 All right, everybody, now for something completely different. I'm going to be talking about looking at our past to understand our future. It's a generic-sounding title. Hello, GRPCConf. My name is George Castro. I am a Developer Relations Advocate or something like that at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and I've kind of grew up in Cloud Native. I come from an ops background. If you've used Ubuntu, I worked on that for 10 years, and I've worked on Kubernetes, Kubeflow, Cloud custodian, and now I literally work for all of you at the CNCF, kind of look at our projects and see how we can make things more efficient, and as they say, the ecosystem going. My job is about ecosystems, but I haven't done a talk in like three years, so I'm also appealing to your empathy because I am so nervous. So yeah, I'm this guy, and I know what you're thinking. There's 172 projects in the CNCF. GRPC is one of them, and it's kind of my job to understand how this ecosystem works. But when you look at it, there's a lot of stuff. I don't know how many of you've gone to landscape.cncf.io, and you're like, oh man, another one of these? Someone's making another one of these? How many of these things could there possibly be? It's almost impossible for a single person to keep track of them. That's why we make tools to keep track of the things that you are all making, and that makes it very interesting. However, it's a great lens as to what's out there as well. But it's an actually very, very huge ecosystem. And I know this because on my first day, they said congratulations, you're now co-maintainer of the CNCF landscape, and that was great. But I did fly out of the way over here, and I want to talk about ecosystems, and I want to talk kind of about the unity and diversity of life of our software and the stuff that you are all making. Some of this is gonna sound like advanced common sense to some of you who are familiar with open source and how systems work and things like that, but I've also gotten a lot of feedback from people who are just getting started in open source and cloud native, and they want to understand what it is about all this stuff that makes it so exciting and what kind of wakes us up in the morning. Anybody know what this is? Who likes dinosaurs? Anybody? Of course. All right, we'll get to this guy in a little bit. So today I'm gonna talk about our technology, but I'm gonna use a different analogy than most people use. I'm gonna talk about dinosaurs because they're like pretty cool. And some of you might be surprised what we know today when it comes to dinosaurs than when we grew up thinking about dinosaurs. And as I sat there in my sabbatical thinking about I'm gonna try to figure out how open source works from a more macro economic perspective. I started to think of analogies and things that might be more approachable for people, but also give people the tools to kind of understand how the ecosystems of software work together by using nature as an analogy, especially because the creatures always adapt to the environment and usually not the other way around. So if the environment is gonna be our industry, think of your little projects as the organisms that live inside. And your software kind of goes through the same patterns, right? They grow and that kind of things. However, one of the problems that we have as human beings is we suck at deep time, right? So deep time is this concept where this is all of the existence of the universe and our little existence is the very end, right? And there was millions and billions and billions of years where nothing happened. And if we go back and think about our own prehistory, circa 2014, we're coming up on the 10th anniversary of Kubernetes itself, which means all of these other things are now getting to that age where we've gone through a life cycle. And sometimes we need to kind of wait to see how an organism evolves to be able to understand that. However, as human beings, it's very hard to figure that out. Anyone guess this dinosaur? It's an easy one. Anyone? All right, that's a stegosaurus. How about this one? Yeah, this is called a carnotaurus. We are closer to carnotaurus in time than carnotaurus is to stegosaurus because the whole concept of deep time is very difficult for us to graph. You might have heard the analogy that we are closer to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was when the pyramids were built, the same kind of thing. So we need to be cognizant that deep time is a difficult concept for us, especially when we're working on software because as we look at the life cycle of software, it's not that simple, right? We sit down and we try to make that CNCF landscape and where you sit, right? And then we try to draw neat little lines like container nerds that we are because everyone has to fit in a little box, right? But when in reality, it is a complex system of food webs and cladograms and these are just birds, by the way, right? So you have to do this for every single creature that's out there. And if you think about it, it's actually way more complicated than you think when you think about the relationship of your software with the things that consume it and the things that are important to it in the rest of the ecosystem. So if you think about it, the CNCF landscape is actually way simpler than the thing that it's trying to represent. I found this revelation particularly disturbing. So cloud native grew up fast, very fast, right? An entirely new ecosystem spinning up out of the need for these tools. Everyone had to have it, right? It was exciting and everyone's trying new stuff. And now we've seen this generation of cloud native software grow up and evolve. So some organisms are truly, truly massive, right? High inertia, it takes them a while to turn, right? But once they turn and get going, it's kind of hard for them to stop, right? And when a software project or something changes, sometimes that opens up new opportunities and niches for other software to kind of fill in that blank in the ecosystem. And sometimes it means that there's disruption and change in that part of the environment. And we have to account for that because while we do know that open source always does need that long-term maintenance, we also have to remember that the organizations that we work for are all about that next quarter, right? So we have to normalize that sometimes and we have to find that balance because generally speaking, the ecosystem does find a balance, predator and prey, resources, food, right? So the population tends to add and flow depending on these resources. So this kind of has led me down this road of trying to understand more specifically how the software is evolving and adapting to each other. So the way they do that in nature, here's Carnotaurus again. Why did Carnotaurus make it, right? At the end of the day, it didn't really make it. But for a long time, for millions of years in Cretaceous Madagascar, this was the top predator and lived for millions and millions of years, had a great run. And the entirety of human existence is a sliver of this creature's existence. What a cool species, huh? So let's talk about how species find their niche. Generalization, right? Software in these projects, they consume food. They consume resources. That is you, your attention. Congratulations, developers, your food, right? Your attention, the way you adopt stuff, the things that you contribute to, right? If you're an open source maintainer and you're on my page on GitHub, I have to compete with everybody else for your attention. That's why I spend so much time writing stuff, right? And we all do that. All these projects do that because we're trying to compete whether we like it or not for the same resources, your attention and adoption, right? So generalization is a good way to get there. Databases started off being very generalized, right? It's talk to front-end people that are like, I don't know, I run a front-end, I shove a thing in the database and then it comes back to me the same way I put it in. That's databases, right? And that's like my simple view because databases are a solved problem for me. When you talk to database nerds though, however, they just go deep. I was like, man, I hang out with Colonel engineers and I'm like, oh man, so it gets really complicated. So it really depends on the point of view and the specialization of that software because when you specialize to do things, it's riskier, right? This is a Therizonosaurus, a highly specialized creature. Growing those claws, very expensive. It got very, very big, right? So it had to eat a lot, right? So it invested in those things in order to survive because there was a niche that needed to be filled in that ecosystem based on the conditions at the time. This is called the Dynachyrus, one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. I don't know, and you think about it, sometimes when you look at software and you're like, I have no idea why people made these decisions, right? And then you look at it and you're like, what designed this thing, right? The environment designed that thing. They even came in different sizes. It just wasn't one pattern. It came in all sorts of different sizes. Also imagine what kind of creature eats this. That's your ecosystem lesson for the day. Because it turns out it's this unity and diversity of life that brings robustness to an ecosystem, right? So when we look at the interactions between the cluster and everything that we're talking about all the time, that kind of lack of a monoculture leads to a robustness that allows the ecosystem to thrive despite changes in the environment, right? Hopefully I don't have to give you all the monoculture talk because the analogy kind of stretches a little thin there. But there's a reason that specialization is risky, right? It's expensive, especially for those at the top of the food chain. If you look at the fossil record, anytime the environment gets stressed, it's always the highly specialized creatures that suffer the most. And it's the generalists that make it, right? That's why we all still use curl. Meats Phinosaurus egypticus, one of the largest creatures ever to live, thrived in an environment that was seas and there was like rivers and stuff, very Martian, very, a big crocodile, right? This entire creature died out 30 million years before Tyrannosaurus Rex even existed, right? But we like to talk about the big extinction events and when it comes to ecosystems, right? What happens is if we were growing a time machine and hanging out with Phinosaurus here, we wouldn't be able to tell that the thing is going extinct because that took millions and millions of years. But in the long view, in that deep time, it's a relatively quick extinction. And that's something I think about when we talk about the adoption of the technologies and things that we consume every day. So all this is part of the natural process. And what happens is when you look at the fossil record, when there is opportunity and when there is change in that ecosystem, evolution kicks into overdrive, right? There's holes in the niche. There's holes that need to be filled. There's niches that need to be served and our market is the same way. So part of the thing I like to think is almost like cloud native, we're always constantly in evolutionary overdrive. And yet some designs stand the test of time. Sharks, we've been around before the dinosaurs, right? And then they're around today. Their only threat is us, but that's a different talk. So like the evolution of T-Rex, we're entering a new era now, a new chapter. And what I would like to leave you today is we grow up in these ecosystems thinking, I'm a community manager, you're a dev rail, you're an engineer, you're the infrastructure person, you're the events person. When we start to look at these projects though, I would like us to start to think about, thinking about it like ecologists would, right? Where we're here to nurture these creatures and ensure that they're safe and things like that because there's only one creature that can alter an environment and that's us because of our little monkey brains, right? So dinosaurs of the group ended up dying out, right? But there was one group of VLA that made it and they evolved into the birds that we see today that are all over the world. And we do find it interesting that some people are always going to consume open source without understanding it, right? They're gonna buy that bag of dinosaurs, right into a paleontologist, that bag of dinosaurs is an irradiating bag of contradictions, sort of like when people try to explain how your software works and you, like, no, that's not how it works, but they don't care, they're just there because they want the dinosaurs, right? I just want to consume GRPC, just give it to me, right? So, but running in production is hard, but we do need to understand that as ecologists, some people just want to buy the bag of dinosaurs, right? But then again, it's also up to us to ensure that we're keeping the processes, the governance, the engineering principles, all the stuff that you all do every day, nice and healthy so we could be nice and efficient, like good cloud nerds. Because at the end of the day, sometimes you might look at a creature that, this is a raptor from Gerard. This doesn't look anything like the thing you see in the first Jurassic Park movie, right? Took us 60 years to figure out how this murder chicken worked. So that's what I want you to come with is look at these projects, not only just as software, but where they fit in that ecosystem and how you can help keep it all nice and healthy because at the end of the day, this is really fun. And with that, thank you very much. I will be around all day if you have questions.