 Welcome to Amsterdam and KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2023. Join John Furrier, Savannah Peterson, Rob Streche, and you, Peacock as the cube covers the largest conference on Kubernetes, CloudNative, and open source technologies together with developers, engineers, and IT leaders from around the globe. Live coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2023 is made possible by the support of Red Hat, the CNCF, and its ecosystem partners. Good afternoon, brilliant humans, and welcome back to KubeCon Europe. We are in beautiful Amsterdam, very excited to be here. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by my co-host on his first day. Rob, how are you feeling? Awesome, this has been great. You're whole, I mean it's 430 day one and it's been jam-packed, you're doing awesome. You give me all the energy and the great guests that we have give me the energy as well, so this has been a fantastic day. Yes, actually we have the perfect pair of guests for this afternoon. Natalia and Kevin, thank you so much for joining us. You are on the developer advocate teams, both of you, at Red Hat, and this whole event is really about celebrating developers. How are you guys doing? Welcome to the show. I'm doing awesome, thank you. Love that attitude. For you, yeah. It's great, it's great. We're enjoying this conference and we're seeing there's a momentum for developers on Kubernetes and also the conference is reflecting that, so we're really enjoying that. It feels like the energy is back up. I'm assuming you guys have been in some of the other Kubecons and now I feel like we're sort of in a four times vibe. I don't want to jinx it, but finally got that energy up. Everyone smiles, the show floor is absolutely packed. I imagine it's busy for you guys, yeah? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's been nonstop talking to customers, potential customers, we're doing demos and there's a lot of enthusiasm. People are happy to be here. Last year I was in Valencia and everybody with their mask and there was a lot of hesitancy and everything and this seems way more like how it was before. Bless, yeah, no, it's great to feel that energy. Yeah, I think it's great, especially when you were in the keynote and there were like 58% of the people, it's their first one, their first Kubecon, so I have to imagine a lot of those developers are coming to you guys and trying to figure out how do they take that first step and how do they get to a better experience with Kubernetes. If that's got to be a lot of the questions you must be getting in the booth. Right, yeah, we see lots of people, beginners and experts together, enthusiastic of Kubernetes and all the software, open source software around. They came to question, to hear, they really, you can see they're really happy about that and we are happy too, so this is great. Yeah, yeah, I think this is the first Kubecon where I'm really feeling like there's also a developer presence, whereas in, I feel like previous years it was a lot of focus on kind of more infrastructure side of Kubernetes and how do we get it all set up and configured and everything and now I feel like we're getting to the next level where, okay, now we have, most people are at least somewhat familiar with Kubernetes from the operations side and the developers are now like, hey, this is actually something that we can use, but how exactly do we use it and how do we get started with it and how can we get the feedback that we need to have our applications up and running but also in a stable way where we're not gonna be called two in the morning to fix things because there's unexpected things happening. So there's a lot of questions around how can we move our application? So we have at Red Hat, we have this and I'm sure it's not just at Red Hat but we really like to focus on this inner and outer loop kind of story where the inner loop is where the developers are doing their coding, they're doing their local tests and their local development, perhaps even setting up a local container but then they're committing their code and at that point, you go to this kind of outer loop where you have a pipeline that kicks off and then your application gets built and pushed to some registry and deployed with some sort of GitOps or whatever and so this whole kind of story where we go from beginning all the way to first, perhaps a testing cluster and a staging cluster and maybe even automatically to production. I mean, that's kind of the end goal, right? And so we're really working on making that as seamless as possible and we're getting a lot of traction with that. So we're building tools to help with that as much as we can. I have to imagine, to me it's, we've had seen a theme since we've been here around platform engineering and having been at Amazon and what was always talked about by the engineers on my team was, don't SRE me. They didn't want to be the SRE and get that 3 a.m. phone call to have to get up and fix it every time. So how do we have some split responsibilities? Are you seeing that and is that really, we're a lot of your efforts going into is to help people in that platform engineering, you know, when it's the hand-off part of it, it seems like. Yeah, yeah, I think it, yeah, I don't know. Right, right, no, I just want to add, you see the maturity of a software where you don't care much about infrastructure bits and you start talking about, you know, developer experience. I think Kubernetes and the industry get into this maturity. Now we're focusing on developer experience. To your point, it's really important because platform engineering, it started really as a new thing, right, from side reliability engineer or DevOps, just to focus on how to build platforms for developers, how to let them consume the platform or self-serve in the platform. So platform engineering is getting a very good momentum and Kubernetes, I think it's the right place where to do platform engineering and there are open source tools around that and Red Hat is joining a very popular open source software for platform engineering and internal developer platform called Backstage. We're bringing our enterprise expertise into this community project. We're joining this community and create a community project called Project Janus, which is a project, Backstage project, where we are building this developer portal for developers and we're building on top of that. How is the community responding to that? You guys, we've been talking about community since before we were even on stage. You're obviously super passionate about community. I can actually feel the energy from you guys about that. How has everything been received? How's it going? I think the Backstage community is pretty happy. With Red Hat joining the project, I mean, we have some leverage, I guess, in the open source communities. Some people may have heard of you before. Yeah, I like to think so. Yeah, yeah. It's been a few things. So it's been really positive and also talking to customers, what I've heard a lot is, our customers are building some sort of portal themselves in kind of custom, not really aware that in the communities there's projects like Backstage that are being built. And so there's a lot of enthusiasm among those people too that, hey, cool, like Red Hat is joining this project. It's on our team. Yes, exactly, yeah. So there's a lot of happiness. Yeah, I think that's the thing is that, and I got it out of the whole keynote this morning, was 190 some odd projects, and you're sitting there going, there's just so much going on. And I assume that's where your roles come in, is to help people understand, okay, this is what those projects do, because they didn't really go into it in the keynote today, but I'm sure that you're getting a lot of that, not only the people over in the other wing over here that have their booths there, but is that what you hear a lot of? Yeah, yeah, I mean, absolutely, again, talking about customers, but also the communities that we work in, it's hard to know all the projects that are here. I don't, because it's too much. But people need some sort of opinionated path to having things work and being able to not focus just on learning new projects and figuring them out and everything. So, I mean, there's definitely demand for opinion. If you see the CNCF landscape, it's a very gigantic map with tons of project opens for product, which is great, but then you need some pattern, right? Some blueprint, and with that as a, this concept of validated pattern. So our opinionated way to make, compose everything together, the most important bits, like, you know, for pipeline we use tecton, for github we use argocd, for internet developer port we use backstage, you know, we're connecting all the bit and making our path, but using all those open source projects and contributing to those projects into the communities. It's such a wonderful mesh too, when you've got a company like Red Hat and you've got all these open source projects. I'm curious, for you guys internally, what is the evaluation process like when you're figuring out which projects to participate in versus not? That's a good question. We have our office of CTO that see what's going on in the community. We're deciding also what project we should invest more with putting engineering. Shall we start a new one? Right, it's about investing cash time and resources a lot into these, yeah, keep going. So we're looking at existing project or looking also at our project. Shall we start something from our experience? Shall we look for other project? And so there's an office, there's a department that make this decision and then putting, you know, engineering efforts, marketing, and you know, all the product effort, building the product around those open source software. Yeah, and basically we're listening to people and see what are their pain points. That was going to be my next question. Right, absolutely, yeah, and try to address those. So one example is Podman Desktop where we're feeling a pain point where, you know, like Docker Desktop is a great tool. However, there's some, you know, some decisions that were made and perhaps some things that the customers or, you know, the users are missing. And so we're, you know, like we have Podman already. Let's see how we can expand on top of that with a nice user experience that we, you know, that we've now been putting a lot of effort into to make it, you know, consumable on Windows, on Mac, on Linux, and kind of making a seamless experience, not just for containers, but making it into experience where developers can use this tool to have containers that can then, you know, be used to even go to, you know, be deployed to Kubernetes, to OpenShift. You can, you know, create yamls for Kubernetes directly from Podman Desktop. It's a whole bunch of things that you can do with Podman Desktop that are really cool. And there's a lot of effort that goes into that. But so that's one example of- And Podman was an initiative that started internally, right? We started creating Podman as an alternative container runtime open source, but with another approach compared to Docker, which was rootless and demo-less is another approach, splitting the code base. It started internally, right? Now the community is adopting more and more Podman. And also the Kubernetes is using a runtime container runtime interface. We have an open source implementation around that. And on top of that, this implementation is called Cryo. On top of that, we also defined and started doing a desktop application around Podman called Podman Desktop. So Linux, Mac, Windows developer can start building a container locally with Podman Desktop and then deploy their application, their pod application on Kubernetes anywhere, basically. So this is an example of internal initiative, right? Yeah. As we're talking about open source, how we manage open source projects. What is that feedback loop like with your community? I mean, you obviously got your gear to the ground and it's very clear you're both super plugged in. How do you get feedback from the Red Hat community, from everyone? What's that like? So we have a lot of people on the ground talking to customers. So we have the solution architects in all the different markets that we work in. So we talk a lot with them to get to see what does the customer say. And we also do a lot of sessions ourselves. So we have this Dev Nation program at Red Hat where we as developer advocates go and talk, do sessions at the customer and see like, hey, is this something that you're interested in? And see what they really do. Let's show them some examples of how they can use it. And we're getting a lot of nice feedback on that. But places like this too, you get so much good feedback. Fire hose, right? Yeah, exactly. I'm shy. And people are not shy to share their opinions here. That's true. Very true. There are not a lot of shy, you're either super shy or very open about your opinions throughout. There is, I guess, very open source, if you will, when it comes to your thoughts. And we love that. I mean, yeah, it can be good and bad. I mean, I want to hear it all. It was funny, because we ran into the developer, VP of development for an IOT company last night. And just by happenstance, we started having a discussion and he was like trying to figure out how to get started with Kubernetes. So something like Podman Desktop would be great for what he's trying to do in there. And I think that kind of stuff is super, super helpful to the developer community, because he's looking at it, everything's in VMs, and they're starting to build microservices. But I don't want to go up to a cloud and test it all out. It's all about increasing that complexity. Yeah. And I would assume that also helps them with a cost control thing, which is pretty important right now. I mean, this is given the times in the world. You know, I think that helps. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, speak. Yeah, I was agreeing. Making the right choice on the right tools and making worth, right? Yeah, we have, I think a funny story about, so we have the OpenShift Sandbox, which is like a free version of OpenShift. So you go to developers.redhat.com and you can sign up and you get a free OpenShift for 30 days that you can play with and you know, deploy some stuff in and whatever. It's really cool. But so before we were, the default deployment was just a regular Kubernetes deployment. And so we also have OpenShift serverless based on Knative, right? So we scale up from zero based on the requests. And so we changed the default deployment to Knative serverless, which saved us a bunch of money on Sandbox to the point where now we can offer more resources for each Sandbox to the users because we have more resources available. I mean, that's a great example of how you can kind of save some money on the... Okay, you're, I mean, it's, you know, American saving. Well, you're giving it back into that. What I love about what you just said is we saved money so we're giving the community more. Right, yeah. Rather than just saying sweet. We're just going to skim that off the top, which I mean, I'm American capitalist. You know, I wouldn't blame you if that's what you wanted to do. But I think that's really important. I'm curious, you said something in the very beginning of our conversation, which, and I've been, well, you guys have been in the Kubernetes space probably longer than I have, but I've been hanging out here for about four or five years. And I would say up until about six months ago, we're still in a very early adoption phase when you look at the true scale of how people are deploying containers. Do you, from the energy I'm getting from you and what you were just saying, do you think we're starting to tip over where more and more people are only scaling up using Kubernetes or is it a hybrid? Where are we off at? What is your feeling, Natali? Well, I think there's a maturity of usage of Kubernetes. It's the de facto platform, the target platform for your app, right? Yeah. I don't know if in the local workstation you have Kubernetes, you might have some kind or mini cube, whatever, but remotely you might have some remote cluster, right? Or your production is Kubernetes. So there is this maturity and all the tools around are built on Kubernetes. I see that, I see this expertise. Even if the people are Kubernetes beginner, they want to learn, right? But some teams, some company has the production on Kubernetes most of the time. So it's a standard, like an operating system, right? Your target app is on Kubernetes. And that's the fact. That's an opinion and a half, I love that. Yeah. Yeah, we can see it's not 100% of the case, right? But most of the case is like that. So moreover, for, you know, when you have cloud native application or kind of modern application, most of the time is that the case. I love that. Well, thank you both for being here. Congratulations on all you've got going on. I loved hearing about the community integration with the projects. Natalia, Kevin, you're wonderful. Thank you. This is your first timers, but no one would have known had I not just said that. Rob, you're also doing fabulous, continued fabulous. My name is Savannah Peterson. We're here in beautiful Amsterdam for KubeCon EU. You're watching theCUBE, the source for high tech coverage.