple of working groups Within it the one that's the most active is the service match working group So back to your point about the buzzeness of that the topic And tends to be the one that I focused the most on yeah No, I think it's it's one getting the most oxygen. That's for sure. You know, we didn't tell people Layer five. Where can they go on the web to find out layer five dot IO? Well, la y er Number five number five dot IO