 Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage here in Copenhagen, Denmark for KubeCon 2018. Part of the CNCF. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE here with Lauren Cooney, co-host. This week, founder of Spark Labs. Our next guest is Cheryl Hong, product and engineering manager, StorageOS. She does a lot of DevOps. She runs the CloudNative, or founder of the CloudNative Meetup in London. Great to have you on. Thank you, it's great to be on. So, I mean, you've drank the Kool-Aid on CloudNative, so we're loving the trend. The trend is your friend here. So CloudNative's super hot. And you're doing StorageOS, it's the name of the company, which is DevOps-oriented. Things you're obviously using Kubernetes. First question. How excited are you with the CloudNative trend right now? Because people are getting it with Kubernetes. What's your reaction to the momentum? So, before I joined my current company, I was an engineer at Google for about five years. And I'm probably a CloudNative in the truest sense of the word. And I joined Google when I was 21. I don't remember a time before what we think of as containers and orchestrators. I used Borg, which was the internal predecessor, to Kubernetes. So, when I came out, and I started looking into Dock and Kubernetes, I thought, this is obvious, this is just how software is built and run, right? Yeah, yeah. What did you find? I was quite interested to realize, no, the industry is not there. What was it like for you to go out and say, wait a minute, you do all that? What was it like? As I said, I'd completely forgotten that this is how software was done before. So when I came out, this totally made sense to me. This is very, very natural to me that you run software packaged in a container, and then you orchestrate it across data centers and across machines with something like Kubernetes now. But seeing the whole industry move to this mindset has been really impressive, particularly for the CNCF. They've put a lot of effort into spreading this paradigm and getting the adoption. They've done a good job. I'll probably dig into some DevOps questions I have for you because this is such an exciting topic. Take a minute to explain StorageOS, what the company does, and your role there. StorageOS has been around for a couple of years, two, three years now. And one of the biggest problems with containers is they're designed to be stateless. They're designed so that you don't have to worry about running containers in different environments or moving them around, they should always run the same. So, but clearly there is a need for storage. If you're doing something interesting with your application, you have to make a decision about where to actually store the data at the end of the day. So, StorageOS, we do persistent storage for containers. It's an abstraction layer for storage that runs on top of any infrastructure, could be on-prem, could be one of the cloud providers, could be virtual machines. And we provide storage to pods and to the applications and to the containers that are running. And we also manage replication and high availability in there, among other things. My role there is officially product manager. I do a ton of different things because we're a 15-person startup. So, I actually manage DevOps engineers. I do public speaking. I write and speak about storage and containers in cloud. I write all the technical documentation for the product. And very excitedly, as of yesterday in fact, we announced our GA product. So, now I can finally say, we have a real genuine product that's out there and we think it's ready to go out publicly in life. That's great. Great to be a startup. Very, very exciting, yeah. So, you're not busy at all, is what you basically are saying. I do a million things, but I have a great time. That's awesome. So, what is, you know, with your 1.0 release and the product is actually out the door, what kind of applications are you supporting, for example? What do you see as like the kind of use cases of folks that are coming in and using your solution? The biggest one that is not yet solved problem is the database use case. So, transactional databases like MySQL and Postgres and so on. The other use case that I see a lot is with CICD pipelines. So, people are running Jenkins to build their software and they need to store the artifacts of the software somewhere. And it's quite difficult to do that at the moment. So, those I think are our two priorities. That's great. And DevOps world right now, one of the things that's super exciting is the whole infrastructure as code thing is happening. You mentioned that this is people are getting it. The challenge of staffing up is hard. You guys are starting, you're doing a lot of, wearing a lot of different hats as startups do, but as companies start to grow and do more cloud native, true cloud native, you got to hire people and people got to learn. What are you finding is a good mechanism for learning out so you do a meetup. That's a great face-to-face group opportunity. What are some of the things that people can do to get involved? How are you guys recruiting? How do you manage the team? As it's small teams, what's the workflow look like? If you can share some insight into that, that'd be very helpful. Yeah, so I am the hiring manager for DevOps engineers and when I started looking for this, I thought what would be great is if I could find someone who has some experience with running Kubernetes in production. Clearly, that's very difficult because Kubernetes has only been around for really a year or two and widely adopted. Meetups are a brilliant way for people to get into this space, find out what the community is talking about, and then also to learn and to teach others. And I really encourage people to go and do public speaking themselves and become known in the community for it. Aside from that, I think DevOps is a very broadly defined term, which is one of the difficulties we're finding people. DevOps encompasses everything from people who are traditionally Linux sys admins to people who really do understand the container mindset and the orchestrator mindset. So I think for me, my best channel to find the right people has always been either face-to-face people I know or else looking for things like Kubernetes or other orchestrators. So I got to ask you how in the Kubernetes, we've been given some good hat tips and props to the CNCF for doing a good job with Kubernetes. What is it about Kubernetes and the CNCF that's working in your mind? Why is it working so well? Obviously, it's successful, it's got kind of a de facto standard because a lot of people love it. What are they doing right and what is the work areas that you see are opportunities for people to innovate? So the CNCF has a couple of different branches. One thing that I think they did really well at the beginning was they decided that the technical direction and the vision of the projects would be set amongst the community rather than being controlled by one of Google or Microsoft or Red Hat or one of the big names in this. So separating the governing board from the technical oversight committee is something I think they did really right at the beginning and also encouraging the meetups and the face-to-face and the community growth. So in terms of innovation in this sphere, there's a lot of unsolved problems. There's, you know, we have a absolute mass of tools out there and we don't have best practices and a lot of experience in how it's done. I work for StorageOS because storage is one of those unsolved problems for containers, security is another one, serverless is really coming, you know, and there's a lot of opportunity now to get involved in those conversations and steer towards where you want your own community and your own people to be. That is great and you're doing, I've been in open source for quite a while and the strategy is spot on. So what do you see in terms of inside of the CNCF projects that you're excited about or things that you want to get engaged with further or just, you know, in general, what's really cool? On a personal technical level, I think serverless is very, very exciting. I still think of myself as an engineer in many ways. So I think the developer experience with that is great. One thing that I've seen new at KubeCon is there's a lot of focus now on getting the new first time contributors, the mentors expanding the community, you know, looking beyond just can you submit code to how do we onboard and bring in more people so we have a more diverse set of opinions and feelings that can come in. Setting people up, open arms. Yeah, these things don't happen by themselves, you know, they do take effort and I'm really glad that open source has really, really thrown itself full heartedly into those kind of efforts. Shell, great to have you on the Kube. Appreciate your commentary. My final question for you is for the folks watching who couldn't come today this week, what's going on here? Share the vibe, share the story. What's this top story? What's the most important thing happening this week that people should know about? If I see one trend in people that I talk to, it's Kubernetes is getting boring. You know, what's the next big thing? Service measures seem to be a hot topic. A lot of people are talking about them. But it's quite, it's, I think it's great actually that Kubernetes is now becoming boring. People are standardizing on one thing so we're not duplicating a bunch of effort. And there's a lot of buzz in the hallway about, okay, we're fully bought into Kubernetes now. We know this is success. The CNCF has graduated Kubernetes. So now what are the difficult problems? Now it's about communicating between, on the networking side, between federating, between clusters across different regions. Those are all things that they're not yet solved problems and that makes them quite an interesting challenge. So you need boring to get to the exciting stuff because boring in this case is good. Boring, boring is good. You're rallying around something solid to go attack other opportunities. I think it's just a trend of, we have innovation at the very cutting edge beginning. People rally around them, they become standards, then they become commodities and people no longer find those exciting. But that allows us to work on even more exciting new things. Cheryl, great stuff. Congratulations on your meetup and your success. Thank you. And your startup shipping the products. The Cube, bringing you all the action here in Copenhagen. I'm John Furrier, Lauren Cooney here. Cube coverage continues. Dig with us for more after this short break.