 Hi everyone, this is Cheryl from the CNCF. I want to welcome you to a really special interview that I've been looking forward to for a very long time. So as you probably know, I work with the end user community, the CNCF end user community. This is the 140 top companies and startups who are adopting cloud native. And end users are a huge focus for CNCF now and going forwards. So we've decided to bring on somebody to work with me on end users. And I'm absolutely delighted to announce that Katie Gamangie is joining CNCF. So Katie, welcome. Hi, it's really, really great to have you here. Thank you, Cheryl. I am really excited to be part of officially being part of the CNCF. So I'm looking forward to this. I mean, you and I, you know, like we've known each other for a couple of years. So in fact, why don't you sort of tell people a little bit about how you got started, how you got into software engineering and then into DevOps and Kubernetes? Right. I think this is a good question because this is pretty much highlights my motivation to be part of the community. When I joined the infrastructure world, that's how it was called at the time. It was quite abrupt because out of university, I wanted to have kind of a straightforward programming job and I was trained for that. I did like all the exercises, I did all the courses for that, joined my first grad job, and apparently I had to be part of the automation team that was the name of it. And I had to do a lot of onboarding to the new platform. And this has been a complete, I wouldn't say disaster, but it was such a novel experience for me. I was not prepared for that from being completely 100% code to be something which is, oh, you have servers and you have to put them together and you have to do something out with them. And more importantly, you have to onboard people on top of it. It was, it was a very unique experience at the time. And I think my transition was actually quite abrupt. It wasn't as smooth. I was not prepared for this kind of world. But at the same time, I realized that there is a very good dynamic to the infrastructure platform world. And I got curious. So the more I was in that role, the more I kind of understood that I really want to do this. And throughout the roles, I kind of tried to look for the good technologies to work with. And that's how I, when I moved to Conde Nast, that was my first job to do actual containers and keep it in production. It was a lot of public cloud experience, something which I was really looking forward to. And that was the job which not only gave me the right experience, but during that time, I was really involved with the community. Actually, I got to be involved more with the community. And the more I actually had this tendency, the more I was like, I want to be closer to it. And I did it for different ways. At the beginning, I was just looking at people, what they do, looking at reading blogs, looking at the talks. And then slowly, slowly, but surely, I started to do that myself. And I am here in a position where I'm actually capable to really kind of nurture and grow a community further. So I'm really excited about that. I mean, I think that's awesome. I think you and I actually met in the end of 2017, probably, something like that. Yes. So it was the Cloud Native London. So we met at Cloud Native London, the conference. And I remember, I think you were sitting in a chair in the corner of the room. And I was wandering around, I didn't really know too many people. So I was like, I'm just going to go over and talk to her. So we got talking and I was like, huh, like she's really doing something really interesting. And so I think I invited you to speak at Cloud Native London, which is the meetup that I run, right? Precisely. I think that was a very, just a few words on that. That was a very kind of defining moment, one of the defining moments within my career, because throughout my journey, I've worked with different people. I've met different people. And I think that's one point where I got the guts. And I was like, I'm going to do a presentation. So pretty much that was my first presentation on the topic. And like on the infrastructure topic and Kubernetes and Cloud Native. And it was the first presentation I did by myself. So I was the only presenter on the stage. So it was a big milestone. So thank you for encouraging me to do that. I mean, I still remember you talked about HPAs and VPAs, right? Yes, HP and VPA, all the scalability in the cluster. Exactly. So that was awesome. And I'm really happy actually that you got into the community and you enjoyed speaking and you enjoyed sharing what you know with other people, because that's so important. This is how our community runs, right? People sharing what they know. So I think sharing is one of the things I really like to say is that everyone has a different, usually a different way of either explaining or a different point of view about a subject. And sometimes someone who is very knowledgeable, they don't have the skills to share all of that knowledge and vice versa. And I think that there's this kind of precious thing about everyone. They have their unique understanding and their way unique way of explaining. And that's when I realized that you don't necessarily need to have for years of experience to actually share something you're really passionate about and something which you want people to know about as well. And I think this is kind of extremely valuable and something which is really appreciated in the community lately. Exactly right, exactly right. So after you got into speaking, you know, you started to go into all these different conferences to speak, right? And then how did you end up joining the TOC, the Technical Oversight Committee? Right. Oh, I think, I think there's another milestone within my speaking career, if I can call it that way. Actually, when I was part of the Condenest, there was the Director of Engineering, Crystal Hirshan, and she was supposed to do a keynote for KubeCon in Barcelona that was in 2019 last year. And she wasn't able to do that. And because I started to do some kind of talks around the community in London, she just passed me this opportunity. I was completely stumbled. Like I couldn't believe that. And in the end, I did it. But I think that was the key point when I realized how big the community is and how much everyone could give to it. And from that, I started to meet more people. I started to do more conferencing, more kind of speaking. And the key point when I actually joined the TOC was me being a bit more close to the CNCF staff. So to be honest, I didn't knew about all the components within the CNCF organization, I think, as an end user, or even like as someone who wants to kind of approach the industry, there is a lot of moving parts. And you don't really understand where exactly to go and what exactly to do if you would like to contribute. At the time for me, it was still a mystery. It was, well, there's definitely enough information, but it's just looking for it and kind of having those leverage points. And I do remember like getting close to the CNCF staff a bit more, kind of started to talk. And there was, at the time, it was December last year, the TOC elections were around. And I was advised to apply because I was doing a lot of talks on, at the time, I was doing the cluster API talks. It was just emerging. It's been around for half a year. I was doing talks about it. I was really excited about it. I was talking about Federation. And I really wanted to give this context of you can use these tools. And this is how you use these tools in real infrastructure rather than having a demo of something which is quite vendor itchy in a way. And from that, actually, someone approached me, advised me to apply. Never thought I'm going to get it, but I actually was like, I was extremely, extremely happy. It happened actually to me to find the results. Once I had my first day at American Express that this day when I found out that I'm going to be a TOC as well. So I had like a double beginning for like different roles as well. Really excited about that. But even like the more I started to understand about the TOC and what they do, the more excited I got about it because it really, it's kind of a key point where you really can collect feedback and you can actually apply that feedback. So it's kind of a position where you can really shape the community, especially the CNCF landscape because at the moment it's ginormous and it's great. It's great to see what this is doing. But to understand like which tool is actually has the right governance, which project is healthy in terms of contribution, which project actually is able to put the missing piece within the ecosystem. This is something which the TOC will be able to further leverage or accentuate further. So the more I kind of started to do that, the more I appreciated all the work for it and kind of the entire motivation to have this kind of TOC body as well. I think that's amazing and I think you've been absolutely fantastic on the TOC. And as you say, like sometimes it's hard to know what, because it's such a large community, it's such a large landscape. It is hard to figure out where to use your time and where you can best share what you know. And I think through the TOC, you've really brought through the voice of the end user because you represent the end user community. So let me ask you like, what do you think? What do you see end users caring about? What's on the mind of end users right now? So I can say that from the perspective of being in two companies with two different kind of goals for their infrastructure. We've condensed, we had something which we need to create from scratch. So we had a green field and we were able to choose the best for our infrastructure at that point in time. And I'm working currently for American Express and well, looking to move away, but at this stage, American Express looks to transform rather than kind of bring something completely new from scratch. So how about you do this transformation and migration process? And from both of these companies, it's really interesting to see a desire to move forward. A desire to not necessarily transform their technology, but usually if they want to move forward with their business logic or if they want to grow their customer base, they need to accelerate. And usually to accelerate means you have to bring changes to your technology as well. And seeing that is like, it's all about kind of the underneath stream. It's how can you get more value to the customer faster and usually that goes very hand in hand with the technology as well. And likely it goes hand in hand with cloud native technology because it goes so fast. There's such an enormous amount of tooling, as I mentioned, it's really, it's really catering for different unique features and unique kind of requirements. Now with the end users, what they really care about is how can they reach that acceleration point? How can they deliver value to the customers? How can they deploy faster if you're talking about the actual operations within an infrastructure team? How can they really leverage the product? And the tooling, I think, from that is about the tooling and the tooling at the moment, it really satisfies those needs there very well. And they want to understand it better. They want to understand how they use it for it. And this is just the moment, just reaching that acceleration point is just one step. You have to continually do that. And I think this is where there is this desire to further grow and to further introduce the tooling and explore. And that's why I think the end users are always kind of on the look. They always like looking, what's the next thing that we need to introduce? So the next thing which is actually going to help us to do what we do but better. And just following from that, where do end users look for information about what's coming next? I think they look everywhere. Honestly, they look everywhere. I think it depends on the, obviously it depends on the financial budget a company has or a team has. It depends on the amount of resources they have in terms of engineers. But usually, depending on the problem, they either look at vendors or they look within like actually GitHub and looking for projects to do things. And I think it's kind of two main streams. They're obviously different ways. But the better way to really kind of grow your kind of vision and perspective is like for this conferencing. And this is quite important because it's impossible to know everything what's happening there. And it's impossible to like do the magic keyword search and Google and going to find a project. Or even the vendors like, well, if you have the money, you can go for them and they're going to do cater a solution for you. But still like nowadays, it's all about how can you do things. But sometimes in a cheaper way as well, they want to use open source. There is the desire to do open source regardless. And I think going back to the point how what is the best way to find about new projects, I think conferencing lately has been a very good quality. And I think it's happening maybe from my perspective, I've been quite active in this conferencing world for maybe a year and a half, two years. And there is a lot of kind of connection points I've made with people using different, the same technology, but in different contexts or with, for example, teams coming and showcasing their infrastructure or showcasing any tooling. So I think from that perspective, this was a very good way to get that concentrated amount of information about a infrastructure or about some tools within the infrastructure world. And you'd be able to, from that kind of concentrated amount to choose what's the best for you. And I think this concentration point is important because again, the internet is quite dispersed. There's a lot of things you can find and not all of them are going to work. But with the conferencing and with some like examples and demos, we'd be able to really see a good representation of how that works in a good company. Speaking of conferences, of course, we have KubeCon, CloudNativeCon coming up very soon in a couple of weeks. Do you remember your first KubeCon? How was that experience? I just got the chills, just remembering that multiple line. I think that was another very defining moment within my career. So it was in Seattle, it was in North America, and I think it was in 2018 in December. And I got a scholarship, a diverse scholarship. That was great. So I applied for a scholarship. I really wanted to be part of that because usually the companies have a very limited budgeting or a very limiting amount of time for someone to actually go and be part of conference. So at the time, I was like, I really hope for this diverse inclusion scholarship because I would actually have the financial resources to reach that place. And I was, I got it. I was extremely, I was extremely happy, but at the same time, I didn't know what to expect because it was my first KubeCon. I knew I want to understand more about Kubernetes and the tooling around it. But at the same time, I didn't know what to expect out of it. And I do remember even now it was the first day, it was the first keynote. And I walked in, I was slightly late, so I was kind of in the back, but I think that was part of the experience. I walked in and this was like ginormous room with thousands of people generally. There was this black and blue background and there was Kelsey Hightower giving a keynote. And I think I, even now I'm getting the chills, honestly, that was such an iconic moment for me. I realized how big this community industry is and how much interest there is for people to connect and to understand more. And from that moment, I was like, I want to do that one day as well. So for me, I want to be, for example, on the keynote stage and delivering that kind of talk and value to the industry in the community. And I actually got to do that and it was absolutely amazing. But that I think I was like, wow. And throughout the, the conferencing as well, I was, I was quite concerned that I'm going to be by myself. And there is a lot, obviously the first thing was to attend talks and kind of understand more about industry. But at the same time, I was like, oh, I'm going to be by myself as well. So it's like, I was like, maybe not the best thing. But, uh, oh, I was wrong. I met so many people throughout. I actually met someone from of zero, I think, and we had lunches and we kind of shared our infrastructure use case. It was very chill. It wasn't anything with boosting off ego. Like, this is how I do Kubernetes and this is how we do things. It was such a kind of humble and modest kind of community could really, really approachable as well. And for a first, keep going for me, I think that was really, really important to actually feel part of the community. Even if it's ginormous, I was part of it. Even if I was not given the talk, I was still part of it. And I think that was something which really drilled me to eat more. And that's why I'm actually continuously trying to get closer to it. Yeah. That's actually so funny because it was very similar to my first coupon experience as well. My first one was Berlin. So 2017, I guess the same. No, that would have been Copenhagen 2016, 2017, something like that. I was also on a diversity scholarship. And I remember being in the keynote room. For me, I think Apana soon was my like, she was giving the keynote at that time. And I was like, oh, that would be so amazing to go up there and give a talk on such a big stage to all these people. So I agree with you, like KubeCon is a really friendly community. People are just so nice, so kind of welcoming, so open to talking about what they're doing. 100%. And this is something again, I've been part of this community for a couple of years now. And it's not like something, it's just the first impression. It kind of goes away. It's still there. I'm still really drawn to the community meetings, for example, because there's so much politeness in terms of who talks, people raise hands, people are very polite to everyone's opinion. And it's something which people do very voluntarily as well. It's not like they pay for that. They want to be part of that community. And they want to make it healthy as well for everyone to be part of that. And I really appreciate that. And the more I've been part of it, the more I could see this more defined and countered. And like, this is awesome. Honestly, I'm really kind of amazed by how far he got and kind of the personality kind of got to it as well. So of course, we have the next KubeCon coming up very shortly. And it's a virtual conference. So what are you looking forward to for KubeCon North America? So I think this one is going to be the second KubeCon virtually. I'm not going to lie, I'm still missing the in-person events. I think there is a different connection you could make with people. It's like just going to the showcase room and just having a coffee or a vendor coffee college and just go around. It's terrible coffee, right? It's part of the experience. It's part of the experience. No one complains about that. It's part of the experience. But I think what I've seen through the first virtual KubeCon, there is a lot of movement in the Slack channels, the cloud native Slack channels. And there was a lot of movement in Twitter as well. So even if we couldn't be in person, I still could feel that connection. I could still be like, oh, we're watching the same thing and we have kind of opinions about it. Let's talk about it. And we still could have a level of connectivity even though it's not in person. So I'm looking forward to the same thing happening in NA. I'm really looking forward to kind of meet people, kind of look for their views on the new tooling or the new usage on the tooling. And I don't know, I'm just looking for a great experience. There's like a lot of good sessions already. I'm going to give two of them as well. So I think it's going to be awesome. That is really awesome. And going back a little bit, since we talked about diversity and women in tech, I know you really care about women in tech. And it's been awesome to see how you've grown from being an individual engineer, working on things to sharing what you know with the community and with the TOC. So do you have any advice for other women or the young people who are kind of up and coming and they want to break into DevOps or open source? I'm not sure if I'm entitled to give advice is because I think like there are so many different ways to reach a level of involvement. But I think the most important thing is do, do realize what you really like to do. Actually think about it. Take like a day or two, have a coffee every single day, every single morning and 15 minutes. Just think, do I really like my job? Like do I want to do this further? Do I want to grow in this position? And if the answer to those questions is yes, then that means that there is motivation. If there is motivation, there is like, especially with the cloud native community, I think there is a lot of kind of key individuals or key people you can reach to. If you want to, you can do that. Or you can actually even just look at what they do and try to reach out, try to connect. I think part of this is the thing like the community here is very open, try to connect. If you have that motivation, do try and kind of ask a question. Maybe try to collaborate on a TOC further or maybe try to understand more of about a TOC they gave. Things like that do reach out. They actually make the first step because not everyone is lucky enough to have someone take their part by the hand and be like, this is the stage, we can talk about that on it. Not everyone has that kind of privilege and sometimes you have to make the first step. And once you make that, the community is very welcoming. That's what I'm trying to kind of highlight here. And in terms of the new engineers, I think there is a lot of resources now and a lot of free resources as well. And this is what I really appreciate. You don't really need to pay hundreds and thousands of pounds to actually to get that knowledge about Kubernetes. There's a lot of good amount of resources you can have a very good foundation. Look out for those and again try to reach out. If you feel comfortable with what you do, if you like what you do, reach out. And if you'd like to further grow, there are possibilities. And there's always a good space within a company or within the community you can actually leverage your skills. So just think about what you really like to do and if you'd like to enhance that experience for you and for that your team may be for people around you and so forth. I definitely agree that that first step is really, it's really hard, but it's really important. Certainly for me, you know, coming from an engineering background as well, I also had that experience of like, you know, where do I begin? Where do I reach out to? So it is hard and I do want to reassure you like, you're not the only person sort of in the same in the same boat. And I also actually, I didn't want to imply that, you know, women are just junior engineers as well, because I also know there's a lot of women who are just, I respect them so much because they know so much and they're so good at what they do. So definitely also want to shout out to all the fantastic women who've been role models for me. 100%. Like, I've been, I've been at this point in my career because I've been, I've been empowered and I've been given some opportunities by some very good women within like the industry. So I really appreciate that. And again, a really big shout out to them. And just, I just want them to keep doing what they do. Yeah. So coming background to the beginning, you are joining CNTF. In fact, today will be your first day when this video is released. And I know that you'll be working with the end user community, but not in exactly an engineering role. So for you, like how do you feel about moving away from that kind of engineering? So I, I try to actually not see it moving away from engineering because I still have like, again, I had like the coffee in the morning and I was like, what do I enjoy doing? And I, I did realize that I really enjoy to be part of the community. I really want you to grow that and make space for more people to be part of this community. This is something which I'm really passionate about. And something which I'm really passionate about is I really still like to kind of get the tools, get a keyboard in this classroom, a local machine and try the new tooling around it. And I don't think I'm actually walking away from that. It's something like I've been doing regardless. So I feel like I'm going to have a focus more on the community, the end user community and specifically, and I'm going to look for what they do. I'm actually thinking to why not maybe apply that, try to, to put a demo together, try to maybe somehow share that as an architecture and so forth. But I don't see it as moving away from engineering. I think it's quite crucial to still have that understanding of the ecosystem, understanding of the tooling. And I think this is something which will really help me to move forward with the role as well. So I think you still can go, go stand at hand. Like I don't feel like I'm giving up anything yet. So I'm just really excited to like focus a bit more on the community part, but still kind of get my, get my fingers into the cringe clusters and see what they're doing in the new releases. I mean, actually that's why I'm also really excited to work with you because you have had the end user experience of running Kubernetes at Condé Nast and at American Express and you're excited about all the new, the new tech that's coming out and you want to try it yourself. And I totally agree. Having that kind of connection with the engineering, with the, with how the tech works is absolutely critical. Precisely. And this is how what I actually tried to reach throughout this role as well. It's again, engineering should be there, at least for me. I like it. It's something which I enjoy to do. So I would like to do that further. But at the same time, there's the community, which actually has so much amount of like data and so much like things to share and so much kind of not one Kubernetes platform is the same. So it's always intriguing to see how they did their canvas of tooling, how what kind of things they use for different functionalities and so forth. So it's always something which is, for me at least, it's still quite enthusiastic and it's still intriguing for me to to look out for what they do and how they connect things together. Let me explain to people a little bit about how the end user community actually shares information because it's not public. It's, you know, a lot of it's private within the group. So perhaps people aren't certain about what this looks like. So you and I, we've been on the same course together for a couple of years now. So the course are usually they're on a single topic and usually two or three different companies present for five, 10 minutes on the same topic. So that everyone gets a different view of a couple of different views of how things are done. And then there's discussion Q&A. And then at the end of the call, there is voting. So people vote on the topic for the next call and people volunteer to speak as well. So sort of every two weeks or so, this is how the end user community gets together and keeps discussing what what things they're most interested in and getting sharing best practices. And like if I could add to that, I was so I was part of these calls more frequently as part of my TOC role. Condenast was part of the end users, but we had someone else joining the calls at the time. Now, so I didn't have that much exposure to these calls. With the TOC, I was actually part of the calls. And the first thing I was like, I was, again, I mean, I've been using this word a lot. I've been amazed as well because there is so much like people would actually share how they do things in their company. But there is again, like that politeness would be like the calls. Everyone was very welcomed, especially if you're a first time comrade, they're gonna welcome you would like to share a bit more of what you do and how you do. So actually, like from the first meeting, if you're new, you already kind of not like noticed and valued straight away. And again, like like the information that people share in the engineer shares, like, of course, quite useful. People actually talk about that they can vote on what they're interested in. It's not something which you said, and it's going to be this schedule for the next three months. People actually choose what they want to talk about, and they actually try to tailor those conversations they have for these meetings. And this is something which really helped me as a TOC to kind of approach this end user community better, but at the same time to understand what they they care about. And again, making everyone, everyone welcome. Again, big shout outs to everyone who've been doing that. I presume yourself and there's Henning and there is James James James James as well. Yes. So all of them they organized this meetings quite nicely. And it's really great to kind of feel welcome, but at the same time have the benefit of learning more as well at the same time. I mean, I'm really, really happy that you said that because I think when I started with CNTF, there was no end user community really. So it's been, you know, my last two years worth of work to get to this point where it's a genuine community. People share what they know. People care about being welcoming and, you know, having a nice atmosphere. And it's been, it's been a surprising amount of work, community work is a surprising amount of effort to get to the point now where people feel comfortable in that environment. So I'm really happy that you said that. I'm really happy to be part of it officially as well. Yeah, exactly. Last thing, anything that you're excited about coming up, you know, could be technical, could be anything. I think I am really excited about the further collaboration that is happening. Like this sounds some quite, quite common, but I'm really excited to like see the environment grow further from a technical point of view. So I'm really excited to see like the new releases and the new features. And I'm like, Oh, great, people want that. Finally, we have this. And of course, I'm really excited to, even like the current times do not allow us to meet in person, but I'm still looking to kind of still close the gap on how can meet and how can share information and make it a bit more personalized, not necessarily personalized, but make people to, to kind of be part of it, people to contribute, people just to be around and kind of be part of this entire ecosystem. So yeah, a very generic answer, but I'm really, really excited about that. Truly. So am I. So am I. I said, Katie, thank you so much for chatting with me today. And you and I are going to work really closely going forwards. So very, very excited to see what you do. Thank you, Cheryl. I'm really excited about this opportunity as well. Thank you so much. And see you, see you at KubeCon virtually and everybody else as well. Take care. Bye.