 Welcome to Amsterdam and KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2023! Join John Furrier, Savannah Peterson, Rob Stretche, and UPScon 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 afternoon and welcome back to KubeCon Europe. We are in fabulous Amsterdam and we are at the Kube. I am joined with you. How are you doing today? I'm very well. The sun's out again. I know, I feel like you brought the sun when you came back on set. It's what I do. It's what I do. You just bring the heat no matter where you go. I love that about you. It's wonderful. We are joined by a very fabulous guest and we're going to talk about some exciting projects. Liz, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. Yes, it's wonderful to have you here. We're going to talk about your role in a second. Isovalent, Cillium, talk to me. Give the lay of the land to the audience. Yes. Isovalent is the company that originally created the Cillium project, which I think most people here will know as a networking solution for Kubernetes. It's an incubating project in the CNCF. For a while, we've had the ability to connect multiple Kubernetes clusters together. This week, we've been talking about Cillium Mesh, which is the ability to also connect not just multiple clusters, but also connect to external workloads. If you have hybrid cloud, legacy workloads, things running in VMs, being able to seamlessly connect those into your set of services that are distributed over Kubernetes or not Kubernetes or with Cillium Mesh. So, make life easier for everyone here. Absolutely. It's all that simplifying things at the networking level. The question is because no application is actually just container. It's just cloud. It just says, you know, applications span the whole gamut of solutions that we have. Absolutely. There's also the question of a legacy workload that at some point needs to migrate into the cloud. How do you take that VM-based workload? There's that whole lift-and-shift concept, but you've got to have the connectivity between where it's running today and where it's going to run tomorrow. Cillium makes that very easy to do. It all looks like a Kubernetes service, and that makes things very familiar for Kubernetes operators. Yeah. That consistent experience, I think, is what we need when we're going from on-prem or legacy applications into the cloud, into containers, because we still need to have it running in production, have it be stable, so we need that observability. Yes. So, what I wonder is kind of what Cillium Mesh adds to having that consistent experience across all of those. Yeah. So, Cillium is based on EBPF, which is a fantastic technology that I'm extremely excited about and could talk about all afternoon. And we can use that to really simplify the networking path between workloads and do really efficient load balancing between the pods that back a service or between pods and VMs that might be running externally. And we also use EBPF for that observability angle that you mentioned, which is critical, that you can see where your network packets are flowing, you can see how your services are connected. We've also been doing some really great work with Grafana. There's a new Hubble. Hubble is the observability component of Cillium. There's a new Hubble plug-in for Grafana. I like that name. We'll tell us your preference. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. So, you can get these fantastic graphs and visualizations of how your services map together, how your network packets are flowing, what the latency is, where your DNS problems are, because it's always DNS. It always is. So, can we just bottle your energy and sell it at the sidebar? Because you were, I love how excited your observability has been such a hot topic here. We definitely see the future shifting there a lot. I don't want to talk about the event though. You had your first Cillium con. Yes, we did. Yes, so the co-located events, the day before the main show started, we had the first ever Cillium con. It was fantastic. That's really exciting. It really is. It matters. We had so many amazing submissions. We had, you know, a really tough job to choose which talks we were going to have. I think we picked some excellent talks. We had really great New York Times, Robin Hood, Data Dog. A couple of brands folks may have heard of at home. Exactly. Ikea, you know, really household names, coming and talking about how they've been using Cillium. We had a fantastic talk about a murder mystery solved using Cillium. It basically came down to, it was DNS, what, done it? Talk about great customer applications though. Yeah, yeah. Fantastic to see people with these real-world use cases and they're not just coming along going, da, da, da, yeah, it all works. They're telling us about some of the challenges they had and how they've overcome them and what they're looking for next. So it's been really, really great to have them involved and have that half a day where we just focused on Cillium. And I think the attendees loved it. We had a lot of really great energy in the room. Well, that's what community is all about is sharing those stories, not just being successful with a piece of technology, but sharing that knowledge and finding out what's new, what's next in the community. And you'll be more successful with that technology if you have that community who share the enthusiasm. And I feel like they're a part of the journey. Yes, yes. And they're our best advocates. Oh my gosh, yeah. Telling the story and sharing their success and we love that. Did you have a favorite customer example or one that's been on your mind, since CilliumCon? I did love this murder mystery, particularly because... I mean, who doesn't love a good murder mystery? So you know how you get in a TV drama, you have like a pinboard with lines and pictures and trying to figure out who done it. Yeah, there was a slide with that and that was amazing. We also had IKEA with some really great IKEA sort of furniture references. We had an IKEA instruction manual for how to build a private cloud with Cillium, but all styled like an IKEA assembly manual. Beautiful. That's so good. How do we get one of those? That feels... The slides are available. So yeah. Yeah. How are your IKEA furniture skills? They are like IKEA furniture, 80% done. You have a very cool job title and one that we have not seen. You've been on the show before, although we haven't had the chance to talk about it. What does it mean to be the Chief Open Source Officer? It's a great question. So, and I say Valen is very much an open source first company and the engineering that we do is probably, you know, 90% open source, but really my role and what my team do is involves interfacing with organizations like the CNCF, helping build the community, helping ensure that we've got all the governance things in place and encouraging the contributions from outside. So although I have an engineering background, it becomes also a lot about how we evangelize the technology and how we encourage participation in the community. That's exciting. Was the position created because of your presence or was it a position that you... Was it advertised that way? It was not advertised that way. Just not me. There was a little sneakiness. Little Birdie just told me you recently went on a big bike ride. Yes, I did. Is that where you get all the energy from? From the cycling? If you see me moving around, I move more slowly right now than normal. I cycled here from London to get here to Amsterdam and I have to cycle back again at the end of the week. So, yeah. How long did that take you? It took two days and an overnight ferry. It was just under 250 kilometers to get here and I have been raising some money for Doctors Without Borders, MedSense or some frontier. So, people want to look me up on Twitter and find that link. That would be awesome. We had Audi on the start yesterday and we were talking about the e-tron. We've got EV vehicles, but I think you might have come here the most sustainable way. Yeah, I'm not the only person who cycled here. Bill from my team also cycled most of the way. He came from Berlin, took a train to Bremen and then cycled even further than me. There's a chap called Jan, who's cycled, took seven days to cycle from Switzerland. Another chap called Andrea, who's cycled from London. So, there's a few of us about. SIG Bike, it's an immune system. So, is cycling a big part of your culture then? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, apparently so. Did you cycle here? I did not. Even though I'm Dutch. There are a lot of cyclists around here in Amsterdam. So, there's a couple bikes outside. Okay, so, outside of Sillium, you're a trend watcher. You've been working in the space for a while. You've got a technical background. You've got a love for community. What are you most excited about? What do you hope we get to talk about the next time we have you on the show? Oh, that's a really great question. I've been so excited about EBPF and a few people are like, what's next after EBPF? And I think we've still got quite a long way to go to build more things using EBPF. I was just moderating a panel with a great bunch of people for analysts. We were talking about the future of Cloud Native and what's next. A lot of that related to multicloud, hybrid cloud, how we support stateful applications, what's coming with artificial intelligence based, how that's going to influence how we develop in Cloud Native. So, I think there's a lot of really interesting things happening across this whole space. It's such an exciting place to be. And especially the overlap between observability and AI. I mean, you've mentioned that the cat's out of the bag now. How do you think observability is going to change in the next year or so given this enormous push for AI and LLMs? Yeah, it's a really great question. I think there's a lot of potential for AI and this ability to interpret natural language and convert that into, if I want to solve a problem, how do I ask the right questions of my system? And that's really what observability is. So, if AI can help us make it easier for us to ask those questions in a way that the machines understand, then that could be really helpful. I don't know what the answer is, but I think that's a really interesting direction. I think that's a good point because interpreting whatever the observability system observes is still a very manual thing, but also it's a super complex thing to do right. And getting value out of an observability system is not installing it. It's actually being able to answer those questions. Yes, yes. You've got all these data points at your fingertips, but how do you pick the right ones to look at to answer the question that's really going to solve your problem? And maybe even start answering questions that you didn't even know you wanted to ask. Maybe the next frontier for observability is getting answers to things that you hadn't even thought of. Absolutely. I mean, I think you're touching on that. I don't think we know this is going to sound a bit daft, but I don't think we know where we're going yet. We're at an intersection of a bunch of different technology coming out. I mean, from our conversations about observability with AI, with security, with everything, the ecosystem has finally matured, and we have all this momentum. And I don't think five years from now, who knows what we'll be talking about. I mean, it's never finished, right? Yeah. I don't know if any of us has ever finished. Yeah, that's definitely the truth. So with the future of your community, how many people actually do you think are in the Cillium community? So, while we were live during CilliumCon, we passed the milestone of 5000 stars on GitHub, which was a pretty nice milestone. That's kind of fun that that was happening here. Exactly. And we have a similar number in our Slack channel as well. So, yeah, that's about the size of it. We have several hundred contributors to the project, people who've contributed code or also documentation. We've been working quite a lot to help people contribute in non-code ways. So if they want to, not just creating docs, but maybe they're going and doing talks, presentations, creating videos. And we have ways to acknowledge them now in the Cillium project officially, so that we have this contributors can feel valued. We want people to feel that whatever it is they're adding to the project is valued. Well, and clearly from your enthusiasm it definitely is. Yes, absolutely. So talk to us a little bit about EBdex. I've been reading up on it. It seems like a great way for people to actually share what they've created for EBPF so that people don't have to recreate the wheel. Yeah, so we had this very cool B character. So the symbol for EBPF is a B and then we have this amazing artist who's part of our surveillance called Vadim and he was creating all these wonderful B characters in various situations, doing various different things like astronauts and detectives and travelers and all sorts of characters. And then we thought we should bring them together. We created the EBdex, very much influenced by what GitHub have done with their Octodex. And then all those bees are available for people to use, creative commons. So we hope to actually creep on the bees right now. See the fly flying. And it's a long list. Oh, that's awesome. And we need bees. I mean, we need them for so many reasons. That's good. That's cute. Yeah, that is that is very cute. If people want to work with you, what should they do? So if they want to get involved with the Cillium project, they can go to Cillium.io. That's probably the best place to start, find all the slack, the weekly developer meetings, all the different ways that they can interact with the project. And of course, Isovalent is hiring. I'm kind of feeling you may enjoy a little opportunity. Isovalent.com has some really interesting opportunities. And the broader EBPF community is also really exciting. So EBPF.io is another community resource for people to learn more about EBPF. And there's several other projects that are using that technology as well that people might want to. And an upcoming documentary. Yes. Yes. I don't know how public that is, but yeah, we are going to, there's been a few documentaries starting with the Kubernetes story. And yeah, we want to tell the story of EBPF as well. Well, I know that you and I will be there with some popcorn to watch that one. We sure will. There's no doubt about that. It is actually getting bright in here. Productionists told me we're a little blown out. So I'm going to put the shades back on after, after you're staying in my sunglasses on the entire day, it's like a little greenhouse. And here we're little tulips growing. We're in the daffodil section. Do the Dutch really love the flowers as much as we think you do? Let's say yes. Let's say yes. Okay. That's absolutely fantastic. Liz, this has been really nice. Thank you for having me. It's been fun. Yeah. Thank you. So I think you might be our most enthusiastic guest. And I love that. You also have the best nails, which I don't say lightly. You have great nails too. That's why they pay me the big bucks. No. You power your nails. My nails have finally worn off. So I have kids that love to apply fingernail polish to my hands. So you give regular mannees. I love that. I do. I do. I mean, they're... Are they here? Will they come and do mine? Yeah. So wait, can we just bring them next time to touch us all up? Definitely. That's fantastic. Thanks for being here with me. Liz, you're the best. I want to just... I'm going to literally just take an IV and stick it in my arm to get through the rest of the next two days. Thank all of you, most importantly, for tuning in to The Cube. Without you, we're not here. We're live from KubeCon EU in Amsterdam. My name is Savannah Peterson and you're watching The Cube, the leading source for technology coverage.