 Good morning, Cloud Natives, and welcome back to Chicago. We're here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined with John Furrier. It's day three, the energy is still thriving. Are you still as excited about Kubernetes as you were day one? It's up and running, the book is here, you got signed copy, I mean, you got beam in the mouse. I'm a spoiler, I know, we've got our favorites in some of our good friends here casted by beam. Tom, you've been on the show almost as much as I have, great to have you back. How are you doing today? I'm good, I'm good, a little bit tired was a great event. We got a lot going on at our booth. It was great to see the level of conversations going up yet again, we had a lot of demos, a lot of interest in the product, that was really good. But what I'm most excited about was stepping up my game here again, because I've always tried to bring a next level guest with me, and now we have the one and only Michael Kate. I don't know how I'm going to do after this, because I sort of, I met the ceiling, I'll have to bring our CTRC or something, yeah. I love that, well Michael, we're very happy to have you. The pressure's on now. Yeah, yeah, no pressure, right. No pressure, right. Great game, let's go. So why are you so great? I, yeah, good one. Well Michael, you spoke, you did the co-located events, D-Bass Day, tell me a little bit about your show experience, the conversations you've been having. Yeah, like kicking things off with the co-located event, we had D-Bass Dev Day, we had data on Kubernetes, and it's just amazing to see 300, 400 people over two of those co-located events, just listening about data in and around Kubernetes, and it's like, there's a time when a certain author of this book would be like, don't run, don't run data anywhere near your Kubernetes cluster. So that conversation, that data responsibility, the people around keeping the lights on there, they're here, and we're having those conversations. So that's kind of been the trend for me over the week. Yeah, so you feel like there's been a real evolution then in the conversation? Yeah, I think, like, so my first KubeCon, which was the one during the pandemic, which was just, there was a lot of developers, developer-centric, a lot of developers, a lot of engineers, and that progression has definitely come off to the SRE, the platform engineering folks, the operations people, the people that keep the lights on. I come from an infrastructure background, I've been in the VM world for many years, or VMware Explorers, it is this week actually in Europe, and then this evolution of coming here. So seeing the same people actually, like there's a lot of old, friendly faces that I recognize here. Well, and that's good, speaking of friendly faces, we had Kelsey Hightower on the show. He signed the book, tell me a little bit about the book here, folks, I'm going to make sure they can get a nice little ISO of it. We'll even do a little signature on the inside. Woo, bookmark flying out, yep. Properly signs. Yeah, so this is Kelsey's book where if you ever want to get involved with Kubernetes, like that day one, where do I go, where do I start? Well, it's best to go and do it the hard way, and he famously authored this book to get hands on, but understand the nuts and bolts of Kubernetes. Now, I feel like we're well ahead of that. I always talk about it being you've got to walk that line to understand what it is, what are the building blocks, but I feel like with some of the companies here, we've massively simplified what that Kubernetes up and running actually looks like today. You probably don't need a book like that, which we were giving it away and it's great, and people need to understand what the nuts and bolts, the building blocks of Kubernetes is. Well, and the adoption curve is definitely something that's been a challenge for Kubernetes, and I do feel we've talked a lot about it on the show, very much at an inflection point, things are happening now, this isn't just a conversation, it's execution. That said, complexity is still the biggest challenge with Kubernetes, so perhaps, well at least perhaps, I might need to read this book, at least to pro myself up. Tom, how do you think the, well actually I want to talk about it, you had a release at the show, tell me about that. So, we released a product, version 6.5 of Kasten K10. Focus is really on enterprise scale and security, and one thing I want to link to that on the security topic is one thing we've been seeing at these shows is how the use cases are evolving. So, when you look back at the videos of us talking two years ago, we'd be talking about backup all day long, every day all day, but today the use cases are more varied. We're seeing for example, a lot more customers talk about migrating their applications, so our application mobility functionality comes in there, but we're also talking to a lot more CISOs and people on the security level, and that is where this release and also the previous release has been focused on. One of the features is integration with Iron Bank, which allows us to grow in the federal space as well, and where security is even more important than the traditional customers that we have been working with. I mean, that's interesting, because that points to some of the things that you guys are hitting on, which is the maturization of Kubernetes operationally, the next level problems are security. Yeah, absolutely. Data protection, threats coming in, so you've got data protection and threats, and then how do you get that data back? So like the whole conversation elevates as Kubernetes starts to get more operational, and then two, you've got younger generation coming in that'll learn how to get up to speed on Kubernetes. So you have the folks who are building it, figure things out. Now it's in production, running stuff, more clusters. Now you've got new talent coming in, it's little skills gap issues. How do you guys see that? Because now that's like the next level of challenge is okay, it's running. So in a way it makes our go-to-market a little bit more complex, because we used to just focus on people who are getting up to speed. So most of our go-to-market efforts were really educating. We did a Dummies book back in the days, Kubernetes backup for Dummies. We started our whole KubeCampus effort to get people up to speed faster. I was going to bring it up if you didn't. And that one is still going strong. We're getting close to 30,000 people on there. That's so impressive. We've run more than 16,000 labs. So we're still working on those people early in the journey because the market is growing. But then at the same stage, or at the same time when I see the level of conversations that our salespeople, that our technical salespeople have, where Michael is also involved, that's really going deep. And the questions that we're going are really about people who now have been using Kubernetes for several years, and where security becomes an issue. Customers that are now like, okay, we've been using this in the cloud, but we really think, I mean, X came up this week, right? With their whole move to on-premise. They're not alone. We're having customers tell us like, we want to move from the cloud to on-premise because it's whatever reason they may have might be too expensive, or they have other compliance, traditions. Yeah, exactly. So, but that is like next level conversation, people who've actually been using it for a while. It's a platform conversation now. It's really involved. Yeah, absolutely. I think to go on to like Tom's point there as well, is that migration of the application, maybe we started off using some of our assets that we'd already spent. Like we already have virtualization maybe on-premises, and now we're growing up, we want to take advantage of the cloud. So, as much as we see big, big enterprises coming back, but we're also seeing big, big companies going into the cloud, and taking advantage of things like Red Hat OpenShift on AWS or ARO on Azure, because that gives them a complete, the same look and feel that they had on-premises now in the cloud, and all of the benefits of that as well. So, it's not always about cost and bringing it back, and that's a big thing for us is we're ultimately agnostic to the Kubernetes distribution, whether it's OpenShift, Kubernetes, blah, blah, blah, but we can help move that workload, move that application from A to B, and I think that's a compelling conversation that we're having on the show floor. Flexibility is just off the charts, but now you have an optionality from a customer's perspective. They can move whatever they got to do on the architecture basis. Yeah, that freedom of choice is obviously massive for that aspect. You know, flexibility, freedom of choice, it's one of my favorite topics whenever we talk product marketing, because you can see it as, it's so generic, everybody can say flexibility, freedom of choice. It becomes cliche. But when we dig into what we actually mean by that, the support for this whole ecosystem, it's part of Cloud Native, it's part of DevOps, it's no longer I'm going to build an application with this and that tool. No, I'm going to build an application, I'm going to use 20 tools, and they all need to work together. And you know what, next month I might change my mind on that tool or that database, and I want to switch it, and you guys all need to support me in doing that, or even switch from one stack to another. So flexibility is absolutely key, however shallow it might sound, there's a lot about it. This is a key point, Savannah and I, we're talking about this all week, is that when you look at architecting these Cloud Native complex environments, it's a systems construct. And so you need to have elements that aren't going to lock you in, or have consequences. So flexibility here is not just a cliche, hey, we're flexible, customer satisfaction, we're great. No, this is actually a systems element, as customers start to figure out the environment, and it's use case driven, it's basically customer- 100%, and things are moving so fast right now too, we don't even know what tools we're going to need. You know, I like the word no lock-in, because no lock, I've been in the storage industry for a while, and no lock-in used to be like this big important feature, but we don't really do it, and it was very dangerous to talk about it. No lock-in in this world needs to be the default. It's not even a feature, if you have anything that looks like a lock-in, it's just not acceptable. You're locked in by not being locked in. Basically, because you have the flexibility, again, this is back on the system side, it's not a feature, because every customer will be different because they have a different environment, and their use case will be defined by their distributed computing architecture. Just to add on to that, we always talk about lock-in, but actually, and actually it's Kelsey Hightower, so I'm stealing this from him, but he talks about lock-out, like being locked out of functionality, why can't I go and use Cloud SQL or Big Data, and understand what BigQuery, sorry, in Google, to understand a bit more about that data or that workload, so being locked out of features and functionality as well as being locked in to, oh, I've got to stay here because that's how we've architected it. I mean, that's called foreclosing up future value. If you get locked out, you don't have the ability to get that value. Exactly that. Locked out and left behind. Yeah, I mean, that's key. Yeah. Nice, there's a little tangent there, Savannah, that was good. That's why you have me here. Michael, you mentioned that you contributed something to the community, you gave something away here, tell us about that. We did, so we contributed the project called Canister. Canister is an open-source project, has been for a number of years, 2016, 2017 maybe, but really the focus there is raising awareness of data protection or availability. Resilience inside and outside of Kubernetes, like a lot of data points will be generally a staple set or an operator model within Kubernetes, but equally we've got PAS-based services such as AWS RDS that link into that application. How do we protect that? There's some other open-source data protection tools out there. It's unclear where they're going in terms of who maintains that, who's what features and functionality are they bringing. What we're doing is we're going into the application, providing that consistency. Databases haven't, as much as we have loads of databases available to us in the cloud native world, they're still transactional, they're still moving parts. We have to think about the consistency of that like we have done for years, so Canister brings that capability. It works on a blueprint model, so if you've got a Postgres database, we dive into that, make sure that we co-west that workload and then we take a backup of that and send it off to object storage or something along them lines. So that's open-source, it uses these blueprints, we want to encourage, raise awareness of data protection and availability in Kubernetes, but equally enable people to write against that using our blueprint framework. So hopefully we see some good community adoption around that. That's great. I mean, community is the core of this event and we heard that the keynote this morning, a culture of inclusivity. I love seeing companies big like you that are contributing in and it's across the board. It's one of those things that, I don't know, makes me feel good. I love to see the collaboration. Tom, since we've had the pleasure of having you on the last three KubeCon shows, what's the biggest difference between Amsterdam and here in Chicago? That's a really good question. I was going to say the weather was kind of similar. I'm sorry, I'm a spring, it's the same. Chicago and winter almost. No, I think I see a lot of, or quite a few new companies. So that's really interesting. I agree. The ecosystem is growing. Companies are getting bigger, companies are getting smaller with respect to presence. That's one thing. The collaboration is even to the next level between the partners as well. I see a lot of partner activity at our booth, for example. We have a full event of theater presentations and every time I was watching, there was a partner presenting in our booth. So that's really good. And yeah, as mentioned before, if even possible, the deeper conversations that we're seeing effectively. We're talking to airline companies, we're talking to insurance companies. We're no longer just talking to the absolute, take geeky people. It's real business. It's real customers with real projects. And it was present to an extent in Amsterdam, but it keeps going up. So that's really a positive takeaway here. I couldn't agree with you more. I feel like we've actually tipped over that inflection point and everyone's out and running, not just wondering what's going to happen next, which is just exciting. I'm pumped about it. I want to talk a little bit more about our swag. Tom, you always bring great swag on the show. We've got a little octopus, I think this is. Is this like a finger puppet? Oh my God, wait, it's reversible? Oh my gosh. Okay, reversible, wow. So depending on your mood, this is great. What's your mood today, John? Are you, you're blue? No hesitation, we're happy here on theCUBE. I also love, and I noticed this about you right away, you always have a bit of a focus on sustainability. It matters. There's so much, actually, fun fact. 80% of swag ends up in the landfill after the first year. So I love that you give away, I mean, their bags are sustainable, check this out, I have a backpack at home, I still use. They didn't pay me to say that, that's just the truth. And then you've also got, this is very fun, we've got utensils and a bottle opener. So I know what's coming on my next camping trip. Thanks for bringing us some fun supplies. Looking forward to Paris, I'm sure we'll see you there. Michael, what do you hope you can say in Paris that we can't say yet? I think the continuation of Kubernetes and storage. I think there's storage in general in the tech world. We've been talking about it for many years. And I think there's a lot of features and functionality around things like changebot tracking that are still very infant in terms of Kubernetes storage. So I think we'll see that evolution, I think, hopefully as we're involved in that changebot tracking implementation from a Kubernetes point of view, then hopefully we'll see that moving along nicely by the time we get round. And that's just going to encourage more and more people to trust Kubernetes for a place to put your data. It's going to be that first-class citizen. And I think on top of that, I think on top of that, Kubernetes isn't just for container orchestration. I think we're seeing from Red Hat, we're seeing OpenShift virtualization, putting VMs in there. Now, obviously there's a recent big acquisition happening in the virtualization space. That opens up a door to see different workloads, more workloads inside the Kubernetes cluster, which actually then pushes that into a control plane API versus, oh, it's just a container orchestrator. But I think it's going to get exciting next year around that, different workloads. I hope we can get excited and talk about it on the show in Paris. Tom, what about you? What do you want to say next time we have you? It's unusually warm for Paris this time of the year. Amen! Literally what I want us to be talking about. Let's hope it's good, it's good. No, I think I want to echo what Michael is saying. We want to see this growth. We want this trend to continue in a very positive way, deeper conversations, more interesting customer case studies. I'm hoping to maybe bring some new interesting customer case studies to the interview as well, to the booth, because hearing from customers is even better than hearing from partners collaborating together, right? So I really hope that more and more customers will speak out about their experience, the bad and the good, and pitfalls to avoid, and how to make things better for your business. So yeah, that would be really good evolution. I love that. We were talking about how fun a conference of just post-mortems would be to learn from this. And I do, I mean this community, the way that everyone shares is really awesome. So we certainly welcome those customer stories. Tom, it is such a pleasure to have you on every time. Michael, thank you for gracing us with your presence. You are great. He wasn't kidding. So we'll see. You lived up to expectations. Yeah, you lived up to expectations. You lived up to the hype. You lived up to the hype, just like AI. No, I'm kidding. And John Furrier, it's always a pleasure to share the stage with you. And thank you all for tuning in to day three's coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, here in the second city. My name's Savannah Peterson, and you're watching theCUBE, the leading source for emerging tech news.