 Welcome to the CUBE'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 afternoon, nerd fam, and welcome back to Paris, France. We're here at KubeCon cloud-native con with three days of coverage here on the Kube. My name's Savannah Peterson, and I am really excited about our next guest. In fact, I would not be sitting here in this chair if it wasn't for the fabulous Neil Creswell. Neil, thank you so much for being on the show with me today. This is heavenly. This is like a fun family reunion for us. I love it. I know, I love it. I love it too. Obviously, you're with Portainer. You've been to KubeCon a lot of times. Yeah, this is my fifth as well. Was our first together in LA? Yeah, yeah. Oh, wow, how are you? Wow. We're pretty cute. Lots has changed, both for Portainer as well as I think for this ecosystem and collaborators. I want to get into that a little bit. How has this show different than some of the other shows you've been to? Well, first of all, it's massive. It is. Biggest one ever. I can't believe that your shoulder to shoulder, you're queuing deep to speak to people. Yes, salespeople you mentioned to me earlier, which is wild. I'm seeing people at a booth, eight deep queuing to see a salesperson. That's unheard of. Yeah. So there's a lot of people. The personas here are seen quite different as well. You mentioned you talked to Kelsey Hightower about that a bit. Yeah, I think KubeCon historically has been very engineering centric. There's a bunch of engineering practitioners and engineering leaders coming here to understand what's new with the technology. Now it seems to be very much more the architecture leaders, platform engineering leaders who are coming here to say I need to build a platform, what's the composition on my platform? And they're coming here to make a decision as opposed to just researching a bunch of tech. So I think the persona's changing a lot. Yeah, I think it is. And I think the ecosystem has matured a lot too since we were first coming. I feel like, I mean, Kubernetes is everywhere now. It's still very confusing. I couldn't imagine how daunting it is. If you're a company and you're looking to get started with containers, and you're deciding that Kubernetes is how you want to get started, how do you make the decision of which of these vendors to back? Yeah, we've seen some big name vendors, unfortunately, fold. It's a great point. In the last six months. Vendors who you would have never have imagined have folded. How, looking these halls, how do you decide which one you're gonna stake your platform on? That's a daunting task. I think it is a daunting task. How would you advise people do that? Oh my goodness. So with Portainer, our view is don't do that. Our view is have one tool that has all the capability you need. And that way, but arguably then that's putting all your eggs in one basket. So it's a tricky answer. It really is. In the open source world, open source unfortunately, companies do come and go, or projects come and go. So I suppose you really want to say, well how well funded are they? What's their revenue growth like? What's the people like? What's the management like? What's their adoption like? And try and figure all this out and build a map? It's confusing. Yeah, it definitely is confusing. What does the open source community mean to Portainer? I know you're, I always used to describe you as a community first CEO. What does open source crew mean to you? So purely functionally, it is an awesome way to get your product in the hands of as many people as humanly possible, without any barriers, without them having to reveal their identity. It's a way for people to get a lot of hands on experientially the product. For those that love it, spread the word. For those that don't love it, spread the word. I've said for a long time that the people who dislike our product from the community are our biggest asset because they tell me what we're doing wrong and what we need to fix to get better in the future. So a lot of people take negative or take criticism badly. I mean I do take it personally because I love my product and my company. But I take that criticism as well, this is something we need to improve if we want to get better. So for me, open source is a very, very good way to get people using your product to get the feedback on what you need to do to get better, understand where the gaps are in your product. And yeah, that's it. Yeah, I just want to give you a pat on the back there. I know you personally sit on those calls with the community as CEO. You do a lot of that interfacing. Talk about direct access. I am on Twitter, I'm in Reddit, I'm on Slack. You try and get me out of it. I spend a lot of time on planes and hotels and alone, and all at alone time in social media engaging with the community. Yeah, no, I've always really admired that about you. And it has driven the product roadmap quite a significant amount. Oh, so much. Yeah, what's the latest from Portainer? We actually just released the new version. We actually moved to a short-term support and long-term support model. And this was basically off the back of customer feedback saying we're becoming significantly more adopted in large enterprises and large enterprises move slower and they couldn't handle an open source release cycle where we release fast release often. They couldn't handle it. And so we said, okay, well I'm fine. We'll break it in half and we'll release two or three maximum long-term supported stable releases in the market and we'll release short-term support much more, much faster and so iterate, iterate, iterate. And then every so often we'll put a stake in the ground and say, okay, everything that's been released up until now, we'll go do deep regression and release it as a long-term support. So this, we just released the version two days ago. It is the first short-term support. There's a bunch of new features, hundreds of new bug fixes and it's really exciting because... That is exciting. It's a whole new way of releasing for us. Yeah, and so how do you prioritize resources with those two pipelines? Also the only difference between long-term support and short-term support is QA. Oh, okay. So when we put the stake in the ground, we say, okay, everything that's made it until now now goes through deep regression testing. So it's a QA resource, not a dev resource. Oh yeah, cool, all right. So we had Priyanka on earlier this week and we've had a lot of folks chiming in on this. I want your hot take. Is Kubernetes having its Linux moment? I think Kubernetes has reached the point of mainstream. So obviously with Portena, our customer type or our ideal customer persona is more mainstream businesses than deep engineering-led organizations. And we have seen a dramatic pick-up in inbound inquiry for our product. Now that's just the market maturing. And the companies that are hitting us up, they're not what I would consider tech innovators. They're everyday businesses. And so that to me indicates that it's now reached that mainstream... You're bequity. Yeah, and so normal companies, not tech innovators, are now saying, let's go. Formal companies. I love that. Yeah, I love that. Let's talk about that a little bit more. You touch a lot of different verticals and customers with Portena. I remember a lot of fun instances that you and I uncovered, robotics and a whole bunch of stuff. What are some of the trends you're seeing across verticals beyond that ubiquitous adoption? Because it doesn't have to be about Kubernetes either. Okay, so what I'm seeing especially now is there's a lot of companies out there who would have preferred to have remained, not in the past, but remained where they were on virtual machines. It was, IT was easy. You didn't really have any major challenges. It was just easy because we've done it for years and we know what we're doing. Yeah. And they weren't really wanting to make a move to containerization. There was no real motivating factor. The problem is, Kubernetes and containers in general is such a revolutionary change for people who make software, ISVs or internal DevOps. It's such a revolution. Every ISV now ships as containers. Yeah. You are procuring software. The ability for you to ignore containers now is zero. That was going to say impossible. Because your vendors are now saying, we're no longer shipping a virtual appliance. We're now shipping a Helm chart or a Docker image or a compose file. You can't ignore it. You have to go there, right? So there's that angle. The second angle is the VMware challenges. And be careful what I say there, VMware challenges. You can say anything you want. And there's a lot of people now saying, okay, we want to get off this and onto something new. And whatever you want to believe to move off VMware virtualization and onto another virtualization platform, you're up for a big amount of services, right? Big amount. Now why in your right mind would you go and spend hundreds and hundreds or even thousands of hours migrating from one virtualization layer to another? You haven't moved forward. You've moved sideways and you spent time and money. So this is another forcing factor that says, well actually, let's move from VMs to containers. Let's use those hundreds or thousands of hours and actually move forward, it's not sideways. So I think there are two levers being pulled concurrently which is basically forcing this rapid maturing of the technology. I think it's really interesting. So it's got to be kind of a moment for you. You must be feeling, yeah. That cheeky grin tells me everything I need to know. We're now eight years in, it's about time. Well and when we started talking, I mean it was something like only 15% of companies had even really thought out their container management strategy. I would imagine it's a lot more than that now. I can't wait to see the next survey of the market. But when you're getting everyday companies, manufacturers and automotive companies and everything else, these are the guys who you'd say are slightly more laggard than others now that they're doing this technology or embracing this technology, it really has matured. So yeah, I think the next two years are going to be telling and I think you're going to see that mass pickup now. I think we've reached that point where you get that dog leg in adoption and we see the huge pickup in the next two years. Like, hot take. You're hot take. I think you're right. I'll validate that hot take. I'll plus one that. I'm curious, so Portainer is used by so many different companies. Are there any use cases lately that have surprised or excited you that you can share publicly? Automotive is interesting. Yeah. And I think Tesla changed the game with their over the air updates and being able to push new features to vehicles on demand. And I think a lot of people have woken up and said well actually we need to do more of this and so I think we're going to see more and more automotive companies saying well actually the in-car entertainment or the vehicle control system or other things are going to be container driven. Yeah. IoT, it's kind of struggled for a while. You know, you've seen the cloud providers on again, off again, on again, off again on IoT and I think IoT is also having its moment now. Yeah. Just because again all the vendors are shipping now as containers and if you want containers on your devices where you need a container runtime there and so how do you control that when you've got thousands of devices? Yeah. You've got to have it got a management tool set. So. You do. So IoT I think is having its moment as well. So automotive, IoT is interesting. The industry for adoption of containers also is skyrocketing. The number of manufacturers looking to get better efficiency out of their plant and material and people. There's so much cool stuff happening. So much cool stuff happening. There really is some cool stuff happening. AI has been a big topic of conversation. Lots of hype. How is that entering into your world? Do you think it's over hyped? Where do you, I want your hot take here on this one too. So we just turned on an API chat bot in our documentation right now. Pultainer we invest really heavily in our doco and our academy. What we found though was people's willingness to go and search documentation is not there. They'd much rather ask a question than go find the answer in the documentation. So even though we've got this amazing documentation that probably answers 90% of the questions, they still ask them. And so putting a chat bot in that was able to front all our documentation, our hit rate from AI to answering community questions, support questions is exceedingly high, right? And I'm like, my goodness, that's amazing. So now we want to put that, rather than just being on the website or in the documentation, we want that in app. But also the questions people are asking are not necessarily Pultainer questions there. How do I get this application running? And I think the ability to provide really specific guidance to how to get the application running through AI is going to unlock even more mainstream use of this technology. So again, there's already two levers. Now there's the third one, which says it's actually going to get dramatically easier because you can ask the questions and it will give you a lot of data innovation. So it's going to be a really simple way of using AI and I know there's a lot more advanced uses of it, but. Brett Hatt talked about the exact same thing. I would give you more credit than that because it's all about increasing, decreasing developer cognitive load and increasing productivity. I mean, everybody wants to do more and if you meet your community where they are when they have that question and they have that struggle and you can provide the right guidance, that's extremely valuable. Also, if you look at the spread of technical capability across the world and developers, right there, not everyone is equal, right? Not everyone is equal, right? That's reality. This has a way of normalizing things. It normalizes out the curve and says actually those who need a bit more help can actually be given the guidance they need without having to admit they don't know the answer. They can ask anonymously and they'll get a lot of guidance and it really helps them with education and again removes a barrier to adoption of this new technology. Yeah, absolutely. Are there any of the CNCF projects that you are particularly excited about? Is it Covino, I think, so you pronounce it? Perhaps. We'll go with your pronunciation. I quite like it. The ability to centrally control policy and governance, I think it's quite interesting. One of the biggest challenges when you get to Kubernetes at scale is how do you centralize your policies and controls and governance and make sure that you don't have any weaknesses or backdoors or holes in your security posture and I quite like this ability to define a policy once and push it at the environment so quite like that. So that's something that we're very interested in as well. I can imagine there's a little bit of overlap. I can see why you like that. Yeah, that's awesome. What do you hope when I have you on the show next that you can say that you can't say today? I know you just got an exciting new announcement and whatnot but next, KubeCon, what do you want to be able to tell me? Rapid adoption to the masses. Again, we've seen at least three times an increase in inbound interest. If that continues, the inbound interest will be off the charts. I see no reason for it to stop based on the market dynamics. So if that's the case, that to me says that this is now a completely unstoppable force and it's crossed that magic threshold to being a technology that's with us forever and mass adoption, it'll have its VMware moment where it's everywhere, ubiquitous and that would be amazing. Well, I look forward to having that conversation in Salt Lake. Neil, thank you so much for joining me today and thank you for hiring me originally and bringing me to my first KubeCon. I am so grateful. It's been a great fun. Yeah, hopefully, yeah. We had a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun every city we ended up meeting each other and I've seen you all over the world at this point now. And if you remember, that was right in the peak of COVID and I think there were more sponsors than there were attendees because everyone was too scared of getting sick. 100% and we were all masked, we remember all the protocol. Yeah, we were all masked and we had the bracelets on and it says, stay back and... That's right. It was the weirdest experience ever. That was a very franken conference and it really does, we've noticed it here today, over 12,000 people, biggest KubeCon ever. It feels, and I don't want to jinx it, but it feels like the before times a little bit. It feels like we're back. It feels like the community is super stoked. 100% Yeah, well, anyway, this has been a blast. I can't wait for our next chat and to talk more about the ubiquity. And thank all of you for tuning in to our fabulous coverage here in Paris at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech coverage.