(upbeat instrumental music) Hello and welcome to this Analyst Angle preview of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon EU taking place in Paris, March 19th through the 22nd. I'm Rob Strechay, managing director with theCUBE Research. Today I'm joined by Stu Miniman, Senior Director of Market Insights for Red Hat. And we're going to discuss some of the top trends to look for at this year's KubeCon and CloudNativeCon EU. Welcome. How are you doing? Thanks Rob, I'm doing great. Looking forward to going to Paris along with you. And you know, what'll be 10, 12,000 of our friends in the community. Always a phenomenal event and you know, early spring in Paris. Probably can't beat that. No, no. And I think in fact I've been hearing even potentially up towards 15,000. Wow. Of our closest friends, which will be very interesting. I think obviously there's a lot going on in the open source market in general. I think one of the things that's really interesting is that day zero, as we were talking about before is, you know, Tuesday and there's a lot of days, very interesting days and in fact I think when I was talking to some people, I said don't miss Tuesday this year. 'cause Red Hat has their commons going on. But there's also a lot of other different days going on as well. One of the ones that's going on is not surprisingly around AI and with Kube Flow or Cube Flow, I think it's Kube Flow, like KubeCon as I've been pronouncing it wrong for like years now. And also they have a CloudNative AI segment as well. What, what are you seeing from the customers you're talking to in the industry of what's going on around AI? Yeah, so first of all Rob, you know, you are so right what used to be called the Day Zero events is now called the co-located events. Really for the most part there's been times where I go through that day and I'm like, look, I've had a productive week already. And that's really good and I know people that are, you know, local in Europe that are coming just for those events and not doing the main event because what I've talked about for many years, KubeCon is kind of a choose your own adventure. You can go deep in a whole lot of areas. And last year when you, Dave and I previewed the Amsterdam show, I said, if we don't come out of that show really with the drumbeat of AInfusing it, I'm going to be really shocked and surprised. And it's no surprise that cube flow is a project. AI overall is a workload is happening across a lot of events.

And as you mentioned right in the Day Zero, Red Hat were heavily involved in the theCUBE Flow event that's happened there. We've got a bunch of other events that I definitely want to talk about, but AIs hot. I actually did a preview interview with one of the co-chairs of this event and they were talking about, you know, the tracks and how many sessions and AIs a big piece of it because you know, AIs just part of the overall ecosystem and it's a big ecosystem when we talk about Cube. Yeah, I mean if you look at CloudNative in general, it really does scream AI. I mean a lot of the different projects that are out there across the various different landscapes from things like Trino and Spark and others in the Apache world. But I think what's interesting is there seems to be a lot more like Cube Flow coming to help with that infrastructure piece and tying Kubernetes back together with it, which I think is great. Yeah, so I mean if you look at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, yes there's a lot of, there's a lot of the infrastructure people here. There definitely are a lot of developers at this show and from an infrastructure standpoint, the other thing that's been hot for a couple of years is everything around platform engineering. So there's both a platform engineering day and a backstage con and we're involved in both of those and you take those two and Argo Con, 'cause Git Ops is hot as ever and Cube Flow and by the way you mentioned Red Hat Common, which is where I'll be on Tuesday. I'm actually given a part of the morning keynote there. We will have speakers talking about all of those topics. And a lot of customers, we've got Airbus talking, we've got a ABB, the robotics company talking SVA is even going to talk about their use of Wasm.

So you can go really deep on a couple of topics or you can come listen to a lot of practitioners at Commons. By the way, the quick plug for for Red Hat Commons, it is free to attend. It's a little over kilometer west of the convention center itself, but it's a nice full day. Not only is there the main stage that we have, we have a couple of breakouts where you can go deeper into platform engineering and of course there's a reception at the end of the day for people to network. Which is always good as well. The network, I think that is also one of the things that's fantastic about this, 'cause last year in Amsterdam, when they asked everybody to raise their hand about how many of you is this your first KubeCon? Usually it's 50% of the people have never been there. In fact, I think that to me is always the entertaining piece of it is you get out in the evenings and you're networking and I'd like to talk to the people who it is their first time there and what are they doing. I think last year it was, it was a gentleman from Switzerland funny enough that, that had a company that made the exit signs in all of that. And he was talking about all the IOT that is in all of those exit signs and how they have to build them and how they actually track all of the environmentals around them and all the smoke and all other things that they're triggering and how that was all being moved from being on VMs to being moved to Kubernetes and they were looking at and evaluating and trying to understand.

So I think learning from the others who blazed that path before you is fantastic thing for you to go down. Now you hit on a whole lot of things in there. Let's kind of, we'll go to one that you didn't mention, but it's kind of, because I think, you know, your different part of your company may be working towards is observability. What we're seeing is that observability is really moving towards a platform play and there's going to be a ton of observability companies there, probably about the same amount as there were in Amsterdam, but they seem to be consolidating down. And then you have always the fun of open tofu, which is, you know, we'll see if it gains momentum this year because really I tried to gauge it in Chicago, it had some momentum, not, it didn't seem to take off like Open Search did when Elastic went and changed theirs. Yeah, so, Rob, right, a few things there, number one, yeah, observability absolutely is, you know, a very important topic. Something we've worked to take many of those projects and put them into OpenShift as well as we have very deep partnerships with like the Dynatrace of the world who are doing a very good job there. I'm going to plead a no comment on Open Tofu itself. Red Hat is not a project that we're directly involved in. I believe our friends over at IBM have had some participation there. But you know, to your point, community is involved in a lot of different projects there, since the last event, there's been some interesting, you know, consolidations and moves in the space. I thought like the biggest acquisition was Isovalent by Cisco for, if I remember right, like $650 million.

So EPBF, great technology, something that many of us are working to embed that into the platforms that we have. And the other one, you know, it was a sad thing that Weaveworks unfortunately has closed shop. So, you know, two technologies and companies that, you know, we've spent a lot of time looking at in this space. One, you know, had a successful exit and one closed down, the work that Weaveworks did into Flux and helped the get up space was instrumental for the growth of this ecosystem and definitely will live on going forward. Yeah, no I think that that's a very interesting comment is that with the, you know, I guess you could say the nuclear winter that has been the VC market and some of these organizations trying to figure out their licensing strategies, we had Buoyant go on, you know, from a service mesh perspective, go and change their licensing strategy and I think it could have been communicated a little better. I'm not surprised that they went and did it the way they did it. But that's going to impact some things like Kubernetes on the Edge, which has got its own part of the day as well on Tuesday. How do you see all of these, especially in that Kubernetes on the Edge perspective? 'cause Red Hat definitely plays there along with a lot of other distributions as well, but yeah, how do you see that playing out? So right Rob, so we spent many years working on our overall Edge solution. We had a project we did micro shift to be able to shrink smaller than just Kubernetes itself. And there's this great use case that's going to use Edge a lot that we already talked about, which is AI really AIs, we talked about it re:Invent when I had an interview with John. AIs really the killer use case for hybrid because inferencing at the Edge is something that many, many companies are going to do. You talked about, you know, retail and putting in signs, financial services or put putting things in kiosk, you know, manufacturing of course telecommunications, Edge is something that has huge growth and is one of the bigger focuses that we will have at the show itself. Definitely. And yeah, that product line has been doing a lot. Yeah, when we talk about it and we see it in our ETR data that really inference as we talk about in our power law of AI, it really is that long tail is where the most deployments will be and inference in Edge is a huge piece of that. And I think it's, again, you can't move all the data all the time and which is a very interesting one 'cause there's the data on Kubernetes, which I'm a part of, DOC and DLK, which actually if you're not, they do a great job online and have some monthly call on it. Fantastic, and I think it's talking about how you keep the data organized and how you have it available. And I think this is not just tackling, hey, what's happening in a main data center or it's how does it, you know, really bring that back.

And I think there's this, there's going to be an interesting discussion I think about do you bring the AI to the data or the data to the AI and I think it's going to be both. And I think to your point, it's a multi hybrid cloud type of scenario. But one other thing that you kind of hit on and is, it's kind of, you know, near and dear, is kind of the CloudNative applications and Wasm. Yeah. I think over the last, since Chicago I've seen more, I guess you could say more momentum with Wasm than I had seen before. Are we really getting to, do you see like getting to that, getting over that hump with Wasm? Yeah,it's funny Rob, at the Amsterdam show, I was actually really disappointed at how much discussion there was at Wasm. There was a little meetup that I walked by and there was only a handful of people there. It's interesting our Linux group has been involved in doing some things there. We really think there was a lot of discussion, you know, is this evolutionary or revolutionary? It's another great workload that'll work well on Kubernetes is you know, kind of where we see things and definitely keeping a close eye on it and we will see because it's funny, Rob, you know when I think like in the last year I've been having to talk a lot about something that I didn't think I'd have to talk about much anymore. And when I talk to customers and they look at their budgets, they're all stealing budgets to work on those new AInitiatives that they're getting from the top and Edge is a new opportunity a lot of times to drive new revenue.

But you know what I'm teeing up here, there's that concern around what's happening to their virtual machine estate and those of us that have been at KubeCon for years and years, like I remember when VMware showed up, VMware is a very active participant in the open source community and we welcome them there. Well, the Broadcom acquisition has put this front and center and has been a conversation I feel I've been having every day for the last six months. And what I point out is there's actually going to be a great keynote Thursday morning on the main stage at KubeCon where Goldman Sachs is going to talk about their use of Kubert, which is the open source being able to bring virtual machines into Kubernetes. And definitely one to take a look at. Yeah, there's, I think there's a lot of momentum behind Kubert. I got it right that first time. So, but, and I think for good reason because I think that everybody knows that if you've ever administered VMs and you know, having been on that side of the fence and looked at it and you, you start to look at it, sometimes there's bloat in those VMs anyways and the workloads could fit very nicely into a container based deployment. Right, I think that people are trying to figure out as they go smaller and towards the Edge in particular, how do I balance that out? Another place, it's interesting, you brought up VMware by Broadcom or VMware from Broadcom. I always screw that up a little bit.

I'm interested to see in another project where they play out as well this time around because it's backstage and they had been contributing to Backstage. I have a feeling they'll be there contributing back into Backstage and you guys contributed to Backstage. We had some of your folks on that were on the committee or on the steering committee for Backstage in Amsterdam. How's that been progressing? Yeah, it Rob, it's going great and absolutely Red Hat developer hub is our productization and that's now generally available. So we'll have a strong presence as we said at the co-located events. You'll definitely have some people on theCUBE to talk about the progress that's being made there and that whole discussion about, you know, what do we have to do for the developers, how do we help, you know, conquer some of that, you know, the developers being overloaded, that cognitive overload that they have and you know, allow people to ramp up and get a little bit more consistency because that was kind of the greatest sin in the data center was every application got its own silo of excellence and we built everything bespoke cloud architectures were supposed to be a little bit more repeatable and general purpose. And of course we've seen the cloud itself is even more complex than the data center was.

So platform engineering hopefully will get some consistency as to what as an organization, what tools we use, what best practice we have, set those golden paths up and what we've been doing at Red Hat is helping to take Backstage and make it so that it's consumable for the enterprise. So it's something that, you know, here's the tools. We have plugins, back at Amsterdam we had a whole bunch of the ecosystem partners like Jade, Rog and many others that were making their services available to the developers through that tool. So the hope is that this is going to be able to, you know, simplify things a little bit but you know, we're running real enterprise applications and you know, unfortunately, spoiler alert, AI's not going to make anything simpler. You know, maybe it'll help with some of the coding and a little bit of the overhead, but the overall infrastructure in managing that environment is complex and will continue to be something that these sorts of tools will be a huge help. Yeah, I think that's the understatement of the year that AIs not going to make things simpler. I think it really, yeah, I would be shocked if not every conversation had an AI bent to it at KubeCon this year because I think again, and I said it before, I think it's definitely moving from being KubeCon to being CloudNativeCon big letters versus, because I think it really KubeCon's done its thing and I think I'm interested in seeing which different cases actually mature, come from sandbox, go from incubation into sandbox and how they really move around. Because I think there's some, we had talked about it, there's still some rationalization and I think that, so you hit on it the golden paths and the processes and the people and platform engineering coming together and I know that there'll be a big push from the CNCF as well on a lot of what they're doing around how they're bringing more training. 'cause I think that was always a big thing is that if you look back to the, you know, years in the past where VMworld, a lot of people would go to VMworld to get trained on things and I think that the CNCF is trying to do that with these events as well. Yeah, well you know the quick thing, what have we been doing at Red Hat is how do we make this solution a a full comprehensive application development platform? And it's a tough balance because we can help curate that big ecosystem but still give you the flexibility that if there's a tool that you want to be able to use, that's not something that we have in their default, we allow that to come in. So that's something that, you know, we see as opposed to, you know, that overload and keeping up with the, oh, there's another new project, there's another new thing and you know, how many updates do I need to make every month and every quarter we want to shift that burden to us and something that we can do from a product standpoint and even manage services that we offer with our partners and solutions that we have with both cloud providers and some of the data center hardware peers. Yeah, with the cognitive load on these platform engineers is real. And in fact, I was talking to one of the platform engineering teams at a very large financial large pharma and we were having this discussion and their whole thing was just keeping up with the roadmaps is like they literally have somebody whose full-time job is figuring out and tracking all the roadmaps and where they should be. And because we haven't even really gotten into, but security and open SSF is going to be there in a big way and there's a lot of security things going on, but SBOs are kind of maturing. People know that SBOs aren't the end all, be all of everything. And just keeping up with that cognitive load from a security and compliance perspective is just unbelievable. Yeah, yeah. Well Rob, yeah, I am surprised we didn't talk about security because that is front and center of something that we all need to be looking at. Again, I was going to add to that equation also. So absolutely something we will be talking plenty about at that show. Even though it's interesting 'cause the CNCF pulled off, there's a CloudNative security con which is happening, I believe it's in Silicon Valley. Coming up in a couple of months, we'll have a presence there too. I've got a couple folks on my team that are heavily involved in that kind of activity. So security absolutely front and center. It's almost, you know, a given at this point that we're going to spend a lot of time and a significant chunk of budget on that piece of the stack. Absolutely, and I think again, it's one of these where platform engineering really is kind of big tent for bringing in finops, security, bringing in a lot of other pieces there. It's kind of the new IT as I like to say. And you know, again, if you are looking to get your, you know, where do you go from your path, it's not always, hey, I have to just be the cloud admin. It's like platform engineering and being multi-cloud and hybrid is probably the place to go if I was, you know, counseling people in IT these days. That's where I would say to focus. So last word, what else? Anything we missed, any? Yeah, I think we covered a good swath of it. You know, absolutely, if you're going to the event, a hallway track is something that we definitely recommend. The expo floor is big. Good news is you want to come see Red Hat, we're right when you're walking the door, I believe it's E1. If you go just search online like Red Hat, KubeCon, Paris, you know, 2024, you'll find a page. We've got over 30 speaking sessions. We've got, you know, people participating on theCUBE. We talked a bunch about the co-located events. So it's a really busy event. If you're there, please reach out to me. I'll be at our booth a bunch. I've got a bunch of meetings with some of our partners, some analysts and the like, but always love to meet new people and it is a really, really welcoming community. So don't be shy. If you have a question, reach out, find ways that you can participate because that's something we always need in this community is more people participating and it's not just code.

There's help and documentation, there's help and organization. I've got a few people on my team that are heavily involved in community aspects of what we're doing. So check it out, stop by, say hi and yeah, tip, if you stop by early at the Red Hat booth when they're open, you might even be able to grab a fedora. Yes. I was just going to say the fedoras go quickly. That's for sure. Well, thanks for coming on board and doing this preview because I think again, getting your guys' insight from being in the trenches and in all of these open source projects is always enlightening. Thanks so much Rob. And thank you for watching this KubeCon in CloudNativeCon preview on theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise analysis and coverage. (upbeat instrumental music)