 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019, and a special segment. We're actually going to be doing our 2020 predictions. I am Stu Miniman, joining me, my two co-hosts of the week to my left is Justin Warren, I believe it's been to, you went to the first, all four of the North America shows. I personally have been now to three of the North American, as well as one of the Barcelona, and we have a first time KubeConner, but long time host of theCUBE and things. John Troyer, it's my right gentleman, thanks so much for joining us. So first thing, the rapid fire, 12,000 attendants last year, 8,000 a year before 4,000, so my math says that it will be 16,000 when we come next year to beautiful November in Boston, Massachusetts, which I can drive to. We've had snow in Austin, rain in San Diego, so I'm predicting 60 to 70 degree weather in Boston, because that never happens in Boston. Number of attendees next year, Justin. Well, it was doubling and they've dropped it to 50%, so I reckon another 50%, I reckon 18 to 20,000. John? Yeah, I'll go higher, that many plus one. Okay, I feel like we'll do, you know, I bet $1, $1, but okay. We have not hit Pete Kubernetes yet. We definitely have not hit Pete Kubernetes. One of the things, I keep looking for the theme of the show, and one of the things we've been talking to some of the segments is, this needs to be, there needs to be simplification. When we talk about where we are with cloud adoption, when we talk about some of these environments, there is a broad ecosystem, so there needs to be some winnowing down of the technologies. We've seen some areas where things like micro-cades and K3S to be able to put Kubernetes at the edge. It's not that that will replace Kubernetes, but things need to get simpler in some environments. Justin, I'll throw it to you first. Is simplification the theme of the show? Is there something else that's grabbing you? Oh, the theme for me is that the money has arrived. We saw a little bit that last year, but this year it is definitely just the number of sponsors that we have here, the number of startups that we have here, the ecosystem, the number of parties, the VCs are here. This feels like a lot of other technology shows that we've been to before in their heyday. We are right here in the heyday of Kubernetes, so I can see it getting bigger. Will there be consolidation? Yes, I think there will, but I think that this is going to broaden out further first. I don't think that we're quite at the point where things need to start collapsing in. I think we're still going to be exploring all the different options that we have. I think the theme of simplification, yes, I agree, but it's now going to be people trying to solve that problem by creating these higher level services, managed Kubernetes offerings. A lot of the different component projects that are there, we're going to see a lot of options where they try to manage that for you and make it easier to consume, but there will be several different attempts at that and not all of them are going to survive. Yeah, I'll go with you. Simplification is going to be an issue. It has to happen. We saw a lot of different stacks here at the show. If you go out on the show floor, a lot of people are trying to give you a generic platform, a general purpose platform. Maybe it has its own opinionated view of networking or storage or management or security, but at the end of the day, we need things on top of the platform. So I'm hoping next year we see more things on top of the platform, more applications. We saw some big data applications this year, but people are still building engines and I want them to build cars because not everybody can build the engine. Yes. And actually, Justin, a question for you is, when we talk about Kubernetes, there are some people I interview here and they're like, well, no, we know how to build it better than us and when you want to go across all environments, we should do it. Is that, are we still going to see that for a while or can we all hold hands and talk about open source and be able to just manage across all of these environments? Well, one of the key founding principles of Kubernetes is that you can operate it the same everywhere. If it's certified Kubernetes, it should function the same no matter whose build of it it is. So that just provides us a common platform that we then build on top of. So I think the main differentiation is going to be on things like the tooling and the services that allow you to operate that base layer of Kubernetes. But that base layer of Kubernetes is about as interesting as Ethernet. It's extremely pluggable and it's just ubiquitous, but no one really cares which brand of Ethernet you've happened to be giving me. I care about all the stuff that I run on it. And that's what I think we're going to see a lot more. I'm with you, John. We're going to see a lot more of those services. I'm seeing a bunch of startups at this show that are starting on that journey. They're providing a lot of things like database services, very highly tuned monitoring and measurement telemetry systems. There's a big push to make sure that there is a certain amount of interoperability between these different services, things like having open telemetry be the standard for sending telemetry information around, because everyone knows that if we all build to Ethernet, we're all going to have a much better time of it than if we all start trying to come up with our own version of it and call it Banyan Vines and Phytonet. And God knows how. I'm glad you brought up the example of Ethernet. First of all, I have no problem watching a 45 minute discussion of what 400 gig is going to look like and the challenge and the opportunities. And if you are talking Ethernet in someone's data center, for the most part, they're going to run that on a single vendor because while there is interoperability, it's not until I go to the internet because layer two, I want to keep it single vendor. When I go layer three, I want to do that. Is that, maybe it's not the best analogy, but Kubernetes- I think that's reasonable in that if you're trying to operate something across different environments, then it's much easier if the two environments can talk to each other. A simple example that people tend to forget about is M&A. If one company goes and buys another one and I run Banyan Vines and you run, I don't know, Thinland or something, then we can't talk to each other and integrating those two companies becomes impossible. But at least if we both have, you might have Juniper, I might have Cisco, those two network sets can still talk to each other. So as long as you might be running Mesosphere and someone else might be running Morantis or Rancher, and that's their system for operating Kubernetes, turns out actually if you can operate it much the same, one of you can decide, you know what, we can operate everything with Rancher because we think that that's going to be the best thing for the holistic company. You might keep them separate. As long as you get the same outcome, then it doesn't really matter. Yeah, that's why I think we aren't yet at peak Kubernetes. Those Kubernetes skills that are at high demand from a job market that people are being upskilled on, they're actually still going to be useful. Now these stacks that these opinions that people are doing, I mean there was a talk about people over projects, right? That's a great philosophy. This is a very friendly community. It's a very open source. But cynically, I think in sometimes people swap your company t-shirt for your project t-shirt that your company is the one that's behind. And that's kind of a, that's a little bit of a bait and switch. If yes, it's an open source stack, yes, all the major vendors have open source, 100% open source stacks around Kubernetes, but they're all with different projects and they're all picked their own projects. So I think that has yet to be resolved. Well, it's interesting because the thing that I heard is it used to be open source with something that people contribute to it. Now the majority of people that contribute to open source do it as part of their job. So there is some of that. Yes, I'm paid by a company, X, but my job is to participate in the community. There's a large company that got bought by $34 billion. They have a lot of contributors out there. Their job is open source. They are on those projects. They might switch from one project to another. We had Kelsey Hightower on today. He's like, hey, you know, right, you know, we need to think of people above project. It's okay for them to move from one to the other between projects or between companies. But right, it is very much often companies that are behind the scenes and pushing people and dollars into these projects. One thing I like about the CMCF here is we do have, there's 129 end user companies participating here. So we've reached a certain maturity level that they are driving it, not just companies driving it for the dollars. So I guess the thing I want to ask though is there's so many companies here. We started off the conversation this week, John, talking about Docker and the cautionary tale of how many companies, when I asked, what is your business model? What do you do? I created some cool new project. What does that mean? You look at the business model. You live, you know, right with Silicon Valley there. What are you seeing? As you look forward, what are you expecting to see? Oh, sure. I mean, half the logos will be gone, but they'll be swapped out for other logos. So that's all fine, right? If you have a point solution, as I was kind of pointing out, things are kind of stack-ifying. So things need to consolidate from a buyer's perspective. A lot of the sessions here were about custom projects that people did either in-house or for a customer. So I think, you know, yeah, that's okay. That's the natural, it's the natural Cambrian explosion and then die-off. Yep, creative destruction. That's the general point of how we do things. There's a lot of things that are basically a feature and you can't really build a company behind a feature. They're hoping that they will find some sort of pathway to money. We've seen some big acquisitions where they didn't really find a good route to money. That's fine. People will figure that out. And how you fund this developments too? I mean, that's the perennial problem. At the moment, it's possibly not the perfect solution, but it's a pretty good one in that we have, developers are employed by a company that pays them to develop open-source software. So we can't, anyone can go and grab that software and then use it. So we don't actually really depend on that company sticking around. And enterprise sales is still very expensive to have even a small booth here and three or four people and nice t-shirts and all your swag and you flew them here and fly them all around the country to company after company. Conference room after conference room. That is an expensive model to sell things. And you need to have a fair amount of revenue. All right, so Justin, a lot of progress, a lot of projects, what's missing? What, look out for 2020, is there an area or a space that needs to mature or needs work? What's your advice for this ecosystem? Oh, well for me, it's all about the data. So we've seen a lot of evolution in stateful sets and being able to manage state-based data within the Kubernetes ecosystem. A lot of progress on that, but there's still a long, long, long way to go. Also just on the general operational tooling. So the things that we are used to and have taken for granted in other traditional like vSphere or we've come from the VMware ecosystem, simple things like high availability. So I need my data to always be available and I need to be able to have this managed. There's a lot of stuff in there but there's still a lot more stuff that needs to happen. Service mesh and that service discovery and making that easy enough for normal mortal humans to deal with. That still really isn't there. You kind of have to be a bit of a super genius to configure that and get it working and operating. So there's still a lot of very hard work on these quite hard problems to then make it look simple. Yeah, so John, the one I want to throw to you is Dan Khan came out of the, the keynote stage yesterday and he said, Kubernetes has caused the chasm yet most enterprises are still worried about software failure. We know many people that are coming in new and shell shocked when they come to look. What does the industry as a whole and this ecosystem specifically need to do to make sure that we don't come a year from now and say, wow, things slow down because we kind of couldn't get the vast majority of people on board. Well, I mean, we're going back I guess then to the same thing. Things have to be simpler. In times of uncertainty people either stop or they go to a trusted provider. There is probably although there's a high value on Kubernetes skills right now that also means there's not enough folks. So if you can't get the engineers, that was a problem in previous generations of some of these stacks in that if you couldn't get enough engineers or if the stack, if everybody had their own snowflake version of it and the skills were not transferable you could not move forward. So I'm hoping we'll see more managed service providers. I'm hoping we'll see more startups and services built on top of these existing infrastructures. I think we're seeing more of those. I see a lot of stuff in the operation space and kind of the SRE space, the incident management space, the kind of all the tooling you'll need to actually run these things in day two and beyond. And then hopefully the industry keeps pounding on digital transformation and process transformation. One project at a time, you start with one, you start small, you start tooling up, you get some small things under your belt and start to learn, but that's an enterprise timeline. At a certain speed. All right, last thing, any aha moment surprises, cool things as you've been going around the show, Justin? I would just walk into the show, surprise me at just how big it has gotten and how much energy there is here. It's amazing to me. And I can just only see it getting bigger and I hope better. I am surprised by the reaction from people who haven't come into the Kubernetes ecosystem, I think. There's still a lot of people out there for whom this is a big surprise that it's as big a show as this is. There are lots and lots of people out there who can't actually spell Kubernetes. So there's a lot of work for us to go and do to figure out how we get those people to come into this ecosystem in a way that doesn't shock them and scare them away. Yeah, absolutely. Welcome to the party. Those that have been joined, John. Hey, the thing that I was surprised me was this is both a multi-cloud show and a non-cloud show. This is the only show where people working in multiple public clouds can come together. So that's one of the systemic forces causing it to grow. On the other hand, this is not a public cloud only show. Over and over again, we talk to people here on theCUBE. I talk to people on the show floor and most of their workloads or many of their workloads are on-premises, right? This Kubernetes is fully functional and fully up to speed in private cloud, in people's data centers because it is useful and they're starting to do that process tooling and process re-engineering even on-site. And then they may be using a portfolio of different clouds. So I think that was one of the surprising things to me is this was not 100% public cloud show. Yeah, and a little bit of caution I'll give there is we want to make sure we don't become complacent and say, oh, well, we could just kind of slide in what we were doing before and not make some change because the driver here we've been talking about for decades now is really kind of that application modernization and Kubernetes in this whole, it is about cloud native. It's not the Kubernetes, it's the cloud native piece. You know what I didn't hear? I did not hear putting legacy apps on Kubernetes as much this year, much quieter this year. Yeah, so, and I'll just say, I'll highlight, we did an interview yesterday with the American Red Cross. Tech for good is something that we've been highlighting John Furrier, especially helping lead the charge and make sure and we highlight that. The Microsoft show, they very much talked about that this year. American Red Cross is saying, hey, we know you want, we always want your dollars, but we'd also love your skill set. So this community and specifically Kubernetes cloud native because it makes it easier, there's common tooling, something that I've been hearing a lot this year is when I go through that modernization, I can hire the next generation workforce. There's too many of those, oh, I'm doing the old way. If I don't have somebody with 30 or 40 years experience in the industry, you won't understand our systems. And we need that next generation of workforce to be able to get involved. So love, future jobs, tech for good, all good things. This community has always been strong on diversity and inclusion. And so, I guess final word I'll say, big shout out to, of course, the CNCF, this event, they have a large menagerie that they need to take in here and manage. And they're doing a good job. There's always things to work on. They are listening and open. We really appreciate the partnership. A huge shout out, of course, to our sponsors that make it possible for us to do this. So for Justin Warren, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much. We definitely are excited for one more day tomorrow as well as next year in 2020, Amsterdam and Boston. Please reach out always if you have any questions and thank you so much for watching theCUBE.