 I'm Cheryl Hung and it is magical to be back for my 11th KubeCon cloud native con. What excites me and keeps me coming back is seeing people discover cloud native for the first time, grow their careers and transform into community and industry leaders who then bring on the next generation of cloud natives. Going virtual has expanded KubeCon to people who could never have dreamed of attending previously. So whether this is your first KubeCon or your veteran, you're welcome. You're a part of this community and I want you to grow and to help others grow. Along with virtual events, COVID has accelerated everything cloud native. Over 80 projects now call CNCF home and there's almost a thousand cloud native tools and frameworks on the CNCF landscape. Organizations are pushing the possibilities of where and how to deploy containers and Kubernetes but to fully embrace cloud native you're going to have to understand what's possible and what are the challenges you're going to face along the way. I lead to the CNCF end user community. It's the largest end user community of any open source foundation or standards body with over 140 members. So I have a pretty unique view into how engineers solve thousands of problems across hundreds of different environments. Today I'm going to reveal these insights from the CNCF end user community to you so you're equipped for your cloud native journey. Each year the CNCF end user community votes to award one member the CNCF top end user award. Previous winners included Zalando, Inturitz, Bloomberg, JD.com and Didi. This year I'm not only announcing the winner but I've invited all of the nominees to share their cloud native journey with you and what the community means to them. But before we find out the winner I want us to have a little bit of fun kubecom style. I'm going to challenge you to solve a small problem in the style of the CKS or certified kubernetes security specialist exam. At the end I'll reveal the solution and that solution will reveal the winner of the CNCF top end user 2021. So I'm going to go over to the laptop. If you've taken the CKA, CKAD or CKS certifications this is going to look really familiar. So I'm in the Linux Foundation exam portal. On the left hand side I have the task that we're going to do today and on the right hand side I have a terminal which links to a live cluster. First off let's just take a quick look at the cluster itself which I'm going to do with a quick get nodes. This looks like a really tiny cluster just a master and a single worker and then our task is in three parts. So the first task is to retrieve the content of the existing secret named credentials in the demo namespace and I'm going to do that just to look at that. Cool okay I've seen that we have a credential secret and credentials encodes the name of the winner of the top end user award. So when we find out the solution to this we'll also find out the winner of the award itself. Our second part is to store the winner field and the password field into these two files creating them as we go along and then the third part is to use secret and decrypt one from the other. I'm going to pause there and I'm going to ask you what would you do in this situation. So head over to Slack discuss it with other people and we'll find out the solution at the end okay. Time to bring on our nominees to introduce themselves. We have one-on-one mail-in media Apple, CERN, Fidelity, Spotify and Verizon Media Hello KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. I am Stefan from one-on-one mail-in media in Germany. You may not have heard of us ever before but probably you do know one of our brands WebDE, GMX or Mail.com. With these brands we are Germany's biggest email provider. More than 40 million monthly active users trust our free email services. Additionally we offer further services for personal information management, identity management, cloud-based file storage and news portals. Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple's five software platforms iOS, iPad OS, Mac OS, Watch OS and TV OS provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iCloud. Apple's more than 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth and to leaving the world better than we found it. CERN is the world's largest particle physics laboratory. It was founded in 1954 with the main goal being fundamental research. We try to understand the building blocks of the universe and for that we build very large scientific experiments like the Large Hadron Collider. Fidelity investment is 75 years old privately owned financial institution. We invested billions of dollars annually in game changing technology platforms between big data, AI, cloud computing, very forward-thinking ideas that happen inside our Fidelity Technology teams. Spotify launched in 2008 and today we are the world's most popular audio streaming subscription service. We have 345 million users including 155 million subscribers and we're live in 178 markets around the world. Our mission is to unlock the potential of human creativity by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it. Hi I'm Mujibu Ha from Verizon Media. As a Verizon Media group our brands like Yahoo, Tecrunch, Riot and many more help people stay informed and entertained communicate and transact while creating new ways for our advertisers and partners to connect with. With technologies like XR, AI, machine learning and 5G we are transforming media for tomorrow too. All right first off tell me why and how you're using cloud native. One-on-one Made in Media's cloud native journey started in 2017 with our first small Kubernetes cluster. Since then the environment has grown to 16 clusters running on nearly 1,000 bare metal servers. This sums up to 55,000 usable CPU cores and 280 terabytes of RAM. The clusters are managed and operated centrally by a dedicated and highly skilled team of specialists. Access to the Kubernetes clusters is provided by a multi-tenancy setup. This provides easy but still isolated on-demand provisioning, dynamic autoscaling and efficient usage of available resources. The tight integration with our CI-CD system makes Kubernetes an attractive default platform for running our applications. This relieves the application DevOps teams from tedious and repetitive tasks so they can fully focus on providing business value instead. The core elements of our platform are CNCF projects like Kubernetes, HCD, container D, Prometheus and Open Policy Agent, Core DNS, Helm and Fluent D. And from the surrounding ecosystem we happily use traffic, Istio, Flatcar Linux, Calico, GitLab and Grafana. Apple was using Mesos but decided to transition to Kubernetes for scalability reasons. Our users are Java, Python and Go developers who want to test and run their applications and containers and are interested in Kubernetes as part of their CI-CD pipeline. We use a large number of CNCF projects, Kubernetes, container D, Envoy, Prometheus, Kubevert, at CD, Cryo, Opa, Core DNS, Jager, Falco and Helm. Our users want to adopt cloud-native tools for better debugging, logging, monitoring and tracing of our applications. One of our main challenges is to make sure that we can keep up with the needs of our physicists as they produce larger and larger experiments. This means that we are always searching for new technologies and Kubernetes and the cloud-native ecosystem and projects like Kubernetes but also Prometheus, Core DNS, Fluent D, container D and many others have made a huge impact by simplifying our infrastructure and letting us focus on the physics analysis itself. CNCF is allowing us to collaborate and to help building this unique solution. It did shape the strategy for fidelity and for multi-cloud strategy for all of our application workloads, between using Kubernetes, between the innovation ideas around Envoy and service mesh, between the open-to-limitry solutions that are being provided by CNCF. It did shape our strategy to build the foundation for the next generation of the financial service platform building site for that. On Kubernetes we are operating on 150 clusters running over 2,800 services across all stages of our software life cycle. We have multi-tenant clusters running many different types of workloads including ML jobs, media transcoding, data pipeline orchestration and high-scale backend services. Using Kubernetes has significantly reduced our cost and increased our overall velocity. We also use a number of other CNCF projects such as Prometheus for monitoring and Argo Rollouts for automated canary analysis and branch deployments. With the growing portfolio of media brands, we had n number of stack managed by n number of team. Each team doing their own tools and platforms and none of them were containerized. Additionally, we had our own in-house on-prem homegrown solution of pushing and deploying code. It was very, very painful and took a long time. When we decided to move towards immutable infrastructure and containerization, we evaluated a number of orchestration solutions and we picked Kubernetes which was outstanding for its futures. Today we have one of the largest Kubernetes on-prem cluster with over 2500 plus applications, 34 plus production clusters, running in seven data centers and 8000 plus node cluster. By moving service into container and using Kubernetes as an orchestration platform, it helped us to reduce duplication, standardize the way we build and deploy code today and also increased our cluster utilization and to add increased our product velocity and developer productivity. Next, what does the community mean to you? Melon Media joined the CNCF in the beginning of 2020 as an end user supporter. Since then, we are regularly participating at the bi-weekly community meetings, usually with at least two people. In this meeting series, we already had multiple opportunities to share our experience and knowledge in short presentations and of course we regularly engage in the discussions. Additionally, we host local meetups and also speak at conferences like DevOpsCon, Container Days in Hamburg and of course also at CubeCon, where we could enter the stage in 2019 in Barcelona and at least virtually last year. On the more technical side, we also involve ourselves in many products we use, at least by reporting issues we find or adding more data to existing bug reports. Occasionally, we can also contribute by fixing smaller bugs ourselves. Apple joined the CNCF in 2019 as an end user supporter. We actively participate as speakers and attendees at community events like CubeCon and even shared our story in a keynote at CubeCon North America last year. Apple employees serve on committees and boards throughout the project, including the CNCF governing board, TOC, steering committee and release team. We regularly participate in SIGs and employ a number of maintainers and core contributors to CNCF projects. Apple employees such as Paris Pittman and myself have received the Chalkwood and Careywater awards for our contributions to the community. So thank you very much, CNCF. It's been a very, very exciting journey until now, working with everyone with all the projects and the rest of the community and we are really, really looking forward to what's coming next and to continue working together with everyone. In the past year, we contributed two projects to the Office House community, Kiran and KConnect. We truly believe that all of them is going to help the community's board and will help them security and the governance side of the house. I believe that with that focus and with that support and with that cross promotion between CNCF and Fidelity, we are sponsoring many bug groups at this moment and workshops and we're helping our colleagues in other financial services and in other services as a matter of fact to help the CNCF strategy next year. And to help with the role map around Kubernetes and about other projects that CNCF has. I truly believe it's all space and it will help Fidelity as it will help the community as well. Our flagship contribution in 2020 was Backstage, which is our open source development portal. And the response from the community has been nothing short of extraordinary. In terms of adoption, we have 24 official company adopters, 79 companies are building a portal, 209 companies are interested in learning more and these numbers are growing rapidly. We have 302 Git clones per week and 313 external contributors. And the project is adding six new contributors every week. We've been contributing to almost all of the CNCF projects that we use, whether it's documentation, issues, code, or speaking about them at various conferences and meetups. Most notably, we've been actively contributing code to Envoy, where one of our engineers is a core contributor. We've also done extensive work with GRPC and Kubernetes where we've helped resolve numerous issues that we faced during adoption with the community at large. Beyond coder projects, we've also been very active. We have Spotify employees wearing many different hats across the CNCF, including one of the co-chairs of the developer experience in the end user community and one of the end user representatives on the CNCF TOC. But it's not just hats that we wear for CNCF. We wear lots of other swag too, including ambassador crowns, program committee pins, and of course, the endless amount of great t-shirts for different roles that we have for CNCF. We've also given many talks at KubeCon, including multiple keynotes and as many as six talks in San Diego. And we've done lots and lots of different podcasts representing CNCF technologies. There are many reasons we love being part of a CNCF end user community. As a company, giving back to the open source community has always been very important to us. We have made upstream Kubernetes contribution in the form of issues and pull requests specifically for Envoy and OPA. We also open source several Kubernetes focused projects. We also built an open source, a certificate based authentication and authorization system, ATENTS, to implement zero trust security principle in the platform. We are very excited that ATENTS is now part of the CNCF sandbox project and we are looking forward to build a great community around it. It's actually incredible to see how Cloud Native has transformed these organizations and what these teams have achieved. So huge thank you to you for sharing your stories. Let's go back to the laptop now, find out the solution and the winner for the top end user award 2021. Okay, so we were at the point of storing the winner and the password field into these two files. So let's take a closer look at that credential secret. And yeah, it looks like there is a password and a winner field here. So I'm going to take this and just echo it into these two files that I was told to. So I just got the winner one and I will do the same for password now. And then our third step was to use secrets to decrypt the winner field. And they've just given the entire command here. So what happens if I try this? Okay, looks like we screwed up somewhere because the key doesn't match. But the key doesn't match because we forgot that Kubernetes secrets are base 64 encoded already by default, which means that there are actually two layers of encryption to deal with here. We have to decrypt the base 64 and then we also have to decrypt with the password. But we can fix this. So let's go back to where we put the winner field into the seek into winner dot text. And we're going to just decrypt it before it goes in. Okay, now let's try decrypting using secret. And that's looking pretty good. So we should be able to find out the name of our winner. And it's Spotify. So congratulations to Spotify. Congratulations to you two if you were following along. And if you got the solution, Spotify have been an amazing member of our community. They've contributed so much through the projects, through donating their own project, through the TOC and the different community groups. And I'd really like to thank them and welcome them back on again to say a few words. Wow, I can't believe we won. Thank you so much. Thanks to all the end user companies that voted for us. And thanks to all the companies that submitted nominations, we were truly humbled and really inspired to read the other nominations and still really can't believe that we won out over them. Thanks again to everyone at CNCF and everyone in this community at Spotify. We're going to build on this and try to do even more with this community in next year. Thanks again, everyone. Congratulations to Spotify once again. Your award is on its way. And to sum up, Cloud Native is still accelerating. The board members are getting bigger and more complex. But with the help of the community, you too can take charge of your own Cloud Native journey. If you want even more insights, go to cncf.io slash end user and find out why your organization should join the CNCF end user community. This is Xiaohuang and I can't wait for you to show me what you can do.