 All right, good morning again. Today, we have a very special guest with us. It's Ben Hall, the founder of katacoda.com. And why am I sharing that with you? Well, very simple. Let me quickly show you, you might know already, but if not, learn.openshift.com actually is powered by Katacoda and we are very happy customers and we are building out all the different courses there. And so I thought, it makes sense to talk with the man and see what he's got to say and where the whole thing is heading. So welcome, Ben. Hey, well, thank you. It's gonna be always nice to talk to you and always nice to have a conversation about Katacoda. Cool, thanks a lot for your time. Now, can you tell us a little bit about the background? Like what are you doing before Katacoda? What's up with you? Yeah, sure. So as you kind of kindly introduced, Katacoda is very much focused on learning and helping developers upgrade their skills and understand new technologies and how they can actually be adopted to solve their problems. So I've always had an interest in helping developers and sharing content. So I've spoken at many different conferences, some of which we have co-presented at the same conference, which is always good, it's a nice validation, and delivered training courses and different blogs and writing and books, et cetera. So I've done many different things within the community, in the background. And I think Katacoda just bringing everything together and kind of helping showcase what's happening within the community and the ecosystem and what's important for developers. Right, so imagine, I know it's hard to imagine that anyone out there would not know what Katacoda is, but imagine someone out there doesn't know, like in an elevator, what's Katacoda got? What can we do with it? Yeah, so we're an interactive learning platform for software developers. So we teach developers how to learn and how to use Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, obviously, but also the other aspects of the cloud-native ecosystem. So where does tooling like Peruvia set it and how do you stop monitoring and understanding what's happening within systems? And we take people from not having any awareness, so foundation understanding of what containers are and get them to the point where they can securely deploy Docker containers in Kubernetes or on top of Kubernetes in a beautiful architected system and kind of walk people through all of the different concerns and all of the different aspects via the platform. And the platform is interesting because it's all interactive. There's lots of great ways of learning these technologies, but I believe the best way is to actually try it and to experiment and enter in the command, see the errors, figure it out and work out actually what's happening in the covers and not just watching someone as a passive listener. And so when you go to Katakoda, not only do you have 100, 150 free tutorials, you also have the interactive platform and a Kubernetes cluster which has been preconfigured that you can experiment with within the browser, you don't have to worry about downloading or installing anything. You can just go on and get started instantly, learn, experiment, break everything, hit refresh and you get given a brand new, clean, fresh environment. And I've seen you've recently added machine learning, so Kubeflow is there as well. You can toy around with the Kubeflow, which is essentially TensorFlow plus the Jupyter Notebook so they can do machine learning there. I understand, I'm not sure if everyone knows that, but this is really like, this is the real thing, right? You're really deploying a Kubernetes cluster there or OpenShef cluster or whatever and really interacting with the real thing, right? It's not just going on in your browser, right? Exactly, yeah, it's not simulated, it's not faked in any way. You can see everything that's happening and it's a complete environment. And so within the case of Kubernetes, you have your primary kind of master control plane and then you have nodes and you can reboot them and see kind of like workloads go down and see how Kubernetes responds and then bring them back up again and kind of like experiment in a safe place. And because we don't have any restrictions like it's free for all. So if you want to start crashing boxes and kind of accumulating failures or networking going down, then that's awesome. And it's a great place to do that instead of doing it on your production systems. So you said you have no restriction, that means like the Bitcoin miners, they would just go there and have their farms there for hours and hours or I guess there is like a timeout, right? So we do have 13 restrictions in place, but we try and have the restriction so that they don't limit someone's learning capabilities, but we limit someone's Bitcoin mining capabilities. And obviously we're, yeah, it's an open platform and some of the scenarios like an open shift, we don't even prompt for an email or kind of like any sign up. So people can just jump in and get started straight away. And obviously that does attract some and wanted attention every now and again. But yeah, as we see different things emerging and different approaches, then we combat that so that they don't get very far. Right. Let's switch gears a little bit like from, we've been talking about the end user, consumer, whatever aspect here so far. But what about, you know, imagine you have a cool open source project or whatever and I want to show it off. I want to give people something to try it out. Can I just go there and create something or do I, how do I go about that? Yeah, so we want to work with different, we want to work with different open source projects and help and showcase what they're working on and why it's valuable and why it should exist. And so that is somewhat difficult to do just by going to someone's GitHub repo and trying to understand, trying to see all of the moving parts and like if it's even relevant for solving my problem. And so this is where Catechoga can help and can extend that. And so you can go into the platform, you have a teaching section and then you can start creating your own content on top of it. You have your own profile page. You can repurpose our existing environment. So if you need Kubernetes, if you need Docker, then that's all set up and pre-configured. You select that base environment, start writing some content in Markdown, click publish and you have a beautiful interactive scenario which can showcase demos, interactive ways of learning, however you want to demonstrate what you're building. Right, right. When I stand there like two ways, if you like just want to quickly do something, you have an interactive editor in the browser or you can have a real Git repo, backing it and then essentially working with that in your favorite editor and desktop or whatever. Yeah, completely. So we offer different ways which kind of match how people like to create content. So some people like the browser experience. It's more self-contained. I'm great for kind of technical writers and documentation teams because they don't need to understand the Git workflow and kind of creating Git repo, et cetera. But when we're working with kind of open source projects and teams and collaboration, GitHub is a natural place. It's where everything is sitting already. So you can create GitHub repository, link that to Catecoder and then when you do a push to the repository that automatically gets pulled in by ourselves and then we make it available onto the website and then that's how you have this really nice workflow to produce in your content. Awesome, awesome. Wow. All right, let's move on a bit more towards the future in terms of what's your plan in 2018, what's your future or whatever you want to share with us in terms of future Catecoder. Yeah, so the whole landscape of Cloud Native is changing so rapidly. It's hard to predict what the end of 2018 is going to look like. But there's some things which we're definitely excited about working on. Well, we have the interactive nature at the moment. At the moment, it's very descriptive. So we walk you through how to solve particular problems. And so we give you like, how do you deploy a container? OK, well, here's Docker run. This is what the images are. This is where the hub exists, et cetera. And then, for example, of securities, here's C groups, here's namespaces. This is what's happening in the covers. And we're kind of walking people through those different steps. What I think the next stage, what we want to experiment is making it more challenge focused. So how can you verify that you understand what we're explaining? And so you can walk through something like, yes, I understand now how to launch a container. And it's like, OK, so prove it. So actually go ahead and throw particular challenges and particular aspects on Catecoder and then use that to kind of verify that you have understood all the different moving parts, making sure you're not missing something, test your command line skills in a safe place. And then that kind of reinforces that whole Cata mindset, which is where the name came from. So deliberate learning, continuous practicing, repeating the same steps over and over again to improve missile memory and make it something which is very natural. And I think Catecoder is in a great place now to be able to offer and support that type of learning. And so it's a natural extension to what the platform is. So that's going to be fun. So we definitely are working on that. And then decided more content, working with different open source projects and different communities to showcase what they're working on. And kind of areas, as you mentioned, Kubeflow is an exciting project. And it's an extension to Kubernetes. And so it falls within the kind of our existing content manner. But when we start talking about Kubeflow, then teaching TensorFlow makes perfect sense. And when you're teaching TensorFlow, then teaching the rest of the machine learning ecosystem. And it's kind of a natural evolution and a natural growth plan, which we're slowly rolling out. We already have some great TensorFlow content on the website, which kind of goes into the different aspects of TensorFlow, but also into deep learning and how TensorFlow works and it covers. And it gets a little bit too complex, even for me. I am not a data scientist by any stretch of the imagination. But it's proven really popular. People are really excited. It's a great way to see how you can actually start training models. And because it's all hosted by ourselves, you don't have to worry about having an expensive laptop or having a huge machine available to your disposal. You can all train it far south. And then you can just focus on what the results are instead of worrying about burning through your SSD disk on your laptop. Right, we essentially outsource all these worries to you and your team. And we can just use it at the brochures and the booth or whatever. And it's just possible because the audience is a laptop in the browser. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And that's where we have a great place where we can allow people to focus on what's important, which is producing great content, producing great products, delivering a great workshop, not the, OK, now I need to spin up 150 machines for the attendees. And how do I give them the IP addresses and the passwords? And OK, what does that? I now need to remember to turn them off. The last thing I want to do at the end of the workshop is remember to turn off machines. If I forget, I've got more cost. Like, there's lots of moving parts which generally are filled with some random bascripts, which are then need to be maintained and kind of like tested, et cetera. So it's a distraction. And by using Cascoda, we're finding that people can actually focus again more on the content, spend more time on what's important for the attendees and less time on the surrounding infrastructure and we can take care of that for them. So I personally can't wait to see these quizzes or test, self-paced tests, whatever you're going to call this feature in place. I love that idea to essentially really have kind of told me, it's like, hey, not just rushing through it, it's a guy, whatever. But really saying, hey, did I actually understand what's going on there? Like, prove it, right? Enter the command or click on the place or whatever. That makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah. And I think it would be great when just as a extra place to start learning. So you've read a great blog post on OpenShift blog. And it's like, OK, have I actually read that properly? Or have I understood all of them even part? I haven't missed a section. It's so easy to miss critical aspects when you're reading online. It's just it's a difficult experience. And so we want to make sure that we're not people are fully understanding the content, focusing less on the text and more on directing developers on what's important commands and being very developer kind of focused on our ways of learning. And I might be biased because I'm using Cataclysm quite extensively in the context of learn.openshift.com. But the other day, I just wanted to show off my new little tool, Kube-Dash, and I was like, OK, I'm just going to put together a Cataclysm scenario. But it literally only took me, I think, 15 minutes or whatever. I initially started out with the online editor. And of course, I knew what I want to do there. But literally from starting to having it online and everyone just go there and try it out, that's awesome, right? That's really I think I'm trying to encourage others to really have a look at it and see if they can use it for their own projects as well. I think the perfect environment. Yeah, we have some really interesting projects. My favorite at the moment is Chaos Toolkit, apart from yours, obviously. Oh, Chaos Toolkit is a really interesting, it's going into that whole chaos development theory, which everyone's getting excited about and winning Chaos Monkeys on infrastructure and things your application actually work. Have you expected to when things start falling apart? And I think that's a really great case where they just started writing content. They didn't need anything from ourselves, didn't engage. Initially, they just went on to website. And as you said, it's like writing a blog post pretty much takes about the same time. But the benefit is is interactive and people can experiment. And now they've got a great set of content which kind of demonstrates different aspects of their open source projects and their toolkit and you can start winning some Chaos Theory principles and seeing actually how it works in a place online. So it's nice to see projects starting to embrace it with us without our involvement because that's so that actually there's something there which is always good to see and nice validation. And then once we have that, we can start promoting different community projects more through Catechord of itself. So you have your own profile page, which you can kind of promote and share. But we want to do more to support that. And obviously, half the battle is discovery. So I think we can do more to help people discover different projects and actually discover what problems can be solved. Very similar to what the cloud native landscape is doing, like just highlighting all of the different ways and parts in a nice categorized way. I think we can do something similar with open source and the content which we have on Catechord of two. Awesome. And in a sense, you already kind of preempted what I wanted to ask you next, but maybe there's something else. Like what else is there? Doesn't have to be necessary within Catacola, but what excites you? What are you into? Maybe it is Chaos Engineering. Maybe it is machine learning. What drives them all? So I think one of the things which I enjoy about Catacola itself, it can evolve as the world around it is evolving. So initially, we're very much focused on Docker and kind of like what containers are. And then we saw more growth and energy around Kubernetes and kind of we could then support and add more content to focus on that. We've got some Nomad content coming from the HashCorp team, which is very exciting. Nomad itself is a very interesting proposition. I think many people overlook and kind of like Kubernetes have got such a mind chair and just such a community passion behind it now. Nomad is probably the purest scheduler of them all. It just schedules workloads. But for many companies, that's exactly what they need. They just want a scheduler. They just want to like run this JVM part somewhere and just make it happen and then return me the results. They don't want to go through the stress of setting up clusters and networking and everything like that. So I think it's interesting to see where all of this technology is evolving and just kind of being able to play and learn and see what the different viewpoints are is great. And then obviously that then drives helping companies understand more and helping them have a better adoption strategy and kind of solving more interesting problems. So that's always interesting. And I still really enjoy doing that. It's always fun to deliver a workshop in a classroom and see how different companies are facing different problems and how we can help utilize Cloud Native to make their lives easier and make their lives better. So that's fun. So we've got more of that coming in the future. Partnering with different companies to kind of do co-workshops together, through working with their community, taking advantage of CACCODA. And we thought we have available to kind of like share and collaborate and kind of get the best of both worlds. So that's exciting. More conferences, as always. So yeah, we've got that coming. And then I think just generally exploring different ways of learning. As I said, we've got challenges coming. But everyone is very different in their approaches. Some people like video content. Some people like blog posts. Some people like interactivity. Some people like a compilation of all of them. Or maybe there's a new approach, which we haven't even started to explore yet. And so being able to investigate and explore what is the best way to help people understand this very complex fast-moving space is going to be an exciting challenge and something which we're... I'm looking forward to exploring and spending more time on. Now we've got the foundations in place. We can start pushing that and seeing it. So we're playing with some secret things, which are not so secret, if you hint hard enough. But yeah, there's some things which we're exploring to try and enhance what else can we bring to an interactive platform and how I can actually look and feel. So yeah, there's lots in the future. That sounds exciting. Yeah, there's lots on my plate. Hentaway is all a bit over the place at the moment because roadmaps are being crafted and explored at the start of the year. So yeah, that's great. And then as you said, more kind of helping people in the classroom, helping companies themselves adopt new technologies and helping them understand it from kind of like an internal viewpoint. So you've got distributed teams. You've got different teams working on different things. How can they collaborate more effectively together and make sure that they're transferring knowledge effectively and making sure that knowledge isn't being dropped when people move around or shift teams or contractors come in and out making sure that everything's being captured in a successful way. So lots of different moving parts. Awesome. And I'm very tempted, so I have to ask, is there really a Bitcoin slash blockchain scenario up there? We do have some from the community. So yeah, so there is some community-driven content. So yeah, again, it's that whole trying to discover it. So we're adding a search engine so that you'll be able to come in and type blockchain and then you'll discover all of our blockchain content created by the community. So that's a much better way of discovering it. But yeah, there's definitely some blockchain content on there because it's an exciting, it's like people are excited like, what is this new technology? Is it even relevant to me? And people want to explore. So yeah, the community's kind of stepped in and kind of started producing some of that to showcase creating like ethrealm contracts and using our API and stuff like that. So it's cool to see. Yeah, it's not on my radar yet. Too many other things to be learning myself, but I know that there's a catacord of content there when I need to. Very good. So wrapping up, you've been doing catacord now for how many years, what's it like? I think it's about two years. I think on kind of like, yeah, the early days were prototypes and experiments to see kind of like what's happening. So 18 minutes to two years. Right, you're based out of London. So if people are in London, they should hit you up and get a coffee for you and tell you how awesome it is. Definitely. Yeah, we're based in central London and then we just kind of go to different conferences. So yeah, if you ever see me around or want to have a chat, then definitely send me a tweet or send me an email and that would be great. Although we go spend a lot of time at the different London meetups. So Kubernetes London, Cloud Native London, Docker London, which we help organize, Istio London, we've got a great community here. So you'll see me dotted around various of those, probably on my laptop at the back answering emails. Awesome. Hey Ben, thanks so much for that. I assume there will be questions once we put up that video. And yeah, thanks a lot. And you know, keep up the great work there. We all love the color here at Red Hat. And yeah, hope that this journey, the successful journey continues for you. Yeah, keep it up. Awesome. Yeah. Now, thank you very much. It's been fun.