 Live from Austin, Texas. It's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and the Kube's ecosystem partners. Well everyone, welcome back to our exclusive coverage from theCUBE here in Austin, Texas. We're live on the floor at CloudNativeCon and KubeCon, KubeCon, like KubernetesCon, not the KubeCon us, but KubeCon. We have Michelle Norelli, who's the senior software engineer at Microsoft, also the co-chair with Kelsey Hightower, great event, record-setting attendance. I'm John Furrier, your host with Stu Miniman. Michelle, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much for having me. So people don't know, but they might've watched the stream. If you had a stream, you were on stage, keynoting and managing the whole program here. Congratulations. Thank you. More attendees here at this event than all the other KubeCon and CloudNativeCon combined. Chose the growth and interest in a new way to develop, new way to engage with other developers and create value. And Kubernetes has been the heart of it. Explain, CloudNativeCon and KubeCon, what's the difference? Because I love CloudNative, but what's this Kubernetes thing? I love that, too. How does it relate to the intertwined explain? Take a minute to explain. There's a really big Kubernetes audience and community and they need time to engage and just work with each other and learn from each other. And that's where KubeCon came from. So KubeCon was the original conference. And the first one was in November in Seattle in 2016. And I was actually at that one, there's a few hundred people. And it was just so small. People were actually asking like, what is the pod? What is Kubernetes? Which are fine questions asked today as well. But it was everyone was asking this question. Nobody was past that point. And then Kubernetes was donated to the CNCF and there were also these other CloudNative projects that came about in the space. And so we wanted a conference that encompasses both all of the CloudNative projects as well as serves the Kubernetes community as well. So that's where both of them came from. Some of the other CloudNative projects have their own conferences like Prometheus has PromCon. And that's been growing as well. I think the last one was 200 people up from 70 the last time. So I got to ask you because we've been covering us. We were there at the KubeCon. I was actually having drinks with Luke Tucker, J.J. We're like, hey, we should do this Kubernetes thing and bolt it on to the Linux foundation. So we've been present at creation with the whole team. It's been fun to watch. Wow, yeah. But it's the tale of two stories in the community in the industry. Companies that got funded and were building open source and our participants who were building projects out and a new onboarding of new developers coming into the community. A lot of first timers here. Seeing a visibility into the success of Cloud and they're regal and engaged. So you got a lot of folks who have invested into the community and new entrants, a migration into the community. What does that dynamic mean to the CNCF? How is that impacting how you structure the programming? And what are some of the insiders talking about? What's the reality? Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with, you know, this is a really positive community and there are just like so many people working together and collaborating, not just because they, I mean, it's nice to be in a positive community, right? But you kind of have to. Like these problems are really hard and it's good to learn from different organizations that have like come across these projects or problems in the space before and they'll come and collaborate. I think some of the things that we've been talking about inside the community is how to actually, how to onboard people. So the Kubernetes community is starting up a new mentorship program to help people that are new to the community start learning how to review code and then PR code and be a productive members in the community and whatever area they want to be in. Michelle, I want to hear about kind of some of the breadth and depth of the community here. You know, when there's so many announcements, there's a bunch of 1.0s. There's a bunch of brand new projects. I think what it was four projects a year ago and it's now 14, you know, right. How does somebody supposed to get their arms around it? Should they be thinking about that? You know, where should somebody start? You know, what do you recommend? Yeah, start with the, that's a great question by the way. I think that people should start with a solution to a problem they already have. So just know that people have run into these problems before and you should just go into the thing that you know about first. And then if that leads you to a different problem and there's a solution that the CNCF, you know, has already come across, then you can go into and dive into other problems for example. I am really interested in Kubernetes and have been in that space. But I think tracing is really interesting too and I want to start learning how to incorporate that into my workflow as well. So, yeah. So Michelle, you're also one of the diversity chairs for the event. Can you talk about kind of the diverse global nature of this community? Yeah, we're spread across all time zones. So I actually want to share an experience that I have as a sick lead in Kubernetes. So at first I really wanted to serve all of the time zones and so we have these weekly sick meetings at 9.30 a.m. Pacific. And I was like, no, maybe we should have like alternate meetings, like alternate weekly meetings for other time zones. But after talking to those, the people in the other time zones like, that are very far off actually like China, Asia Pacific, I realized that they're actually more interested in reading notes and watching videos, which is something I didn't actually know. You know, it's, you think like, oh, you have to serve every community in the same way. But what I've learned- Like face to face. Yeah, face to face, exactly. And that's not actually how, that's not how actually everybody wants to interact. And so that's been an interesting thing I've learned from the diverse nature in this space. What's the challenges? I mean, we've been talking, we were just at the re-invent last week at Amazon, obviously the number of services that they're rolling out is pretty strong, and they're the leader in the cloud. But as multi-cloud becomes the choice for most enterprises and businesses, the service requirements, the baseline, has got to be established. Seeing your community rolling out a lot of great new services. But storage, old storage is transferring to machine learning and AI. And you got IoT right around the corner. So you have new kinds of applications. Yeah. It's changing the game on the old guard. Storage and security, obviously two important areas. You got to store the data. Data is at the card of the value proposition. And then security, security. How are you guys dealing with those challenges? Those are political grounds that people have a lot of money in. I mean, old storage, I mean, ship a storage drive and here's an architecture. Those are being disrupted. Yeah. I think they'll continue to be disrupted. I think people are just going to bring in more new and new use cases. And then people will come and meet them, meet those customers where they are. And people just have to change, I guess. Get used to it. Shift or die. Yeah, I think that we are getting to that point, but I can't, only time will tell. We'll see. What are some of the exciting things that you see from the new developers? I've recognized some friends here that aren't one year in the community or new. And they're kind of like looking at their shops like, wow, what a lot of excitement. I could build value and I could have a distribution. I got a community and I can make money. And then Dan said, project, products, profits. He put the profit motive right on the table, but he's clear to say not pay to play. It's okay to have profits if you have a good product from a project. I buy that. But the new developers like that because it's an end scoreboard. What are you guys doing with that new community? What's the vibe there around those kinds of opportunities? You guys creating any programs for them or? Yeah. I think just to just, they can get involved. I think knowledge is power. Perspective is power also. So being involved helps give you a perspective to see where those gaps are and then come up with those services that are profitable or those tools that are profitable. And I think this space can be very lucrative based on the number of people here. It was a 20 sponsors, I think he said. Michelle, I was wondering if you can comment when you're building the schedule, how do you balance all those platinum sponsors versus some of the practitioner companies that are also getting involved? How do you look at that? Yeah, there are different levels of sponsorship, like you mentioned. The events team has a sponsorship section or a sponsorship team and they handle most of placing sponsors and all of that. And so they'll get whatever level they want. But actually Kelsey and I do a lot of research into what's happening in the community, what's interesting, what's new, and we'll find time to highlight that as well. Lots of research. What's your role at Microsoft? Share with the audience, what are you working on? What's your day-to-day job? Is it just foundation work? Are you doing coding? What are you coding? What's your favorite? The VIE, Max, what do you prefer? I mean, share some. That's awesome. Yeah, so my work is 30% community and 70% engineering. I really love engineering, but I also really love the community and just getting these opportunities to give back, you know, build skills as well, learning how to speak in front of people as well. These are valuable skills to learn and it gives me an opportunity to just give back what I've learned. So I appreciate those. But I mostly work on developer tools that are open source that help people use containers and Kubernetes a little more easily. So I work on projects like Helm, Drafts, and Brigade. And these are just like things that we've seen, the pain points that we've experienced and we want to kind of share our solutions with them. So Draft is the one I've been working on a lot. Have you heard of Draft? No. Okay. Let me give you the two second thing. Draft is a tool for application developers to build containerized apps without really understanding or having to understand all of what is Kubernetes and containers. So that's my favorite space to be in. You know, one of the things we look at coming in here is there's that balance between, there's complexity, but there's flexibility. You know, I've heard Kelsey talking about this a lot. When I talk to customers, they're like, oh, I love Kubernetes because I take Vault and I take Envoy and I take all these different things and put together and it does what I want. But a lot of people are daunted and they say, oh, I want to just go to Microsoft Azure and they'll take care of that. So how do you look at that? And what is the balance that we should be looking for as an industry? Yeah, we've been emphasizing in the community a lot on plugability across projects. It's like a theme that I think almost every project hits and a word that you'll hear a lot. I'm sure you already have heard a lot. And I think that's because you can't meet everyone's needs. So you build this modular component that does one thing very well and then you learn how to extend it and or you give people the ability to extend it. And so that's really great for scaling a project. I do really appreciate the clouds coming out, all of them, with their own managed services because it's hard to operate and understand all of these things. It takes a lot of depth and knowledge, context and just prior experience. And so I think that'll just make it a lot easier for people to onboard onto these technologies. I was going to ask you. I was going to ask you to write up plugability. So we saw Netflix on stage was this phenomenal, love the culture dynamic. I think that's a super important conversation. We've been talking about style change as a real part of what we're seeing tech being a part of. But the things that popped out at me in the keynote were service mesh and pluggable architecture. So I want to get your thoughts for the folks that aren't that in the trenches and inside the ropes. What is a pluggable architecture and what is a service mesh these days? Because you got Lyft and Uber and all these great companies who have built hyperscale and large scale systems in open source and now are big tech success stories donating these kinds of approaches. Plugable architectures and service mesh. Take a minute to explain. So pluggable architectures. This is when you have one layer of your, there's a piece of software that does something, does one thing very well. But you know, every, I like to say that every company is a snowflake and that's okay. And so you may have some workflow or need that is specific to your company. And so we shouldn't limit you to just what we think is the right solution to a problem. We should allow you to extend or extend these pieces of software with modular components or just extensible components that work for you. Does that make a little bit more sense, yeah? I work on Hellman. We also have a pluggable architecture because we were just getting so many requests from the community and it didn't make sense to put everything in the core code base. If we accepted one thing, it would really just interrupt somebody else's workflow. So that's helped us a lot. And in my personal experience, I really like pluggable architectures. So that means you can go build a really kick butt app, nail it down for your specifications, but decouple it from a core or avoiding kind of the old spaghetti code mindset, but kind of creating a model where it can be leveraged. That right, plug in, we all know what plugins are. So that someone else could take advantage of it. Exactly, yeah. Service mesh, that's evolved, we've heard a lot of that. What is that? Yeah, so developers, this is actually, the Lyft story is really interesting to me. So at Lyft, developers were really uneasy about moving from the monolith to the microservices architecture just because they didn't really understand the network component and where network reliability would not be so reliable, would fail. And so, service meshes have allowed engineers at Lyft to understand where their failures happen and in terms of a network standpoint. And so you're basically abstracting the network layer and allowing more transparency into it. This is very useful for when you have lots of microservices and you want this kind of reliability and stability. Awesome, so 1.9 is coming, it's going to support Windows. That's the key announcement, congratulations. Just going to the next level, I mean, growth. Talk about the growth because it's fun for us to watch kind of a small group core, young community, less than three years old, really two, Kubernetes kind of had some traction, but it really is going to be commoditized and that's not a bad thing. So what's your take on this and what's the vibe? What's the current feeling inside the community right now? Excited, pinching ourselves? Yeah, no, I think everybody is in awe. And we're just like, we want to make this the best experience possible in terms of an open source experience. We want to welcome people to the community, we want to serve people's needs and we just want to do a good job because this is really fun and I think the people working on these problems are having a lot of fun with seeing this kind of growth and support. It's been great, certainly for us, President and creation of this whole movement, it's been fun to watch a document. Final question, what should people expect this week, what is the show going to hopefully do, what's your prediction, what's your purpose here, what should people expect this week and the folks that didn't make it, what did they miss? Okay, there are so many things happening, it's insane, you're going to get a little bit of everything, there's lots of different tracks, lots of diverse content. I think when I go to conferences, in my personal experience, I really love technical salons. Those are really great because you can get your hands dirty and you can get questions answered by the people who created the project. That's an experience that is really powerful for me. I went to the first open tracing salon and that's where I kind of got my hands dirty with tracing and Ben Siegelman, who's doing the keynote today this afternoon, was the person who was teaching me how to do this stuff, so. How cool is that? Yeah, it was awesome. It's not like some marketing fluff pitch. No, it's not and it's just like, it's real experienced, very expert, like experts in the space teaching you these things. So that definitely can't be replicated, I think. The SIG sessions will be really cool. There's a big focus on not just learning stuff, but also collaborating and just talking about things before they get documented. So that's a really good experience here too. And it's an action-packed schedule. I tweeted that. It feels like when Burning Man had like 100 people and now it's this big thing. I think this is the beginning of an amazing industry. People are cool, they're helpful, they're getting involved, answering questions. Open book here at Cloud NativeCon. You've got thanks, Michelle. You're really becoming my co-chair, senior engineer at Microsoft. Great to have her on the Cube. Great keynote, great color, great fun. Exciting times here at Cloud NativeCon. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE Media with Stu Miniman, my co-host. More live coverage after this short break.