 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation, and ecosystem partners. Welcome back, we're here in Barcelona, Spain, where 7,700 attendees are here for KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's live two-day coverage. Happy to have on the program two returning guests to talk about five years of Kubernetes. To my right is Tim Hawken, wearing the Barna contributor's shirt, and sitting to his right is Gabe Van Roy. So I didn't introduce their titles and companies, but so Tim's at Google, Gabe's at Microsoft, but heavily involvement in Kubernetes since the very early days. I mean, Tim, you're on the Wikipedia page. Gabe, I think we have to do some re-editing to make sure we get the community expanded in some of the major contributors and get you on there. But gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Thanks. So Tim just spoke to Joe Bada, and we talked about the idea of Craig and Brendan and him sitting in the room, and open source, and really bringing this out there to community. But let's start with you, because I remember back many times in my career, like, oh, I read this phenomenal paper about Google, we're going to spend the next decade figuring out the ripple effect of this technology. Kubernetes has, in five years, had a major impact on what we're doing. Give us a little bit of your insight as to what you've seen from those early days. Yeah, in the early days, we had the same conversations when we produced these papers that are seminal in the industry, and then we sort of don't follow up on them sometimes as Google. We didn't want this to be that. We wanted this to be a live, living thing with a real community that took root in a different way than MapReduce to do sort of situation. So that was very much front of mind as we worked through what are we going to build, how are we going to build it, how are we going to manage it, how are we going to build a community, how do you get people involved, how do you find folks like Gabe and Deis and get them to say, we're in, we want to be a part of this. All right, so Gabe, it was actually, Joe corrected me when I said, well, Google started it and they pulled in some other like-minded vendors, like he said, no, no, Stu. We didn't pull vendors in, we pulled in people, and people that believed in the project and the vision. You were one of those people that got pulled in early. He were, you know, so help give us little context in your viewpoint there. I did, and you know, at the time I was working for a company called Deis that I had started and we were out there trying to make developers more productive in industry using modern technology like containers. And, you know, it was through the process of trying to solve problems for customers was sort of the lens that I was bringing to this where I was introduced to some really novel technology approaches, first through Docker. And, you know, I was close with Solomon Hikes, the founder over there, and then, you know, started to work closely with folks at Google, namely Brennan Burns, who I now work with at Microsoft, you know, part of the founding Kubernetes team. And I agree with that statement, that it is really about people. It's really about individual connections at the end of the day. I think we do these things at these KubeCon events called like contributor summits. And it's very interesting because when folks land at one of these summits, it's not about who you work for, what jersey you're wearing, that sort of thing. It's people talking to people, trying to solve technical problems, trying to solve organizational challenges. And I think, you know, the phenomenon that's happened there and the scale with which that's happened is part of the reason why there's 8,000 people here in Barcelona today. Yeah, it's interesting, Tim, because, you know, I used to be involved in some standards work and I've been, you know, working with the open source community for about 20 years. It used to be, you know, it was the side project that people did at nights and everything like that. Today, a lot of the people that are contributing, well, they do have a full-time job and their job will either let them or asking them to do that. So, I do talk to people here that when they're involved in the working groups, when they're doing these things, yes, you think about who their paycheck comes for, but that's secondary to what they are doing as part of the community. And it is, you know, some of the people. Absolutely, it's part of the ethos of the project that the project comes first and if company comes second or maybe even third. And for the most part, this has been wildly successful. There's this huge base of trust among the leadership and among the contributors. And, you know, it's a big enough project now that I don't know every one of the contributors, but we have this web of trust. And, you know, I have this army of people that I know and I trust very well and they know people and they know people. And it works out that the project has been wildly successful and we've never yet had a major conflict or strife that's centered on company this or company that. Yeah, I'd also add that it's an important development has happened in the wake of Kubernetes where, you know, for example, in my teams at Microsoft, I actually have dedicated PM and engineering staff where their only job is to focus on community engagements, right, running the release team for Kubernetes 115 or working on IPv6 support or Windows container support. And that work, that upstream work puts folks in contact with people from all different companies, Google, you know, Microsoft working closely together on countless initiatives. And the same is true really for the entire community. So I think it's really great to see that you can get not just sort of the interpersonal interactions, but you can also get sort of corporate sponsorship of that model because I do think at the end of the day people need to get their paychecks. And oftentimes that's going to come from a big company and seeing that level of investment is I think pretty encouraging. Okay, well, you know, luckily five years in we've solved all the problems and everything works perfectly. If that's not maybe the case, you know, where do we need people involved? What things would we be looking at kind of the next year or two in this space? You know, a project of this size, a community of this size, a system of this scope has infinite work to do, right? The barrel is never going to be empty. And in some cases it's filling faster than it's draining. Every special interest group, every SIG has a backlog of issues of things that they would like to see fixed, of features that they have some user pounding the table saying, I need this thing to work. IPv6 is a great example, right? And we have people now stepping up to take on these big issues because they have customers who need it or they see it as important foundational work for building future stuff. So, you know, there's no shortage of work to do. That's not just engineering work though, right? It's not just product definition or API. We have what we call contributor experience. People who work with our community to online new contributors and streamline how to get them in and involved in documentation and testing and release engineering. And there's so much sort of non-core work. I could go on this for days. You're just reminding me of the session this morning is I don't manage clusters, I manage fleets and you have the same challenge with the people. Yeah, I also had another dimension to this about just the breadth of contribution. We were just talking before the show that, you know, outside at the logo there is this, you know, characters, book characters, Fippy and such. And really that came from a children's book that was created to demonstrate core concepts to developers who were new to Kubernetes. And it ended up taking off and was eventually donated to the CNCF. But things like that, you can't underestimate the importance and impact that that can have on making sure that Kubernetes is accessible to a really broad audience. Okay, yeah, look, I want to give you both just the final word as to, you know, what you shout out you want for the community. And yeah, any special things that, you know, have surprised you or exciting you, you know, here in 2019? You know, exciting is being here. If you rewind five years and tell me I'm in Barcelona with 7,500 of my best friends, I would think you were crazy or from Mars. This is amazing and I thank everybody who's here who's made this thing possible. We have a ton of work to do, you know, and if you feel like you can't figure out what you need to work on, come talk to me and we'll figure it out. Yeah, for me, I just want to give a big thank you to all the maintainers, folks like Tim, but also, you know, some other folks who, you know, you may not know their name, but they're the ones slogging it out in the GitHub PRQ, you know, trying to just, you know, make the project work in function day to day. And we're not for their ongoing efforts. We wouldn't have any of this. So I thank you to that. Well, and look, thank you, of course, to the community and thank you both for sharing with our community. We're always happy to be a small piece of, you know, helping to spread the word and get some voice to everything that's going on here. Thank you so much. All right, so we will be back with more coverage here from KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.