 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2021 virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. Well, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got two great guests here. Always great to talk to the KubeCon co-chairs and we have Stephen Augustus, head of open source at Cisco and also the KubeCon co-chair. Great to have you back. And Jasmine James, manager and engineering effectiveness at Twitter at KubeCon co-chair. She's new on the job, so we're not going to grill her too hard, but she's excited to share her perspective. Jasmine and Stephen, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having us. Thank you. So obviously the co-chairs, you guys see everything up front. Jasmine, you're going to learn that this is a really kind of key fun position because you got multiple hats you got to wear. You got to put a great program together. You got to entertain and surprise and delight the attendees and also get the right trends, pick everything right. And kind of keep that harmonious vibe going at CNCF and KubeCon as ad. So it's a hard job. So I got to ask you right out of the gate, what are the top trends that you guys have selected and are pushing forward this year that we're seeing evolve and unfold here at KubeCon? For sure, yeah. So I'm excited to see, and I would say that some of the top trends for cloud native right now are just changes in the ecosystem. How we think about different use cases for cloud native technology. So you'll see lots of talk about new architectures being introduced into cloud native technologies or things like WebAssembly, WebAssembly wasm use cases. And again, I think I mention this every time, but what are the customer use cases? Actually really thinking about how all of these building blocks connect and create a cohesive story. So I think a lot of it is enduring and will always be part, my favorite thing to see is pretty much always maintainer and user stories. But yeah, but architectures wasm and security, security is a huge focus. And it's nice to see it come to the forefront as we talk about having these like the security day as well as all of the talk around supply chain security. It's been a really, really, really big event, I will say. Yeah. Well, great job from last year, we're virtual again, but we're back in real world's coming back in the fall. So hopefully in North America will be in person. Jasmine, you're new to the job. Tell us a little bit about you, introduce yourself to the community and tell more about who you are and why you're so excited to be the co-chair with Steven. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Jasmine James. I've been in the industry for the past five or six years, previously at Delta Airlines, now at Twitter. As a part of my job at Delta, we did a huge drive on adopting Kubernetes. So a lot of those experiences I was very, very blessed to be a part of in making the adoption and really the cultural shift easy for developers during my time there. I'm really excited to experience like cloud native from the co-chair perspective because historically I've been like on the consumer side going to talks, taking all of those best practices, stealing everything I could and to bring it back into my job so make everyone's lives easier. So it's really, really great to see all of the fantastic ideas that are being presented, all of the growth and maturity within the cloud native world. Similar to Steven, I'm super excited to hear about the security stuff, especially as it relates to making it easy for developers to shift left on security versus it being such an afterthought and making it something that you don't really have to think about. Developer experience is huge for me, which is why I took the job at Twitter six months ago. So I'm really excited to see what I can learn from the other co-chairs and to bring it back to my day to day. Yeah, Twitter has been very active and open source and everyone knows that and it's a great job to see you land there. You know, one of the interesting trends is this year also you besides security is get off. But the one that I think is relevant your background so fresh is the end user contributions and involvement has been really exploding on the scene. It's always been there. And we've covered, you know, Envoy with Lyft, but now enterprises now mainstream enterprises have been kind of going to the open source well and bringing those goodies back to their camps and building out and bringing it back. So you're starting to see that flywheel developing. You've been on that side now here. Talk about that dynamic and how real that is and important and share some perspective of what's really going on around this explosion around more end user contribution more end user involvement. Absolutely. So I really think that a lot of industry like players are starting to see the importance of contributing back to open source because historically we've done a lot of taking, you know, utilizing these different components to drive the business logic and not really making an investment in the product itself. So it's really, really great to see large companies invest in open source even have whole teams dedicated to open source and how it's consumed internally. So I really think it's going to be a big win for the companies and for the open source community because I really am a big believer in like giving back and making sure that you should give back as much as you're taking and by making it easy for companies to do the right thing and then even highlighting it, you know, as a part of CNCF projects, it'll be a really, really great, just a drive for a great environment for everyone. So really excited to see that. Shesman, awesome stuff, great insight. Stephen, I want to just have you piggyback off that and comment on companies, enterprises that want to get more involved with the cloud native community from their respective experiences. You know, what's the playbook? Is there new on-ramps? Is there new things? Is there a best practice? What's your view? I mean, obviously everyone's growing and changing. Look at IT has changed. I mean, IT is evolving completely to cloud ops, SRE, GitOps, day two operations. It's pretty much standard now, but they need to learn and change. What's your take on this? Yeah, so I mean, I think to Jasmine's point and I'm not sure how much we've discussed my background in the past, but I actually came from the corporate IT background, the desktop help desk support, all of that stuff up into operations, DevOps, SRE production engineering. I was an SRE at a startup who used CoreOS technologies and started using Kubernetes back when Kubernetes was at one two, I think. And that was my first journey into cloud native and I became CoreOS as like only, you know, only customer to employee convert, right? So I'm very much big on that end user story and figuring out how to get people involved because that was my story as well. So I think that, you know, some of the work that we do or a lot of the work that we do in contributor strategy, the CNCF, SIG contributor strategy is all around thinking through, thinking through how to bring on new contributors to these, the various cloud native projects, right? So we've had chats with container, you know, container D and linker D and a bunch of other folks across the ecosystem as well as the kind of the maintainer circle session that we hold, which are kind of like they're private, you know, not recorded so maintainers can kind of get raw and talk about what they're feeling, whether it be around bolstering contributions or whether it'd be like managing burnout, right? Or thinking about how you talk through the values and the principles for your projects. So I think that, you know, part of that story is building for multiple use cases, right? You take Kubernetes, for example, right? So a Meredith chair for SIGPM over in Kubernetes. One of the sub-project owners for the enhancements sub-project, which involves basically like figuring out how we intake new enhancements to the community but as well as like what the end user cases or all of the use cases for that, right? How we make it easy to use the technology and how we make it more effective for people to have conversations about how they use technology, right? So I think it's kind of a continuing story and it's delightful to see all of the people getting involved in SIG contributor strategy because it means that they care about all the folks that are coming into their projects and making it a more welcoming and easier to contribute place. Yeah, that's great stuff. And one of the things you mentioned about IT and your background and the scale change from IT and just the operational change over is interesting. I was just talking with a friend and we were talking about, you know, GitOps and, you know, SREs and how, you know, in colleges is it an engineering track or is it computer science? And it's kind of a hybrid, right? So you're seeing essentially this new operational model at scale that's CloudOps. So you got hybrid, you got on-premise, you got cloud native and now soon to be multi-cloud. So new things come into play, architecture, coding and programmability. All these things are like projects now in CNCF and there's a lot of vendors and contributors. But as a company, the IT functions changing fast. So that's going to require more training and more involvement and yet open source is filling the void. If you look at some of the successes out there, it's interesting. Can you comment on the companies that are out there saying, hey, I know my IT department's going to be turning into essentially SRE operations or, you know, CloudOps at scale. How do they get there? How could they work with KubeCon and what's the key playbook? How would you answer that? Yeah, so I would say, you know, first off, the place to go is the 101 track. We specifically craft that 101 track to make sure that people who are new to CloudNative get a very cohesive story around what they're trying to get into, right? At any one time. So head to the 101 track, please head to the 101 track, hang out, check out the, definitely check out all of the keynotes. Again, the keynotes, we put a lot of work into making sure that these keynotes tell a very nice story about all of the technology and the amount of work that our presenters put into it as well is phenomenal. It's just, it's soft-notch. It's soft-notch every time. So those will always be my suggestions. Actually go to the keynotes and definitely check out the 101 track. Awesome, Jasmine, I got to get your take on this. Now that you're on the KubeCon and you're co-chairing with Steven, what's your story to the folks that are on the end user side out there that were in your old position? You know, you were at Delta doing some great Kubernetes work, but now it's going beyond Kubernetes. I was just talking with another participant in the ecosystem, KubeCon ecosystem, saying it's not just Kubernetes anymore, there's other systems that we're going to deploy our real-time metrics on and whatnot. So what's the story? What's the update? What do you see in the inside now? Now that you're on board and you're at a hyperscale or Twitter, what's your advice? What's your commentary to your old friends in the end user world? Yeah, it's not an easy task. I think that was you had mentioned about starting with the one-on-one is like super key. Like that's where you should start. There's so many great stories out there in previous KubeCon that have been told. I was listening to those stories and the great thing about our community is that it's authentic, right? We're telling like all of the ways we tripped up so we can prevent you from doing the same thing and having a easier path, which is really awesome. Another thing I would say is do not underestimate the cultural shift, right? There's so many tools and technologies out there, but there's also a cultural transformation that has to happen. You're shifting from traditional IT roles to really holistic, like so many different things are changing about the way infrastructure was interacted with the way developers are developing. So don't underestimate the cultural shift and make sure you're bringing everyone to the party because there's a lot of perspectives from the operations side, from the development side that need to be considered before you make this shift initially, so that way you can make sure you're approaching the problem in the right way. So those would be my recommendations. So speaking of cultural shifts, Steven, I know this is a big passion of yours is diversity in the ecosystem. I think with COVID we've seen probably in the past two years, a major cultural shift on the personnel involved, the people participating, still a lot more work to get done. Where are we on diversity in the ecosystem? How would you rate the progress and the overall achievements? I would say doing better, but never stop. What has happened in COVID, I think, if you look across companies, if you look across the opportunities that have opened up for people in general, there have been plenty of doors that have shut, right? And doors that have really made the assumption that you need to be physical or in person to do good work. And I think that by cloud native ecosystem, the work that the LF and CNTF do, and really the way that we interact in projects has kind of pushed towards this async first, this remote first work culture, right? So you see it in these large corporations that have had to change the travel policies because of COVID and really for someone who's coming off of being like a field engineer and solutions architect, right? The bread and butter is hopping on and off of a plane, shaking hands, going to dinner, doing the song and dance with customers. And for that model to functionally shift, right? Having conversations in different ways, right? And yeah, sometimes it's a lot of Zoom calls, right? Zoom calls, webinars, all of these things, but I think some of what has happened is, you take the release team, for example, the Kubernetes release team, this was our first cycle with a Nobarun who's our 121 release team lead is based in India, right? And that's the first time that we've had an APAC region release team lead and what that forced us to do, we were already working on it, but what that forced us to do was really focus on asynchronous communication. How can we get things done without having to have people in the room? And we were like, with Nobarun here, it either works or it doesn't. Like we're either gonna prove that what we've put in place works for asynchronous communication or it doesn't. And given that a project of this scale can operate, just fine, right? Just fine delivering a release with people all across the globe. It proves that we have a lot of flexibility in the way that we offer opportunities, both on the open source side as well as on the company side. Yeah, and I gotta say a KubeCon has always been global from day one. I was in Shanghai and I was in Hangzhou visiting Alibaba and who do I see in the lobby, the CNCF crew and I'm like, what are you guys doing here? Oh, we're talking cloud with Alibaba. So global is huge. You guys have nailed that. So congratulations and keep that going. Jasmine, your perspective is women in tech. I mean, you're seeing more and more focus and some great doors opening up. Still not enough. We've been covering this for a long time. Still the numbers are down, but we had a great conference recently at Stanford Women in Data Science. Amazing conference. A lot of power players coming in. Women in tech is evolving. What's your take on this? Still a lot more work to done. You're an inspiration. Share your story. Yeah, you know, we have a long way to go. There's no question about it. I do think that there's a lot of great organizations, CNCFB and one of them really doing a great job at sharing networking opportunities, encouraging other women to contribute to open source and letting that be sort of the gateway into a tech career. My journey is starting as a systems engineer at Delta, working my way into leadership somehow. I'm not sure I ended up there, but really sort of shifting and being able to lift other women up has been like such a, so fortunate to be able to do that. Women who code being a mentor, things of that nature has been a great opportunity, but I do feel like the open source community has a long way to go to be a more welcoming place for women contributors. Things like code of conducts, that being very prevalent, making sure that it's not daunting and scary, going into GitHub and starting to create a PR out of fear of what someone might say about your contributions, instead of it being sort of an educational experience. So I think there's a lot of opportunities, but there's a lot of programs, networking opportunities out there, especially everyone being remote now that have presented themselves. So I'm very hopeful and the CNCF, like I said, is doing a great job at highlighting these women contributors that are making changes to CNCF projects and really making it something that is celebrated, which is really great. You know what I love, Steven, and we talked to us last time and the Clubhouse app has come online since we were last talking and it says all audio. So there's a lot of ideas and it's all open. So with asynchronous first, you have more access, but still context matters. So the language, so there's still more opportunities potentially to offend and or get it right. So this is now becoming a new cultural shift. You brought this up last time we chatted around the language, language is important. So I think this is something that we're keeping an eye on and trying to keep open dialogue around, it matters what you say, asynchronously or text. We all know that text moment where someone said, I didn't really mean that, but it was offensive or... It's like, but you said it. But you said it's there, it's like, there it is. Sherry, you're passionate about this here. This is super important, how we work. Yeah, so I, you mentioned Clubhouse and it's something that I don't like. So, you know, no offense to anyone who is behind creating new technology is for sure. But I think that Clubhouse from, you know, if you take platforms like that, let's, you know, let's generalize, you take platforms like that and you think about the unintentional exclusion that those platforms involve, right? You, if you think about folks with disabilities who are not necessarily able to hear a conversation, right? Or you don't provide opportunities to like caption your conversations, right? That either intentionally or unintentionally excludes a group of folks, right? So I've seen, I've seen cloud native, you know, I've seen cloud native things happen on Clubhouse, on Twitter spaces, I won't personally be involved in them until I know that it's a platform that is not exclusive. So I think that it's great that we're having new opportunities to engage with folks that are not necessarily, you know, you've got people who prefer the Slack and Discord vibe, you know, you've got people who prefer the text over phone calls, so to speak thing, right? You've got people who prefer phone calls. So maybe like, you know, maybe Clubhouse, Twitter spaces, insert new, I guess, Discord is doing a thing too. They call it stages, Discord has stages, which is essentially Clubhouse. Stages, they have stages, okay, all right. So insert, you know, Clubhouse clone here. And, yeah, and that's- Cubehouse, we've got a Cubehouse, come on in, yeah. Cubehouse, Cubehouse, trivia. So you've got a great, you know, great ways to engage there for people who, you know, prefer that type of engagement. And something that is explicitly different from the, I'm on a Zoom call all day, kind of vibe. Enjoy yourselves, enjoy yourselves, try to make it as engaging as possible. Just realize what you may unintentionally be doing by creating a community that not everyone can be a part of. Yeah, unintentional consequences. I mean, this is key. Language matters to how you get involved, how you support it. I mean, accessibility, because I never thought about that if you can't listen. I mean, you can't, there's no content there. Yeah, yeah. And that is, you know, that is a huge, you know, that's a huge part of the cloud native community, right? Thinking through accessibility, internationalization, localization to make sure that our contributions are actually accessible, right? To folks who want to get involved and not just prioritizing, let's say the US, you know, the US are English-speaking part of the world, so. Awesome, Jasmine, what's your take? What can we do better in the world to make the diversity and inclusion not a conversation? Because when it's not a conversation, then it's solved. I mean, ultimately it's got a lot more work to do but you can't be exclusive. You got to be diverse, more output happens. What's your take on this? Yeah, I feel like it'll always be work to do in this space because there's so many groups of people, right, that we have to take an account for. I think that thinking through inclusion in the onset of, you know, whatever you're doing is the best way to get ahead of it. There's so many different components of it and you want to make sure that you're making a space for everyone. I also think that making sure that, you know, you have a pipeline of, you know, a network of people that represent, you know, a good subset of the world is going to be very key for shaping any program or any sort of project that anyone does in the future. But I do think it's something that we have to consistently keep at the forefront of our mind, always consider. It's great that it's in so many conversations right now. It really makes me happy, especially being a mom of an eight-year-old girl who's into computer science as well, that there'll be better opportunities and hopefully, you know, more prevalent opportunities and representation for her by the time she grows up. So really, really great. Get her coding early, as I always say. Jasmine, great to have you on, Steven, as well. Good to see you. Final question, what do you hope people walk away with this year from KubeCon? What's the final kind of objective? Jasmine, we'll start with you. Wow, final objective. I think that I would want people to walk away with a sense of community. I feel like the KubeCon CNCF world is a great place to get knowledge, but also an established sense of community, not stopping at just the conference and taking part of the community, giving back, contributing would be a great thing for people to walk away with. Awesome, Steven. I'm all about community as well. So I think that, you know, one of the fun things that we've been doing is just engaging in different ways than we have normally across the kind of the KubeCon boundaries, right? So you take CNCF Twitch, you take some of the things that I can't mention yet, but are coming out, you should see around and post KubeCon week. The way that we're engaging with people is changing and it's needed to change because of how the world is right now. So I hope that to reinforce the community point, my favorite part of any conference is the hallway track. And I think I mentioned this last time. And we're trying our best. We're trying our best to create it. We've had lots of great feedback about, you know, whether it be people playing among us on CNCF Twitch or hanging out on Slack to the early hours, you know, just chatting it up and our kind of like crafted hallway track. So I think that engage, engage, don't be afraid to say hello. I know that it's new and scary sometimes. And trust me, we've all, we've literally all been here. It's gonna be okay, come in, have some fun. We're all pretty friendly. We're all pretty friendly. And we know and understand that the only way to make this community survive and thrive is to bring on new contributors, is to get new perspectives and continue building awesome technology. So, so don't be afraid. I love it. You guys have a global, diverse and knowledgeable and open community. Congratulations. Jasmine, James, Steven and Gus co-chairs for KubeCon. Here on theCUBE, breaking it down. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.