 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. Good evening, cloud-native community, and welcome back to stunning Paris, France. We're here at KubeCon cloud-native con, CNCF's largest event in Europe. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined by my fabulous co-host, Dustin. Hello, hello. We may have gotten the memo on twinning, and we've run our fashion game. What I'm really excited about is our fabulous guest, also understood the fashion game. It could be KubeCon, it could be Paris Fashion Week. We don't know, either way, it is so good to see you back on the show. How you doing? I am good, thank you so much for having me. Lovely to see your bright faces. It is truly a pleasure. You gave a fantastic keynote today. Thank you. What was that like being around your community? This is the largest KubeCon ever. Congratulations, that room was packed. Dustin was joking, he was in the 236th row, just to get a peek. At least. Yeah. Would you say something? What did it feel like up there on stage today? Amazing. It was so nice to see the houseful audience, the largest KubeCon ever, 12,000 people plus. We have officially beaten San Diego, so it feels good. And we've beaten Amsterdam from last year, so it's a wonderful experience. It just goes, it's a testament to this ecosystem growing and developing as the world needs it to. Yeah, we kicked off the keynote analysis this morning with, first of all, just taking a pause at the size of the number of people in that room, the number of people still outside making their way through security. This has absolutely blown up. It has to surpass your expectations at this point, right? Absolutely. Yeah, I heard that was the overflow room and whatnot. It's just like. You're popular. Yeah. It's not me. It's Kubernetes, it's not native. I don't know about that. I would argue about that. Speaking of though, do you think Kubernetes is having its Linux moment? Yes, absolutely. I think so many would say that's the case. I think I heard Nvidia say it today on stage. So people are experiencing a ubiquity, a default expectation to see Kubernetes in these workloads as in with most workloads. And I see that as the Linux moment. What a compliment, by the way, for us to be compared to such an iconic technology. I mean, I would say that this is an iconic moment in general, 10 years in, largest conference ever. You're an icon, you dress like an icon. I mean, absolutely smashing it. You get to see some of the coolest projects in the world. What are some of your favorites at this show in particular? Oh gosh, that's like asking who's my favorite child. I mean, you can say all of them, but maybe highlight a few just cause you have such good. Sure, yeah. I think that the CNCF portfolio keeps growing, right? And we're like 180 plus projects and Kubernetes will always be the bell of the ball. But a very interesting trend that's happening is the ecosystem developing around open telemetry. Oh yeah. It is on fire. The end users we work with, as you may know, we have a deep integration with the end user ecosystem. We have a technical advisory board with execs from Fortune 500 companies. And the whole idea is to connect the dots, bridge the gap, technology, and its users. And what we learn is that open telemetry is a game changer. They love the de facto standardization that it has brought. They require it of all their vendors now. And we're seeing it, we have this velocity chart graph, which is like the size of the bubble tells you how many people are contributing and how up and to the right it shows the velocity. And there's like Kubernetes and there's all sorts of projects and open telemetry. So that's a big one. And of course, I mean, anything that's helping like Caser, which is just coming in from LFI and data, Kubeflow, these are things that are helping with these, I say workloads du jour, which are the AI ones. So they're having a moment right now. Absolutely, very French of you to bring in the du jour, by the way. Impressive demo this morning. I caught that in the keynote. Really cool live image taken right there on stage, processed by a large language model on a Kubernetes cluster on your laptop. I mean, that's pretty spectacular, right? Thank you. Yeah, and then connecting that back to some of the world's biggest brands. You want to throw out some of those names off the top of your head that you can mention, that places where CNCF projects are now core to their technology business. Yes, absolutely. I mean, Intuit, Airbus, Deutsche Bahn, Zalando, Adidas. That's just six names that I gave you. But there is hundreds, maybe thousands of organizations out there that use cloud native. It's becoming the fabric on which the digital transformation journey happened. But rather, it has been the fabric on which the digital transformation journey happened. And that's why you see every organization either already comfortable with it or adopting it. I mean, there's a reason why Jensen had a big Kubernetes logo in his keynote slides, right? If anyone didn't see it, it's a one hour and 18 minutes on the YouTube video for his keynote and you see it right there because that's what enterprises understand now. How did you feel when you saw that slide? I was very happy. I was like, okay, we're both talking about each other. This is cool. You might say that it's a community and an ecosystem and there's some collaboration going on. I think that's really important. I love that the open source projects end up getting to this stage. What sort of trends are you seeing in some of the newer projects that are earlier stage? Well, that's a hard one because we are such a wide ecosystem at this point that the Sandbox has all kinds of wonderful projects in there. I mean, Kate's GPT, I don't know if you heard about that one that came in, which is basically you can ask questions about your Kubernetes cluster and natural language. That kind of stuff, which is AI for ops is going to be so helpful for us. I'm definitely hearing that from a lot of vendors where they're like, we enable a lot more developers and affiliate associated roles to understand the code base and the distributed system because you can just ask like a person what's going on. So I think Kate's GPT is exciting and it's more also like, how do you say, a bellwether for what's happening in the ecosystem. So that's one I would say other than that, I mean, Falco graduating is very cool. It shows the importance of the security side of the story and there too is the same thing, right? Security for AI, AI for security. We have this duality that we're experiencing in a lot of our projects right now, which makes for fun times. Yeah. I followed a little bit on the social media during the keynote and I think there's quite a few people that appreciated your call out and others asking to see more open source around the models themselves. In particular, I think you were asking Apache and MIT license as a preference, I don't know, can you give us just a little more color and context and again on behalf of people who are saying like, this is good, thank you for going out and asking for more open source around the models themselves. Yes, absolutely. I think there is generally an open source washing going on in the AI landscape right now. This happens when people are actually feeling anxious and trying to hold on as much as they can, but they know, everybody knows that success often comes to open standards, open ecosystems, right? So they're trying to be open, but they're nervous about it and the way that's manifesting is in confusing licenses. It's like, hey, this is open, but it turns out up to this many parameters. Oh, this is open, but like only source available. You have to really read the fine print. And so that's why you can no longer just say, is it open source or not? Who knows in which license way is this open source? But being CNCF particularly are comfortable with Apache 2 and MIT licenses, as you may know, that's a requirement to join the CNCF. And we've seen these licenses foster competition, collaboration, ecosystem building. So- And business models. And business, exactly. And so that's why that's my personal bias on display over there. I mean, I think you're allowed to be personally biased in this particular case. Well, we'll afford it. We'll afford it. We allow opinions here on the show that that's a big part of it. Someone said something really interesting on the show earlier and I want to get your take on this because I haven't decided if I agree on it, but they said that open source is really good at projects, but not products. What do you think about that? I think of that as opportunity, right? Love that, yeah. You build the technologies and then you productize it and that's where your revenue sources are from. I very much understand and believe that. That is decoupled in my opinion from the importance of documentation and security and all of that that you need to have for open source today because it's so pervasive and so important that without that it's like you're not meeting the bar in my opinion. There's still lots of room for productization. Docs and security is not, that's table stakes. That's what I'm saying. Right, I was going to say essential. Yes. Absolutely table stakes. No, I think that's really interesting. So you've had some interesting personal news since the last time we had you on the show. Congratulations on your new babe. Thank you, thank you. You are, that is very exciting. We did miss you on the show though. I understand you had to be a mom, but this is our favorite spot to see you at least professionally. When your little one is grown up, we can define that as whatever age. Let's call it 15, 18, whatever. What do you hope you can say about the ecosystem or where do you hope this is a little bit longer out? That's such a nice question. Thank you. You know, so today Kubernetes is 10. If when Axel is 18, it would be 28. So it would be still shy of Linux's age, right? So I hope it would be just as relevant and on our way to being like Linux as mature, as ubiquitous, as suitable for all kinds of verticals. So that's what I would like to see and I believe I will see for this project, this community. I hope my son actually brought him to the conference. Yeah, Axel's here, that's so cool. I mean, what a city to bring him to. I know, right? It's like world traveler, baby. Yeah, that's start him young, love that. But it's, what I really hope he will see is as he grows up, the community, the collaboration, the diversity, equity, inclusion, which brings all kinds of people together. And I'm hoping to enroll him in the CNCF Kids Day. Oh, that's fun. Yeah, ASAP. Oh yeah, little Axel doesn't know how much his future is planned when it comes to this ecosystem. I think, yeah, I think that's awesome. We're actually going to have Cassandra Chen, who does, who makes the books on with me on Friday. She's such an inspiration. Every time I'm blown away by her. There are some really powerful, I love that you just brought up diversity, equity and inclusion. A lot of powerful diversity in this space and we actually have the deaf and hard of hearing working group coming on. We had them on in Chicago. One of my favorite segments of my entire career, just really special to see how people help, but then also create resources for everybody else at events and whatnot. Do you have, does it still surprise you ever how collaborative and inclusive everybody is? Is it, or at this point, are you just so aware that it's a part of your ecosystem? I think the thing I'm most aware of is that diversity, equity, inclusion is a moving target. So we get good at something and then we will discover more ways to bring the world together, bring people together. And that's a good thing. So as long as this flywheel keeps turning and we keep doing new things, we're on the right track. Oh, you're definitely on the right track. I mean, looking around too, you and I, we've been women in tech for a long time. I go to a lot of conferences. I don't normally see this many women or even just a variety of diverse populations. Can you share any numbers or metrics with us on that? What I can tell you, guaranteed, is that the keynote stage was 50-50. And I'm very proud of that. And then the metrics on the 10Ds and stuff are going to come out soon. Oh great, well we look forward to those. I actually just felt it in my heart when you said it's 50-50. And it's impressive and it's because these collaborative projects are inclusive, anyone can join and that is one of the powerful parts. Everyone should join. Yeah. Because opportunities are how we grow and how we become more equitable in this world, right? So that's how we need to pull people of all kinds together. And you're right that over time I'm also seeing more women, non-binary folks in the audience. It feels more, you know? Yeah, yeah. And that's nice. It's good, seeing is believing too. I mean the next generation, Axel's got to see women in power like you. It's super important. All right, so when we're in Salt Lake City, what do you hope you can say that you can't say today? Oh boy, then that would be saying it. I'm setting a target. Yeah. Setting a target. Well, I mean, you know, there could be some things in the pipeline that aren't confidential. No, I do think things will move forward and we'll have a lot of progress made in the next six months. I just look at the demo in Chicago that I did, to the demo I did here. A lot changed even in just my own understanding of the stack and how the stack evolved. So I expect the same in that there will be updates, there will be new ways to interact with this technology. The thing you think will be a solved problem by then, you know, the observability is one of the things we've heard a lot about, certainly in the keynote it came up. There's still asks around that. Our last guest actually, Dynatrace, was talking about open telemetry. Is that or something like that? Do you think might be a solved problem by Salt Lake City? So I think you can't say something is going to be a solved problem because even if you figure out the mechanics of something, a new workload will come along and ta-da, restart. So we're always on that flywheel, right? But I think we will have made a lot of progress, yes. I think it'll be interesting coming together of security and observability. Yeah, I can imagine us seeing more and more there. And that whole duality around security for AII for security, I think we will see more there too. I like it. That's my expectation. I think you're right. I think there's a lot trending that way and definitely a part of the hallway track just listening to folks talking about that. No, I think that's important. Curious from a strong woman perspective, sorry, Dustin. If, what would you say to the young women or women of any age, frankly, who might be watching and are considering a career or considering joining this ecosystem, what's your advice? I think my advice is follow your heart and go for whatever you want. If you like seeing the work we do over here, then come along, join in. Nothing will stop you, but sorry, I was going to say nothing will stop you but yourself, but then I was like, that's not really fair. So I can't really say that, but you need to think in that way that nothing will stop you but yourself. Like if you don't take that for a step, it's definitely not happening, right? And so there are challenges along the way, of course, but just go where you want to go. You're going to break through walls. It's going to happen. Gives me all the feels. Beautifully said, yeah. Gives me all the feels and it is relevant. I've got two little girls and one of which is dying to be a software engineer. We actually ran into VentSurf on our flight from to Paris, from Austin to Washington DC. And I pointed out and said, you know, he invented the internet. And she was like, what? And she went and talked to VentSurf who told, who encouraged her to follow her dreams and become a software engineer. Do it. No, it's beautiful. Okay, so I knew this was going to be the most fashionable segment of the show. I was not prepared for it to be the most heartwarming. That is, oh my gosh, I love that. Well, Priyanka, it is such a pleasure to have you every single time. And I really look forward to having you back in Salt Lake. Can't wait to see those demos. Can't wait to see what you're wearing. It's all just fabulous and shout out to Axel. He must be very proud of his mom even at that little tiny stage where he's at now. Thank you so much. I had tons of fun. We love it. We absolutely love to have you. Always a pleasure matching and co-hosting with you, dear. And thank all of you for tuning in live to our coverage here at KubeCon CloudNativeCon in Paris, France. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.