 Good afternoon, Cloud Natives, and welcome back to the second city. We're here at KipCon, Cloud NativeCon, and my name is Savannah Peterson, joined by my fabulous co-host, Dustin Kirkland. Dustin, you feeling great this afternoon? Yes, I just heard you call the audience Cloud Natives, and I don't think I've heard that yet. That's a wonderful term. I try and have a different one every time. I like that one. I like that one. That's my favorite so far. Great, I love the positive feedback. Thank you for that. We have some really exciting guests. We actually have someone who works for the foundation that makes this entire event possible. None of us would be here without Linux or the Linux Foundation. Robert, thank you so much for being here. Well, of course, thank you for having me. Thank you for coming to our event. I mean, it's our pleasure. theCUBE's actually been at every single KipCon. It's one of John's badges and claims to fame here. We love being here. I met theCUBE through KipCon, which is also awesome. You're here because you're an awesome member, and you probably were on at a KipCon in the past, I would imagine. I think so. Yeah, all right, well, we're all connected. We've also got Josh joining us from Equinix. Thanks so much for being here. Absolutely, I'm excited to be here. I can tell, your smile tells me that, which is a great start. Hopefully, we'll keep that smile going for the rest of the show. I can do it. Yeah, and we had your scarf on the show last night, which was great, swag segment for those wondering. They're the only scarf in the house. It's a bit chilly in Chicago. Which is perfect for Chicago, especially with all that wind we've been getting. Yeah, it really is. Windy City is no joke. Josh, I'm gonna start with you. What are some of the observations you've seen from being here, talking to folks? Your booth is just nearby. What's the buzz? Well, I mean, obviously it's an exciting event. We had Kubernetes continues to mature. We have tons of customers who use it, and so we have those conversations a lot. I have a bias, right? I've always been an infrastructure nerd, right? It's always been a thing for me. Shout out to the infrastructure nerds in the audience. That's right, software is really boring if it doesn't have something to run on, right? So being at Equinix has been pretty fantastic because it's our core. What we do is infrastructure, and so being able to actually, my favorite part is being able to engage with some of our partners who build solutions on our platform to enable both our customers and their customers. That's been really exciting. We had Quimby come by, and we've had a few other partners that just come by to talk to our joint customers about how they've been using our platform, using our network, our bare metal servers to be able to solve problems. It's just nice remembering that the infrastructure's still there, and it's important. I feel like you're feeling the love right now. I feel the love. You've got that warm, fuzzy vibe going on. I can feel it sitting next to you. That's right, yeah, the infrastructure's important. Yeah, it is important, and everybody here notices that. Robert, this has got to feel like a party for you and all your friends. Well, you know, we're here to service our contributor friends. Yeah. If it wasn't for our open source projects, this doesn't happen. And so, just happy to be here, happy to be able to facilitate an event so that we can have our friends, there are partners like Aquinix, we can have our contributors. We can have our end users together. And to get everybody together after a few dark years of not being able to get together, it's wonderful that- It's a gentle way of putting this. Yes. But the clouds have split, and now the sun is shining, and we're all together again. It's wonderful. It must have been that wind out of the wood field, right? Wow, I'm here for the dad jokes. I know we've got some parents on the stage. Ah, here we go. You know. All right, Robert, tell us about how CNCF, LF, and Aquinix work together to support those open source developers. Well, it's, you know, like you were saying, you know, it's infrastructure. We certainly, we're building cloud native technology, and it needs to run somewhere. And so Aquinix has been very generous in providing credits to CNCF projects so they can do what they do. The way Linux Foundation and Cloud Native Compute Foundation work is that we are the janitors of open source. We do the things that are really not that interesting, that are a little messy. But important. Well, certainly they are, but they're not as important as our maintainers and contributors and our end users. We are in service to them. And so by creating infrastructure with our friends at Aquinix, by providing them the tools and services they need to live their best open source lives, we get better software. Time and time again, we have shown that open source development model, well, it won't. It is far superior than any other development model out there and it continues to accelerate and not only innovation but value it provides to end users, to customers, to service providers. Absolutely. I mean, open source community is what we're celebrating here. It's also a big conversation in the AI dialogue and I'm curious since you're probably having a lot of these conversations, at least in the hallway and the talk track as well, what role do you think the open source community and how important are they to what's going on in AI as the adoption ramps? Huge. So Linux Foundation, we have our LFAI and data foundation where we are beginning to bring people that are interested in this space that can provide value to our open source community, a providing a place where they can centralize their work, they can talk amongst themselves but also Linux Foundation has a role to play here to help educate our regulatory agencies. There was a time in the 90s where we saw cryptography as very evil and dangerous and PGP and people were arrested over this and well, it turned out not to be that big of a deal and so Linux Foundation has a role to play in this to help educate our governments to help them understand that this is not something to be afraid of, this is something to leverage to improve everyone's lives to make smarter decisions. Now like any tool, it can be used for bad things but we would hope that when we bring people together of like minds into our foundation at LF that we can help educate and move it towards more positive opportunities. Yep, I couldn't agree more and on that note I really want to hear about some of the bare metal infrastructure. I'm really interested in hearing about that and how that ties back to Robert's mission around supporting those maintainers. Josh? Yeah, sure, so we support over a hundred projects in partnership with the CNCF and the Linux Foundation and we also have a few other open source projects. That's awesome, that's almost half the projects, isn't it? It's a lot. It's over half, yeah, pretty darn close, that's fantastic. We have a lot of operating systems, for example. Alpine Linux is a great example. It powers half of containers, right? It's a really small operating system. Which is impressive when you think about the market saturation there, it's wild. And it's all over the world, so we see them running into two key problems. One, they have to do development and when they do development, they have to do development against x86, 64-bit and ARM processing. So they need servers that they can actually, bare metal, develop against, right? Then they run into a problem of, well, now once we've developed it we need to get the code to everybody so they need a distribution network. And so we are able to provide the backend infrastructure and work with them to make sure that not only can they develop the products that people will then be able to use and have a high rate of success in using, but also making sure they can get access to it. I mean, they're downloading over four terabytes a day of data that's coming off of people downloading Alpine Linux. And that's just Alpine Linux. I know, this is wild. I'm just saying zeros and ones and chaos with that. And to think about how that's being processed and what people are building with it. Yeah, I mean, you've got a lot of work. How do you, I just want to follow up question there. You say you support over 100 projects. How do you determine which projects you support? Well, there's a lot of different variables. And so I'll do a call out to Ed Bielmetti. They're a lot of different projects too. Yeah, so I'll do a call out to Ed Bielmetti who's on our team. He runs our open source partner program. He does a lot of work in working with those programs, helping those projects understand what we can offer. Getting the requirements and laying that out. We do put a lot of emphasis on operating systems because they're just critically important. But we also look at a lot of distributed data, distributed networks, virtual networking. We don't have a very specific checklist that we are the requirement. What we're really looking for is, does their need, do they have contributors? Is it in a group? Is it people actually working? Is it momentum? Is it building up? What are their needs? Can we address that need? We can't address every need. Sometimes projects come in with asks and we're not able to accommodate the ask. And it has nothing to do with what they're doing. Like we just don't accommodate. But the vast majority of them, obviously, there's over a hundred. Like we're able to accommodate, we're able to provide that infrastructure and to support them. Wow, that's such a value for the community. Is it making, I see you grinning over there as you're listening to this part. Does it make you happy to hear these narratives? Well, beyond happy. I mean, you know what makes me really happy is understanding and seeing the impact that Equinix is having, not only at the Linux Foundation, but also the entire open source community. And so what we do at Linux Foundation is not possible without our partners. Without folks showing up to chop wood, to carry water, this doesn't work. We almost bring things to the system. And one of the things that really, when I started digging into what Equinix has done in the past with Linux Foundation and CNCF, the thing that really got my attention is the work on the Linux kernel. So this is fundamental technology. This is on Mars. This is in your watch. This is in medical devices. This is in your car. And so what Equinix hosts, one of the many things that they host for the kernel project is git.kernel.org. So they, you know, putting git into a CDN does not work very well. And so what they were able to do with Equinix's help is distribute this around the world. So regardless of where you are, you can have access to git. That is allowing anybody in the world, regardless of the level of development, your country's end, education level there, whatever, you have access to this, to this code. And they also host archive.mirrors.kernel.org, archive.kernel.org, where all the headers are and those sorts of things, which is crucial for compiling kernel modules. If this didn't exist, if this goes down, half the internet goes down. That's not my line. That's from the Linux kernel team when I was talking with them about this. The scale that this is running at, the number of people, number of users it's servicing, we couldn't do it without Equinix. And I just hope people are appreciative of, you know, that impact that it has across for everyone. Because at the Linux Foundation, we don't care who it is. We just want to facilitate open source development and people to be able to benefit from it. When we all work together on something, we all win. The old proprietary model, it just doesn't work. And sometimes it keeps trying to come back and bless their heart, but they need to stop. Open source wants. The gray hairs of capitalist past. No, I totally agree with you. I mean, even the two of you just sitting right here, it's an example of what this ecosystem has created. It's what the Linux Foundation existing and pumping out projects has done. You mentioned, Robert, that your first day for the Linux Foundation was at KubeCon in Amsterdam. Yes. Engaging with that community. The Linux Foundation has, I mean, you have community members and contributors all over the world. Yes. And where do you see, are there any trends outside of the projects themselves that you've been seeing where there's hotspots or communities that are popping up? Give me, you got to have a lens that we don't have. Well, one thing that I saw, I was just recently at KubeCon China in Shanghai. Oh, yeah. And to work with that community and see that the second largest country to provide contributions is China. And the amount of work that's being done and the amount of projects that are being donated to the CNCF from China is amazing. And regardless of political differences and what our governments are working through, as open source developers, we can agree on these core beliefs that open source is a way of uniting us, of working together on a common goal and spreading goodness throughout the world. The other trend that I've seen is more developers and contributors from Africa. It ran into individuals that traveled from their countries in Africa to Spain, to Bilbao, for open source summit, and shared with us that through our scholarships for training and certification, certainly the support that we get for travel and hotel rooms for contributors and for maintainers, that they're able to now travel. What this means is that all across the world, regardless of where you are, EU, North America, Japan, it's like, no, we are starting to see more and more development from other countries. And that is beyond exciting for us, because as a species, when we unite, there's nothing that we can't solve. There's nothing, no problem that is insurmountable. Yeah, I'm going to restate something you said but in a slightly different way. When you say open source one, I think what you're really saying is that when we talk about massive scale software, not an individual app on your phone or some little piece of internal software, we're talking about something that scans, spans, excuse me, continents, spans cultures, spans companies, organizations, startups, open source is the only answer to how to solve that problem, right? Absolutely, we have to have everybody helping out. And when we distribute that load, that responsibility, and not everybody is going to write code, but we can have people writing documentation, using the software, submitting bugs, we all help in our own different ways. We could have individuals hosting meetups. We could have people that have spent a lot of time with Linux or Kubernetes, mentoring that next generation of technologists. We all have a purpose. We all have some bit of value that we can provide and the only way we scale is that if each of us figures out what that value is and shares it with everyone, well, we all win. And you're right, I could say open source one, but in reality, we're all winning. Just a trifecta of Ws up here, I love it. This is great. I think with what Robert is saying, that also ties into why it's so important for Equinix. We look at, like, Equinix was founded on equality and neutrality, right? Connecting regions, connecting people, making it possible for what the Linux Foundation is doing. Like, at our core, that's what we've done over the last 25 years. So it's really exciting to your point. It's like being able to see these different regions of the world who have gotten this increased connectivity, increased availability of resources, increased opportunity to information and to connect with others, and to be able to find purpose and meaning and be able to contribute when that wasn't as easily an option, obviously not 20 years ago, but even in the last 10 years, it's improved dramatically. I love that, equity and neutrality. I mean, we need a lot of that as we approach our AI future, a lot of different things that are going on. Last question for you as we wrap, when we have the opportunity to sit on the same stage with you in Paris, what do you hope that you can say there that we can't say here yet? Ooh, what's your answer? I want to hear this. Love this. So I'm going to be good, and I'm not going to over-communicate or our desires and intentions for Paris, but I think the safe answer is you're going to continue to see Equinix make investments and see the importance of our contribution to open source projects. I anticipate that we will have made some progress on some things that we've been working on that I'm not allowed to talk about. I'm sniffing a Parisian announcement, perhaps. Well, I'm not going to commit to anything because I'm going to be good, but we do look at the KubeCon events as really important milestones to interact with the community, to be able to share the progress that we've been making. In my function in developer relations, I work to influence the experience for developers working with Equinix, on Equinix, and our partners developing in our open source community, developing and working with Equinix. And so I've got some projects coming over the next couple of months that I hope will prove to be very exciting. Josh, leaving us with a cliffhanger. It's going to be a cliffhanger. It's going to be a cliffhanger. All right, well, I'll look forward to it. I'll see you in Paris, and I'll give you some of it. I know, I'll see you in Paris! All right, what about you, Robert? Oh, everything we do is transparent. Right. You're going to see it. Yeah, well, of course we're going to see it, but is there something that you're really hoping develops or matures a bit in the next six months in particular? Well, I hope that what we were able at Linux Foundation to be in better service to our strategic partners. I hope that we can start delivering more and more value to them. One of the reasons why I joined LF was to make certain that in the past we've been very good at receiving donations and those sorts of things. We've been terrible at writing thank you notes. So I'm hoping that we get much better of writing thank you notes. I hope we get much better at sharing the value that we're getting out of these partners and expect to hear more and more of that. Wonderful, I love it. Well, Robert, I'll get your thank you note in the mail shortly. Yours as well, Josh. Thank you both for joining us here today. Dustin, always a pleasure to share the stage with you. And thank all of you for tuning in to our live coverage here from KubeCon, CloudNativeCon in the second city. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for emerging tech news.