 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, the 2020 European show, of course, happening virtually. And that has put some unique challenges for the people running the show. We're really happy to welcome to the program. She is one of the co-chairs of this event, and she is also a principal software engineer at Splunk. Constance, Carol Monaless, thank you so much for joining us. Hi, thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here. It's definitely an interesting time. All right, so Constance, you know, we know KubeCon, you know, it's a great community, you know, robust. Everybody loves to get together. There's some really interesting, you know, hallway conversations and so much going on. We've been watching, you know, the four or five years we've been doing theCUBE at this show, you know, just huge explosion of, you know, the breadth and depth of the content, and of course, great people there. Just if we could start with a little bit, you know, your background, as I mentioned, you're the co-chair, you also, you work for Splunk by way of an acquisition of Omniscient. Try saying that three times fast. And, you know, Omniscient was, you were telling me as a company that was bought really before it came out of stealth. But when it comes to the community itself, you know, how long have you been involved in this community? What kind of led you to being co-chair? Yeah, I guess I've been involved with the community since 2017. So I was at Lyft before Omniscient Splunk and I was lucky enough to be one of the first engineers on Envoy, you know, you might have heard of Envoy. Sorry, I laughed at my own jokes. But what, I guess the thing that I, like my first exposure to KubeCon in the CNCF community was KubeCon Austin. And the thing that I was amazed by was, actually you said it, the hallway tracks, right? Just, you know, I would just see someone and be like, hey, like I think I've seen your code of view. Can I say hi? And that started, that got me at least a little bit involved in terms of talking to more people than they needed people. I would be, you know, work on a PR or in some of the community meetings. And that was my first exposure to the community. And so I was involved in Envoy, pretty actively involved in Envoy until, from 2016 until May 2018. And then I switched projects and turned into Lyft and did some other stuff. And I came back into CNCF community in open telemetry as of last year, actually almost exactly a year ago now to work on making tracing, I'm gonna say useful. And the reason why I say useful is that usually people think of tracing as, you know, not as important as metrics and logs, but there is so much to tracing that we just, we tend to undervalue. And that's why I got involved with open telemetry and admission because there's some really interesting ways that you could view tracing, use tracing, and you could answer a lot of questions that we have in our day-to-day. And so that's kind of, that's how I got involved in the second round community. And then ended up getting nominated to be on the co-chair. And I obviously said yes, because this is an amazing opportunity to meet more people and have more of that hallway track. All right, so definitely want to talk about open tracing, but let's talk about the event first. As we were talking about, you know, that community, you always love, you know, the speakers, when they finish a session, they get mobbed by people doing questions. When you walk through the expo hall, you go see people. So give us a little bit of insights as to, you know, how we're trying to, you know, replicate that experience, you know, make sure that there's, you know, I don't know, office hours for the speakers and just places and spaces for people to, you know, connect and meet people. Yeah, so we'll say that like, part of the challenge with KubeCon U was that it had already been meant to be a in-person event. And so we're changing it to virtual, isn't going to be as smooth as a KubeCon, well, we have the China event that's happening in a few weeks or a Boston right that's still going on. Like those ones are being thought out a lot more as a proper virtual event. So there's a little bit of the awkwardness of, you know, now everything is going to be online. It's like you can't actually shake someone's hand in a hallway, but we are definitely trying to be cognizant of one in terms of future load, like probably less content, right? It's harder to sit in front of a screen and listen to everything. And so we know that we have a little bandwidth. We are trying to find different pieces of software that, you know, allow for better Q and A, right? Exactly, like the mobbing after session is one as a speaker and one as a attendee is sometimes I think the best part about conferences is you get to, you know, you might, like someone might have said something like, hey, like this is a little tidbit. I need to ask you more questions about this. You know, so we're providing software to at least make that as smooth. I'm putting things in quotation and as you'll be able to tell you on who's watching as I speak with my hands. Right, so we're trying to, we're definitely trying to provide software to at least, you know, make that initial interaction as smooth as possible, maybe as easy as possible. We know it's probably gonna be a little bit bumpy just because maybe it's also the first time like everyone, every conference is facing this issue. So it's gonna be really interesting to see how the conference software evolves. It is things that we've talked about in terms of maybe offering better office hours. For that, it's still something that like, I don't know, it's, I think it's actually, I think it's gonna be really just an open question for all of us is that how do we maintain that community? And I think maybe when we were talking or kind of when I was like planting the seed of a topic beforehand, it was like, there's something I was thinking about. It was like, how do we actually define community? Cause so much of it has been defined of that hallway track or bumping into someone, right? It's like, and, you know, going into someone's booth and be like, you, you know, like asking that question there because it is a lot less intimidating to ask something in person that is to ask it online when everyone can see your question, right? I know I ask less questions online. So I guess maybe what they don't wanna say is that for now that I'm thinking about it is like, if you have a question, please ask questions, right? We are, you know, for certain, if a recording is done, if there's a recording for a talk, the speakers are usually being available online during the session, but afterwards, so please ask your questions when things come up because that's gonna be a really good way to at least still have a bit of that question there. And also don't be shy. Please, if something is, I guess, even when I say like in terms of like, when it comes to review code reviews, but if something's unintuitive or let's say think about something else, like interact with it, say it, or even, you know, ask that question on Twitter. If you're brave enough, I wouldn't, but I also don't barely use Twitter. Yeah, I don't know. It's a big open question. I don't know what the community is gonna look like and it's gonna be harder. Yeah. Well, one of the things I know every time I go to the show conferences, you know, when the keynote went, it's always like, okay, how many people is this your first time at the show? And you look around and it's, you know, somewhere, you know, a third or half of people attending for the first time. I know I'm trying to remember if it was, you know, year and a half ago or so, there was graded kind of a one-on-one track at the show to really help, you know, onboard and give people into the show because, you know, when the show started out, it was like, okay, it was Kubernetes and a couple of other things. Now you've got the graduated, the incubated, you know, the dozens of sandbox projects out there. And then even more projects out there. So, you know, cloud native is quite a broad topic. There is no wrong way is where you can start and there's so many paths that you can go on. So, any tips or things that we're doing this time to kind of help broaden and welcome in those new participants? Yeah. So there's two things. One is actually the one-on-one track is official for a KUKON EU. So we do have like there's a few good talks in terms of like how to approach KUKON. It was meant to originally be for a person, but at least helping people in terms of general terms, right? Because sometimes there's so much terminology that it feels like you need to carry, you know, cloud native dictionary around with you. Doing that and giving suggestions there. So that's one of the first talks that is gonna be able to watch on KUKON EU. So I highly suggest that. This is actually a really tough question because a lot of it would have been, like I guess it would have been, for me it would have been in person. It'd be like, don't be afraid to like, you know, if you see someone that, you know, said something really interesting in a talk you attended, like even if it's not after the question, just be like, hey, I thought what you said was really cool. And I just wanna say, I appreciate your work. Like expressing that appreciation and just, even if it isn't, you know, like the most thoughtful question in the world, just saying thank you or, you know, I appreciate you is a really good way to open things up because the people who are speaking are just as, well, most people are probably just as scared of going up there and sharing their knowledge as probably you are of asking question. So I think the main takeaway of that is don't be shy, you know, like maybe do a nervous dance to get those jitters out. And then after, right? And then ask that question or say, like, thank you. It's really nice to meet you. It's harder to have a virtual coffee. So hopefully they have their own teapot or a, you know, a coffee maker beside them but after do that, send an email. I think one thing that is very common and I have a hard time with this is that it's easy to get overwhelmed with how much content there is. Or you said it is just like, I feel so small and, you know, at least, say if you're only focusing on Kubernetes, especially like a few years ago, at least, you know, like maybe that there are a lot of people who are really advanced but now that there's so many different people, like so many people from all range of expertise and this subject matter experts and interests that it's okay to be overwhelmed and just be like, I need to take a step back because mentally attending like a few talks a day is like, I feel like it's taking like several exams because there's so much information is being bombarded at you and you're trying to process it. So understand that you can't process it all in one day and that's okay, come back to it, right? It's great thing is that all of these talks are recorded and so you can watch it another time. And I would say probably just choose like three or four talks that you're really excited about and listen to those. Don't need to watch everything because as I said, we can't process it all and that's okay and ask questions. So some great advice there because right, if we were there in person, it was always, you know, and what you really want to see or the speakers you want to engage with because you can go back and watch on demand. That's been one of the great opportunities with the virtual events is you can have access to on demand. You can poke and prod, you know, personally, I love that a lot of them you can adjust the speed of them. So if it's something that it's kind of an intro talk, I can crank it up to one and a half or two X speed and get through more content or I can pause it, rewind if I'm not getting it. And the other opportunity is, I tell you the last two or three years when I'm at an event, I try to just spend my time not looking at my phone talking to people. But now there's the opportunity, hey, if I can be of help, if anybody in the community has a question or wants to get connected to somebody, we know a lot of people, I'm easily reachable on Twitter and I'm not sitting on a plane or in the middle of something that being like. So there is just a great robust community out there online and we're great to be a part of it. So speaking of projects, you mentioned open telemetry, which is what your day job works on. It's been a really interesting topic, of course, for those that don't know the history, there were actually two projects that merged. It was open tracing and open census, created open telemetry. So why don't you bring us up to speed as to where we are with the project and what people should be looking at at the show and throughout the rest of 2020. Open telemetry is very exciting. We just did our first beta release. So for anyone who's been on the fence of, is open telemetry getting traction or is it something I should look at? This is a really great time to one get involved in open telemetry and start looking into it if it's as a viable project. But I guess I should probably take a step back of what is open telemetry? Open telemetry, as you mentioned, was the merging of the marriage of open tracing and open census, right? It was an acknowledgement that so many engineers were trying to solve the same problem. But as most of us knows, right? We are trying to solve the same problem, but we had two different implementations and we actually ended up having essentially a lot of ways to resources because we're all trying to solve the same problem, but then we're working on two different implementations. So that marriage was to address that because, right? It's like, if you look at all of the major players, all of the players on open telemetry, right? They have a wide variety of vendor experience, right? Even as a speaking from the vendor hat, right? We do have a lot of, you know, we have, vendors are really lucky that they get to work with so many customers and they get to see all these different use cases. Then there's also just so many actually end users who are using it. And they have very peculiar use cases too, that, you know, even with a wide set of other people they're not gonna necessarily have that. So open telemetry gets to merge all those different use cases into one, or I guess not into one, but like into, you know, a wide set of implementations or at least is maintained by a larger group instead of having two separate. And so the first goal was to unify tracing. Tracing is really far ahead in terms of implementation. A lot of several reference, or several implementations and libraries like Go, Java, Python, Ruby, I'm blanking on other languages right now. But, you know, quite a bit of the list there. And there's even a collector too, which some people might refer to as an agent depending on what background they have. And so there's a lot of ways to, one, implement tracing and also metrics for your services and also gather that data and manipulate it, right? So example, tracings, I love tracing, right? It's like you can generate a lot of traces but sometimes missing data. Like the collector is a really great place to add data to that. So going back to the state of open telemetry, open telemetry since we just did a beta release, right? We're getting closer to GA. GA is something that we're tracking for at some point this year, no dates yet, but it's something that we're really pushing towards. But we're starting to have a very stable API in terms of tracing, metrics is on its way, logs is also something we're wrapping up on. It is a really great opportunity to, you know, all the different ways that we generate that, you know, we even say like service owners, applications, even business, right? That we're trying to collect data and to have visibility into our applications. This is a really great way to provide one common framework to generate all that data, to gather all that data and generate all that data. So it is really exciting. And I don't know, there's like, we just want more users. And why we say that is to the earlier point is that the more users that we have who are engaged with community, right? If you want to open an issue, have a question. If you want to send a PR, please do. Like we really want more community engagement. It is a great time to do that because we are just starting to get traction, right? Like hopefully, I don't know, hopefully in a year or two, like we are one of those really big, you know, big projects right up on CNCF where everyone could climb and see how much has grown. And it's a great time to join and help influence the project. So many chances for ownership. I don't know, it's really exciting. We can talk about use cases another time. Constance is really exciting. Congratulations on the progress there. I'm sure everybody's, you know, looking forward to, as you said, be a later this year. I want to give you the final word yourself. And Vicki Chung is the co-chair for the event. What's your real goal? What do you hope the takeaway is from, you know, this instance of the 2020 European show, of course, virtual now instead of Amsterdam? Is it, I guess maybe that I think that, I guess like two parts. One for the takeaway is that, you know, it's probably going to be awkward, right? Especially going back to the community is that we don't have a lot of that in-person thing. So this will be an awkward interaction, but it's a really great place for us to want to assess what a community means to us and how we interact with the community. So I think it's going to be going into it with an open mindset of just knowing like, don't set the expectations like any other coupon because we just know it won't be, right? We can't even have, you know, the after hours, like going out for coffee or drinks and all stuff there. So having that there and being open to that and being different. And then also, if you have ideas, share it with us because we want to know how we can make it better. So expect that it's different, but it's still going to provide you with a lot of the content that you've been looking for. And we still want to make that as much of a welcoming experience for you. So know that we're doing our best and we're open to feedback and we're here for you. Excellent, well, Constance, thank you so much for the work that you and the team have been doing on absolutely one of the events that we always look forward to. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right, lots more coverage of theCUBE at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe 2020. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching.