The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Gerhard goes to KubeCon (part 1) (Interview)

Episode Date: December 18, 2019

Changelog's resident infrastructure expert Gerhard Lazu is on location at KubeCon 2019. This is part one of a two-part series from the world's largest open source conference. In this episode you'll hear from event co-chair Bryan Liles, Priyanka Sharma and Natasha Woods from GitLab, and Alexis Richardson from Weaveworks. Stay tuned for part two's deep dives in to Prometheus, Grafana, and Crossplane.

Bandwidth for ChangeLog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com. We move fast and fix things here at ChangeLog because of Rollbar. Check them out at Rollbar.com. And we're hosted on Linode cloud servers. Head to Linode.com slash ChangeLog. This episode is brought to you by DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean is the simplest cloud platform for developers and teams

with products like Droplets, Sp droplets spaces kubernetes load balancers block storage and pre-built one-click apps you can deploy manage and scale cloud applications faster and more efficiently on digital ocean whether you're running one virtual machine or 10 000 digital ocean makes managing your infrastructure way too easy head to do.co changelog again do.co slash changelog. Again, do.co slash changelog. Welcome back, everyone. This is The Changelog, a podcast featuring the hackers,

the leaders, and the innovators in software. I'm Jared Santo, managing editor of Changelog Media. This is a special two-part series for you to end 2019 on a bang. We sent our dear friend Gerhard Lazu to KubeCon for the very first time. You may remember Gerhard as our resident infrastructure expert. He's been part of the Changelog family

for years now, and we couldn't think of anyone better to rep us at KubeCon than him. On this first episode of the series, you'll hear from Brian Lyles, co-chair of the event, Priyanka Sharma, and Natasha Woods from GitLab, and Alexis Richardson from Weaveworks. Okay, I'm passing it off to Gerhard. Enjoy. I'm Gerhard. Today is the 19th of November, 2019, day one of KubeCon North America and the Cloud Native Conference.

We are here with Brian Lill. He's the co-chair and senior staff engineer for VMware. We watched this morning Brian have a great keynote. I really enjoyed it, and especially the dance that he started with. I really loved it. And I thought it was a great keynote. I enjoyed the conference so far.

This is my first KubeCon. It's a great conference, 12,000 people. That's so many people. But tell us how it was so far for you, KubeCon. I think we started in July And so just to let everyone know how this works Is that we put out a call for papers And I don't know when this is going out But we're having another one A call for papers like December 4th For KubeCon Amsterdam next year In March

But we pull out a call for papers We get many replies. I don't know the exact number, but it's thousands. And then we have a program committee, and the program committee, we need that because we're doing 14, 15, 16, 17 different tracks here at KubeCon, and there's no way that me and my co-chair, Vicky, could actually read all those talks and then score them. It just would never work.

So what we do is we bring together about 110 people and we tell them, here, you're going to look at talks in applications or operations or machine learning or networking or something like that. And we make sure that every talk gets about four to five reviews and they're scored. And the scores are interesting.

They're scored in like four or five categories. And it's just like originality, what we think the speaker has done in the past. Have we seen talks like this before? And then what happens from there is then we get this huge spreadsheet. Yeah, we use a spreadsheet. And then what we do is we go through in the co-chairs, go through every single talk. So let's say if we had 3,000, we have to look at 3,000 talks times four or five reviews. So imagine that can be up to 15,000 things. And then we just put together and we figure out that we have, you know,

12, 13 to 17 talks per track and we organize and we order them and we make this thing. So what everyone's seeing now who came to KubeCon is a lot of work. And I did it over vacations and, and over weekends. And it was a ridiculous amount of work. But the reason we do that is for this reason that people come and they see our keynotes and they're like, oh, wow, that keynote was inspiring. Or they go see a talk and they're like, wow, I saw this talk. But the best part is that all this stuff that we're doing, I mean, minus a few talks,

are going to be on YouTube in a few weeks. So you could just not come. But that's only part of the conference. The other part of the conference is our SIG stuff. And our SIG updates are, we have two types of SIG. And the SIG in Cloud Native World is Special Interest Group. It's a group that is focused around some kind of topic. So we have Kubernetes SIGs, and then we have CNCF SIGs. Kubernetes SIGs probably, as you can figure, are around Kubernetes.

So there's a lot of those. So all of those will get one or two talks. And it's usually like an intro talk, like let's say SIG apps. And that's talking about applications running on Kubernetes. SIG Apps would have an intro of what they are, meet the members, and then they would have a deep dive into some topic, something they're trying to solve right now. Then on the other side, we have our CNCF SIGs.

What those are are the cloud native. They're not focused around any particular product. Here's something else. I co-chair that. I do my day job, but I also co-chair one of the CNCF SIGs, and that's SIG Application Delivery. And what we're trying to do is figure out

how people are writing applications in the cloud-native world. So we'll do a beginner talk, and then we'll do an advanced talk. So the goal here, including our pre-day stuff, where we have a whole bunch of mini conventions all in one, is to get people who are in this cloud native space somewhere to come meet people and hear topics they would not hear about. And the best part about this is the first piece.

It's meet people. I will not go to a single talk while I'm here at KubeCon. But between now and probably January or February, I'll probably watch 50 or 60 on YouTube. But I take advantage of being here to actually meet new people, forge old relationships, and just basically put myself out there

as a person who is trying to succeed in this space. Long answer, but that's what it is. It's very comprehensive. And I think we got so much out of that. So the thing which I would like to add is that you're right. The talks, you can watch them on YouTube. But there's so many other things happening

around the conference. It's difficult to even comprehend the scale of the exhibits that different sponsors have and some great interactions happening there games contests demos pairing stations and pairing setups and solving problems together it's so amazing to watch everybody contribute the thing which i enjoyed today very much was going to talk to the ask me groups like there was the prometheus group

there was a etcd group the fluent d group it was really great to go and talk to those maintainers in a corner and the sort of interactions that where would you have that you'd maybe have to go to prom con or to the specific conferences to get that. I was so impressed by these small things, which in themselves are really big if you think about it. So one thing is about KubeCon, and it's different from a lot of conferences, KubeCon is, it can only be put on at this level because we have lots of great platinum and gold sponsors

paying lots of money to the CNCF. And people can have opinions about that, but it's not about that. It's not about enterprise. You'll notice that on the stage, when big companies like Microsoft or IBM Red Hat or VMware come on the stage, they can't sell a product.

And we actually coach them not to sell a product. We want the people that come on stage from these companies to talk to the audience, who are mostly developers and operations people. And there are some executives and VCs out there, too. But we want to talk to our community, the community that's building things. So what you said, especially around the ask me's, those are important. Because there's two things.

One, I want to talk to the people who write the software that I like to use. Like, it's nice to be able to meet people from the Prometheus project or people from the Envoy project. That's real cool. But the other side is for the writers of the software. And this morning, I did an update as a project update for CNCF incubating and graduated projects. And I just picked a few. And then I brought people on stage for two reasons. One, I don't think some projects are getting enough. They don't get enough press because their developers just don't think that way or their heads down, or it's just like boring stuff. DNS is boring. And it should be boring dns is exciting um we have bigger problems

in life so starting off with core dns was just to show people hey um i didn't put a url up there just go google it or something and if you like it you like it if you don't you don't but also getting these developers who who write software so um a good example of that was I brought one of the founders of the, what's it called? The Open Policy Agent. OPA. OPA, yeah. And you know what?

That software is boring too. But to see the passion of Torrent explaining about their custom language rego and how all the integrations work, wow. Wow. Yeah. And the web assembly piece, I thought it was really interesting

how that fits into the big picture. And if you didn't know that, you were like, it's policy. Boring. But it's not boring. It's interesting. And I want these developers who spend all this time working on this stuff

to have an outlet. And it's a little counter to what people were doing before. And, you know, whoever comes behind me will probably do it different. But my thing is spotlight on people creating good things. And that's what I take these opportunities to do. I have a platform. I'm going to use it for that.

Yeah, that's a great summary of what happened this morning. I really enjoyed being in the audience from my perspective. As you mentioned, OPA, I haven't even heard of that project, the Open Policy Framework, Open Policy Actor.

It's Open Policy Agent. It's made by a company called Styra. And the gentleman I'm talking about is named Torin. And the crazy thing is that, of course, I wait to the last second to put these together, just because that's just how the world works.

And so I reached out to Torin last Wednesday, or no, it was last Monday, and I'm like, hey, this is going to happen. Give me slides. So even though you spent six months reviewing all those submissions and preparing, there were still last minute things and all that to make a conference which has been running so smoothly it's only day one but already i feel that so much has happened and i connected with so many people i had so many interesting conversations so i think the focus on that the focus on getting people together and less about attending talks unless you're really

interested in them i think that's a great way of approaching. It is. And I know this is ChangeLog, and you all talk about open source, so this is what we're doing. We're trying, so funny thing, KubeCon slash CloudNativeCon is the largest open source conference in the world.

Crazy. We are talking with big companies and small companies and all in the between. And end users and individuals are people just talking open source. I mean, it's all around cloud native for the most part, but it's all open source. So it's great that we are giving people the outlet. And yeah, I do wait till the last minute to do the updates because there's so much other things going on. The update talk is actually the last thing in my mind. So it's more of, let's get the talks, the agenda, and then let's get my keynote, which I'm going to do on Thursday. And I'll talk about that in a second. And then we'll talk about this update. And because it's, I mean, it's a couple hours of work. So that's how we do that.

And so when it comes to representation in different companies, every single ChangeLog sponsor is present at this conference. I was like looking through everybody there and it was, it took me a good hour

roaming the halls and the showcases for the sponsors it's unbelievable how many people are here and how many like the buzz is immense i really enjoy that and i haven't seen this happen at any other conference so hats down the biggest conference um amazing discussions amazing people and um everything is running so smoothly. So a big... I will actually say this about things running smoothly. Linux Foundation has the best events team in the industry. There's also, there's a lot of good events teams out there,

but the Linux Foundation, they're really good at this. And a lot of the success goes to people who don't get named in these talks, but they're there. They're coordinating the location. They're working on the speakers. They're setting up the agenda. They're actually doing the groundwork for this.

So this is a big event. Okay, so any last remarks that you want to make? Yeah, actually, so since I'm on an open source podcast, I want to talk about my open source. And actually, it's really relevant to this whole thing. So I work on a piece of software called Octon. I wrote it over the last year. And the long story short is that we wanted to solve the problem of how can a person who is not familiar with Kubernetes sit down and understand what's going on with their workloads.

It's a really heavy topic. I created a proof of concept last year. We went through and we got it all approved, and now it's a piece of software. But that's not really what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the power of open source and this whole concept of a 10x developer. So I like to think of myself as a 10x developer and I can just imagine people stopping this conversation.

They're like, that guy, Brian, what is going on? So this is why I think I'm a 10x developer. And no, I'm not telling the binary joke. That's not even funny. My job as a developer is to inspire others to do things and to write software that allows others to do things. But the real testament of a piece of software, whether it's good software or even mediocre software, is if someone can take your software and do something with it that you never even thought of doing. So the reason I brought up this piece of software of Octant

where you can actually go and view your Kubernetes clusters and we're putting more features in there like terminals and all sorts of things. But what I found is that I put a plugin system in there a few months ago on a weekend because you know why not plugins seem pretty cool but at being at this conference this morning I found four or five people to come up and said oh wow your software is pretty cool I'm like yeah but you

know I'm like the developer is saying well I could have fixed this I could have fixed that they're like no no no no it's amazing and I wrote a plugin using your plugin system, which is crazy because we didn't document it. So people are creating software based on software that I wrote. So I've actually inspired people to do things. And someone has come and created something that I could not imagine with my software. That's what makes me a 10x developer. I've made more than 10 developers more productive. So guess what? 10x. I have 10x myself.

And that's what actually I want to leave everyone with. It's like this whole myth of the 10x developer. Your job, if you can make two developers more productive, so if you have two times two, that's four. So guess what? You're now a 4x developer. So if you can do it for 10 or 100 or 1000, or in some cases, at high levels, like a million, because it's possible. That's how you

actually scale yourself. And here's the crazy thing. Am I a good developer? I think so, because I practice. Am I the best developer? Probably not, because someone's practiced harder than I am. But we can still all be developers who are multipliers. And open source is actually one of the greatest ways of doing that, especially whenever you're using permissive licenses and you're allowing people to build things that aren't even possible without your software. And that's crazy.

So I just wanted to leave everyone with that. And that's actually why I do all of this. I'm here to inspire on the stage, but I'm also here to inspire in software and just be inspirational all the way around so that's my positivity moment for the afternoon so i think i think that's amazing and it's it's a rare skill to see the best in people and it's even a rare skill to want to contribute and make them even better and to not empower others but emancipate others that's a word which i like very much emancipating others to do things that they themselves couldn't do giving them the idea giving

them the inspiration um or just a glimpse like what could be and that's amazing like yeah and that's and that's something i think my parents taught me that um my dad taught me that the best idea you've ever had Is that one you gave away And it made it someone else's best idea And you know it took me It's funny we were talking Right before we started recording About being an adult

And you know adult That's whenever I knew I was an adult When I realized that an idea Was just an idea And whether I did it Or someone else did it It didn't matter And if it's your best idea

But I came up with it That's fine I made you better And then hopefully you know you do you either do me another favor or you go out and make the world better so either way i win so that's that's how i look at it you know um maybe i'm a bit naive or i have a little bit of blinders on but the world will always be weird and bad so you have to go find your happiness and this is how i find my happiness that's amazing brian thank you i love that that's a perfect way of ending this thank you oh no problem i'm glad to do it this episode is brought to you by getPrime. GitPrime helps software teams accelerate their velocity and release products faster by turning historical Git data into easy-to-understand insights and reports.

Because past performance predicts future performance, GitPrime can examine your Git data to identify bottlenecks, compare sprints and releases over time, and enable data-driven discussions about engineering and product development. Shift faster because you know more, not because you're rushing. Get started at getprime.com slash changelog. That's G-I-T-P-R-I-M-E dot com slash changelog. Again, getprime. So many things have happened. It's crazy. I know. It's the biggest conference I've been to. It doesn't stop surprising me. The amount of talent, the amount of openness, friendliness.

I am really, really surprised by what I've seen here. So today we have Priyanka from GitLab and Natasha, also from GitLab. And they're here to talk about Kubernetes, releases, and anything else in between. So would you like to introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit of the history? Sure. Thank you so much for having us. As you said, I am Priyanka. I serve as Director of Technical Evangelism at GitLab, which is very similar to developer evangelism, developer advocacy, and other companies. And our job is to build GitLab's technical brand by participating in the ecosystem, by being useful members and contributors.

I also serve on the board of the CNCF, which is the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, who are the people who bring you this event and are the home for Kubernetes and a bunch of other projects. So that's me. I'm Natasha Woods, and I'm the head of corporate communications for GitLab. And a little bit of background before that, I worked on PR and marketing for CNCF. My first announcement was Kubernetes coming into the foundation several years ago, so that was very exciting. I also worked on a lot of the promotion for KubeCon,

including the first one under the foundation when there was only 1,083 of us, and now there's 12,000 of us here this week. And I'm also a Kubernetes contributor. I was the marketing lead for release 1.9, 1.10, and 1.15. Wow, that's amazing. That's a lot of releases. So even though things have changed a lot since those days, and the whole community and ecosystem has grown so much. What do you remember from those days? A lot of work. No, the spirit's still very, very much there. I mean, at that time, everybody was really excited about it coming under the foundation and a lot of contributions

and a lot of people outside of Google. I mean, Google was very much still involved, but a lot of people from, you know, Red Hat and, you know, even Mirantis and tons of different companies were getting really involved. And there was just a really great spirit of community and collaboration and just trying to kind of figure this out. Like, how do we take all of these contributions And how do we release on a smart cadence? And just for KubeCon, how do we make this a developer-first event? And how do we educate people? And how do we bring people in that have been doing this for a while and pair them up with people who maybe haven't been doing this for a while? And then on top of that, it's launching a foundation. And was kind of a an experiment like is this going to work and is this

going to thrive and um you know the foundation has 129 end user members i'm not talking about the vendor members that's over 500 but that's that's just end users um you know like the ticket masters and the home depots and andidelity and, you know, the Air Force and companies like that. So it's really a testament to all the work that everyone's been doing, you know, the last five years with Kubernetes, the last four years with the foundation. So it's been a lot of fun. And now I'm at GitLab and I'm getting to do it all over again with the rocket ship of a company this is. And so it's a lot of fun yeah i remember yeah i think i attended the first kubcon that was under the foundation in seattle right yeah there were i think 700 or so folks in the room there and it was totally different size

wise and it was the first time i was actually engaging with the sort of like what i call the systems systems people uh because i'd'd done mostly web development stuff before. So I was extremely nervous. I basically didn't want to go, but I went because I'd been working on the Open Tracing Project, which we wisely put in the foundation. And the first, like the day zero kind of thing,

there was a meetup, a Kubernetes meetup, and I went there and I was like, everybody knows so much. This is is intimidating i should just run away but people were so nice everybody just welcomed me and like i was completely they made me feel so comfortable people were going out of their way to do that and they didn't even know me right and i just my heart just warmed and i had actually ended up having a great time at the conference. And since then, I've been attending all of them and been on the program committee for a lot of them. And that's the nice thing that ethos is the same as you were saying, Natasha. It's like, yes, there's like 12,000 people here now, but so many people are new first timers, just like I was, you know, in 2016.

And they're all like like we're bringing them into the fold we're welcoming them in and i think this is why it's the best community ever i would i would totally agree with everything you've said the one thing which really stuck with me from today uh was um tim i believe he was talking about a project over company, right? And he was saying how it doesn't matter which company you're from because we're meeting in this space, which is the open source, the Kubernetes and everything that goes around it. CNCF, right? So much more than just Kubernetes and the approach,

the way everybody approaches the problems that we're trying to solve is so friendly and the scale even though it's so much bigger than it was a couple of years ago it's exponential growth it's exponentially better i would say right so things haven't changed in the way people approach it but the scale makes it so impressive. So the one thing which I keep noticing is the documentation for all these projects is so good. Yes, I mean... Why is that? I think there's a lot of hard work that goes behind it.

So it's nice. I think the CNCF does a good job of gently pushing projects in that direction of like, hey, documentation is really important. And I think it's part of the graduation criteria as well, right? It is. And they also provide documentation funding. So they provide resources, which I know a lot of projects outside of a foundation and

outside of a large company may not have such resources. But they do provide those resources which is wonderful yeah and i think you know the cool thing as you were saying tim said project over company so people's identities are becoming about the work they do on project x y or z and when that's the case you start thinking holistically and so your project is like a product you want people to use it you want like otherwise what's the point you know and so I I did this myself and the open tracing project right when when we got got it going we weren't developing in a vacuum we were developing for people and so you got to make that make it easy for them to use

it so I spent as Natasha said a lot of time on the open tracing website just writing things down or if I didn't know, like that some level of technical detail that was beyond me, I was like, harassing people to make them do it. Like, hey, hey, I don't understand this. Can you explain it? Can we do this? And that was and it was kind of like grunt work, right? It's not the most fun, but we pushed through and then suddenly we had a bunch of stuff that was super useful and then adding to it is actually a lot easier it's kind of actually at GitLab we have like there's the product documentation but there's also the

company process documentation which we call the handbook and I can't even imagine what it must have been like for Sid our CEO when he started it because you're like the blank page problem. But now it's so in the habit that, oh, update the process on handbook. That's like the natural thing you do when you change a process. And so I think once the ball is rolling, same for documentation, same for process documentation, then edits are a lot easier. And so I think that's kind of where we're at

with CNCF projects and that's why it's, I think, very good. Yeah, at GitLab we say handbook first and we iterate a lot. It's actually one of our values is iteration and I think that that's a really good lesson for open source projects is document first, iterate.

It's really going to help you go back and it's also going to help new people coming in. I agree. That's a big advice that I think we would give to someone that's getting involved in this area. I think the nice thing, which is true for GitLab and also most open source projects, is that everyone's distributed, right?

Everyone's remote. There's no office. And then there's no way to communicate if it's not written down. And that ends up helping a lot. One thing which I would add to this is that I was watching PromCon a couple of days ago and I forget his name.

But what I do remember is that I went to the GitLab handbook and the dashboards, the operational dashboards... Ben Koji or Andrew Nurig nurige i think ben koji yeah he's a prometheus core team member and get labber right and having looked at the handbook everything was there so even from someone that didn't know that that thing even existed it was so approachable so i looked at that i clicked a couple of links and all of a sudden i could see everything i wanted to learn from and that's something that just happened that is so cool you had that experience that's what we aim for yeah so i really enjoy that i have to say it

works beyond the internal team it also works for outsiders that may be interested in, hey, how does GitLab do this? Or how do they do that? Yeah. I mean, there are people, I talk to a lot of startups. I don't know why. It just happens. And they're telling me, like,

we basically are copying your GitLab handbook because it's the best way to document process and be efficient as a company. And it's nice that we've been able to provide sort of a starting point for a lot of folks. And I'm seeing this momentum grow. More and more people are coming and telling me this. It's pretty cool. I would just go a step further with the documentation and a little story of working on the release team. So when we were working on release 1.7 and 1.8,

more from the communications side, and I mean, communicating with the different stakeholders and contributors and people that are, you know, really giving back, but also the companies that, you know, are seeing what's coming down the line for the new releases and things like that. We didn't have a ton of documentation on that. So for 1.9, JSTU Mars really championed, he was the release late at the time, he really championed documenting the process and documenting everybody's roles. So you can go, and you can see all this documentation now, but what are each

release team members roles and responsibilities? What is the previous experience that they should have before they are elected to these roles? Because it changes each time for the release. And what are the key steps that need to happen from a timeline perspective? I mean, they always had a timeline, but it was a little bit more detailed. And then we just iterated on it for several releases. And so Jace came to me and he said, we need to write down something for marketing. And marketing is always a very last thought, but there's so much more into it than just maybe tweeting something out or calling a reporter to get an article. And so I sat down and I documented everything I did for that release,

and we implemented it, and then we implemented it for 1.10. And then I was lucky enough to have my second child, and I was on maternity leave, and so I wasn't able to really update the next person and help them through if they had questions because I wasn't available. So they were able to take everything that I documented and implement it from a marketing perspective for the next few releases, which was really great and really helpful. And so some of those things were learning what is coming down the pipeline from the SIGs and what is going to make it into the release and what's not going to make it in the release and why is this relevant to the audience

and who is the audience? Why is it relevant to a vendor? Why is it relevant to a customer? Why is it relevant to another developer? And then making sure that that is communicated not only within the blog post, but it's also communicated to any press that are covering it because you don't want misinformation out there and confusion to happen and then how is

this being communicated to say the companies um you know like the red hats and core os back then and and those types of companies who are following along with the releases how are you communicating that to them and um so we actually created this really great detailed, you know, process out of it. And, you know, obviously, Kubernetes is a different league, it's, you know, the same league as Linux. But for the smaller projects, you can take pieces of this and see the importance in communication across everything. And also documenting. I think I'd like to talk about documentation from a slightly different angle, which is that I think we were just talking before we went on the air that the open source ecosystem today is a lot more than some code, some library that you pull in and throw into your own software. It's a much more vibrant community.

There's a lot more value and things going on. And part of that value is if you're building something, let's say you're being entrepreneurial and building an app or something, it's a community where you can discuss ideas, where you can find friends to test your stuff, to give you feedback, all of that. And documentation actually plays a really strong role in that. So as an example, I'll tell you, the Jaeger project did this the first time and I thought

it was really cool, is that they don't have any telemetry baked into, like user telemetry baked into their project, it's open source, but they wanted to know who is using this what's going on how can we improve so they started um i think an issue uh where it was like okay anybody who is using jaeger proactively if you are open just share what you're doing what you like what you don't like and i was like who's gonna write that right no it's a long long like long issue with so many people written in and then that moved into I think a read me but what that did was suddenly they had this great feedback from their community on how to to iterate right and then I actually uh country I sometimes contribute to the Jaeger project when I have time

I helped them out with with we picked people off of that list and asked them hey would you please do case studies and people were already so engaged like normally what's the case study process at a like when you're a product right people are like oh they they feel like they're doing you a favor and there's like a bit of like a sort of a power dynamic I think but in this case they they were like, grateful we called. And then suddenly I like, we were writing all these case studies and had this like really deep detail

of how to use Giger, what are the benefits, blah, blah, blah. And all of that started because like we used existing channels, which is issues, readmes, to write down that we're looking for x people come and write down or like respond and you're not just telling me you're not just telling yuri you're not just telling an individual you're telling the whole community what you're doing so that's like

the one like you know the many to many communication that which is what documentation is i think is really powerful it's about like the how-to but it's also about like how did it go where should we go next and it changes how we do things which is really cool i think i think that sounds really good and going back to what natasha was saying a bit earlier about um the kubernetes and the releases and how the documentation plays such an important role in the Kubernetes releases. I'm wondering how much of that influenced the way other CNCF projects do documentation. Kubernetes, a very popular graduated CNCF project, the way things are done in Kubernetes,

I'm sure they must have inspired the other projects and they must have been, Kubernetes itself must have been an example of how to do it well because it's proven itself over the years how effective that is. And so many projects could have learned from that. And I'm wondering if some of those learnings made it in the graduation process of the CNCF itself.

I would say that you would have to talk to the TSC about their decisions around the graduation process. But I will say that events like KubeCon bring the communities together and allows them to talk to each other and learn from each other. And the projects will host different deep dives at KubeCon. And so you can go into the deep dives and really dig into the project, what it's doing, ask questions, learn, you know, things like that. So I think there's a lot of cross communication that happens. And I know definitely for some of the younger projects coming in, probably did look up to Kubernetes and what they were doing. And everything was freely shared between each other, which is great. So I launched a lot of the projects that came in from a PR perspective.

So I would write the blog post and I would work with them to get some press about what their project was and things like that. And I looked at the documentation and the antidotes of people, how they use it to get myself up to speed because all these technologies are not the same. So I had to learn a lot of those very quickly and not having a background as a developer. This was really, really helpful.

But people could also read through everything that's documented and make a decision on if they even wanted to donate their project and if they wanted to be part of a community. So I think it's powerful in different ways. Yeah. As someone who's worked on a few of the smaller projects, I can definitely say that the Kubernetes governance model and how they're structured, like? Like how you do the releases with them

and what the processes are, absolutely influence how smaller projects do things. I think there's obviously, there are things you will do when you're a Kubernetes level project that you just don't need to do when you are like a sandbox project that just came in, right? It just doesn't apply.

But what Kubernetes has provided is a great framework of how to grow. And when you start feeling those growing pains, like here's a good way to do governance, here's how you start special interest groups to address whatever concerns. Actually, as an example, so there's a sister foundation called the CD Foundation, Continuous Delivery Foundation. And some members, we're a member, GitLab is a member, and some other members and we were talking about how, well, interoperability is a key thing that we all set out to do with this foundation. But we're not sure if it's like there yet. And so seeing the example of how Kubernetes had special interest group SIGs,

that's what we've actually proposed. I put my name down as some of the people who proposed that, hey, why don't we have an interoperability SIG? So we had this structure, is structure the right word? Framework. Yes, exactly. We had this framework to learn from. And then we moved a lot faster than if we were the first people to think up of SIGs, right? So that's been really helpful. And I also think like to your point about how KubeCon, everybody comes here and learns. That's been very, that started off very Kubernetes driven, right? And the other projects, I think, followed suit in how to like present themselves how to like educate the community so the learning is i think deeper than just like oh this is how kubernetes structured their docs let me do the same it's more like processes governance the how to be we learn from kubernetes i can see this this openness this desire to be better desire learn, it's so present in everything. And it doesn't matter whether you're Red Hat or whether you're GitLab or whether you're

Google. They all learn from one another and they're willing to accept that there is a better way. And I haven't seen this before. This feels something new. And the scale that it reached reached it feel like we are all trying to improve the technology around us and it doesn't matter where we're from we have this common language we have these common frameworks that we can apply and these approaches which have proven themselves over the years and the things that we're creating and the way we are working

today feel so much better than it was five years ago yeah i think you know i would like to give a like a shout out to the the cncf uh leadership as well as the board not myself the other people i like you know i'm i'm definitely a more like uh newer member of the board relative to some folks who've been around for a while um i noticed we had the board meeting on monday and i just noticed how passionately people were sitting debating some topics uh of that we you know that were brought up and someone asked me like why do these people care like many of them have become like independently wealthy because of this ecosystem why do these people care it's like because we always want to be better we will like you're never perfect and the the drive

these people have they could totally rest on their laurels right they could just chill and be like we did this this is great no no it's a constant discussion of like what's next what's next and i'm just inspired I'm so grateful that I get to be in that room and see this because that motivates me and whatever I do to be always trying to be better so it's pretty cool yeah I sat in on I think it was the second or third board meeting for the CNCF ever and it was just as passionate I was it was just as passionate and driven um and I think that's I think that that's also part of a culture change, too. I mean, you have obviously different age groups here, and you have very young developers.

And I mean, even some of them are very young teenagers, you know, and all the way through. And we want to make changes, and we want to be passionate about what we do every day. And, you know, we don't want to just be stuck in a rut or work on something that we don't seriously believe in and love. And so I think that that's why this is a great space. Yeah. And I think that's also why the scale that you were commenting about is happening, is because nobody's resting on their laurels. It's like proactively identifying, okay, this is maybe not a problem right now, but within six months, it will be. And that focus on preempting problems, I think, is what's keeping this community growing really well.

I'm wondering how much the fact that everybody is doing things for the right reasons has contributed to this community becoming what it is today so there's no competition or at least i don't see it there's no trying to be better than someone else the we're trying to be better for ourselves and better than i was yesterday but i'm not competing there's enough work just being better than yourself right hard enough to do that that's right right and it seems like that is the best reason to contribute and to be part of this because it's forcing yourself to be better and they're not you're not competing with someone else they're like all your friends and they all have their like these goals which

seem to be the right goals and that's why everybody is growing and everybody's happy and there's no conflict i haven't seen at least any conflict i think there's healthy conflict not like a right like uh it's not like oh let me like you know step on this person's toes to be taller myself it's more like, maybe I disagree with you on how we should move forward or because of my reasons and this is my logic and somebody else will think something else. That I see actually often, as we said, very passionate board meetings.

But I think, and also to your point of like, I think what you're getting at is that it's like, it seems like a healthy community and like not like sort of self-interest driven. and i think there's obviously we're all very great but there's also good like checks and balances in my point of view because i've noticed this like any time you know it seems like let's say i don't know somebody's something is like somebody's maybe unintentionally taking advantage of something it's brought up really quickly and it's discussed in the open and so i think it people nip it in the bud and you have to be watchful of that because realistically this community represents it's a powerful community

where like everyone's really humble but these are the people that control a lot of like it budgets and like decisions on like what's what software is bought somewhere, etc. So it could get very, people could get very self-interest driven, but I think there's a check and balances and also the avenues for people to actually promote themselves. I voluntarily spent a lot of time in the sponsor showcase today because I was having such a good time talking to different booths boots I even tweeted about them no one told me to do it but I was actually enjoying myself as an attendee and doing that so I think providing that space where people can express self-interest and nipping it in the bud really quickly wherever you know that's

something's not the right avenue that combination is really important yeah and i would say that um the community has a code of conduct so the events have a code of conduct the foundation has a code of conduct projects to graduate need a code of conduct and kubernetes has been a really great example of a code of conduct i know sarah novotny and michelle naroli and countless others um worked on Kubernetes code of conduct very passionately. And when there were violations, they took it very seriously. And, you know, even here at KubeCon, if there is a code of conduct violation, I mean, the events team takes it extremely seriously. And so I think that in itself sets a precedent for everybody.

I mean, we have a code of conduct for GitLab if you're contributing on the issues and we remind people of it. And so it's definitely very serious and I think that helps with the checks and balance. It helps keep people in check and they more come to this conference with that open source code of conduct mindset

or the way that they contribute with each other on the projects or or cross-company partnerships and I think sometimes that has been trumping capitalism and competition I'm I do disagree there is competition and companies do need to make money and and some of them are doing very well and some of them are great upstarts and but there's a level of respect that's in this community that maybe some other um communities it's a little bit more cutthroat and um i really appreciate that yeah totally agree and there's this nice like with the code of conduct it's so important natasha that you bring it up i feel like

how like you know the leadership or like the events team handles code of conduct reports is really important. So sometimes people might feel like when they report, if it feels like they're seen as a complainer, they will not be incentivized to do that. I actually reached out to the events team at one, not this event, like one of the other events, because I noticed something which I thought was not okay. And I wasn't even sure, frankly, if it wasn't okay. I just was like, this is seeming off, I should notify somebody just to check into this situation. And I didn't even think I didn't even worry about how will I be perceived or any of that stuff. I emailed them and I was like, hey, this is what I noticed.

I thought you should know. I'm not saying definitely something bad happened, but maybe worth looking into as a preemptive thing. And they were just so grateful. They were so nice. And like I connected them to the people they had to talk to, all of that. And it was an easy process for me.

And it was frictionless and like no judgment no shame and that creating that environment is really important i think they had a good job good job of it i think it creates a safe space um if you looked at uh when dan khan did his opening keynote um and he said how many second graders or first time coop khan attendees do we have and how many fourth graders or you know veterans um there was so many hands that have went up and and um walking around and just getting to know new people this week i ran into so many different people that are new and they keep saying like how welcoming the community is and how they feel like this is a safe space and um i think that's really important because if you're stepping

out of your comfort zone and you're you're new to a community um and even and you may be new to development so that's very intimidating as well i mean um i was nervous doing my first mr uh my request yes initiated uh but um it's it's definitely a safe space and i think that the communities have come together, not just Kubernetes is here. You know, obviously we have Prometheus and OpenTracing and Jaeger and Linkerd and all of those,

but those communities have really come together to make it a good environment to contribute. So if you haven't contributed or thinking about contributing, I think it'll be a good experience. Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, this was my first KubeCon. And as I mentioned, yeah, to begin with, I was definitely second grader.

And that's why everything that I've seen has been so positive. And you're right, like a lot has happened in the past. All good things, which led to this safe space, so this great way of collaborating, of communicating, of just being together. And the way things are being managed, it's amazing. Yeah. And you mentioned earlier about, you know, you wonder if Kubernetes has influenced the smaller projects that have come after it. And the same could be said as, you know, has KubeCon influenced some of the conferences

that have come after it? And I'm going to give a big shout out to Priyanka here because she worked tirelessly to put out the first GitLab commit event, which happened in Brooklyn in September. And it's GitLab's first user conference. We've never done this before. And obviously, you know, more larger companies than us

have their conferences. And we fashioned a lot of that conference after KubeCon. We wanted it to have that same learning and open community feel. We wanted it to be a safe space. We wanted people to walk away just having a great experience. And our events team has been great about doing that. But it was a big influence for us. Absolutely.

I think, like, the biggest thing, at least for me, when I was thinking about GitLab Commit, was that we want to be like KubeCon in that content is king. You have to educate. You have to have real stuff to say, not some, like, pitches, you know? And we focused a lot. I borrowed a lot from the program. I program on the program committee for KubeCon and that thank god because I was able to like kind of mirror that process not as we didn't need to be as complex because you know it's the first time I went but

I had a framework a playbook to work with and that i think created the good content that we saw at good lab commit because everything was documented everything was documented so circular we keep coming back to this right it's yeah that's great um so what do the next six months look like for you or maybe between now and the next cube con which is in 2020 october or november amsterdam first there's eu so there's three actually eu uh asia pack and us so three miles three like checkpoints in the year i think um so what's next well from my perspective uh i'm actually really excited about amsterdam um because it's in about six months and I think a lot of stuff that we're seeing, that I attended talks about, will have, you know, there will

be projects that have like, more projects will have joined the CNCF as some technologies will have released like 1.0s and some sort of like, I feel more prepared now for that. So this has been a good checkpoint for me. I think my focus as a technical evangelism person at GitLab is going to be to make sure we're engaging in those conversations and bringing the GitLab perspective. Because the nice thing that I think GitLab contributes to these conversations is that we're very close to the end users. We ourselves are an end user, right? Because GitLab is also on a DevOps transformation, cloud native journey.

And like over 100,000 organizations use GitLab pretty extensively. Even randomly walking down these halls, I would meet people, they'd be like, oh yeah, I'm a GitLab user. I'm using it to deploy to Kubernetes. I was like, rock on, that's awesome. And so it's a really big priority

to just like engage with the community and bring, keep bringing that perspective in. So that's like on a high level, what I'm thinking about. Yeah. Not to freak you out. It's four months away. It's March 31st. 31st. Um, no, I mean, I think a big priority, um, for us is we have get love commit san francisco on um january 14th and so just kind of again bringing our community together and it's great because there's a lot of like lessons learned and a lot of great content here and and um just seeing the way that people um are learning um and and kind of taking that back to that conference as well, and then transitioning over to the next KubeCon will be a lot of fun. I'm excited for some of the next releases.

GitLab has coming out. We have a great EKS integration. Autocluster create. Sorry. Yes, thank you. Autocluster create. We have a great cross-planeplane integration that's a big one for um our release is coming out on the 22nd of november so i'm excited to see that

um i'm excited for christmas because i'm tired i need a break that'll be fun um no it's just really cool to see the community this is the first cube kind of attended not working for cncf um yeah it's aF. It's a big deal. It's a big deal. That was a big, big part of my life. And I'm still very appreciative of everything I learned and just being part of the community. And it's been really nice. I can't tell you how many great conversations I've had this week

and how many hugs and just wonderful time spent just catching up with people and what they're doing and just watching the foundation grow and just being so proud. you've done so much for it it's amazing and and just proud of just proud of all the little technologies and how far they've come and when i heard cloud events hit 1.0 i was like yes i was so excited for cloud events if you haven't heard of cloud events go check it out um but they hit their 1.0 and and I was like, man, I remember when Doug Davis first brought that into the SIG, and look what it looks like now. Yeah, that one actually is really useful.

So I'm a track host at KubeCon, and so I introduced a talk about cloud events. And there's a lot of confusion around, like, cloud events, Knative, which one to use type of thing. And this talk, it's by Ian Coffey, so people can look it up. And I think it's like a future of Cloud Events, something like that. There's future in the title. But it really shows well how those two work together. So Cloud Events has like, and I learned, which I didn't know before that session, just like it's really matured and it's like pretty useful part of how to do serverless eventing basically i'm gonna have to

go to the cncf youtube page and check out that um the video um from his session yeah he like did a it was so funny he had this demo which was like ai bots talking uh to each other and like there was moods he could set so he set the mood distracted and so the bots just started saying things like sparkly sparkly so distracting unicorn here so it's just like random stuff but it's like demos like that like it makes the story accessible and interesting uh and i feel like i came away much more knowledgeable of cloud events and k-native and how the two work together blah blah so blah, blah. So highly recommend that one. Can I add that application to my kids and go, and sleep?

That's really funny. That would be wonderful. I actually just wanted to, like, the 12.5 release that you mentioned for GitLab, I think has really, like, got some impactful stuff. One thing that we had so much cool stuff to discuss we didn't touch upon's just the importance that we are seeing at this conference of multi-cloud. I mean, our CEO, Sid, he said, we hosted a multi-cloud con, and he said, Kubernetes is the great equalizer for the clouds. And that's so true. which is coming out in two days' time. GitLab's going to ship with Crossplane, which is an open source project,

which basically enables application portability between clouds, because it's a universal control plane where every cloud is a first-class citizen. It's pretty amazing, right? And exactly what's needed. So I think that one's a big one, because it will help end users

in the desire to be not locked in, to be multi-cloud, So I think that one's a big one because it will help end users in this, you know, the desire to be not locked in, to be multi-cloud, go like a step further and within the comfort of, you know, the tooling and workflows that they're used to. So I did want to like give a shout out to that. Yeah, cross-plane, I mean, following them closely. Marcus, he was working for Linode at the time. Sorry, who?

Marcus, Marcus. closely Marcus he was working for Linode at the time Marcus Marcus I forget his second his last name Johansson not Johansson Marcus not sure I know Basam well but not yeah so first name Marcus and he worked a lot on Linode on the Terraform provider on the Kubernetes building blocks and that's when we were working together from the changelog side and with Leonard because Leonard is one of the changelog's partners and sponsors.

And when he transitioned to Upbound and started Crossplane, I was so excited to see 0.3, 0.4 and the live streaming which they are which they are they are doing and the interface to use the kubernetes interface to interact with all these clouds and making them so accessible that was amazing exactly what's needed exactly what's needed it's pretty cool so kubernetes like it just goes beyond what people have imagined to begin with and now like all these extensions being added are really really like that it's so exciting and like all clouds and on-prem

everything you know so it's like there is no second class citizen it's all like because of our and we have an end user called genworth who spoke at multi cloud con and they were like the and they're an insurance company, so regulations really matter for them, right? And they're like, the reality is that different regulatory reasons will make you actually pick different clouds many times. Like, it's not like you just feel like it.

It's like you have like a legitimate, like you just have to. And so the end users are in a, we have to use multicloud boat, so we got to help them. We have to make progress to just level the playing field of operations. Yeah, you make a really good point. It's like I think Crossplane and GitLab

and a lot of the companies you see here are having to meet the end user where they're at versus, oh, they have a desire to do this. Well, sometimes they're locked in and they can't and and i'm not talking about vendor lock-in i'm talking about like regulation lock-in um you know things like that and so it's really meeting with them where they're at and and knowing that going in and and it's it's again of the the wanting to help the money the being nice and wanting to contribute back it's how can we you, you know, whether you're using the open source tool or a paid version.

Doesn't matter. Yeah, it was actually at the same multi-cloud con, we also had a panel of venture capitalists. And we were asking them questions on, like, this ecosystem is really evolving and, like, the type of companies you were funding before. Now, what's the difference? And one of the things they said was that in the initial brouhaha when Kubernetes came around was people had this futuristic technologies that awesome tech, but a regular company would have to jump through a billion hoops to get there. And some of those tech were getting funded back then. But now I think there's been clarification in the market where if someone does it is not able to meet the

end-user where they're at it's like not a very fundable idea anymore and I think that's a great thing just because like it was the point of like designing rocket ships if like like people like don't even people need cars you know what I mean it's like if that that disconnect isn't good so i'm really happy to see that change thank you very much priyanka natasha i've learned so many things right we all learned so much the gift that keeps on giving um i'm so glad that we had this opportunity i'm so glad that cubecon is happening so often across the entire world. I highly encourage anybody that is even mildly interested, even if they're not, just join it, see what it's all about.

It's an amazing experience, and it's really difficult to capture it in a couple of words or even like in half an hour. We could be talking about this on and on and on. It's like so many aspects a bit of something for everybody and actually many things and things that no one even expected um i there are many things which i didn't expect and they're all amazing so thank you thank you for having us thank you so much for having us How often do you think about internal tooling? I'm talking about the back office apps, the tool the customer service team uses to access your databases,

the S3 uploader you built last year for the marketing team, that quick Firebase admin panel that lets you monitor key KPIs, and maybe even the tool that your data science team had together so they could provide custom ad spend insights literally every line of business relies upon internal tooling but if i'm being honest i don't know many engineers out there who enjoy building internal tools let alone getting them excited about maintaining or even supporting them and this is where retail comes in companies like doord DoorDash, Brex, Plaid, and even Amazon, they use Retool to build internal tooling super fast. The idea is that almost all internal

tools look the same. They're made of tables, drop downs, buttons, text inputs, and Retool gives you a point, click, drag and drop interface that makes it super simple to build these types of interfaces in hours, not days. Retool connects to any database or API. For example, to pull data from Postgres, just write a SQL query and drag and drop a table onto the canvas. And if you want to search across those fields, add a search input bar and update your query, save it, share it. It's too easy. Retool is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. And for those concerned about data security,

Retool can even be set up on-premise in about 15 minutes using Docker, Kubernetes, or Heroku. Learn more and try it free at retool.com slash changelog. Again, retool.com slash changelog. And by our friends at Square, we're helping them to announce their new developer YouTube channel. Head to youtube.com slash square dev to learn more and subscribe.

Here's a preview of their first episode of The Sandbox Show, where Shannon Skipper and Richard Moot deep dive into the concept of item potency. Welcome to the pilot episode of The Sandbox Show, a show where we'll... Well, a YouTube show. Where we'll deep dive into subjects that developers find interesting. Don't worry, there will be plenty of live coding. I'm Shannon, and this is Richard, and we're going to cover a broad range of topics as the show evolves, but for today, what are we going to be covering? On this first episode, we're going to be covering item potency.

We had talked to people in our community, and the thing that people seem to be really confused by is this concept of item potency and how does it relate to interacting with an API. Right. And so I didn't do some Googling on this beforehand, but I know that you did. I did. So the definition of item potency comes from item and potent. So item being same and potent power item potency comes from item and potent.

So item being same and potent power or potency. So it's the same potency. All right. Check out this full-length show and more on their YouTube channel at youtube.com slash square dev or search for Square Developer. Again, youtube.com slash square dev. it's the 21st of November 2019 it's the last day of KubeCon it's a sunny day we had two days of rain and wind and misery the spirits were high everybody was super excited. And now on a sunny day, we have Alexis from WeWorks with us here, sharing some of his mindset and sharing some of his takeaways from this amazing event. Thank you. Nice to meet you, Gerhard. Glad to be here.

What got you really excited at this KubeCon? I was tweeting about this this morning. Something I saw today that was exciting, and yesterday, I was very happy to see that the conference has grown, but also the foundation has changed its style a little bit. And people are now coming through the community and from other communities,

other open source communities, other technology communities, and saying that they want more of a say and a role in how the foundation works and, therefore, how the ecosystem functions, how the projects work, how we add value to end users, and all of these things, which I think represents a passion from the community. I could be very passionate about other people's passion about the success of the project so um yes people are saying you know how do we get elected to the toc i want to be elected i want to stand where does it say and it turns out that you know this isn't very well described and it's a little bit complicated

so we need to make it clearer to people how to get involved how to help and how to we need to simplify the process of people getting involved so getting involved so the community can run this thing. So that's very exciting to see. It represents a real maturity. On the commercial front, I've been on the floor this morning and talking to lots and lots of people, companies using Kubernetes, GitOps, Weaveworks, very successfully to build real commercial platforms. Kubernetes app platforms, app delivery, CI CD, all of these things are things they're already using now. A couple of years ago, they were just getting started and that's really changed.

Yesterday, I was on stage with Fidelity to come out a solution for the Fidelity platform in the cloud. It's been a long time waiting for a big financial to make that kind of bet of putting everything in the cloud there's been a few others as well but it's very impressive so that's been great I think that's really exciting to see it's not just a maturity in the way the community is approaching this ecosystem which has grown so much and a lot of ecosystems when they get to a certain point they

start to degrade right and i think this is something that we're seeing here where there are some good balances and good checks in place which make sure that everybody participating is focused on the positive is trying to do things better is trying to improve so that the ecosystem continues to grow in the same positive way absolutely i mean if you think about the ecosystem as an economy or a marketplace of ideas perhaps you might use phrases like level playing field or fairness and trust uh continuing the analogy if it is if it were a table like the one in front of us uh somebody could overbalance it you could have those four corners which are what are they you know the end users maybe the

projects maybe the small vendors maybe the big sponsors and if you overweight the table by putting a big weight on one corner it will collapse we've seen that happen with other foundations or they didn't quite collapse, but they became wobbly. And they had to spend several years fixing themselves. And if you don't have a balance of interests, so that everybody can participate, the whole thing falls over. I think that's a great analogy. And that's, you know, helps people understand a little bit more what is maybe one of the things that are special about the cncf about the linux foundation about kubernetes and kubecon itself we can see these good principles everywhere around us for

example we want to see great projects i'm personally involved in projects like flux and argo now which have joined together flag. We've worked with other projects as well that are either in or hovering around the CNCF, like Cortex and Scope. Now, we want the CNCF to be a great place for fantastic open source projects, a really appealing place to put your project if you want to be a real leader in the space, and we want to bring in the ones that we think are the best. Not necessarily individually the best sometimes there'll be several projects that collectively cover different aspects of one space we're not a kingmaker organization and some people have said

i am confused there are components where is my platform if we were to pick one stack or one platform we would be forced to focus on just one use case. So instead what we've done is we've created an environment where vendors and big end users and systems integrators can choose how to assemble platforms and create economic value around that and create products. So we have a separation of project components and commercial products that the CNCF encourages.

Now with other foundations, there's been things where even naming any commercial interests at all in the room gets you sent out. And I used to work at VMware, and we were responsible for Tomcat. And if we used Tomcat in the wrong way, we'd get letters from the Apache Foundation. Then there was the Eclipse Foundation, which moved a long way towards the commercial interests, but unfortunately, what's happened to that? It's struggled a bit. I think with OpenStack, one of the things that wasn't quite right was they tried to create a single stack-like organism at the beginning, which meant that the more it grew, the harder it became to change. It was only suited to one use case. Of course, if they got the use case wrong because they thought it might be public cloud,

then it was private cloud, then it was automated data center, then the stack wouldn't necessarily adjust with that. We don't want to make that mistake. We want there to be great projects that you can build into platforms and products, but we see vendors doing that. Right. So the thing which I would like to add to this is that many mistakes have been made in the past, but the difference that I can see in this ecosystem is that sufficient people that have learned from those mistakes came together and are very wary of what happened in the past and they're very conscious and they just like yourself they're saying let's not make those same mistakes again and everybody seems to be pulling in the right direction and has seemed to have the right reasons and the right reasoning so that what is happening now is like a best of many worlds.

I believe that the analogy for cloud-native change is the rise of the World Wide Web in the 90s. That was the last time we saw a really significant technology replatforming, creating masses of business opportunities for large and small companies, but also fun things to do, technology changes for developers and for the community held together by open source and also open standards like w3c with all the big technology creators pushing in the same direction together and if you were part of that it was just a lot of fun as well and i see that again today that's what makes the cncf so exciting is we have a lot of fun as well. And I see that again today. That's what makes the CNCF so exciting, is we have a collection of technologies that's creating a new platform

for a new class of applications and digital experiences. And companies that don't understand that are lost. I just think they just don't get it. They are so confused. And some couple have struggled. It's been a bit too difficult for them to understand how the end users are driving this as well now. We didn't see that with, say, OpenStack or Big Data.

Where were the JP Morgans or the Intuits? I'm wearing an Intuit t-shirt. So, yeah, there you go. Okay. So to take one specific aspect, which I know that you're very passionate about, is GitOps. And just like to go a bit down on the're very passionate about is GitOps. Just to go a bit down on the vertical as far as GitOps is concerned, first of all, what

is GitOps? GitOps is, we call it operations by pull request. It's fundamentally about automation. Git and Ops. Git is, as you know, an open source shared control system for documents and code, which has many implementations including GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and others. Actually, you don't even need to use Git for GitOps, but it's probably the best implementation of the concept. Around Git, we have developer workflows. And the developers who are doing these workflows used to just write code and push it and then

they would have other tools that did infrastructure automation. With GitOps you see a much tighter coupling between that and a new class of automation tools for operations. So in GitOps, operations is as automated as you like and is triggered by changes in what's in Git, which we call the source of truth. The people who love GitOps love it because they can ask questions like,

is my infrastructure, my cluster, in the correct state? If I destroy my infrastructure or delete it, can I start it again in the right state? And can I upgrade just by making config changes? If you can't do those things, you will end up in a manual, semi-automated mess. And that's why so many people today have got stuck with one or two or three snowflake Kubernetes clusters, which end up getting frozen. And then when the team that build them move on,

they don't know how to adapt them to new circumstances. And commercially, we are engaged with customers who are building application platforms using this so yesterday on stage with fidelity we showed how githops was an enabler for currently it's on amazon but it's designed inherently to be multi-cloud a new class of application platform for categories like machine learning big data mobile apps etc so it's a very, very powerful technique for building application platforms using our products

and also many open source tools. So would you say that GitOps is enabling the Kubernetes landscape or the Kubernetes landscape is enabling GitOps? I would say if Kubernetes is the problem, GitOps is the solution. Really? Okay.

That's a great way of putting it. Okay. So? Okay, that's a great way of putting it. Okay. So beyond Kubernetes, do you see GitOps going into other areas? So can it expand beyond it? For me, yeah. I mean, obviously there were tools like, so the concept of GitOps is invented by Mark Burgess

with CF Engine in the 90s. And then it was popularized through the continuous delivery movement and infrastructure as code with books like Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and Dave Farley, which talk about this idea of having autonomic convergent changes.

So the idea is you make a change in config and then you never touch production, but it always converges to the correct state based on automation tools. That was a prediction because we didn't have all the tools yet. Then we had tools like Puppet and Chef which do this, the declarative approach turned out to be a better one. People started talking about infrastructure as code. Then we had immutable containers, which is

another piece of the puzzle. And then we had tools like Terraform and Kubernetes and Flux and Flagger and many, many other GitOps tools. You don't have to use ours. There's others as well. Argo is one from Intuit. And so, yeah, I think that GitOps is spreading beyond the core Kubernetes environment. If you're using Terraform, you're doing GitOps for broader things. I'm seeing it being integrated with backend services

by both Google and Amazon projects. I'm seeing GitOps integrated with back-end services by both Google and Amazon projects. I'm seeing GitOps for Lambda functions coming through. I'm seeing GitOps for database schemas coming through and database upgrades. There's a company called Replicated that just released a bunch of really nice GitOps tools which cover interesting cases like that. What we haven't seen yet is GitOps for data. You know, what is the versioning story for that? Obviously considerably more complicated. Probably best to leave it alone for now. So there's Argo, and there's Flux,

and there's this continuous delivery, and there's the GitOps. Very powerful concepts. Where does running tests, continuous integration come into play? So the great news is you carry on doing that. You're using Jenkins, please carry on using Jenkins. You're using commercial Jenkins, CloudBiz, carry on doing that. Or you're using CircleCI, or you're using GitLab. These are all wonderful tools for doing what we think of as a dev cycle.

But instead of actually having the external dev orchestration powered by your CI tool be responsible for deployment and management, in GitOps, we put all of our deployment artifacts into our repositories, which will be the containers and the config files. Note that these are immutable things. Then the ops is done autonomically, automatically, or automagically by the tools that are responsible for managing the stack. So they deploy the changes. They make sure they're convergent correctly. And they manage the system. And they alert you if it's drifted from its correct state.

So what we're doing is we're pulling back the responsibility of CI just a bit. So it's no longer doing deployment, management pulling back the responsibility of CI just a bit, so it's no longer doing deployment management and any kind of observability, because that's not really the role of CI. The external orchestrator drives the dev cycle. The internal orchestrator drives the secure deployment of changes. So the test and dev just carry on as before. Now, the other one is testing and production, progressive delivery.

That can be done using GitOps too. We've created a tool called Flagger. In Argo, it's Argo rollouts. These will eventually, I hope, become one project under the Argo brand. But Flagger lets you make a change and then adjust the impact of that change in the live system. So you, for example, could roll out a canary, meaning a new image with a new feature. You could direct 5% of your traffic to it to test it in production. You could even run a security check and roll back automatically if things are insecure. You can do feature flags in the same way.

The future is thousands of clusters running thousands of experiments concurrently so that everybody can make incredibly fast iterative changes to their systems, all powered by GitOps. I hear a lot of tooling, different names. For someone just wanting to get started, what would you recommend? Which is the best way of getting started to understand what they are, how they fit together, how to start using them, all these tools? We have a lot of information on our website weave.works about this go to the gitops pages there's an independent site called gitops.tech which i recommend as well there are

tools like firecube wksctl eksctl flux and flagger if you read about those you can start doing gitops immediately and in fact more and more companies are getting into gitops i think one thing that Flux and Flagger. If you read about those, you can start doing GitOps immediately. And in fact, more and more companies are getting into GitOps. I think one thing that we're missing still is the ultimate getting started guide. So that could be a great thing for somebody to write. Excellent. So contributions welcome and contributors welcome. And I think this is one of the areas which are worth emphasizing, how there's so much great documentation and so many people willing to help. Anybody that wants to join, anybody that wants to, you know, just at least get interested. And if something isn't there, reach out and you can definitely help. So just by pointing out that, hey, this doesn't make sense and contributing what you think would make sense,

that's a great way of contributing on its own. Or just ask questions on Twitter, whatever you like. I'm monadic on Twitter. I'm happy to take good ops questions, as long as there aren't too many of them. What's next for you? What do you have coming up? What things into 2020, the first thing that you're excited about?

Well, Weaveworks is an American company with loads of great American staff distributed all around the US. We're hiring very quickly. Please get in touch if you'd like to work with us. We work remote and distributed, as well as we have a few offices for people in big cities. However, you may have noticed I'm British. I have an english accent i will be enjoying next week what we think of in england as the quiet week while all the americans are partying with their thanksgiving because the week after that is amazon reinvent and i'll be in vegas

with all that that entails exciting too many conferences right too many great conferences it's really difficult to pick which ones to go to. I try to go as few as possible because of the carbon footprint impact. But I think that these are the ones I have to be at at the moment. Thank you very much, Alexis. This was great. Thank you. All right.

Thank you for tuning in to The Change Log. Special thanks to our friends at the CNCF for making this series possible. Stay tuned for part two to hear Gerhard run an interview marathon on the final day of KubeCon. He's talking Prometheus. He's talking Crossplane. He's talking Grafana. These are deep dives that you don't want to miss.

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