 from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE. We're here in, we are at KubeCon 2018 in Seattle, CloudNativeCon as well. This is, we've been to every KubeCon and CloudNativeCon since inception. I'm John Furrier, my co-student minimum. I'm going to break down three days of wall-to-wall coverage of the rise of Kubernetes and the ecosystem and the industry consolidation and standardization around Kubernetes for multi-cloud, for hybrid cloud. We're here breaking down day one keynote, kicking everything off. Stu, you know, it's fun to come here and watch, you know, words like expansive, Moore's Law, expansive growth doubling down, the attendance for KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, hockey stick growth chart on Twitter, you know, the 1200, 4,000, 8,000, up into the right, global phenomenon, the team at CNCF, KubeCon, huge presence in China this year, total expansion, all to save, hold the line on the cloud tsunami that is Amazon Web Services. This is the massive cloud game going on, your thoughts. Yeah, John, first of all, right. I mean, you have to start out just expansive growth. You can just feel the energy here. We're in the middle of the show floor. You were here two years ago in Seattle when I think they said there were like, you know, was it 16 or, you know, there weren't that many sponsors here. There's 180 booths at this show. The joke in the keynote this morning was if you want to replace your entire t-shirt wardrobe, that's what you can do here. Everybody's got, you know, fun stickers. It's a good crowd. Definitely, you know, those alpha geeks, this is where they are. And Stu, you're sporting a new t-shirt. Yeah, John, so I want to thank our friends. I'm sure they can see, everyone can see that. So, you know, our friends here, women who go, they do the go-lang languages, the gopher is what they're doing here. So, love that. If you at the show come by, get our stickers. If you look up women who go on thread list, they actually have an artist shop. The CNCF has their logo up there. We have our logo. There's blockchain, there's Docker, there's all these. And you can buy the shirts and the money for buying these shirts actually goes to bring women and underserved people to events like this. We always love John when they're supporting this. The CNCF actually, I think it was, you know, 130 or so people that they brought to this conference through charitable donations from many of the sponsors. And that's one of the highlights I want to get to later is the mission-driven and the social responsibility, scholarships, the money that's being donated to fund, diversity, inclusion, all walks of life to make cloud native. So Stu, let's get back to the core thing that's going on here at KubeCon, cloud native con. A couple of years ago I said, we said on the Kube that the tsunami, that is Amazon web services going to just hit a shore and just wipe out the industry in IT as much as it can go, unless someone builds a seawall, builds a wall and to stop that momentum. Kubernetes and KubeCon specifically had that moment. This is the industry saying, look it, cloud's awesome, it's full validation of cloud, but there's more than just AWS. This is about multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and a lot of forces are at play competitively to make sure that Amazon doesn't run the table. Yeah, John, it's good to do a little bit of comparing contrast here, because if you go back to OpenStack, it was OpenStack is the Hail Mary against Amazon and it's going to help you get off your VMware licenses. Well, that's not what Kubernetes is. If you look, both VMware, who acquired Heptio, and Amazon have a big presence at this show. Amazon, their hands were forced to be able to actually work with Kubernetes. I remember I'd read an article that said, there are about 14 different ways you can run Kubernetes on Amazon before they supported it. Now they fully support it, they're going even deeper. AWS has Fargate. I know you spent a lot of time at Reinvent digging into some of this environment here. So this isn't, portability is a piece of Kubernetes. Kubernetes won the orchestrator battles out there. It is the de facto standard out there and we're seeing how this stack can really be built out on top of it. The thing that I've been keying in on coming into this year is how serverless plays into it. You heard a big push for Knative on the keynote, which is Google who of course brought us Kubernetes, IBM, SAP, Red Hat all there, but I don't see Microsoft or AWS yet embracing how we can kind of mash up serverless and Kubernetes today with the Knative. I mean, I think if I'm Amazon or Microsoft, I might be a little bit afraid of this movement because when we went through the multi-vendor days, multi-vendor decades ago, now multi-cloud is the multi-vendor story and what's interesting is that choice becomes the key word in all this and a real enterprise that's out there, they got Cisco routers, they got tons of stuff that's actually running their business, powering their business. They need to integrate that. So this idea that one cloud fits all certainly has been validated, I think it's going to be a winner take most, but what this community's doing Stu around Kubernetes is galvanizing around a new kind of stack configuration with Kubernetes at the center of it and that will disintermediate services at AWS and at Microsoft. And Microsoft's stock price has put that company in a higher value position than Google or Apple. What has Microsoft actually done to make them go from a $26 stock price to 100 and change? What did they actually invent? What did they actually do? What did they disrupt? Was it just going to cloud? Is it Office 365? This begs the question, is it just the business model shift? So certainly there is business in the cloud and it's showing here at KubeCon. No John, I mean there was a major cultural shift inside of Microsoft. I was really excited one of the shows I got to go to this year was Microsoft Ignite. And in many ways it's interesting. That show we've been around for decades and in many ways it was, the Windows admins just getting the latest and greatest. From my standpoint I think it was Microsoft fully embracing the move to SaaS. They're pushing everybody to Office 365. They are aggressively moving to expand their cloud that that hybrid environment, Microsoft has the applications and they're not waiting for customers to just leave them or hold on to whatever revenue stream. They're switching to that ratable model. They're switching to SaaS model. They're pushing really hard on Azure. They're here in force. They're really embracing developers, all the .NET folks there. They're moving the ball inch by inch down the field slowly to that cadence and that in totality with social responsibility and commitment to the cloud. I think it's been, it's not one thing that's happened. It's just a total transformation for Microsoft and the results and the valuation are off the charts. Google, same way, Diane Greene has, I think it was unfairly categorized by the press in terms of her exit. She'd been running to retire for years too. She has turned Google around and you look at Google where they are right now versus where they were two years ago. Two years ago they were slinging cloud the Google way. Now they're saying, hey, you know what? We know the enterprise. Jennifer Lin, Sarah Notty, Dawn Chen, all those people over there are leading the way. Real enterprise shops with tech and they got some big moves to make and they're doing it. Diane Greene did not fail. So that was one thing that's interesting in the ecosystem. And then Amazon, as you know, just kicking ass. So given all that's due, how does that relate to this? Yeah, let's bring it back here. So first of all, Kubernetes, it was interesting. The keynote this morning, we spent a lot of time talking about things that, you know, built on top of and around what's happening with Kubernetes, talking about things like, you know, how Helm is moving forward, Envoy, Prometheus, all of these projects there, there are a couple of dozen incubating projects and a few of them are graduating up to be full flank projects. When you talk about the, you know, we talked about the ecosystem and how many partners are here. There's around 80 service providers and about 80 platforms that have Kubernetes baked in. I want to point out an interesting distinction. Some people said it's like, oh, you know, there's 75 or 80 different distributions of it. I don't think that anybody thinks that they're going to, you know, make a differentiated platform that people are going to buy what I'm doing because I have the best Kubernetes. Really what the CNCF has done a good job is saying, you're fully supported, you're interoperable, you meet the guidelines to say, I am Kubernetes and therefore it's baked into what we're doing. So why do we have so many of them? It's, well, there's a lot of clouds out there, there's service providers, and even the infrastructure players are making sure that they're in there. Everybody from, you know, Intel all the way through, you know, servers and storage and networking, all making sure that they're doing their pieces to make sure that they work in the Kubernetes environment. So Stu, I got to ask you a question on the keynote. You were in the front row, I was watching online here, kind of distraction because they've sold out in the keynote. I didn't get the whole gist of it. How much of the keynote was vendor or project expansion versus end user traction? Can you give some color on that? Yeah, so a lot of it was the projects. What's really good is there's not a lot of vendors. Sure, there is, here's the logo slide. Let's everybody give a big round of applause and thank you, but when they put the projects up there, many of these projects came out of a group. But, you know, some of that is like, well, Lyft, you know, Lyft created one of these projects and who's involved in that. One of the big news announcements was EtsyD is being donated to the CNCF. And, well, that came out of CoreOS to solve a really neat problem that they had to make sure that when you're rolling upgrades that you don't, you know, reboot the entire cluster all at once and then your application isn't be able to be there. So why are they donating? Well, it has reached a maturity level and while CoreOS is inside of Red Hat, there is a broad adoption, lots of people contributing and it just makes sense to hand it over. Red Hat, everything they've done always is 100% open source. So them making sure that they have a good relationship with the foundation and who should have the governance of that, you know, Red Hat has a strong track record on that. I know we'll be talking a lot together. All right, so Stu, get your perspective on the big players, we saw Google up on Santa Parna, we saw VMware, Cisco's here, I saw some of the Cisco executives here earlier, you got Red Hat, you got the big dogs here, Microsoft. What's the trend on the big players and then what's the trend on the hot startups, either companies and or with new ways that you're on, you mentioned K-native. So big companies, what's the general trend there and then what are you seeing on the interest around startups? So John, last year when I talked to users at this show it was most of the people that were using Kubernetes were kind of building their own stack. The exception to that was, oh, if I'm a Red Hat customer OpenShift makes sense for me, I can build in what my model is. Azure had just come out with their AKS support. AWS had just been figuring out the ECS versus EKS and what they were going to do and before Fargate was down there. Today, what I hear is maturation of the platform. So I expect Amazon and Microsoft to win more and just I'm on those platforms, I'm using it. Oh, I want to use their Kubernetes service. That's going to make sense. So the rich get richer in this a lot of way. Red Hat's going to do well, IBM's a strong player here and of course sometime in 2019 we expect that acquisition of Red Hat to close. From a startup standpoint, it's there are so many niches that can be filled here. The question is how many of them are going to end up as acquisitions inside some of these big ones? How much of them can monetize? Because as I said with Kubernetes, John, I don't see a company that's going to say oh, I'm going to be the Kubernetes company and monetize. You know, Morantis for a year or so ago was pivoting to be from the open stack company to the Kubernetes company. Heptio was an early player and they had a quick exit. They're bringing strong skill set to the VMware team to help VMware accelerate their cloud native activities. So in many ways, John, this is an evolution more than a revolution. So I do not see a drastic change in the landscape. Cloud computing, we know if that's going to yield edge of the network and then on-premises, complete convergence. This evolution is interesting, Stu, because this is an open source community kind of vibe. You have now two other things going on around it. You have a classic open source community event. Then you've got on the other end some normal app developers that just want to write code. And then you've got this IT kind of dynamic. So what's happening that'll be interesting and we'll be watching this is how does the CNCF, KubeCon, cloud native comp evolve? And you start to cross-pollinate app developers who just want our infrastructure as code, IT people who want to take over a new kind of IT and then pure open source community players. This has now become a melting pot. Is that an opportunity or a challenge for the CNCF and the Linux foundation? Yeah, I mean, the danger is that this just gets overrun by vendors. It becomes another open stack that people get disenfranchised or what they're doing. So absolutely, there was a threat here. To their credit, I think the CNCF has done a really good job of managing things. They're smart as how they're doing, very community focused. I have to say in the keynote, John, if we noticed the diversity was phenomenal. Most of the speakers were women. There were one from end users. There are a couple of dozen end users that are now members of the CNCF. I think they're all Kube alumni, Stu. Absolutely, and John, we've been here since the early days, been tracking the whole thing. It's fun to watch. In my opinion on the whole, kind of the melting pot of those personas is, I think the CNCF and the Linux foundation has a winning formula by owning and nurturing the open source community side of it. I think that's where the data's going to be. That's where the action is. And I think as a downstream benefit, the IT market and developers will win. I would not try to get enamored by the money and the vendor participation hype. I don't think they are, I'm just saying. I would advise them to stay the course. Make this the open source community show, of course. That's what we believe. And of course, we're Kube Native this week. We are here at the Cloud Native, and now we're Kube Native. This is the first day of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier with Stu Minin, breaking down of the analysis, talking to the smartest people we can find, and also talking to some of the key players that are sponsoring the show. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.