 Hello, wonderful viewers. Welcome to CubeSites, your insider look at KubeCon Cloud Natocon. I'm Katie Greenlee, and I'm super excited to be here with all of you. Thank you for joining us. A few housekeeping notes before we get started during this live stream, you are not able to talk as an attendee. There is a Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. Feel free to drop your questions in there, and we'll get to as many as possible, either throughout the stream or at the end. This is an official live stream of the CNCF. And as such, it is subject to the CNCF code of conduct. Please do not add anything to the chat or questions that would be in violation of that code of conduct. Basically, be respectful of all your fellow participants and presenters. Today's live stream is about our project pavilion at KubeCon. We'll dive into this cornerstone of the event and how you can elevate your experience. I'd like to take a moment and welcome our very own George Castro, who will be sharing all his knowledge with all of you. Welcome, George. Thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me today. Yeah. Why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and why you're the expert on the project pavilion here at KubeCon? Yeah. So I'm George Castro. I kind of grew up in the Ubuntu community in the early days, and migrated to Kubernetes. I was a community manager at Kubernetes for a while with Heptio and VMware. And I've been involved in many CNCF projects, like Cloud custodian and Kubeflow. And I've been working with the CNCF for about nine months now, and the kind of idea there is to take all the expertise and knowledge that I have about projects in open source and taking these best practices and applying them to as many CNCF projects as possible. So that could be anything from making recommendations for governance things for the talk, or in this case, ensuring that the projects are just maximizing the value that they get out of that booth that they get. So. Yeah, that's awesome. I know we're super thankful to have you here. And I've heard an overwhelming excitement from the projects that they get to work with you. And I'm excited to kind of learn a little bit more about the Pavilion. So why don't you give us a bit of an overview of what the Project Pavilion is and what the mission is of the Project Pavilion overall at the event? Yeah, so the Project Pavilion is a dedicated area in the expo floor that is just for CNCF projects. They're explicitly non-commercial. They're just pure open source. The idea there being, if you want to learn about these projects, you go there. And they're all in one place for you to find them. We have 184 projects in the CNCF. There's always new ones. They come in all shapes and sizes. I call it an ecosystem of dinosaurs and creatures or whatever you're into. And each of them has different requirements, different needs. They meet different audiences. So what we try to do is present them as a whole. So attendees can't say, what is the cool new stuff in the CNCF landscape actually look like? So if you take the CNCF landscape and just lay it down on the ground, that's the Project Pavilion. Yeah, I'm going to show my screen just so everyone gets context on that layout. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that layout when I show it here. So let me go ahead and get that up for us. Ooh, all right. All right. So this page here on the website that people can access that project engagement tab on the KubeCon, CloudativeCon, Europe tab has all kinds of information. And this is kind of that overview of the Project Pavilion. I'm going to see if I can zoom out real quick. Yeah. There we go. Does it show the break area? Is that what the logo represents? I believe this is where the break area is. And then over here is kind of a lounge area. But maybe you can kind of tell us what. How we ended up here. So in the past, this is only my second KubeCon with the CNCF. But I've been to many of them. And sometimes as a project, you go to the Pavilion and it's just a row of booths. And then projects go. And then they do their shift. And in Chicago, I kind of wanted to re-energize the Project Pavilion. So I actually volunteered to help coordinate the Project Pavilion because I think the context, what we actually really want to do, let me just go ahead and say that out there, is to ensure that these projects are healthy is our long-term goal. And in order to do that, attendees need to understand how these projects work in the ecosystem and how the community works. So it's in our best interest to ensure that every single attendee, my goal is for every single attendee to step foot into this Project Pavilion. Even if they go in and say, wow, I am overwhelmed. But I'm glad this exists. When I get back to my organization, I'll ask someone who does understand what all this is, how we can leverage this. So it's an opportunity to educate our attendees and connect them with maintainers, because those relationships is what leads to getting more support for our projects and ultimately more resources for them. So in the past, one of the things that bugged me is it was just a row of booths. And we don't want to spend a ton of money, but we can do a lot of things to make it a lot smarter and more fun for everybody. So one of the things I've noticed is, especially for maintainers, is they're very busy at KubeCon. And depending on where you are, sitting down is like a luxury to them. So in order to attract maintainers, I wanted to reorganize it from a row of booths to more of a fishbowl style arrangement with a break area centralized in the middle. That's for a few reasons. A, it's close to the maintainers. So as you're doing your booth duty and you're rotating shifts with your friends or whatever, you can chill out there. And the idea is that our team there from the CNCF projects team will be there. So it will be myself. GIF, which is Jeffrey Sika, that's his nickname, will be there. Amy Scavarta-Paren will be there and she brings a ton of projects expertise, most projects, probably by now, if they've been around, have engaged with her over the years. They should have engaged with Amy. Yeah, and if they're not, yeah, and if they're not, this is the perfect time to learn at the Project Pavilion with Daniel Crook, who is our manager. We're trying to expose, the project team is trying to expose all the resources that we have available to all the projects. So maintainers told me it's really hard to find you like trying to get on your schedule, and we are running around like nobody's business. Yeah, it's like passing ships, right? Yeah, I remember, we didn't see each other for like two days at KubeCon and I had been walking the entire time and we just never ran into each other. So for us, this gave us an opportunity to revamp the layout, give people a centralized location where they can say, okay, this is where the maintainers and the projects hang out, right? So my ask for people is, if you need to meet somebody, don't do it at the registration desk, do it at the Project Pavilion. So you can at least like hang out with all the others. And then we have booths for other parts of the community that are crucial to helping these projects. So there's a booth for the CNCF ambassadors that they can work on them. So, you know, I'm trying to interface and get those many people through there as possible. And you're always really close to the break area, which is great. We've also strategically placed the caffeine, which is the crux. So, you know, we're trying to make it so that if an attendee needs caffeine or they wanna sit down, you gotta go through the Project Pavilion if you're on this side of the thing. And that gives the maintainers an opportunity to reach out to folks. Additionally, we're laying it out in a certain special way. It's like a wedding seating chart where the outside is where we're putting the sandbox projects. These are usually the newer projects that have kind of started their journey into cloud native. We put those on the outside to draw people's attention to them because they're brand new when you're walking by, you're gonna wanna see that. And then on the inside, we're putting the more graduated projects, Kubernetes, Prometheus, you know, like those projects that have been around for a while. And then in between are gonna be the incubating projects and the kind of middle ground. The idea there is you find something new on your way to a thing that you've heard of and that will help kind of make it, we're trying to optimize each path for where someone comes into the Pavilion to give them a vertical slice of the CNCF lands, as opposed to, wow, is this whole road databases? You wanna give people some variety there. Yeah, and I think one of the differences too is the schedule. So something people should probably be aware of, right? Is that some kiosks aren't going to, some projects won't be there full time throughout the week. So really be mindful of if there's a particular project you wanna engage with when they're gonna be in the booth and when they won't be. It doesn't mean that the maintainers won't be around and maybe hang out in the booth. It just means that they may not have a kiosk the whole time. So if you wanna kind of talk about what that looks like and how, I know you're gonna do this really great thing of taking people through like project tours. So how does that play into the timeframe of when projects will be in the booth and when can they take these tours with you? Sure, so we had overwhelming response to getting booths this year. So we kind of had to have shifts. So it's important to recognize that some projects will only be there for a limited time. So my recommendation to folks is check it often. You will wanna come in to the project pavilion early if you can, like when the show opens, the floor opens and you come in, meander on through, we're gonna have a screen that will have a schedule of the tours and things like that, which I will get to in a minute. But it will also let you see what booths and things are there that day. And if they are not there that day, that's why we have that break area to kind of act as a rallying point where it's like, oh, I missed you yesterday, but can you meet me at the break area tomorrow? And then you can go grab a spare table in the back or something or there's plenty of places for people to break out and do things like that. So we will definitely help try to facilitate that for you. That's mostly what I'm doing 90% of the time when I'm on the floors trying to connect people to projects. So you can always come see me and even if they're not there, I'll find a way to get you connected to them. The other thing I wanted to do was project tours. I found an interesting pattern is when people come to their first KubeCon or they have a coworker who kind of doesn't understand the stuff, other people in their organizations would walk them through the project pavilion and be like, okay, it's your first time here. Welcome to the team. I'm gonna walk you through some of the important projects that we built products on as an example. So we wanted to kind of explore that. It's like, hey, what if we gave people a regimented scheduled set of tours with someone who's kind of been around the block? That's me. So if you come in and you have no idea where to start because it is very overwhelming. If you don't, it is so overwhelming. And I especially want to reach out to the people who are new with their first KubeCon, bring a coworker, feel free, bring your boss because it's also important that everybody in your stack understands the values that these projects are bringing. I like to say like, this is the innovation lab, the R&D lab of open source is running out of the pavilion. So if you want a more structured approach, you can show up to one of my tours and I will start on one end of the circle and kind of make my way internally and then we'll end in the break area. And we will be walking through the pavilion, pointing out certain projects. Maintainers will be sitting there. They'll be like vying for your attention and then you'll be able to split off into things if you want to go deep or you could just stick with the tour until you get to the end and then explore the rest of the space on your own time. So what we're also hoping is in the future having volunteers that are subject experts on certain things to be able to do their own guided tours. So that's more of a future thing that I'm thinking about is one of the valleys of KubeCon is access to the experts but sometimes direct access to the experts is overwhelming. So getting that middle ground there. We're shooting for like a zoo tour, right? We're not gonna go deep on every animal but you will know that this is where the giraffes are the next time you come hang out. So that's what we're shooting for there. Will you talk about what project, like how I guess from an attendee perspective, right? If I'm a new contributor, like what projects are or like if I was an end user, will you talk about like how an end user could use these projects? Is that kind of, will that be available during these tours or is it something someone could ask you post tour of like, hey, I'm an end user and I don't know how to get involved or what projects might be the best projects for me to get involved with in my stack and here's what I'm looking for or will you kind of talk about that from each perspective of like if you're a new contributor, this is how you can engage with them or if you're an end user, this is how you use this project. Is that how those tours will be structured or is it more just a quick, here's what this project is, here's where they are, like what does that look like? Very much I wanna do the former unless you're like compressed for time because in order to understand the ecosystem you have to understand how end users consume a thing and how maintainers produce that thing. And the health of that is literally our jobs, right? The average attendee is more looking at the final product. They want the pie that they buy at the store and they just wanna know that the ingredients are all natural and good for them stuff and some will really wanna go deep and figure out what's the recipe like, I wanna modify it, I wanna do my thing and do the open source thing. So we have to accommodate both audiences which is really great because we'll also have people there from the end user community. So Taylor, Dolezal will be around and I'm expecting to actually have a mix of both and we'll have enough people on hand in order to, if you're a developer, this is the person that you're gonna talk to and while you're talking to them maybe you're an end user and then we can go over some of the organizations that are using that specific piece of technology and production and things like that. And usually most of the people that are staffing the booths know how to make that pitch because they want, a lot of the projects in the Pavilion, they wanna be part of your IT team. They want people to consume it so that they can make it better and KubeCon is one of those conferences where you can meet someone and not even heard of their organization and they're using your product at scales that you didn't expect. And that's the kind of relationships and discussions that we like to have in the Pavilion. And that's why we do it in a Pavilion style so you can share it in front of others and it becomes a teaching area along with a fun place to hang out and geek out about nerd stuff. Yeah, I think you kind of touched on some great stuff about like that there will be a multitude of people that are kind of around to help facilitate conversations whether it's an end user or a maintainer or a new contributor. I think one of the things we haven't talked a little bit about is the mentorship program. So Nate Waddington should be in the booth as well, right? Oh yeah. There's some portion of it. Yeah, I am trying to attract as many slices of verticals, I guess you could call them of people that can kind of cover every need. I would, ideally, what I would love to have is, you know, my project, I need to learn about Foo, you know, the place to learn that would, well, let's stop by the Pavilion. And even if we don't have the answer for you, there's enough of us in there that know how to point you in the right direction. So mentorship will be there. Christoph Sothier will be there. So we'll be talking about training programs with all of the projects that we have. And mostly, you know, the staff, we have our own booth. So that's gonna be like our home base anyway. And we designed that on purpose because it forces us to be in there with everybody else. And we are all having, you know, everyone's trying to do the same mission, you know, are the attendees having a great KubeCon? Are they engaged? Are they digging my stuff? You know, for a lot of them, it's just knowing, you know, I just wanna get my project on people's radar. You know, I'm not even ready to go to that another step. I'm at the exposure stage of the excitement, you know, which is where you're gonna see some of those sandbox projects. And we want them to be able to find their communities so that when they are ready in their maturity life cycle to go to incubation, that they have all the things that they need, including healthy contributor cycles. You know, the governance is nice and in place because you have enough people to help out. You know, usually projects know exactly what they need to do. Executing it, however, is sometimes a unit of work that needs multiple people to work with. So we're hoping just by the virtue of having everyone together, the sharing of these concepts. And usually you're not privy to those conversations if you're just a random attendee. But if this is open source, even if you're just standing there listening to them talking, it gives you an understanding of how the stuff is put together. And that is one of the reasons that people choose open source in the first place. So, you know, I keep saying it's like a zoo, you know, and sometimes it feels like the projects we have to put you on display. Yeah. But you know, it is trying to show the relationships between these projects and how that contributor flow goes into maintaining them so that it continues to be a place of innovation. And we want projects to graduate, you know, and move to the, yeah, over time. Absolutely. And get improvements and get all the benefits, you know, and it starts with standing in a booth next to somebody next to you who's going through the same process with people that have done it before. And then that's how we evolve our, we foster that cloud native culture that's so important. Yeah. So that's the vibe. I think you talked about a few really great points. One of the new things that came out of you kind of helping to reconfigure our project engagement was the lightning talk schedule, which is another area for projects to give a quick update about what's going on in their project. It's different from the maintainer tracks, which is a little bit more of that deeper dive or that introductory to what their project is. It's more of a quick update on recent features or recent news that came out of the project, right? So do you want to kind of go through how people can kind of navigate this portion of it and the benefits that it will bring to the project overall? Yeah. So first of all, if you're here to learn a lot about projects in a short amount of time, it's literally an entire day of just lightning talks. And they're what, seven minutes? Seven minutes? Like six minutes, depending? Yeah. So if you keep scrolling down, I mean, we're, you know, and we had, we can only fit so many on here. So we've had overwhelming response to get stuff in there. This is happening on Tuesday. And we started at 9am, I have to emcee this thing from 9.30 to the very end. Yeah. So this is going to be exciting for me because I think for a few reasons. First of all, the KubeCon is short. It's a week, right? So it goes by fast. But also when I, when attendees ask me, how do I get the most out of KubeCon? I usually tell them, you got to be efficient. Yeah, there is so much stuff out there. You know, you're going to have some people that really want to go deep in on a subject. But if you're looking for that vertical slice of like, you know what, what's the, if I go to KubeCon and I can only go for one day, you know, what, what, what can you cram into there? So this gives us an opportunity to put a diverse set of projects out there. We want to put as many different styles of projects and people out there so that they can showcase the work that they've been working on. And then we just booked a whole day to do this. And then after that, you go to dinner and then that evening are the actual KubeCon lightning talks themselves. So it is an entire day of, you know, too long didn't read, but I sat through all the lightning talks and we're going to try to make this as smooth and as efficient as possible. And then the important thing will not just be the talks themselves, but you'll be able to see that person and then follow up with that at the booth the next day because the show floor is not open when these are going. So you can go there, you know, they each have seven minutes to pitch to you and that kind of gives you, tells you where in that booth organization that you want to go. So this is like a good precursor to that. And then you can check out the booth and engage with them at a higher, at a higher, higher level. I think it's important to note for our attendees that this is not part of the all access pass. So you do not need the all access pass to come to the project lightning talks. It's a free opportunity for people to just, if you're around and you want to learn more about projects, this is your time and that opportunity to do that outside of those co-located events that are happening on Tuesday. So it's not something that is requiring that extra pass, correct? I'm pretty sure. Yeah, I think we can note that in our stuff, but I'm pretty sure that's exactly how we have it set up. And cause it runs just like our lightning talks, like you said in the evening, that you don't need an all access pass to go to those lightning talks either. So- Yeah, and what's nice is, you know, I'm the only one that has to sit there the entire day. So, you know, if you want to come in, listen to a few and kind of, you know, cap out or look at the schedule, see what lives for you and then do it later. You can consume as much or as little of it as you want. Yep. But I'm hoping to get as many people in there as possible. Yeah, and another thing that to know is that we don't have graduated projects on this project updates, not because they're going to have their updates on the keynote on Friday, March 22nd, on the videos. So those will be separate. So if you're looking at this and you're wondering why you don't see a graduated project, you really wanted to elevate the voices of the incubating in the sandbox to give them the chance to provide those updates that are so crucial, like you said, to building that cloud native culture and bringing in new contributors and having people understand how they can engage with the project and put it into their stacks overall. Yeah, yeah. And it's a great way to just see what's new. It's like the upcoming artists playlist on your music service where you're like, okay, what's the cool new stuff that's coming out? So that's really great. We do have a question asking if we can stream the event. We will not be streaming the project lightning talks, but they will be recorded and posted on our YouTube channel post event. So just keep checking in on that YouTube channel throughout the week and you'll see those project lightning talks available at that time. So we've kind of talked about the pavilion. We've talked about the lightning talks. Is there anything in your project tours? Is there anything else that you think is beneficial for people to know about the project pavilion before they go? Anything that you think is important, whether they're a maintainer or an attendee to kind of get themself prepared for the week? Yeah, I think just bring the energy. Just show up, recognize what we have to do there. Wear comfortable shoes, which is something I recommend to, actually I'm up to two pairs of comfortable shoes and I swapped them out because I'm walking so much. Yeah, just come with an attitude to learn and the maintainers are gonna come with the attitude to teach. You're not gonna show up, go to a booth and learn all of the production mysteries of a thing. It's not like you're not gonna get a full training, right? So the idea here is to go in and kind of sample the menu and get a vibe for a project that you might not know existed or is adjacent to something that might be a problem for you, it might not, right? So usually a lot of QCon attendees are part of larger organizations. So the ask of you there is learn all of this stuff and you will be surprised when you go back to your organization to see that there is a lot of really great tech out there that you could be utilizing. Some might be useful for you, some might not. But we are finding that as we build all this stuff together in this kind of collaborative manner that a lot of them solve problems that people have and the entire mission of this pavilion is to expose that to you as much as possible. So even if you're only a single attendee from your organization or something like that, come and take notes, find out all the cool stuff and then take that back to work and help make your organization a better place. Yeah, and I think that alone is what the project pavilion is bringing to the community as a reason to attend, right? So that way you can bring it back to your own company and how you can utilize it within your business. So just a quick reminder to register today. We are tracking to sell out. So it would be great for people who haven't registered to get themselves registered and we look forward to seeing everyone in Paris, right? Yeah, come see me and say hi and just hang out. I'd love to, you know, there's lots of so many great people in open source to learn from. I can just help get you going in the right direction when you stop by the pavilion and then sky's the limit. Yeah, well, thank you, George, for joining me today. I really appreciate it. Thank you to our audience and we'll see everyone in Paris in a little over a week and a half right now.