 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Docker, Docker, Docker. No, you're in the right place. This is KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019 here in San Diego. I'm Stu Miniman, kicking off three days of live wall-to-wall coverage. My co-host for most of the week this week is John Troyer. Justin Warren's also in the house, will be hosting for me. And a big shout out to John Furrier, who's back at the corporate ranch in Palo Alto, keeping an eye on all the CloudNative stuff with us. The reason I actually mentioned Docker is because it is the first thing that is on our lips this week. Just this week, Docker, which is the company that, if it wasn't for Docker, we wouldn't have 12,500 people here at this event, really democratize containers. But the company itself built out a platform, millions and millions of companies using containers. But when the orchestration layer came in, there was some contention, there's lots of politics. I'm waiting for Docker, the Broadway musical to come out, to talk about all the ins and outs there because Kubernetes really suck the air out of the CloudNative world, spawned tons of projects here. As you can see behind us, this ecosystem is massive and swelling. Last year it was 8,000 people. A year before it was 4,000 people. So many people here. So, and John, so let's start. This is your first time at this show. You've done many shows with us. Definitely covered some of the CloudNative. You've worked with many of the companies that are in this ecosystem here. Give me your first impressions here of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. Sure, sure. Well, I mean, Stu, 12,000 people. It's pretty crowded here. We're right by the t-shirt line on day one of the conference. Look, a conference this big, especially an open-source conference, has several, there's several jobs to be done, right? This is an active set of open-source projects in open-source communities. So a lot of the keynote this morning was updating people on details about the latest releases, the latest features, what's in, what's out, what's going on. CNCF is a very broad umbrella for a very broad number of projects. Not a coherent opinionated stack. It's a lot of different things that all contribute to a set of CloudNative technologies. So that's job one. Job two, it's a trade show and it's an industry show and people are coming here to figure out how to build and learn and operate. So that wasn't particularly well served by the keynote this morning. There's certainly a lot of hands-on this week. There's a huge number of breakouts. There's a huge number of tracks. Even day zero, which is a set of specialty breakout workshops and sessions. Everything was packed. There were over a dozen of those. So what strikes me as the breadth here is that it's a mile wide. I won't say it's an inch deep because there's some, but it is a mile wide. Yeah, John, you were right. There's so much going on. The day zero tracks are amazing. I think there were over two dozen, maybe even more of the sessions where half day or full day deep dives. Even talk, there were some other small events even that went on for two or three days leading up to this. So sprawling ecosystem. Last year at this show in Seattle, I actually said that this show is the independent Cloud show that we've been looking for. John, I was at Microsoft Ignite just a couple of weeks ago. And absolutely, Satya Nadella, they're not talking about the bits and the bites. It's Microsoft is your trusted partner for everything you're going to do, including building 50 billion new applications. Amazon re-invent will just be right after Thanksgiving and we will hear a very different message from Amazon and where they play. But this is not a company. It is a lot of different projects. The CNCF is the steward of this. And so Kubernetes is the one that gets all the attention. I think for this group to even grow more, it needs to be focused more on the cloud native con because how do we do cloud data? You know, what does that mean? We heard, you know, Suga was up on stage talking about Vittes and he said, look, if you, you know, bake your database directly in fully Kubernetes cloud data, that means that, you know, when you want to move between clouds, you bring your data with you. So data security, networking, messaging, there's so many pieces here. And so a lot of work to be done to mature the stack, but it definitely is getting more mature. You start hearing, you know, many of these projects with, you know, million or more downloads a month. So, you know, so many pieces. John, you know, what are you looking to dig into this week? What are you most excited for? You know, what questions do you want answered? Well, here on theCUBE, I'm always excited when we get to talk to people in production, customers really see what's going on. There's a lot of stuff in production right now, but it's not, which is not to say, a lot of stuff isn't bleeding edge, right? You, I hear a lot of stuff just out of the woodwork about things that are fragile, things that aren't ready, things that are not quite updated. And I think Kubernetes is an architectural as well as a spiritual home for everything. But there's a lot of pieces that plug in and there are opinionated ways of doing it. There are best, you know, best of breed ways. There are vertically integrated stacks. What's the best approach? It's not clear to me. I mean, if you have to look at, from a company perspective, who are the winners and losers? I don't think that's a very productive way of looking at it. I'm interested in some projects like we're going to be talking with Rancher and they've got some announcements, but I'm also interested in K3S, which is their project there. I've been hearing, you know, some really interesting things on the storage front. You know, all these things are really necessary. It's not all just magic containers moving around. You got to actually get the bits and bytes into the right place at the right time and backed up. Yeah, I love that you brought up K3S. Edge is definitely something that I hear talking a lot because if you talk about cloud native, it's not just about public cloud. Many of these things can run, you know, in my on-premises data centers and everything like that. And Edge fits in all of these environments. So, right, winners and losers, I remember two years ago, first time I got a chance to interview Kelsey Hightower, who we do have on the program. He had actually taken a couple of shows off, but he's back here at the show. I said, Kelsey, why are we spending so much talking about Kubernetes? Doesn't this just get baked into every platform? And he's like, yeah, totally. That's not the importance of it. It's not about distributions. It's not about who's who. Any of the software companies, it's how do they pull, you know, all of the pieces together? How do they add value on top of it? And one of the terms I've heard mentioned a lot is we need to think a lot about day two. Heck, there was even one of the companies that was having this space, Mesosphere, they renamed the company, day two IQ, spelled D2 IQ, no relation to R2 D2. But, you know, that's what they are focused on to help these things really go together. So, yeah, there's, you know, we talk about multi-cloud and how do I get my arms around all of these pieces? How do I manage, you know, a sprawling environment, you add edge into it? I've got, you know, a huge surface area of attack for security issues. So, you know, John, remember, cloud was supposed to be, you know, simple and cheap and it really isn't either of those things anymore. So, yeah, a lot, a lot for us to dig into. Yeah, it'll be an interesting mix. Developers, experts, people brand new, probably half the people here, they're the first time. And people coming over from the IT space, as well as people coming from the open source space. And I even saw this morning, this is the biggest conference I've ever been to. So it's all, it's a many, it's a different part to the elephant, I'd say. Yeah, absolutely. It is a good size conference, especially if they're open source, it probably is the largest. But Salesforce Dreamforce is going on this week, which is more than an order of magnitude bigger. So, you know, my condolences to anybody in San Francisco right now, because we know the BART and everything else like that completely swamped with too many people. One other thing, you know, the CNCF, what's really interesting for me always is, when you look at a lot of these projects, the people that we saw up on stage were companies, it was the person that, oh, I started this project and I'm the technical lead on it and that's where I'm going. We've interviewed many of the people that start these projects and they come many times out of industry. It's not a vendor that said, hey, I built something and I'm selling it. It is companies like Uber and Lyft that said, we did things at massive scale, we had a problem, we built something, we thought it was useful for us. Open source seemed a good way to help us, you know, get broader visibility and maybe everybody could help and other people not only pitch in but say, this is hugely valuable and that's where we go with it. So, it's something, a narrative I've heard for years about, you know, everybody's going to be a software company. Well, almost everybody at this conference is, you know, building software. We've heard about 30 to 40% of the people, you know, attending this show are developers and therefore many of them are going to, you know, build products. A question I have and I'll give you is, with Docker, we just kicked off talking about Docker. You know, Docker created this huge wave of what happens there but, you know, to put it bluntly, Docker, the business failed. So, they're not dead. There's the piece that's in Mirantis, there's the piece doing the developer piece. We wish all of them the best of luck but they had the opportunity to be the next VMware and instead, they are, you know, the company that gave us this wave but did not capitalize on it. So, you know, I look around and I see so many companies and you say, hey, what are you? Oh, we're the creators of X technology in this project and my question is, are you actually going to be able to make money and do a business or is this just something that gets fit into the overall ecosystem? John, any thoughts and advice for those kind of companies? Well, I mean, we are here, even though there's 12,000 people here, this is still very leading edge, right? This is, there's a lot of pieces, parts here. We're not sure how they're all going to fit together. A lot of the projects have come out of real use cases, like you say, but it's commercial viability, it makes them, is a different beast than utility. Docker was very good at developer experience but the DNA of actually selling an enterprise management stack is a whole different beast and there are a lot of those too. So, I mean, I think a lot of the companies here may not be around but their technologies will live on. I think if you're here and the interviews here at the show I think will be, you'll be one to have your antenna out to see like, okay, is this, you know, is this give you a feeling like this is a, solving a real problem and is incorporated in a real ecosystem? You know, the big company, it cuts both ways, right? Some of the times those technologies get absorbed and become the standard, sometimes they disappear. So, the advice is you just put one foot in front of the other and try to find people in production. That's the only way at the end of the day that you move ahead as a small company. All right, John, I gave you one piece of advice when we came here and I said, you know, one thing we don't talk about at this show, we don't talk about open stack. So, I'm going to break that rule for a second here just because I feel we have as an industry learned some of the lessons. There is some of the irrational exuberance around some of these. There's lots of money being thrown at these environments, but I do feel that we are reaching maturity and adoption so much faster because we are not trying to replace something. The early days of open stack was, you know, we're your alternative for AWS and we're going to get you off of VMware licensing and both of those things were, they didn't happen for the most part and open stack did fit in certain environments, especially outside of North America. There's lots of open stack deployments, the telecommunications environment, open stack is used a bunch. Telecom, another area, talk about Edge, that plays in here and we have a number of conversations. But there are both the big and the small companies. When I look at our list of people we're going to be talking on the program, you know, I love first the customers. We've got, you know, Fidelity, Bloomberg, Red Cross and Ford Motor Company all on the program and we've got big companies, mega giants like Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, as well as a couple of companies that came out of stealth like in the last week, including Renderer and Chronosphere. So, you know, broad spectrum of what's going on. You've done some of the open stack shows with me. You know, you've got a long community and ecosystem. Viewpoint John, what are you thinking? What are you here? Yeah. You know, this is, I guess yeah, this is the next generation. You can look at it that way. Anytime you bring together one of these open source foundations, you know, it is kind of a new style of development. You do have differing agendas. People do, again, have to have their antenna up to see is this person promoting this open source project and what is their commercial interest in it? Because there are different agendas here. But it looks pretty healthy. Look, there's probably a million engineers worldwide that are going to have to know the guts of Kubernetes. But it's a different job to be done than open stack. Open stack community is actually, that exists is still thriving. It is good for the job to be done there. This job to be done is a little different. I think it's going to be an engine of, you know, the engine that's embedded in everything else. So there's going to be a hundred million engineers that don't need to know anything about Kubernetes. But people here are the people who pop the hood open and start to, you know, mess with the carburetor. And that's, this is a carburetor show. And so for the coverage here, we're going to try to up level it to talk about the business a little bit. But, you know, it feels, this feels important. It feels cross cloud. It feels outside of any one silo. And I'm really interested to see what we're going to learn this week. Okay. And thank you, John. I really appreciate it. Right. Final, it's like, what is our job here? We are an independent media organization. Yes, we did bring our own stickers here to be able to, you know, we know everybody here loves stickers. So we've got, you know, the cube and we've got the, the fun go for one, our friends at women who go that support this because, you know, inclusion, diversity, something that this community definitely embraces. We are huge supporters of there. But right, we want to be able to give that, you know, broad viewpoint of everything. We're not going to be able to get into every project. We're not going to go as deep as the day zero, you know, content with, but give a good flavor for everything going on in the show. That, you know, I've found of all the shows I've gone to in recent years, this is, you know, some of the biggest brains in the industry. There's a lot of really important stuff. So I appreciate bringing my, you know, PhD, you know, holding, you know, co-host with me, John, looking forward to three days with you to dig into all the environment. All right, so we will be wall to wall coverage. Three days, if you're at the event, we are here in the textbook hall. You can't miss us. We've got the big lights right next to the cloud, native con store. If you're online, of course, reach out to us. I'm at Stu, STU on Twitter. He's at Jay Troyer. And hit us up. See us in person. Come grab some stickers. Let us know who you want to talk to and what question you have. And as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.