 Hi, everyone. My name is Savannah Peterson, and I am very excited to be coming to you today from the Cube in Palo Alto. We're going to be talking about CubeCon, giving a little preview of the hype and what you might be able to expect in Detroit with the one and only co-founder and CEO of the Cube and SiliconANGLE, John Ferrier. John, hello. How are you today? Hey, thanks for hosting and doing the preview with me. My goodness. A pleasure. We got acquainted this time last year. How do you think the ecosystem has changed? Are you excited? Well, first of all, I missed the CubeCon, Valencia, because I had COVID, was so excited to be there. I had this big trip plan and then couldn't make it. But so much has gone on. I mean, we've been at every CubeCon. The Cube was there at the beginning, when OpenStack was still going on. Kubernetes was just starting, came out of Google. We were there having beers with Lou Tucker and a bunch of the luminaries when it all kind of came together. And then watch it year by year progress through and how it's changed the industry and mainly how open source has been really the wave behind it. Combining with the Linux Foundation and then CNCF and then the open source movement and to Kubernetes was been amazing. And under it all, containers has been the real driver in all of this. So Docker containers, Docker was a well-funded company. They had to pivot and were restructured. Now they're pure open source. So containers have gone supernova. On top of that's Kubernetes. And with that's a complete ecosystem of opportunity to create the next operating system in software development. So to me, CubeCon is at the center of software, software 2.0, 3.0. What do you want to call it? Super cloud. It's really the action. It's not where the old school is, it's where the new school is. Excellent. So what has you most excited this year? What's the biggest change from this time last year and now? Well, two things I'm looking at this year carefully, both from an editorial lens and also from a sponsorship lens is where is the funding going on the sponsorships because they have a very diverse ecosystem of builders but also vendors. So I'm going to see how that dynamic is going on. But also on the software side, there's a lot of white space going on in the stack or in the map, if you will. You have the runtimes, you've got observability, you got a lot of competition, maybe projects might be growing, some rising, some falling, maybe merged together. Going to see how that, but there's a lot of white spaces developing. So I'm curious to see what's new on that area. And then service meshes is a big deal this year. So I'm looking for what's going on. So there's been kind of a, I won't say Cold War, but kind of like, where is this going to go? And because it's a super important part of the orchestration and managing containers. And so be very interested to see how service mesh does, Istio and for other versions out there have been around for a while. So that and also the other controversy is the number of stars on GitHub a project may have. So sometimes that carries a lot of weight, but we're going to look at which ones are rising, which ones are falling, which ones are getting the most votes by the developers vote with their code. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we did definitely miss you down in Los Angeles, but it will be great to be in Detroit. What has you most excited? Do you think that we're going to see the number of people in person that we have in the past? I know you've seen it since the beginning. So I think this year is going to be explosive from that psychology angle because I think it was really weird because LA was on, they were bold to make that move. We were all there. Absolutely. It was first conference back. It was a lot of like badges, don't touch me, only handshakes, fist pumps. But it was at the beginning of the COVID second wave, right? So it was still not yet released that where everyone was not worried about it. So I think it's in the past year, in the past eight months, I mean, I've been in places with no masks. People have no masks. Vegas, other places. So I think it's going to be a year where it's going to be a lot more people in person because the growth and the opportunities are so big. It's going to drive a lot of people in person, just like Amazon reinvent does. Yeah, absolutely. And as the most important and prominent event in the Kubernetes space, I think everyone's very excited to get back together. When we think about this space, do you think that anyone's the clear winner yet? Or do you think it's still a bit of an open territory in terms of the companies and partnerships? I think Red Hat has done a great job. And I think we're going to see how well they can turn this into gold for them because they've positioned themselves very well. Open Shift years ago was kind of waffling. I won't say it in a bad way, but once they got view on containers and Kubernetes, Red Hat has done an exceptional job in how they position their company. Being bought by IBM is going to be very interesting to see how that influences change. So if Red Hat can stay Red Hat, I think IBM will win. I think Cosmos wins. That's one company I like. The startups were seeing companies like Platform 9, Rafi Systems, young companies coming out in the Kubernetes as a service space. Because I think whoever can make Kubernetes easier because I think that's the hard part right now. Even though the show is called KubeCon, there's a lot more than Kubernetes. I think the container layer with Docker's doing has been exceptional. That's the real action. The question is, how does that impact the Kubernetes layer? So Kubernetes has not done a deal yet. I think it hasn't really crossed the chasm yet. It's certainly popular, but not every company is adopting it. So we're starting to see that. We need to see more adoption of Kubernetes. So seeing that happens is going to decide who the winners are. Totally agree with that. If you look at the data, a lot of companies are and people are excited about Kubernetes, but they haven't taken the plunge to shifting over their stack or fully embracing it because of that complexity. So I'm very curious to see what we learn this week about who those players might be moving forward. How does it feel to be in Detroit? When was the last time you were here? I was there in 2007. It was the last time I was in that town. So we'll see what it's like. Wow, yeah. But things have changed a little bit over the last year. Lions are good this year. They've got great hockey going there. All right. You've heard that. Sports fans, let John know what you're thinking, your sports predictions for this season. I love that. Who do you hope to get to meet while we're at the show? I want to meet more end-user customers. We're going to have Envoy again on theCUBE. I think Red Hat was going to be a big sponsor this year. They've been great. We're looking for the end-user project. We're also looking for some editorial super cloud-like commentary because the CNCF is kind of the developer tech community that's powering, in my opinion, this next wave of software development. Cloud-native DevOps is now cloud-native developers. DevOps is kind of going away. That's killed IT, in my opinion. Data and security ops is the new kind of ops, the new IT. So it's going to just see how DevOps turns into more of a software engineering meets super cloud. So I think you're going to start to see the infrastructure become more programmable. It's infrastructure as code. So I think if anything, I'm more excited to hear more stories about how infrastructure as code is now the new standard. So when that truly happens, it's a super cloud model to be kicking into high gear. Love that. You touched on it a little bit right there, but I want to dig in a bit since you've been around since the beginning. What is it that you appreciate or enjoy so much about the Kubernetes community and the people around this? I think they're authentic people and I think they're built, they're also progressive. They're very diverse, they're open and inclusive. They try stuff and they can be critical but they're not jerks about it. So when people try something, they're open-minded about failure. So it's a classic startup mentality. I think that is embodied throughout the Linux foundation but CNC in particular has to bridge the entrepreneurial and corporate vibe. So they've done an exceptional job doing that. And that's what I like about it. There's money-making involved but there's also a lot of development and innovation that comes out of it. So the next big name and startup could come out of this community. And that's what I hope to see coming out of here is that next brand that no one's heard of that just comes out of nowhere and just takes a big position in the marketplace. So that's going to be interesting to see. Hopefully we have on our stage there. That's the goal. We're going to interview them all. A year from now, when we're sitting here again, what do you hope to be able to say about this space or this event that we might not be able to say today? I think it's going to be more of clarity around the new modern software development techniques, software, NextGen using AI, more faster silicon chips, you see Amazon with what they're doing, the custom silicon, more processing. I think hardware matters. We've been talking a lot about that. I think we're going to shift from what's been innovative and what's changed. I think if you look at what's been going on in the industry, outside of crypto, the infrastructure hasn't really changed much except for AWS, what they've done. So I'm expecting to see more innovations at the physics level, way down in the chips. And then that lower end of the stack is going to be dominated by either one of the three clouds, probably AWS. And then the middle layer is going to be this, where the abstraction is around making infrastructure as code really happen. I think that's going to be clarity coming out of this year. Next year we should have some visibility into the vertical applications and of the AI and machine learning. Absolutely. Digging in on that actually even more because I like what you're saying a lot. What verticals do you think that Kubernetes is going to impact the most, looking even further out than say a year? I mean, I think that hot ones, Healthcare, FinTech are obvious to get the most money they're spending. I think they're the ones who are already kind of creating these super cloud models where they're actually changed over there. They're spending from CapEx to OpEx and they're driving top line revenue as part of that. So you're seeing companies that want customers of the IT vendors are now becoming the providers. So that's a big super cloud trend we see. The other verticals are going to be served by a lot of managed service providers, oil and gas, all the classic vertical healthcare. I mentioned that one. Those are the classic verticals. Retail is going to be massively huge. As you get more into the internet of things, that's truly internet-based. You're going to start to see a lot more edge use cases. So telecom, I think it's going to be completely disrupted by new brands. So I think we should just see how that plays out. But all verticals are going to be disrupted. Just a casual statement to say. Yeah, yeah, no doubt in my mind. That's great. I'm personally really excited about the edge applications that are possible here and can't wait to see, can't wait to see what happens next. I'm curious as to your thoughts, how, given your history here and we don't have to say number of years that you've been participating in, in KubeCon. But given your history, what's the evolution looked like from that community perspective? When you were all just starting out, having that first drink, did you anticipate that we would be here with thousands of people in Detroit? You know, I knew the moment was happening around 2017, 2018, Dan Cohn who no longer with us, he passed away. I ran into him randomly in China and it was like, what are you doing here? He was with a bunch of Docker guys. So they were already investing in. So I knew that the CNCF was a great steward for this community because they were already doing the work. Dan led a great team at that time and then they were kicking ass and they were just really setting the foundation. They did, again, they set the architecture perfectly. So I knew that that was a moment that was going to be pretty powerful. At the early days when we were talking about Kubernetes before it even started, we were always talking about if this could be the TCP IP of cloud, then we could have kind of a de facto interoperability and Lou Tucker was working for Cisco at the time and we were called an inter-clouding, like internet working, what that did during the revolution of the- The inter-cloud. Yeah, the revolution of the client server and PC revolution was about connectivity and so TCP IP was the disruptive enable that created massive amounts of wealth, created a lot of companies, created a whole generation of companies. So I think this next inflection point is kind of happening right now. I think Kubernetes is one step of this abstraction layer but you're starting to see companies like Snowflake who's built on AWS and then moved to multiple clouds, Goldman Sachs, Capital One, you're going to see insurance companies. So we believe that the rise of the super cloud is here. That's going to be cloud 3.0, that's software 3.0, it's software three, whatever you want to call it. It's not yesterday's cloud lift and shift and run a SaaS application. It's a true enterprise digital transformation. So that's kind of the trend that we see riding in now. And so if you're not on that side of the street, you're going to get washed away from that wave. So it's going to be interesting to see how it all plays out. So it's fun to watch who's on the wrong side of it. It is very fun. I hope y'all are listening to this really powerful advice from John. He's dropping some serious knowledge bombs on us today. Well, I'm holding them back for KubeCon because we got all the great guests coming on and that's where all the content comes from. I mean, the best part of the community is that they're sharing. Yeah, absolutely. So just for old time's sake, and it's because it's how I met your fabulous team last year, define Kubernetes for the audience. Kubernetes is like, what someone said, it was a magic Christmas. I heard that was a well-better combination with that one, I heard that one. You mean the technical definition or like the business definition or? Maybe both. You can give us an interpretive dance if you'd like. I mean, the simplest way to describe Kubernetes is an orchestration layer that orchestrates containers that are containing applications. It's a way to keep things running and runtime assembly of the data. So if you're running containers, you can containerize applications. Kubernetes gives you that capability to run applications at scale, which feeds into the development cycle of the pipelining of apps. So if you're writing applications and you want to scale up, it's a fast way to stand up massive amounts of scale using containers and Kubernetes. So a variety of other things that are in the system too. That was pretty good. There's a lot more under the hood, but that's the oversimplified version. I think that's where we were going for. I think it's actually harder to oversimplify it sometimes in this case. It connects all, it's the connective tissue between all the container applications. Yes. Last question for you, John. We are here at theCUBE. We are very excited to be headed to Detroit very soon. What can people expect from theCUBE at KubeCon this year? So we'll be broadcasting Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. We'll be there early. I'll be there Monday and Tuesday. We'll do our normal kind of hanging around, getting some scoop on the ground floor. You'll see us there Monday and Tuesday, probably in the lounge too. Come up and say hi to us. Again, we're looking for more stories this year. We believe this is the year that you're going to hear a lot more storytelling coming out of this community as people get more proof points. So come up to us, share your email, your handle. Give us your story. We'll publish it. We think this is going to be the year that cloud native developers start showing the signs of the rise of the super cloud that's going to come out of this community. So if you got something to say, we're open to share stories. So we're here. Well, speaking of John, how can people say hi to you and the team? On Twitter at Furrier, at SiliconANGLE at theCUBE, theCUBE.net, SiliconANGLE.com, LinkedIn, Dave Vellante's out there. We're open on all channels. Signal, Instagram, WhatsApp. Perfect. Well, pick your channel. We really hope to hear from you. John, thank you so much for joining us for this preview session. And thank you for tuning in. My name is Savannah Peterson here in Palo Alto at theCUBE Studios, looking forward to Detroit. We can't wait to hear your thoughts. Do let us know in the comments and let us know if you're headed to Michigan. Cheers.