 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering GitLab Commit 2020. Brought to you by GitLab. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of GitLab Commit 2020 here in San Francisco. You might notice some of our guests have some jackets on. It is a little cooler than normal here in San Francisco, but the community and knowledge is keeping us all warm. Joining us for the first time on the program is Nicholas Klick, who's an engineering manager at GitLab. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for inviting me. All right, so you had an interesting topic. The state of serverless in 2020 was the session that you gave, definitely a topic. We've loved covering on theCUBE, something I personally have been digging into, trying to understand, definitely something that the developers, and especially the app devs that I speak with are very bullish on. So what is the state of serverless in 2020? That's actually a good question. So my talk was actually broken into two parts. One was like initially I just wanted to help provide a clear definition of what serverless is. In my opinion, serverless is more than just functions. There are a lot of other technologies like backend as a service, API gateways, service integration proxies that you can stitch together to create dynamic applications. So I created a more expanded definition of what serverless is from my perspective. Another part was to really talk about three things that I'm finding exciting right now in the serverless space. The first is Knative, and the fact that Knative is likely gonna go to GA pretty soon. So it'll be production ready and we can finally build production workloads on it. The second is that is the running serverless at the edge, I find to be an exciting topic. And then finally talking more in depth on those service integrations of how you can actually create applications that don't include functions at all. So functionless serverless? Yeah, so a lot of things I definitely want to tease out of that. Nicholas, I guess maybe we should just step back a second and was there a survey work or was there something done or is this kind of something related to your job that you put together as just an important topic? Yeah, I know this is just me speaking as someone that works in the space and sees the technologies evolve in and just my opinions I guess. Okay, when I talk to the practitioners when you go and say oh they're interested in it, chances are they're doing stuff on Amazon is like what kind of the first piece of it tends to be. There are lots of open source projects out there but it's still, it's kind of dominated by Amazon Azure has some pieces of course Google has things they're doing. I liked how you teased out that serverless definitely isn't a thing and the definition and even the term itself gets people all riled up and things like that. So I hate getting into the ontological arguments but the promise of it is that I can build applications in a different way and I shouldn't have to think about some of the underlying components that's the name serverless kind of does that but it definitely is a change in mindset as to how I build and consume environments. Right and like another point that I made in the talk that I believe pretty strongly is that serverless is not something that's gonna replace monoliths and microservices. I believe it's another tool in the tool belt of the developer, of the operator to solve problems and that we should look at it like that. It shouldn't be, it's not the next progression in application architecture. Yeah, I've met some companies that 100% they built everything on serverless but that's like saying I've met plenty of companies that are all in the cloud. It depends on what you do and what your business is. When we look at the enterprise, it is a broad spectrum and making changes along that path is something that typically takes a decade or more and they have hundreds if not thousands of applications and therefore we understand. I've got my stuff running on my mainframe through my latest microservice architecture and everything in between. Right and I mean I'm speaking as an employee at GitLab and we have a very well known monolith that we deploy and so from my opinion, I don't believe the monoliths are gonna die anytime soon. All right, I'd love you to tease out some of those pieces that you talked about, the three items you talked about K-Native. K-Native is interesting. The thing I poked out when I go to KubeCon and CloudNativeCon is today, I mentioned when I think about customers, most of them are using Amazon. The second choice is they're probably doing Azure and today K-Native directly doesn't work with EKS, AKS or the like. I know there's a solution like trigger match that actually will interact between the Amazon and there but I mean don't you need the buy-in of Amazon and Microsoft for K-Native to be taken seriously and the other thing is Google still hasn't opened up the Google controls, the governance of both Istio and K-Native and there are some concerns in the ecosystem about that. So what makes you so bullish on K-Native? Yeah, so I'm definitely aware of some of the discussions around K-Native from my perspective, I think that K-Native is, if someone is already operating a lot of Kubernetes infrastructure, if they already have that infrastructure running then deploying K-Native to it is not that much more of a, it doesn't require additional resources and expense. So it could be, again, it depends on their use case and I think that when I think about serverless, I try to remain pragmatic. So I'm already using Kubernetes and I want a simple serverless runtime, K-Native would be a great option in that situation. If I wanna be able to work like cross-cloud, like this is another opportunity that K-Native provides is the ability of deploying to any Kubernetes cluster anywhere. So it has that, there's not a vendor lock-in issue with K-Native. Yeah, and absolutely there was initially some concern that could serverless actually be the ultimate lock-in. I'm going to go deep on one provider and don't have a way. There's open source groups like the CNCF trying to help along those ways, K-Native absolutely along those ways, looking at that environment. From a GitLab customer standpoint, GitLab's not tied to whether you're doing containers or serverless or VMs are in the environment. What does it mean for GitLab customers? If I wanna look at serverless, how does that fit into my overall workflow? Yeah, so initially at GitLab we focused on providing the ability to deploy to K-Native. That was, we were very early in the K-Native space and I think that as it's matured, as those APIs have matured then our product has kind of developed. And so right now we enable you to be able to create Kubernetes clusters through our interface and then deploy your function runtimes directly from your GitLab repo. We've also are kind of growing in our examples and documentation of how to integrate GitLab CI CD with Lambda. That's another big area that we're moving into as well. Great. As you look forward to 2020, we've got a whole new decade in front of us. What do you think people should be watching on in the maturity of this space? Yeah, so I think that the point that I touched on earlier of the service integrations, I think that that is something you're gonna see more and more of the providers themselves linking together their different services and enabling you to create these dynamic applications without a lot of glue that you have to manually create in between. I think that we're gonna see more open source frameworks like for example, service framework or Terraform that people want the, I know that a lot of people use for example, AWS SAM, people want easier ways and faster ways to be able to deploy their service so you have the bootstrapping of serverless. I guess another thing that I expect is that the serverless, the serverless development life cycle will mature in that whether you're going from bootstrapping, testing, deployment, monitoring, security, I believe you're gonna see companies that will start to really fill in that entire space the same way that they do for monoliths and microservices. Absolutely, thank you so much, Nicholas. Definitely something we've been tracking over the last year or so, you started to see many in the tool chain of cloud native environments digging into serverless, helping to mature those solutions and definitely an area to watch closely. Great, all right. Lots more covered, check out the cube.net for all the events that we will be at through 2020 as well as you can go back see we've actually done serverless Conf a couple of years, many of the other cloud and cloud native shows, search innerindex, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the cube.