 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. Welcome back to Barcelona, Spain. We're here at the FIRA, and 7,700 people are here for the KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019. I'm Stu Minim. My co-host for the two days of coverage is Corey Quinn. And joining me are the two co-chairs of this CNCF event. Janet Cua, who is also the software engineer with Google. And having done the wrap up on stage in the keynote this morning, Brian Lyles, a senior staff engineer with VMware. Thank you both for joining us. Thank you. Thank you for having me. All right, so Janet, let's start. We're celebrating five years of Kubernetes as Dan Con laid out this morning. You know, of course, you know, came from Google board and over a decade of experience there. So it just helps set the stage for us. So I started working on Kubernetes since before 1.0 release. And I'm still a project maintainer today. And I feel so proud to see all the progress of this project and it has grown exponentially. And today we have already 31,000 contributors. And I expect it to grow even more in the future. All right, so Brian, you work with some of the original people that helped create Kubernetes because you came to VMware by way of the Heptio acquisition. Yes. 7,700 people here, as we said it. So just about the size of the US show that we had in Seattle a few months ago, we expect that San Diego is going to be massive when we get there in the fall. But talk to us as the co-chair, what's it mean to put something like this together? Well, so as a long time open source person and seeing all these companies move around for decades now, it's nice to be a part of something that I saw from the sidelines for so long. I'm actually, it's kind of surreal because I didn't do anything special to get here. I just did what I was doing. And Jan and I just wound up here together. So it's a great feeling. And the best part about it is whenever I get off stage and I walked outside and I walk back, it's like a 10 minute walk each way. So many people are like, yeah, you really made my morning. And that's super special. Yeah, I mean, look, we are huge fans of open source in general and communities, especially here. So look, there was no, you both have full-time jobs and you're giving your time to support this. So thank you for what you did. And we know it takes an army to put this together in a community, some of these people. Brian, you know, you got off stage, talk about all the various projects. There's so many pieces here. We've only have a few minutes. Any kind of major highlights you want to pull from the keynote? So the biggest, actually, I will only highlight one. The open census, open tracing merge is great because not only because it's going to make better product but you had two pretty good pieces of software. One from Google, actually literally both from Google, ultimately, but they realized that, hey, we have the same goals. We have similar interfaces and instead of going through this arms race, what they did is said, well, this is what we'll do. We'll create a new project and we'll merge them. That is, you know, that is one of the best things about open source. You know, you wouldn't see this in a lot of places but people were maturing up to say, hey, we're going to actually make something bigger and better for everyone. And that was my favorite update. Yeah, well, I tell you that I'm doing my job well because literally, like during the keynote, I reached out to Ben and Ben and Morgan and they're going to come on the program to talk about that merging later today. That was interesting. I've often been accused of having that first language of being snark. And I guess in that light, something that I'm not particularly clear on and this is not the setup for a joke but one announcement that was made on stage today was that Tiller is no longer included in the current version of, was it Helm? Yes. Yes, and everyone clapped and applauded and my immediate response was first off, wow, if you were the person that wrote Tiller that probably didn't feel so good given that everyone was clapping and happy about it but it seems that that was big and transformative and revelatory for a lot of the audience. What is Tiller and why is it perceived as being less than awesome? All right, so I will give you a disclaimer. Please. The disclaimer is I do not work on the Helm project. Wonderful. So anything that I say should be fact checked. Excellent. So here's the big deal. When Helm was introduced, they had this thing called Tiller and what Tiller did was it ran at a basically a cluster-wide level to make sure that it could coordinate software being installed in Kubernetes namespaces or the groups, how Kubernetes applications are distributed. So what happens is that that was the best vector for security problems. Basically you had this root-level piece of software running and people were figuring out ways to get around it and it was a big security hole. What they've done- It's not just a component, it's an attack platform. Yeah, it was 100%. I mean, I remember, Bitnami actually wrote a blog post, disclaimer VMware just bought Bitnami. Yes, I insisted it's called Bitnami, but we'll get to that another time. Yes, this is a disclaimer. They are now my coworkers, but they wrote a very good article about a year and a half ago about just all the attack vectors, but then also gave a solution around that. Now you don't need that solution. What you get by default now is something that's much more secure. And that's the most important piece and I think the community really loves Helm and now they have Helm with better defaults. So Janet, a lot of people at the show, you talk about tens of thousands of contributors to it, but that being said, there's still a lot of the world that is just getting started. There's part of the keynote and I knew you wrote something, running workloads in Kubernetes. Talk a little bit about how we're helping, those that aren't yet on board with getting into the Kubernetes ship. So I work on the C-gaps. So C-gaps, one of the sub-projects that I own is the Workloads APIs. That's why I had that blog post about running workloads in Kubernetes. So basically you're using Kubernetes declarative APIs to run different type of applications and we call it Workloads. So you have stateful stateless or jobs and demons and you have different APIs to run those workloads in Kubernetes. And then for those who are just getting started, maybe start with stateless workloads. That's the easiest one. And then for people who are looking to contribute more, I encourage you to start with maybe small fixes, maybe fix some documents or do some small PRs and build your reputations from there and start from small contributions and then build all the way up. Yeah, so one of the things when I look out there, it's a complex ecosystem now and there's a lot of pieces in there. Trend we see is a lot of customers looking for managed services. I need opinions to help get me through all of these various pieces. What do you say to those people when they're coming in and there's that paradox of choice when they come look at all the options out there? So I would say start with something simple that works and then you can always ask others for advice for what works, what doesn't work and you can hear from their success stories or failure stories. And then I think I recently saw a blog post about some people, the community is collecting a bunch of failure stories and there's also a talk about Kubernetes failure stories. So maybe you can go there and learn from all those mistakes and then how to build a better system from there. I love that. We have to celebrate those failures that we hopefully can learn from them. Brian, anything on that from your viewpoint? Yeah, so actually it's something I research is developer experience for Kubernetes. So my Kubernetes is this whole big thing. I look on top of it and I'm looking at the outside end how do developers interact with Kubernetes. And what we're seeing is that there's lots of room for opportunities and more tools outside of the main Kubernetes space that will help people actually interact with it because that's not really Kubernetes developers responsibility. So one neat thing that I think that we're doing now is we're looking, and this is something that we're doing in VMware that I can talk about, is that we're looking at APIs. We're looking at, we realize that Client Go, which is the way that Kubernetes talks to its APIs and a lot of people are using it externally, we're looking at, well what does it actually mean for a human to use this? And a lot of my work is just really around, well that's cool for computers. Now what if a human has to use it? So what we're finding is that not only, and I'm going to talk about this in my keynote tomorrow, we're on this journey and Kubernetes is not the destination, Kubernetes is the vehicle that is getting us to the destination that we don't even know what it is. So there's lots of spaces that we can look around to improve Kubernetes without even touching Kubernetes itself because actually it's pretty good and it's fairly stable in a lot of cases, but it's hard and that's the best part. So that's lots of work for us to solve. From my perspective, one of the turning points in Kubernetes's success story was when it got, I guess beyond just Google folks working on it. For better or worse, Google has a certain set of coding standards and then you bring it to the real world where there are people who are, let's be honest, like me, where my coding standard is I should try to write some days and not everything winds up having the same constraints, not everything has the same approach. To some extent it really feels like a tipping point for all of it was when you wind up getting to a position where people are bringing their real world workloads that don't look like anything anyone would be able to write at Google and keep their job, but still having to work with this. It wound up being sort of blossoming effect of really accelerating the project. Conversely, other large infrastructure projects we need not mention, when they had that tipping point and getting more people involved, they sort of imploded on themselves. I'm curious if you have any thoughts as to why Kubernetes started thriving where other projects had failed trying to do the same things. I have something, but you can go first, Janet. I think the biggest thing about Kubernetes is the really strong community and the ecosystem. And also Kubernetes has the extensibility for you to build on top of Kubernetes. We've seen people building frameworks and then the platforms, different platforms, open source platforms on top of Kubernetes. So other people can use other layers higher layers of stacks on top of Kubernetes. Just use those open source. So for example, we have the CRD. It's an API that allows you to build your own customized Kubernetes style API. So if you're using some custom, for example, databases, you can just create your own Kubernetes style API and then call out to your database or other stuffs and then you can combine them into your own platform. And that's very powerful because everyone can just use the same API, the Kubernetes style API, to manage almost everything. And that enables it to be able to, you know, on Kubernetes being adopted in different industries such as IoT, AI, and more. So actually, this is perfect because this leads into what I was going to say. The secret of Kubernetes that we don't talk about, actually Joe Beta says this a lot, but it's a Kubernetes as a platform for creating platforms. So Kubernetes really is almost built on itself. You can extend Kubernetes, but Kubernetes extends itself with the same semantics that it lets users extend it. So Janet was talking about- It's becoming the software that is eating the world. Yeah, it literally is. So Janet talked about the CRD, these custom resource definitions. It's the same mechanism that Kubernetes uses to add new features. So whenever you're using these mechanisms, you're using the Kubernetes, basically the Kubernetes infrastructure to create. So really what it is, is that this is a toolkit for creating your solutions, which is why I say that Kubernetes is not an endpoint. It's the journey. It gets you there. So it's cloud-native system D. So you know what? Yeah, and I like the Linux analogy that people talk about, like Kubernetes is like Linux. If you think about how Linux, little L-Linux, yeah, you know what I'm saying? Little L-Linux, let's put together. Yeah, Kubernetes, parts of Kubernetes would be system D. And it's all these components come together to create your operating system. And that's the best part about it. Yeah, okay. So for the people that are not the 7700 that are here, give them a little bit of a walk around the show and some of the nooks and crannies that they might not know. For myself, having been to a number of these, like boy, there were so many half day and full day workshops yesterday. There were like at least like 15 or 17 or something like that that I saw. Obviously there's some of the big keynotes. The Expo Hall is sprawling. I've been to 15, 20,000 people show here and this Expo Hall feels as bustling as that one is and as well as tons of breakout sessions. So give us some of the things that people would have been missing if they didn't come to the show here. So just for the record, if you miss the show, you can still watch all the videos online. And then you can also watch the live stream for keynotes. So I personally love the different ways for customizing Kubernetes. So there's a customizing Kubernetes track and also there's the applications track and I personally love that. And also I like the case studies. So you can go to the case studies track to see different users and users of Kubernetes share their real world stories. Yeah, so the thing that she will miss, there's a few things that you'll miss if you're not here in Barcelona right now. The first thing is that this convention center is huge. It's a 10 minute walk from the door to where we are sitting right now. But more seriously, one of the things you'll miss is that before the conference start, there are a whole bunch of summits. Red Hat had a summit and a few of the people had summits yesterday where they talked about things. There's the training sessions, which a lot of cases aren't recorded. And then another thing is that the special entrance groups, the SIGs, so the Kubernetes SIGs, they all get together and they have face-to-face discussions. And then generally the ones from yesterday were not recorded. So what you're missing is the people who actually make this big machine turn, they get together face-to-face and first of all they build from Rotary, but they get to discuss items that require a high bit of bandwidth that you really can't do over a GitHub issue or email or even a Slack call. Like you can actually get these things solved. And the best thing is watching these people and then you watch the great ideas that in three, six months to a year become like real big things. So I bet yesterday something was discussed. Actually I know of some things that were discussed yesterday that might fundamentally change how we deal with Kubernetes. So that is the value of being here. And then the third thing is like when you come to a conference like this where there's almost 8,000 people, there's a lot of conversations that happen between the Expo Hall and the session rooms. And there's people are getting jobs here, people are finding new friends and people are learning. And the fourth thing, and I'll end with this, is that I walk around looking for people who come in on the diversity scholarships and I would not hear their stories if I did not come. So I met two people. I met a young lady from New Zealand who got the scholarship and flew here, you know, and super smart, but is in New Zealand and in university and I get to hear her insights on life. And then I get to share how you can do better. And the same thing, I met a gentleman from Zimbabwe yesterday who's going to school in Cape Town. And what I hear is that there are so many smart people without opportunities. So if you're looking for opportunities, it's in these halls. There's a lot of people who have either money for you or they have resources or really doesn't have a job. Or just, you know what, maybe there's someone you can call whenever you're stuck. So there is a lot of benefit to coming to these if you can get here. Talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is not. So I think the diversity scholarship program is one of the most inspirational things I saw mentioned out of a number of inspirational things today. No, it's my favorite part of Kubernetes. You know, I am super lucky that I have an employee or employer that can afford to send me here. But I'm also super lucky that I probably could just afford to send myself here if I wanted to. And I do as much as I can to get people here. Well, Brian and Janet, thank you so much for all you did to put this and sharing it with our community here. I'll repeat something that I said in Seattle actually. There was a lot of cloud shows out there. But if you're looking for, you know, that independent cloud show that, you know, lives in this multi hybrid cloud, whatever you want to call it world, you know, this is one of the best out there. And the people, absolutely, if you don't come, the networking opportunities we had into it on earlier and they talked about how, you know, this is the kind of place you come and you find a few people that you could hire to train the hundreds of people inside on all of the latest cloud native pieces. So can I say one more thing? Please, Brian. So this is significant and it's significant for Janet and I. We are in the United States, we are, you know, Janet is a minority and I am a minority. This is the largest open source conference in the world series. This is the largest open source conference in Europe. When we do, at the end of the year, whenever we do San Diego, it'll be the largest open source conference in the world. And look who's running it. You know, my new co-chair is also a minority. This is amazing and I love that it shows that people who look like us, we can come up here and do these things. Cause like you said, opportunity is, you know, opportunity is the hard thing. Talent is everywhere. It's all over the place and I'm glad we had a chance to do this. All right, well, Brian and Janet, thank you so much for all of that. And Corey and I will be back with more coverage after this brief break. Thank you for watching theCUBE.