ADAM GLICK: Hi, and welcome to the Kubernetes Podcast from Google. I'm Adam Glick.

CRAIG BOX: And I'm Craig Box.

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CRAIG BOX: Happy sixth birthday, Kubernetes.

ADAM GLICK: Woo-hoo!

CRAIG BOX: A milestone celebrated over the weekend. I hear you went out and got yourself a present.

ADAM GLICK: [LAUGHS] Yeah, I've realized that I'm going to be working from home for a little while, and so I've been starting to try and build up a home office. So I got myself a chair to be able to sit in, which is slightly better than the plank avoid with a foam covering on it that I was on previously.

CRAIG BOX: The chair I have in my home office came from a job that I used to work at. It had two armrests. And my arms were resting on them at one point a few years ago. And all of a sudden, they just completely fell out from underneath me, a giant steel-welded piece of metal just completely sheared off.

I didn't think I had that strength in me. But it's sitting over there in the corner waiting to one day be reattached. Possibly it is a little less ergonomically sound than it used to be.

ADAM GLICK: [LAUGHS] I'm picturing what that would look like, to just sit there and have your arms on the armrest, and just pop right off. Did you get up and flex? Did you take a moment right there, just to feel the might?

CRAIG BOX: I didn't. I guess I looked underneath it and said, "hmm, I wonder what happened there?" And maybe I don't want to put too much weight on the right armrest here in case it falls off. But my sitting style doesn't really lend to resting my arms on the rest anyway, so it doesn't feel so bad.

ADAM GLICK: Fair enough. Browsing around on YouTube, as I sometimes do on the weekends, looking for interesting music and songs, I ran across the Frog Leap Studios, which is a guitarist from Norway. He's in a band called Frog Leap. And he does a lot of covers. Basically, take any popular song you might think of and make it a heavy metal version. And that's pretty much his channel. And there's just all sorts of fun things there. He even as a kid's album out--

CRAIG BOX: Why wouldn't you?

ADAM GLICK: --but I've linked in the show notes, one of the covers I thought was particularly entertaining. If you remember Chumbawumba and "Tubthumping?"

CRAIG BOX: Who doesn't!

ADAM GLICK: He has a memorable version of it. I think I'll put it that way.

CRAIG BOX: I had actually seen this one. Not all of the music that you suggest on the show is something that I've come across before. But this guy had done a cover of "Hello" by Adelle, which I'd seen a couple of years ago when it came out. And one thing I will note, obviously, with studio equipment, and computers, and things, it's easy to record a song yourself in a way that it never used to be.

Say, this guy, you say he's in a band. But he plays the guitar, and bass, and drums, and sings in multiple parts, and everything. And part of me thinks, well, that's great. Good on him. He's able to do that. But part of me thinks, well--

ADAM GLICK: What are the rest of the members of the band doing?

CRAIG BOX: Well, it's not that so much as in, like, how much of a perfectionist are you to say, "no, I don't care for what these other people can bring. I'm just going to record all the parts myself."

ADAM GLICK: I think he just does it for fun.

CRAIG BOX: Indeed.

ADAM GLICK: Let's get to the news.

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ADAM GLICK: Rancher Labs has announced the general availability of Longhorn, their container-based storage solution. Longhorn is persistent, distributed block storage designed for stateful applications running in Kubernetes. The project is open sourced and became a CNCF sandbox project in late October of 2019. Longhorn provides the ability to take snapshots, backups, and do restores of your data.

The release supports non-disruptive volume expansion, cross-cluster disaster recovery with defined RTO and RPO, and live upgrades without impact to running volumes. It offers a standalone UI as well as Kubernetes CLI integration.

CRAIG BOX: Fairwinds has launched version 1.0 of Polaris, a tool for codifying best practices for Kubernetes. Initially launched as a dashboard for reporting on what your cluster was running, Polaris later gained a validating web hook, as well as support for Helm charts and YAML files. 1.0 adds the ability to define custom checks in JSON schema format and support for all controller types, including custom resources.

ADAM GLICK: Two new features in this week's Azure Kubernetes Service update allow you to customize egress networking and IP address allocation with custom route tables. In preview, AKS now supports Mac surge upgrades with confidential workloads via the DC series of VMs available in private preview.

CRAIG BOX: They say the cheapest cluster is the one you don't run. So the team at Kubecost have launched a new open-source project called Cluster Turndown. As the name suggests, this is a tool that helps automate the shutting down of nonessential nodes, like those used in staging, development, and testing clusters.

The tool works on an automated schedule and user-defined criteria. So it can both shut down clusters at night and spin them up before people start working in the morning. Cluster Turndown currently works with GKE, EKS, and kops, with a K, on AWS.

ADAM GLICK: Solo.io has announced the release of a developer portal for Istio to help document, expose, and compose APIs. The portal makes it easy to do Kubernetes-native API management, enabling easy exposing of APIs, rate limiting, external authorization, and per-client policies. It also enables self-service sign-up for API usage, access to security keys, and easy testing. We spoke with Solo.io CEO Idit Levine in episode 55.

CRAIG BOX: Two CVEs in Kubernetes were recently disclosed, both of medium severity. The first let you attack several container networking implementations by sending IPv6 router advertisements and then intercepting traffic, even on a network which normally only runs IPv4. The second allows users to access a small amount of information from other services on the local network of the Kubernetes master.

While this latter bug doesn't sound bad in and of itself, when combined with things like a metadata service on a cloud network, this became a critical vulnerability to the providers. Both Google and Microsoft paid bug bounties to the security researchers ReeverZax and Hach. They wrote up their experience in a blog post, which you can find linked in the show notes.

ADAM GLICK: Ambassador API Gateway has released version 1.5. This release adds URL rewriting for services, support for running in a pod with an Istio sidecar, and improvements when running as an ingress for Knative. Under the hood, Ambassador has been upgraded to Envoy 1.14 and is starting to use the new V3 APIs.

CRAIG BOX: Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu, has added Windows and Mac support to their Microk8s distribution. Microk8s runs natively on Linux, but can now use a VM on the other platforms, and could be installed through an .EXE on Windows or Homebrew on Mac. Learn more about Microk8s in our interview with Mark Shuttleworth in episode 60.

ADAM GLICK: Google Cloud continues its series on GKE logging with a blog from Rami Shalom and Charles Baer. They discuss how logs are actually captured, how to find and search for your logs, structuring your logs to allow interfacing with other debugging tools, and defining what logs are written to minimize storage usage.

CRAIG BOX: Google Cloud has also released a white paper on business continuity with Anthos. The post announcing the paper focuses on three strategies-- ensuring you have sufficient access to engineers to build and operate your applications, the ability to scale up and down, and automation with centralization of ops. The blog gives an overview of the paper, which is available for download in exchange for your email address.

ADAM GLICK: The CNCF has announced a new cloud engineer bootcamp. The online training is a packaging of several existing Linux foundation trainings designed to help you obtain the Linux Foundation Certified Administrator and Certified Kubernetes Administrator certifications. What's new is that, along with the self-paced training, the instructors of the course will be available through online forums for participants to ask questions. The bootcamp also provides a bundled price for training for several courses and the cost of taking both exams for a buck shy of $1,000 US, with introductory pricing of $599 till June 17.

CRAIG BOX: Speaking of training, the CNCF has announced that, starting September 1, the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam will change its topics and questions. Most of them will be familiar, but certain areas will change the amount of focus they receive. For instance, troubleshooting jumps from 10% to 30% of the curriculum. Other areas are consolidated. And there are now five major areas of questioning as opposed to the 10 previous.

ADAM GLICK: Finally, Noah Kantrowitz from Ridecell has been heads-down with Kubernetes for the past two years and has come up for air with a blog post talking about his lessons learned. His team completed a total migration from Ansible and Terraform to pure Kubernetes and talks about what is good-- Traefik, Prometheus, GitOps, and operators-- what is not good-- secret management across namespaces-- and what still needs attention in open source-- Kubernetes native CI and log analysis tooling.

CRAIG BOX: And that's the news.

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ADAM GLICK: Priyanka Sharma is the new general manager at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. She was most recently Director of Cloud Native Alliances at GitLab, where she represented the company on the CNCF governing board, and is a founding member of the OpenTracing project. Welcome to the show, Priyanka.

PRIYANKA SHARMA: Thank you so much for having me.

CRAIG BOX: Your career started at Google, but not in Cloud?

PRIYANKA SHARMA: That's right. I was working on the AdSense team. It was my first job out of college, actually. Google really is what brought me to technology.

I grew up in India. And I was very interested in all the sciences there. I enjoyed math a lot. Computer science was something we all studied in school. But as I grew up and got older, I spent a little bit more in the social sciences route.

I got a scholarship to study at Stanford, and that's how I ended up in the US. There, I did a Structured Liberal Education program, SLE. So we were the nerds within the nerds kind of thing, we were the ultra. [CHUCKLES]

But it was an amazing program. But that sent me more in the direction of philosophy, political science, history, et cetera. And that's what I did at Stanford.

So after I graduated, I was expecting to stay, I figured, in spaces where poli sci grads end up. But somehow, the best opportunity that landed on my lap was-- well, I shouldn't say landed on my lap, because it took a lot of work to get it, but-- [CHUCKLES] was my job at Google. And I started in AdSense. I was in business development, partnerships, that kind of stuff.

But it was a really good experience, because immediately I was like, OK, this is right. This feels good. I want to be in tech. And so that also slashed my plans of moving to London, New York, Hong Kong, because I was in Mountain View. [CHUCKLES]

CRAIG BOX: California is nice.

PRIYANKA SHARMA: Yes, I have grown to love it. But back then, it was a little like, wait, change of plans. That was a great start. And I also discovered very quickly, upon joining Google, that I worked very well with engineering teams. I did some projects with them, got an offer to actually join the AdSense eng team.

And then the startup bug bit me. And I joined a startup that was acquired by GoDaddy, then started doing my own thing. And you know, in the series of pivots that me and my co-founder did, that's when I actually really discovered developer products and open source.

One of the tools that we worked on was a time tracker that had open-source plugins. And I just saw the momentum in the community. There were like 2,000 people, like, coming and going, and, like, 200 people who were regularly involved. And I was like-- if I remember correctly, by the way. This is a while back, so the numbers are fuzzy.

But I had never seen this kind of activity before, where people just give, come, collaborate, for no other reason but for the joy of building together and being useful together. And I just fell in love. And that changed the trajectory of my career.

CRAIG BOX: Do you look back and think, wow, I remember when 2,000 people working on a project was a lot?

PRIYANKA SHARMA: [LAUGHS] Yep, that's a very fair statement. Yeah, it was a completely different kind of open-source activity, because it was unlike what we see in our world now in cloud native, where it's very complex, large things that are built. That was a little bit more homegrown project, with folks just excited to get the plugin they needed, and that kind of thing. So it's a different kind of community, but at the same time impactful and awesome.

ADAM GLICK: Your first cloud-native company was LightStep. Tell us a little about LightStep.

PRIYANKA SHARMA: LightStep was another turning point in my career. Extremely amazing experience. I was advising and consulting companies at an accelerator called Heavybit in San Francisco. It's a dev tool accelerator. Companies like Stripe have come out of it-- Stripe, PagerDuty, LightStep, Rainforest QA, et cetera. I still advise there. Love the community. And I met LightStep founders Ben Sigelman, Ben Cronin, and Spoons, is what he goes by.

CRAIG BOX: Ben Spoons?

PRIYANKA SHARMA: No no. [LAUGHS] Oh, I think his real name is Daniel. I don't know. He goes by Spoons. [LAUGHS] Well, Spoons and Ben Sigelman are both Googlers from the past. And through them, I learned about distributed systems for the first time. Ben Sigelman actually built Dapper and Monarch at Google, so distributed tracing and time-series database, respectively.

And he just is such a knowledgeable genius, I would say, in this space. And I had the honor, really, of working with him directly, and learning every day how he thinks about systems, how he thinks about resilience and observability. Being that close to someone who spent 10-plus years working on systems like these was extremely beneficial and fun for me, because Ben happens to be a great teacher.

So I learned a lot. It was a very steep learning curve, by the way. Because the first few months, I would be sitting in meetings in rooms and being like, they're using English words, but--

ADAM GLICK: [CHUCKLES]

PRIYANKA SHARMA: I do not follow. So it was hard, but I got there with a lot of help and support.

And that was parallel to the time I started working on the OpenTracing project, which was an open standard for distributed tracing to make it easier to instrument your software systems. And OpenTracing was actually the third project to join this Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

I was just talking to Chris Aniszczyk the other day, who is our CTO, and discussing, like, remember the day we all met in Heavybit? That was, like, the beginning of the beginning, for me anyway. And we just laughed at how much has changed since.

Because keep in mind, this is back in 2016. The foundation had started in 2015. And a year later, there we were, third project, early days. And it was just a very thrilling time. I kind of grew up with the foundation in that way.

CRAIG BOX: We spoke to Yuri Shkuro, in episode 97, about OpenTracing. And you can listen to that if you want to learn a little bit more about these standards there. But what was it like working in a project that was not just a thing built by one company, but run with multiple companies involved?

PRIYANKA SHARMA: It was awesome. And it was how I think it should always be. You mentioned Yuri. And Yuri, I am such a big fan of his. I actually helped him write a bunch of case studies for Jaeger recently. I contribute to Jaeger when I can. I have not done much, but I'm a big fan. And it's also a graduated CNCF project.

Yuri is amazing. He worked so hard for OpenTracing, along with Ben, Spoons, and a bunch of other folks. Having that collaboration early on-- and there were a ton of companies involved, and different individuals involved, different perspective, different use cases. So everybody brings that. I remember hosting a working group with a lot of folks who thought tracing was important.

So we had Datadog in the room, we had New Relic, we had Pinterest, we had Yelp, all kinds of folks joining in-- end users, vendors, you name it. And we all moved forward together, I would say. So it was a wonderful experience.

And I think being in the CNCF was also a great foundational start for us. Because since the early days, that's how we were doing things. It's not like, oh, you join a foundation, and then you have to dramatically shift your operations to be more inclusive or anything. We were like that from the beginning. And that worked really awesome for us.

So yes, I would encourage everybody, if they're working on open source, find ways to reach out, whether it's by joining a foundation or just, like, talk to your friends. Find folks who will make you and your project better. Absolutely.

ADAM GLICK: Your most recent role was at GitLab.

PRIYANKA SHARMA: Mm-hmm.

ADAM GLICK: How did you end up there?

PRIYANKA SHARMA: [CHUCKLES] This is a cool story, in my opinion. I'm a bit dorky with what I think cool stories are. So don't have high expectations. [LAUGHS]

But I met Sid, one of the founders of GitLab, actually, when I was doing my own startup. And he coached me and my co-founder on our Y Combinator application. He was so awesome. I was introduced to him over email by a mutual friend. So he didn't really know me. But he showed up at our coworking space, coached us for three hours, and then we had dinner together, all of us.

I remember thinking, that day, that this person is impressive. Something good is going to come out of what he is doing. And at that time, GitLab was, I think, nine people. They'd just come out of IC, something like that.

And we kept in touch. As I got more and more involved with distributed systems, our conversations morphed into him sort of keeping up with the latest on the tracing world through me. And I always enjoyed the chats.

And then we were just having conversation. And I had launched LightStep. And OpenTracing was thriving in the foundation. So I was ready for something new. And just in one of our conversations, he was like, oh wait, yeah, join in, obviously, right now.

And things happened pretty fast after that. I think GitLab had, just about a few months ago, at that point, made the decision to really go all-in on cloud native, and support end users, developers, to go cloud native easier, deploy to Kubernetes in one click, that kind of stuff. And so they felt this would be a great fit.

And I joined as director of cloud native alliances. The name of the title is fairly self-descriptive, I'd say. [CHUCKLES] Alliances in the cloud-native world of all kinds, super fun.

And as I was in that role, somebody told me that, hey, the CNCF governing board election is open. Do you want to run? And I was like me, "psshh," no. That sounds crazy. But they were like, no, seriously. You have to do this.

And I mulled over it, because I don't know, I wasn't sure what it takes to be on a board. It sounded very serious. [CHUCKLES] But the person nominated me actually. So I ended up running. And I did not expect it, but I got elected.

So that was awesome. It was such a thrill. It was one of those things where you're like, you almost think it's funny, but you apply. And it's like it works out. So you get like this added confidence in yourself and in what you've been doing in the community. So it was a great vote of confidence. And that was a great experience.

CRAIG BOX: The governing board of the CNCF is composed of representatives of member companies as well as elected end user academic and non-profit members. So as a member of the CNCF, GitLab enabled you to stand for that. What does the governing board do?

PRIYANKA SHARMA: Their job is to ensure that the executives and staff at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation are moving in the right direction to support them. On a very tactical level, they approve the budgets for all the planning that we do. They are also a huge resource.

Now is as good of an example of a time as can be. We're all going through very unprecedented times. We're hopefully coming out of a pandemic soon. But we're in it right now still. There have been other kinds of tumultuous activities in the world lately. It's a tough time.

And the board has been 100% there for us, with advice, ideas, support. Because one example of a big activity that we do that's changed is we host the KubeCon Cloud Native Con event.

CRAIG BOX: I think it's fair to say that we've been there before.

ADAM GLICK: Yes, indeed. [CHUCKLES] Yeah.

PRIYANKA SHARMA: [LAUGHS]

ADAM GLICK: We may have been to one or two.

PRIYANKA SHARMA: Just a couple. [LAUGHS] Yes, so I can tell that you are regulars. And the KubeCon, as you know, is awesome, right? And it's like summer camp for us cloud-native people. We all get together, have a great time, and learn a lot.

That's not happening right now because of the shelter-in-place rules everywhere. So KubeCon Amsterdam, which was supposed to happen in March, is now going to be a virtual event in August. So that's a big change.

There's pros and cons to virtual experiences. And there's ways to make it amazing. That's what we're kind of figuring out right now. But that's been a big change for us. And the governing board has been totally behind a foundation staff to figure it out, go for resources. They're just 100% in on the mission.

So the CNCF working staff is actually a very lean team. But with the GB, as we call the Governing Board, we actually suddenly expand to a lot more people, and a lot more very experienced people. So it's really, really helpful.

ADAM GLICK: You've recently taken on an advanced role in that organization. You've moved to be the general manager of the CNCF. How did that change come about? What made you interested in that role? And what changes as part of your duties as you take on this new responsibility?

PRIYANKA SHARMA: It's a completely new job. I am now full-time employed by the Linux Foundation. As the GM of the CNCF, I am responsible for, well, everything, for better or for worse. [CHUCKLES]

CRAIG BOX: No pressure.

PRIYANKA SHARMA: No pressure. No big deal. [LAUGHS] So as general manager, it is my responsibility to continue the awesome growth and the success that the foundation has already had. As you folks know, we've grown very quickly in the last three-plus years. And the impact of the CNCF is fairly widely known.

The credit definitely goes to Dan Kohn and Chris Aniszczyk, who really built this up from scratch. Dan has worked so hard, alongside Chris and with Jim's guidance, to build a very unique foundation that has multiple touchpoints for the end users and contributors, the doers in our space, whether it's KubeCons, whether it's community days, whether it's the webinars we host every week. There's so many ways for people to get involved.

And the interesting thing is, it's done by a very lean staff, with a bunch of volunteers, with a bunch of part-time help, et cetera. So my job is to make sure we keep doing the awesome, and grow and build even more. I am particularly interested in our end user community and leveraging that to greater heights. We have 142 members that are end-user members. And that is actually the largest end user community that any open source foundation enjoys. So we're very proud of it.

Cheryl on my team has done a lot of the legwork to make this happen. So that's a big priority for us. In addition, just being out there to support the community, being part of the community. Because those are my roots, right? I just want to keep that going. And we are all a Team Cloud Native. And we got to move together. And that's what I'm here to do with everybody.

CRAIG BOX: Dan Kohn was the executive director of the foundation, and you're the general manager, although the roles appear the same. Why the change in verbiage?

PRIYANKA SHARMA: A bunch of people have been asking me that. And it's really just a consolidation that the LF is doing. So right now, if you look at the various subfoundations in the LF umbrella, there's some GMs-- like LF networking has a GM, Arpit. Then RISC-V has a CEO, Calista. Then there's also executive directors.

So we thought, let's consolidate, have one title. Jim landed on general manager. And sounds good to me. What's-in-a name kind of a thing. And that's really what's going on here.

ADAM GLICK: Out of curiosity, with that, are you forming a standards board and a foundation in order to make sure that the names and titles are all the same?

PRIYANKA SHARMA: [CHUCKLES]

ADAM GLICK: Can we expect to see a GitHub repository with a description?

[ADAM AND PRIYANKA CHUCKLE]

PRIYANKA SHARMA: Well, you never know. [LAUGHS] Never say never. [CHUCKLES]

CRAIG BOX: We spoke to Dan Kohn, the outgoing executive director, in episode 35. What can you tell us about the new project that he's moving on to?

PRIYANKA SHARMA: Oh, I am so excited for Linux Foundation Public Health. I will not go too much into detail, because Dan's going to do an amazing round of announcements soon. So we'll let him do that. But all I can say is he's going to work on basically enabling authorities and governments to use open source in the COVID response.

I have to say, if there's anyone who can do it, it's Dan Kohn. He's a juggernaut. He does get so much done. He is so smart and dedicated. So I'm very excited for the announcement when it comes out. I know it will blow people's minds. I'm very, very stoked for what he's doing.

CRAIG BOX: I do know he listens to the show. I know how excited he was to tell everyone he had an epidemiologist on the staff.

PRIYANKA SHARMA: [CHUCKLES]

CRAIG BOX: That was a little bit earlier in the COVID crisis, when we were trying to decide what would happen with events. Dan has done a lot of great things, obviously, with the foundation. Which of the specific things that Dan has brought to this do you feel that you most want to carry through?

PRIYANKA SHARMA: I truly want to continue everything the CNCF is doing right now, to be super clear. Because I've talked to a bunch of end users, members in the community, and they're like, keep it going, for sure. There's a lot of positive momentum here. So to be clear, generally speaking, everything is awesome and we've got to keep going.

Of course, the KubeCons, I wouldn't say they were an innovation of Dan's, but he really made them a huge success alongside the Linux Foundation events team. So we want to keep following in his footsteps, and innovate as much as we can, and make the experience amazing for folks, whether virtually or in person. So that's one thing.

In general, I mean, he's done so much good stuff. I think a really impactful thing he's done is in enabling Cheryl to be the director of our ecosystem and focus on the end users. And the results we're getting there, with case studies, with something actually Cheryl is going to announce next week, which is end user opinions on projects and technologies-- again, don't want to steal her thunder too much, so I'll leave it at that. But I think that's really thriving.

Just the other day, Condé Nast did an interview slash write-up up with The New Stack about how they're using Kubernetes and other open source to standardize the infrastructure across their global properties. And they have so many, like they have "Wired," "New Yorker," "Vanity Fair," just in the United States. So they have properties everywhere. And they have standardized on Kubernetes, alongside, like, Terraform.

The point is that the end user stories are becoming deeper and stronger. And that's all because of the work Dan and Cheryl have done. And we've got to continue that trend. So I am particularly excited about that.

ADAM GLICK: Just from talking to you, and then knowing your background experience, I suspect that you are not here to be a caretaker government, so to speak. So I imagine that you've got a lot of ideas on what we can do to increase the community, increase the involvement, grow the number of projects, and continue to build what is just an amazingly vibrant community that's transforming the software world and the world overall.

What would you like to drive net new as part of the CNCF?

PRIYANKA SHARMA: This is my first few weeks on the job. It's early days. And I have to say, my number one priority actually is to listen and learn. The reason for that is, as we've been talking, this is a vibrant community. Multiple different kinds of stakeholders, people who care, people who are involved, everyone has a perspective, and everyone has something awesome to add. I need to understand all of those.

Because I come with one perspective. It's like Priyanka, the community person who loves hanging out with all people cloud native. And then there's the perspective from the TOC. There is a perspective from different members of the governing board. And then there are people in the community who just spend a lot of time in cloud native. I wanted to talk to all of them. I want to understand what we can do next to be most impactful.

I will tell you three things that are top of mind already though. Number one-- and this is very chronologically speaking-- KubeCon EU is close. It's almost here in event planning terms. We're doing a virtual event of this scale for the first time.

I personally have had some experience doing virtual engagements, experiences. I actually did something called the Cloud Native Summit online, early in April, which really stemmed from a couple of members in the community and myself being like, oh, it's a bummer we can't go to Amsterdam. Let's just hang out on our own.

And I'd expected a couple of people to join in, max, right? Thousands came. And so we ended up innovating with using streaming tech. I don't know if you've heard of OBS, Open Broadcast Software.

We used that, along with YouTube Live, along with a bunch of other-- we piecemealed a bunch of things together. We cobbled it together to create a really fun experience for the folks who joined in. And there was lots of engagement and things we were doing together, "Emoji Blast," blah, blah, blah.

And that kind of gave me a peek into what can be when it comes to virtual experiences. So I want to spend some time thinking, what can we bring to the KubeCon experiences that will be cool from an online perspective? It's never going to be the same as physical events. It's never going to be apples to apples.

This is a new paradigm. How can we leverage it best for our community? I think we'll be able to achieve a few things by KubeCon EU. But I'm hoping by KubeCon Boston we've really tried out a ton of stuff and gotten better at it. So that's one thing I'm looking forward to in the immediate term.

The next thing I would say-- and I've already talked about it a little bit-- is doubling down on the end user program. I launched-- and this is not a me thing. I would say we-- me, Cheryl, the other board members, have already heard from them, a bunch of other people-- we want to think deeper about how engagement can be more meaningful when it comes to feedback from the end user community when it comes to technologies, or them engaging with each other when it comes to implementations. There is a lot we can do there, and that's a top priority for me.

The third thing is something that is going to be an ongoing effort and something very close to my heart. That is that we all are part of one community, whether it's a governing board member, or whether it's a person on the staff, whether it's someone who does webinars, or someone who just consumes the open source code. We're all one Team Cloud Native. And we need to move together in a unified way, and not think of any us-versus-them fractures within this wider ecosystem. That is my number one priority.

I want to demonstrate that in my behavior, in my actions with the community, with the other staff, with the board members, that we are all one. We're all in it together. We care about, really, largely the same things. So let's get past the us, them, you, me, and be Team Cloud Native. That's my top priority.

ADAM GLICK: Those are fantastic. You mentioned the KubeCons, which I've really enjoyed, having gone to them for several years, and getting the opportunity to meet tons of people and interact with folks through them. And as it's moved online, it's a different set of experiences. We know that the EU event is going to be online. Looking forward to the experiences that we'll create.

You mentioned KubeCon Boston. Will that be an in-person event, a virtual event, or will it actually be an amalgam of both? What are your thoughts around that event, which is a little further out?

PRIYANKA SHARMA: Everybody is hoping and telling me that their fingers crossed that we can have at least some in-person component-- yep, yep. [CHUCKLES] And I agree with that. I really miss hanging out. [CHUCKLES]

But the reality is that, as you all know, we're in a fast-moving world right now. Things are changing. What the pandemic looked like a month ago is different from what it looks like now. There is a possibility of a second wave in the fall. We don't know the answers.

So we have the setup ready that, if in-person is allowed, we can do it. However, we have to follow the state guidelines. We have to follow the rules. And that, unfortunately, is kind of coming month by month, week by week. So we've got to play it by ear on that front.

We do know that we will most likely have a virtual component, at least. Because A, we'll be much better at doing virtual events once this one is done. And B, regardless of what the scenario is, I imagine some folks will be a little bit more cautious about being able to travel. There's lots of reasons why someone would want to do that, and we want to stay cognizant of that.

All of that is to say, watch this space for more, or watch Cloud Native announcements for more. But we're trying our best to figure out something that includes in-person. And I really hope it has that component.

CRAIG BOX: You spoke before about the relationship between the governing board and the staff of the Linux Foundation, having now moved from one to the other. I'd like to ask also about the relationship with both of those groups and the TOC. TOC, the Technical Operating Committee, largely elected from the project maintainers, and separate from both of those groups. They're the group that select the projects. So they, by accepting projects in, commit the CNCF to supporting those projects. How do these groups all interrelate?

PRIYANKA SHARMA: The Linux Foundation staff are the sort of day-to-day staff, people like myself, who work on this foundation. And our job is to run it, every aspect of it, as you would any other organization. There is work to be done. There's budgets to be managed. There's initiatives to be decided. There's execution on events, execution on programs, everything. That's the staff's work.

The TOC, the Technical Oversight Committee, is, as you said, made up of elected people from the technical community who serve-- actually it's a big service, because they spend a lot of time doing this, deciding what projects get accepted. They work beyond that, though. They think through what should our vision be.

They help projects in the various stages. Because as you may know, there's sandbox, which is the earliest entry point, then there's incubation stage, and then there's graduated stage, in that order. So they help guide the projects through these journeys.

There's a lot of special interest groups that have been spun off from the TOC that help actually accomplish all this work. I attend the monthly meetings. And I'm just always sitting, holding my head in my hands, being like, how do you folks do it? You're all volunteers. You're heroes.

Because this is a ton of work, and I'm so proud to know that you're doing it, because you're that invested. That's what that tells me. So they're that awesome group.

And then the governing board is like the governing board of any organization, which is an oversight onto the work that everybody is doing in the Linux Foundation staff, approving the budget, providing resources, being there to support everything that happens.

Now, in terms of how do they kind of interact with each other, so LF staff, we're doing everything all the time with everybody. Chris Aniszczyk, who is, as you know, one of the founders of the foundation, he has spent a lot of time and energy at the TOC, and he continues to do so. He is such a great resource for anyone who's thinking of joining the foundation, bringing in your project.

Chris knows basically everything, and he can guide you to the right people if you already don't have the contacts to go there, or you just don't know where to go. Talk to him. And he's very receptive, and understands the technology ecosystem so well that he can be very responsive, very quickly. So Chris works tightly with the TOC.

Formally, the governing board meets every quarter. Often that coincides with the KubeCons, and once with the Open Source Leadership Summit-- I think that's happened once. I don't know if it often happens. I may be messing up timelines here.

But we meet four times a year. And the objective is to discuss any changes to the bylaws, any budget changes, also any new appointments. So all those approvals go through there.

The TOC joins us at the end, I think, half hour or hour of that meeting. And we all are in it together. And then we discuss things that impact both the running-the-show side of things and the technical side of things.

And by the way, that happened just a little after I joined the governing board. So I'm really glad that this joint meeting TOC GB is happening. It's very useful in my opinion.

CRAIG BOX: How do you balance the fact that Kubernetes is such a large project, and for a lot of people, it sucks up all the oxygen? KubeCon+CloudNativeCon, for most people who attend, is just KubeCon in their head. What do we do for the other projects?

PRIYANKA SHARMA: We have 10 graduated projects. That includes Kubernetes, but also nine other folks. Prometheus was the second project who joined the foundation, and it is also a graduated project. It's extremely impactful, and a lot of people are using it for monitoring.

Envoy is the network proxy that Matt Klein brought from Lyft into the foundation. Again, very impactful project that is used in a bunch of service meshes, including Istio. And it just has a very wide coverage in terms of user base. CoreDNS, Fluentd, Jaeger-- my personal favorite. Sorry, I'm not supposed to have a favorite. [LAUGHS]

CRAIG BOX: But you do.

PRIYANKA SHARMA: [CHUCKLES] And then Helm just graduated, actually. So that's been really nice. And there's a couple others-- Vitess, Containerd, CoreDNS. I think now I've covered all of them. So no favoritism was done there.

CRAIG BOX: Each of these projects obviously causes a financial cost to the CNCF, in that now there's a different thing to promote, and sponsor, and so on. Is there a point where the governing board or the staff would ask the TOC to stop accepting new projects?

PRIYANKA SHARMA: Anything can happen in this world. But I would not bet on that. [CHUCKLES] I would really not bet on that.

As you folks know better than anyone, technology moves extremely fast. In three months, in six months, everything's new. And we've got to keep pace with that. That includes ongoing development in existing projects, but also accepting new projects that are filling gaps that we maybe did not have before. Or there may be overlap with an existing project.

That's fine. We're not here to be kingmakers. We're here to accept good technology and guide projects to become better and better, especially when it comes to trustworthiness with, like, a solid governance model, diversity of contributors and maintainers, how you run things, and having a neutral IP zone-- probably mostly important.

So our goal is to enable and help anyone and everyone who can be a solid contributor in the cloud native space. So my vote, I will say, is let's keep accepting projects, yes. [CHUCKLES]

ADAM GLICK: You have one other skill that we haven't talked about so far. But it turns out you've had some strong success with renaming projects. I was wondering if you could share your experience with the Project Ollie renaming.

PRIYANKA SHARMA: [LAUGHS] That's funny. Well, so as I've shared, I adopted a rescue dog last year. His name is Ollie. He's adorable. He's sleeping under my desk right now. He's so peaceful. It's adorable.

When he was at the shelter, he was called Bandit, because he has a badass look. But he's not actually badass. That's the funniest part. But he would never respond to it. And so at first, I was like, oh, does he not respond to names? Is that just not his thing? I didn't understand.

But it seemed like, well, if it's a name issue, Bandit is not working. When I adopted him, we were driving back in the car. And we were at a light. And the car next to us was stopped. And they were like, oh my gosh, gorgeous dog. What's its name?

And it just came out of my mouth-- Ollie. I have no idea where it came out of. And suddenly he was Ollie. And he loves the name. He totally responds. He has perfect recall-- knock on wood.

Since then, his name has expanded actually. His full name is Oliver Houdini Sharma. Oliver, just for any serious conversations. He responses to that as well.

Houdini because he is such a mischief-maker. He can escape from anywhere if he thinks I am leaving the house or something. He has jumped six-feet-high fences. This dog can make things happen. He is a doer. Just like our community, he is also a doer. So that's all.

CRAIG BOX: Will we expect to see him onstage at the next KubeCon keynote?

PRIYANKA SHARMA: Oh my gosh, that's a great idea. [LAUGHS]

CRAIG BOX: You heard it here first.

PRIYANKA SHARMA: Yes, I will definitely attribute it to you. It's a very good idea. [CHUCKLES]

CRAIG BOX: All right, thank you so much for joining us today, Priyanka.

PRIYANKA SHARMA: Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed myself.

CRAIG BOX: You can find Priyanka on Twitter, @pritianka, and you can find the CNCF at cncf.io. What is a Pritianka?

PRIYANKA SHARMA: You know, Priyanka is an extremely common name in India, and Priyanka Sharma is-- like, if every other girl is Priyanka, every third girl is Priyanka Sharma. So none of those handles were going to be available. And this is a while back.

And so I just was playing around with different spellings of my name. And I got a Gmail account-- this is back in India, a billion years ago-- pritianka@gmail. And once I got that, I noticed that handle would generally always be available. So I take it wherever I go. That's the story.

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ADAM GLICK: Thanks for listening. As always, if you've enjoyed the show, please help us spread the word, and tell a friend. If you haven't subscribed yet, please subscribe in your favorite podcast app. If you have any feedback for us, you can find us on Twitter @kubernetespod, or reach us by email at kubernetespodcast@google.com.

CRAIG BOX: You can also check out our website at kubernetespodcast.com, where you will find transcripts and show notes. Until next time, take care.

ADAM GLICK: Catch you next week.

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