 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 of KubeCon 21, CloudNativeCon, part of the CNCF's event. This is theCUBE's continuing coverage. You got a great guest, Kube alumni, entrepreneur, I'm Tavara, founder and CEO of UpBound. Great to see you remotely. Too bad we're not in person, but soon the pandemic is right around the corner. It'll be post-pandemic. We're seeing events are coming back. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on for KubeCon 21. Good to be back on theCUBE, John. Great to see you. I've always loved your career, what you've been doing with many conversations on theCUBE and also in person. You're the creator of Rook and Crossplane, the CNCF projects there. Great venture. Really part of this CloudNative revolution that's happening. Early on in the history of your career, but now you're seeing it go mainstream. So let's get into that on this session because I really want to dig into this. CrossCloud and now GitOps is hugely popular. This is kind of what they call day two operators are ongoing, this is the future, this is the new environment. Before we get going, talk about the update on your end. What's new with Crossplane? So Crossplane is growing, as you know, it's a multi-cloud control plane. Essentially it lets you, you can connect it up to all the different infrastructure vendors and lets you manage infrastructure in a consistent way. Consistent with what we do with GitOps and the Kubernetes API. And so the community has been growing tremendously. We've just applied for it together, the incubation status at the CNCF and really happy with all the progress around it. It's such an amazing journey that we've been on with Crossplane. You know, it's funny, you watch all the evolution of the cloud and the early days it was, what is cloud, the big debate, people define what cloud is. Then it was, oh yeah, cloud's great. You can start up cloud developers, green field. Then it became enterprise cloud around 2015. Now, today the cloud is not so much moving to the cloud as it was in 2015. It's like scaling in cloud. That is true enterprise grade, real serious operational security impacts, multiple resources. And this is where CrossCloud comes in or you know, I see hybrid clouds, the operating model everyone has agreed on that. That's the architecture. But that also brings in, assumes multiple clouds, right? This is where the new kind of control plane or you guys call CrossCloud management kicks in. This is an enterprise priority from what I can see. Do you agree with that? Can you share your commentary on how much are enterprises prioritizing CrossCloud management? Because that seems to be the hot one. What's your take on this? Yeah, the way we see it is that, and we see this with customers and we see those folks in the community, almost every enterprise we talk to is modernizing their IT. As you said, they're not going to cloud, they're already in cloud, but they're doing so many more things to kind of accelerate the pace of innovation and reduce the time for them to ship applications, which is now a fundamental part or a fundamental measure of their success, right? And so what we're seeing is that they're organizing into platform teams internally and these teams are the ones that own the cloud accounts, they're the ones that are responsible for deploying infrastructure and cross, whether it's CrossCloud or HyperCloud. And these teams are essentially organizing to build what looks like an internal platform. And a key ingredient of this internal platform is a control plane. And this is what enables GitOps, you see Kubernetes as a control plane that's in there. It's the piece that's allowing them to actually connect to different clouds, it's the piece that's allowing them to manage their infrastructure, whether it's on-premise or in cloud, it's the thing that's allowing them to do day two operations, all of that's happening. In an interesting way, it's happening within the enterprise, it is their own platform and it layers on top of the backend infrastructure that they're using, whether it's cloud providers or hybrid infrastructure, it's happening in a way that's enterprise, from the enterprise and going out to the vendors, which is a little different model than we've seen in the past. And that's where multi-cloud tends to come in and multi-vendor or heterogeneity in general, is we see that very, very commonly in the enterprise. You know, I think you're exactly right. That's classic market evolution in computer industry. You know, multi-vendors ultimately when things start to settle in on the mass of growth. Hybrid cloud, however, is really kind of where the action is today. And you can see people struggling and innovating around the area of continuous operations. And obviously continuous development, that's DevOps concept. But the problem is, is that as they realize, well, stuff's in production, it's in the public cloud, it's on-premises. You know, the operational piece starts to rear its head and, well, we got to fix that. And then they connect the dots and saying, if multi-cloud is coming, which people generally agree upon, then they go, if we don't clean this up, we're going to be screwed. That's generally the consensus that I hear from people. So explain with the rise of multi-cloud, what cross-plane is? I mean, what is cross-plane about? Give us an overview around this. Yeah, so I mean, there's a lot of ways to describe this, but we see it as like the rise of platform engineering. There's a lot happening around people building their own platforms that layer on top of cloud, which happens to also be multi-vendor and multi-cloud. So when you're building a platform in an enterprise that can talk to Amazon, that can talk to Microsoft Azure, that can talk to your on-premise infrastructure, whether it's VMware or OpenShift, you need a layer that is able to orchestrate and deploy and manage and deal with day two operations. That is an important piece. It's the piece that is, you know, the way you can enforce your policies, you can set out your controls, whether you're compliance, do your compliance and governance, and essentially serve this to your developers so that they can actually get productive and deploy applications on this platform. And we see cross-plane, and what Kubernetes has started with a control plane as a critical approach in this new platform. In fact, the approach that's kind of pioneered by Kubernetes with the Kubernetes API and control plane is now becoming the dominant way of managing infrastructure and deploying applications on it. This is, you hear this in different ways, like this is why GitOps has become popular. GitOps is a really great thing. It's a way to essentially let you manage infrastructure through configuration that's stored in Git repositories. But the thing that it connects to is a control plane that's gonna make it happen, right? And we see that with Kubernetes, predominantly with Kubernetes, right? And so what cross-plane does is lets you extend the GitOps approach and the management approach that's pioneered by the Kubernetes community to the entire surface area of cloud. So not only can you deploy your containers using GitOps, you can actually manage through GitOps, VMs, serverless, databases in cloud, hybrid environments, multi-cloud environments. Even your load balancers that are on-premise could be managed through GitOps. Anything that speaks in API could be managed through GitOps if you go through a project like cross-plane. That part is where we're seeing the most success right now. We're seeing a lot of people that are adopting these approaches to managing infrastructure while they're building their platforms. And they're pulling in cross-plane. We're seeing massive end-user adoption of cross-plane right now. It's overwhelming. I want to get at this impact of the control plane. But before we get there, I want to real quick why I got you an expert. I know this KubeCon, you don't need to explain what GitOps is, everyone knows what that is. But for the folks that aren't in the community, I want to grab the soundbite if you don't mind. Could you define what is GitOps? So GitOps is somewhat of a marketing term, but the way I interpret it is, essentially storing your configuration in a Git repository using, you know, versioning techniques that are pioneered to manage code, right, whether, you know, using PR flows, storing things in Git, doing the collaboration on what changes happen in Git. And then having that be essentially mirrored to a control plane that is able to implement the declarative configuration that you've specified. So a good example of this is, if you wanted to deploy, say, you know, start up a cluster, a Kubernetes cluster in a cloud vendor, and then run applications on it, and then configure it to connect to databases, you can describe your intent and store it in Git, collaborate with your team members on it, make sure it's all correct, and then through a GitOps pipeline, you're able to take those, you know, essentially that configuration and then apply it via a control plane onto your vendor of choice, right? That's the style. It's great because, you know, Git is a great place to store configuration. It's a great place to collaborate. There are amazing tools around PR flows, pull request flows. There are amazing tools for auditability and versioning, and you get to leverage all of those when you are, you know, deploying infrastructure that runs your entire enterprise. Yeah, and I would also add to that. I explain it simply for people that aren't in the weeds on the tech, think of it like a QA for SREs, it's like you need to manage the infrastructure, because we're talking about DevOps, infrastructure as code, we're programming infrastructure, so you got to have some sort of process. And I think this brings up my next point about this control plane, because you mentioned Cross Plan has this nice program to it, most people write their own code. They'll like do homegrown work to create in their platform, mainly because there's gaps in there. Can you comment on how you guys are different than someone saying, hey, I'm just gonna wrap my own code and kind of do my own thing, I have my own platform team, I don't need Cross Plan, what do I need you for? I'm gonna do it myself. Yeah, yeah, so what we see predominantly is folks that are doing GitOps or infrastructure as code and setting up pipelines for their compute workloads, and specifically for containers, right? And then like you said, they're actually writing homegrown scripts or doing Terraform or doing other things that are on the site to deploy the other parts. Including, you know, stateful workloads or things that are running across AI, ML, on-premise, hybrid, all of that stuff is done organically on the side of this beautiful path for GitOps, right? What we're doing with Cross Plan is essentially letting you bring all of the things that you're managing organically into the same pipelines with GitOps. So you're able to actually normalize on a single approach for management, for orchestration of infrastructure and applications. So you're able to, you know, get rid of your custom scripts and use APIs to define what your developer should do. You're able to, you know, use the mechanisms that are, and the tools that are available to you for GitOps and for the in a Kubernetes ecosystem to manage the entire surface area of, you know, infrastructure that you're managing within the enterprise in a consistent way, right? That's where Cross Plan comes in. Cross Plan enables you to extend the control plane of Kubernetes to manage everything that's offered by Amazon and Microsoft and Google and VMware and OpenShift and, you know, Red Hat, everything else becomes falls into the same orchestrator, the same control plane that's managing it all. And you can access it and give it to your developers in a safe way using, you know, GitOps-like approaches. You know, I've heard horror stories where people push new codes, trivial stuff, and then all of a sudden it breaks because some code or script was written for a different purpose, but the impact was created into a small little dependency, but it's essentially the human error aspect of software. It's like, well, we didn't really kind of see that coming, but at that point, that script worked. Now this new thing, something trivial and easy, breaks because, and then it crashes. This is kind of the kind of day two operations that we were talking about, is that right? That's very much, that's very much the case. And we see a lot of people kind of normalizing on templates and scripts, you know, where it's like, okay, you want to deploy a database? Here's a, well, open a ticket. And then some human runs, you know, a template, a Terraform template, et cetera, that deploys a script and then shuttle credentials back to the developers over email or over Slack. And then they plug them into their manifest to deploy on through GitOps pipelines. There's a lot of interesting things that are happening. And what we want to do is to prevent the human error, to put the guardrails in place, is essentially arrive at a consistent approach for all of it. Your legacy workloads, your multi-cloud workloads, your hybrid workloads, your, the little system that's sitting on the side, you can essentially normalize on using a single approach to manage all of it. One that is safe that you can give to developers directly. There has all the guardrails in place, has policy and controls factored in and is exposed through an API. That's the part that I think is, you know, leads to the largest, most scalable platforms in the world. You know, I think that's just natural evolution too, as your customers and enterprises get visibility on the operational standards. Like, okay, let's lock that in, put the guardrails down, makes a lot of sense. I got to ask you on the enterprise adoption piece, something that we've been covering on Silicon Angle and theCUBE this year, is looking at the mainstream adoption of Kubernetes and whatnot and rest of the cloud news. It's certainly with COVID, it's accelerated everything. How is the enterprise adoption of cross-plane changing? Is it gaining the kind of momentum you expected when you started the project a few years ago? We're very pleasantly surprised by the adoption, especially in the last six months. Since we declared cross-plane 1.0, it has reached a maturity level now that it's actually in Fortune 100 massive production deployments in Fortune 100 companies. This is why we're actually, you know, taking it to the next level at CNCF. We're also proud of the ecosystem convergence on it. So we're seeing the cloud providers working with all of them on, you know, ensuring that cross-plane can address their infrastructure and we're seeing the community rally around us. We think the ecosystem part is super interesting for a cross-plane. As you can imagine, having an orchestrator control plane that's able to, you know, address the entire surface area of infrastructure offered by all these different vendors requires the vendors to be involved, right? And so both the, it's a two-sided network, both the ecosystem, you know, adoption and the end user adoption are important for cross-plane. And we're seeing like massive traction on both right now. That's awesome. Traditionally, as the adoption arises, the users want more things. I see enterprise, they want everything. Every nook and cranny they want, every feature, they want every integration. I mean, they prioritize, but as you get more, it's not just like a consumer product, although it is cloud-native and you got that, but there's certain things that are table stakes and then there's innovation. But they really want the well-known integrations and support and so forth. How is cross-plane and the community responding to the challenges as you guys get more popular and as the standards become clear around multi-cloud? Yeah, I mean, this is the beauty of open source. I mean, we're seeing a lot of different folks contributing to open source. The majority of contributors right now to cross-plane are outside of UpBound, the company that started cross-plane and essentially donated to CNCF. We're seeing folks that are coming in and adding the resources that they're needing or adding features, really significant features to the code base and improving, which is, you know, again, it's the network effect around open source and it's just unbelievable to see and unbelievable to see it happen and happen so quickly around a project. That's awesome. Well, it was something great to have you on. You're always great to talk to. You're super smart. We've had many great conversations in person, on camera, on theCUBE, now remote, CNCF is again, doing such a great job with the open source and now with KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, the open hybrid cloud and now cross-cloud, multi-cloud, whatever you want to call it, it's happening. So I got to ask you with respect to Kubernetes because, you know, we were all having beers and open stacked that time. We were like, Kubernetes is going to be hot. I think how many years ago that was? I think you were kind of hanging around with me and Robert and others. Kubernetes was just an idea and was developing now. It's obviously mainstream. The question that I get a lot now is, how do I manage and deploy Kubernetes in an open hybrid cloud that take advantage of the current state-of-the-art open software and commercial opportunities and be positioned to take advantage of multi-cloud? In other words, they want the future of multi-cloud but they got to address the open hybrid cloud. So how do I do that? What's your advice? You know, honestly, reflecting on the success of Kubernetes, I have a, you know, maybe a controversial answer to your question. I think Kubernetes will be remembered for its control plane and its ability to manage infrastructure and applications in a general way and not for the fact that it's a container orchestrator. In 10 years, we'll probably look at Kubernetes and say it's true superpower is the fact that it revolutionized how we manage infrastructure and applications using this declarative approach, using this control plane approach to management. And the fact that it's managing, the fact that it started out with just containers is, well, will probably be a historical thing. So in some ways, you know, to kind of go back to your question, I'd say, yes, I think Kubernetes has reached mainstream in the container space but we now have to uncontainerize it and use it for managing infrastructure everywhere in a multi-cloud and in a, you know, in a hybrid environment as well. Well, I mean, that's a great point. First of all, I don't think that's radical. I mean, I'm on the record years ago saying that I saw it as the TCP-IP moment for cloud where you have interoperability and what you're getting at, I think that's so interesting right now. And I think everyone's kind of, it's the hidden secret. It's kind of like the land grab. Everyone's trying to go for it. Customers just want to provision and manage cloud infrastructure and program it with applications. I mean, just think about that general basic concept. Right? I want to just provision. I don't want to have to have meetings, no waterfall, no this. I want to be agile. Yeah, I want operations. I want security. I want all that baked in. That's kind of where the puck is going. Very much. Self-service is a really critical part. And a part that is part of the Kubernetes kind of design is you just, developers just want a database or they want a cache to run their application alongside their application. They don't really need to understand all the security details and networking and VPCs and everything else. And so if you give them an API just like Kubernetes does that tells them, okay, look, if you want a pod or if you want a database or if you want a cache, here's the API you use. Use whatever framework you want. Use any language you want. And then we've got all the guardrails built in behind the API line. Just through GitOps or not, deploy this thing, provision it, and then the control plane takes care of the rest. That's the path we're on as an industry. Yeah, whatever you want to call it, GitOps, CrossCloud, it's unlimited cloud resource at scale, this is what customers want to do. The market's evolving super fast. Tons of opportunities for entrepreneurs. Tons of opportunities for enterprises who are themselves innovating. Again, another big theme here. I'll give you the final word around this user generated open source paradigm which they've always been involved with. Now more than ever, you're starting to see that, I don't know, maybe second generation, maybe third generation end user inside companies contributing to projects and driving this. This is an interesting dynamic. No one's really reporting this. Your thoughts on this end user driven projects. We're seeing a lot of end users get involved in projects like Crossplane. I mean, it's amazing. It's like companies that are directionally, they're all, when they're modernizing, they're all heading down a path that's open source. So even towards cloud native projects, right? And so what we see is they typically get involved initially by just asking questions and reporting issues and asking for features. And then within a few months, you see actual meaningful contributions come in to projects, right? And so, I mean, there's nothing speaks, nothing says they're committed more than just submitting a pull request where they've spent hours, weeks, making changes to a project, right? And that's happening across the entire ecosystem around cloud native. It's what makes it so powerful. So I'm great to have this conversation. Great insights, thanks for sharing the update on Crossplane and your vision around this provisioning new infrastructure and this universal control plan. I think this is where everyone is talking about having that value and the scale sets up automation. It just brings everything to the next gen, next level of capabilities. So I appreciate taking the time. Thanks for coming on. Thanks John. Yeah, good to be back on theCUBE. Great to see you. Okay, this is the CUBE coverage of KubeCon 21 Virtual Cloud Native Con. I'm John Furrier, your host with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.