 Hello, but I'm John Furrier, co-host of the Cube Founder of SiliconANGLE Medium here at Palo Alto Studios for Cube Conversation as a preview for upcoming the CNCF-sponsored KubeCon event coming up in Shanghai and in Seattle. My name is Janet Quo, who's a software engineer at Google and recently named the co-chair of KubeCon, the main event around Kubernetes, multi-cloud, all the things happening in cloud native. Janet, thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me. So you were recently named co-chair, Kelsey was previously the co-chair and he's always had those good demos, but the program has been changing a lot. You're the new co-chair. What's it like? What's happening? What's the focus this year? What's the content going to look like? Tell us, what's happening? So we get a lot of overwhelming number of submissions much more than last year and I see a lot of interesting case studies and also I see that because Kubernetes is actually help you abstract the infrastructure away and it runs anywhere. So I see a lot of people are actually deploying it everywhere, multi-cloud, hybrid, and even in edge. For example, I see chiefly, they are going to talk about how they deploy Kubernetes in their edge restaurants and the store owners, they are not tech experts as you can expect. I mean, that's the edge of the network, a Chick-fil-A. And you know, a great retail example, everyone loves Chick-fil-A, certainly out here in California, it's like getting out burger if they go hand in hand. But this is a good use case of edge and this is real world. So Kubernetes has certainly grown up. We know from the growth of KubeCon, the event itself has gotten pretty massive. The number of people involved have been great. How has Kubernetes grown up? Because we're seeing the conversation move from, we love containers, Kubernetes is great for orchestrating everything, but now people are starting to really start really cranking it up a notch. Is that the trend that you're seeing as well? And is that some of the content you'll be focused on? So I took a look at the Google trend for search for Kubernetes and it's still going way up since the beginning. And also I look at a recent CNCF survey and I realized that about 40% of people who respond to the survey and they work in the enterprise and they said they run Kubernetes in production. So that's a huge number. That's awesome. Well, now that you're the new co-chair, tell us a little bit about yourself. How, what's your background? How did you get there? So I started working at Google in 2015 and that's before Kubernetes was, 1.0 was released and before CNCF and before the first coupon. And when I joined Google and it's, Kubernetes is a way very new concept and not like it's fixed and it's already adopted by everyone. So we work very hard to get ease of use and get more people adoption and we get a lot of feedback from people. And then Kubernetes getting more and more popular. So after that, I decided that I need, I want to submit my first ever conference talk to KubeCon and then I got selected and then I started feel like I enjoy this and I did other CNCF hosted events, for example, a panel in San Francisco. And I think that might be how I was selected. What was your first talk about, what you talk about? So I talk about running workloads in Kubernetes and I did an overview of the Workloads API because I am the developer of the Workloads API. So that's also get hooked on Kubernetes like everybody else. It's like the Kubernetes drug. So how did you get involved in open source? Just were you always developing with open source? How did you get involved in the open source community? So Kubernetes is actually my first open source project. And so I, before that, I had a phone call with Tim Hawken. He's the principal engineer at Google and he sold me the idea of Kubernetes and we need to be open and let people choose the best technology for them. And he sold me the idea and I think Kubernetes is the future. And also I want to work on open source but I just didn't have the chance to work on it yet. So we had a good fun time in Copenhagen but last KubeCon and the Kube has been in all the KubeCons as you know. We love this community. We think it's really special not only because we've been there from the beginning but we've gotten to see the people involved and the people have been very close knit but yet so open and inclusive. They're seeing a lot of input and then at the same time, so that's always great open source, inclusive and fun but then the companies are coming in and waves massive amount of waves of commercial vendors jumping in. Linux's foundation has done a great job of balancing being a good upstream and good project but that dynamic is very interesting. It's probably the fastest open source kind of commercial yet good vibes, commercial open source. How does that change or affect you guys as you pick and look at the data? Cause you get surveys, you see what people want. Vendors, users, industry participants, developers. What is the data telling you? What's all this data coming from the different KubeCons and how is that changing the selections? What's the trends? I guess what's the trends coming from the community? So from selecting talks because we want to focus on make Kubernetes, make KubeCon a still community focused conference. So when we pick talks, we pick the ones that not just doing vendor page or sales page but we pick the ones that we think the community is going to benefit from and especially when they're talking about a solution that others can adopt or is it open source or not then that affect our choice. And then we also see a lot of people start customizing Kubernetes for their own needs. And a lot of people are starting using Kubernetes API to managing resource outside of Kubernetes and that's a very interesting trend because with that, you can have Kubernetes to manage everything in your infrastructure, not the things running on Kubernetes. So what are some of those examples that are outside Kubernetes? So for example, you can use, so Kubernetes has a concept called custom resource that you can register a custom API in Kubernetes. And so you can use that, you can register an API and you can implement a controller to manage anything you want. For example, different cloud resources or VMs, I even saw people use Kubernetes API to manage robots. Wow, so this is real world. So you mentioned that you were working in the workload API at Google. The big trend that we're seeing on the Kube and that crosses all the different events not just cloud native is workload management, managing workloads and workloads are changing and it's very dynamic, it's not a static world anymore. So managing workloads to the infrastructure is where we see this nice activity happening from containers, Kubernetes to service meshes. So there's a lot of activity going on there. And some of the stuff is straightforward, I won't say straightforward, but containers and Kubernetes is easy to work with but service meshes are difficult. Istio for instance, Kubeflow or hot projects, there's a real focus of stateless has been there but stateful is hard. Is there going to be talks about stateful applications? Are you guys looking at some of the Istio? Is service mesh going to be a focus this year? Yeah, we still see a lot of submissions from service meshes and so you can use service mesh to manage your service easily and secure them easily. And we also see a lot of talks for stateful workloads. For example, how you customize something that manage your stateful workloads or what are the best practices. And there's a pattern that's popular in the community which is called operator. And the concept is that you write a controller, use the custom API that I just mentioned and you just impact the knowledge of a human operator into that controller and let the controller do the automation for you. So it's putting intelligence like an operator into the software and letting that ride. Yeah, and it will do all the work for you and you only need to write it once. And automation is a big trend. So if you could stack or rank the top three trends that we expect to see at KubeCon this year, what would they be? On the top three, I would say customize and multi-cloud and then service mesh or serverless, they're both pretty popular, yeah. Is storage less coming? So if we have serverless, will there be storage less? I made that up, I tweeted that the other day. If there's no servers, it could be on the storage. I mean, servers and storage go together. So again, this is where the fun action is that the infrastructure is being programmable. And I think one of the things that I like about what KubeCon has done is they really enabled developers to be more efficient with DevOps, the DevOps trend, which is the cloud native trend. The question I want to ask you, specifically it's kind of a Google question because I think this is important that Google Cloud, I really love the trend of how application developers are being modernized, that's so cool, love that. But the SRE concept that Google pioneered is becoming more of a trend that's more of an operator role, not in the sense of what we just talked about, but like an SRE, businesses are starting to look at that kind of scale out infrastructure where there's a need for, kind of like an SRE. Does that come up in KubeCon at all? Or is that more to operator oriented? And to that, on the agenda, does that come up in the KubeCon selection criteria, the notion of having operators or SRE-like roles? And so we have a track called operations. So some of the operator, I mean, the human operator talks are submitting through that to that topic. And, but we didn't see an... It might be too early. Yeah. It might be a little bit too early, that's what I think. And since it brought up some of the tracks, we're always interested in knowing about startups because there seems to be a lot of startup activity, doing a lot of AI stuff or applications, AI ops, and there's some new things going on. Is there a startup activity involved that you're seeing? Is there features of startups at all? Do you guys look at that? Is there going to be an emphasis of emerging companies and startups involved? Or is it mostly companies coming from the community? We definitely see a lot of startups submitting their talks and also you just mentioned machine learning. We also see several talks about machine learning and AI submitting to both the Shanghai event and Seattle event. So projects like Kubeflow and Spark, that's being used a lot. And we still, we see a lot of submissions from those. Those are the popular ones. Yeah, popular ones. And also from Shanghai, I saw some AI submissions and I'm excited about those. Okay, so now back to the popular questions. Everyone wants to know where the popular parties are. What's the popular projects? If you have the, in terms of contributors, activity, do you guys have like a rating? Like, here's the most popular project. Do you guys look at just a number of contributors? How do you rank the popularity of the projects? Or how would you rank them? We didn't actually look at the popularity of the projects and because are you talking about the CNCF projects or any project in general? Well, CNCF and KubeCon, if I go, okay, let me ask the question differently. If I go to Shanghai or Seattle, what's going on? Where do I engage? What should I pay attention to? What can I expect if I'm a user and I come to the event? What's going to happen at Shanghai and Seattle? What's the format? Yeah, so we separate all the talks in tracks. So you can look up the track that you are interested in. For example, do you want to know all the case studies? Then you can go to case studies and if you're interested in observability, then you go to the observability track and there'll be a lot of different projects. They are presenting their own solutions and you can just go and figure out which one fits you the best. And so multi-cloud is hard. I asked you a multi-cloud question because one of the things that we're tracking is, what is multi-cloud and how is that different from hybrid? How would you describe that? Because people talk about hybrid cloud all the time but multi-cloud seems to have different definitions. Is there a different definition to hybrid cloud versus multi-cloud? So I think hybrid includes things and that's not cloud. For example, your on-prem versus you have your on-prem environment and you also use some cloud solutions. And that's hybrid. And multi-cloud's multi-clouds. Yeah, multi-clouds, yeah. So workloads on different clouds or sharing workloads across clouds? Workloads on different clouds. Yeah, so Office has 365, that's Azure. Yeah. And then a TensorFlow on Google and something, okay. I always want to know if I can run workloads between clouds, that's the, what would be the ideal scenario? Yeah, that would be ideal. All right, so here's a tough question for you. Okay, I'll put you on the spot here. What is your favorite open-source project in the CNCF and favorite track at KubeCon? My favorite project is of course Kubernetes and my favorite track would be case studies because I care a lot about user experience and I love to hear user stories. And so for Seattle, we picked a lot of user stories that we think are interesting and we also picked some keynote speakers that are going to talk about their large-scale usage of Kubernetes and that's very exciting for me. I can't wait to hear their story. We love the end user stories too because it really puts the real-world scenario around. Okay, final question for you. Jenna, I wanted to ask you about diversity at KubeCon. What's going on and what can you share around that program? Yeah, we care about diversity a lot. We look at that when we select talks to accept and also we have the diversity scholarship that allows people to apply for scholarship. We are going to cover the ticket to conference and also the travel to conference. And also we have a diversity luncheon in December 12th and that will be sponsored by both Google and Hiptail. So December 12th in Seattle? Yeah, in Seattle. And that was great, by the way. You did a great job last year, the program with the scholarship. I think standing ovation, so that's awesome. Thank you for doing that. Thanks. For the folks watching that might not be really deep on Kubernetes, in your opinion, why is Kubernetes so important? And why should IT leaders, developers and people in mainstream tech who are now new to Kubernetes and seeing the trends, why should they pay attention to Kubernetes? What's the relevance? What's the impact? Why should they pay attention to Kubernetes? Because Kubernetes allows you to easily adopt cloud because it's abstract every infrastructure, the infrastructure level away and allows you to easily run it, run your infrastructure anywhere. And most importantly, because a lot of people different cloud and different stack of development, for example, CICD service mesh, they put a lot of energy to integrate with Kubernetes. So if you have Kubernetes, you have everything. Yeah, Kubernetes, everything. Well, we love the work you're doing. Thanks for co-chairing the KubeCon event. We'd love going there. CNC has been very successful, been a great relationship. We love working with them. Obviously, it's a content-rich environment. I think everyone who's interested in cloud-native should go to the CNC. There's a lot of sponsors and the logos, more and more logos come on every day. So you guys are doing a good job. Thanks for doing that. Appreciate it. Thank you. Maybe we'll do two cubes this year. Janet Quo, who's a software engineer at Google is joining me here in theCUBE. She's also the co-chair for KubeCon, the event put on by the CNCF and the industry around cloud-native and all things Kubernetes, multi-cloud and really application workloads for a cloud environment. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.