KASLIN FIELDS: Hello, and welcome to the Kubernetes Podcast from Google. We're your new hosts. I'm Kaslin Fields.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: And I'm Abdel Sghiouar, and we are very excited to publish our first episode.

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KASLIN FIELDS: This week we'll share some interesting new things that happened in the cloud native world over the last few weeks.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: And we will also hear from folks who attended KubeCon North America.

KASLIN FIELDS: Let's get to the news. First off, researchers at CrowdStrike have uncovered a cryptojacking campaign targeting vulnerable Docker and Kubernetes installations. Kiss-a-dog is the name given to this activity as a reference to the domain name used by the attackers to download and run a payload to be able to escape the containers and mine crypto on your infrastructure.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: In more positive news, Scaffold v2 is generally available. Scaffold is a command line tool that facilitates continuous development and delivery of containerized applications. The new version introduces new features like building for ARM and X86 architectures, enhanced support for GitOps and CI/CD, and support for Google Cloud Run.

KASLIN FIELDS: Google Kubernetes Engine introduced a new Security Posture dashboard. This new dashboard gives you a single pane of glass visibility into vulnerabilities in your container workloads, misconfigurations, and more.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: AWS announced the general availability of cdk8s+. The intent driven High-level API allows you to use familiar programming languages to manage Kubernetes resources. Cdk8s is a CNCF sandbox project and works on any Kubernetes installation.

KASLIN FIELDS: At KubeCon North America 2022, the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee announced a new process for projects seeking to join the CNCF as sandbox projects. The new process is hosted on GitHub to make the application more conveniently accessible to project maintainers.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: The committee has also accepted Istio and Cert-manager as incubating projects.

KASLIN FIELDS: During their KubeCon North America 2022 keynote, Cisco announced OpenClarity, an umbrella of open source projects focused on application security, the software supply chain, and the shift left movement. This umbrella includes three separate projects, FunctionClarity, KubeClarity, and APIClarity. Each project focuses on different areas of the cloud native software delivery process, with a focus on building and delivering secure apps.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: A bug was discovered in kube-router 1.25. If you install the fresh cluster and your networking doesn't work, you might want to check the iptables version on your nodes.

KASLIN FIELDS: Google Cloud Next took place October 11 through 13. If you're interested in all the announcements made at the event you can find a link to the event wrap up in our show notes.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: You can also check Microsoft Ignite, which took place October 12 to 14.

KASLIN FIELDS: The Linux Foundation and CNCF announced a new event due to the overwhelming popularity of their security co-located event at KubeCon. Cloud Native SecurityCon 2023 will take place in Seattle, Washington in February. The call for papers for this event closes November 13.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: The Linux Foundation and the CNCF announced a partnership with Razom for Ukraine on Project Veteranuis. The project aims to provide Ukrainian veterans, their families, and those in need with access to technical educational content in Ukrainian. To read more and support the project, click on the link in the show notes.

KASLIN FIELDS: And that's the news.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: All right, Kaslin. You were at KubeCon North America last week in Detroit.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yes. It was so exciting to be back in person. This is actually the third one that I've done in person since 2020. It was my 11th overall, including all of the virtual ones, so it was really exciting to be with the community.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Awesome. Unfortunately, I could not go, but I was told that you have interviewed some people to hear their impressions of this year's edition.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yes. I really wanted our listeners to hear the news from the conference just as they would if they were there right from the show floor.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: All right. Let's listen to what people had to say.

KASLIN FIELDS: This is Kaslin Fields of the Kubernetes Podcast from Google Cloud at KubeCon North America 2022 in Detroit. And I am here with — would you please introduce yourself?

MO KHAN: So I'm Mo Khan, a software engineer at Microsoft. I started working on Kubernetes mid-2016. I'm one of the co-chairs for SIG Auth. I worked on various API machinery, things over the years. Happy to be here.

KATRINA VEREY: My name is Katrina Verey, and I work on Kubernetes open source at Shopify.

AISHWARYA HARPALE: Hi. My name is Aishwarya Harpale. I'm a student at Rutgers University, and I've been in the Kubernetes community for a while.

JEFFERY SIKKA: My name is Jeffery Sikka. I work for the CNCF. My title is principal developer experience engineer.

KIRSTEN SCHUMY: My name is Kirsten Schumy. I'm a software engineer at Amazon working on EKSV, the distribution for Kubernetes. So it's a totally open source project.

JEAN-PAUL ROBINSON: I am Jean-Paul Robinson. I'm an HPC architect at the campus of the University of Alabama at Birmingham in Birmingham, Alabama.

MADHAV JIVRAJANI: My name is Madhav. I work at Vmware. Within the community I help out with a few areas in contra backs, API machinery, architecture, that being a few of them. But yeah, it's nice to be here.

LEIGH CAPILI: What's up, Kaslin? Leigh Capili here from the Vmware Tanzu Advocacy Team. Also, I do a lot of work in the Flux project, so I'm really excited about Flux.

NIM JAYAWARDENA: Hi, Kaslin, and everybody else listening. My name is Nim. I am a developer programs engineer at Google. I focus primarily on GKE and at Anthos Service Mesh. And I'm also the tech lead of this popular sample application called Online Boutique or Hipster Shop. So yeah, that's me.

CHARLIE YU: Hello, my name is Charlie Yu. I'm a developer programming engineer at Google. In fact, this is my first year at Google as well, so Kubernetes is still a relatively new thing to me. And this is also my first ever conference, technology conference, so I'm excited to be here.

AHRAR MONSUR: My name is Ahrar Monsur, and I am a developer relations engineer at Google and I'm currently focusing on Anthos and GKE with a specialization in high performance computing and AI ML workloads.

MICKEY BOXELL: Thank you, Kaslin. My name is Mickey Boxell. I am a product manager of the Oracle container engine for Kubernetes service.

EDDIE ZANESKI: Sure. My name is Eddie Zaneski. I'm a software engineer at a company called Chain Guard, and I help lead the CLI tooling SIG for the Kubernetes project. So I work mostly on Kube control, and I also work on the build and test infrastructure for the project.

ANDY PIGGOTT: Hi, I'm Andy Piggott and I am the chief product officer at Section, a cloud native hosting platform.

LOGAN SMITH: Hey, my name is Logan Smith, and I'm the director of business development at GrafanaLabs.

KASLIN FIELDS: What are you most excited about at KubeCon?

MO KHAN: Oh, I think it's probably the same thing that I'm most excited about. It's maybe extra excited this time because of the whole COVID mess in the last few years. But yeah, it's just being able to see all the folks that I spend so much time working on GitHub on in-person.

I've had such great conversations here with folks and just, it's impressive how much more you can get done with just a little bit of extra bandwidth, and yeah, just some face to face talks. But yeah, I love the folks that I work with and I'm just really happy to see them.

KATRINA VEREY: My favorite thing about KubeCon is the chance to see people that I work with in the community, meet new folks who are also passionate about open source, and talk to other end users about their experiences with Kubernetes and with the particular tools that I help maintain.

AISHWARYA HARPALE: The thing that I'm most excited about are the people that I'm meeting over here and the network that I'm building because there are all these people that I've met on social media that I've seen around, that I've seen in the community, but I'm finally getting to meet them in person.

JEFFERY SIKKA: So what am I most excited about the conference? It's in Detroit. Detroit is my hometown. Not to make it not technical or not Kubernetes related, but I've been wanting a KubeCon in the Midwest since I have been going to KubeCons.

Not just because I feel like there's heavy bias to the East Coast or the West Coast, but mainly because I think there's a lot to offer in the Midwest. There was a large startup contingent in Ann Arbor and in Detroit. Detroit is not just known for all of the negativity that people think — which, by the way, I completely disagree with — but there's a lot of growth, both in startups and technology.

There's a Google office here. There's been a Microsoft office here. There's just a lot of representation here. So Detroit was the thing I was most excited about in the conference. Also, besides tooting my own horn, having a keynote. That's kind of a nice little experience to happen to me. I'm excited.

KIRSTEN SCHUMY: Most excited about is just seeing all the different companies and seeing what everyone else is doing. It's always wild to me how many cool and innovative things everyone's just out there doing and creating. You kind of get in your own space sometimes and just get head down in an area, but it's just wild the different directions.

There was a talk, which unfortunately I missed. There was different one I wanted to go to. But I'm like, 5G, and then that was crazy. I was like, wow, I didn't even think about that. Just wild the things that people are working on.

JEAN-PAUL ROBINSON: I guess the most exciting thing about the conference is having come here and not been sure if I was going to meet any peers in the research industry, and I met neighbors in my talk. They were also very excited about using Kubernetes in research, and we basically had a really great conversation after the presentation. And it was me and actually several other university folks representing their universities from around the country.

And so that was a really exciting kind of a unexpected connection that I was able to make with a university right next door in Georgia and then one up in Wisconsin. So that was, I think, probably the best thing so far. And then just the energy of the people here. I like that. So they're excited about technology, and that's always nice.

MADHAV JIVRAJANI: Well, most excited about is me getting to meet all the folks that review my peers and seeing the disappointment in real time. But no, it's been great getting to meet these people, having conversations that we've been having over Zoom or over Slack, but in person, exchanging on some of those ideas and actually seeing some of those ideas come to life. So it's been really rewarding that way.

LEIGH CAPILI: KubeCon, Cloud NativeCon is just a really exciting place. And I think you see a lot of new and fun differentiation happening in the co-located events that happen on day zero and even day minus one. Shout out to the Contributor Summit where we try to make cool stuff happen and also have a good time with the contributors.

NIM JAYAWARDENA: So this was my very first KubeCon in person. The previous KubeCons that I've attended I've been a virtual attendee. And it was just really nice to see the hype and the community around KubeCon in person. I think it's really hard to really contextualize that online just by looking at GitHub stars and the inner YouTube video views and whatnot. Seeing it in person is really a different experience, and that's what excited me the most this time around.

CHARLIE YU: Honestly, as for my first technology conference, everything is quite exciting overall. I loved all the booths and all the talks that are happening around the conferences. And everything is new to me so everything is really stimulating for me, so yeah. Overall, very excited for it.

AHRAR MONSUR: I think what I'm most excited about for KubeCon 2022 has been just seeing the landscape of CNCF laid out and seeing the people who are operating within it, how they're sharing information and interconnecting with one another. There has been a lot of shared technologies and technologies layered on top of each other that's been really fun to see. I can appreciate how Google as well uses them and collaborates with them to create technologies.

MICKEY BOXELL: Mainly I'm just excited to see people in 3D again. I have been working remotely for such a long time now that it's nice to actually have hallway traffic and get to talk to people who are both my end users, and also just members of the greater Kubernetes community.

EDDIE ZANESKI: The best part of KubeCon for me is obviously the Contributor Summit. I get to see and hang out with the people that I work with all year in-person. I met a bunch of contributors that I've worked with for the past two years for the first time today, so that was pretty great.

ANDY PIGGOTT: I have been most excited for seeing a lot of the innovation that's been happening over the last couple years where we've not been together in person, and really spending time with peers and our customers talking about what we're doing, what we're working on next, and seeing what's been happening across the industry as a whole.

LOGAN SMITH: I was most excited about our announcement with Isovalent. So this year GrafanaLabs announced an investment in Isovalent, and also some deeper product integrations that we're hoping is going to add a lot of value to our customers.

KASLIN FIELDS: What is your favorite thing that you've learned so far?

KATRINA VEREY: My favorite talk was one called Consumers to Contributors by Brendan O'Leary of GitLab. He gave a lot of great advice around why a company that is currently consuming an open source technology might want to move to being a contributor, or ultimately even a maintainer of one of these tools, and how to go about making that shift.

He really emphasized how to relate the needs of the business to these often critical supply chain projects, and the need to treat the relationship with the community like any other valuable partnership. He emphasizes the story of relationships that's involved here, and many of the tips that he gave really resonated with my experiences as someone who works on open source at an end user company.

AISHWARYA HARPALE: The favorite thing that I've learned so far is that developers are struggling between their 9:00 to 5:00 jobs and open source contributions. And at the same time, we have new contributors who are asking the same questions such as, how do I start in the community? So it's exciting and there's hope.

KIRSTEN SCHUMY: Probably not the most useful in the workplace but my favorite thing was the talk on the bees. Pretty blown away on how complicated bees are. That was pretty interesting. The presenter just talked about how it relates to Kubernetes, and it was informative, really, for that. But I just had no idea that they were so precise with directions. It was pretty crazy. So again — hopefully my boss isn't listening to this because I'm sure he's going to be like, why do we send you there? But that was really interesting.

JEAN-PAUL ROBINSON: So the thing that I've learned so far that was probably most exciting was that we use a scheduler called Slurm by a company called SchedMD, and SchedMD representative was here and we got started talking. And he was essentially saying that they're looking at a lot of ways where they can integrate SchedMD and the resource reservation components with Kubernetes, and so it was exciting to see, one, that they're looking at this problem, and two, that it's a problem that we really need to solve. And so I'm glad to be connected with that person.

MADHAV JIVRAJANI: That's an interesting one. So earlier this week we had the Contributor Summit on Monday, and then there was a unconference session by Stefan around kubectl bind. That was really interesting to see. What that essentially tried to do or tell us was, how can you use Kube native style APIs to act as a service provider? So if you have a Kubernetes cluster, how can you turn that into a service provider itself? So that was really, really exciting to see. I'm still yet to understand the depth and breadth of it, but the idea of it seemed really intriguing.

LEIGH CAPILI: Yeah. As far as learning, I was having some conversations over in the suite sponsor hall that we have with the million booths. And I found the folks at Fermion, got educated on why LSM is such a disruptive technology. So we think about why containers made a huge difference compared to VMs, right? VMs are, they're a big deal in that you don't have to provision a machine.

You don't have to go and rack a server in order to run a virtual machine. But these things are still at least gigabytes large, usually, and they run a lot more than just your app. It's all tightly coupled together still. And so we're abstracting from the operating system, but we're not necessarily abstracting the application and really talking about what the app needs.

So containers are like, OK, I just got my app. Now this thing is way smaller and we can boot it up way faster than a VM. Well, LSM, I mean, the support for various languages in the runtime is still evolving. It's getting pretty good. But this is new. This means we don't have to rely on all of these weird features and set up all of this dynamic runtime for languages that do things in an expensive way. We're going to do it super fast and super small. Just your code runs on the LSM time and it's starting up.

I mean, the overhead is single digit milliseconds from cold start. That is really incredible. And then if it's in memory it's like you don't even know that you just started a process from nothing. So that's orders of magnitude faster than containers in some applications, and I'm really excited about learning that this is something that we should be considering when we're assembling all these cloud native technologies together.

CHARLIE YU: For me, since I'm still pretty new to Kubernetes, I'm still learning a lot of stuff. And although some topics or technology I'm still not really familiar with, the few things that I first got into is stateful or closed and stateful applications. So I was learning through all the talks about statefulness and how to safely upgrade them and how to use them properly. I think that is the most important thing that I've learned so far that I can relate to that right now.

AHRAR MONSUR: My favorite thing so far has been seeing how many different technologies can exist together in very close proximity in the tech stack but still have very discernible uses. I've seen a lot of different dashboards throughout the conference, but they all have a specific purpose that seems well differentiated from one another. That's been really fun to see.

MICKEY BOXELL: I suppose the favorite thing that I learned so far is that we had been talking about one particular security approach internally, and I saw a startup that's doing exactly the same thing that we discussed. So here I am thinking I'm being cutting edge and doing something innovative, and the community, as usual, is one step ahead.

EDDIE ZANESKI: The most interesting thing I've learned is kind of just a realization. You know, the Kubernetes Project is obviously in need of help and a lot of open sources. We need new contributors, we need PMs, TPMS, all of that. But I think the realization I had was that a lot of the things that Kubernetes is built on and depends on are also in desperate need of help. Etcd is a great example.

I think there's maybe one to two or three maintainers for etcd. That is the lifeblood of the Kubernetes Project, everything. It's the brains of the operation. And so I'd like to see them get some help with engineering, with releasing. We could help them improve the release process a bit. And it's just really — this technology and open source companies have built massive enterprises on top of and massive businesses, and I like to see those companies give back a bit more to the technology they depend on directly.

ANDY PIGGOTT: I think my favorite thing — and it may be more of an observation than a learning — but is really around the maturity of Kubernetes now. I think we have transitioned from that cutting edge, really exciting, slightly risky way of doing things.

We solved a lot of the big problems around observability and traceability, and of course, the security piece I mentioned a few minutes ago. And now we've moved into this level of maturation which is creating a lot of new outcomes for companies and a lot of new solutions which people can leverage. Whether that's for improving performance or improving security, there are so many options for us now, and it's been really, really exciting to see that come together.

LOGAN SMITH: I think that might have been my favorite thing, just observing trends that I've noticed on the floor and seeing the evolution of some of these companies.

KASLIN FIELDS: What are the emerging trends you're seeing at KubeCon?

MO KHAN: So I was a little bit sad that Wasm Day and Contributor Summit were on the same day because that means I couldn't go to both of them. I am personally really excited for wasm and the potential use cases it has. I think as I work on SIG Auth, a lot of the problems around security and isolation come from just the broad level of access that a posix model gives to applications.

Whereas wasm starts from, you get nothing unless the host gives it to you, and I think it's just foundationally easier to build something secure with that as the starting point. So yeah, I'm really excited for all the different use cases that wasm has outside of the browser. So I'm just — maybe if the Go Team is listening, I would really love some wasm support in Go. Oh, please. If I can make a feature request.

AISHWARYA HARPALE: So this is something that I learned new. I learned about WebAssembly and wasm, so that's something I would say is an emerging trend.

JEFFERY SIKKA: What emerging trends do I see at KubeCon? Well, this was announced recently but there is a new convention coming up, Cloud Native SecurityCon. That will be February 1st and 2nd, I believe, 2023 in Seattle. I bring that up because that started as one and then multiple co-located events at KubeCon.

And because they got so popular, registrations were large, and also because it's such a large and booming sector within cloud native, it got spun out to its own Cloud Native Security Conference. Things that we're seeing in those regards as well is Backstage. Backstage, both adoption and contribution, is shooting up and to the right.

And it makes sense because as developers are getting used to Kubernetes or as some developers are getting used to Kubernetes and seeing that others are struggling, this idea of, maybe you don't even need to know Kubernetes, you just need a tool that lets you hand over the keys to someone. All they have to do is turn the key, the engine starts. That works. Car analogy. Detroit. Not even planned.

KIRSTEN SCHUMY: Let's see. Emerging trends at KubeCon? I'd say a lot seems to be — which I think is great, love to see it — on security. You just really can never be too secure. And I think that just really hitting home on that being a primary focus now in the future and just trying to keep up with things is so critically important.

MADHAV JIVRAJANI: Well, this year, for the past six months the hot topic has been supply chain security. But I'm also seeing a lot of talk around WebAssembly this time around. There's also quite a bit of talk around using eBPF. So I'm excited to go ahead and explore WebAssembly a little more. I don't really know what WebAssembly is, so that's definitely something I'm excited to go and see if I can understand that a little bit better. For sure.

LEIGH CAPILI: Yeah, emerging trends? Gosh. I mean, for me being a Flux person, just watching GitOps turn into something that's more mature, something that's more real, and something that's finding out about where it came from as we have more practitioners just chomping at the bit to present.

We had GitOpsCon. GitOpsCon is an awesome collaboration by all of the folks from the lovely GitOps projects — be it Flux, Argo CD, or any of the adjacent ecosystem that comes out of extending mainly those two projects — and this year at GitOpsCon we had two tracks and a bunch of contributors from everywhere.

I think if you could say that there is a major emerging trend in changing not just what we work with, like the tools, but the way that we work with each other, it's GitOps and the flavor of DevOps and continuous deployment and making promises to people that it enables.

CHARLIE YU: Honestly, I feel like I see a lot of security trends and also logging, monitoring, and tracing booths around KubeCon and also talks about it. And I feel like that is, indeed, a really important trend, and that's a really good direction that we're heading towards because security is always the really important part of anything, right? So yeah, I do agree. I do see that trend happening a lot.

AHRAR MONSUR: Some of the emerging trends that I've been seeing that I'm personally really excited about is, as somebody working at Google, we see GCP being a solution for all, but there are a lot of these projects which take a very deliberate step to only address a specific niche and slices of the whole pipeline and the whole technology stack.

This means that smaller companies who are just starting can make more deliberate decisions on picking and choosing their technology that fits their needs and their capacities at the moment that they're in. So that flexibility without having a lock in to a full platform has been encouraging and it's also given me ideas for starting my own company at one point and seeing the variety of options I have available.

MICKEY BOXELL: So this year I've seen two things, primarily, that I was not expecting. Well, one of which I suppose I was. One is multicluster management. It seems like there are so many companies that are trying to solve this problem, and also so many projects that are also looking to solve the problem. So that's been very exciting to see in person.

Also, the number of companies that are looking into or actively using eBPF and Cilium. I feel like a year ago at this time, people were talking about it notionally but no one had really started the journey of adopting it, or at least that was my impression. And now it seems like so many startups have popped up related to it or so many cloud providers have implemented it. It's very exciting to see.

EDDIE ZANESKI: Emerging trends this year? So there is definitely supply chain security is a big thing. A lot of folks are doing it. I obviously work for a company that's focused on solving it, or solving it the best we can. I think figuring out how we deploy Kubernetes is still a thing people need to solve and how we deploy to Kubernetes. So I think something like Acorn Labs is on to something really cool.

You haven't checked out Acorn yet? Oh, that's Darren Shepherd's company. I think it's Darren. If it's Darrell Shepherd, I'm sorry. I think it's Darren Shepherd But they have a mechanism and a tool that helps spec out your Kubernetes manifest and deploy it to your cluster. And same thing like Argo CD. Argo CD is known for that GitOps flow too.

ANDY PIGGOTT: I think the emerging trend that I've really noticed is that the ecosystem has developed to a state of maturity, which allows so many new products and services to come to life on top of that. Be it the FinOps platforms to allow us to analyze and break down cost and manage cost through to proliferation of new security services to help us understand new threats and vulnerabilities and risk within this very dynamic infrastructure which we're rolling out today. It's really exciting to see how that's been developing.

LOGAN SMITH: I think one trend I've noticed from walking the show floor is that companies are moving from just observing and pointing out issues in Kubernetes and container infrastructure and moving towards troubleshooting and remediation of the issues to solve problems faster.

KASLIN FIELDS: What would you like to see at KubeCon in the future?

MO KHAN: This might be a little bit controversial but — or maybe not. I don't know — I would like to have a dedicated conference for the Contributor Summit [LAUGHING] because that's why I come here. I mean, I do enjoy looking at all the vendors, mostly just because I don't know, there's a shared sense of community and I'm always impressed what people build on top of Kubernetes and around it. But yeah, I get a lot out of conversations with folks that I usually have a hard time getting more than just a little bit of their time.

But when folks are here they tend to have no meetings and the whole time is blocked away, and it's really easy to get hold of them and get some stuff done. We had some great brainstorming sessions about some of the future things that we want to make possible for all related things. So I don't think those conversations would happen otherwise. So yeah, more of that would be wonderful.

KATRINA VEREY: One of the things that I've really enjoyed but found difficult to set up is the opportunity to connect with other users who are using the same CNCF technologies at a similar scale. So more opportunities to have a facilitated experience where we can help other end users find each other and have those really productive conversations about the experiences that we've all had.

KASLIN FIELDS: Like birds of a feather sessions or something.

KATRINA VEREY: Yeah.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah.

AISHWARYA HARPALE: Being a student, I would definitely like to see some more talks or items in the student track that would definitely get a lot more students engaged in the community.

JEFFERY SIKKA: What would I like to see at KubeCon in the future? And I don't mean this to toot my own horn again, but more representation of the local culture, more representation of where we are at. It goes as small as the snacks at the vendor room, cider and donuts. That was amazing. You know, cider and donuts is a very Midwest thing, a very Michigan thing. Faygo is a Detroit brand.

We are lucky enough to be able to travel to these venues and essentially mind meld with each other and show our experiences and grow together. It's also really nice to both be able to experience these locations and also try to up level them. So sure, being able to say, hey, go to my favorite pizza place when I was a kid, that makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

But also being able to find all of these other people that wanted to do meetups around Detroit or all of the students that have been working in smaller universities, hearing about their stories, that was like, I don't know. That was just one of the more warm and fuzzy things that I learned. There's so much more room for us to grow and there's so much more that we can contribute to the places that we visit.

KIRSTEN SCHUMY: I think I'm probably a little bit biased. I've really enjoyed seeing how many women there are in the industry, but I would just love to see there be more women who are maybe involved to attend. I think that CNCF does actually a really good job of promoting women presenters and gender diversity in the spaces, being inclusive with that. And so I think the organization does a really awesome job of providing a platform.

And so I just really hope that more women take advantage of this conference but also just join the industry. I enjoyed seeing that there was the outreach event for the young kids because I think that that was something that wasn't around, really, when I was a kid, and I think that really can make a big difference to girls out in the community.

JEAN-PAUL ROBINSON: Well, I would like to see KubeCon in the future. So this is my first visit so I'd like to come back. [LAUGHING] And a topic that I'd like to see maybe more of in the future is just I'm happy to see that there were researchers here, research community members here.

Just like with OpenStack in the early days, it was kind of a thin representation in the university space, and that's just the nature of applications that we have. They're established applications so they tend — unless you're talking about machine learning — they tend not to be geared towards containerization and Kubernetes yet. So I'm kind of eager to see other folks' use cases in that space, and so I'd like to come back and learn more about that.

MADHAV JIVRAJANI: KubeCon is a great place to facilitate discussions around the broader community, what's going on at large, what problems we face. What I would also like to see is if we can have discussions around what can an individual contributor like me do to try and play a role in some of these larger problems that we discuss and facilitate at KubeCons.

Like if you are discussing sustainability in some project, how can I help out? What's the one thing I can do to make it 0.1% better? So that next KubeCon, we can start from there. It's always difficult to talk about problems, but it's almost always harder to come up with tangible solutions. So being in person, that's the best thing I think we can try and do.

LEIGH CAPILI: For me I don't really drink a lot of alcohol, so this is a shout out to any sponsors who try to do fun stuff that's not just around booze. I mean, for real. If I could say anything spicy it's that, what is our industry's relationship with this very expensive liquid that makes everybody a lot dumber than they usually are?

Can we have a bubble tea meetup? You know? Is there like a SIG milkshake? I would be into that. Alcohol is a fun time. Sometimes I participate. But I think I find I really enjoy a lot of other things more, and maybe we could just like have some dessert or a cool juice or soda together.

KASLIN FIELDS: I think it's now up to you to start a SIG milkshake.

LEIGH CAPILI: SIG milkshake. Yeah.

NIM JAYAWARDENA: I personally missed out on a lot of talks, and that was intentional. I think I'm probably going to watch them online next week and speed through a bunch. I wanted to do more booth crawling and more in-person interaction with the community here, and I thought that was something that I can't get anywhere else.

And I think I'd like to see KubeCon maybe invest more in that, and more in the community building aspect of it and the in-person interactions. So that's really what I'm excited to see KubeCon capitalize on in the future, I think.

CHARLIE YU: Honestly, I would like to have better food, especially the breakfast here. I would love to have more hot options, please. Thank you.

AHRAR MONSUR: I think one of the things that I really enjoyed about KubeCon has been the keynotes. We have addressed a lot of topics in and around CNCF, some questions about support across Ukraine, for instance.

Something that I would like to see more about in keynote speeches and just as a sense of the whole event would be to see a bigger focus on transparency for the foundation, how they are making decisions for the projects that are within it and that are coming into it, and how the governance structure is created and maintained so that we can all be active participants in ensuring the growth and maintenance of the CNCF foundation.

MICKEY BOXELL: I think at the next KubeCon I would love for them to accept my talk. I've been submitting for years and I can't wait to get up on that main stage and start sharing with people my thoughts about Kubernetes and the greater community.

EDDIE ZANESKI: I think — and we already took a stab at this this year — I think the Kubernetes Project is struggling for maintainers and fresh talent that will stick around. We have a lot of folks that maybe come and do one PR and hang out for a bit and then disappear, and as maintainers, that's a real fast way for us to lead to burnout is to consistently onboard and teach new people for them to vanish.

And so I think in the future I'd like to see the companies that employ full time engineers in Kubernetes be elevated. We can shout them out. We took a shot at this this year by printing out some signs and passing them out to some of the sponsors that do do that. Unfortunately, it wasn't that many that I passed out, so hopefully next year we can pass out a bit more.

And I really like how Let's Encrypt this year printed out nice booth badges. Yours is actually sitting right there. And that's a really cool way to showcase that. It says — what does it say? It says “proud sponsor of Let's Encrypt”. And I think that's a cool way to call out those and surface that, right? That is a project giving it to the sponsor as recognition for their efforts.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah. I saw the signs come by saying that “We Hire Kubernetes Contributors,” and I thought that was really cool. So thank you for doing that.

EDDIE ZANESKI: Thank you. I'm just trying to help my fellow teammates be a little less stressed out.

KASLIN FIELDS: I really like that. Thank you.

ANDY PIGGOTT: So there are a couple of things I'd really like to see. I think, one, the content is phenomenal here, and I mean, clearly people attend for that. But there's also a lot of incredible innovation on the show floor and making sure that people are aware of that and that we get the people who care about the things that these companies are working on to come in front of the companies.

The other side is, I think as the show is organized, it's a lot of different people in different places very spread out and there may be an opportunity to really try and put specific solution providers together. And yes, maybe they're competing with each other, but it's going to help people who are looking to solve specific problems to hone in on the companies that they need to talk to to have the right conversations and really get what they need from the show. So I think there's some work that we could potentially do to improve how that's organized in the future.

LOGAN SMITH: I think it'd be really interesting to see actually some topics around the business side of the CNCF and just thinking through things such as different licensing models for open source, and how to best define what features to open source versus not and things along that line.

KASLIN FIELDS: Perfect. Thank you.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Oh, wow. That was a very intense set of thoughts and opinions from people.

KASLIN FIELDS: [LAUGHING] Yeah. I had so much fun going around the conference, and I'm so excited that I managed to get such a wide variety of perspectives. I think this is really going to help folks understand — I hope all of you out there see what a wonderful event KubeCon is and how much everyone gets out of it. Everyone got something a little bit different, I think.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. I also like the fact that in some of the interviews you could actually hear the background, that you can hear the noise. So you are kind of immersed in usually the sponsor hall where all the sponsors are. You have this, like, noise, the background noise. It was awesome.

KASLIN FIELDS: Shout out to my colleague Brian Dorsey for recommending the mics that I used for that. He specifically mentioned that it would pick that up and I do think it was really cool.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Nice. Nice. Well, I think there are a bunch of things that I learned from listening to the episode. Quite a lot of trends, quite a lot of interesting tech. But I think if there is one thing which is universal is people always talk about three things for KubeCon. Community, people wanting their talks to be accepted, and the food.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah. [LAUGHS] Yeah. I really enjoyed those. But definitely the community and getting to see people in person, getting to collaborate with folks that you don't normally see in person. That came up so many times. It's clearly one of the most important things, most valuable things that folks get out of KubeCon.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. Cool. Well, should we do maybe what's your three favorite things?

KASLIN FIELDS: Sure. We can give that a shot.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: All right. What do you think are your three favorite things?

KASLIN FIELDS: Well, like I said, the variety of perspectives is one of my favorite things. I hope this episode can be a useful resource for folks who are trying to make the case to go to KubeCon. I just love all of the different things that people learned.

I think the things you've learned section was my favorite because I was taking notes as I was listening to all of the interviews and there were very few consistencies in there. Everyone had something different. So that's one of my favorite things is the huge variety there. What's my next favorite thing?

Everyone is always asking me when I come back from KubeCon what trends I saw, and just like a lot of the folks that I interviewed, I'm always really uncomfortable answering that because I'm like, I only have my own perspective to go off of. But here now we have 15 perspectives to go off of, and security came up the most with WebAssembly being second most. So the trends that folks called out, I think, was another thing that I really, really loved.

And in things that folks would like to see in the future, several people mentioned that they want more opportunities to collaborate with their peers from other companies, from other places within the ecosystem on things that they care about. So that was another of my favorite things is hearing that feedback of, there should be more facilitated opportunities for folks to work together at KubeCon. I thought that was really cool.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah.

KASLIN FIELDS: And what about you, Abdel?

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Well, boy, a lot of things. [LAUGHING] I think one interesting thing was the trends. You remember when we were in Valencia this year, there was eBPF was the thing, right? Everybody was talking about it. It was all over the booths. This year it seems like wasm is the thing, or this edition, at least, not this year. Right?

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: So it seems like every edition there is a trend that is the one thing that people talk about lots and care about lots, which is kind of interesting. I think there was some surprising things to me, specifically Eddie. Eddie spoke about companies that are actually providing tools for deploying Kubernetes clusters and deploying apps to them, which to me is surprising because it seems like something we should have solved already, right? So I mean, Kubernetes exists since 2015 and we have already solved this problem somehow, I guess, but—

KASLIN FIELDS: It's like a problem that's at the core, I think, of how we use Kubernetes. So it makes sense to me that there's always going to be iteration on that problem space.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. And I think as we're also going multicluster, multiregion, it's a different set of problems because you suddenly have to deploy to multiple places at the same time.

KASLIN FIELDS: That's true. Yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. And I think the other interesting thing in general was a lot of people seem to say, I've been to KubeCon but I really didn't attend talks. I was more here to meet people. Which is sort of a universal thing about conferences in general. If you go as a representative of your company, you hardly have actually time to go to talks because they're going to be on YouTube anyway. So I think that that was — I was feeling I'm the only one who does that and I was always feeling guilty about it, but after listening to the episode I'm not.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah. I like that there were also a few folks in there who did go to talks and that was some of their favorite learnings came from actually going to talks, so a variety of perspectives once again.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. Yeah. And there was actually two interesting things that have been said by two different people that their favorite talks have been a non-tech, non-Kubernetes related talks. So one of them was about bees, which I'm very curious about.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah, I definitely want to hear that one. [LAUGHING]

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: And the other one was Consumers to Contributors by Brendan O'Leary, which talks about how can companies actually get a competitive edge by contributing to open source, which I think is quite interesting.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah. Always good to hear a couple of talk recommendations.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. And I'm looking forward to the Cloud Native SecurityCon.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah. That will be exciting. It's going to be in Seattle in February. The CFP is open until November 13, so depending on when you're listening to this, it may be still open. At least check out that conference. I think Jeffery Sikka made a couple of good comments in our interview about where that came from and about the huge amount of interest and excitement about security solutions at KubeCon and how they had to spin up a whole separate event for it. So curious to see how that goes.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: We will have the link in the show notes.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah. And I think one of the most fun things in there was SIG milkshake. [LAUGHING]

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Oh, yes. Hashtag SIG milkshake. I'm not a big fan of milkshakes, but I like the idea of having a SIG for soft drinks.

KASLIN FIELDS: He also mentioned boba, so.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Oh, yeah.

KASLIN FIELDS: Maybe some variety in SIG milkshake.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, boba tea was the highlight of my Taiwan trip a few years back. Well, that was awesome. Thank you, Kaslin, for taking all the work of interviewing people.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: I'm very excited to see how this episode is going to come out.

KASLIN FIELDS: Me too.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: And thank you, everyone, for listening to us. We will see you next time.

KASLIN FIELDS: That brings us to the end of another episode. If you enjoyed this show, please help us spread the word and tell a friend. If you have any feedback for us, you can find us on Twitter @kubernetespod, or reach us by email at kubernetespodcast@google.com.

You can also check out the website at kubernetespodcast.com, where you'll find transcripts and show notes and links to subscribe. Please consider rating us in your podcast player so we can help more people find and enjoy the show. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.

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