 Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE, covering Open Source Summit North America 2017, brought to you by the Linux Foundation and RedHash. Okay, welcome back everyone, live here in Los Angeles, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit North America. I'm John Furrier, your host with my co-host, Stu Miniman, our next guest is Chris Anizic, who's the COO, Chief Operating Officer of the CNCF, cloud-native compute foundation, formerly KubeCon, cloud-native foundation, all rolled into the most popular Linux Foundation project right now, very fashionable, cloud-native, running on native clouds. Chris, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you. Awesome, it's been a while, it's great to be back. So you are the Chief Operating Officer of the hottest project, to me at least, in the foundation. Not the most important, because there's a lot of really important, everything's important. You don't pick a favorite child, but if one's trending, the CNCF is certainly trending, it's got the most sponsors, it's got the most participants, there's so much action going on, there's so much change and opportunity around Kubernetes, around containers, around writing cloud-native applications. You guys have really put together a nice foundation around that, nice group, congratulations. Thank you. Take a step back and explain to us, what the hell is the CNCF? We know it, we've been there, President of Creation, but it's super important, it's growing in relevance every day, take a minute to explain. So I mean, CNCF is all about providing a neutral home for cloud-native technology, and it's been about almost two years since our first board meeting, and the idea was there's a certain set technology out there that are essentially microservice-based that live in containers that are essentially orchestrated by some process, right? That's essentially what we mean when we say cloud-native, right? And CNCF was seated with Kubernetes as its first project, and as we've seen over the last couple of years, Kubernetes has grown quite well, they have a large community, diverse contribution, contributor base, and have done kind of extremely well. They're one of actually the fastest, highest-velocity open-source projects out there, maybe only compared to the kernel is maybe a little bit faster, but it's just great to kind of see it grow. Why is it so hot right now? What's the catalyst? So I think if we kind of step back and we look at trends in industry, right? More and more companies are becoming software companies, right? Like folks like John Deere building IoT platforms, you need some type of infrastructure to run this stuff, right? And especially at scale, imagine sensors in every tractor, farm, or in every vehicle, you're going to need serious infrastructure, and cloud-native really is a way to scale those type of infrastructure needs. And so this is kind of, I think why you're seeing a lot of interest being peaked in CNCF related technology. A lot of prototypes, too. Chris, you know, it's interesting, I look back a year or two ago, and it was like, oh, it was like, the orchestration wars, it was like swarm versus mazos. And now I look at it, in the last year, it's like, wait, mazos fully embracing it, mazos-con, they're going to be talking about it. Mazos is the best place to recuperate, he's on TCO as container D, now part of. The container wars, yeah. The container wars, we're going to talk about OCI. Amazon, Microsoft, of course, Google, help there at the beginning. Is there anybody that's not on board the Kubernetes strain at this point? I mean, we literally have the top five cloud providers in the world, depending on what metrics you look at, part of CNCF, there's some others out there that still aren't fully part of the family. Hopefully, if you stay tuned over next week or so, you may hear some announcements coming from CNCF of other large, cloudy-type companies joining the family. Every week there's a new platinum sponsor, you guys are getting a check every week it seems like. To me, it's great to see companies stepping up to the play and actually sustaining open-source foundations that are critical to the actual business, and I think that it's great to kind of see this involvement, so to me, I'm personally thrilled, because otherwise, we'd be in a situation where if the top five cloud providers weren't in the world, weren't in part of CNCF, they may be trying to do their own initiative, so it's great that we have these companies at the table and all trying to kind of build, find their own pathway to cloud native, essentially. You guys are hyper-growth right now, and you're new, too, you're still kind of... Less than two years old, less than two years old. It's amazing, so I want to put a little Jim Zemlin test to you, which is, and this keynote today, he talked about, this is the big 10 event for the whole community of open-source to come together, and again, he talked about 64 million libraries out there now, he projected by 2026, 400 million, it literally is a hockey stick growth, so you've got growth coming. He talked about four things in my summary. Project health, so healthiness, sustainability, secure code, training, new members. What's your strategy via those four things? Keeping the CNCF healthy, you don't eat too much and choke on all that growth. Yeah, so in terms of projects, we have a very unique governance structure in place when we design CNCF, so we kind of have this independent, technical operating committee, we kind of jovingly refer to them as a technical supreme court, but they are made up of people from kind of luminaries in the container, cloud native space, they're from competing companies too, but they try to really wear an independent hat and make sure that projects that were accepting are high quality, are a good fit for the foundation, and so it's actually fairly hard to get a project in CNCF because it really requires the blessing of this TOC, so even though we have 10 projects now in about two years, I think that's about almost, let's say, a project every two months, which is an okay pace. The other unique thing that we're doing is we have different levels of projects. We have inception, incubation, and graduation. Right now, we have no graduated projects in CNCF. Believe it or not, Kubernetes has not graduated yet because they're still finalizing their governance for the project and they're almost there. Once they do that, they'll most likely graduate. They'll walk cap and gown the whole nine yards. Exactly, it'll be great. In December, we'll have this cap and gown ceremony, but the other unique thing is we do annual kind of reviews for some of our projects. Certain levels will be annually reviewed, and if they're no longer healthy or a good fit, we're okay archiving them or telling them, like, maybe you're not a good fit anymore for the foundation or like you're, and so I think having, you have to have a process in place where sometimes you do have to move things to the attic. So you have a high bar on the project? The initial bar is extremely, extremely high and I think over time, we may see some projects that get recycled or moved to an attic or maybe even maybe merged together, we'll see. So we're thinking about this already, so. Okay, security. Security, so we, all projects in CNCF that graduate have to partake in the core infrastructure's best practices badging programs. So CII has this great effort that is basically helping to ensure projects meet a minimum level of best practices that make their projects secure. You know, it doesn't give you like a full blown guarantee, but these are good practices that people have. So you're leveraging a preexisting work, classic open source, eat those. Exactly, and they have like a set of domain experts completely focused on security, building out these practices and you'll notice like Kubernetes recently merged in the CI best practices badge. So if you go to the read me, you'll actually see it and then you'll click through and you see all the like things that they've had to sign off and check on that they participate in. And so we're going, all our projects are kind of going through this process. Training, yeah, we just recently announced a couple of things. One is we have a- Good stuff, are you getting an A plus? Yeah, so as of today, we've launched the Certified Kubernetes Administrator Program, or CKA for short. So we have folks that are getting trained on and are having official stamps that they are certified Kubernetes administrators. And to me, that's huge given like how hot the space is. Having some stamp of approval that they are really certified in the space is huge. So we also offer free training through edX. So we launched some training courses earlier and to be honest, if you look at our member companies, lots of great folks out there providing training material. So one of the key notes that Christine Corbett was met, Moran was talking about and her keynote was more inclusion so there's no ruling class. Now I know you're early, you have a ruling class going on with your high bar. I get that. How are you getting new members and what's the strategy? Who are the new members? How are you going to manage the perception possibly that a few people can control the swing boats of potentially big projects? So here's what's interesting is like people joining CNCF, like I mentioned before we have a TOC, right? So there's kind of this separation of, I don't want to say church and state, but like so the governing board, people who pay to join CNCF, they pay to sustain our open source projects and so essentially they help with, they pay for marketing, staff, events and so on. They actually don't have technical influence over the projects. Like you don't have to be a member to have technical influence over our projects. People join CNCF because they want to have a say in the overall budget of how marketing and events and stuff and just overall support the organization. But on the technical side, there's this kind of firewall. There's an independent TOC. They make the technical decisions. You can't really pay to join that at all. You have to actually be heavily participating in that community. How does someone get in that group? To their code? They have to just be like a luminaire. We have a kind of election process that happens every two, three years, depending on how things are structured and it's independently elected by CNCF member community essentially. It's the simplest way I could kind of explain it. The other announcement you talked about the kind of the individual certification but the KCSP certification programs and other things that we maybe tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so we had a program set up so it's a Kubernetes certified service provider, KCSP, that basically- It rolls right off the tongue. I know, right? Yeah, exactly, right? Our Kerbal space program. I think of sometimes video games when we say it but essentially the program was put in place that a lot of end users out there and companies that are new to cloud native and new to Kubernetes essentially want to find a trusted set of partners that they could rely on services and other things. So we created KCSP as a way to vet a certain set of companies that have at least a minimum of three people that have passed the Kubernetes certification exam that I talked about and are essentially participating upstream in some way actively in the Kubernetes community. So we got a couple handfuls of companies that have launched, which is great. And so now, given that we're growing so fast, companies out there that are early end users are exploring a space now have a trusted set of companies that they go look at. And we're hoping to grow that program over time too. So this is just phase one. All right, so Chris, the other thing that I wanted to make sure we talk about is the Open Container Initiative. So I think it was originally OCP, which of course was an afternoon. Open Container Project, yeah, it was a bad name. Which when OCP was announced, it was like, okay, the Cold War of Docker versus CoreOS versus everybody else trying to figure out what that container format was. We all shook hands. I took a nice selfie with Ben, who was CEO at the time, and everybody. So 1.0 is out. So containers fully mature, ready to be rolled out, right? What does it mean? So yeah, I mean, it's funny, because I basically joined the Linux Foundation to help both start CNCF and OCI around the same time, right? And OCI was very narrowly scoped to only care about a small set of container-specific issues. One around like, how do you actually really run containers, start, stop, all that kind of life cycle bit? And how are containers laid out on disk? We call that the image specifications. You have the runtime spec and the image spec. And those are just very limited core pieces. Like the OCI was not opinionated on networking or storage, those are all left to other initiatives. And so after almost two years, we shipped 1.0. We got basically all the major container players to agree that this is 1.0 and we're going to kind of build off from this. And so if you look at Docker with its Container D project, they're fully adopting OCI, the Mesa's community is, Cloud Foundry, even AWS announced their container register supporting OCI. So like we got the 1.0 out there. Now we're going to see kind of an abundance of people building tools and other things. I think you'll see more end users out there exploring containers. Like I've talked to a lot of companies that I can't necessarily name, but there's a lot of folks out there that may not dive into container technology until there is actually a mature standard and they feel like this technology is just not going to go away or they're going to get locked into some specific platforms. So with 1.0 out the door, you'll see over the next six to 12 months more tools being built. We're actually working to roll out a certification program so you get that nice little like, hey, this product is OCI certified and supports the specs. So you'll see that happen over the next. Okay, so you've got the runtime spec and the image format spec. Yup, those are the two big ones. All 1.0, are you ready to roll? Yup. What's the roadmap looking like? Yeah, what's next? So, you know, there are early discussions about, you know, what other mature areas are out there kind of a container land right now. There are some discussions around distribution. So having a standard API to basically fetch and you know, push container images out there. If you look at it, each container registry has basically a different set of APIs and like, wouldn't it be nice if we could all kind of easily work together and have maybe one set of way to kind of distribute these things. So there are some early discussions around potentially building out a distribution specification, but that's something that the technical community has to decide with an OCI to do. And so over the next couple of months we're having some meetings. We're doing a bigger meeting at DockerCon Europe coming up in October to basically try to figure out what's really next. So I think after we ship 1.0, a lot of people took a little bit of a breather break and say like, congratulate themselves, take some vacation over the summer and now we're getting it back in the full swing of things over the next couple of months. So what's the big conversation here? How's she getting your event in Austin? It's going to plug without the queue. We'll be live covering it as well. I know, I'm excited. What's the update? What's the conversation in the hallways? Any meetings? Give us some scoopage. I know there's some big announcement coming on Wednesday. Is there stuff happening? So, you know, first coming Wednesday, so like I mentioned, we have 10 projects right now in CNCF. We have two projects currently out for vote. So one of them is Envoy. There's a company you've probably heard of Lyft, you know, ridesharing company, but Envoy essentially is their fancy service mesh that powers the Lyft platform. And many other companies out there are actually taking advantage of Envoy. Google's, you know, playing around with it, integrating into the Istio project, which is pretty powerful. But Envoy is currently, it was invited by the TOC for a formal vote. The voting period started last week, so we're collecting votes from the nine TOC members and once that voting period is, hopefully we can announce whether the project was accepted or not. The other project in the pipeline is a project called Yeager, which is from Uber. You know, it's nice to have Uber. Yeah, your Meister. Yeah, Yeager Meister, but like, you know, it's nice to have a project from Uber and another project from Lyft. And it's nice to see when you- And if you have too much of Yeager, you have to take the Lyft to get home, right? Exactly, right. So, you know, just like Envoy, Yeager got it was formally invited by the TOC. It's out for vote. And hopefully we'll count the votes soon and figure out if it gets accepted or not. So, Yeager is focused on distributed tracing. So, one problem in microservices land is like, once you kind of like refactor your application to kind of be microservices based, actually tracing and figuring out what happens when things go wrong is hard. And you need a really good set of distributed tracing tools, because otherwise it's like the worst murder mystery. You have like no idea what's happened. So, having solid distributed tracing solution like Yeager is great. Because in CNCF we already have a project called Open Tracing, but that's just kind of like the spec of how you do things. There's no full-blown client-server distributed- For instance, there's usually needed for manageability. Exactly. And that's what Yeager provides. And I'm excited to kind of have these two projects under consideration in CNCF. Is manageability the hottest thing going on right now in terms of conversations? Or is it more stability in getting graduation, projects graduating? So, like our big focus is like, we want to see projects graduate and kind of meet the minimum bar that the TOC set up for graduated projects. And other times it's kind of like other hot areas that are under discussion in CNCF are storage. So, for example, we have a storage working group that's been working hard to kind of bring in all the vendors and different storage folks together. And there's some early work called the container, something container storage interface. We call it CSI for short. And so, you know, there's another project CNCF called CNI, which basically tried to build the standard around how networking is done in container land. CSI is doing the same thing because, you know, it's no fun rewriting your storage drivers for all the different orchestration systems out there. And so, why not get together and build out a standard that is used by Kubernetes, by Mesos, by Cloud Foundry, by Docker, and just have it so they all work across these things. And so that's what's happening. And that's still early days, but there's a lot of excitement in that. Okay, the event in Austin, what can people expect, KubeCon? You're literally going to have the biggest gathering of Kubernetes and Cloud-native talent. It's actually going to be one of our biggest events, probably for the Linux Foundation at all. We're probably going to get, you know, three to 4,000 people, a minimum out there, and I'm stoked. We're going to have some schedules not fully announced yet. I, you know, I do secretly know some of the keynotes potentially, but, you know, just wait for that announced. I promise you, it's going to be great, so. And one question I get, just I thought I'd bring up since you're here in the hot seat. A lot of people coming in with supporting you guys on the governing side, not influence technical. How are you going to service them? How are you going to scale up? Do you have confidence that you have the ability to execute against those sponsorships? Yeah, support the members. What's your plan? Can you share some insight? Yeah, you know, pressure makes diamonds, right? Like, you know, we have a lot of people at the right table and, you know, we are doing some hiring. So like, we have a couple spots open for developer advocacy, technical writing, you know, additive things that help our project overall. We're also trying to hire a head of marketing. So like, we are in the process of expanding the organization. But you feel comfortable. I feel comfortable, like things are growing, things are moving a fast clip, but like, we're doing the best we can to hire, and you know, don't be surprised, you see, you know, here's some announcements soon about some fun hires. Well, it's been great for us covering, we've been President of Creation, if you will, this movement, which has been kind of cool because it's kind of a confluence of a couple of things coming together. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's just been really fun to watch just the momentum from the cloud to Roddy early days, 2009 timeframe to now. It's been a real nice ride, and congratulations to the entire community. Yeah, thank you. Like, for me, it's just exciting to have all these like, you know, companies sitting together at the same table, like, you know, having Amazon join, and you know, the other top, you know, it's other top cloud providers, all basically committing to saying, we are in the cloud native, we may have different ways of getting there, but we're all committed working together at some level. So I'll, I'll start. Great momentum, and you guys do some great work. Congratulations. Thank you very much. And you know, it's working when I get phone calls. Hey, can you just meet up? So, so I'm like, oh yeah, no problem. Oh, wow, they're big time now. You guys are big time. So, you know, congratulations. Thank you. I think phase one now, like we have the right people on the table. Don't screw it up, as they say. It's on yours. Good job, Chris. Chris Anasic, who's the COO of the cloud native compute foundation, the hottest area of Linux foundation right now. A lot of action on cloud, cloud native developers were DevOps is meeting a lot of progress in application development. Still early, only two years old, get involved, more inclusion, the better. It's theCUBE, CUBE coverage of CNCF will be in Austin in December. December 6th through 8th. We'll be there live, more live coverage coming back in Los Angeles here with the open source summit in North America after this short break.