 Welcome to Amsterdam and KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2023. Join John Furrier, Savannah Peterson, Rob Streche, and U.P. Scott as the Kube covers the largest conference on Kubernetes, CloudNative, and open source technologies together with developers, engineers, and IT leaders from around the globe. Live coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2023 is made possible by the support of Red Hat, the CNCF, and its ecosystem partners. Good morning everyone and welcome back to Amsterdam where it is a bright and beautiful sunny day. So bright in here. I've even got my shades on. Don't worry, I'm still looking at you kid. We are at KubeCon Europe and I'm very excited to welcome Rob hosting next to me for the first time. Rob, welcome. Oh, thank you. It's great to be here with you. How does it feel? Are you intimidated right now? No, not at all. I just made this so smooth. So it's like, how could, and you're very brightly colored not to mention the sunshine. So this makes it very smooth and we're here with some great people. So a lot of fun nerding out going on. It's going to get nerdy, folks. I hope you're all ready. And that is a sexy thing and a good thing here on the Kube. So we don't mind that. Without further ado, welcome to the show. Gentlemen, this prop indicating the company that you work for. Machi and David, how are you guys doing today? You enjoying the show? Awesome. It is beautiful day after literally cloudy couple past days. Today is just wonderful. The sun is shining on the Kubernetes community and we are lucky to be part of it. Yes, I love that. David, when we got to chatting in our green room, aka sitting here before the show started, you talked a little bit about the keynote. Tell me about your hot takes. So I really enjoyed hearing about how all these projects are being built on top of it. And there was a lot of focus on the ecosystem around it. And there's a lot that the platform really builds out, needs to make and also currently provides. And so seeing how people use it and then I'm here to hear what people need from it in addition to keep building out their products and their projects. I love that. So if you all were listening, make sure you find these gentlemen and tell them exactly what you need when it comes to building your Kubernetes based project. Just a casual offer for the audience. What was your take? Oh, I really loved how we can grow the community. I really like the community in bloom theme that is spread all over the place. It's like literally building on top of where we are. And at the same time, it's also building on top of what we care about the most with regards to community building. And that has been brought up numerous times. Yesterday, when we were talking with the rest of the Kubernetes contributors, talking about we need more folks that will help us to make the product even better than it is already, how we are welcoming and we're opening our gates to engage more folks, introduce them to what it looks like to work on Kubernetes. You're like a gateway. You're like a gateway drug for Kubernetes. Yes, I'm trying a lot, but we'll see how that works. I mean, we are in Amsterdam. So here we go. I can't think of a better city to try things out. So tell me a little bit more about that. How does Red Hat act as that gateway? How do you make it easier for folks to build? Both David and I, both of us, we are very engaged in community. And we're basically in the Kubernetes project since the early days. David has been longer than I did, because if I remember correctly, David was involved even before the official 1.0 release. Kubernetes OG up in here. I got involved a little bit later around December, 2014. You were still pretty OG too. That's no joke either. Correct. It's going to be very early after that point. So it was, and we're trying, and we're the fact that we are so long. We have a lot of knowledge that we want to share with everyone and help them succeed. I can feel it sitting next to you. And help them succeed. Both of us are representing multiple interest groups within the Kubernetes project. We're trying to raise new people that will come after us so that we can slowly retire. Let's call it that way. I'm not going to retire. Yeah, it's not a real retirement. Delegate maybe some of your responsibilities. Partially that. That will allow us to grow the community, grow the project. It's like, literally, that's all it's about. David, how you've seen this community grow basically since day zero. How has it evolved? Well, gosh, I have so many questions for you given that. Let me get my mind straight here. What sort of, are we where you thought we would be a decade ago when you got involved? That's the question I'll start with. So it is much larger than I ever anticipated. Oh, I'd love to hear that. And so I spend a lot of time working on the core platform, talking to other people about what their projects need, what we as the core Kube community need to build for them to be successful and to create more value on top. And so I would say that we started out in the very early days. It was like, let's get something off the ground that a cluster admin can use. Something that shows, yeah, this is valuable. You want to use it. And then from there, you look and say, okay, I've got this core piece. What can I build on top of it to make it easier for those people to succeed? And that's just been rinse, lather, repeat. And we've been going at it now for like, gosh, going on nine years. So Rob, did you rinse, lather and repeat this morning? I did. I did before getting here. You know, you've got to be clean. But I thought what was interesting, and I think you guys hit on this a little bit, is 58% of the people are first timers here at this platform. Yeah, it was out of 10,000 plus attendees. I think there was a strong message of simplicity. Yet as people know, it's not as simple as that, especially when you're talking about hundreds of projects and all of the different pieces. What are you seeing when you're talking to customers and talking to the others out there about how do you look to make it simpler for them, I guess? That's really good. I mean, I actually gave a talk yesterday about we need to make this simple enough for someone to use and succeed operationally. So when you go to deploy it, the platform extension authors, they're doing the very best they can. It's still tough to manage. And so we're continuing to invest in core concepts in KK itself, the cube product itself, to make that easier so that operationally, when you run, it does what you expect. We spent, you spent a lot of time doing that as well. Yeah, I mean, I still remember there's a bell ringing in my head. I'm going to geek out a little bit. I totally can get nerdy. In one of the early cube cons in Europe in Berlin, that was like years, eight years, seven years ago, when someone in the room, I was sitting with a friend, both of us developers involved in the core cube. And someone said to us that yams are today's assembler, basically. And I was talking with her and I was like, I don't feel that way at all. But over time, I actually realized that a lot of the tooling helps to initial users, especially because, yes, the fact that we are still nine years in, on the keynote, we are showing yams. That's a little bit intimidating and problematic. We're trying and we're building a lot of tools to make those yams, make those initial people help them start faster. It's not easy task. That's why I'm saying we need more people. Because the hard part for us, where we are so old timers, is we know a lot of this stuff. And it's always when talking with the newcomers, so the 58% that is present over here, that's a huge number of input that we can gather. That's really exciting. We literally gather as much feedback as we can on every possible session, taking notes, talking with them, everything, or listening to them. And based on that input, we're trying to filter and help them to succeed, to make the platform easier. Because it's equally hard for users, but it's also equally hard for developers to help join us and join the ranks. Yeah, and I was talking to a gentleman who's in software development for his company, and they do hardware and it's IoT type devices. And we were having this conversation last night about he's still trying to figure out where to get started with Kubernetes. Right now, they're fully virtualized on VMware stack right at the moment, but he's looking at, okay, I now need to make that next jump. And I'm building microservices, but how do I then, which is the right platform? Which is the right set of services? And I think that's, I think one of the big things that we're seeing is, they're coming here to see that. And I think for me, personally, this is my first KubeCon. So I've done a welcome. Welcome, welcome. I am not an OG. You've got the welcoming committee right here. Yes, I was going to say I feel very welcome. Gosh, I'm actually feeling vulnerable, which is saying something. But it was, I think what you guys are saying, I think resonates is, how do we help people learn more and get started quicker to know what here's the primitives you need, right? And is that some of the work that you're seeing going on with what you're doing with Red Hat and that you're bringing to the table for them? Is that through KubeCon and others? I mean, your talk yesterday. KubeCon's definitely a part of it. Trying to handle all that scope to say, I need something that works in a cloud environment. I now need it to work on-prem. I now need it to work small. I now need it to work at the edge. Finding people who can help you do that, who actually span all of those, is really difficult to do. And I guess- Yeah, it's like a super generalist with that. Yeah, I mean, at Red Hat, we do spend a tremendous amount of time to be able to do that. I going down into the edge and having a really small footprint and then scaling back up to something that you can manage and having that single interaction style to know, okay, this is how I take care of it. I can do it on my cloud. I can do it in my data center and I can do it on my edge devices. It's a huge win. Yeah, because I think it was just last year that you guys announced OpenShift Edge single node, if I remember correctly. And I think he and I were talking about various different platforms and full disclosure, I was at AWS for a little bit and he was leaning towards one of my former colleagues' services in ECS because of the simplicity. And I happened to have left Amazon and went somewhere else where we were using ECS when I got there and we were trying to move off onto pure Kubernetes. And I can tell you, it's not easy. And I think that's one of the things. Are you seeing a lot of people here that are looking to understand how they can move between different, I guess you could say varieties and they're looking at the true standards? At the end of the day, if everyone are looking at the platform, it's just not just Kubernetes. You actually need Kubernetes to be the base. And then you also need the operating system. You need the additional tools to build around it. And you're basically building multi-layer cake, like you just said. Being on your own on that journey is very challenging. It's intimidating. There's a lot of things you're thinking about. Exactly. There's so many. If you look at the landscape of CNCF products, that is just mind-blowing how huge it is. And they're so different. It is, of course, the variety that helps all of us. But having a helping hand that will guide you through your initial steps will help you direct you with your choices and help you build the initial steps. That is definitely a key. And we're doing a lot of effort to help people at all those stages, all the way from, like David mentioned, from Edge to AI. And there's still a lot more going into ensuring that whatever you come to us with your problem, we will be able to help you to solve your problems. I just noticed your shirt. Thank you. Will you give us a little chest so the cam can zoom in on you there? So in case you're wondering how to pronounce the name of the platform that we keep talking about here, it is Kubernetes. Just in case. Is this a Red Hatcher? Yes, it is. It's from a couple years back. I'm still trying to convince our branding team to to brought it back without any success so far. Well, consider this my formal endorsement. And I speak on behalf of theCUBE. We the media would love to see that back. I do a segment on swag and I mean, it made me smile as soon as I saw it. David, you both brought a lot of energy to the show when you guys sat down. I love this. You're bringing it right now. What's got you most excited? You know, I'm really looking forward this time to how people are leveraging some of the new stuff that we've made in the past year, right? You see a ton of stuff about security. And so I've slated that in. How are we going to integrate with security this, security that? And it really is a buzz here. Yeah, it is. And we've actually done a lot of work again, core platform have done a lot of work to enable integrations and to enable people to have more confidence than when they deploy. It's not going to go all sideways on them. And I'm planning to attend a bunch of sessions around that. What about you? What's got you most pumped? Outside of talking to everyone, because I feel like you were just the advocate for that. Yeah, talking is a lot of my day job. But other than that, I think my passion goes back to the early days and everything around batch workloads. So job is basically where I got my first major contribution to Kubernetes. And it just goes on and on. We're expanding the territory to add more HPC related workflows. Crunch up, I think we can say finally that we've managed to cover a lot of the use cases. So it's very good. But there's more and more requests about workflow support, about AI ML. There's a ton of people. Yeah, that's a lot of topic. We have a separate group that is discussing all those. We're gathering feedback from all those different projects, which is missing about supporting different tooling or hardware. It's actually like GPUs, because if you're talking about AI ML, you definitely want to run them on dedicated GPUs. If you're talking about HPC, you want to run them on dedicated CPUs and so forth. And there's a lot of work going on into ensuring that it works. It works the way you specifically wanted it. And that's probably the one that I'm most passionate about around these days. And yeah, I'm looking forward to a couple of good sessions about that. Well, I love this. Red Hat has definitely brought the passion here, day one of KubeCon. Machi, David, thank you so much for being here with us. Really enjoyed chatting with you before and during this interview. And Rob, high five, man, for a show in the books. Thank you for joining me. Well, thank you. And thank you all for tuning in live or watching this recording. My name is Savannah Peterson. Joined by Rob, we are live from Amsterdam at KubeCon Europe. And you are watching the Kube, the leading source for high tech coverage.