 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. Hi and welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019 here in Barcelona, Spain, we're at the end of day one of two days of live wall-to-wall coverage. I'm Stu Miniman and at the end of the day, what we try to do always is do our independent analysis and say what we really think, and joining me is someone that usually has no problem telling you exactly what he thinks online, so I've challenged Mr. Corey Quinn, cloud economist with the Duckbill Group and the curator, author, last week in AWS, to tell us what he actually thinks, so. Well, Stu, you know what your problem is. All the best feedback starts off that way. No, this has been a fascinating experience for me. This is the first time I've ever been to KubeCon and I didn't quite know what to expect, but it wasn't- Corey, it's KubeCon, not KubeCon, come on. It is in GitHub how you have to make the pronunciation correct, so KubeCon- We are on theCUBE. We would think that we would be subject matter experts on this. The CNCF will be cracking down on you if I don't correct you on this, so. I still maintain we're in Barcelona, Italy, but that's a whole separate argument to have with other people. Yes, well, most Americans are geographically challenged and we understand you have some challenges too. Exactly, when most Americans need to learn geography, we go to war. All right, so Corey, I guess first question for you is, you usually go to mostly AWS shows. Most of the customers we've talked to have been AWS customers, so is this feeling much different from the usual show you go to? The focus of the conversations is different and to be clear, I'm not much of a cloud partisan myself. I deal with AWS primarily because, not for nothing, that's where my customers are. That tends to be exactly where the expensive problems tend to live, for better or worse. If that changes, so will I. Yeah, so are you saying yet that the other cloud providers don't have their customers with big enough bills or they just haven't figured out how you might be able to help them in the future? To be very honest with you, yes, is the short answer. Right now in aggregate, my customers spend about a billion dollars a year on AWS. I don't see the same order of magnitude on other providers, but it's coming. It is very clearly coming. None of these providers are shrinking as far as size goes. It's largely a matter of time. All right, but Corey, I hope at least you've understood that Kubernetes has made the answer for all things and that multi-cloud is the way that we are today and will always be in the future and we should all hold hands and sing along that we all get along. Is that what you've learned so far? I think that's absolutely what I've learned so far. It comes down to religion and it's perfectly named for it. I mean, Kubernetes was the Greek god of spending money on cloud services. All right, but seriously, Corey, I think one of the things that I really liked is we talked to customers and there were some interesting things, at least I heard, when you talked about, they see huge value in what they're doing with Kubernetes. Many of them only have one cloud provider today, yet they are choosing to layer on Kubernetes either with AWS or with another solution there. What's been your take of what you've heard about kind of the why and what they're doing? There have been a few different reasons on it. One that resonated with me did validate what I talked about at the beginning of the day, which was that by trying to position yourself to be strategically amenable to any potential provider you might want to use in the future, you are sacrificing velocity and you're gaining agility, losing velocity to do that. Is that trade off worth it? I don't think I'm qualified to judge. I think that's a decision every business has to make on its own. My argument has always been that if that's a decision you make, do it knowingly. And I don't think we've talked to anyone who's made that unknowingly today. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. What else, what has surprised you or interest you that we've heard so far? I have to be honest. I have a long and storied history in open source. I was a staff on the Free Note IRC network for about a decade, which was an interesting time. And I've seen a lot of stuff, but I don't think I've ever seen two open source projects merge before. The fact that we saw that today is still swirling around in my head for better or worse. Yeah, and it was open census and open tracing coming together open telemetry. So definitely check out Ben Siegelman and it was Morgan McClain from Google Cloud. Really interested in discussion. And even, I don't think we're sharing too much when we say off camera they were like, look, it's like, yes, they got us in a room and we worked, but we'll try not to throw punches here on the set and everything like that. We understand that, look, there are people that put these things together and you have smart people that build things the way that it should be done. And these were not like two very similar projects going in the same direction. They were built with different design principles and therefore there will be some things that they will need to reconcile to be able to go forward. But yeah, very interesting. And everyone we spoke to today was very focused on what the needs of their customers, whoever they happen to be and how to meet those customers and their business requirements. There's no one that we spoke to that was sitting here saying, oh, this is the right answer because it is technically correct. The answers were always of the form, this is what we need to do in order to serve customers. And it's very hard to argue against that strategy. All right, but none of this really matters because serverless, right Corey? Oh, absolutely, serverless is the way and the light of the future. And to some extent, I believe that. But if they're not doing serverless, I'm pretty sure they're half a step behind you. Yes, yes, it's easy to make going ahead and say that, oh, if you're not running the absolute latest bleeding edge thing, you're behind, you're backwards, et cetera. And I don't get at all the sense that that is reality. I think that there's, if you're building something greenfield today, you're fundamentally going to make different choices than if you have something you're trying to carry forward. And I don't just mean carrying forward a technical sense. I mean carrying it forward in terms of process, in terms of culture, in terms of existing business units that need to modernize. People are moving in the same general direction. The question that I think is still unanswered is today there's a perception, rightly or wrongly, that containers are slightly behind serverless. I don't know that that necessarily holds true. I think that they are aligned toward the same business value. I think to judge either one of them by today's constraints in the context of longer-term strategy is a mistake. And I'm curious to see what happens. And Corey, I love. So we had Jeff Buran from Intuit. And they were like, look, we're doing serverless. We're doing a lot of containerless stuff. And I'd love it for my developer not to have to worry about. And they've even moved down that path. So we know one of the truisms out there is everything in IT is always additive. When you talk to them and say, oh, well, I'm going in the cloud, wait. I still have some stuff that's running on my mainframe or my i-series. And that will probably be running there when I've retired. We were talking offline. It's like, well, there's been a little research in COBOL just because it did not die after Y2K. And so these things always come back and it's always additive. And the longer you've been in business as a company, the more legacy you need to be able to maintain and extend and connect to where you want to go with the future. It's almost a sawtooth curve. As complexity continues to rise, it becomes the point where it's untenable. There's something that comes out that abstracts that away and you're back down to a level a human being might actually be able to understand. And you take it a step further and you start to see it again and again and again. And then it collapses down. Docker and a lot of the hand-built orchestration systems were like that and then Kubernetes came out and initially it was fairly simple and then things have been added to it now. And I think we're climbing that sawtooth curve again. Whether or not that maintains, whether or not that simplifies again, I find that history rhymes, particularly in tech. Well, yeah, and I always worry sometimes when you talk about the abstraction layer, you got to be really careful what you're abstracting. What we see here a lot is a lot of times it's people, how can I just consume that? I want to buy it as a service and somebody take care of that, not hiding, it hides the complexity for me but some of the complexity is still there. Right, so our site is now intermittently slow. What do you plan to do? It's update my resume immediately because we're never untangling that Gordian nod of an infrastructure. That's not a great answer but it is an honest one in some jobs. Look, and I've talked to, we know that there was, for a long time people outsourced what they were doing and we need to make sure that when you're buying something as a service that you haven't outsourced, that you understand what's important to your business, what happens when things go wrong? We had some discussion today about networking and observability that we need to be able to go down that rabbit hole, at least turn to somebody who can because just because I can't touch that gear doesn't mean my neck's not on the line if something goes wrong. You can outsource a lot of work, you can't outsource responsibility. Put slightly more succinctly, the line I've always liked was you own your own availability. If you have a provider that you've thrown a lot of these things over to and they go down, well sure, you're going to have loud angry phone calls and maybe a few bucks back from an SLA credit. We, your customers were down and were suffering. So the choices you made impact your business' perception in the market and your customers' happiness. So as much as fun as it is to be able to throw things over the wall for someone else to deal with, you're still responsible and I think that people forget that at their own peril. Yeah, Corey, one of the things I like, I've got a long history in open source too, is if there are things that aren't perfect or things that are maturing, a lot of times we're talking about them in public because there is a roadmap and people are working on it and we can all go to the repositories and see where people are complaining. So at a show like this, I feel like we do have some level of transparency and we can actually have realism here. What's been your experience so far and what do you think? I think that people have been remarkably transparent about the challenges that they're facing in a way that you don't often get at a vendor show. Where you have a single vendor, you're at their show, regardless of who that might be, you're not going to be invited back if you wind up with a litany of people coming on a video show or a podcast or screaming and sobbing in the bathroom, however you want to, whatever your media is, it would just have a litany of complaints the entire time or make that provider look bad. Here there's no, I don't sense that there's any of that pressure and for some reason, and this is my first KubeCon, so maybe this is just the way this culture works, everyone regardless of who they worked for or what they're working on or what their experience has been seems happy. I can only assume there's something in the water. All right, well I've just been informed that the CNCF had asked me to remove Corey because you refuse it to say KubeCon. But Corey, since this might be your last time on the program, any other final words that you have for it or I will let you do something very rare and if you have any questions for me, lob them my way. Absolutely, what did you find today that you didn't expect to find? Yeah, so the one that jumps out for me really is two things. One we discussed it already is the observability piece coming together. The other one is you talk about that maturation of where Amazon fits in this ecosystem and we had a lovely conversation with Abby Fuller but not just that when we talked to the users and how they think about it which is what really matters is there's so much talk about who contributes more code and who does the most here. But look, we're talking cloud. Most of these customers are using AWS as if not the cloud, one of the clouds. I've said it on theCUBE many times when you live in a hybrid and multi-cloud world and the public cloud, AWS is the far leader. There's no debating that. So they are participating here. They are doing plenty for what their customers want and they give choice and they listen to the feedback. So that was interesting to me, that maturation of where that sits because to be, when I come into the show and many times it is, well, it is the open source in this whole ecosystem trying to prevent Amazon from taking over the world. And look, we want a good robust ecosystem out there. While I have many friends that work for Amazon, we probably don't want to all be working for a single company down the road. But I certainly don't. Yeah, so we like a nice robust ecosystem where there's choice out there and that keeps it options. So that maturation of where they are has been interesting to me so far, especially from the user standpoint. Very much so. I don't think that anyone wants to look back and say, wow, I'm sure glad we have only one option in this entire space that does anything useful and then a whole bunch of could have but didn't. And for better or worse, I don't think that the future is nearly as clear cut as the past of cloud. Historically, AWS has been the 800 pound gorilla. I think that we're hearing fascinating things from GCP and from Azure. I don't necessarily think that the future is preordained. I do think right now it is AWS's game to lose, but I'm starting to see a lot of other players in the space start to make a lot of very interesting and arguably very correct moves. All right, well, we know you as our audience have lots of places where you can turn to find your information and we are always pleased that when you turn to us to watch theCUBE, if you have any feedback for ourselves, Corey Quinn and myself, Stu Miniman, reach out on Twitter, we're easy to reach on that and we have lots of hosts. So if you're like, hey, tired of looking at this mug here, let us know, but hopefully we're asking the questions and digging into the areas that you want and will help your businesses going forward. So we are at the end of day one, two days live coverage here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. This is theCUBE, your leader in live tech coverage. Thanks for watching.