 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are here in San Diego where we are keeping CloudNative classy. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host is John Troyer and we are happy to welcome back to the program our host Dan Kahn who is the executive director of the CloudNative Computing Foundation or the CNCF. Dan, thank you so much for having us. Threw it to me back again. All right, and yeah, so our fourth year doing this show, the big shows, right along the same level. Yeah, one year to the next you can just confuse them pretty easily. So Dan, we actually did a prediction show yesterday and I said, maybe it's my math background but I look back, two years ago it was 4,000 8,000, now 12,000. So I predict Boston must be 16,000 because I was used to those standardized tests but with the growth, you never know and it is very difficult. We talk about planning, we've talked, this facility was booked before two years ago that the curve really started taking off. Help us set the stage a little bit. We're getting towards the end of the event but tons of day zero things. So many sessions, so many people. There were pre-show events I heard that started like the end of last week so it's a small city in this community and so many pieces and the CNCF helps enable all of it. It does and what's fun for us is just that the community is out there adopting these technologies and contributing to it and growing, being able to come together. This is always our biggest event in North America but also in Europe and China. It's just a really nice snapshot, point of time when saying, okay, where are things? How many companies are interested in having a sponsor booth? How many developers are there? How many track? But I think maybe my favorite anecdote from KubeCon in San Diego is that there was a, so we offer a CFP track, a call for proposals that's extremely competitive, only 12% of the talks get accepted and then we have a maintainer track where the different projects can have both either an intro or a deep dive or both. So the deep dive for the project Helm, which is not even a graduated project yet, I mean it's very widely used, package manager for Kubernetes, but the deep dive for Helm had more than 1,600 people inside their session, which is more than we had at all of attending KubeCon 2015 and 2016 combined. So Dan, one of the words that gets mentioned a lot in this space and it has lots of different meaning is scale. We talk about Kubernetes built for big scale, we're talking about edge computing, which goes to small scale. This event, you look at the ecosystem, there's a 30 foot banner with all of the logos there, you look at the landscape, there are so many logos on there. Actually, I thought you had an enjoyable, yet useful analogy in your opening keynote. You talk about Minecraft, I've got a boy, he plays Xbox, I've seen Minecraft, so when he pulls up a little chart and there's like all of these little things on the side, my son can tell you how they're all used and what you can build with them. I would be completely daunted looking at that, much like many of the people come to this show and they look around and they're like, I don't even know where to start. And that was a fun keynote for me to put together because I did need to make sure, both on the Minecraft part that all the formulas were correct, I didn't want anyone, but then I drew the analogy to Kubernetes and how it is based on a set of building blocks, hundreds of them that have evolved over time. And for that, I actually did some software archeology of reaching out to the people who created the original IPFW Linux firewall 20 years ago based on VSD and then the evolution since then made sure that they were comfortable with my description of it. But now, bringing it out to KubeCon CNCF, we have a lot of projects now, so we're up to 43 when we met in Seattle four years ago, it was two. And so it's definitely incumbent on CNCF to do a good job and we can probably do an even better one on trying to draw this trail map, this recommended path through understanding the technologies, deciding on which ones people might want to adopt. Yeah, I think that would be really interesting. In fact, the words trail map kind of came up on Twitter today I saw. And one of the things that struck me was how the first rule of KubeCon as well, Kubernetes is not maybe in the center of everything, it's underneath everything, but because of 42 projects in the CNCF, many more projects, open source projects, of course, from different vendors, from different coalitions that you can see here on the show floor as well, if not sessions. So without giving maybe a CNCF 101, I mean, what does the path forward look like in terms of that, you know, the growth of projects within the CNCF umbrella, the prominence of KubeCon? Is this, you know, are we headed towards CloudNativeCon? We've always been calling it KubeCon CloudNativeCon and we could reverse the names, but I don't see any particular drive to do that. But I would really emphasize and give credit to Craig McLachy and some of the other people who originally set up CNCF, where Google had this technology, if they'd come to the Linux Foundation and said, we want to call it the Kubernetes Foundation, we probably would have said yes to that. But the impact then would be that all of these other technologies and approaches would have come in and said, we need to become part of the Kubernetes project. And instead, there was a vision of an ecosystem. And the reality is that Kubernetes is still by far the largest project. I mean, if you look at the total number of contributors, I believe it's approximately the same between Kubernetes and our other 42 projects combined. So, and of course, there's overlap. But in that sense, in some ways, Kubernetes sort of represents the sun and the other projects are orbiting around it. But really from the beginning, the whole idea was to say that we wanted to allow a diversity of different approaches. And CNCF has had this very clear philosophy that we're not king makers, that if you look at our landscape document where we look at different functions like key management or container runtimes or databases or others, there can be multiple CNCF hosted projects in each box. And so far, at least that approach seems to be working quite well. Yeah, Dan, having been to a number of these, the maturity and progress is obvious. Something we've said is Kubernetes is really table stakes at this point. No matter where I go, there is going to be Kubernetes. And therefore, I've seen it some over the last year or so, but very prominent at this show. We're talking about workloads, we're talking about applications. It's defining and explaining that cloud native piece of it. And the tough thing is modern applications and building applications and that app dev community. So, speak a little bit, you've got a very diverse audience here. Talk about the personas you have to communicate with and who you're attracting to this. I know that they put out lots of metrics as to the surveys and who's coming and who's participating. Well, we do and we'll be publishing those. And I love the fact, I think some people misunderstand the thinking that KubeCon Cloud NativeCon is all infrastructure engineers and something like a third or more of the attendees are application developers. And so I do think there's this natural move, particularly towards app dev. The difference is that on the infrastructure side, there's just a really strong consensus about Kubernetes, as you're saying, where on the application development side, it's still very early days. And I mean, if anything, I think really the only area that there is consensus on is that the abstractions that Kubernetes provides are not the ones that we want to have regular application developers at most enterprises working with. That they shouldn't actually need to build their own container and then write the YAML in order to configure it. Brian Lyles hit that point nicely with his keynote today around Rails. But so we can agree that what we have isn't the right outcome. We can agree that whatever are the winning solutions are very likely underneath going to be building those containers and writing the YAML. But there are so many different approaches right now at a high layer on what that right interface is. Yeah, I mean just one example I have had the opportunity to interview Bloomberg for the second time. And a year ago, we talked very much about the infrastructure. And this year, we talked about, really they've built internally that pass layer so that their app devs, they might know that there's Kubernetes but they don't have to interface with that at all. I've had a number of the CNCF end user members participate, maybe speak to the community of end users participating and just end user usage overall. So when we first met in Seattle four years ago, we had three members of our end user community. We appreciated them joining early but that was a tough haul. But to be up to 124 now, representing almost every industry and all around the world, just a huge number of brand names has been fantastic. What is interesting is if you go talk to them, almost all of them are using Kubernetes as the underlying layer for their own internal paths. And so the regular developers in their organizations can often just want to type get push and then have the continuous integration run and the things build and it deployed out and everything. But it's somewhat surprising there hasn't yet been a level of consensus on what that sort of common paths, the common set of abstractions on top should be. There's a ton of our members and developers and others are all working to sort of build that winning solution but I don't have a prediction for you yet. And of course skill interoperability and skill transferability is going to be key in growing this ecosystem. But I thought the stats on the searches you can do on the number of job openings for Kubernetes is incredible. Yeah, on the interoperability, we were very pleased to announce Tuesday that we've now passed 100 certified vendors and of all the things that CNCF does, probably even including KubeCon, I might say that that certified Kubernetes program is the one that's had the biggest impact to have over implementations from over 100 different organizations that you can take the same workloads and move them across and have the confidence those APIs will be supported. It's just a huge accomplishment and in some ways up there with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth are some of the best interoperability standards. And then you mentioned the jobs core which is another area. Yeah, I want to transfer engineers too as well as workloads. Area that we're thrilled and we just launched that but we now have a couple hundred jobs listed on it and a bunch of people applying and it's just a perfect example of the kind of ecosystem development that we're thrilled to do and particularly the fact that we're not charging either the employers or the applicants. So it's jobs.cncf.io to get access to that. Great, Dan, you also mentioned your keynote. Kubernetes has crossed the chasm. That changes the challenges that you have when you start talking about the earlier mid-majority environment. So I know you've been flying around the globe. There's not only the three big events but many small events. Talk about how CNCF mission helps educate and push, I guess not push, but educate and further the mission. Enable. So one of the other programs we have is the Kubernetes certified service provider. These are organizations, essentially consulting firms that have a deep expertise that have had at least three of their engineers pass our certified Kubernetes administrator exam. And it is amazing now that we've passed 100 of those but they're in over 30 different countries. And so we're just thrilled to see businesses all around the world be able to take advantage of that. And I do get to go to a lot of events around the world. We're actually, CNCF is hosting our first ever events in Seoul and then Sydney in two weeks that I'm quite excited for. And then in February, we're gonna be back in India and we're gonna be in Bengaluru where we had a very successful event in March. We'll be there in February, 2020 and then our first one in New Delhi. Those are both on the third week of February. And I think it does just speak to the number of people who are really eager for these to soak this up. But one of the cool things about it is that we're combining both local experts. Half of our speakers are local, half international. And then we do a beginner track and an advanced track. Yeah, Dan, you know, we just love a little bit of kind of insight from you as to there's a little bit of uncontrolled chaos when you talk about open source. Many of the things that we're talking about this year, a year ago, we would have been, oh my gosh, I would have never thought of that. So give us what it's like to be at kind of the eye of the hurricane, if you would. A lot of criticism, to be honest. It is an amazing number of people, like to point out the things that we're not quite doing correctly. But the huge challenge for an organization like CNCF where we're a nonprofit, these events are actually spinning off money that we're then able to reinvest directly into the project. So doing things like a quarter million dollars for a security audit for Kubernetes that we were able to publish or Jepson testing for HCD or improving documentation and such. So a big part of it is trying to create that those positive feedback groups and have that. And then another huge part is just that given all the different competing interests and the fact that we literally have every big technology company in the world on our board and then all of the, I mean, hundreds of startups that are tend to be very competitive, it's just really important that we treat organizations similarly. So that all of our Platinum members are treated the same, or gold or silver. And then within the projects that all the graduated projects are treated similarly, incubating sandbox. And people really notice, I have kids and it's a little bit there where they're sort of always believing that the other kid is getting extra attention. Yeah, right, you can't be the king maker if it will, you're letting it out. So look out a little bit, Dan, and we still have more growth to go in the community. Obviously the event has room for growth. What do you see looking forward to 2020 and beyond? Yeah, I would love to predict some sort of amazing discontinuity where everyone adopts these technologies and then CNCF's not necessary anymore or something like that. But the reality is, I mean, I love that crossing the chasm metaphor and I do think it's very powerful. And we really do say 2018 was the year that Kubernetes crossed the chasm from the early adopters to the early majority. But I would emphasize the fact that it's only the early majority. We haven't reached into the entire second half of the curve, the late majority and the laggards. And so there are a ton of organizations here at the event who are just getting up to speed on this and realizing, oh, we really need to invest and start understanding it. And so, I mean, I don't, we also talk about there will be some point of peak KubeCon, just like peak oil. And I don't yet see any signs of it being 2019 or 2020, but it's something that we're very cognizant of and working hard to try and ensure that the event remains useful for people and that they're seeing value from it. I mean, there was a real question when we went from 1,000 Seattle four years ago to 4,000 in Austin three years ago. Oh, is this event even still useful? Can developers still interact? Do you still have conversations? Is the hallway track still valuable? And thankfully, I'm able to chat with a lot of the core developers where this is their fifth North American KubeCon and they're saying, no, I'm still getting value out of it. Now that what we tend to hear from them is, but I didn't get to go any sessions where I have so many hallway tracks and private meetings and interactions and such. But the great thing there is that, you know, we actually get all of these sessions up on YouTube within 48 or 72 hours. And so people ask me, oh, there's 18 different tracks. How do I decide which one to go to? And I always say, go to the one where you want to interact with the speaker afterwards or ask a question or really, because the other ones you can watch later, but there isn't really a substitute for being here on the graph. Well, so much content there, Dan. I think if they start watching now, baby, at that time you get to hamster Dan, they'll dent it a little bit. I give a quick pitch for my favorite Chrome extension is called a video speed player. And you can speed people up to 120, 125%, say get a little bit of that time. Yeah, absolutely. We have at the back end of ours, there is YouTube, so you can adjust the speed. It does help most of the time and you can back up a few seconds needed. Dan, look, congratulations. We know you have a tough role, you and the CNCF. We really appreciate the partnership. We love our community, you know, has had a phenomenal time this week of the show and look forward to 2020 and be a lot. Oh, I do as well. I really want to thank you for being with us through this whole way and I think it is just an important part of the ecosystem. And I know John Furrier also says thank you. Oh, absolutely. And it's good to see you next year. All right, Dan, thank you so much for John Troyer. I'm Stu Miniman, getting towards the end of our three days wall to wall coverage here in sunny San Diego, California. Thanks for watching theCUBE.