 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation, and ecosystem partners. Welcome back, we're in Barcelona, Spain, and you're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage, and this is KubeCon CloudNativeCon. I'm Stu Miniman, I co-host for the two days of live coverage, it is Mr. Corey Quinn. And joining us was on the main stage yesterday, Cheryl Hung, who is the Director of Ecosystems at the CloudNative Computing Foundation, or the acronym CNCF. Cheryl, welcome back to the program, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, I always have a great time with theCUBE. So, first of all, 7,700 people here, one of the things that strikes me is, we go to a lot of shows, we even do a decent amount of international shows. The community here is definitely global, and it's not, sometimes it's the same traveling pack, some person's like, well, not quite as many people here as we're in Seattle, I'm like, well, this isn't just the contributors all going and some of their friends and family. We've had on our program, thanks to the CNCF, and for some of the ecosystem, many of the customers here in Europe doing things, when we talk to people involved, it is obvious that it is a global community, and it definitely shows here at the event, so great job on that. It's something that the CNCF really cares about, because it's not just about one country, or a small set of countries, this is actually a global movement. Their business is all over the globe that are in the middle of this transformational moment, so it's just really exciting to see it. I mean, I think of myself as being pretty involved with the cloud-native community, but as I'm walking around the sponsor booths here today, there's a good 40, 50% that I'm just not familiar with, and that's quite surprising to me, it's like I would have thought I'd knew almost all the companies around here, but it's always really fun to see the new companies coming in. Okay, so let's talk for a second about the diversity inclusion. One of the things is bringing in people that might not have been able to come on their own. Can you talk a little bit about that effort, and you've got some connection with that yourself? Yeah, yeah, so I care a lot about diversity in tech and women in tech more specifically. One of the things that I feel like this community has a lot of very visible women, so when I actually looked at the number of contributors by men and women, I was really shocked to find out it was 3%. It's kind of disappointing when you think about it. It's 3% of all the contributors to all the projects in the CNCF. Exactly, if you look at the 36 projects, you look at the number of the people who've made issues, commits, comments, pull requests, it's 3% women. And I think the CNCF has put a lot of effort into the, for example, the diversity scholarships. So bringing more than 300 people from underrepresented groups to KubeCon, including 56 here in Barcelona, and it has a personal meaning to me because I really got my start through that diversity scholarship to KubeCon Berlin two years ago. And when I first came to KubeCon Berlin, I knew nobody, but just that little first step can go a long way into getting people into feeling like they're part of the community and they have something valuable to give back. And then once you're in, you're hooked on it and yeah, then it's a lot of fun. It's been said fairly frequently that talent is evenly distributed but opportunity is not. As you take a look at the diversity inclusion efforts that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is embarking on, how do you, where do you set evolving to next? And I mean, I guess that has, I guess that has two specific questions. One is do they target for next time other than just larger than 3%? And secondly, are you looking to actively expand the diversity scholarship program? And if so, how? Yeah, the diversity scholarship and the other initiatives around this are long-term initiatives. They're not gonna pay off in the next three months. They're gonna pay off in two years time, three years time, you know, at least that's the hope, that's the goal. So we're always relying on a lot of our sponsors. I mean, it's kind of a nice time at the moment because there's a lot of efforts and willingness to be supportive of diversity in tech and that means that we can offer more diversity scholarships to more people. But I sometimes wonder, like, I hope that this is not a, I hope this is not a one-off thing that will happen for five years and then people will lose interest. So I think there are other things that need to happen. And one of the interesting things that I looked at recently is a GitHub survey. This was done in 2017, where they asked men and women, the last time that you got help in open source, where was, what was the source of that help? And women were, so women were just as likely to say they were interested in contributing, but they were half as likely to say that they had asked on a public forum, like a mailing list, and half as likely to say that they had received unsolicited help. So I don't think it's something you can just say, right, we'll look at individuals and make them do more. This is a community effort. We're all part of the same group of people that we're trying to do the same, trying to work on the same things. And to do that, we need to get this mindset amongst the community that we need to reach out to more individuals and help them and pull them in rather than saying, well, it's up to the CNTF to sort it out. So Cheryl, another piece of the ecosystem that you're involved with is the end user piece. We saw some of the end users on stage, as I mentioned, we've had some on the program. Talk about the importance and the progress of end user participation in the CNTF. Yeah, so the CNTF was set up with these three bodies, the governing board, the technical oversight committee and the end user committee. And in theory, these three should be co-equal in power. At the moment, the end user community is probably lagging behind a little bit, but it's the reason that I joined the CNTF, the reason that my role exists is to understand what the end users need and get them active and engaged in the community. So my hope for the end user community is that end users who come in can see not only the value of using these projects, but there's a path for them into becoming strong technical leaders and having actual influence in the projects beyond users and then eventually maybe contributing themselves and becoming leaders. Governance of open source projects has always been something of a challenge because it seems that in many respects, the most vocal people are often the ones who are afforded an unfortunate level of control, despite the fact that they may very well not speak for the common case, that instead they start advocating and advocating for corner cases. How it seems that at this point, based upon the sheer level of engagement you're seeing across enterprises and companies of all sizes, that that is clearly not the case. How did you, I guess, shape an ecosystem that has a healthy perspective on that? So leadership in open source is very different from leadership in a typical corporate hierarchy. And leaders in open source, I recognize not only because of their technical depth and their hands-on contribution, but for their ability to communicate to others and have the empathy and understand what other people need. So I think that's gone, the people who are seen as leaders in this community have, they've become role models for others and others kind of use that to earn the actual trust of the community. You have to be very clearly making the right decisions and not doing it because you have an agenda in mind or because your employer wants you to do certain things. So I think that's gone a long way to making sure that the ecosystem is really healthy and people really feel good about what they're doing. Okay, Cheryl, last thing is, could you give us for, how are we helping end users get an on-ramp into this community? If you could just give us kind of a real quick, what's the CNTF doing? What are some of those on-ramp for those that aren't already on the boat? The three big challenges for end users right now. Number one, how do I navigate the ecosystem? Number two, how do I hire engineers? And number three, how do I make sure that my business strategy is aligned with cloud native? So navigating the ecosystem is probably the trickiest one because there's so many channels, so many projects, there's no central authority that you can go to and say, I've got this problem, am I doing the right thing? Can you help me get this project, this feature into this project's roadmap? So the CNTF has a lot of programs to ensure that end users can meet their peers and especially companies who are perhaps 12 months ahead of them. And everybody's trying to go through the same journey right now, everyone has these common challenges. So if they can figure them out together and solve them together, then it just saves a lot of time and effort for everybody. On the hiring piece, the CNTF does a lot around marketing and PR and brand awareness. And there's companies here who have a booth who are not selling their products at all, they're just here because they want to be in front of the engineers who are most involved with open source and with Kubernetes. And so the CNTF facilitates that and to some extent subsidizes these end users to be at KubeCon. And then the third challenge is aligning your business strategy with Cloud Native. So end users want to know these projects have longevity. They're going to be here in five years or 10 years time. And so for companies that want to get involved into that next level, for example, running on the technical oversight committee or being on the governing board, the CNTF can help end users become, have that level of impact and have that level of engagement within the community. All right, so Cheryl, last word, any advice for people? What's the hottest job out there that people are looking for? I previously managed DevOps engineering teams and finding people with real Kubernetes production experience right now is just really hard. And I would say that the first thing that you should do if you have no experience at all in it is look at the training programs, for example, the CKA, Certified Kubernetes Administrator. You don't have to get a certification, but if you look at the curriculum and go through it step by step, you can understand the basic concepts. And after that point, get the production experience. There's no substitute to a year or two years of really running applications and monitoring and scaling them in production and dealing with fires. So once you get to that point, it's a great place to be. All right, well, you heard it here. It's Cheryl, thanks so much for sharing everything with the ecosystem, diversity and inclusion. Really appreciate the updates. Thank you, really good to meet you. For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman, coming back with, getting towards the end of two days live coverage here. Thanks for watching theCUBE.