 from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here in Palo Alto, California at the CUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE for a special CUBE Conversation, a preview of the upcoming CUBECon cloud native con in San Diego where the CUBE will be there, as well as a bunch of other folks. The new stack will be there. A lot of other media produces as well as the big conference CUBECon in its fourth or fiftieth year, depending on what year you count. It's a super exciting conference. This is where the Kubernetes and the cloud native communities come together to set the agenda to talk about all the great things that are going on in the industry and how it's changing tech for good. We're here with Vicky Chung, who is the co-chair and also a software engineer manager at Lyft. Vicky, great to see you. Thanks for coming in. Thanks for having me. So I'm so proud of CUBECon and the community because when we were there at the early days when it was kind of forming and created, there was a big vision that it would play a critical role. A lot of people haven't really kind of seen how big it's become. It's really become so important that the big companies are now moving towards open source. The CNC has been very successful, both on getting vendors in and user projects. You're setting the agenda. You're setting the table for this year's CUBECon. Yeah. Tell us what's going on. Yeah, I think we're seeing the maturity of the community coming together and sort of continuing on this trend where as you said, the adoption is sort of growing exponentially. I think two years ago, if you survey the room and ask people who is using Kubernetes and Docker in production, you maybe get like a hand. I think you're seeing this thing where this trend where this year, I think if you survey the room, it'd be like maybe half the room or like raising their hand. And the acceleration is interesting. I mean, huge acceleration of the adoption of Kubernetes and other projects. And I think what's interesting to me and I think the commentary that we've been reporting on is that Kubernetes can be that unifying point. You're seeing this de facto standard emerging. And a lot of people are talking about that de facto and that has accelerated the production use cases. So the end user projects are increasing. Is that going to be a focus, main focus of this year's CUBECon? Oh yeah, definitely. I think we're seeing maybe even like last year, we've had a lot of end user talks from early adopters startups, maybe like tech giants. But this year, we're seeing a lot more sort of like enterprise use cases and that's driving a lot of the content as well. So I think when it comes to enterprise use cases, we're seeing a lot of talks around security and governance. We're seeing a lot of developer productivity talks and we're also seeing a lot more focus on how to scale operations. So take me through the focus this year. Just let's get this out on the table because this is a big event. What can people expect this year when you guys sat in the room with the teams and said, okay, here's going to be the content agenda. We have a format that's not broken. Let's not fix what's not broken. So the format's good. What was the focus? What was this year's focus? Why is, what's going to be the focus of this year's CUBECon? Yeah, I think, so Brian and I, when we sit together, we have all the tracks that we've been using for the last couple of years and generally we sort of like stick to them because they're like pretty, pretty good. But the way we, I think the interesting thing is we sort of see over the years how the distribution across the tracks have changed. So for example, I think this year, operations is like a super big track and it's like very competitive to get into. And that's because we're seeing a lot more adoption at scale in different use cases, different types of companies and yeah, in production. So I think sort of that track has been like a main focus and also I think customizing Kubernetes is another one as people's use cases got more sophisticated. And in the sort of use case track, I think we see a lot more enterprise, like even banks adopting Kubernetes. So essentially the same game as before, but weighting them differently based upon adoption? Exactly, yeah. I think it's sort of a shift like earlier, it would be like maybe a more earlier adopter and sort of like experimental use cases. And now it's like, okay, people are actually going into production now. So the shift has been into like, how do we get this running reliably at scale? So yeah, that's what we're seeing. On terms of the industry, if you look back and again, you guys went public at Lyft and you guys are growing and you guys have a great open source product with Envoy. I'm sure you guys are going to do the day zero thing again this year, last year was a big success. Is there any projects that you see coming out of the woodwork that are going to evolve up and what can people expect in terms of project growth or emerging projects? Is there any indication from your standpoint of what's going to come out of the community? Yeah, I think there's a lot of projects that are growing like your home continues to grow. I think one thing that I'm seeing from this year's content is there's a lot of focus on like OPA. Yeah, like I said, the security is sort of like a growing focus and OPA is certainly like one of the things I think people should expect at this year's conference. Another area that I'm like personally very interested in and I see I'm happy to see it popping up more this year is developer experience and developer productivity as we're even just personally witnessing at Lyft adopting cloud native architecture and microservices and Kubernetes comes with a lot of benefits but also a lot of new challenges into like how people should develop in this ecosystem. So there are projects like telepresidents and tilt that are coming up more and there's a few talks around that in application development as well. How about the developer side? What's the general sentiment in the community these days? If you had to kind of put up a rumor out there, what's the general vibe in the community from a developer standpoint around cloud native and Kubernetes? I think it depends on who you ask. Generally people are very, very excited to be sort of moving in this direction and I think it allows people to be a lot more flexible in how they develop their applications but I also think that there's a lot of open questions that we still have to answer and this is where I guess some of these new projects come in to help fill the gap. Well, first of all, you guys always have a great conference. theCUBE will be there as well as other media producers so it'll be a lot on digital. So folks not going to the event, they should go and see the face to face. I want to get the take on some of the submissions. You guys have an interesting dynamic in CNCF and KubeCon and cloud native con is you have a ton of end user projects, a lot of end user focus obviously, it's an end user focus show but you also have a lot of vendors, suppliers that are also in the community. So you have an interesting balance going on. Talk about some of the numbers in terms of submissions because I know everyone's got submissions. Not everyone gets accepted. Like the operations you mentioned is a hot track. What's some of the numbers? Can you share any kind of statistics around number of submissions versus acceptance? Yeah, I think typically CNCF will publish sort of like some of the numbers in a blog post. So I don't know all the numbers off the top of my head but for example in operations, I think the acceptance rate was maybe less than 10%. I think it wasn't that competitive maybe two years ago but certainly as everyone moves to deploying Kubernetes on their own that's sort of a hot topic. What's the relationship in the community with the big vendors? Obviously you see Amazon, Google, Microsoft are big players in there and they're investing heavily in Kubernetes and VMware as well is also investing. Is that good, bad? Is it just balancing? What's the community's view on the participation of the big guys? Yeah, I think it's actually been really great to the community and I mean I personally would not have expected Microsoft, AWS to be as active in the community as they are now if you asked me five years ago. So I think it's this interesting thing that Kubernetes and CNCF has managed to do is instead of having the tech giants suck out the energy and the technology into their sort of private ecosystem it's sort of been the other way around where Microsoft and AWS and Google have been contributing a lot of the integrations and like other tooling and projects that they've built on top of the projects in CNCF and just enriching the community. So you're saying that they've been pushing more towards open source, not pulling out of it? Yeah, I think that's, I mean obviously I'm like super happy to see that but I think like that was not obvious at all from the beginning. Yeah, it's super exciting. You know we've been traveling the business model evolution and open source is more popular than ever before now and it's growing so fast and changing. Let's talk about the enterprises now because I think you're seeing adoption on the classic IT enterprise moving in. I've, we've interviewed many CISOs, CIOs and practitioners they all have the same kind of reaction. Oh my God, this is so good for our business. Kubernetes and what containers are doing will allow us to manage the lifecycle of our applications at the same time bring in cloud native without a lot of disruption. What's your reaction to that? Are you guys seeing that same dynamic and if so what are some of the use cases of enterprises within KubeCon? Yeah, I think one thing is sort of the earlier pitch is of course it allows you to have that flexibility to move from your data center into hybrid cloud and maybe to like different cloud vendors. So I think that's super appealing but another thing that we're seeing this year is as people adopt it at scale they're also seeing a lot of cost savings from adopting Kubernetes just because it allows them to be a lot more flexible in how they deploy things. I think that, yeah, in general you know, as you move to sort of like a community standard and open source platform it does help your developers a lot because now they don't need to build their own in-house thing which is, you know, for example what Lyft had before Kubernetes. So yeah, I think it's generally a productivity win. Talking about Envoy real quick, while I got you here, Lyft has been involved in donating that project and driving it last year and one of the most notable news at least from our observation was is that the Envoy did that event that day before and it was really popular. Yeah. Is it going to happen again? What's some of the views on that? Yeah, so EnvoyCon is happening again this year right before Kubernetes. Yeah, I think it's even more popular than last year. So there's going to be a lot of talks around, I think running Envoy in, I guess, at scale and also like on top of Kubernetes as people sort of integrate the two technologies more. Okay, so I've got to ask you the personal observations. You can take your co-chair hat off and put your KubeCon community hat on. What dark horses are out there that you think might surprise people this year? What do you think might happen? Because there's always something that goes on that just is a surprise that dark horse if you will comes out of the woodwork. What do you think might happen? Well, I think there's, of course, going to be a few new open source projects that are launched there. And I also think there will be a lot of, maybe more than usual interesting people that people can meet at the conference, so. I heard there's a rumor that the original gangsters or the OGs or the original members, the seven original members are going to be there. Yeah, I don't know. Confirm or deny? I don't know if I can confirm or deny. Okay, that's possibly, we'll be tracking that. All right, final question for you. What do you think will be the most important story for people to pay attention to this year? What do you think is going to be evolving out on the stage, out on the tracks, out on digital? What do you expect to see this year? What are some of the top stories and top notable points that you think is going to happen this year? Yeah, I think one thing that maybe for me and for a lot of people is sort of this message that like Kubernetes is ready. I think it's been sort of building up in this hype for the last few years. And yeah, we've seen adoption, but I think this is truly the year that I see a lot of like enterprise and user use cases. And I can really say that like Kubernetes is ready. So the new criteria is proof points. Scale, operationally seeing some operations, real proof points, customer adoption, enterprise and hyperscalers. Yeah. Vicky, thanks for coming in and sharing this preview on KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. This is theCUBE covering the KubeCon, CloudNativeCon preview with Kichang Co-Chair, who set the agenda with her fellow Co-Chair, Brian Lyles as well. Great to have her on and share upcoming conversation around KubeCon. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.