 Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage here in Copenhagen, Denmark for KubeCon 2018 part of the CloudNative Compute Foundation also known as CNCF. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, the founder of Spark Labs. We have two of the main players here at the Linux Foundation, CNCF, Dan Cohen, Kube alumni, executive director and Dikumar vice president of product marketing. Great to see you guys, welcome back. Oh, throw it to me here. Thank you. So you guys, not to build your head up a little bit, but you're doing really well. Successful. We're excited to be part of the seeing, witnessing the growth. I know you work hard. We've talked in the past and off camera. Just, it's working. CNCF's formula is working. The Linux Foundation has brought a lot to the table. You've taken the ball with this CloudNative community with Kubernetes growth, good actors in the community. A lot of things clicking on all cylinders. Thanks, we're thrilled to be here. And yeah, 4,300 people is the biggest ever for a KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. It's actually the biggest conference the Linux Foundation has ever thrown, which has been incredibly exciting. And also here in Europe to show it's not just a North American focus. And you've got the big North America event in Seattle, which, what's the over-under on that? 6,000, 8,000? We go a little higher. 7,500, we're going to max out. So we'll see if we hit that or not. But we had 4,200 six months ago when you were with us in Austin. And so we think a ton of people, you know, people joke about Seattle being the cloudy city because it's not just Amazon there, but Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM, all of the huge cloud offices. And the University of Washington has been an amazing program in computer science. A lot of tech there. Seattle's certainly an awesome city. I got to ask you, you know, you do a lot of work with the members in the organization. Obviously the success is well-documented. We're seeing it. Kubernetes is now going to mainstream tech. And still learning, a lot of people are learning about Kubernetes, but there's a lot going on. You talk to a lot of people. What's the vibe? What's the conversation like? What is actually happening in the membership organization that's notable that you'd like to share and get the word out on? Actually, D's been working directly with all the members as we've been putting together our marketing plan. So one thing I can do share in terms of the vibe and some of the feedback that we have received from the members is they really, I think it's about what we've heard from all the keynotes and the sessions. It's about really us coming together as a community and defining what is cloud native and what's that journey. And so as a step towards that, what we have done as a CNCF is we have launched the interactive landscape, which kind of showcases a lot of the member work that we are jointly working on. And secondly, the trail map is our attempt to define what is the cloud native journey. So we've kind of highlighted about 10 steps and the processes to get to a cloud native journey. And I think the next steps in terms of the vision and the goal is to really engage the member community and to start building on that. What is containerization? What is orchestration? Microservices, CICD, and Dan, I think in his keynote touched upon continuous integration. We really need to figure out integration, testing, development, deployment, and what does all that narrative mean and how as a community we have a common understanding and a framework. And then the next step would again be in terms of building use cases and also really showcasing some heroes in the community, which is our developers. So our developers and contributors end of the day are the heart and soul of the cloud native ecosystem. So we really want to bring their stories, mash that up with our end users. We're seeing incredible growth with just leveraging the cloud native, different types of architectures. One of the things I'm looking at the cloud native interactive landscape map, which is by the way pretty impressive. Yeah, the market cap number in the trillions plus Amazon, so let's take that out. But good, healthy distribution. I want to talk about the startups because they're going to be the lifeblood of the future. The total funding to date is 4.7 billion of cloud native compute foundation members, startups. Significant investment. They got to build, they're building products. What do they care about? What's the most important thing for them? You guys, can you share what they're asking for? Is there a profile that you're seeing emerge? Cause there's a new era coming, right? Is the new guard, the new guard of startups? There's incredible diversity of startups there. And what I love about the startup ecosystem, kind of like the open source ecosystem, is they're all looking for their niche. And so there is kind of an evolutionary strategy for it. But it's really amazing to see different approaches towards attacking different markets, consulting specific products and such. One of the neat things about CNCF is that we like to think of ourselves as a commercially friendly startup. All 20 of our projects, commercially friendly open source foundation. All 20 of our projects use the Apache 2.0 license, which allows you to create a commercial product on top of it. We are very cognizant of the fact that most large enterprises are going to want support from a business startup or an established industry player, and in many cases both, in order to roll this out. And so we love the fact that that's available if they need it, but they also could download the projects directly and work with themselves if they want. Well, I think that's an important point. I always want to highlight, because what you said I think is really, I think is a big part of the success. You guys do a great job of balancing community and the role of the people within the community and the traditional Linux foundation mission of having great open source. But at the same time, you're like, hey, it's okay to have a business model with open. And I think this new era is being highly accelerated on commercialization. I think this is, I think, a unique part of the digital fabric, the digital businesses of the future, and cloud hits that right on. So that's to me a great step. Question I have for you is, how do you keep it going? What's next? What do you get? Because the bar is high. Now you've got to do more. What's the strategy? What's the plan? So one thing that we can do is, like I highlighted again back to the cloud native journey as a story. Today we kind of have a lot of emphasis on Kubernetes. And it's just not limited to containers and orchestration. And we really want to expand the narrative and the story to address all the 2019 different projects that is all housed under the cloud native computing foundation umbrella. And we really want to bring out use cases, value props. And I think there's a lot to be told here. Like how do we address security? There's a lot of sessions and keynotes today that bring about security applications, testing, CI CD, how does the developer community can enable all these different amazing technologies? So we've had a lot of talk about it, but I think it's something that startups that I've been talking to have asked me to help all the CNCF in terms of just simplifying these conversations. Like how do we make it simple? And to your earlier point, like they want to start with simplicity and then that eventually leads to monetization and they want to take that fabric from CNCF so they can then start building a narrative in terms of a solution. And what does that mean in terms of value creation? Exactly. And I actually work with a couple startups inside of the CNCF and work with them on their business model and what they're doing and what is that narrative that they're going to start telling. You know, I think it's interesting because you have all these communities actually coming together in that ecosystem. And when you take a look at that, you probably, you know, you talk about use cases. And I think those are really what the developers are going to be driven towards as they're onboarding to this platform basically. And what are the top use cases that you guys see kind of across the board? So I think there are three main use cases and I think a partner did a great job of summarizing that today. So I think it's primarily security because that's the enterprise audience and most Fortune 100 companies are dealing with that. Second, I would say it's about agility. It's about who gets to market first and back to the startup point. It's about addressing that. Thirdly, I would just say it's scalability. It's, I think it's about going beyond, you know, a science project where you just have Kubernetes or a couple containers deployed in your own QA or staging environments. And people are really thinking about how do you adopt Kubernetes on a large scale? How do you take it to a production type of environment? And what does that mean? And I think today, financial time, Sarah Wells, she did an amazing job of just taking us through what it took them in terms of getting from where they were and how they had to deal with all the challenges. And I think she did a great point about technologies can be boring. So I think that was some of the key takeaways in terms of the three use cases that we could build on collectively would be agility, scalability, and security. Well, you're also changing the conversation, really. You know, we had a great customer of Kubernetes on here earlier and they were talking about really how their whole infrastructure, they didn't have to worry about it. It's based on AWS. They were phenomenal and really what the point was is that they are not just an energy company, they're actually a technology company and a software company. And that's really what folks want to be working with today. And are you seeing more of that with the startups is that they have the opportunity to start shifting their companies more in the direction of technology for the end users? Absolutely, yeah, but it is amazing that just range of different approaches that they're taking. But we think there's really on every level of the stack. We have this, you refer to the interactive landscape before and I will give the quick pitch. It's at l.cncf.io. But it is amazing to see all of the different layers of which the startups are operating. And you guys do a good job of breaking down which ones are open source, which ones are not, funding, public, private, categories, so good job. Well, so what's, I guess, what's the numbers look like? Dan, I'd like you to just take a minute. Just, I know you do this a lot, but just do it on the record. What's the numbers, members, growth? How many cities are you going to be doing KubeCon in? You mentioned Shanghai before we came on. Sure. Just run us through the numbers, inside the numbers. The first number that I think is the most exciting is we have over 20,000 developers actively engaged across our 20 projects. And so those aren't users. I mean, the users is hundreds of thousands, but those are people who've actually found issues with it, made a documentation fix or added some significant new feature in order to scratch the itch that they were having. We have 4,300 people here in KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. These events are always a great check-in. We were together in Seattle just a year and a half ago and had 1,000 people, 1,500 here a year ago, 4,200 in Austin, six months. What we're very excited to do is head to Shanghai in November for our first ever KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, China, where we now have three Platinum members there, three Gold members, just a huge level of engagement and interest. And a big developer community there in China as well. You do know. And obviously the language issue is a barrier and we're going to be investing real resources to have simultaneous interpretation for all of our talks and all of our tracks. In real-time or post-anime? Definitely. In real-time. Primarily in English and then? No, we can do it both ways. And so we're telling every speaker that they can present in Chinese or English and then the question could be in Chinese or English. Well done. In order to, and it's a cost, but we think that that can really help bridge those two different parts. And then we'll be in Seattle in December 11th or 13th for our biggest ever event, CubeCon, CloudNativeCon. Along that journey, we've been increasing members and so we had, I believe, 68 in Berlin a year ago and we're 216 today. And of those, we have 52 members of our end user community that we're particularly proud of. Well congratulations. I'd like to get those members out. And again, we'd like to talk about they had more projects coming, coming. So good job. Adia, I want to get your thoughts on the branding. Obviously, CNCF, Linux Foundation, separate group, part of the Linux Foundation. I noticed you got CloudNativeCon built into it still. Branding, guys, thoughts in here because there's more than Kubernetes here, right? There's CloudNative. So what's that? Is it going to keep one, both dual branding? What's the thought? So I would say the branding will be defined by the community and the fact that we have 20 different projects. I wouldn't put a very strong emphasis on just having one type of a branding associated with CloudNative. So I, one of the things that I'm thinking about is I've been talking to the community and I think it's the developers and contributors again who's going to define the branding of CloudNative in general. And I think it's still something that we as a community have to figure it out. But essentially it's going to be beyond containers, orchestration. There's a lot of talks around Prometheus. We talked about CoreOS, Red Hat. So I think it's just a, you know, a combination of how all these projects work together in a way is going to define the branding strategy. So I think it's a little bit too early for me to make some comments on that. My best move is not to move at this point. Keep it, I'm a big CloudNative, but the CubeCon, a little bit of a conflict with the Cube, because we're not going to put a trademark or trade it on you guys yet. We appreciate that. We love the confusion, you're in good company, vice versa. Okay, serious question, Dan. I want to ask you, and Dee, you can weigh in too on this. You're a student of the industry. You've also been around a while. We've seen many waves. For folks that are like, look, yeah. This is a new wave, you're younger than me. For the folks that are like looking at this going, okay, the numbers are there. I'm seeing growth, got my attention. And they're still trying to grok what this wave is about, this new modern era, CloudNative, CubeCon, Kubernetes. Certainly, insiders kind of see it and a lot of people are kind of high-fiving each other, but yet it's not yet fully here. How important, how do you describe it to someone at a cocktail party, or in the elevator, or should I explain them to the historic nature of what's happening? What's in your words, what's happening? And it is tricky because at my kids' little leagues games, if we're just chatting about what we do, I sometimes describe it as the plumbing software for the internet. And it's not a bad metaphor. A Linux has also been described that way because plumbing is really important. Now, most of us never think about it. We don't have to worry about it, but if it breaks, we all get extremely upset. And so I do think of our sort of overarching method is to say that the whole way that software is being developed, being deployed, especially being pushed into production, is changing and that there's just, it's almost all for the positive, where in the last decade you had virtualization, but that was often through a proprietary solution that you were paying attacks for every new application you deployed. And the idea today that you can pick this software platform and then deploy to any public, private, or hybrid cloud and avoid that lock-in, but get all these advantages in terms of higher velocity, lower cost, better efficiency, that lack of lock-in, those are really amazing stories that lots of enterprises are just now hearing. There's this cliche of crossing the chasm. And I do think we can make the argument that 2018 is really the year that Kubernetes crosses the chasm outside of just innovators and into the early majority. I think that's definitely the case. I've been walking around and talking to people and one of the things that I'm hearing is that folks are here to learn and they're actually kind of beginners on Kubernetes and they actually want to learn more and their companies have sent them here in order to actually figure out if the technology is going to work back at their home company, which is ranges from tech companies to banks to different types of manufacturing and things along those lines. It's really a tremendous growth. What do you see in terms of end users? What types of end users are most you're seeing mostly? Or what kind of categories do those fall into? So we have 52 companies in our end user community now and a number of them are up on the stage, including folks like Spotify. I thought it gave a really inspiring talk today about not just being a user of software, but how to engage with the community and contribute back and such. But the thing that I love is that there really is not one industry that we're focused on or avoiding. So finance, who have tons of issues around regulation and such, they're much more likely to be deploying Kubernetes in their own infrastructure on bare metal, but we have just fantastic stories. Bloomberg won our first ever end user award. We're very big on publishing, so to have not just the New York Times, but Reddit and Wikipedia. And then a number of just very interesting consumer oriented companies like a Pinterest or a Twitter, Spotify. And then the list sort of keeps going and going. Yeah, it's impressive. And I got to say, you're agnostic because everyone needs plumbing, right? So plumbing is vertical agnostic, so it's... Well, and the cliche from Mark Andreessen that software is eating the world is again somewhat true, that there really is not a company today that can avoid writing its own software. I mean, as I was saying in my keynote yesterday, that software tends to just be the tip of the pyramid that they're building on tons of open source, but every company today needs to look at... And your point about commercialization-friendly or a membership organization which you built is important. And I've got to say, for the first time we heard on theCUBE multiple times, not from the visionaries who believe in and drink the Kool-Aid, so to speak, like us and you guys. End users and other commercial entities have used the word de facto standard to describe Kubernetes. Now, there's only a few times in history when you heard that word. There's been inflection points. So... Linux was certainly one of them. Yes, so again, when you have a de facto standard that's determined by the community, just really good things happen. So we're hopeful and we'll keep monitoring it. And I do want to say that we take that responsibility very seriously, and so we have things like our certified Kubernetes program about making sure that Kubernetes remains compatible between the carefulness that we do apply to new projects coming in, and so we hope to live up to that. Right, and D, we talked yesterday, you're going to get that. Share that information with our team, happy to amplify it, because a lot of people want to learn, they want to discover and find out who to connect with, so we're a robust community. Appreciate you going with us on this journey. It's been fun. We're going to hang along for the ride. We're going to be a sidecar, pun intended. Watching theCUBE, Dan, thanks so much. Congratulations, Executive Director. Oh, thank you very much. D, good work. Thank you. CNCF here inside theCUBE at their event here at KubeCon 2018. I'm John Furrier, Lauren Cooney. We'll be back with more live coverage. Stay with us after this short break.