 Welcome to Amsterdam and KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2023. Join John Furrier, Savannah Peterson, Rob Streche, and UPSCOT. 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 to KubeCon Europe. We're here in sunny Amsterdam. It is a glorious spring day, and I am so excited to be kicking off this show here. I am joined by Youp. This is our first time co-hosting together. How are you doing this morning? I am very well. I'm enjoying the natural light here. I'm enjoying the ambiance. It's awesome. It's a whole vibe. And as you told me, you've never looked more beautiful. I'm sure the audience agrees. Speaking of beauty, we've got a fabulous first guest to start off the day. Sebastian, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. So before I say where you work, everyone's been talking about your car. How did you get to the show? Tell us about that first. Well, I drove from Ingelsdott to Amsterdam with an e-tron GT RS, 650 horsepower, three engines, 3.3 seconds from 0 to 100, which definitely is very dangerous in the Netherlands. It was fun driving here until I reached the border to the Netherlands. Then fun stopped immediately. When the three hashes stopped, it was over? Yeah. You can drive 200, 250, 260 was my max speed because I'm a responsible driver. There was very low traffic at some points in Germany. So you had all these three or four lanes for yourself. You can do that. But in the Netherlands, it's like 100 max until 7 o'clock in the night. And then you can drive 120. I don't think I did that. I've seen that. It's like from 6 to 7, from 6 AM to 7 PM, you can drive 100. And after that, 120. So 120 is max speed. You did a little naughty after dark. Like, what is that? That's great. It's like, OK, it's like in four seconds, you're definitely a speeder here. Yeah. Well, if you haven't guessed our guest, it works for Audi. Tell us a little bit about your role there and what's up. Team lead of the Container Competence Center and Platforms team. So we have several responsibilities. We create new platforms together with other teams. We maintain our own platform. And we have a cultural mission of transformation. And we have a transformational force with an enablement layer throughout the silos. And that's so critical. We do container security as a service throughout platforms as well. So it's quite a big team now. And we've started this four years ago, just three people. And now it's three product teams, actually. Wow. So what I want to know is you're in its company center. You're kind of centralized. You're uniquely positioned to help the whole organization. You know, adopt Kubernetes, adopt Cloud Native. But how does it work in an organization of this size? Because Audi is not a small company. Great question. So I wonder, how do you do it? How do you make Kubernetes a success in an organization like this? What's your plan of attack? Well, I focus always on adaption. So you need to convince with a great product first. And it's not like there is a top-down decision process first. You choose the tech. And then you tell the people what to do. What we do is we gather the most passionate people. We do people-first transformation. And let them choose the best tech to solve a problem. And if you do people-first transformation, people solve problems. If you do process-first transformation, people satisfy processes. And... Louder for the people in the back. Yes. Seriously. Because I was going to say, I hear people first. Let them choose the technology. And I didn't hear process up until then. Which I think is, A, a great thing. But B, also not something you would expect from a company this size. From German engineering. Exactly. The process comes at a certain point and it needs to come. It's mandatory. It's necessary. We can't live without the process. So it's also not scalable throughout the organization without processes. You can't handle the 6,600 Audi projects. That's so many projects you're working on. That's so many workloads that Audi manages. And that's just Audi. We are a part of the VW Group. So in a wider sense, the scalability is necessary throughout Audi, VW Portia, or the premium group with the other premium car manufacturers in the VW Group. So we always have a responsibility of thinking with a scalability to other brands as well, even out of our own borders. But let alone Audi, you can't have 6,600 DevOps teams with 6,600 security experts. And there is nobody for that on the market. So you need platforms. You need processes. You need to centralize that. And what we promote is something you haven't heard in the DevOps culture a lot. It's respect the silos. Don't fight the silos. Leverage the silos. I have never heard that. It's our way of scaling an organization. But what you can do when you ask why you are doing DevOps, you have some business goals behind it. You can reach those business goals without investing 80% of your energy in fighting silos. So let's dive into that. Yeah, I was just going to say, we've got to go deeper on that. So culturally, I mean, first of all, that's awesome, because it's almost contrarian and an ironic sense. But how do you then, if you're not going to fight the silo, how do you embrace the silo? What does that look like from a company culture? You have specialists, obviously, in a certain field. We have a product team for container security. So every container or every workload, every application project team doesn't need their security expert in container technologies. That's the kind of platform thought everybody has, right? So you have a centralized service for everyone and that everyone can leverage and that everyone can learn from as well. So we started off with getting the most passionate people together to create something great, right? So you have a great product first. But you also need passionate people to create products. So when you reach the point where you let people choose the technology for solving a problem and you automate that, what is the automation? It's a process. The automation of the technology they've adapted to 100% degree is a process itself. And it's a process that naturally evolved and already is proven to solve a problem. Not something somebody invented that caused even more problems, maybe. Sometimes it is like that, right? So, and that way you can automate through the silos. So you have a developer on the left, you have an infrastructure on the right. So how does the developer get stuff to the infrastructure? It's usually a service owner in the middle. So often it's an external development company, a service owner in the middle who organizes the external company and then internally has to organize operations. And he's like overwhelmed because he's not really too deep into the technology. Mostly they're users themselves of the application. So it's a technical developer of autonomous driving, for example, who's like working on the car itself. So he needs the software to do some math on some equations and needs to calculate it fast with some machine learning, accelerate the process to simulate millions of kilometers driven on a certain part. And he outsources that to an external development company. Then he gets the results but this external development company needs operations internally because the data belongs to us, obviously. And then how do we do that? We let the external company or the internal development company which are companies of ourselves, we let them automate through the, for example, OpenShift platform to our infrastructure, to the Kubernetes endpoint. So after the Kubernetes endpoint, everything is with us. And we show them how to do that, how to create a container on OpenShift, no route, for example, first rule, and how to create a Kubernetes manifest so they can deploy seamlessly and automatically to our platform. And we give them a couple of services so they can do that securely. And we focus just on security and runtime and everything else is with the DevSecOps team. And they have a vertical of managed services as well. So they can tap into cloud native services. We don't resell Azure, Google, or AWS services which will say you can get a cloud account and you can connect your container with a vertical of cloud native services yourself. So it's a mix between you're responsible for your own cloud account and for the services out there but your runtime and your security is with us. We focus on the interface security and the runtime. I like that approach because this almost, this obviously feels like a startup within Audi. It is. Yeah, it totally does. But at the same time, there's a little bit of friction because Audi is a big company. There's a lot of people involved. You cannot let everyone do their own thing completely. Yeah. And so I like your focus on offering a standard runtime, a standard set of security practices. You've standardized that. You offer that as a service. Make it fast and make it safe. Exactly, and that's kind of the de facto definition of what platform engineering is supposed to be. But you also very explicitly say, hey, here's the freedom that you do have because there's a lot of things that you need to do that don't necessarily, you know, we don't necessarily care about. We care that it's safe and fast. You know, you can deploy it to your production but then here's all of this freedom that you have to actually let teams innovate. And I think that's a very nice balance between being in a big company but also being that startup within the company. Yeah. So what I wonder is, how do you make, how do you onboard teams onto a platform like this given that they're maybe used to a lot of freedom but now they do have to use a couple of your standards? How does it work in terms of user adoption? How do you make them smile and be happy about the services that you offer? Yeah, you have to keep in mind we have all flavors of product teams. People who have literally no idea haven't ever worked with these kind of technologies and experts who are not very happy about guardrails or policy enforcement on that matter. So, and you have always these people who say, well, if you give me too many guardrails I can't be innovative. And obviously it's selling something, selling a value out for them. And we always convince our users that this is the best solution. If you don't think it's the best solution then don't go with us. So we don't force you to go with us. It's your choice and people get so many good services, so many advices. They're never left alone. So we force them into having success actually. We take their hand in onboarding and we never let loose their hand until they're productive. Yeah. I mean, that's always a good approach, right? Don't force your customer in, make them want to use your stuff, make them want to stay. Show them why it has value. Exactly. It's not even a force function at that point. Yeah. And that's how, if you do that 20 times you have 20 happy customer teams and you basically created a community. Exactly. So, and we have so, so few tickets in the service center like first level tickets or that sort of thing because the people solve their problems Wow. between the project teams. That's amazing. So no tickets, you embrace the silos, you recruit the best people. Community obviously really matters to you. It's something that you're passionate about. A lot, a lot. Talk to me a little bit more about both your internal community as well as the broader Audi community. I'm sure a lot of people here driving Audi as I know John drives an Audi. We've got a whole family of Audi fans in the house here. What does that mean to you as a leader as well as the company? The community in the cloud native sense obviously is a very different kind of community as in the Audi customer sense, yeah. I figured they were a little bit overlap maybe, but yes. It's an overlap. We have customer success managers, for example from other companies that are huge Audi fans and even have our leading Audi fan club. So actually that was super fun when I was talking to our container security customer success manager from the company that is working with us in there. And he's actually like literally leading an Audi fan club. And that's always. Does that make you feel good? It's an honor for us obviously if our products are loved by the customers. So in IT infrastructure, you're very abstract basically. It's a very abstract topic. So many people are really not getting what we're doing. So I needed like 10 years to explain my friends what I'm actually doing. And I'm still not sure. They ask me every year, you know. I'm still not sure if it's stuck with them, but I tell the digital world needs compute, right? So you need computing power somewhere. And we allocate that stuff. That's it. That's our thing. We allocate compute to where it's needed. And that usually automatically. That doesn't take 10 years to explain. That was not legit. It doesn't, but the next 10 questions too. So, and obviously in the, in the Audis, we're talking driving data centers now. They are driving data centers. We create petabytes of data every day with our fleet. We have autonomous driving. So a lot of GPU necessities, camera workloads. We have a digital service portfolio that we want to engineer as amazing as our hardware products, as the cars itself. And we're coming from three to five year product cycles. You can imagine in software that doesn't match. Right, there's a lot going on there. And that's something we want to match with our digital transformation. We need to go away from these old school product cycles, from these waterfall engineering, to a continuous deployment and continuous development. And we're doing that obviously on Kubernetes with the many, many, many development teams that we have in Audi and in the Volkswagen Group. And thus, the growing adaption of cloud native in general. And this huge community, this is the biggest conference now, the biggest open source conference now in Europe. It's amazing. That's really amazing, yeah. And that creates obviously more overlap because people know now what cloud native is about. People know what kind of thing we're doing. And they also recognized our contribution to CO2 savings, for example. Because in the cloud, we create the public transport versus individual mobility use case. Love that. Because you share a data center with many companies. You don't need the hardware yourself, like everybody has a laptop at home. How often are you using your computer at home? So. Yeah. We're all edge devices at this point. Same, yeah. Same, yeah. So, and if you share that computing power, if you share the chips, we could save so much actually in resources, in hardware, that it contributes to a higher goal. And that's what we're doing, not only this community, but also in a transformational sense, in reaching our business goals, creating value add, having a better time to market. Cloud native community, everybody's asset, everybody investing in cloud native, his main goal is kind of rockets launching the time to market KPI here. I mean, time to market is really everyone's biggest KPI, I feel like around here. Exactly. Last question for you, Sebastian, before we wrap up, real quick, this is obviously a show that matters to you. You're a big Kubernetes user as well as, I mean, you sit on the CTO board here for CNCF, very exciting. What are you most pumped about this week? The CTO summit tomorrow, obviously. We're talking about FinOps, financial operations, optimizing cost in the cloud. This is a topic everybody's very, very much in. Oh, it's a huge topic right now. Yes, exactly. It's all about that cost optimization. In the last couple of years, everybody, I politically correct, say, created cloud, cost agnostic infrastructure. So they didn't care what it was about, at least it boosts time to market. That was the main KPI. And now we're optimizing all of that stuff and going into a more responsible handling cost and optimizing costs in the cloud. But what I'm really looking forward here is meeting the people again. The communities, what creates the technologies? You have seen 200K contributors, 1,300 maintainers. And talking to these people, exchanging with these people that really are hands-on on these technologies and talking about exchanging like my needs, my pain points. For example, certification processes in big companies and third managers and that sort of stuff and automate that in a suitable way is like a very small pain point but it's something people here are working on. So I will meet them, I will talk to them. I hope I get them today and we can exchange on how we develop the future of our digital world. And we are the foundation of the digital world. We allocate the computing power. So if quantum computing comes, we allocate a lot of computing power. We're still there, you know? In order of magnitude. Yes, oh, I love it. Sebastian, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been really great. You, this is going to be a ride all day. And for you folks at home, thank you for tuning in. If you're here with us in Amsterdam, definitely check out the e-tron and say hello to Sebastian. He is here to meet you. As are we on theCUBE with you. I'm Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source in high tech coverage here in Amsterdam at KubeCon.