 Good evening, CloudNatives, and welcome back to KubeCon, CloudNativeCon here in Chicago. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by our fabulous analysts and my co-host, John Furrier. John, day two, energy's high, stamina's high, information is high. How are you feeling? Doing good. I think we got a great wrap-up panel, Joe's back, Dustin's back. We've got great analysts. Day two. I'll throw this time around. Well done on the group there. Yeah. All good. Just two days of packed coverage, and it's just again, the acceleration of this community, and with AI, it's the backdrop of this one. They didn't have it in Amsterdam. It's just a tailwind, and even though the economic times are tight, it's still positive all around. It's an A-plus ecosystem. Open space is everywhere. Open source dominates, and I think it's going to be an AI future. I think so, I love it. Well, I can't wait to hear what our analysts have to say. Joe, I want to start with you. Just give us a little summary of your day. What did you see? What did you learn? What did you hear? I love John's concept of what are they saying in the hallways. So I actually took the time to go sit with a couple of different people, and chat with them about what they were thinking. And I kept hearing the same thing. I want more AI. I want more AI love. I need AI love. I need AI use cases. I need to know more. So, I mean, it's like on everybody's- Curious, excited? Yeah. Seems like positive, hopeful vibes. Absolutely. More and more AI. Just like Bob's suggestion. I love that hall. All the actions in the hallway. The lobby and the hallway, it's all right there. I was talking to actually one of the chairs of the tracks about the CNCF tracks here, and he said actually the most important track is the hallway track. Which I thought was- Is there a chair or the hallway track? Yeah. Do we need a chair? Yeah. But I thought it was really cool. Dustin, I'm really curious about your observations today. I spent today with developers, and there's kind of a couple of different groups of developers. My people were, for a long time, the Kubernetes developers themselves. Some of the key sysadmins, turned DevOps, turned software engineers that built lots of the cloud-native infrastructure. Today, I spent time with the developers writing applications that run inside of a container, that run inside of a Kubernetes. Some of those being open source applications that are part of this infrastructure. Some of those being proprietary intranet type apps as well. So it's really interesting to hear from them. It was interesting to hear some of the developer efficiencies that they are seeing and feeling. Part of it around AI. We talked to, you and I, talked to GitLab earlier today, Savannah. 7x efficiency. That was just using GitLab. They're going for 100x once people have implemented their AI engine. Yeah. So that's how I spent my day. Really interesting. Would you say the developers on the progress bar are satisfied with all the containers and all the challenges and the complexity that's being abstracted away as the industry? Where do you see their perspective? Where's their psychology? Where's the progress bar? How would you peg the ending we're in? Or how would you describe this state of where they're at? Yeah, I think a lot of momentum, a lot of momentum in the right direction. I think we are snowball rolling downhill at this point. It's not some of the friction and headwinds we've experienced. If you've been around this industry 20-something years, I know you have, John. Microsoft didn't use to make it easy for open-source developers to do what open-source developers do. Those headwinds are gone and I think that's helpful. But I am interested in where are the friction points. This is core to my blood. How do we make things go faster? There's still some headwinds and friction around some of the various language ecosystems and how do you create that code, package that code, put it into a container, do so efficiently through CI CD. Had a really interesting hallway track conversation around Rust in particular, being particularly difficult in some cases to package and containerize. And then I would also say and conclude with, there's a lot of unpackaged software out there. And I'm talking Python modules, Ruby, Gems, lots of third-party software NPM, and the entire world of GitHub and GitLab and just open-source code that's out there, but that's not in a package repository. Joe, you got some notes on some ops. One of the trends that we're looking at we're unpack is the role of Dev and ops, obviously Dev Ops. My favorite line of the week so far is yesterday, Savannah on theCUBE, the person said, are Dev and ops teams having lunch and dinner together? They're kind of hanging out. And I said, dogs and cats living together. You know, from that famous line in Ghostbusters. Because that's really, that is the answer we need to see is Devs and ops playing nicely. So I'd love to get your thoughts on how the ops world is changing. What do you have for us? I mean, if we're talking about peanut butter and jelly, let's up level and let's talk about Dev's sec ops. I mean, that is like- Yeah, let's put the loaves of bread in there, let's add a little honey, make a little marketing, you know, yeah, seriously. Yeah, well, first of all, let me say that this feels like a very, very enterprise environment, right? It is not some guys or gals hanging around in hoodies anymore. This is mainstream stuff that we're seeing. And we're seeing containers occupy a larger percentage of, not on the infrastructure, but the budget. So some of the decisions are flowing that way as well. But I think that there is struggle. You know, they're trying to move really fast, but from a percentage standpoint, they're not necessarily getting all the tools that they need to do what they need to do. And I think that there's still this silo situation going on. There's the infrastructure guys, and then there's the dev-op guys. And there aren't really tools that go across both environments. What do you think? I love that you said the word budget right there. And I think that's super important. Yesterday we talked about open source business models. Open source doesn't necessarily have to mean monetarily free or free in every case or every use case. I certainly have seen budgets actually free up from the CIO and the CISO, the C-suite in general, funding certain technologies that are transformative regardless of whether it's open source or not. And paying for quality, paying for value, paying for security. So I agree, Joe. The other thing I want to bring up and bubble up is the idea of workload placement. As this does become more of an enterprise play. Very relevant. Right? Yeah. Who decides whether it goes in a container or who decides whether it goes in a VM? Or why is it still in a VM? Do we like it in a VM? Are we comfy in a VM? Is this a legacy thing? Yeah, right? Is it a legacy thing? Like is the thinking shifting or is it just comfortable where we are? I don't know. And so who makes that workload placement decision and how is that made? Well, what's going to come down to what AI will tell us? Maybe AI can assist us. No, this came up as a legit answer in one of the sessions. AI will help on some of these challenges around where to put the best practice or the run book, whatever you want to call it. This has come up as automating some of the playbooks. And the other one is the Kubernetes clusters. How big are they? What are they running? What are you seeing, Joe, on stats on Kubernetes clusters and the kinds of deployments you're seeing? What's that? I have a couple of notes, so let me go to my notes. Yeah, give us the data. So, you know, stats, right? 56% of businesses have more than 10 Kubernetes clusters and 69% run Kubernetes in multiple clouds or other environments with 80% expecting their scale to grow. And I stop and I think about that as an engineer, right? I think about, you're an engineer. I think about, whoa, how do I manage that? Oh, how do I secure that? Oh, I'm in trouble. Like, I need help. They're investing in it, it's happening. Right, right. So what happens next? I think that it becomes a real conversation about money. Open service is not free, necessarily. Or you might get some of it free, but you still have to secure things. Yeah, I would just say you have to expect to pay for value, you have to expect to pay for value. And when there is a clear value transition, then there's an exchange of funds. And I think we've done that everywhere else in the entire world and only recently have we really figured out some of the open source business models where, you know, it makes that palatable. I think the interesting conversation around containers and VMs is a good one, because you've got bare metal on premise. The on premise is different than the cloud services model. And so as you reconcile and kind of get that in cloud ops, they got to make that run together. So I think that's going to be very interesting to see. I can see use cases for bare metal on premise with running VMs. I can see microservices in the cloud. The question is that's where the Kelsey Hightower debate came into earlier today around, do I code on my machine hardware? Or do I use code in the clouds to develop our environment question? But it's almost got 700,000 views on Twitter. Everyone's coming out, we're in a hybrid work environment. But the debate was, are developers going to use machines or the cloud? And that just, it just went viral. And I think it hit a nerve, Justin and Joe and Savannah on what the preferred user experience is for developers and combined with hardware versus cloud. So it's kind of like multiple elements of polarization going on there. Are you for the cloud or you're on premise? I think it's for efficiency though. I mean, I think it's for ease of use and decreasing complexity and getting it done. I think the reason people are thinking about doing it on premise is right here and if my computer's fast enough, I can do it. That's, it's more the simplicity of that. It's that ease of use that we've been talking about. I think, yeah, I can tell you're anxious to chime in, Joe. Well, I, my mind goes a different direction. I think about, because what I see when I'm out in the field is I see domain ownership. And what I mean by that is OT environments maybe are using edge. And so they might be using bare metal and that's controlled by that BU or whoever is designing that the design engineers in that group, right? And then you have another group in the house that is maybe, you know, cloud native group. And then you have this other group, maybe more legacy workloads that, you know, they're using VMs. So I think it really depends on who's controlling the budget, skill set, and comfort level. Like manufacturing, that could be completely. I think that's a great point too. And what you're trying to do. Yeah. Yeah, you asked me a question, Joe, a little bit earlier if I thought, you know, all workloads would move or should move or could move from virtual machines to containers. And I'll actually back that up one and say, you know, and or bare metal. And I think personally, no, I don't think so. I think there's different levels of security domains that you want to, and threats you want to protect against. In some, many, maybe even most cases, containers with all of the security dressings that we can put around it are good enough for a whole lot of workloads, but not all workloads. Sometimes you do need the virtual machine barrier. And sometimes you need the physical machine barrier, you know, depending on what types of attacks you're trying to protect from. So I certainly don't take a container exclusive. The tool for the job. A zealous approach. A horse for the horse, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right, let's talk about development environments. Dustin, we've been riffing on this for theCUBE. Savannah, this came up a lot on your segment at GitLab. It comes up every time. Ease of use, the developer environments, they're setting the agenda based what they vote with their code. They choose environments. We had the coder guys on with Kelsey. That was a big part of that conversation was the debate never really happened. It was more of an agreement of how people want to work in this world of more global, we live in a flat world. It's remote, it's hybrid, it's cloud and then on-premise. What do you guys think about the conversations you're hearing around developer environments? I'll speak as a developer and say we love solving problems, but we are particular about the problems we want to solve, okay? If we want to write some code to solve a problem, that's the problem we want to be focused on. Not some other problem somewhere else. And I will say for too much of my career to solve the problem I wanted to solve, there was a whole list of other ones that I had to solve first, okay? And by me, take that one person and extract that to a team and say 10 people, extract that to an org, to a hundred, or a company to a thousand, and you multiply that problem over and over and over again. So back to Kelsey's point from earlier, I think it's really about giving people the tools that they need and letting them focus on the problem, their domain that they very specifically want to solve and have the expertise to solve. I think that's a good point. Joe, what's gotten you most excited today? Oh, man. I can feel your energy and I feel like you've really brought it all day, which is great, I mean that genuinely. So I'm curious what's been stoking your fire? So I think about, you know, my mind goes to AI security and my mind goes to how are we going to use open source to use foundational models, you know, that are going to in turn become privatized models and how can we kind of take from both sides of the universe and make it the best thing? And where is that going to live, right? And how are we going to think about- Great questions, I think half this room is like, it's chewing on right now for sure. That's what I think. I think that's, I'm excited to see some of the governance that comes out. I'm excited to see some of the thinking that happens and I think, you know, who wins is who is able to scale the fastest. Yeah. I think we all agree there. I mean, I'd love to get your guys' thoughts around last KubeCon, Amsterdam, and then KubeCon North America last year. What's changed and what wasn't? Because security continues to be the conversation. But remember, Watson was a huge thing last one. Last two. Not a lot of WebAssembly conversations, not a lot of Docker conversations. So I feel like Docker has kind of lost its presence a bit in this community from a vibe standpoint, not a lot of conversations around Docker, other than the reunion of the old Docker I spoke about last night. And- The people are here. The people are here, but they've moved on. So Docker has legacy, but like also WebAssembly, you know, our friends, our Mads company, they're not on the front lines anymore. Is there anything that's kind of lost, I won't say it's lost favor, but like- It's still going on. But what's rising and what's not rising from previous KubeCons? I think in previous KubeCons, for better or worse, we're very much dominated by the hyperscalers. A lot of Google, a lot of Amazon, a lot of Microsoft, Azure, that dominated the narrative. And all of them are here. They're, you know, they've got the biggest booths and you know, and also the paid keynote spots. But it's not as dominating as it may be it used to be. There is a lot of small to medium- You're right about that brand presence though. You don't feel it the same way. Yeah. Which is really interesting. It does feel like there's a lot of community companies. Software supply chain's still buzzing, right? Yep. Software supply chain's still happening. Oh yeah. For sure. Big. Developer productivity. Yeah, Sbom, Sigstore. Wasm, I'm glad you brought that up. That's another thing that I think we'll be talking about even more six months and a year and two years from now. I think we're still kind of early there. Yeah. You think we're early? I think that conversation is still maturing. So to your point, I don't know that it's not on the forefront. I think it's still. It's boiling. It's a howl away conversation. Yeah, I would say it's percolating right now. Where it hasn't quite punched into that extreme relevance. I'm curious if the audience here would like to hear more about that. That's maybe some content that we could offer some extra insights into. Let us know. We'll check our QBAI on that one. That'd be a good way to check. What should we do next? What should we do next? While you're here, let's go. Dustin, Joe, what do we have? What are we missing? I'm going to say it again. I said it earlier. I think that we're going to see lots of AI security come into the fold the next time we all meet and are here. I think there's going to be all these cool little companies that pop up about some form or fashion of governance. Right? What that looks like, you know? That's governance internally. Governance externally. Sovereignty, right? Is going to be a thing, is a thing, right? We had the EO roll out. Yeah. And how is that going to affect us and shape us? Is it a field of dream situation where we're going to attract some great talent to the US in AI because of that? You know, that's exciting. That's a great statement that you just posed. I think we're at a stage, I totally agree with you. And I think we're at a stage now where there's a lot of noise and so much excitement and it's kind of like everyone's yelling in the cafeteria before the assembly starts, kind of thing, like we're all so excited, but we're not quite sure exactly what's going on. We're excited and we know that we like it, but we want to see it. And I think what we'll be talking about, my prediction, is I think when we're in Paris, we'll be talking a little bit about some of the darlings, some of the companies that are starting to show favor within a lot of different players or the solutions to your point. There's going to be security and governance that pops out. And we'll have more brand recognition, I think, or at least consistent community engagement around some of these core pockets of engagement instead of everyone just saying, oh my God, I got to do it right now, which I don't blame everyone for jumping on it and I love the entrepreneurial ambition that is not a put down. I just think we'll have a little more clarity. I mean, Paris, seeing about Paris, I think you're going to have a, see a clear line of sight into who's in the production. That's going to be the KPI I'm watching. We're going to reinvent and we'll look at what reinvents got going on. All the general AI experiments and the stuff that's percolating is going to come to a boil and we'll see who pops out. I think the key is going to be what goes in the workload, what workload's going to production, that have AI in it, even at some element. That's going to be number one. Then you're going to see people filling in the gaps. The white spaces are some of these infrastructure, guardrail, platform engineering stuff. I'm going to take off the developer hat for a minute and put on the investment banker hat and say, I think- How do those hats look different? Oh, very, very different. Have you seen an investment banker hat? Very different than about- They're definitely more expensive hats. I want to, you know, we do that. We bought some tailored hats. We bought some tailored hats on the show yesterday, so I'm chuckling sitting to myself. What does that hat made of? Yeah, exactly. It's Italian, so. Hey, what are we? Okay, so I think there's something, like if we get off of technology for just a second, I think we've got some big macroeconomic trends that are going to determine what the world looks like in six months in Paris, okay? Still on the inflation, is inflation slowed? You know, is the Fed still rising rates? Are we going to start seeing, you know, a little more growth? Is this recession coming or not? Plus two wars going on in the Middle East and in the Ukraine, okay? So there's a lot going on. Yeah. If things turn in a positive direction, I think you're going to see a heck of a lot more growth and back to the investment banking. I think you're going to start seeing some IPOs coming out, which has slowed down quiet a bit over the last- That's a great call out right there. Yeah, what was just mentioning that KLab had IPO'd on the floor when we were at UConn in 2021. And 2021 was hot. Yeah. 2022 and 2023 have been quiet on the IPO part. I would just throw my banker hat on, my M&A hat on, my private equity hat on, say there's going to be the startup gutting going on now. Startups are struggling right now. Oh, it's already happening. You're going to see a struggling of consolidation of startups that had good of teams and old business models like education, you're going to see a complete consolidation of new back-end models around graph data. I think AI will start hitting really high-end areas immediately out of the gate, like education, healthcare. You start to see these verticals consolidate old and to bring in the new, and the new players are going to be net new, and then the old players will be consolidated. I think you're on to something there. My question to you is, is that M&A and a more active M&A posture, is that a result of slowing macroeconomics or bull macroeconomics? I think two things. One is distressed expectations. This is education. Overfunded learning management systems are old. They help people learn a different, how people develop. So those areas are essentially the people that are underserved with the technology. So that has to consolidate. You'll see that crash. And then there is going to be inadequacy of the interface. I think just doesn't work and people don't want to use it. And it's going to force economics out of the gate. You'll see a slow burn. And then they're going to be like, wait, we're going to be dying on the vine. So that's going to be the low-hanging M&A fruit there. And then the positive side is the net new startups that see the young or innovative, that's an opportunity and they build it up and they come out of the gate net new. So a lot of that's going to go on. It might look ugly on one end, but beautiful on the other. So it's going to be very interesting to see. I think you're going to see doubling down of these ecosystem partnerships happening. Just going to make it. Man, we're on the same page. Loving it. I was literally just going to say that. Right. Get it. You're going to see companies like IBM doubling down with AWS, which they have. And what does that mean? Oh, the professional services money bags are coming out. Why? Because people need help. That's where the money is going to come from. And AWS has competition. Well, I mean, they're frenemies, right? No, and there's all these big players who are going to make the investments that may not come from capital outside. That's exactly where I was driving. You said it better than I did. We were on the same page. I love it. I love it. I have one final question we got to wrap up before they kick us out. You all have brought so much energy to the floor and you and I were talking about it. Dustin, what is your secret to having energy on the floor? Is it skittles? Is it coffee? Is it? I love some skittles. I'm going to tell you that. Coffee and a little bit of sugar. Yes, indeed. What's your secret? Oh man, flat shoes. That is such a good call. Comfortable shoes. I'm usually in sneaks. I broke my own rule. That's great. You commented on it earlier for me. You saw it on the same thing yesterday and today too I've got popcorn. I'm a true midwesterner at heart with my whole family being from here. I grew up in California, but popcorn fuels me. What about you, John? I just like having great conversations. The conversation with great smart people like Joe and Dustin. Oh, you're going to make it us? You've got to be all warm and kind about it. Sitting next to you gives me energy. Okay. I'll take that. At least my shirt color probably does. Thank you so much, Dustin and Joe. It's such a pleasure to have your wonderful analysis and insights with us. John, always a pleasure. And thank all of you for tuning in to day two of KubeCon CloudNativeCon here in the Windy City. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for emerging technology news.