 Kubernetes is maturing. For example, moving from quarterly releases to three per year. It's adding many of the capabilities that early on were avoided by Kubernetes committers, but now are going more mainstream. For example, more robust security and better support for multi-cluster management and other functions. But core Kubernetes by itself doesn't get organizations where they need to go. That's why the ecosystem has stepped up to fill the gaps in application development. Developers, as we know, they don't care about infrastructure, but they do care about building new apps. They care about modernizing existing apps, leveraging data, scaling. They care about automation. Look, they want to be cloud native. One of the companies leading the ecosystem charge and building out more robust capabilities is Red Hat. And ahead of KubeCon Spain, it's our pleasure to welcome in Stu Miniman, director of Market Insights at Red Hat to preview the event. Stu, good to see you. How you been? I'm doing awesome, Dave. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. So what's going on in KubeLand these days? Yes, so it's funny, Dave. If you were to kind of just listen out there in the marketplace, the CNCF has a survey that's like 96% of companies, running Kubernetes production, everybody's doing it. And others will say, oh, no, Kubernetes, only a small group of people are using it. It's already probably got newer technologies that's replacing it. And the customers that I'm talking to, Dave, first of all, yes, Containers and Kubernetes, great growth rate, good adoption overall. I think we've said more than a year or two ago, we've probably crossed that chasm. The Jeffrey Moore, it's no longer the early people just building all their own thing, taking all the open source, building this crazy stack that they need to have to do a lot of work. We used to say, chewing glass to be able to make it work right or anything. But it's still not as easy as you would like. Almost no company that I talk to if you're talking about big enterprises has Kubernetes just enterprise-wide and 100% of their applications running on it. What is the tough challenge for people? And I mean, Dave, something you and I've covered for many, many years, that application portfolio that I have, most enterprises, hundreds, thousands of applications, modernizing that, having that truly be cloud native, that's a really long journey and we are still in the midst of that. So I still think we are in that, if you look at the crossing the chasm, that early majority chunk. So some of it is, how do we mature things even better and how do we make things simpler? Talk about things like automation, simplicity, security need to make sure they're all there so that it can be diffused and rolled out more broadly. And then we also need to think about, where are, we talk about the next million cloud customers, where does Kubernetes and containers and all the cloud native pieces fit into that broader discussion. So yes, there's some maturity there and we can declare victory on certain things but there's still a lot, a lot of work that everyone's doing and that leads us into the show. I mean, dozens of projects that are already graduated many more along that process from Sandbox through a whole bunch of co-located events that are there and it's always a great community event which Red Hat, of course, built on open source and community projects. So we're happy to have a good presence there as always. So you and I have talked about this in the past how essentially containers are going to be embedded into a lot of different places and sometimes it's hard to find, it's hard to track but if you look at kind of the pre DevOps world skill sets like provisioning lungs or configuring ports or troubleshooting, squeezing more server utilization. I mean, those were really in high demand. If that's your skill set then you're probably out of a job today. And so that's shifted toward things like Kubernetes, right? So you see in the ETR data, it's along with cloud and RPA or automation is right up there. I mean, it's top, the big four, if you will, cloud, automation, RPA and containers. And so we know there's a lot of spending activity going on there, but sometimes like I said it's hard to track. I mean, if you got cloud growing at 35% a year at least for the hyperscalers that we track, Kubernetes should be growing faster than that, should it not? Yeah, Dave, I would agree with you. When I look at the big analyst firms that track this I believe they've only got the container space at about a 25% growth rate. Slower than cloud. But I compare that with, you know, Deepak Singh who runs AWS, runs the open source office. He has all the containers and Kubernetes has visibility and all of that. And he says basically containers are the default when somebody's deploying to AWS today. You know, yes serverless has its place but it has not replaced or is not pushing down or slowing down the growth of containers or Kubernetes. We've got a strong partnership, have lots of customers running on AWS. So I guess, you know, I look at the numbers and like you I would say that I would expect that growth rate to be, you know, north of where just cloud in general is because the general adoption of containers and Kubernetes, we're still in the early phases of things. And I think a lot of the spending is due is actually in labor resources within companies. You know, that's hard to track. Let's talk about what we should expect at the show. Obviously this whole notion of secure supply chain was a big deal, you know, last year in LA. What's hot? Yeah, so security Dave, absolutely. You said for years it's a board level discussion. It's now something that really everyone in the organization has to know about. The DevSecOps movement has seen a lot of growth, secure supply chain. We're just trying to make sure that when I use open source there's lots of projects. There's the huge ecosystem and marketplaces that are out there. So I wanna make sure that as I grab all of the pieces that I know where they got came from the proper, you know, signature or certification to make sure that the full solution that I build I understand it. And if there are vulnerabilities, I know if there's an issue, how I patch it in the industry we talk about the CVEs. So those vulnerabilities, those exploits that come out then everybody has to do a quick run around to understand, wait, hey, is my configuration am I vulnerable? Do I have to patch things? So security, absolutely still a huge, huge thing. Quick from a Red Hat standpoint, people might have noticed we made an acquisition a year ago of the Stackrocks. That product itself also now has a completely, fully open source project itself, also called Stackrocks. So the product is Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes. There's an open source equivalent for that called Stackrocks now, open source community. You know, there's a monthly office hour live streaming that a guy in my team actually does. And so there'll be a lot of activity at the show talking about security. So many other things happening at the show Dave. Another key area you talked about the developers and what they want to worry about and what they don't. In the container space, there's a project called Knative. So Google helped create that and that's to help me really have a serverless operational model with still the containers and Kubernetes underneath that. So at the show there will be the first Knative con and if you hadn't looked at Knative in a couple of years, one of the missing pieces that is now there is eventing. So if I look at functions and events, now that event capability is there or something I've talked to a lot of customers that were waiting for that to have it. It's not quite the same as like a Lambda but is now similar functionality that I can have with my containers in Kubernetes world. So that's an area that's there and so many others. I mean GitOps is super hot at the last show. It's something that we've seen really brought adoption since Argo CD went generally available last year and lots of customers that are taking that to help them. That's both automation and security put together because I can allow Git Hub to be my single source of truth for where I keep code, make sure I don't have any deviation from where the golden image, if you will, it lives. So we're talking earlier about how hard it is to track this stuff. So with the steep trajectory of growth and new customers coming on, there's got to be a lot of experimentation going on. That probably is being done. Somebody downloads the open source code and starts playing with it. And then when they go to production, I would imagine Stu, that's the point at which they say, hey, we need to fill some of these gaps and they reach out to a company like yours and say, all right, now we got to have certifications and trust, do you see that? So here's the big shift that happened. If we were looking four or five years ago, absolutely I'd grab the open source code and some people might do that. But what cloud really enabled Dave is rather than just grabbing, you know, going to the, you know, dot, the GitHub repo and pulling it down itself, I can go to the cloud. So Microsoft, AWS and Google all have their Kubernetes offering and I click a button. But that just gives me Kubernetes. So there's still a steep learning curve and as you said, to build out that full stack, that is what one of the big things that we do with OpenShift is we take dozens of projects, pull them in together so you get a full platform. So you can spend less time on, you know, curating, integrating and managing that platform and more time on the real value for your business, which is the application stack itself, the security and the like. And when we deliver OpenShift in the cloud, we have an SRA team that manage that for you. So one of the big challenges we have out there, there is a skill set gap. There are thousands of people getting certified on Kubernetes. There are, I think I saw over 100,000 job openings in the, you know, with Kubernetes mentioned in it. We just can't train people up fast enough. And the question I would have as an enterprise company is if I'm going to the cloud, how much time do I wanna build having SREs, having them focus on the infrastructure versus the things that are business specific? You know, what did Amazon promise Dave? We're going to help you get rid of undifferentiated heavy lifting. Well, just consume things as a service where I have an SRE team manage that environment. That might make more sense so that I can spend more time focusing on my business activities. That's a big focus that we've had on Red Hat is our offerings that we have with the cloud providers to do, you know, a need of offer. Yeah, the managed service capability is key. We saw, we saw it go back to the Hadoop days. We saw that, you know, that's where cloud era really struggled. They had to support every open source project and then the customers largely had to figure it out themselves whereas you look at what Databricks did with Spark, it was a managed service that was getting much greater adoption. So these complex areas, that's what you need. People win sometimes when I use the term super cloud. You know, we get little debates on Twitter which is a lot of fun. But the idea is that you create the subtraction layer that spans your on-prem, your cloud, so you've got a hybrid. You want to go across clouds, what people call multi-cloud. But as you know, I've sort of been skeptical of multi-cloud as really multi-vendor. But so we're talking about a substantial experience that's identical across those clouds and then ultimately out to the edge. And we see a super pass layer emerging, right? And people building on top of that, hiding the underlying complexity. What are your thoughts on that? How does Kubernetes in your view fit in? Yeah, it's funny, Dave. If you look at this container space at the beginning, Docker came out of a company called DotCloud. That was a PaaS company. And there's been so many times that that core functionality of how do I make my developers not have to worry about that underlying gunk? But Dave, while the storage people might not have to worry about the LUNs, somebody needs to understand how storage works and networking works. If something breaks, how do I make sure I can take care of it? Sometimes that's a service that the SRE team manages that away from me so that, yes, there is something I don't need to think about. But these are technically tough configurations. So first to one of your main questions, what do we see in customers with their hybrid and multi-cloud journey? So OpenShift, over 10 years old, we started OpenShift before Kubernetes even was a thing. Lots of our customers run in what most people would consider hybrid. What does that mean? I have something in my data center. I have something in the cloud. OpenShift Health, thanks to Kubernetes, I can have consistency for the developers, the operators, the security team across those environments. Over the last few years, we've been doing a lot in the Kubernetes space as a whole, as the community, to get Kubernetes out to the edge. So one of the nice things, where do containers live, Dave? Anywhere Linux does. Is Linux gonna be out of the edge? Absolutely. It's gonna be a small footprint. We can do a lot with it. There were a lot of vendors that came out with, it wasn't quite Kubernetes. They would strip certain things out or make a configuration that was smaller, out at the edge. But a lot of times, it was something that was just for a developer or something I could play with. And what it would break sometimes was that consistency out at the edge to what my other environments would like to have. And if I'm a company that needs consistency there, so take for example, if I have an AI workload where I need edge and I need something in the cloud or in my data center of consistency, so the easy use case that everybody thinks about is autonomous vehicles. We work with a lot of the big car manufacturers. I need to have, when my developer builds something and often my training will be done either in the data center or in the public cloud, but I need to be able to push that out to the vehicle itself and let it run. We've actually even got, Dave, we've got Kubernetes running up on the ISS. And you wanna make sure that we have a consistency. The ultimate edge. Yeah, so I said, right, it's edge above and beyond the clouds even. We've gone to beyond. So that is something that the industry as a whole has been working at. From a Red Hat standpoint, we can take OpenShift to a really small footprint. Last year we launched was known as single node OpenShift. We have a project called MicroShift, which is also fully open source that takes, it has less pieces of the overall environment to be able to fit onto smaller and smaller devices there. But we wanna be able to manage all of them consistently because you talked about multi cluster management. Well, what if I have thousands or tens of thousands of devices out of the edge? I don't necessarily have network. I don't have people. I need to be able to do things from an automated standpoint. And that's where containers and Kubernetes really can shine. And where a lot of effort has been done in general and something specifically, we're working on at Red Hat. We've had some great customers in the telecommunication space. Talk about like the 5G rollout with this and industrial companies that are, you know, need to be able to push out at the edge for these types of solutions. So you just kind of answered my next question, but I want to double click on it, which was, you know, if I'm in the cloud, why do I need, you know, you? So, and you touched on it because you've got primitives and APIs and AWS Google and Microsoft, they're different. If you're going to hide the underlying complexity of that, it takes a lot of R and D and work. Now extend that to a Tesla, right? You got to make it run there, different use case, but that's kind of what, you know, Linux and OpenShifter designed to do. So double click on that. Yeah, so, right, if I look at, you know, the discussion you've been having about super clouds is interesting because there are many companies that we work with that do live across multiple environments. So number one, if I'm a developer, if my company came to me and said, hey, you've got all your certifications and you got years of experience running on Amazon, well, we need you to go run over on Google. That developer might switch companies rather than switch clouds because they've got all of their knowledge and skill set and it's a steep learning curve. So there's a lot of companies that work on how can we give you tools and solutions that can live across those environments. So I know you mentioned companies like Snowflake, MongoDB, companies like Red Hat, HashiCorp, GitLab, also span all of those environments. There's a lot of work, Dave, to be different than, we're not just, I say, I don't love the term like, you know, we're cloud agnostic, which would mean, well, you can use any cloud. You can run on any cloud. But it was, that's not what we're talking about. Look at the legacy that Red Hat has is, Red Hat has decades of running in every customer's data center and, you know, pick your x86 server of choice and we would have deep relationships when Dell, HP, IBM, Lenovo, you know, you name it, comes out with a new piece of hardware that was different. We would have to make sure that the Linux primitives work from a Red Hat standpoint. Interesting, Dave, we're now supporting OpenShift on Azure Stack Hub. And I talked to our head of product management and I said, we've been running OpenShift in Azure for years. Isn't Azure Stack Hub, isn't that just Azure in your data center? He's like, yeah, but down at the operating system level, we had to change some flags and change some settings and things like that. So what do we know in IT? It's always the, yeah, at the high level, it looks the same, it acts the same, it feels the same. Seamless. It's seamless and everything. When you get down to, you know, the primitives level, sometimes we need to be able to do that. I'll tell you, Dave, there's things even when I look at a cloud, if I'm in US East One or US West One, there actually could be some differences in what services are there or how things react. And so therefore, we have a lot of deep work that goes into all of those environments. And it's not just Red Hat, you know, we have a marketplace and an ecosystem. You wanna make sure you've got API compatibility across all of those. So we are trying to help lift up this entire ecosystem and bring everybody along with it because you said it at the upfront, you know, Kubernetes alone won't do it. No one vendor gives you an entire, you know, everything that you need for your developer tool chain. There's a lot that goes into this and that's where we have, you know, deep commitment to partnerships. We build out and support lots of ecosystems. And this show itself is very much a community driven show. And therefore that's why, you know, Red Hat has a strong presence at it because that's the open source community and everything that we build on. Yeah, you guys are knee-deep in it. And you know, I wrote down when you were talking about Snowflake and Mongo, Hashi Corpse, another one, I wrote down Dell, HPE, Cisco, Lenovo, Pure, all that. To me, that should be their strategy. NetApp, their strategy should be to basically build out that abstraction layer, the so-called super cloud. So it'd be interesting to see if they're going to be at this show. It requires a lot of R&D, number one, number two to your point. It requires an ecosystem. So you got all these guys, most of them now doing their own as a service. As a service is their own cloud. Their own cloud means you better have an ecosystem that's robust. I want to ask you about, do you ever think about what's next beyond Kubernetes or do you feel like, hey, there's just so much headroom in Kubernetes and so many, you know, active projects. We got a ways to go. Yeah, so the Kubernetes itself, Dave, should be able to fade into the background some. In many ways, it does mirror what happened with Linux. So, you know, Linux is just the foundation of everything we have. We would not have the public cloud providers if it wasn't for Linux. I mean, Google, of course, you wouldn't have without Linux. It's on the internet. Right, you might not have a lot of it. So Kubernetes, I think, really goes the same way. It is the foundational layer of what so much of it is built on top of it. And it's not really, so many people think about that portability. Oh, Google's the one that created it and they wanted to make sure that it was easy if I want to go from the cloud provider that I had to use, you know, Kubernetes on Google Cloud. And while that is a piece of it, that consistency is more important and what I can build on top of it. It is really more of a distributed systems challenge that we are solving and that we've been working on in industry now for decades. So that is what we helped solve and what's really nice, containers in Kubernetes, it's less of an abstraction. It's more of a new atomic unit of how we build things. So virtualization, you know, I don't know what's underneath. And we spent like a decade fixing the storage and networking components underneath so that the lones matched right and the network understood what was happening in the virtual machine. The atomic unit of a container which is what Kubernetes manages is an application or a piece of an application. And therefore that there is less of an abstraction more of just a rearchitecting of how we build things. And that is part of what is needed. And boy, Dave, the ecosystem, oh my God. Yes, we've gone to only three releases a year but I can tell you having, you know, our roadmaps are all public on the internet and we talk heavily about them. There is still so many things that just at the basic Kubernetes piece, you know, new architectures, ARM devices are now in there. You know, we're now supporting them. Kubernetes can support them too. So, you know, there are so many hardware pieces that are coming, so many software devices, the edge we talked about it a bit. So there's so much that's going on. One of the areas that I love hearing about at the show we have a community event called OpenShift Commons which one of the main things of OpenShift Commons is customers coming to talk about what they've been doing. And not about products, we're talking about the projects and their journey overall. We've got at the Valencia show Airbus and Telefonica are both gonna be talking about what they're doing. You know, we've seen Dave, every industry is going through their digital transformation journey and it's great to hear straight from them what they are doing. And one of the big pieces, an area we actually spend a bunch of time on, that application journey, there's a group of open source projects under what's known as conveyor. That's conveyor with a K, conveyor.io. It's modernization and migration. So how do I go from a VM to a container? How do I go from my data center to a cloud? How do I switch between services, open source projects to help with that journey? And oh my gosh, Dave, I mean, you know in the cloud space, I mean, that's what all the SIs and all the consultancies that they're throwing thousands of people at is to help us get along that curve of that modernization journey. Okay, so let's see. May 16th, the week of May 16th is KubeCon in Valencia, Spain. theCUBE's going to be there. There was a little bit of a kerfuffle on Twitter because the mask mandate was lifted in Spain and people had made plans thinking, okay, it's safe. Everybody's going to be wearing masks. Well no, I mean, you're going to have to make your own decisions on that front. I mean, you saw that. You follow Twitter quite closely. But hey, this is the world we live in, right? So I'll give you the last word. Yeah, we'll see if Twitter still exists by the time we get to that show with what happens. But yeah, no, Dave, I'll be participating remotely. It is a hybrid event. So one of the things we'll be watching is how many people are there in person. LA was a pretty small show. Core contributors brought it back to some of the early days that you covered heavily from the Kube standpoint. How will Lensi be? I know from Red Hat standpoint, we have people there, many of them from Europe, both speaking, we talked about many of the co-located events that are there. So a lot of pieces, I'll participate remotely. So if you stop by OpenShift Commons event, I'll be part of the event just from a hybrid standpoint. And yeah, we've actually got the week before we've got Red Hat Summit. So it's nice to actually to have back-to-back weeks. We'd had that a whole bunch of times before. I remember back-to-back weeks in Boston one year where we had both of those events and everything. So definitely keeps us busy with there. You've got a whole bunch of travel going on. I'm not doing too much travel just yet, Dave, but it's good to see you and it's great to be connected with the community. Yeah, so the Kube will be there. John Furrier is hosting with Keith Townsend. So if you're in Valencia, definitely stop by. Stu, thanks so much for coming into the Kube Studios and Marvel, appreciate it. Thanks, Dave. All right, and thank you for watching. We'll see you the week of May 16th in Valencia, Spain.