 covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Seattle for KubeCon 2018. CloudNativeCon, I'm John Furrier, with the Kube coverage for three days. Our next guest is Chris Rosen, who's the program director for offering mentor for Kubernetes, IBM's Kubernetes service. Chris, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. Thank you very much, glad to be here. We always love covering IBM. Think is coming up this year. It's going to be in San Francisco. I want to get that out there because we're psyched it's in our backyard. It's always been in Vegas. We've been covering IBM's events for a long time. We've seen the evolution of Cloud, you know, BlueMix, SoftLayer all coming together. Kubernetes, actually the timing of Kubernetes couldn't have been better. Absolutely. With all the software investments in BlueMix, all the customers that you guys have, now with Scale and Choice with CNCF, kind of a perfect storm for you guys. Explain kind of what's going on, your role, and how it's all kind of clicking together. Sure. So it is, you're exactly right. It's an exciting time to be there. There's a lot of change. Everyone here at the conference, so excited. There's so much new going on. About two and a half years ago, IBM went all in on Kubernetes for our cloud, as well as our on-prem offerings to leverage and provide flexibility, portability, eliminating vendor lock-in, all those things that our customers asked us for, and then adding capabilities on top of it. So we're really excited to kind of grow and participate in the ecosystem. So I hear a lot of people talking about Kubernetes. First of all, we love covering it, but the language around what is Kubernetes, they even do in children's book stories, just trying to break it down. The rise of Kubernetes kind of has gone mainstream, but I hear things like the Kubernetes stack, the CNCF stack. I mean, it's not necessarily a stack per se. Could you break down? Because a lot of people go into the CNCF for a variety of other things, with Kubernetes at the core. Describe how you talk to customers. How do you explain it? Unpack the positioning of Kubernetes at the core and the CNCF offerings, or what do people call it? The stack, CNCF stack? Or how does this all break down, can you? Yeah, so you're right. It's a very complex stack, and that's where the complexity comes in that we're trying to eliminate for our customers. It's to simplify managing that stack. So at the top of the stack, of course, we've got Kubernetes for the orchestration layer. Below that, we've got the engine. We're using container D now, but we also have Prometheus, Fluent D, Calico. It's a very complex stack. And when you think about managing that, and a new version comes out from Kubernetes, how does that affect anything else in that stack? Yeah, Chris, I wonder if you can explain a little bit what IBM's doing here, because some people, I've heard they said, oh, there's like over 70 different platforms with Kubernetes, oh, they're all trying to sell me a Kubernetes distribution. I don't believe that's the case. So maybe you can explain what bakes into your products, what IBM bakes into the community and your role. Well, you're exactly right. So we're not forking and doing anything IBM asks with Kubernetes. We have core maintainers that live out there, that's their job is to focus upstream. We think that's very important to be agnostic and to participate in these communities. Now what we do is we build our solutions on top of these open source projects, adding value, simplifying the management of those solutions. So you think about the CNCF conformance testing, IBM participates. We typically are the first public cloud to add support for a new version of Kubernetes. So we're really excited to do that. And the only way we can do that is by actively participating in the community. The upstream dynamic is important. Just talk about that for a second because this is I think why one of the reasons it's been so successful is the upstream contribution is not your IBM perspective. It's just pure contribution for the benefit of the community. Then downstream you guys are productizing that piece. That is kind of the purpose of open source. Exactly, exactly. And you hear time and time again at these conferences that the power of the community is so much greater than one individual company. So let's work together as a community, build that solid foundation at the open source level, and then IBM is going to add things that we think are differentiating and unique to our offering. What's the number one end user conversation problem that's being solved with the evolution of CNCF and Kubernetes at the core? Obviously choice is one, but specifically as you talk to customers, what is the big need? What's the conversations like? Can you share some insight into the customer equation? Probably the biggest request is around security. And that's a couple of fronts. One, maybe this is my first step into public cloud. So how do I ensure in a multi-tenant world that I am secure and isolation and all of those things? But then also thinking about maybe I'm just starting with containers and microservices. So this is a completely different mental paradigm and how I'm developing code, running code, and to explain to them how IBM is helping simplify that security aspect along that entire journey. So talk about the auto-scaling security piece because again, the touch points, it's interesting about cloud, the entry point is multiple avenues for a customer. Could be workload portability, it could be for a native application in the cloud. Where is the scale come in? How do you guys see the scale picture developing? Right, so again, scaling comes with kind of two factors. One, pod auto-scaling from Kubernetes. So you can define, let your application scale out when it needs to, but then there's also the infrastructure side. So I need to be able to set parameters to scale up when I need to and then scale back down to kind of meet my requirements as well as managing my costs. Well, IBM thinks coming up on February 15th and just a plug for theCUBE will be there. Obviously, register for IBM Think is a big conference. How much of Kubernetes will be at the center of IBM Think? Kubernetes will be a huge part at Think. We encourage everyone listening to come, sign up and join us. There'll be a range from hands-on for your developer focus or your operators. We'll have much larger business benefits for our C-level participants. So a lot of activities, a lot of fun, a lot to learn at IBM Think 2019 in San Francisco. What's the biggest story here at KubeCon, Kube Cloud Native Conference? For the folks not here are watching or maybe on the wait list in the lobby con that's happening in Seattle. What's the biggest story? The biggest story is the vibrant ecosystem. When you look at the amount of people that are here, the chatter, the booths are packed, the sessions are packed, the keynotes are packed. It's great. Everyone wants to share a story, learn from each other. It's a fantastic community to be a part of. I got to ask you the program ability piece because one of the things that people look for is virtual private networks. They're usually VPNing. They want to take VPNs to the next level. SD-WAN is super hot trend that's kicking back up. People want to program networks. They don't want to actually provision networks anymore. This is DevOps, but now it's also the network layer. Storage and compute looking good. Networks evolving. How do you guys see that picture? Can you comment on that? It's a hot air. I just thought I'd get your perspective. Yeah, definitely evolving just like the rest of the space. So we're excited to work with various vendors here. IBM has our own point of view of what virtual private cloud means, supporting, bring your own IP, private endpoints, private clusters. So that way, if I only want connectivity inside my backbone network, I can configure my networks that way. Creating a VPN tunnel back to my resources on-prem and just have it completely isolated from the rest of the world. And you've seen a lot of on-premises activity. Azure Stack, Amazon announced this outpost constant to be about a year away and their whole messaging is latency. Workloads need certain things. Some of them have need low latency. Some need more security. Is that just the course of business now? The customers have to have these diverse sets of needs met? Absolutely. So IBM has two offerings. IBM Cloud Private for on-prem with multi-cloud manager that's really focused at managing in that hybrid or multi-cloud world. How do we simplify resources that are running on-prem? IBM Cloud, other clouds, and how do we do so efficiently? So we definitely see a lot of hybrid architectures, whether that's on-prem to IBM Cloud, IBM Cloud to other clouds, and latency really becomes a minimal. And what's your to-do list on Kubernetes as you look at this event kind of has to be continuing to grow. The international piece is pretty compelling as well. Both in China is seeing that. What's your plans for IBM Kubernetes offering? What's the roadmap look like? What can you share some insight into what's next for you guys? Absolutely. So we're definitely focused on security. Continues to be paramount, even though we think we're a very secure offering already, but continuing to expand on that. The private endpoints that I mentioned, the private connectivity isolating network traffic is a huge piece of it. Staying compliant and up to date with Kubernetes versions as they come out, making sure that they're scalable, performant, upgradeable, and then making those available to our users. IBM continuing to transform, obviously the big news we saw with the Red Hat acquisition, you know, obviously been in the cloud for a while. Everyone knows that with Bluemix. I mean, people may not get to know as much work that went into Bluemix, for instance. A lot of great stuff you guys have built on the developer side within cloud. IBM think is February 15th. It's going to be in San Francisco. The queue will be there. Check these guys out. They're going to have a lot of workshops. We're excited to see how the evolution of IBM and IBM Cloud continues. Just a little bit on the queue. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Cube coverage, I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman, stay with us for more coverage here in Seattle after this short break.