 Good afternoon and welcome back to day three of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, here in the Windy City, Chicago, Illinois. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by my favorite sidekick, John Furrier. Thanks for having me. Hey, I'll always have you at your own table. Thanks for creating this show so that we could have this conversation. Not a great event. This is one of my favorite events of the year. As you know, I love KubeCon. I post a video on it. Well, it's just authentic and the people are good. It's a mix of all kinds of great people. Startup founders, hyperscalers, big companies, open source contributors, and innovators all in one place, end user customers. It's really the perfect melting pot of innovation and the people involved, so it's always fun. Well, it is always fun and we're fans, even if we didn't have CNCF sitting at the table with us. Taylor, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much, yeah. Two's a party, three's a cube. Yeah, yeah. That's what I'm talking about. Have you been thinking about that one while we were getting ready here? Yeah, yeah. The magician never tells his secrets. Whoa, you're a magician? Yeah. Okay, we're going to have to do some magic tricks. Yeah, before I was dropping cards, yeah, nobody caught that on camera, but it's like still figuring out what I want to be when I grow up. Well, you run the CNCF ecosystem, so you're in charge of the ecosystem, I should say. The people run it, we're all here. This must be your favorite time of the year. Is this like your Christmas to a degree? Absolutely, yeah. No, most folks that focus on the NFL get the Super Bowl. It's like having two of those every single year. So really, really exciting to get to see everybody. All right, Matt, and I bet you've got a lot of friends milling around. What conversations have you been having the most of? What are some of the themes, topics? I think what's been really strange is that people have been talking about AI a lot at this conference. We haven't talked about it at all. I can just about spell it, so that's good, platform engineering, security, and then just, yeah, lots of other threads and features and things within the ecosystem, but I think those are the top three, is AI, security, platform engineering. Little bit of developer experience overall encompassing a lot of that too, which I love because that's kind of like the culture of code. We saw record numbers in Amsterdam. We were there just this past year. I think there was 10,000 capacity, 12,000 actually got in, waiting list in Europe, which is a good sign. We had predicted that we'd have the same vibe here. Again, smashing results here. Congratulations. Thank you, thank you. Give us some of the numbers. What's going on? What's some of the highlights from this year that you can share with folks watching? Yeah, so some of the highlights I think have been, for me, is really, again, just the people, the hallway track, but unfortunately, we don't stream that on YouTube just yet. Once we figure that out, it'll be different story. I think one of my favorite things was Tim Hawkin talking this morning about what the future of Kubernetes looks like. And the one quote that really stood out to me from his presentation was, inference is the new web app. And so I was just like, ooh, yeah, I gotta write that one down, put that on a Christmas card or something like that. But it was just a lot to rethink about how we actually balance those things out, deal with GPUs, all of the conversations that I've had with people too, it's where in the stack are we focused on? And so just that alone, it's clear that we need like a mall map or something like that. Like level three GPU, level one, this is apps. So that's been cool. And then, yeah, so many other sessions that have been going on too, people illustrating out security roles and like mock playing through that. Whitney Lee, one of my friends, was that had a really cool, engaged type of talk. And then other things are just a little bit more like research focus that I'm curious to check out later. We had our analyst session yesterday and one of the questions I threw out to the group, we were all kind of chiming in on was trying to synthesize what market is this? Like cause cloud native obviously is the focus. KubeCon may even, you know, Kubernetes is becoming boring, which is a good thing. And we talk about that all the time. But we look out on the landscape here in the ecosystem, we were trying to like, what market is this? It's not IaaS, it's not infrastructure as a service, it's not platform as a service, it's not just cloud middleware or API control playing whatever or just running Kubernetes. There's also apps. So again, people are just building and deploying workloads. What market is it? Is it software? I hope it's still ours is software, but then you got infrastructure. How do you describe this? And the result came was that we said, it's a new thing. How do you look at that? Because you have the view of the ecosystem. What, how would you describe this market that CNCF is focused on? Obviously cloud native, but you can't really put it in a bucket. What's your vision on this? Yeah, yeah, cloud native bucket maybe, but even then it'd be hard to replicate. I think it is really difficult to quantify. Yeah, it really has fallen into this asterisk kind of category, but we, it's, I've talked with a lot of folks focusing on different aspects of the stack. I think when it comes to this group of people, it's mostly infrastructure folks, but then when it comes down to some of the implementations, there have been like the app stack and everything else. We're starting to see more developers kind of come into the fray, wanting to understand things, especially when it comes to platform engineering. And then starting to see some folks more from the hardware side too, with all of the AI stuff, GPUs, how do we, how do we all put this together and stitch together our wonderful tapestry of things? So it's, I think that's the answer is D, all the above, right? It's a new thing. And it's what's exciting is that the platform engineering conversation is like now broader, it's not niche SRE kind of DevOps. It's like all of the new modern, I hate to use the word IT because it's really not IT. It's more of stuff that's running stuff. Right, like, yeah, that like ML ops, AI ops, SRE platform engineering, we're starting to see all these new roles termed at the same time too. I think, I think we're, well, and these terms are all kind of building on top of Kubernetes, which is awesome. We've been chatting on the show all week. It feels like we've gotten to a point of maturity. Yeah. Would you agree? Are you seeing that across all the projects? Definitely. I think that one of the things I've liked that Kelsey, Kelsey Hightower has constantly said is like, you'll know Kubernetes day of success when it starts to disappear into the background. And we're really seeing that. I think with, I work mostly with end users too, like Intuit, Mercedes-Benz, the people taking these technologies and projects and applying them within their businesses and seeing the contributions in Kubernetes do the little whoop, you know, and then it start to go down a little bit and that's not because there isn't interest in it. It's because you're seeing people start to shift away and put their focus on other aspects, like GitOps, continuous delivery, security things, platform tools, end users especially, just really specific kinds of workloads that they really want to figure out and then vendors coming in and picking up the rest with things like open telemetry and other stuff that people want to really focus on. What's really exciting to me is in looking at how open source has evolved such in a great way is that the contributions get fresher and bigger. You look at backstage for instance, you look at mentioned Intuit and Argo, right? So these are like massive contributions and people are digging it, they're Intuit and it moves the needle. And so now you have constant innovation from the end user side, the companies are now participating in a big way, not just kind of hanging out. That's a real power dynamic here. Exactly, and if you take a look at the anatomy of our projects, of those contributions, you'll see a lot of equal slices of pizza. It's not dominated by one specific company or organization, especially in those end user projects. Like Argo, it's really well mixed up with all those levels of focus. So that I think is, that's a very specific to end user projects. Did you bring up pizza because you're in Chicago? My mind of. Yeah, you're more just cool puns. Like I said, I love to dish. Yeah, let's talk. He's dishing it out. I got to ask you, I got to ask for people watching who may not have the fluency in ecosystems. We, it's super important for this community. Obviously, how do you look at that nurturing aspect of it? How do you nurture the community and ecosystem in a way that's not too overbearing, but also not too light enough? How do you have that iron hand velvet glove approach? What's the secret sauce of managing this ecosystem? Because one, it's growing, it's diverse. It's like we just said, it's kind of multi-dimensional global. What's the secret? What's the vision? How do you, how do you nurture this? Honestly, it's the, it's everything needs to have a home. And I think understanding the core values of the CNCF, we've been asking that a lot this year as we've seen things go on within our ecosystem, outside of our ecosystem. It's been a lot to navigate. I got to talk with Emily, our, the TOC chairperson yesterday about this, like, hey, if we have some people that want to get together and create a new, brand new, net new project, can we, can they do that within the confines of the CNCF and as a safe place of vendor neutral space? And she was saying, it would really help to get folks involved in tech, the tags and working groups and really these places that already exist. We already have these paved roads ready to go, but that's the most difficult thing for us to solve is that information proliferation and bringing, you know, awareness to what's already going on. The, you know, like, oh, we have dinner at home, you know, kind of thing. It's like, no, no, but that's not what I want. It's like, yeah, that's what we should have, come on. Yeah. You got a lot of mouths to feed in this ecosystem. Talking about dinner at home and this people, I mean, how demanding is the ecosystem from your standpoint? Do you have it on autopilot? What's, it was some of the inside baseball. Chris, Chris Anacheck, our CTO and Emily were presenting yesterday to the board and Chris showed the diff, you know, talking about our values. Chris showed the diff of here's what was in scope back when we started. Everything in blue was just a couple boxes and then he fast-forwarded to today, the whole image was just stark blue. And so it's like, we've expanded a lot and so that's what we're really trying to think through as well. Just the secret being just constant conversation and listening to the community. If we're making decisions and not including them into that mix, it's just gonna be a bad time. So really focusing on the culture and the values of what we actually stand for and constantly re-evaluating that with the community. And how fast is the cycles you're iterating on because you've got Paris coming up, right around the corner, you've got the content catalog. Yeah, please don't remind me. Yeah. We're all, you're the only one who would say that the rest of us are very excited about Paris. The AI wave happens so fast. Remember when you were in Amsterdam, a lot of the tracks, people were at the hallway was dominated with AI now it's front and center. The changes are really rapid right now and it must be a huge challenge from a content standpoint. How do you stay on top of it? Is that a triggering question? Don't answer if you don't want to. It's funny because one of our community members made a KubeCon countdown and it's like a little ASCII art person like holding a sign saying this many days till KubeCon. I used to love that not working for the CNC. I was like, yeah, KubeCon's coming up. Now I'm like, I only have a week to get this done. So yeah, it's like, actually that never happens. Everything's completely planned well. Yeah. Of course. You're already ready for Paris. Exactly. What are you even, what are you talking about? I've known about that for 10 years. Vincent Rappi is so easy. Come on. The good news is that the CFPs and things like that coming in by the community, I think that typically goes well, but it is, yeah, it's, this one's coming up really quick at the end of March. So already starting to have conversations and I was taken aback by, even before Chicago kicking off, people asking like, hey, is this specific event that is in Chicago going to be in Paris? And I was like, oh my gosh, yeah, we have a lot of work to do. But I imagine that conversation will continue and then we just spun up our end user technical advisory board to bring more awareness and checks and balances within our ecosystem. So end users, we constantly say those are the three pillars of the CNCF, the governing board, technical oversight committee, and our end users. And so bringing our end users and creating a body for them to really give this feedback and act as checks and balances is really exciting to see. We will have tons more news once we hit Paris on things that they do, reference architectures and other areas of concern that they kick off. I love that. And working groups aren't just about technical stuff. There's also the deaf and hard of hearing working group. We just had them on the show. So cool to see what they've been able to accomplish and come together in just a few months. I mean, it was deeply inspiring. And moving to get to chat and think about the deaf coders who now get to be empowered by this community. It's just super special. That's the thing I think is a lot of folks when you're driving like corporate change or working in an enterprise, it can be difficult to start to push something forward. And that's the thing that always catches me off guard in the best way possible within our community is, hey, I see a problem. I'd like to fix that. We're like, let's do it. People are like, whoa, this fast. And find my friends who are also going to, you know, find some friends and we'll build it. Yeah, it's just like, you care about this too? Yeah. Let's go. Yeah, yeah, which is really cool. Actually, let's stay there for a second. Curious, I mean, there's lots of projects within the CNCF ecosystem, but what are some of the trends you're seeing in some of the earlier stage projects right now? Good question. What's next? I think earlier projects, I think that they're, so graduated, obviously, like you said, just really well-defined, clear paths to engagement. Some of the other projects, it's interesting conversation because they're asking for best practices on how to run those things. And I think personally, I think that's what, you know, when you look at companies, organizations, foundations, what's the product? And I think ours is culture. And it's really about how do we embody that and then how do we keep that? And that's what I love about the job. That's what truly has, I feel at home working in this role because of that. And so that's the focus for giving those projects a safe space and then some guidance on, and you get to see these like big brother, big sister projects coaching some of the younger projects like, oh, I remember when that happened in our community, here's some things to think about and you just see this, you know, cross concern. It's not like I work in this, I mean, Project Red, I'll never talk to Project Blue. That's not the case at all. It's everybody sharing best practices in that way and a lot of coaching across the community. We're stronger and we're better together. I think that's a really important point. And I think that's actually the core tenement of this community. You see the collaboration between enterprise and small projects. We've got contributors at every level. It's really magical. I can tell how much you love your job just by your radiating enthusiasm. I'm not sure the viewers at home can feel that, but it's real. It's genuine. It's genuine. Absolutely, absolutely. How long have you been a part of the community before you were? Oh, it's way back. I think early days for me was Docker. I was working in Cleveland, Ohio at the hospital. Focused on HIPAA and really, really interesting stuff in the cloud to get approved, all of that stuff. Yeah, yeah. And then, yeah, I think the demo that did it for me was seeing some early Kelsey Hightower talks and things, but what really changed it for me was a local meetup when somebody showed me WordPress and when one of the persistent volume claims, the hard drive went away and came back, I was like, this is magic. And so that was what did it for me. I started getting involved like 2016, 2017, and then while working at Disney, flew out to the West Coast, worked for Disney Studios and that's where the ball really started to roll, started contributing, got to lead a release, worked with a couple of groups there. And then just the community just pulled me right in. It truly was the magic. So I'm really happy to be here. Yeah, I mean, the community is what pulled me in. It's why you've been going since the beginning. Yeah, I mean, it's the community's great. And the innovation, the conversations are great, the people are great, but there's progress every year. There's material progress and the needle moves. The target's raised, yeah, totally. And you can see it. And what's great now is you see people who are startups now growing up, they actually got funding, they're growing, and then the end users again, to me that's the big magic, is when you got into it and Spotify and Lyft with Envoy, I mean, some of the major advancements have come from enterprises. Not like the old school, but like companies that grew up, hyperscalers, built their own stuff and said, hey, I'll donate it back to the community or give it back. And that's killer, because those things are needle moving. So, and again, I just love the startups too. We saw David earlier, he was at Google Azure, he's doing a really cool edge, Kubernetes kind of light thing for IoT devices, okay? Kubeberg, probably going to be a huge project when VMware gets bought by Broadcom. You're going to see a lot of people looking at open source alternatives to what might feel like a future that's going to be a lot different. So, again, across the board, this is the action. It really blows my mind, just that and even the amount of projects going on within this space. One fun thing, I do have to post about it on LinkedIn, but Chris Anacheck just recently launched a landscape two. So, it might still be memeable after that, there's still a lot of projects, but so that's being enhanced and then the taxonomy's going to be a little bit better too. The landscape's so big, it's like 0.4 font to get everything in there. It's like, I keep asking my eye doctor if they can replace that with the CNCF landscape, but they keep saying no, yeah. Well, we talked about the magic and you're a magician. Is there any chance we can see some magic on the show? I hadn't asked you to do this before. I'm pretty good at sleight of hands, but yeah, we might have, but yeah, no, I need to up my practice, yeah. Okay, well the next time you sit with us in Paris, maybe we should have a little bit of a magic segment. I'll get my demos ready. Yep, perfect, fantastic. All right, way to go. Taylor, thank you so much for being here with us. You are the energy I think everyone needs at the end of day three. I know I'm certainly thriving in it and it's so fun to hear your hot take. John, thanks for your insights, for your commentary, for bringing the magic as usual, and thank all of you for tuning in to KubeCon, Cloud DativCon here, live from Chicago. My name's Savannah Peterson, you're watching theCUBE, the leading source for technology news.