 Thanks so much for coming, Keven Gemalgi, who is now part of the TLC and you know, doing been around I think in Kubernetes for a bit now. And you know, thanks for doing our little car interviews. And you want to tell us a little bit maybe about kind of your background, maybe how you got in the Kubernetes in the first place? Yeah, absolutely. Actually, thank you very much for having me here. It's a very unique interview, so definitely couldn't miss it out as an experience. In terms of myself, I'm currently a senior field engineer for Apple and pretty much I'm trying to bring the Kubernetes and cloud native expertise to different products and teams within Apple. However, I've been involved in cloud native for a very long time. I was this actually second term as a TLC. I've been working for CNCF as a full-time employee as well, so I have a lot of relations or connections with this community. What got me started was my job at Cundinast. That's when we had to create a platform from scratch and the basis of the fundamentals of it was Kubernetes. And that's how we implemented this, adopted it, but at the same time I got connected to the community. That was my first interaction and I never went back since. Did you get to travel to all of the Cundinast places? Actually, no. They had a quad-quarter in London. They still have it, but I've been based in London only. I think I was that close to visit the New York office as well, which is in the one-world trade. It's like a beautiful location with a beautiful view across New York, but I just gave my resignation, so I could enjoy it. It's too bad. Maybe in the future. Yeah, it always has really pretty pictures. The team itself is so very talented and the amount of inspiration they get out of nowhere is just amazing. It's very unique. Yeah, I'm sure. So, to ask a little bit about what do you feel like you're now on the TOC for the second time? What's keeping you there? What is so engaging about working with the Oversight Committee? It's a very good question. I think I always am very motivated to be involved in the community. For me, this is one of the best ways to give back, because yes, you can be a contributor in writing code, you can be a contributor being part of multiple SIGs and working groups, which I'm doing as well, but I would like to steer a bit of the decisions and actually be more of a kind of visionary in terms of what tools can be within the CNCF and what tools can be the right or the kind of the cutting-edge technology that the community can adopt and being in the TOC actually get that opportunity, not only to interact with the latest, like the newest startup companies, but to actually help them to be part of the landscape. So, pretty much we are steering this technical vision for the ecosystem and I like that very much. So, being the TOC, I think it's a very privileged position, it's only 11 of us in total and we have a two-year term base and you can do it only twice, but yeah, definitely we feel very privileged to be in that position and to actually influence from that regard. What's keeping me here, the community, I couldn't emphasize that enough. It's always meeting people from all around the world, different companies, they have such a diverse experience in terms of adopting technology and using it, but it's always nice to connect and actually explore how they do things and why they do things. So, I think that is never something that's always going to surprise me, that's what I'm trying to say. Yeah, yeah. And it's definitely a good place to be. Yeah, I think that's one of the beauties of kind of open source in general, right? It's like you can connect with the community around the stuff you're doing with way less secrets, right? Because, yeah, of course, there's some, what you're doing exactly in your internal organization or whatever is often secret, but you can kind of talk about it in concept, you can talk about, hey, what is this bit over here do? And I think that's a really, really nice way to kind of grow your own expertise as well as you can kind of benefit from the community experience and talking through something. Well, you can do that internally at an organization. It just widens the views, right? You know, so many more perspectives gives you so much more kind of feedback on what you're doing. So, yeah, I couldn't agree more. I couldn't believe how how much working at Red Hat changed my brain. Like, you know, I'd used open source, I've been involved in it a little bit before that. But once I was working at Red Hat, I was like, now I don't really understand why all software isn't open. It's really why that's not happening. We're talking about Red Hat. I used to work with, what was it? Oh, my goodness, OpenStack. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I think that was the first time when I was interacting with, like, data centers and actually doing onboarding from, you know, self-managed VMs to delegated management within OpenStack. So that actually got me into infrastructure. So, right, right, it must be due. Right. Yeah, from Red Hat, I moved to containers pretty much after. Instead of VMs. Yeah, well, I mean, everyone was talking about containers anyway. So I took the opportunity and explored it. Yeah. Well, for me, what really drove me about container, like because I've been, I've been like mostly just kind of a developer, right? I've never really worked ops, you know, and they're just so quick. All right, like you can, you know, you can whack out a container and like try something out and, you know, bang, you know, it works, right? Every time you don't have to worry about, do I have all the right stuff installed? Do I have to spit up a VM to make sure I can get that version of Python, which is conflicting with this other project I'm working on? You know, so it's like, I really, I really, really like containers. And yeah, I get made fun of for it, you know, at the university sometimes. Oh, my goodness. I'm okay. Maybe I shouldn't say that maybe off camera. But I'm posting like when I'm visiting KubeCon, I started to post this series of containers in that specific city. So like the actual ship. Oh, I saw your tweet. Yeah. And now I'm getting a lot of, yeah, a lot of that, you know, banter for that. So right, there's that. Yeah, I've, I have a couple of photos that I have in a lot of my talks, which is actually flower pots and using that kind of container, rather than like shipping containers. But yeah, so a whole bunch of, you know, I have one I really like, which is basically this wall of hanging flower pots of all different sorts. Yeah, because what I what I kind of like, it's kind of like you're trying to tell two messages at once, in the sense that I like using the mix of flower pots because everything, all the containers are different. But at the same time, the shipping containers, what's different is the stuff on the inside, right? But you can stack them all together. And that's a feature as well. But I just, you know, and there's deep perspective as well. And you see like all of these floor pots together, it's just like this beautiful, you know, green wall, right? You can wire and just like, it works. Everything works. Right, right. So yeah, totally cool. I was going to comment though on OpenStack when you were involved in that. I mean, that was, is right. Another really great community. I was always really impressed, especially with what I think OpenStack really brought to the table for a lot of people kind of unintentionally, was kind of config management and, you know, auto CI and all that stuff, they did such a good job in that community of, you know, auto CI for a very hard problem, right? Like testing VMs and wanting VMs and stuff is difficult. And it was so good, and it was so open, and so well documented and everything else. I really think it lowered the barrier to entry for a lot of organizations to commit to their own CI and CD. I think one thing that I appreciated when I was part of the OpenStack community is this ecosystem, like the idea of out of tree approach for your infrastructure. So it actually put components on building blocks that already happened from the Red Hat perspective. I think, well, I think this kind of it's a more natural approach nowadays. But back in the days, it was it was a bit of an innovation. Yeah. And everything I like is like these micro communities around projects as well, which we can see within the CNCF as well, like with different CIGs and different tags as well. So this kind of community work and maybe segregation of projects and interest, I think it's really, really nice kind of propagated within the CNCF as well. I think influences came from different communities. There's the Linux community, which actually had a very big say in terms of open governance and transparency and collaboration across different organizations. But like some of the the practices, I think they came from our foundations like the OpenStack ones. Right. Yeah, I would definitely agree. I think they like I said, it's kind of like OpenStack Kubernetes, you know, even Linux itself, or like the kernel, you know, the protocols in place and the, you know, the techniques and all that stuff is really, because it's all open, has really had a lot I hope or at least I believe right has a lot to do with the change in the industry in general to be so much more sophisticated. And it's been a really good thing because, you know, one of the things I always talk about with software is like, people compare it to like building a building. But it's really not. It's much more like writing a book in that you rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, you can actually rewrite and building that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It falls down and people are not the best comparison. So, and but the kicker, right, unlike writing a book, I guess you kind of do with a book, but the kicker is we can actually test it, you know, without, you know, a car going over a bridge and falling in the river. So, you know, and being able to make that a fully automated process such that the humans can just focus on the parts they need to work on such a big deal. But that could also be mostly showing my age because, you know, I've built, you know, a lot of software where we had very little ability to do anything automated. Yeah, I think when it comes to automation, I think within the since yeah, it's great. Like what I would really like to see is to make it more human friendly. Because I mean, YAML is great. Like there are many people who assume the YAML engineer title and you like that's what they do. They full time job and it's fine. YAML is good. However, it should be more readable. And it's not just within the Kubernetes, but like other tools that we integrate with with our infrastructure. So I really would like to see a more simplified developer experience all the way through. I mean, it's great. It's been doing, you know, a great deal. We actually change the Kubernetes industries and sectors across the world. Right. But I still think when it comes to like the next stage, I would really like to see that more simplified developer experience and actually make it a no brainer and make it just work kind of situation. So I really like to see that happening. And I think we're at the, you know, like at the edge of that initiative or some of the companies try to do that. Yeah. So looking forward to that. Yeah, I definitely agree. I mean, you know, as much as I hate to say it, one of the things I kind of miss about XML was the tooling around it was so good because XML was so horrible. And, you know, but at least what it meant was you could, you know, get nice, you know, ways of kind of interacting with it, you know, you could kind of test it to make sure that it was doing what you thought it was doing, you know, things like that. But yeah, it's, I had a friend who was, he did a little Python library that was what do you call it? It was called like any converter or something, but it would convert like YAML to JSON to, you know, whatever. And you could just kind of pipe it through. And I was joking around, joking around one day about XML. And so he actually implemented an XML output as well, mostly to make fun of me. Is it okay? Yeah. Fair enough. Okay. I thought using, oh, there is like an initiative using spreadsheets to manage your containers. And it's called, and it's called sheet ops, like with double E just to me. That is awesome. Yeah. So pretty much what you could do, you could pretty much see all of namespaces and amount of actually deployments you have in your namespaces and the amount of replicas. And if you change the amount of replicas in your spreadsheets from like five to ten or like decrease it, depends what you want to do, that would actually have an influence on your clusters. So it can get, you know, like this kind of ideas, they're horrible, but people implement them just for the fun of it. Right, right. Yeah. But again, I think this shows the interoperability. Like I'm trying to, actually when I presented that, I focused on the interoperability of our landscape rather than the actual sheet ops principle. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. And you know, I mean, because every business is largely run on spreadsheets, as horrifying as it is. Some with him horrifyingly, exactly. That's a bit, yeah. Nightmare fuel. It's still funny. I remember, I still remember being brought in for a project when I was in consulting, where it was a team of five or six of us and basically we were there so that this one person could retire. And basically we were building an entire system to replace this one guy's massive spreadsheets. Oh, I can just imagine. Yeah, it was both, you know, like I said, horrifying and at the same time, you're kind of like ridiculously impressed at the same time, you know. It is, like a whole business is running, like on this entire spreadsheet. Right, right. This is your backup, disaster recovery, like this is everything, but yeah, not sustainable, definitely, especially for the employees. Right. I'm looking around to make sure we're going in the right direction. It is a loop and we can't really actually get completely lost, but my brain has been known to try, so. It's very nice, like, to be honest, like the colors. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's just a beautiful fall. There is something about the, you know, fall colors and all that, you know. It's actually funny right now in kind of near where I live in Boston, right. There's a lot of, we get a lot of tourists who come and drive around basically to see the trees, and it makes the driving kind of terrifying in the fall. Oh, okay, okay. Because they're not locals, right, and they'll slow down to see a tree. Especially when they come from Britain, like when you have to drive on the other side and everybody, yeah, for the full juice of it. Yeah, so it's kind of, you know, it's exciting. It works as you get further north, like up into, you know, Maine and all that jazz. I would like the NAV to work again, but I don't know why it doesn't want to do its thing. I might have to pull it off. How many engineers does it take? Yes, exactly. I know that, so the car is really smart, and the problem is the car is really smart. That's the problem. Yeah, I can't figure it out. I think it's a good problem to have, maybe, but yeah, it's my first time in this kind of car. Right, it was my first time driving an electric, not, I mean. Was it full electric? It's not hybrid. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we actually plugged it in last night, which was another thing we had to, like, figure out how to do. How to charge it. But it's funny, it's one of those common problems, especially when you deal with, like, something that's like a really sophisticated piece of, like, technology. It's like, you don't want to break anything, so, you know, basically, we just didn't push hard enough, you know, because you want it, you don't want to, like, hurt it, you know, but at the same time, you know, to take the power out was, all right, Don't do it, don't do it. Yeah. Oh yeah, so cool. So, oh, I forgot, I was going to ask you about the award you wrote, one recently. Yes, that was the Woman in Take 100 award, which is pretty much celebrating the top most 100, well, top most technically infused. I don't even know how to say that. Influential, that's the word infused, technically infused. So, pretty much celebrating the top 100 women in technology across the UK. And that was a very big privilege, because that was a very important milestone for me. I celebrated the launch of the Cloud Native Fundamentals course. I celebrated the launch on the KCNA, or Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate exam. So, everything kind of happened at the same time. Oh, neat. Yeah. Yeah, that was a very kind of big push for me to lower the bar to entry for Cloud Native. So, for the course of actually explaining it from scratch, how can you apply Cloud Native principles, and we have the certifications of, because it's a multiple, it's a multiple choice exam, with our exams within the CF like CKED and CKA and CKS, you actually have a terminal and you have to know the commands to actually implement and pass the exam. While it's the multiple choice allows everyone with an interest in Cloud Native to still kind of demonstrate their knowledge and skills in the space. So, completely lower the bar to entry and get people certified. So, when I applied for the award, actually when I wrote the nomination description, was a lot of that work. And I'm happy that it was considered influential enough for me to get an award. Right, right. Oh yeah, that is definitely cool. I think that's, it's one of those things that's, you know, to be honest, it's partially why I went to work at BU is, is, you know, my partially running joke, right, is I want more people who don't look like me in my industry. And, but at the same time, they, it's one of those things that's so hard that's, you know, there's this really strong push that, you know, kind of anyone can be a programmer. And I think it, which I'm not sure that that's true. I mean, sure, anybody can be anything, but there's, I think one of the problems that technical people have is that they feel, because of how their brain works, they feel like what they do is very straightforward. And I think, because I'm one of those people, it's hard for me to get out of my own head to figure this out, but I think that there are some people who don't find it very straightforward, you know, that they just think differently. You know, it's kind of like, I was reading another article the other day about, you know, there's people who don't have an internal monologue because they think in pictures, or they think in emotions or whatever. And it's still, you know, because I definitely think in words, like all day, every day. And so I think it's a similar kind of, you know, people just think differently. And so I think the more ways we can kind of find, you know, opportunities to let more people kind of in the door, you know, it's more than just, you know, is that stuff documented well. It's also recognizing that people learn and think differently. Yes, I could not agree more. So one of the things, I mean, I know it's going to be kind of a plug to the course, but what I worked really hard on is to provide different ways or different methodologies to transmit information. So you have audio, you have video, you have like written text, you have exercises as well. It's like all like ways or like for people to adopt information or to digest information. So it's been way much more difficult to deliver the course because if you could have just, you know, just written like a wall of text and that's it. But like getting all of this done, I hope that more students will feel more closer to the space and actually get involved. I really, like one of my motivations is just to make people inclined to get involved and be part of the community. And then once they're part of the community, I think it's going to go smoother. Because what I like about Cloud Native is it's one of the most welcoming place. And it doesn't really matter where you work or where you're coming from. It's like as long as you kind of share the same ideas or like not the same ideas, but you want to contribute to the same values. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like in a again like respectable way, you know, in a transparent environment, I think people will align and will create amazing stuff. Well, also I think part of, you know, the push that we have around like the venture of an architecture is Cloud Native. It also minimizes kind of the amount you have to know about the infrastructure for you to write your business logic, right? Like, you know, if you're an expert in something, you know, that doesn't, and you can do a little bit of programming, you can with serverless, right, you can write your little bit without truly understanding, you know, how a Kubernetes cluster works, right? And that's a huge, hugely beneficial, you know, thing to do. Because that way, you know, it's also kind of more welcoming. But on the flip side of it, like, I think it's funny because, you know, we talk about the positive aspects of inclusion being, you know, that we're welcoming to people and all that. But it's also very selfish, right, in the sense that I really, really want more perspectives in the things that I build or deliver because they'll be so much better, you know, like if they can, you know, if for example, you know, you're talking about trying to produce, you know, content for people who are different kinds of learners than yourself. So not only is it more work just in, like, volume, right? But also, like, if I try to produce something that is, like, you know, for someone who learns better visually, I actually have a harder time doing that than I do written. Because I learn from writing. But so I have to, like, put myself in a different kind of brain, right, than to get some feedback. But then if I can welcome, you know, kind of more perspectives into the space, I can get feedback on whether it's actually good for visual learners. Or even better, they can work with you and actually reproduce that. Because they, you know, they are leaders in that space and they know how it works and they know how to deliver that as well. And everything I wanted to kind of mention here, which I think is very relevant, is the language barrier as well. Because I think lately, we have Asian communities joining Cloud Native. I mean, they've been part of the community quite a lot. However, for them to adopt, there is an actual language barrier, like the documentation is mainly in English, not everyone is proficient in English. And there have been a lot of community members that translated or kind of produced or written books about Kubernetes in their own local language. So yesterday, the Contributor Summit, one of them, was actually awarded for translating or pretty much closing the gap between English and Korean speaking Cloud Native community. And I think that was such, yeah. The regenerative breaking on here is still hard to get used to, because the car stops on its own much more than a normal car does, because it's using the breaking to the charging engine. And so it's a little hard to get the braking correct. Like the smooth thing. Right, because I'm normally a very smooth driver. And so, but the braking has been a little bit weird. So sorry about that. But yeah, so that's really awesome about doing multi-language. I've actually, it's funny, I've spent the last, I think, my streak is 250 days of Duolingo with Mandarin. Oh my goodness, Duolingo. Okay, when I hear Duolingo, I can only think about their, I mean, their own TikTok as well, but goodness mind, they have some dark humor sometimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure I'm actually learning the language, to be honest, but I am learning a lot of words. And so it's been kind of interesting, you know, I don't know, I just, my... So what language do you go for? I've been doing Mandarin. Oh, Mandarin. And it's funny because I've, so I was actually born in France. And so my first language was actually French. And so now, but I don't really speak French anymore, because I stopped speaking when I was growing up. But any other language, I kind of like add a French accent to it, because somewhere in the back of my brain is like, foreign means French, right? So, so like I kind of automatically do it. And I've heard myself do it with Mandarin, which is like all kinds of weird. To be honest, like Mandarin itself is very complex, because it's a sound-based language, and you have to be very careful of how you pronounce things. And then adding French on it. I cannot even comprehend. Yeah, so it's a little weird. But it's, you know, I mostly did it, like I said, my kids, you know, like many teenagers, you know, have to pick what language they want to do in school. And so my son had signed up for Mandarin, and I was, because I was trying to convince him to do Mandarin versus kind of one of the ones that you see all the time. And I was like, oh, I'll do Duolingo with you starting over the summer to get you ready. So I just kept doing it. He stopped. He's now taking an actual class, so he'll probably end up being much better at it than I am. Very quick. Yeah, kids learn so quick nowadays. It's just amazing. But it's been fun. And I partially, I also chose Mandarin too, because it is so different that I, you know, I wouldn't get bogged down in, you know, kind of like trying to use English, right, to figure it out and stuff. But yeah. What I like about Mandarin, I mean, maybe this is like a completely different topic is the fact that you had actually signs, and it's a very visual language to learn as well. And then the signs themselves, they make, well, the kanji, they actually make sense. So like if you put them together, you can actually decipher them. I think that's such a nicer story or way of learning. And that's where I've been struggling a bit with Duolingo is that because I'm not taking a proper class, like I can totally see how it would be really helpful if you were taking it along with a class. I'm not learning a lot about kind of like how the language works as much as like how to say this sentence. And I think I'm definitely getting some gaps there. But that's kind of their teaching style, right? It goes for vocabulary. So I think I'd be a little bit better off if I was doing kind of it as a supplement to like a real class. But I was looking actually at BU and actually take I could take the class at BU. That's really cool. That's some very nice perks of being in BU. Right, right. Yeah, you can enroll in anything. Yeah, exactly. And I could just kind of take a real class. So another thing is I'm involved with OpenEK. And this is a new non-profit organization that tries to improve the usage of open hardware data and software across the UK. So we're focusing on that area mainly for now. However, Amanda, our CEO, she's very, very inclined to make it like a worldwide kind of initiative. So it's been great. I'm part of the leadership team at the moment, focusing on the future founders, trying to get any new talent from the UK and kind of identify them and just make sure that they are aware of our organization and can get involved in open source early on. So that's what I'm doing with them. Yeah. Right. Unless I'm like my Liz Rice is involved as well. Yeah. But she's, I think Liz Rice, she's on the governing board. Because that's what I just interviewed. Yes. Yeah. I was like, wait, is my brain? Yes. So we have, we have a governing board, we have an ambassador program, and then we have the leadership team. So my full title is Chief Feature Founder. So and then we have, like within the leadership team, we have people who focus on sustainability mainly or the financial part of it. It's just like it goes really, really long stretch. You gotta run the whole kind of organization, right? But like I think it's very good to identify leaders in the areas and they can kind of create their own teams as well. Right. So as part of that, we have an honors list and we again try to celebrate talent from university. So last year we've identified 100 most in both students within open source and we celebrated them. We gave them a medal and everything, which apparently you cannot give a medal to anyone. We had to make sure that from a legal perspective, like an actual British law perspective, it's going to be fine because only the royal family would be able to to have a medal. Oh, interesting. Oh, yeah. But Amanda, she, I mean by background, she's Amanda Brooke, maybe to measure her name. By background, she's a lawyer. So and she got involved in canonical early on in her career and then now it's all about open source. So, yeah, she she made true. Everything is fine. That's really cool. But that's a very interesting nuance. Yeah, that's not one I ever heard. I think it's one of the interesting things. I don't know if it's still true, but if you're an American citizen and you get like knighted by the by, you know, the queen, not queen anymore, king of England, you instantly lose your American citizenship. If you pick up a title in another country because we're not allowed to have titles as Americans. And like I said, I don't know if it's still true or if that's why it's an honorary thing sometimes for like being knighted. But yeah, so that's supposed to be true. You also used to not be able to be a dual citizen with the U.S. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. One or one or not. Right. Yeah. But well, thanks so much for joining me. I'm sorry we could have talked about the opening case more. Yeah, no, no, it's absolutely fine. I was less lost than I thought I was. So I was a little concerned. Yeah. But thanks again. It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Yeah. It's definitely an interesting experience. And I'm glad I've done it. Yeah, yeah. It was a lot of fun. Cool. Thanks.