 KubeCon and CloudNativeCon is coming up this month, live from Amsterdam, April 18th to the 21st. The Kube will be on the ground reporting, thanks to the support of Red Hat and other ecosystem partners. It's a sold out event, only virtual tickets are now available. There can be hundreds of exhibitors over a dozen high energy keynote speakers, and I'm here with Stu Miniman, the director of market insights at Red Hat and Kube analyst, Rob Streche, who will be co-hosting along with John Furrier, Savannah Peterson and Jupe Piscar. Guys, welcome, good to see you. Thanks for coming into our studios. Dave, so excited. I said it's a little bit of a time warp for me, because I was already to do KubeCon Amsterdam in 2020. Jupe and I were actually gonna co-host the Kube then, and of course we all know what happens, but in the due course of time, now we're back, as you said, huge event, lot of energy, I'm super excited to get back to Amsterdam and do another KubeCon. I used to do this all the time before Big Kube show, so thanks for coming in, but so what can we expect at this event? It's like sold out, how many people, what are gonna be the big themes? Yeah, so Dave, first of all, I hear eight to 10,000 people is what we expected. In the next day or so, there's a wait list and a few people are hoping to get the tickets to get off of it, as you said, otherwise there is the virtual event that they can participate in. The thing about this show is, it basically is a choose your own adventure, so there are so many projects, we forget, it is KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, so there are literally hundreds of open source projects, as you said, you walk around that show floor and there's many just projects that are there, lots of the open source projects, certain products that become open source, certain things that come out of big companies and become open source projects. There are the pre-show activities, so like a big one that we have is OpenShift Commons where we have lots of great customers talking, sharing their stories about projects that they're working on and technologies that they're working on and oh my gosh, we'll get into some of the key themes and topics there, but definitely so much to learn and what's always interesting is at every show, like in the keynote, they'll be like, how many people is this your first KubeCon and two thirds of the audience raised their hand? So it's not the same 5,000 people go into all of these shows and for our team, I'm one of the few going from North America, from Red Hat, and most of the people we're going to have there are European in Poland. And Rob, excited to have you as a Kube host. You know, when you prep for a Kube host, you got to go in with sort of a premise, you want to test, what are you thinking? Yeah, so I'm really excited to hear where people are going on the, not just the day zero operations types of stuff with Kubernetes because I think a lot of that's been figured out already. I think where people are struggling or trying to understand and use KubeCon to get there is day one and day two. So what happens the day after you deploy? And I think a lot of that has to do with not just how do I build, but how do I iterate through those cloud native applications in a Kubernetes environment? I think it's gonna be really interesting to see because I think there's gonna be a big ops theme to this one as well and people trying to figure out, okay, where are different projects that are coming up, open telemetry and others that are being embraced by more and more companies, but how do they really play in this ecosystem? Before we get into some of the trends, let's look at the state of the spending data from ETR. So you pull up this slide, it shows the investment momentum in market presence, about 1500 IT decision makers that ETR surveys each quarter, again the Y-axis is net score spending momentum and the X-axis is presence in the data set, basically how many mentioned sort of mind share if you will. And we're showing data from January 19, you see container orchestration and platforms both off the charts from a momentum standpoint, the two highest sectors in terms of spending velocity well above that 40% dotted line that we consider elevated. Now if you fast forward to today, this is April 2023, it's the survey still in the field, you can see everything has come back down to earth, not a surprise, not much above the 40% line, containers and AI of course with all the chat GPT noise and automation platforms like RPA, still hovering at 40% along with cloud, but every other sector below 40% and you can see the kind of progression of those squiggly lines of containers. Now look, this is no surprise with the economic concerns, but where are we in terms of the maturity of Kubernetes, specifically containers and even broader open source? Yeah, so Dave, one of the things I thought it's interesting looking at those data points is if you look at that spending line, it's in line with cloud computing. And first of all, Kubernetes is everywhere. So Kubernetes adoption in the data center been growing quite a bit in the cloud, but little over a year ago I spoke to one of the senior leaders at AWS and they said, point blank the default deployment option for customers today in AWS is containers and of course Kubernetes, they've got their Kubernetes, we have our first-party product from Red Hat that's part of their offering, a very big part of what people are doing. So I like the data, people are still growing and adding, but we still have quite a bit of the market to move into from a container and Kubernetes standpoint. And to your point, Rob, the focus is going to be on ops because okay, hey, we've done this, it's really exciting and now it's like, okay, there's cost considerations, I got to secure these containers, there brings new complexity, not necessarily a bad thing, it's just a new thing. Yeah, and ramping up into this, I was talking to some customers that were former customers of mine, also talking to some former colleagues that are doing these deployments and I think a lot of what they're looking at is how do they deal with the cost? And I think what Stu was just mentioning about the fact that there is a lot of on-premise Kubernetes happening. In fact, I think that you're going to see a very on-prem flavor a little bit underneath the kind of the waves of the cloud providers talking about this coming week or in a couple of weeks here. Why, why do you think that? Because there's just a cost factor, if everybody's looking at their AWS bill going, geez, I didn't expect this, maybe we can optimize on-prem. Absolutely, and I think it has to do with as you get into things like AI and ML, where is the data and where do I have the large? And if I'm training these models and I'm building applications that are cloud native in Kubernetes, I'm doing that on-prem closer to the data, training those models because I don't have the expense of moving them around. Now, I think there's some, it's not everybody, I think that there is momentum in that direction which is, I think, bared out by the ETR data as well. Stu, everybody's talking, of course, about foundation models. Amy Diamond in his 43-page letter to shareholders, he's talking about GPT. WebAssembly was the big talk at Detroit, but you got to believe AI is going to be front and center at this show. Yeah, Wasm, great buzz in Detroit. There is a Wasm day at the show, Red Hat heavily participating in what's going on there, but to your point, I totally agree. On the drive over here, Dave, listening to the news, I didn't hear discussion of Wasm because it's not something that the general public would know about. Everyone has been talking about the AI moment, chat GPT, foundational models. We have products we've been working on Red Hat. A lot of our partner ecosystem have ways that they're trying to leverage that technology. Dave, you've been talking for years about how do we monetize and leverage that source of data and artificial intelligence is really having that moment. So I do expect it to be a hot topic. It's not something that I see on the schedule yet, but AI as a workload is phenomenal for containers and Kubernetes, built for scale, built for automation. That's one of the things we do with Kubernetes. Yeah, I mean data infrastructure is a hot topic right now, what that looks like. And so what is the play, Rob, do you think for AI and containers? Is it just hyper automation? Is it sort of new data apps? It's scale up and scale down. And I think the down part is big with economy and everything like that and people are looking at how do they not just have things running forever. And I think where people had done that in the past with VMs and before that servers or even mainframe back in the day, right now they're looking at it and going, how do I burst? How do I build applications that actually can take advantage of this operational mode, that day two type of mode? And I think that's where they're focusing. And I also think that there's a lot of open source data projects from Spark to Iceberg to a whole number of different ones that are out there that really fit nicely in the Kubernetes ecosystem and play very well in a Kubernetes environment. And people are looking at, okay, here's how I scale my data infrastructure. And I think that's been, will be very an undercurrent. And I think it's not gonna be overt to exactly what you both were just talking about, but people will be talking about, here's how we're building our new products based on these foundational models. I'd be interested if you could test this on theCUBE, is that you're earlier premise about hybrid. Because, you know, Stu, I wonder if you have some thoughts on this, because if you look at a lot of the data platforms anyway are happening in the cloud. They take the snowflakes, the Databricks, even like a Mongo, all the momentum's around Atlas. But how does that square? And you guys are right in the thick of hybrid cloud. I mean, I'd be embot you to be a leader in hybrid. How does that square with the capabilities? You know, everybody wants to be in the cloud because they got all the tools. Are those coming to on-prem? Is hybrid maturing along with Kubernetes? Yeah, so Dave, absolutely. One of the things I always joked about is, you know, we started with hybrid and multi-cloud really by accident. But we're starting to be more strategic is how we architect things. There are these little pesky problems of the laws of physics. So moving data between sites isn't easy, but some of the things we're doing from a Kubernetes standpoint are allowing me to have a little bit more flexibility as to where my clusters live, how I access certain services. We're working very closely with Amazon, Microsoft, Google as to how their hybrid strategies are being built out and live along those environments. So one of the big containers as an architecture brings you much, much closer to the application itself and you want to be able to live everywhere. But yeah, I mean, one of the biggest challenges, you know, Rob said, you know, getting started is easy. How do we simplify the operations? The big buzz for the last year has been, do we move to something like platform engineering? And, you know, every journalist out there has an article that, you know, DevOps is dead. What's the role of the SRE? So now platform engineering is the hotness today. I'll be sitting on a panel with, you know, some of our peers in the industry talking about that. Well, let's get into that a little bit. How has the role of developer role evolved? I mean, there's obviously some good resume building. Everybody wanted to be developing in containers and Kubernetes. Yeah. Like you said, you know, platform engineering, SRE, it's all the hot topic. Is there a backlash? We heard, you know, Brian Gracely is one of his cloudcasts talked about the backlash of DevRel, the people are cutting developer relations. What's the state of developers, Rob, from your perspective? And I think it is kind of that. The developers are also burning out, the ones that are there. And I think, you know, the whole don't SRE me movement for devs is real. I was talking to an architect for a large financial organization just yesterday and his whole thing was I love that being an architect because I'm not carrying the pager right now. And that, I think, you know, having been at Amazon and lived that life where you get paged at three in the morning, you look at it and go everybody in that squad carries the pager. And so you're all, you build it, you run it. And I think that's the backlash is really about that. And it's not necessarily the developer relations. I think it's people are looking at it and going, hey, we've split this apart before and had IT and app development. It looks like it's going that direction. It looks like it really is going to that platform engineering, which we would have called IT 10 years, 20 years ago. You know, Stu, the other thing is the devs are being asked to do a lot, as Rob was saying, like security. There's like getting that problem thrown at them. You had a comment? Yeah, just to that point, you know, my developers are so important and do I have them working on the right thing as Rob said, if I have to build it and run it, absolutely you're going to get burned out. So there's certain things. You know, how do I scale these environments? How do I really make sure they're secure? You know, DevSecOps is wonderful, but it doesn't mean that everybody in the team needs to be able to handle everything. There's so many technologies to learn, so much focus. You want the developers to be able to, you know, write code, modernize their environment, take advantage of new technologies and not always have to be the one that's relied on, you know, if they're being called all hours of the night. So that's where, you know, platform engineering can help. In many ways it reminds me, you know, I've talked to, you know, so many banks or large institutions that they will build a platform and they become a service provider internally. And that's really platform engineering has some special tooling on it. So like the project that we are working with is Backstage, which came out of Spotify. And really, really cool technology to create an IDP. What is the feedback though? It's really tough for me to use. The user interface isn't wonderful for us. Hey, we at Red Hat know a thing or two about that kind of challenge and it's what we've worked on for decades to help. And that's our goal is to help it so that it can be more broadly adopted. But it's not like this takes over the entire world or changes the role of the developers or lessens their world. DevRel is its own special beast as to, you know, how do you market to developers? Well, you don't, you know, how do you get developers to use things, create great products, make it easy to use and hopefully somebody eventually pays for things. That whole monetization of, you know, freemium or open source is a challenge for many companies. We've been doing it a long time, David Red Hat and it's still, it's not like every product of ours automatically, you know, has money rolling into the cost. But a lot of it is education, right? I mean, that's what DevRel is really there to educate and try to inspire people to, you know, play with new technology and then get feedback and, you know, be there to listen to the feedback and show that they can actually cycle through the system. What about, so stay on security for a second. Zero trust is the new catchphrase. But we've certainly talked about, you know, securing containers and shifting left and, you know, all that stuff, supply chain security. How does the zero trust play into the world of containers and Kubernetes? Do you expect to hear a lot of talk there? Or is it more just sort of still a buzzword? Yeah, so zero trust will be there, Dave. Secure supply chain has been a huge discussion at KubeCon for the last two years or so. We've actually got a survey that will be sharing the results at KubeCon and, you know, without sharing the actual data points which we'll share and we've got some wonderful graphics and everything like that. It's, yes, security is still a challenge. Most, we've had the majority of companies have had secure supply chain issues that they've run into in the last year. And therefore, you know, I need to have this, that, you know, even more of a focus. We know security is everyone's responsibility, but really doing container security is something that is still new to most companies. It's something we've been working on. We made an acquisition in the space about two years ago. Yeah, and I think that it's exactly that. It's gotten really complicated in the security world because there's so many different companies building a piece of security. There's not one big open standard across everything for the Kubernetes environment. And then to your point, it's not just about securing the infrastructure and underlying platform. It's about from the app all the way back to the data. And I think it's taking into account that, you know, again, the supply chain aspect of it for these open source communities is not exactly necessarily being there. I mean, you had Git went out and put out their whole supply chain, you know, being able to do that IBM. You guys went and, or on the IBM side, open sourced some of theirs from a supply chain perspective to help companies have a better feel for what are you getting and how are you building that out within these communities. And I think that has to continue, but there's gonna be consolidation in the security space because there's just too many people trying to go after too many of similar pieces plus a little bit more. So that's the downside potentially of open source and security. There's so many options out there. The flip side is it's open and you can get a lot of people working on it. And the reality is you're not just gonna buy a, you know, a stack from a single vendor. I mean, you just not, even if you're an Oracle customer, you're not going to just buy all their stuff. So let's do any projects that we should be aware of before we close anything you wanna highlight. Well, from a security standpoint, Sigstore is the big one that's been running from an overall project. We talked about backstage being one. What is backstage? Backstage is the platform engineering, the IDP platform to be able to create that piece. In the space overall, Dave, there are still so many projects. Rob mentioned open telemetry out there. GitOps, which Argo CD is the project that we work on, came out of Intuit, is one that, you know, we're on that road to the 1.0 version that we've been driving. So there's so many other projects there. We've got over 50 projects that we are actively contributing, have chair people on and everything like that. And then that's just the ones that make it into our product. We have dozens more that we're working on outside the space, including Lake Walsum that we mentioned. Thanks for coming in. Enjoy the show. Rob, psych to have you as a cube analyst on the program and have a blast. Yeah, excited. All right, April 18th to the 23rd. Tune in at thecube.net, stop by and see us at theCUBE. Thanks for watching.