 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2021 virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon 21 and CloudNativeCon 21, part of the CNCF's annual event this year, it's virtual again. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE and we have two great guests from the CNCF, Cheryl Hung VP of Ecosystems and Katie Mangi, who's the Ecosystem Advocate for CNCF. Thanks for coming on, great to see you. I wish we were in person soon, maybe in the fall. Cheryl, Katie, thanks for coming on. Definitely hoping to be back in person again soon, but John, great to see you and great to be back on theCUBE. You know, I have to say, one of the things that's really surprised me is the resilience of the community around what's been happening with the virtual and the COVID. Obviously a lot of people have been disrupted by this, but the consensus is that developers have used to been working remotely and virtually in a home and so not too much disruption, but a hell of a lot of productivity. You're seeing a lot more CloudNative projects, you're seeing a lot more mainstreaming in the enterprise, you're starting to see cloud growth, just a really kind of nice growth. And we've been saying for years, rising tide floats all boats, Cheryl, but this year, you're starting to see real mainstream adoption with CloudNative and this has really been part of the work of the community you guys have done. So what's your take on this? Because we're going to be coming out of this COVID pretty soon. There's a post COVID light at the end of the tunnel. What's your view? Yeah, definitely fingers crossed on that. I mean, I would love Katie to give her view on this, in fact, because she came from Condé Nast and American Express, both huge companies that were adopting, have adopted CloudNative successfully. And then in the middle of the pandemic, in the middle of COVID, she joined CNCF. So Katie really has a view from the trenches and Katie would love to hear your thoughts. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely CloudNative adoption when it comes to the tooling has been more prominent in the enterprises and that has been confirmed with my role at American Express, that is the role I moved from towards CNCF. But the more surprising thing is that we see big companies, we see banks and financial organization that are looking to adopt open source, but more importantly, they're looking for ways to either contribute or actually to dive a bit more into these areas. So from that perspective, I've been pretty much at the nucleus of enterprise adoption of CloudNative. It's definitely moving, it's low-paced, but it's definitely forward-moving as well. And now I think while I'm in the role with CNCF as an equestrian advocate and leading the end user community, there has been definitely, the community is growing, always intrigued to find out more about the CloudNative usages. One of the things that I find quite intriguing is the fact that not one CloudNative usage, but like usage of Kubernetes or one platform, which is going to be CloudNative-based, is going to be the same. So it's always intriguing to find new use cases, find those extreme use cases as well, that it really pushes the community forward. Yeah, I want to do unpack the end user aspect of this. And it's been a hallmark of the CNCF for years. It's always been a staple of the organization, but this year more than ever, it's been, seems to be prominent as people are integrating in. What about the growth? I mean, from last year this year and the end user ecosystem, how have you guys seen the growth? Is there any highlights? Do you guys have any stats or observations around how the ecosystem is growing around the end user piece? Sure, absolutely. I mean, I can talk directly about CNCF and the CNCF end user community, much like everything else, COVID kind of slowed things down. So we're kind of not entirely surprised by that, but we're still growing over 2020 and in fact, just in the last few months, have brought in some really big names like Peloton, Airbnb, Citibank, just some incredible organizations who have really adopted Cloud Native, who have seen the success and the benefits of it and now are looking to give back to the community, as Katie said, get involved with open source and be more than just a passive consumer of the technologies, but actually become leaders in their own right. Katie, talk about the dynamic of developers at end user organizations. I mean, you've been there, you've been on both sides of the table, if you will, not to the sides of the table, it's more like a round table, if you will, but community driven, but traditional end user organizations, not the early adopters, not the hyperscalers, but the ones now are really embedding hybrid, are changing how IT to, how modern applications being built. That's a big theme in these mainstream organizations. What's the dynamic going on? What's your view? I think for any organization, the kind of the core, what moves the organization towards cloud native is pretty much being ahead of your competitors. And now we have this mass of different organizations in cloud native. That's why we see more kind of eyes towards this area. So definitely in this perspective, when it comes to the technology aspect, companies are looking to deploy complex application in an easier manner, especially when it comes to pushing them to production system securely, faster, and continuously as well. They're looking to have this competitive edge when it comes to how can they quickly respond to customer feedback. And as well, they're looking for this hybrid element that has been talked about. Again, we're talking about enterprise, it's not just about public cloud, it's about how can we run the application securely embedding both an element of data centers or private cloud as well. And now we see a lot of projects which are balancing around that age, but more importantly, there is adoption. And where there's adoption, there is a feedback group and that's how what represents the organic growth. That's awesome. Cheryl, I'd like you to define what you mean when you say end user driven open source. What does that mean? This is a really interesting dynamic that I've seen over the last couple of years. So what we see is that more and more of the open source projects are end users who are solving their own problems and creating their own projects and donating these back to the community. An early example of this was Envoy and Lyft and Yeager from Uber. But Spotify also recently donated Backstage which is a developer portal which has really taken off. We've also got examples from Intuit, donating Argo. I'm sure there are some others that I've just forgotten but the really interesting thing I see about this is that class classically, right? Maybe a few years ago, if you were an end user organization, you'd get involved through a vendor. You'd go to a red hat or something and say, hey, you fix this on my behalf because that's what I'm paying you to do. Whereas what I see now is end users saying we want to keep this expertise in house and we want to be owners of our own kind of direction and our own fate when it comes to these open source projects. And that's been a big driver for this trend of open source and end user driven open source. It's really the open model is just such a great thing and I think one of the interesting things is that that fits in with a lot of people who want to work from mission driven companies but here there's actually a business benefit as you pointed out as in terms of the dynamic of bringing stuff to the community. This is interesting, I'm sure that the ability to do more collaboration, either hiring or contributing kind of increases when you have this end user dynamic because that's a pretty big decision to donate and bring something into the open source. What's the playbook though? If I'm sitting in an end user organization like American Express, Katie or a big company say, hey, you know, we really developed this really killer use cases niche to us but we want to bring it to the community. What do they do? Is there like a manager? Do they knock on someone's doors or a repo? Is, I mean, how does someone, I mean, how does an end user get this done? I think one of the best resources out there is called the to do group, which is a organization underneath the Linux foundation. So it's kind of a sister group to CNCF, which is about open source program offices and how do you formalize such an open source program because it's pretty easy to say, oh, we'll just put something on GitHub but that's not the end of the story, right? If you want to actually build a community, if you want other people to contribute, then you do actually have to do more than just drop it on GitHub and walk away. So I would say that if you are an end user company and you have created something which scratches your own itch and you think other people could benefit from it, then definitely come and like you could email me, you could email Chris Anjik who is the CTO of CNCF and just get in touch and sort of ask around about what are the things that you could do in terms of what do you have to think about for licensing, how do you develop a community governance program, trademark issues, all of these things. It's interesting how open source is growing so much now. Chris has got so much action going on, new verticals are opening up, you know. So much action, Cheryl, you had posted on the internet predictions for cloud native, which is I found interesting because there's so much action going on, you got to break things out into pillars. Tech, DevOps and ecosystem, each one kind of with a slew of key trends. So take us through the mindset. Why break it out like that? You got tech, DevOps and ecosystem, traditionally that was all kind of bundled in one. Why the pillars and is it because there's so much action? What's the basis behind the prediction? So originally this was just a giant list of things I had seen from talking to people and reading around and seeing what people were talking about on social media. And once I'd written out these 10, I thought about what does this actually mean for the people who are going to look at this list and what should they care about? So I see tech trends as things related to tools, frameworks, perhaps architects. I see DevOps as people who are more, as a combination of process, things that are a combination of process and people and culture, best practices. And then ecosystem was kind of anything else broader than that. Things that happened across organizations. So you can definitely go to my Twitter, you can go to at oyeshowl, O-I-C-H-E-R-Y-L. Take a look at this. And this is my list of 10 I would love to hear from you, whether you agree with it, whether you think there are other things that I've missed or yeah, what would your 10? Well, I love the top. Well, first of all, I think the list is very relevant. The one that I would ask you on is more Rust and Cloud Native. That's the number one item. I think cross-cloud is definitely totally happening. I think people are really starting to think about that. So I'd love to get your comments on that. But I think the thing that jumped out at me was the DevOps piece, because this is a trend that I've been seeing a lot more, certainly even in academic institutions for folks in school, right? Going to college for computer science and engineering. This idea of SRE, large scale cloud, is not so much an IT practice, it's much more of a cloud native mindset. So I think this idea of ops, so much more about scale. I use SRE only because I can't think of a better word around it. And certainly the edge pieces with Kubernetes, I think is the biggest story to me. That's where all the action seems to be, when I talk to people around what they're working on, in terms of training new people on boarding and whatnot. Katie, you're shaking your head. You're like, yeah, what's your thoughts? I have definitely been through all of these stages from having a team where the DevOps, I think it's more of a culture of like a pattern to adopt within an organization more than anything. So I've been pre DevOps within DevOps and actually during the evolution of it where we actually added an SRE team as well. I think having these cultural changes within an organization they are necessary, especially if they want to iterate quicker and actually deliver value to the customers with minimal latency. Because what it actually does, there is the collaboration between teams which were initially segregated. And that's why I think there is a paradigm nowadays which is called DevSecOps, which actually moves security more towards left. This has been very popular, especially in the latest couple of months, lots of talks around it. And even there is like a security co-located event of KubeCon, which is going to focus on that mainly. But as well within the DevOps area, one of the models that has been quite prominent has been GitOps as well, which pretty much uses the power of Git repositories to describe the state of the applications, how it actually should be within the production system. And within the cloud native ecosystem, there are two main tools that pretty much leave this area. And there's going to be Argos CD, which has been donated by Intuit, which is our end user. And we have Flux as well, which has been donated by Weaveworks. And both of these projects currently are within the incubation stage, which pretty much by default showcases, there is a lot of adoption from the organizations, more than 100 for some of them. So there is wider adoption. And everything that I would like to mention is the GitOps working group, which has emerged, I think between KubeCon Europe and North America last year. And that again is more to define a manifest of how exactly GitOps pattern should be adopted within organizations. So there's a lot of outside initiatives and this is further outside confirmed with the tooling that we have within the ecosystem. Yeah, that's really awesome insight. I want to just, if you don't mind, follow up on that. Why is the GitOps so important right now? Is it because the emphasis of security? Is it the emphasis of more scale? Is it just, I mean, because it pretty much Git was, okay, it's just the code's storing it over there. Is it because there's so much more inspection going on around it? I mean, code reviews have been going on for a long time. What's the big deal? Why is it so hot right now in your opinion? I think there are definitely a couple of aspects that are quite important. You mentioned security, that's definitely one of them. With the GitOps pattern, there is a pull model rather than a push model. So you have the actual tool, for example, our GoCityR flux watching for repository and if new changes are identified, it's going to pull those changes automatically. So the first thing that we actually can see from this model is that we always will have a delta between what's within our Git repositories and the production system. Usually if you have a pull model, you can pull it, you can push it to changes towards their staging environment, but not always the production because you have the change window sometimes. With the GitOps model, you'll always be aware of what's the delta and you have quite a nice way to visualize that, especially with our GoCity, which has the UI as well. As well with the GitOps pattern, there is less necessity to share the credentials with the actual pipeline tool. All of, because our Go flux, they are natively built around Kubernetes. All the secrets are going to be residing within the cluster. There is no need to share any extra credentials or any extra permissions with external tools as well. There are scale, there is again, we have to have historical data points, which allows us to easily revert to stable points of the applications in the past. So multiple, multiple benefits, I would say, but definitely secured. I think it's one of the main one and it has been talked about quite a lot as well. You know, a lot of these end user stories kind of revolve around these dynamics and the ones you guys are promoting and from your members as well as in the community at large is, I hate to use the word, day two operations, but that really is the issue. Like, okay, we're up and running. I want more automation. This is a GitOps kind of vibe here where it's like, okay, we got to go troubleshoot all this. It should be working. As more stuff comes in, this becomes more and more of the dynamic. Is that because of just more edges, more things, more devices? What's the push behind all these stories around this automation and day two operation things? What do you guys think? I think the expectations are getting higher and higher, to be honest. A few years ago, it was enough to use containers and start using the barest minimum to orchestrate those containers. But now what we see is that it's easy to choose a technology. It's easy to install it and even configure it. But as you said, John, those day two operations are really, really hard. For example, one of the ones that we've seen up and coming and we care about a lot from CNCF is Kubernetes on the edge. And we see this as enabling telco use cases and 5G and IoT and really, really broad, difficult use cases that just a few years ago would have been nigh on impossible. I mean, Katie, you also... Katie, what's your thoughts on that? Sorry, Katie, you also talk about Ed Ray. Absolutely. I think I really like to watch some of the talks that keep going, especially given by the big organizations that have to manage thousands or tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of customers and they have to deliver a cluster to these teams. Now, from their point of view, they pretty much have to manage clusters at scale. There is definitely the edge out there and they really kind of pushing the technology towards, how can we get closer to the physical devices within the customer's kind of bubble or area and surface? So edge has been definitely something which has been moving a lot when it comes to the cloud native ecosystem. We've had a lot of projects moving to towards the incubation stage. K3S has been there for a while and again, has a lot of adoption is known for its stability. But another thing that I would like to mention that now currently we have a lot of projects that are edge focused but within sandbox. So there is again, a lot of potential. If there is going to be a higher demand for this, I would expect these tools to move from sandbox to incubation and even graduation. So that's definitely something which it's moving and there is dynamism around it. Well, Cheryl and Katie, you guys are awesome. Love the work you're doing. I got to ask the final question since you brought it up about the expectation Cheryl. If you guys could both end the segment with the comment around expectations as the industry and companies and developers and participants continue to grow, what's changed with CNCF, KubeCon, cloud native con? As the expectation has been growing and the stakes are higher too, frankly. I mean, you got security, you mentioned these things, Edge, GitOps, you start to see the maturation of this ecosystem. What's new and what's expected of you guys? What do you see and how are you guys organizing? I think we can definitely say the ecosystem has matured a lot compared to a few years ago. Same with CNCF, same with KubeCon. I think the very first KubeCon I went to was Berlin, which was about 1800 people. Kind of mind-boggling to see how much it's grown since then. I mean, one of the things that we try and do is to expand the number of people who can reach the community. So for example, we launched Kubernetes Community Days and we launched, that means community organized events in Africa, for example, for people who couldn't come to large events in North America or Europe. We also are launching things to help students. I actually love talking to students because quite often now you talk to them and they say, oh, I've never run software in anything other than a container. You're like, whoa, this was a new thing. This was brand new a few years ago. And now you can be 18 and have never tried anything else. So it's pretty amazing. But yeah, there's definitely, there's always space to grow the community. Yeah, I mean, once you go cloud native, it's like, ah, you've never load Linux on a server before? I mean, what's going on? Katie, give me your thoughts. As expectations go higher and certainly there's more in migration, not only for young folks, because they're jumping into this, that's engineering meets computer science is now cross-discipline. You're seeing scale, you mentioned scaling up. Those are huge factors. You got younger, you got cross-training, you got cybersecurity, I mean, and you got fintech ops as Chris is working on. I mean, so much is happening. What's, what's, how you guys keep up? What's your, how are you going to raise them? Absolutely. I think there's definitely technology moving forward. But I think nowadays there is a more need for actual end user stories. Well, as the beginning of KubeCon's, there is a lot of focus on the technical aspects. How can you fix this particular problem of deploying between two clusters or deploying at scale? There is like a lot of technical aspects. Nowadays they're looking for the stories because as I mentioned before, not one platform is going to be the same when it comes to cloud native. And I think there's still, the community is still trying to look for some patterns or some standards. And we actually can see, like especially when it comes to the open standards, we can see this moving within the observability stack, application delivery. Well, we have, for example, cross-plane in Kubella. We have open metrics and open tracing as well, which focuses on observability. And all of the interfaces that we had around KubeCon, which service mesh and so forth, all of these pretty much try to bring a benchmark, making it easier to integrate these special use cases when it comes to actually extreme technology kind of solutions that you need to provide. And I was mentioning the end user stories that are there more in demand nowadays, mainly because these are very, very necessary from the community, like for example, the SIGs or the project maintainers, they require feedback to actually move forward. And as part of that, I would like to mention that we've recently soft-launched the end user lounge, which really focuses on this particular aspect of end user stories. We tried to pretty much question our end users and really understand what really moved them to adopt cloud native, what keeps them on this path and what future challenges they would like to tackle or are they facing at the moment they would like to solve in the future? So we're trying to create this feedback a little between the end users and the projects out there. So I think this is something which needs to be a bit more closely together these two spheres, which currently are segregated, but we're trying to dissolve that. Awesome, you guys do great work, great job. Cheryl, the wrap us up real, take a minute to put a plug-in for the CNCF and the ecosystem. What's the fashion this year? What's hot? What's the trend? What are you guys doing? Share some quick update on what's going on in the ecosystem from your perspective. Yeah, I mean, the ecosystem, even though I just said that we're maturing, the growth has not stopped. Now what we're seeing is these, as Katie was saying, more specific use cases, even bigger, even more demanding environments, even more kind of crazy use cases. I mean, I love the story from the US Department of Defense about putting Kubernetes on their fighter jets and putting Istio on fighter jets. It's just absurd to think about it, but I would say definitely come and be part of the community, share your story, share what you know, help other people. If you are an end user of these technologies, then go to cncf.io slash end user and just come and be part of our community, meet your peers and hear what everybody else is doing. Well, having Kubernetes and Istio on jets, that's the Air Force. I would call that tactical edge, Katie, to bring back the edge. Cheryl, Katie, thank you so much for sharing the insight. Ecosystem is robust. Rising tide is floating all the boats, as we always say here on theCUBE. It's been great to watch and continue to watch the rise. I think it's just the beginning. We're starting to see post pandemic visibility, cloud native, more standards, more visibility into the economics and value and great to see the ecosystem rising. We're up with the end users as well. So congratulations and thanks for coming on. Thank you so much, John. It's a pleasure. Appreciate it. Thank you for having us, John. Great to have you on. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE here for KubeCon, cloud native con 21 virtual soon. We'll be back in real life. Thanks for watching.