 Awesome. So, yeah, let's move to the next speaker. And the next speaker is another person, Brandon O'Leary. I don't know if I pronounced it correctly. So Brandon is a senior developer evangelist at Kidlub. And he will be talking on topic predictions in the cloud-active ecosystem. Yeah, Brandon, take it away. Yeah, how's it going? Thanks, you did perfect on the name. So thank you. It was awesome. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. And yeah, I'm just going to share my screen, hopefully. Hopefully I can just do this window. Great. Awesome. OK, hopefully you're seeing my slides now. All right, well, thanks again so much for having me. I'm really, really excited to be here. I'm excited to get to talk to you all today. I'm excited that our Kubernetes community day program is coming back to life after quite the hiatus, given everything we've been going through as a world in this pandemic. I'm excited that the first community day back is in Africa. I'd like the previous speaker. I wish I could be there with you. I'd love to come visit. I've only ever been to Africa once. Me and my team got to go to Cape Town. So kind of all the way in the south, I flew over the whole continent from London on the way. But I'd love to visit more. I think everybody's kind of feeling that. I used to travel a good amount for work. And I think as the pandemic hopefully ends, and hopefully we get it under control, I feel like everyone's got the travel bug to try and go and see parts of the world that we took travel for granted maybe in lots of ways before. So excited for that. Again, my name is Brennan O'Leary. I'm really excited to be here. I work at GitLab, actually with Iwo Bakar, who's one of the organizers of the event. And he asked me to come speak to you today about predictions in the cloud native ecosystem. So that's probably the hardest thing to come and speak about. But I'm honored that he thought I would have something to add to that conversation. And hopefully I do. Hopefully you learned something today. Also really interested in any questions you have for me. I'm in addition to working at GitLab, I'm actually a member of the governing board of the CNCF. I've been a member for probably just about a year at this point. And so I'm really interested in questions you might have for me and about either GitLab, of course, or the CNCF itself, questions and thoughts you might have, thoughts about today's event. All of those things are wide open to talk about. But first today, I want to go through my thoughts and a level set of how I think we got to where we are. Of course, some of this might not be news for folks joining this event who have been following the cloud native community or following Kubernetes for a long time. But I want to give some context, because I think that before you can try and predict the future, which of course no one can, you have to have the context of how we got to where we are. So I want to talk about that a little bit. Then I'm going to talk about some specific things in the cloud native technology space that I think are going to be important in the coming years. And that's reflective of my view on watching the industry, as well as what other industry leaders have been talking about in cloud native, including the head of the technical oversight committee, Liz Rice. So I have to give credit to her for some of these ideas because she has a finger on the pulse of everything, of course. And then I'll talk a little bit about industry trends in general, things outside of maybe cloud native but that are either tangentially or related in the sense that it's in the software industry and trends that are happening in enterprise software and software in general. And then we'll talk about, well, what's next? If these are the predictions for now, how can you possibly keep up with where we're going? So that's kind of what we're going to cover today. And so first, how did we get here? Well, by way of kind of a brief intro, really the landscape of software development is changing. And it's in some ways always changing, but I think that the advent of the cloud and the growing popularity of it, the advent of cloud native technologies have accelerated it. And I think that in itself isn't something that's very new. Again, it's always changing. If we look at kind of what modernization in software has looked like, we've seen these kind of trends that come and accelerate growth in software. So 10 or 12 years ago at this point, there's a famous venture capitalist who said, Mark Andreessen, he said that software is eating the world. And I think that that was very true then and is true now. I think software has eaten the world. We've seen that software is the way that companies now differentiate themselves from one another. It's every company is a software company, whether they make software as their primary product or they sell something else. Every company needs software and to be able to move quickly and adapt to change with their software in order to be competitive in whatever environment they're competing in. And so we had waterfall and agile. Those are methodologies for building the software that came along years ago. DevOps now is a 10-year-old term and was the idea that we want to marry development and operations in a way that we can get software out the door faster to our customers. And then really we have this more recently, the concept of Cloud Native, the reason we're all together here. This is I want dynamic environments. I want to be able to scale up and down with demand. I want to be able to deploy quickly and scale quickly. And this line is kind of like a straight line. But I would say it's almost curved, because each of these innovations not only allows us to continue to grow software development as an industry, but it also accelerates that speed of delivery. And so Cloud Native has definitely done that. And when we talk about every company being a software company, well, then you end up with all of these companies that have stories that are then related to Cloud Native. These are just pictures I literally took off of the Kubernetes customer stories website, images of company logos. But I think it tells a really interesting story, the different kinds of enterprises and companies that you find there who are leveraging Kubernetes for its value, but really to solve very different problems. You have banks, these large banks like Capital One, ING. These banks are typically banks. We typically think of banks as kind of late adopters to software or industry trends. They move slowly. They're very particular. But even in banking, it's been disrupted in many ways by software. And so we see those folks needing to innovate still within their bounds that they have. Or we see traditional journalism, like New York Times. That obviously is a world that's hugely changed since the advent of the internet. And in order to kind of preserve their business and their ability to produce content and journalism, they have to be able to move faster. And then even see IBM, like the oldest company when it comes to computers and software of any kind, also embracing Cloud Native. They really embrace it as they purchased Red Hat, who has a lot of products based around Kubernetes and other Cloud Native technologies. But they use Kubernetes themselves to enable that fast to market software. And so those are kind of large enterprises that see this as a competitive advantage. But then on the other side is startups that also see this as a huge competitive advantage to be able to reach scale without investing the kind of money and resources that those larger enterprises would be able to. So kind of the other side of that coin is Cloud Native enables those companies to be able to be competitive and scale in a way that's new in a lot of ways. The internet did this for sure. But Cloud Native adds another layer on top of it where you don't need a massive capital outlay, a massive investment of money in order to build a business that can scale to the globe. We've seen that happen time and time again with startups who live in the cloud. They are really a Cloud Native. They were born in the cloud and live there. But we've also seen academia and research institutions make huge strides. We just heard about data and data in Cloud Native. We have these universities and large academic or nonprofit organizations that are leveraging Cloud Native to do exactly that, to level up what they're doing with data. Again, to build a scale that they wouldn't otherwise be able to just from a cost prohibitive perspective. They can do things that they weren't able to even dream of before the cloud and Cloud Native technology. And so those stories really show us that Cloud Native touches all of these different areas. And so because of that, I guess, again, a lot of preaching to the choir, if you will. You're maybe bought into that. That's why you're here. So I think a natural question is, well, what's next? So we've got Kubernetes. It's been around for quite some time. We've all these other fantastic projects, many of which are presenting here today. Where do I focus my energy as a technologist to say, these are the things that I want to understand more because they're up and coming? And so one of those things is Kubernetes at the edge. And so the edge can mean a lot of things. It can mean connected devices or internet of things or IoT devices. But it can also mean sensors and equipment for lots of different platforms that live at the edge. And the sheer volume of the data created by all of these devices, right? There's something like 30 billion connected device. I don't even know how you count that. But folks make an attempt to count that in a market of $700 billion going to $1 trillion in the next six years for these kinds of devices. So the volume of data and information, well, data created by, let's separate data and information. So data, just raw data created by these devices, staggering amount of data. And so to turn that data into useful information, you have to have more processing power out near them to process and send that collected data, that aggregated data, that aggregated information back into your cloud services. You can't just stream all of that data all the time, necessarily. And so that's where the edge comes to be. And so again, I haven't really clearly defined what the edge is. It could be these internet of things devices. But really, I think the way to think about the edge is to define it as to what it's not. So you have endpoints, which are the end user devices and the other data generating devices. And you have your core, which is like your core infrastructure. Maybe that's in the cloud or it's on-premise. And the edge lives somewhere in the middle there. So this is things that might be R closer to those endpoints but might have computing power requirements before that data gets sent back into the core infrastructure. And so it can mean a lot of things. And we've seen it mean a lot of things. So there's a lot of mission critical decisions that happen to happen on that edge, based on what the current data is, what the previous models we had were. And these are grandiose versions of that. Kubernetes in your car, obviously that's something we could all think of. But then also, NASA is putting Kubernetes clusters now into devices that it's flying out into space, into the moon. We've received the European Space Agency and other space agencies doing that as well. And the US Air Force putting it inside of a fighter jet. So these are places where there's a lot of data being generated. And a huge need for processing power there at the edge. But there's other simpler things, right? These are grandiose things. If you think of surveillance systems, or road, or toll, or traffic management systems, lighting, asset tracking, that there's lots and lots of things at the edge that need this kind of computing power. And that's why talking about Kubernetes at the edge and things like K3S and ways of running Kubernetes in a lightweight way, but still leveraging all the benefits of it is going to be a trend that's going to be around for a while. And the growing spread of 5G and other fast broadband wireless technology is going to only increase that throughput and increase the amount of data that's coming through the edge. So second, another trend that I think is still being figured out is called service mesh. And so again, let's talk about that and define it. Well, I think before you can define service mesh, you really have to understand what a microservice is. And then again, differentiating microservices from a service mesh, because they're kind of interrelated. So a microservice, right? The idea of that is we used to build only these large monolith software applications that kind of is one code base that does everything, does all of the transaction processing. It does all of the business logic. It does all of the handling of login and identity and all of that in kind of one massive monolith. The idea of microservices is you break that into distinct services, right? There's an identity service. There's a payment processing service. And that's a fantastic idea for a lot of businesses, because at a large enterprise, you're going to have massive teams that have to then figure out who's working on what and how do we distinguish changes between one another. But the question quickly becomes, how will you scale it? And this is a fantastic little fun illustration from a friend of mine on Twitter, Chloe Condon. Any time I say talk about scale, I have to just include it, just because I think it's a lot of fun. And that's really where service mesh comes in and why there's been so much discussion over the past year. And we'll continue to be a lot of discussion about service in the cloud native space. And the reason for that, if I can click, is service mesh tries to create a layer where we're able to control a lot about these microservices. We have all these microservices. If we just connect them all together individually, you have a lot of connection points to think about. And what's the right level of data access between this service A and service B? But using a service mesh allows you to place kind of a proxy layer where all of the metrics about traffic and routing and then how do we retry and when do we time out and how do we turn something on and off is controlled within that service mesh control plane. And so that's why you see a lot of folks talking about there was a lot of kerfuffle last year about which service mesh is best. I won't get into all that, but I do think service mesh is something that's going to be around for a while as more folks adopt microservices and see that while it is a great model, it quickly can spiral out of control if you don't have a way to centrally control it, which of course you did in a monolith. So those are the kind of cloud native technologies I want to look at her. But I also think there's some industry trends and I honestly don't know why I drew this line. I mean, it's somewhat arbitrary, but I think that these trends really impact the whole software industry and not just the cloud native community, although that could be argued for either side of any of these. And so there's a couple of things I want to talk about there that I think are becoming really important. The first and maybe the most critical is supply chain security. This is something that's gotten a lot of attention recently, and I think the reason that it's now getting so much attention, I mean, supply chain attacks, attacking somewhere along the supply chain, it has been around as long as humanity has been around. If you read Sun Sue's The Art of War, you'll read about supply chain attacks. But I think software supply chain attacks are getting so much focus currently because we're at a point where there's a lot of organizations and enterprises who have really matured their security practices fairly well and created defensive perimeters and other areas where they're relatively secure. And so then attackers decide to then find the suppliers to those organizations that may be less mature security-wise and attack there. We've seen that in the Sunburst SolarWinds attack just this week, an attack on homebrew. And so these kinds of attacks and how you secure everything along your supply chain is something that's really being focused on and it's gonna lead to a lot of discussions. Another technology is EBPF. So this is kind of an advanced sort of Linux kernel feature, but one that's getting a lot of attention. And the reason for that is, again, as you have this kind of explosion of services that are maybe running on top of the Linux machine, EBPF provides this kind of native entry point that's a natural extension for controlling networking and observability without layering in a whole bunch of other stuff outside of the kernel. And so I think this is a technology that developers may want to follow, but definitely operators and folks that are running systems are gonna wanna understand as it becomes more popular. And then finally, I think this is kind of a general catch-all category, but I think it's one that's important. And this is like tooling and the experience for developers and operators. So we're seeing a huge kind of influx in how do we give developers and operators a great experience and make it really easy to do their jobs. And so there's probably a dozen things I could talk about here. GitOps is one thing you hear a lot about, right? This is the how do I get the code that we're writing into production, into Kubernetes, into my cloud native technology as best as I can. And a lot of folks are seeing that maybe having an agent that's pulling those changes into the cluster is better than something that pushes it. It's kind of, again, more of a Kubernetes methodology that I wanna state my desired state and have some agent making that true, right? So that's how you can think of GitOps. Of course, artificial intelligence, machine learning, I mean, it's something we talk about a lot, but it's more and more being seen as like a key solution to a wide scope of challenges for businesses. And it's really challenging to design and build and implement successfully at scale and production settings. And so tools around cloud native, like Kubeflow, are really bringing a lot of that tooling, kind of to maturity in a way that you can bring all of that together. And then DX or developer experience, again, this is something that we've seen a huge focus on. We're seeing consolidation in the DevOps tooling space. There's less and less companies doing it, more companies are doing more. And I think developers and operators are kind of come to expect that all of these tools are just integrated into a single platform that allows kind of the dual goal of getting software built and shipped quickly, but also maintaining and operating that software in the future together. So, okay, let's say those are the trends today. What's next? How can you possibly keep up with all this? And so that's a great question. And so how could you possibly keep up with all these trends? Well, I think the clear answer is, well, you can't. It's not possible, right? And I don't think you should put pressure on yourselves to understand and have a grasp of all of these technology changes and know everything about them and dive a mile deep. I mean, they're gonna come and go. And so that's hard. But I think you can try, like I think you can do a number of things to enable yourself to be adaptive in our industry. I think the number one way to do that is just to accept you're gonna be in a constant state of learning and be okay with that. Like that's how it works. I don't know very much. And the more I learn, the less I know or the more I know, I don't know. And that's okay, right? But there's a lot of great ways I think that you can enable yourself to be learning. One, I'd highly encourage you to attend KubeCon if you are having an issue with making that happen. Please find me on Twitter and let me know. I'd like to help. I think you should follow folks. I think Twitter's a great place to follow folks that you're interested in, topics you're interested in. And then on the CNCF side, if you're not in the CNCF Slack, highly recommend joining that. There's lots of channels for different areas that you might be interested in. And then also SIGs. So let's talk about that. So folks to follow, I just put a couple here. Kelsey Hightower, if you're not following him, you have to follow him. I also would recommend following Priyanka. Priyanka Sharma is the general manager of the CNCF. She's speaking at this conference as well, but she really helps highlight all the things that TeamCloud Native is doing. Also take a look at the ambassador program from the CNCF. It's a great program and there's a lot of great folks all across the world that you can follow from that. And then of course, shamelessly, I'll just plug that you should follow me at Illyria on Twitter. But I also encourage you to take a look at what the special intro scripts do. So these are called SIGs. And these groups focus on a very specific topic and they create a lot of great information. So for instance, I talked about supply chain security. That's something that you're interested in. SIG security right now is working on a huge paper on supply chain security. And I've learned so much from just kind of from afar watching those folks work on that paper. And then also, I think it's been mentioned, but there's also finally a mentoring program. If you're looking for a mentor, there's a huge mentoring program as a part of the CNCF and I would really encourage you to check that out. And that would be great. And it's even on GitHub and I work for GitLab, but that's how much I care about the mentoring program, sign up for that. So thank you so much again for having me today. It was really my pleasure to be speaking with you. Again, if you've got questions, I'd love to take them now. And if not, if you want to follow up with me on Twitter afterwards again, very open, my DMs are wide open if you have any questions after today. Also, like, that was one of the presentation. Like, I really enjoyed the presentation. I don't think I actually had the opportunity to learn how the whole cloud recognition ecosystem came to be and how basically what the future is for the Netsys and the cloud technology. I think this was a really good insight for session. Thanks a lot for that, Brandon. And yeah, this is time for Q&A. If you have any questions for Brandon, please feel free to drop me down in the chat section. And if you're also streaming live on YouTube, feel free to ask your own questions and live chats. Brandon and I will be happy to answer your questions. Yeah, for the slides, Brandon, I don't know if you can be able to assess your slides. Yes, I just dropped a link in the chat. Happy to share those. Awesome. So yeah, take a look. It should be in the chat now. Yeah, yeah, I'll just say it now. Cool. Yeah, and please, if you're watching this live, please feel free to tweet on Twitter, shout-out to Twitter, your Facebook, your YouTube. Feel free to talk about the event using the hashtag QCT Africa and let people know about this event. I mean, I think this has been awesome. I mean, the quality of content we've been able to have. So it has been really, really amazing. So yeah, I'll text once again, Brandon. And yeah, I hope to be able to facilitate this session with you. And I look forward to meeting you some other time soon. Yeah, hopefully soon. Yeah, and of course, I mean, yeah, it's still in the pandemic, but... Yeah, where are you based out of? I missed that at the beginning. Oh yeah, so yeah, I'm currently based in Nigeria. Okay, great. Yeah. It's awesome. It's a part of Nigeria. So yeah. Cool. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks once again, Brandon. And yeah, we'll move to the next cut then. Great. Thank you.