 Hello Los Angeles and welcome to the first hybrid, KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America. I'm Katie Gomanje, the ecosystem advocate at CNCF. I'm currently leading the end user community and my mission is to make end users successful while bridging the gap between adopters and projects within the ecosystem. Unfortunately, I could not join in person but being a hybrid event, I am tremendously excited to connect with all of you from London where I can share my house plans and very full splendor. This is my eighth KubeCon and some of you might recognize me from my previous roles as the cloud platform engineer at Condenas then American Express where I go to navigate the landscape from an end user perspective. Last year, I transitioned into a role that allowed me to work closely with end user community and celebrate the lasting impact they have on the growth of the ecosystem. Today, I would like to share their achievements with you. The end user community has more than 155 members that use CloudNative to release their products, including some of the most innovative and disruptive startups to well-renowned enterprises. One of the latest end users that joins CNCF is Niantic with a mission to build a state of the art for augmented reality platforms. They bring the magic around you with CloudNative for mobile games such as Harry Potter, Wizard Unite and Pokemon Go. Our latest fintech end user is Robinhood which pioneers commission free trades of stock. I'm delighted to welcome Cardinal Health which was an essential link to the healthcare supply chain across the world during the pandemic. These companies are just a sample of industries that adopted CloudNative to build their business strategy. The end user community is in constant growth and so is the wider landscape. I would like to take a couple of moments to reflect on the impact that Linux had on our community. The first time I interacted with a Linux terminal was during the network fundamentals class in my first year at university. The moment I saw the purple colored box with mono spaced characters, I thought, wow. So now I am a real computer scientist. As a child, I used to see these terminals in movies and they were used by the smartest engineers to magically save the day. Of course, I immediately associated with them even if all I did was navigate directories back and forth. We used Ubuntu, by the way. This year marks Linux 30th anniversary. It is a tremendous accomplishment for the open source community as Linux had a massive influence not only on the evolution of operating systems but on the wider technology landscape. By laying the foundations of how to commit to upstream and collaborate openly, Linux enabled technologies to focus on feature development while operating in a governed, transparent and highly collaborative environment. This fundamentals cross-pollinate with cloud native principles and mission to foster a sustainable and resilient ecosystem. Based on the CNCF project velocity report, Linux is still at the forefront of open source projects with more than 4,000 authors in last year alone. In terms of contributor activity, Kubernetes closely follows Linux with a 251% increase since last ranking in 2017. Other CNCF project that registered a high velocity rate are HELL, OpenTelemetry, Argo, GRPC, Prometheus, and many more, all of which are incubating and graduating CNCF project. However, contributions are not only measured in the number of commits, merge PRs, or GitHub stars. A huge influence is imprinted by adopters that integrate and configure these tools internally to create their infrastructure. KubeCon and cloud nativeCon is the place to connect with these end users and explore their use case. Over the next couple of days, you can attend one of the 38 talks delivered by end user companies, such as Tesla, Uber, Skyscanner, Intuit, and many more. Also, don't miss the insightful end user keynote delivered by Expedia. Looking back, I do remember attending conferences two or three years ago and the majority of keynotes were focused on the crossing the chasm stage. Crossing this gap is of utmost importance to achieve a balanced adopter base while providing an innovative but stable solution to the entire industry. Cloud native is here to stay and within the last year, a large proportion of tools transition to the late majority phase. Late adopters are looking to apply technologies and principles that have proven to be an established standard, are secure, easily scalable, and have a healthy contributory base with a frequent release cadence. Nowadays, organizations around the world use Kubernetes, Prometheus, LinkRD, OPA and other tools in production. Their long-term strategy for scale and growth is converging on the use of cloud native tools. I have traversed this path too while at Condenast and American Express. On one side, we had a Greenfield platform that allowed us to integrate the best tools to solve a problem. While on the other side, my focus was to bring advanced functionalities to the platform. This is the case for other CNCF end users. For example, ElkHope, the largest electronics retail in the Nordics, produced its infrastructure hosting costs by 80% using LinkRD. While Fidelity Investment, one of the largest financial services, achieved 20 times more frequent releases. The late adopters effect can be observed within the end user community as well. The end user community provides a vengeful neutral space for organizations to share their accomplishments and challenges, cross-check innovation strategies, while seeking and providing guidance for emerging technologies. Over time, this created the demand for a more formal and comprehensive trail map to help end users navigate the CNCF landscape. As such, I am thrilled to announce the creation of the Cartographus Working Group and their Cloud Native maturity model. This group has established five levels of Cloud Native maturity. Build, operate, scale, improve, and optimize. Establishing the maturity level is not just a technology journey, but one which is influenced by four major areas, such as people, project, policy, and technology. Make sure to check their work on GitHub and find guidelines on how to get involved and contribute. As a special surprise for the community, the group produced a children's book. This tells the story of Admin's bash Cloud Native journey after his legacy mainframe ends up at the bottom of the scene. It is based on the maturity model and includes key areas of people, process, policy, and technology. I hope you enjoyed the surprise and invited to join the group for a live reading on Thursday at 11 a.m. Since last KubeCon, the end user community has produced two technology radars. The technology radars are an assertive guide for new adopters to a set of emerging technologies. In June, we released the multi-cluster management tech radar featuring tools such as cluster API, terraform, and cops. This edition of the tech radar had an additional graph showcasing widely used core services installed during the bootstrapping process, such as helm, operators, and customized. Make sure to check the latest radars at radar.cncf.io. Training certifications are highly sold by the end user members. We've had over 100,000 registrations for CNCF exams alone. Last year, CNCF introduced the CKS or Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist based on the feedback from the community to create highly skilled security professionals. This year, the community feedback revealed the need for a more beginner-friendly and inclusive evaluation. Our current training programs are aimed at professionals with hands-on experience. However, there is a need for education that is also relevant for beginners across different jobs, from engineers to project managers to marketing. In the past months, I have led the creation of a new certification, and I am delighted to welcome KCNA, or Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate exam, to the CNCF collection. This is a multiple-choice entry-level certification that grants novice adopters the ability to demonstrate their skills and knowledge of Cloud Native ecosystem. Recently, we kicked off with a beta testing stage, and if you'd like to get involved, go to cncf.io. Ford slash KCNA dash beta. The form is open for two days, and it will close on Friday, October 15th, at 4 p.m. UTC. We have only 400 slots available, so make sure to register your interest now. I cannot wait to see how KCNA will impact the student community and everyone new to Cloud Native. Now, when I joined my first keep-con in Seattle, I could not even imagine how extensive and overarching Cloud Native would become. Since then, I have met and collaborated with many incredible individuals and organizations from all around the world. But my Cloud Native story started a bit earlier before my flight to Seattle. It all began with me applying for the Diversity and Inclusion Scholarship. That was the checkpoint that made the difference in my career and inspired me to make the Cloud Native ubiquitous. As such, I would like to encourage everyone to continue building a diverse community. Also, if you'd like to take charge of your end user journey, go to cncf.io for its slash end user and find out why you should join the cncf end user community today. This is Katie Gananji and I look forward to seeing how you can shape the Cloud Native ecosystem. Have an extraordinary keep-con. Thank you.