 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2021 virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage everyone of KubeCon 2021 CloudNativeCon 21 Virtual Europe. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got two great guests here. James Lubachy, Senior Director of Product Management, Red Hat and Ruchir Puri, IBM Fellow and Chief Scientist at IBM Gentlemen. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for having us. So, got an IBM Fellow and a Chief Scientist, Senior Director of Product Management. You guys have the keys to the kingdom on CloudNative. All right, it's going to be fun. So let's just jump into it. So I want to ask you before we get into some of the questions around the projects. What's you guys take of KubeCon this year in terms of the vibe? I know it's virtual in Europe, North America looks like we're going to meet, might be in person, but this year with the pandemic, CloudNative just seems to have a spring to a step. It's got more traction. I've seen the CloudNative piece, even more than Kubernetes in a way. So it's got Kubernetes, it continues to have traction, but it's always about Kubernetes. Now it's more CloudNative vibe. What do you guys think about that? Yeah, I'm sure you have thoughts and I could add on. Yes, I think, well, I would really think of it as almost sequential in some ways. Kubernetes took hold. Now there's a layer which comes above it, which is where all our clients and enterprises realize the value, which is when the applications really move. It's about the applications and what they can deliver to their end customers. And the game now is really about moving those applications and making them CloudNative. That's when the value of that software infrastructure will get realized. And that's why you are seeing that vibe in the clients and enterprises and at TubeCon as well. Yeah, I mean, I think it's exciting. I've been covering this community since the beginning, as you guys know, the Cube. This is the enablement moment where the fruit is coming off the tree. You're starting to see that first wave of, you mentioned, that enablement, it's happening. And you can see it in the project. So I want to get into the news here, the conveyor community. What is this about? Can you take a minute to explain what is the conveyor community? Yeah, yeah, I think what we discovered as we were starting to work with a lot of end users and practitioners is that what we were finding is that they kind of get tired of hearing about digital transformation and from multiple vendors and through sales folks and these sorts of things. And when you speak to the practitioners, they just want to know, what are the practical implications of moving towards a more CloudNative architecture? And so, when you start talking to them at levels beyond just generic kind of, I would say marketing speak and even the business cases, the developers and systems admins need to know what it is they need to do to their application architectures, the ways they're working to successfully modernize their applications. And so the idea behind the conveyor community was really kind of twofold. One was to help with knowledge sharing. So we started running meetups where people can come and share their knowledge of what they've done around specific topics like strangling monoliths or carving off side containers or things that the sidecar containers or things that they've done successfully to help kind of move things forward. So it was really about knowledge sharing. And then the second piece we discovered was that there's really no place where you can find open source tools to help you rehost, replatform and refactor your applications to Kubernetes. And so that's really where we're trying to fill that void is provide open source options in that space and kind of inviting everybody else to collaborate with us on that. Can you give an example of some use cases of people doing this, why the need, the drivers? I mean, it makes sense, right? As a growing, you got, you got to move applications. People want to have applications move to Kubernetes. I get that. But what are some of the use cases that were forcing this? Yeah, absolutely for sure. I don't know if you have any you want to touch on specifically I could add on as well. Yeah, I think some of the key use cases I would really say will be. So let me just, I think James just talked about rehosting, replatforming and refactoring. I'm going to put some numbers on it and then let's talk about use case a little bit as well. I would really say 30% virtual machines movement that's the first one to happen. Easy, easier one, relatively speaking but that's the first one to happen. The replatforming one where you are now really sort of changing the stack as well but not changing the application in any major way yet. And the hardest one happened around refactoring which is you are, you know this is when we start talking about cloud native you take a monolithic application which, you know, legacy applications which have been running for a long time and try to refactor them so that you can build microservices out of them. The very first, I would say set of clients that we are seeing at the leading edge around this will be around banking and insurance legacy applications. Banking is obviously finance is a large industry and that's the first movement you start seeing which is where the complexity of the application in terms of some of the legacy code that you are seeing move over onto the, into the cloud for a cloud native implementation as well as there as well as a diversity of scenarios from a rehosting and replatforming point of view. And we'll talk about some of the tools that we are putting in the community to help the users and the developer community in many of these enterprises move into a cloud native implementation lot of their applications and also from the point of view of helping them in terms of practices what I've described as best practices it is not just about tools it's about the community coming together how do I do this? How do I do that actually? So there are best practices that we as a community have gathered and it's about that sharing as well James. Yeah, no, I think you hit the nail in the head, right? So, you know, rehosting like for example you might have an application that was delivered to you by an ISV that is not available containerized yet you need to bring that over as a VM so you could bring that into Qvert and actually bring that and just rehost it you can, you might have some things that you've already containerized but they're sitting on a container orchestration layer that is no longer growing, right? So the innovation has kind of left that platform and kind of Kubernetes has become kind of that standard you know, as one the container orchestration layer if you want become the de facto standard and so you want to replatform that and that takes, you know, massaging and transforming metadata to do that to create the right objects and so on and so forth. So there's a bunch of different use cases around that that kind of fall into that rehost or replatform all the way up to refactoring is what you're saying. So just explain for the audience because I know I love the three things rehosting, replatforming and refactoring what's the difference between replatforming and refactoring specifically? What's the nuance there? Yeah, yeah. So a lot of times I think what a lot of people, you know I think obviously Amazon kind of popularized the six hours framework years ago, you know with that and so if you look at what they kind of what they popularized it was replatforming is really kind of like a lift tinker and shift. So maybe it's, I'm not just taking my VM and putting it on new infrastructure. I'm going to take my VM maybe put on new infrastructure but I'm going to switch my app server into like a lighter weight app server or something like that at the same time. So that would fall into like a replatforming or in the case, you know one of the things we're seeing pretty heavily right now is the move from, you know cloud foundry to Kubernetes for example where people are looking to take their application and actually, you know transform it and run it on Kubernetes which requires you to really kind of replatform as well. And refactoring is what's specific so I get the replatforming. Yeah, refactoring is I think just following on to what James said refactoring is really about the complexity of the application which was mainly a monolithic large application many of these legacy applications which are so many times actually hundreds of millions of dollars of assets for these enterprises. It's about taking the code and refactoring it in terms of dividing it into different pieces of code which can themselves be spun as microservices. So then it becomes true. It takes starting advantage of agility of development in a cloud native environment as well. It's not just about either lift and shift of the VM or lift, tinker and shift from a stack point of view. It's really about taking applications and dividing them so that we can spin microservices and it has the agility of the development of a cloud native environment. I totally got it. Great clarification. I really want to get that out there because replatforming is really a good thing to go to the cloud. Hey, I got Redison open source. I'll use that. I can only use this over here and use that vendor over there. Muse open source over there. Really good way to look at it. I like refactoring. It's like a complete re-architecture or refactoring as you will. So thank you for the clarification. Great, great topic. This is what practitioners think about. So I got to ask the next question. What projects are involved in the community that you guys are working in? It seems like a real valuable service and group. Can you give an overview and what's going on in the community specifically? Yeah, yeah. So there's really, right now there's kind of five projects that are in the community and they're all in different, I would say different stages of maturity as well. So there's, when you look at re-hosting, there's two kind of primary projects focused on that. One is called Forklift, which is about migrating your virtual machines into Kubevert. So Kubevert is a way that you can run virtual machines orchestrated by Kubernetes. And we're seeing kind of a growth in demand there where people want to have a common orchestration for both their VMs and containers running on bare metal. And so Forklift helps you actually mass migrate VMs into that environment. The second one on the re-hosting side is called Crane. So Crane is really a tool that helps you migrate applications between Kubernetes clusters. So you imagine you have all your, you might have persistent data in one Kubernetes cluster and you want to migrate a namespace from one cluster to another. That's where Crane comes in and actually helps you migrate between those. On the re-platforming side, we have Move2Cube, which actually came from the IBM research team. So they actually open sourced that. Rashid, you want to speak about Move2Cube? Yeah, so Move2Cube is really, as we discussed the re-platforming scenario already, it is about, if you are in a Docker environment or a Cloud Foundry environment and Kubernetes has become a de facto standard. Now you are containerized already, but you really are actually moving into a Kubernetes based environment. As the name implies, it's about Move2Cube actually. And this is one of the things we were looking at. And as we were talking to a lot of users, it became evident to us that they are adapting now the de facto standard. And it's a tool that helps you enable your applications in that new environment and move to the new stack. Awesome. And then the only other two are Tackle, which is probably like one of the newest projects, which is focused on kind of assessment and analysis of applications for containerization. So actually looking at and understanding what the suitability is of an application for being containerized and start to being, like being refactored into containers. And that's a, you know, we have kind of engineers across both Red Hat IBM research, as well as some folks externally that are starting to become interested in that project as well. And the last project is called Polaris, which is a tool to help you measure your software delivery performance. So this might seem a little odd to have in the community, but when you think about re-hosting, re-platforming, refactoring, the idea is that you want to measure your software delivery performance on top of Kubernetes. And that's what this does. It kind of measures the Dora metrics if you're familiar with kind of DevOps realization metrics. So things like, you know, you know, your change failure rate and other things on top of there to see, are you actually improving as you're making these changes? Great, let me ask the question for the folks watching or anyone interested, how do they get involved? Who can contribute, explain how people get involved? Is there a site? Is there a location? Slack channel, what's out there? Yeah, yeah, all of the above. So we have a Slack channel. We're on slack.kubernetes.io on Pound Conveyor. But if you go to www.conveyor.io, Conveyor with a K, not like the cube with a C, but like cube with a K. They can go to Conveyor.io and there they can find everything they need. So we have a, you know, a governance model that's getting put in place, contributor ladder, all the things you'd expect. We're kind of talking to the CNCF around the SIGAP delivery groups to kind of understand if we can, how we can align ourselves so that in the future, if these projects take off, they can become kind of sandbox projects. And yeah, we'd welcome any and all kind of contribution and collaboration. We're sure I don't know if you have anything to add on that. You covered it at the pointers already. Just to put a plug in for, we have already been having meetups. So on the best practices, you will find the community, not just on Conveyor.io, but as you start joining the community in terms of meetups and the help you can get, whether on the Slack channel, very helpful on the day-to-day problems that you are encountering as you are taking your applications to a cloud-native environment. And I can see this being a big interest to enterprises as they have a mix and match environment and with containers, you can bring and integrate old legacy. And that's the beautiful thing about Hybrid Cloud that I find fascinating right now is that with all the goodness of say Kubernetes and cloud-native, if you've got a legacy environment, it's great fit now. So you don't have to kill the old to bring in the new. So this is going to be everything, a real popular project for what I call the classic enterprise. So I wish you guys both have your companies participate in. So with that, is that the goal? Is that the goal for this community is to reach out to the classic enterprise or open source enthusiasm? Because certainly end users are coming in like you read about. I mean, they're coming in fast into the community. What's the goal? The goal for the community really is to provide assistant and help and guidance to the users from a community point of view. It's not just from us, whether it is Red Hat or IBM Research, but it's really enterprises start participating in and we are already seeing that from the enterprises because there was a big gap in this area. There are a lot of vendors actually when you start on this journey, there will be a hundred people who will be telling you, all you have to do is this. Yeah, yeah. It's easy. I hear all you have to do. I know there is red flag goes up. Oh, it's easy. Just go cloud-native all the way. Everything is a service. It's just so easy. Now, I saw in a Brian Grachley, you get right on that. I want to just quickly turn tangent here. Brian Grachley, who's a product strategist at Red Hat, you're going to like this because he's like, look at the cloud-native pieces expanding because the enterprises now are in there and they're doing good work. Before you saw projects like Envoy come from the hyperscales like Lyft and the big companies who are building their own stuff. So you start to see that transition. It's no longer the debate on open source and Kubernetes and cloud-native. The discussion is integration, legacy. So this is the big discussion this week. Do you guys agree with that and what would be your reaction? Yeah, no, I agree with you, right? I mean, I think the stat you always hear is that the first 20% of kind of cloud happened and now there's all the rest of it, right? And modernization is going to be the big piece, right? You have to be able to modernize those applications and those workloads. And I think they're going to fall in three key buckets, right? Rehost, replatform, refactor. And dependent on your business justification and your needs, you're going to choose one of those paths. And we just want to be able to provide open tools and a community-based approach to those folks to help that. Certainly we'll have, just like Redhead always does, upstream first and then we'll have enterprise versions of these migration toolkits based on these projects. But we really do want to kind of build them and make sure we have the best solution to the problem which we believe community is the way to do that. Awesome. And I think just to add to what James said, typically we are talking about enterprises. These enterprises will have thousands of applications. So we're not talking about 10, 20 number. We are talking thousands. Yeah, and more. So 20% is not a small number. It's still two, three, no, three, four hundred. But man, the work is remaining and that's why they are getting excited about cloud native now, okay? Now we have seen the benefit for this little bit here, but now let's get serious about that transformation. And this is about helping them in a cloud native, in an open source way, which is what Redhead, Excel said, let's bring the community to bed. I'm actually doing a story on that. You brought that up with thousands of applications because I think it's underestimated. I think it's going to be thousands and thousands more because business is now software-driven everywhere and observability has pointed this out and I was talking to the founder of the Grafana project and it's like how many thousands of dashboards are you going to need, Roacher? So again, the problems and the opportunities are coming together. The abstraction will continue to move up the stack in terms of automation. So it's kind of fascinating when you start thinking about the impact as this goes to the next level. And so I have to ask you, Roacher, since you're an IBM Fellow and Chief Scientist, which by the way is a huge distinction. Congratulations, being an IBM Fellow is a big deal. IBM takes that very seriously, only a few of them. You've seen many waves and cycles of innovation. How would you categorize this one now? Because maybe I'm getting a little old and loving this right now, but this seems like everything kind of coming together in one flashpoint, one major inflection point. All the other waves combined seem to be like in this one movement, very fast. What's your take of this wave that we're in? I would really say there is, a lot of technology has been developed, but that technology needs to have its value unleashed and that's exactly where the intersection of those applications and that technology occurs. I'm gonna put in yet another, you talked about everything becoming software. This was Anderson, I think, which actually said the software is eating the world. Another wave that has started is AI eating software as well. And I do believe these two will coincide to, like let me just give you a brief example. Refactoring, how you take your application and smart ways of using AI to be able to recommend the right microservices for you is another one that we've been working towards and some of those capabilities will actually come in this community as well. So when we talk about innovations in this area, we are bringing together the best of IBM research as well as we are hoping the community actually is joins as well and enterprises are already starting to join to bring together latest of the innovations, bringing their applications and the best practices together to unleash that value of the technology and moving the rest of that 80%. And to be able to seamlessly bridge from my legacy environment to the cloud native environment. Yeah, and hybrid cloud, soon to be multi-cloud, really is the backbone and operating system of business and life society. So as these apps start to come on, APIs and integration, all of these things are coming together. So yeah, this conveyor project and conveyor community looks like a really strong approach. Congratulations. Good job. We're very excited about that. Yeah, great stuff. Kubernetes is enabling all kinds of value here in theCUBE. We're bringing it to you with two experts. James Ruescher, thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing, thank you. Thank you for having us on. Okay, KubeCon and cloud native con coverage. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.