 Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon EU 2024, live from Paris, France. Join hosts Savannah Peterson, Dustin Kirkland, and Rob Stratche, as they interview some of the brightest minds in cloud native computing. Coverage of KubeCon cloud native con is brought to you by Red Hat, CNCF, and its ecosystem partners. The CUBE's coverage of KubeCon EU 2024 begins right now. Hello and welcome back to Paris, where we're at KubeCon cloud native con EU. Glad to have you hanging in there for this afternoon. We're wall to wall coverage. And right now we got some of the CNCF's top people here to really talk about the community and how it's really actually expanding, growing, and bringing new people into that tent. So I'm really happy to have Christoph, who's leading up cloud native training and certification, and Chris, who's the CTO of the CNCF as well, along with Dustin, my compadre for this week is really helping us dig into this stuff. So let's kick this off. You guys really, it's such an impressive conference, over 12,000 people here, so many new people here as well. I mean, I think it's something like a 50-50 splitters. 51%. Yeah, 51%, which is incredible, because I think that just keeps showing how much interest, and I think, especially the cloud native side of things. I said it, I said, Kubernetes, maybe I was a little pedantic about it and said it was solved, but it's matured. I mean, 10 years old, coming up this year. How are things changing from a certification perspective? Because I think there's still people who are looking to go beyond just Kubernetes, but need the basics, but then need to go on. How are things really changing? Here there's new partnerships being lined up and things of that nature. Yeah, definitely. So let's kind of break this question into two parts. So in terms of what are people looking for and what we're doing, obviously we're at 184 projects now. We're a lot more than Kubernetes. Kubernetes for sure is a mature technology that almost every website device thing in the world is somehow using behind the scenes, right? We've trained I think over 200, 300,000 people at least have gone through our certifications on that. But since we've grown so much, we now have a lot more technology outside of Kubernetes. We have open telemetry, you need stuff to observe things, you need to secure things, we have like Falco. So we're basically investing a lot in helping build training and certification for those communities. It's kind of, you could kind of think it as like day one versus day two type of thing. Day one, get everyone up trained and certified in Kubernetes. Day two, they had to figure out how to observe things and how to secure things and so on. That's kind of where the investment is. And a lot of stuff we've been doing ourselves, which has been great, but we're an open source organization. We like to work with partners and companies and collaborate. And so we've basically evolved and launched essentially a new endorsed content and partnership program for training that basically is working with folks that provide courses, training. And we're proud to basically work with Udemy, one of the largest training providers out there. And they're kind of our first pilot in this program. We plan to kind of work with others down the line on this. Yeah, and this training investment is something that helps us to put the spotlight on some of our community members too. Because we want to recognize the people from our community who are really involved in both training and the community aspects. So we have some criteria at the CNCF where we will just put the label on those persons. So we need to be KTP, we need to be part of the KTP program which is the Kubernetes training partner or an ambassador or a maintainer if you want to be eligible to be endorsed. So that's really a way for us to show some gratitude also to those persons who are really involved in our community. There's a lot of stuff out there if you especially like go on YouTube and you know, a random site, but you know, being able to highlight the work that is actually being done by our community, our ambassadors and maintainers, that's generally the stuff they produce, they generally know what they're talking about. Yeah, you talk about content. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is community-contributed content. Yeah, it's really impressive. It's quite a library of educational material out there now. Yeah, I think that to me was a big piece that I was glad you guys were coming on because to me and to the people sitting at home, having worked at Amazon and built a service over there, you read it at Google. I mean, we understand how difficult it can be to get up and going, but then once you're up and going, you're not doing Kubernetes to do Kubernetes, you're building an application on top of it. And I think that with the elephant in the room, which is AI and how those workloads are really being put onto Kubernetes and with all of the new projects that are coming in, that seems like there's got to be a ton of interest in that as well. Yeah, definitely. I mean, we have some new AI training, we have some AI projects in CNCF, so we have like new Kubeflow training that we produced. We're debating potentially of like, it's a pretty good idea of what we know, like a cloud native engineer is, you got to know certain skills, but what does it mean to be a certified cloud native AI engineer? What is that? So we're debating whether we may go into that to territory, but we're not there yet right now. We're just kind of just focusing on catching up on the backlog of all these kind of huge projects that we have in CNCF that we just haven't served well in terms of producing training and certification for them. If you kind of look at our top five projects in terms of contribution and community size, obviously Kubernetes, right? Then you have OpenTelemetry, then you have basically Backstage, Argo and you know, it's pretty much like, these are all massive like top 100 in the world open source projects and we just haven't had time until maybe I hired some people to help me out in the organization to kind of keep things, you know, moving. But we have now the hotel starts coming, Argo, a bunch of training on all this stuff. Argo is live for a few days now, so anybody can take an Argo certification, which is a huge step because like you said, people will have deployed Kubernetes, but you need to deploy your application on top of that. And we all know that today GitOps and all the movement around that is something that almost everybody embraced. So Argo is perfect for that. But we also launched an OpenGitOps certification. If you just want to know the basics, not try to any product, take this one. We also launched a Cilium certification. Networking is something which is obviously present everywhere, but you will discover Cilium is way more than that. Thanks to EBPF that we put a lot of emphasis in Chicago, the last CubeCon. So we just launched that. It's always also available for anyone. And finally, we had a certification on security. Security is a broad topic. And you know that. Yeah, tell us more. Oh yeah. And we wanted to have something which could be an entry level certification on security. Obviously we had for a long time CKS, which is our, let's say, yeah. Advanced. Advanced security certification. But we wanted to have something which would be a way for people to embrace that, to start to feel what it is. And so we just launched KCSA. We're really proud of that, really happy with that. And so all those new four for certification are now available to anyone. And we're quite excited about that. Yeah, and there's like two things like, you know, if you kind of, you look at like the traditional CKS, it has the worst pass rate of all of our sort of, I think it's like 20 something percent, like people fail all the time. It's too hard, right? And so if we're going to really, truly grow our community, I think we need to provide a little bit more welcoming like stepping stones. So that's why a lot of cloud providers do this. They have their associate level kind of sorts. And so that our foundational, whatever they call it, that's kind of what we're kind of trying to do. Trying to help people have a good time for their first experience versus just failing it. No one goes to university and starts off in, you know, senior level, 400 level classes. You work your way up to that, right? That's one thing I- That's the perfect comparison for the entry level, what we call the associate level. We aim at someone who has between six months and two years of experience. So not the senior one, sophomore. Right. So, yeah, yeah. I think I've seen how the set of courses now sort of interoperate. And so, you know, both the vertical stacking as well as now in the scale out stacking having being able to add Argo to your resume along with, you know, some security and, you know, tie this all together. Maybe some Kubernetes at the base, you know? But you've got a roadmap, I guess, for how you're looking at the entire educational program. Yeah. So like Chris mentioned, for certification and for training, we are always working on new stuff. We are working, like you said, on hotel. So we will have soon, one day, I cannot say a precise date, but we are working on an open telemetry associate certification also on the backstage one because this is something that has been really trendy for many organizations. How can I help my developer to actually work in an efficient manner and to spread the documentation and, okay, so we will do that. We are working on that. And we're also working on Kaivano, which is related to security. So those are the topics that we are working on for certification and we will start many trainings. Yeah, I just was wondering because it was such a big theme earlier today of sustainability. And that one, I mean, I actually related to what Deutsche Bank talked about with how it was super complex for them to figure out the carbon footprint. Is that a place that you're looking to focus as well? We have a FinOps related kind of trailer. It depends, like, you know, if you kind of like hide it, FinOps generally means like cost efficiency, but they're also adding carbon footprint through because it makes sense. Some people may want to optimize purely on cost, others may want to optimize on carbon footprint. So it's definitely something we're considering. It's not in the, like, immediate plans, but as these technologies kind of evolve and grow, for sure we're going to add it to our portfolio. And the challenging thing here is I think a lot of people don't realize when we develop a certification, we have multiple companies involved, maintainers usually. It's a bit of a dance because, you know, it's not just biasing one vendor. We truly bring in the community and sometimes these vendors don't, you know, they compete in the market, right? And they don't always, you know, get along. So it's like sometimes these things take longer to develop than we initially planned, but the end product is really, really good. Speaking of that evolution and the timeframe, tell us a little bit about the changes going on in some of the certifications. So we just announced at the beginning of the year that we will be changing the validity period of all our certification. Right now is still the case, all our certifications are valid for three years. That will change on the 1st of April. We will move back to two years. So obviously some people are complaining and we can hear that. But the reason we are doing that is that we're in such moving world. Technology is moving so fast. I mean, who was talking about AI two years ago? Not a lot. Open AI maybe, they were, but not a lot. And so we're moving back to two years for two years for the validity. And I will take you an example for Kubernetes. Three years ago, the default on Kubernetes was Docker, was still Docker. It was not the case two years ago. So we think it makes a lot of sense to just move back to two years. And actually that was the first validity period we had. When CKA was launched, it was valid for two years only. And we thought, okay, maybe we can just extend that. Well, we're moving back to that because realize it's moving too fast. It's still an evolving mindset. Yeah, it's still evolving so fast. It was a good idea to say, okay, maybe now that Kubernetes is more mature, we can extend that to three years. But actually it continued to grow and to move and to evolve, and which is obviously a great thing. APIs change, yep. And you mentioned that and we are stressing out that the cloud native ecosystem is not only Kubernetes. So maybe Kubernetes is not evolving as much as Argo today, but since we're trying to be aligned for all our certification, everything back to two years, so that we are allowing us to keep the flow and keep the bit of all our projects. And as part of your certifications, helping the people who go through them and understand it to better understand, because some of the things you brought up, open telemetry and there's a whole number in the observability space for Prometheus and the other one, Jaeger and other things. Is it how they fit together in some of these certifications and that's why you're kind of, when you take a look and you step back, I look at it and go, okay, which one do I use for where? And I want the person, if they're coming through and getting certified to know that, is that part of the goals out of that? Some of them involve maybe best practices with the projects. If you kind of take the CK, A or CKD, definitely you are using different kind of projects, especially outside of purely Kubernetes. So there's some of that discussion, but then if you're doing the CK, A, it's like, well, which CNI should you use? Which one are you going to buy us toward? And it's a challenge, and we've changed that over the years. CNI used to not have really any CNI related projects out of the spec, and now that we have things like Cilium and so on, kind of makes sense that that becomes a default in the certification. Absolutely. I had a meeting this morning about the refreshing about all our Kubernetes certifications. So things will move in the next few, let's say weeks to months, but we are reflecting those changes and those evolution, obviously. Like we are doing in our training, our training are updated regularly. So we need to do that. And there's a fun new title that one can strive for now, right? What's this? I mean, it was kind of a, honestly it came from kind of our community, right? So, you know, I've been built training certification programs before, right? So it was kind of a space a little bit new to me and we started to have this very enthusiastic community and it was like, hey, can you do something like, like the AWS golden jacket program? Like what is that, right? And then you know, kind of look it up. I was like, oh, it's like someone passes all, you know, the Amazon certs, they get this crazy fancy golden jacket. Like, not a bad idea. So we kind of talked about it and like, can we do something similar? And we're like, okay, maybe if someone passes all the Kubernetes things, we'll do something special. And we came up eventually with Cubestronauts, which is a new title and they're going to get a nice jacket, maybe a space helmet. I was going to say, you got to have the helmet. I mean, you got to go helmet. So if someone tells you where to procure a very, very nice space helmet out there in the audience, please let me know. We'll put that out. That's a good challenge. Yeah, exactly. That would be good. And we're basically, these folks are good, these are our official training certification and education ambassadors, right? And they're going to be treated like- And they're people who already have collected the entire stamp, they blacked out their bingo card. Yeah, yeah. And they, we want to recognize them. Yeah, of course. We want us to be able to recognize them, but also anyone from the community to recognize them. So. Yeah, and it is, it's a community ethnicity. It's not just a transaction. Someone takes a certification. These are folks that are up leveling their career and we actually want to treat them like ambassadors. We're going to hold monthly meetings, get feedback on how to improve things. And it's just, you know, we are an open source community at the end of the day. And we really want to reflect that into the certification and yeah, into the certification because you know, we will share our success but also our failure. And people get together, you get some bonds because you fail the same way. So that's why we want to reflect too and we will continue to work on that over the next months in here because this is really, we both come from the community. We also share the same community. You too. You share some, lots of community too, together. Absolutely, it's a fun community to be a part of. Who do you think is going to be our first coops or not? We're going to interview on the show. No, but we have to have them on though. We've got the space helmet. Let's get the space helmet first. But let's make it for, you know, Salt Lake. We're going to have somebody on Salt Lake. That would be awesome. We're two, one or two of them on. That would be fantastic. But hey, thanks for coming on board. Again, it's always good. And I mean, this is, I'm passionate about this because I think it's huge for getting that big tent and bringing people in and involving them. And you're at the pointy end of that spear and I really appreciate you being completely transparent about this. Thank you. And if you ever swing by and look at the job board, there's a lot of companies looking and hiring folks. So we got to train up everyone here. Maybe they're going to have a requirement in there for a coops or not. Or something like, oh. You're now going to create another. The first job post I see expecting to have someone coops your note. Nice bottle of wine. Oh yeah. I want to see a picture of that please. We'll figure that out too. But so thank you for coming on board. Thanks for having us. Always a pleasure to chat and enjoy Paris and see you in Salt Lake. Absolutely, see you in Salt Lake. And see you guys just in a minute when we come back here from KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, EU here in Paris live. Stay tuned to theCUBE. The leader in tech news and analysis. Thanks.