Building Sustainable Ecosystems for Cloud Native Software

Hello, everybody. I'm Priyanka Sharma and I'm the general manager of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. What an honor to be here today to speak to all of you folks looking to operationalize Cloud Native with Kubernetes.

Today, I'm here to talk to you about the Second Wave of Cloud Native. " So your mileage may vary, but I think we all agree that we are beyond the first wave now. So today's agenda, I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself, share what how the history of CNCF, how we came together and then talk about this revolution we're all part of it.

Just Cloud Native. I'll share how the CNCF governance and project structure enables this revolution and then go into other lessons that we will learn in this journey. Finally, we'll talk about the future of Cloud Native and the sorts of things we're seeing in the market and followed by a Q&A on Zoom.

You can actually talk to me directly and live it. I was really excited to do and you'll get information in the chat link on the zoom to join to do the live Q&A. So with all that said, let's get started.

So as I said, I'm the general manager of the CNCF. Many of you may have worked with or interacted with my predecessor, Dan Kohn, who built great things with this foundation and who has put us all on the world stage. I spend an inordinate amount of time on Twitter, which makes me very accessible.

So any time you want to engage, please feel free to reach out. There's my handle @pritianka. And the reason it's not my name is because Priyanka is pretty much the most common Indian female name from my generation.

So please do keep the conversation going from here onwards. So, as I said, currently serve as GM on CNCF. I also serve as an adviser to an accelerator called Heavybit Industries in San Francisco, which focuses predominantly, actually exclusively on developer tools.

I've had a muted role, but I have a deep history with Cloud Native. I've had my career has always been in tech, but not always and distributed systems. About six years ago, I was doing a startup of my own with a friend and the one product that we build on, the many, that stack was a dev tool.

That was a time tracker for developers to track how much time they spent coding, etc. And our plugins for that plugins that pulled data in from, let's say, your data center of choice, such as intelligence, have been sublime and whatever. All those were open source.

And that was my first foray into the world of open source. The startup didn't work out, but I quickly moved on to other dev tool initiatives just because I really clicked with that audience. I ended up working with some folks over at LightStep, who are ex Googlers, those who built the observability tooling for Google and which is still run at scale there.

So with them, I started working on a project called OpenTracing. OpenTracing ended up being the third project to join the app, and this was back in 2016. So from the early days I was involved with the foundation.

I was a project contributor and evangelist. I'm spending all my time speaking to end users, people who are bogged down by the challenges of distributed systems and containerization. And that trend continued when I joined GitLab to lead technical evangelism and I also did Cloud Native there.

It was at that time that I got elected to serve on the board of the CNCF and that was an illuminating experience. At that point, after I served for some time, I was approached to leave the foundation and I have to say what a dream come true. I get to work with the folks I have learned so much from, from a community that's a community of doers, people who come together as a team Cloud Native, and all of you are part of that journey.

So that's my journey here. And I'm to it. By the way, I hear yours and we talk in the Q&A.

With that, let's move on to the real topic of the day, which is Cloud Native. So the CNCF was a nonprofit started in 2015 under the Linux Foundation. And our goal has been to host critical components of global technology infrastructure.

It brings together the top developers and users, vendors, vendors, and creates this ecosystem that innovation has done. We all started with cloud computing becoming the norm after AWS made it real for everyone in 2014 with cloud computing, containerization, and micro services, and therefore cloud data workflows. So today we have evolved to be much more than our humble beginnings.

And that's what I'm here to talk to you about. For anyone who is a newcomer in this space, when we think of the critical technology components, I would say it's the building blocks of modern software. So you have the cloud computing layer of it.

But it can also be private cloud owned services, as we know these days, the diversity of the type of hardware people choose is increasing. And... be on top of that Cloud Native tech, which enables modern applications.

Modern applications? What are they? Well, very simple.

They're fast, resilient, easy to update and customer driven. So when you think about startups, they're often talking about customer driven development and obsession with your user. All of that has now come to open source.

All of that has been enabled in large scale enterprises by cognitive workloads. It's done by being building loosely coupled, scalable components of the system as opposed to one large monolith. And that's what Cloud Native is behind.

So this Cloud Native revolution has resonated with many, as you all know, Kubernetes really change the industry fast. If you look at the blue line on this graph, it's the Google search trends, which can be an interesting barometer of how things are moving. As you can see, it's up into the right.

With the Kubernetes as our flagship project. We today have many more. We are 70 plus projects and we've built a foundation of doers.

This foundation or doers is creating and end user of an open source. And I'll get a little bit more into what what I'm talking about as we go further. But just when I say foundation, of doers that includes you.

That includes people who are eager to learn, that includes people who are deep in the trenches, that includes people who are doing documentation, legal work, event management. All of us are in this together. And that's the beauty of it.

There's a sustainability model that works for CNCF, which is there are projects that come in and those projects people build products on top of that that leads to profits for those people and they invest back into the projects and the happy cycle. A virtuous cycle continues. 7 Million are using Kubernetes on the right.

8 Million in Q2 2019. So just a year ago. 60 percent of backend developers are using containers and 4 million are using serverless architectures functions.

So this data tells you that the Cloud Native revolution has really taken hold. You folks are in good company and it's smart of you to invest time into learning how to operationalize with Kubernetes. Our foundation has not only great projects and lots of developers and end users, but five hundred plus members and at this point 70 plus open source projects.

End user member companies are a key part of the work we do here and end users are people like you who are operationalizing Cloud Native, who are actually figuring out how to use it to delight the your users... your end users and customers. And we today have one hundred and forty plus.

We're actually the largest end user member community of any software foundation. io. Which is a our landscape.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about how our governance and project structure is set up, which has enabled so much innovation in the ecosystem to date. So key is that we separate funding governance, which is the governing board from the technical governance, which is the technical oversight committee. No technical contribution ever requires any membership you want to contribute, whether it's a typo in documentation, whether it's triaging issues, whether it's a major code component.

You go in. You're welcome to do it. Our governance structure is where has the governing board TOC, as already mentioned, and this burgeoning and user community.

Now, that gives feedback to all the folks in the other two sections. So that good building stuff that's relevant to everybody as they move forward. The TOC is the key when you think about the projects that are accepted into the CNCF.

I've provided here resources for anybody who wants to learn more about our TOC principles. The reason I thought it important is because in that virtuous cycle of people building products, projects and gaining profits, the lines are blurred. Who is an end user?

Who is a vendor, who is a benefactor has all emerged. I mean, a great example is, for example, companies like Spotify, Spotify is an end user member and leverages Kubernetes effectively and strongly. They also have contributed a project on Backstage into the CNCF So now they're project contributor as well as an end user.

So the lines are getting blurry. All of us are collaborating together. And so these are resources here for you to look at any time you're interested.

The governance within the TOC is structured with special interest groups, which are really good way to get your feedback and start getting called. If you're ever interested in proposing a project, there is information I'm providing which hopefully, your people will hare the slides afterwards so you can access. But we do have three tiers, which is sandbox, which is a neutral IP zone where we encourage everyone to come and collaborate and build something awesome.

Once you have a method of requirements, then you go through a significant barrier and get into the incubation stage, which is where a lot of due diligence happens. You grow and the incubation stage and then you are at a point where you're an obvious path for any company to adopt. You go to graduation.

At this point you pass security audits, you have confirmed that you have open governance. You have a diverse community. You are a sure bet.

So what are some lessons that we have learned from CNCF that hopefully the world can benefit from? It is our belief that open governance is greater than vanilla open source, the idea is that the brought... In a project more than one vendor should have influence and control.

Think of Kubernetes, the flagship project that you all use. Its if you were reliant on only one vendor to decide whether Kubernetes stays alive or not, that is pretty risky. And I believe that Kubernetes wouldn't be at the stage it is today.

And with open governance, with a diverse set of companies and individuals coming together to direct the project, we're all now secure that it is here to stay and here to grow. As I've said before, end user driven open source is what matters, and our 140 plus companies give us the backing to be able to say that it's working very well for CNCF. As I mentioned before, we have different kinds of governance here in CNCF and end users have a formal role.

What's the benefit here? Four years ago, when I got involved in Cloud Native and I was educating people about observability and my services, etc. We were on the basic questions.

We were talking about what is a microservice? How do containers work? Today things have graduated and users have gotten very much more sophisticated.

Today they have put these technologies in production and seen... stress tests them, seeing where the gaps are. So they are the best people to share advice on what the project would match, they're best people to tell us how a project is doing.

And so these end users today come together in safe spaces that are, by the way, vendor free to talk about how technologies are going for them, how they're solving for specific use cases. And this former role has uplifted the end users and given them a strong voice, a voice that was traditionally missing and a voice that is essential for the future of open source and the future of Cloud Native. An example of that voice is something we launched which is called the technology radar.

It's heavily inspired by the ThoughtWorks radar that was put out about various technologies. And an example here is the first one we did, which was around continuous delivery. So you look at various tools, open source and close, which people have tried and it shares like which you just look at which to try out and which 100 percent adopt.

And it's based on voting from the end users. And all the information is clearly presented in our radar CNCF page. So this is an example of the of end users voice being heard loud and clear, projects clamoring to get feedback from these people.

Vendors are reaching out to get more understanding of what's happening in the radar so they can improve their products. So it's it's end user driven, open source and it's working beautifully. Another lesson that we have on CNCF is that conformance programs critical, a self certified conformance program for Kubernetes, that means anybody can be a Kubernetes distro, but they have to meet certain requirements.

They have to conform and self certify that they are not demerging from the code case. This has been extremely helpful for the foundation because we have over 100 certified Kubernetes providers, every hyperscale that has a certified Kubernetes provider to us, and that keeps the market together. That keeps us moving in the same lock step without confusing ideas.

Doesn't having too many options that are different from each? Allowing for project experimentation is a big part, has been a big part of CNCF success to date. So as I mentioned to you before, we have 70 plus projects today, and that's a good number.

But why it's important is because, as you can see here, we have the early stage of sandbox, which has the lines share of these projects. The only 33 are incubated and graduated, by the way, and by providing this neutral IP zone sandbox for people to come in and wait and get a following going with encouraging experimentation. We're telling people to go ahead and try it out and may the best solution win.

We don't need to decide that the end users will pick the right tools for themselves. And there may not be a one size fits all. So there can be incubated or graduated projects that have similar...

That look at similar fields. But are you providing value for different use cases? It's important for cognitive to have the foundation to have strong marketing there, if we didn't define Cloud Native, somebody else would have today with the landscape.

I mean, look at just how many people are stakeholders in it. Finally, you know, we all, as I said, every contribution matters and we all have a deep respect for the project leader, the product... Project containers, the contributors.

Another round of applause is necessary for the folks who build the community with global events, folks who put on this great conference. All these are essential because that's how we've been able to go after many different geographies, as you know, have the Cloud Native... sorry, KubeCon Cloud Native on US, which has been our flagship.

It's coming soon, by the way. In addition, we went to Europe and we host an event there. In addition, we go to Asia back there, and that's really fostered a global community.

And by the way, the KubeCons are the aggregators, but there are so many meetups. There's so many smaller groups, communities that happen. And that's what keeps people connected, keeps people feeling like they are a piece of this story.

So that's all great news. Clearly, the Cloud Native has figured some things out and it's been beneficial for the ecosystem. Well, there's also more.

I think the most exciting part, frankly, for me for joining this foundation and running it has been just the amount of work we can do here, the amount of innovation that's still happening and that will continue to happen and cause growth in this space. We all know this open source is becoming the default in enterprise. Yesterday I spoke at the Grace Hopper conference to a group of 500 women.

The lifetime high for me and everyone there, I was like all the companies they're talking to, there's open source is used in any pool that they're involved. And they were excited to now start contributing to open source because open source is ubiquitous where they are. Because of that, the Cloud Native ecosystem is seeing a lot of momentum, as you know, we already talked about the projects that end users, got code, the event's.

There's also another side to it, which is that there's a lot of consolidation, lots of players come in, create start ups, bigger players come in and acquire them. So this energy has been going strong. Last I checked, there had been 8 acquisitions in 2020 alone.

But I already know that I'm way outdated in that data. I think it's 10 to 12 already. And some of them are really big ones, such as microprocessing.

And we're all very, very proud of them and happy. Another thing that's happening with this ubiquitous opensource is everywhere, Cloud Native is everywhere is the reality we live in now, which I mean most I'm doing this conference virtually. I could've potentially been there in person with you had this not been a COVID time.

In COVID, in the COVID pandemic post pandemic era. More and more workloads have moved online. With that, just things like that people are not going to the bank anymore.

They're doing all online, that most people have been buying groceries online. So just every workflow going online needs that much more compute power is required. And when compute power is required and gotten from cloud providers, that's where Cloud Native comes into.

So we have seen an uptick in the utilization on Cloud Native in 2020 . We'll be also seeing as another trend that's moving forward is FinOPS and financial management in charge. All these things are becoming bigger.

Our sister organization within the Linux Foundation called FinOs does a lot of work here. And there's also a FinOps foundation that's been launched. The Cloud Native community works very strongly with this with these folks to help them and enable them for further success.

We have a financial services special interest group for end users for that exact purpose. In fact, in my keynote for KubeCon youth, which was a month ago, I talked about SBD Bank China, which joined us as the first Chinese bank and is going to be working hard in the special interest group to make sure that all these problems can be solved and we can help them. Kubernetes and all of their projects.

Another really big trend is Kubernetes and not just for the clouds. Edge and Iot deployments, I mean, everything is a smart device, not whether it's a smart phone, smart lawnmower, smart ovens, smart car, smart, everything. And with that, there's a need to have workflows that happen on the device itself.

And that's where Kubernetes is ready to support itself. We have projects such as KSS, which is a lightweight Kubernetes and KubeEdge, which are coming forward to solve for these issues. And I foresee that this will be a big, big growth moment of growth for us moving to the future.

End user driven opensource, I mean, we've talked about it quite a bit already, this is a trend that's not going to quit and users are going to use open source. They're going to provide feedback on it. They're going to be the spokespeople for it and they're going to be the builders.

And that's going to continue. The change, something that is not changing as well, is the challenges people face when it comes to culture, security, complexity enterprises have since the start of Cloud Native since the start of the Kubernetes era. Enterprises have had a dilemma.

Let me drink water for a second and tell you what is. Oh, I should have gotten more before I started this talk. But yes, the dilemma that enterprises face is that they want to be customer driven.

They want to delight their end users by being fast, flexible, responsive, giving them what they need. And Cloud Native enables that it makes things faster and the DevOps things are more resilient as well. But getting to that nirvana state of the cultural alignment that you need, the security story that needs to be in order, or the operation of operational convexity that needs to be addressed, the skill gap that needs to be managed.

All of this is we're solving for it and we are seeing new issues and we're keeping on moving. It's like we're all in a race together under fixing it as we're raising it. And this change, this trend will continue.

More and more startups will come up to address security issues. Better and better DevOps practices will come about. More and more people will join companies who are very who are Cloud Native in the way they think, improving, changing the culture more rapidly.

So this is a work in progress. We are all works in progress. And I think that's kind of the theme of software in general.

And so we see that continuing. Another really important factor is multi cloud and cross cloud enabled by the Kubernetes API. I talked, as I told you, I've talked to end users and nauseum for the past four years.

Nobody wants to be locked in today. They are using different clouds for different workloads. Some clouds are good at this.

I'm positive that they often sometimes will have their own on Prem for certain parts of their software workloads. So the diversity is really increased as a multi cloud, which was a buzzword, I would say last year. Definitely last year has now transformed into a story of cross cloud.

How do we manage cross cloud workloads? How do we enable the end users to lift and ship one workload from one place to another across cloud without any without significant challenges? And this is an area that's going to continue to change and continues to have innovation.

There's a project called Crossplane that's in the CNCF now that addresses it. And there are lots of things happening in this space that I would encourage you to keep an eye out for. The Kubernetes API also provide CRDs for every cloud service, and I think this is going to keep seeing cool stuff happen.

I see so much about it in the news. I see so much about that as a service operator. It's all about move.

That's exciting. As I said, that that cycle of company projects start up, where companies use some use open source, use Cloud Native, identify gaps, build a project, and then somebody comes along and builds a project up 20 on top of that, that will keep happening as well. You can see some interesting trends if you go to this Google project on open source mapping that I've linked to over here.

Should be fun. Open hardware is also a thing, and we see it a lot in the Linux Foundation, the RISC-V, which is a sister foundation of ours, an open power foundation. All of these things are people are very savvy in the Cloud Native community are keeping a close eye on and making sure that we're collaborating to keep the Cloud Native story strong in those areas.

A very interesting thing I'm seeing is ARM, which is not just embedded anymore, and it's on the server. I mean, if you look at things like Graviton that have come out that are so exciting and all of this kind of impacts Cloud Native workloads significantly. I mean, we ourselves, when we look at the various libraries that we utilize within the foundation, we're always optimizing, always looking for the best options.

And all these changes are really good for us when we think of when we are on an end user. And I believe that's the case, then when any user I mean, at the end of the day, customers, can you do better dollars for performance? And it's just a wave that's going to continue.

Another area that I think could be really interesting, though, is not yet quite the same, it's not yet quite mature, is IDEs. Is there such a thing as a Cloud Native IDE? Today there's some innovation happening out here.

Let's see who wins out in the future. Maybe someone over there in the audience is building something like this for all I know. Policy is code is another really important thing to look at.

Security industry, as we discussed before, security challenges are always going to be top of mind at any price going Cloud Native. But any enterprise is changing and the Cloud Native security is being reimagined. There's so much craziness with different policy languages, models, APIs every service that doesn't work and open multi agent, which is a CNCF project, is a great way to solve for these.

And I think we'll continue to see more in the space. On the more futuristic side, there's also a future run times with Web Assembly and Kubernetes is I mean, the folks may be aware that WEB Assembly is bytecode that can be executed in your browser and it doesn't matter what's your operating system or architecture, multiarc, as they call it. And so that's opened up a new era of programing and that doesn't need to be transferred to JavaScript.

Yay. And so in the future, we might be leaning, leaning towards a future runtime that wasn't Kubernetes. So that's a lot of ideas and movements that are shared with you today.

My goal was to provide a holistic sense of what has happened, the Cloud Native and what future trends will be. So a key takeaway, a key summary for that, the end user driven open source, that's where it's at. And as the foundation of doers CNCF is at the forefront of this.

Kubernetes will extend to Iot edge environments. One thing we didn't even talk about was like telcos adopting a Kubernetes that's going to be big too. Cross Cloud is the future.

And ultimately open source will continue to force innovation in new industry verticals from finance, pharma, telco you name it, you'll see it. So all this is exciting, right? CNCF's good well, there's lots of future trends happening.

What CNCF's role in this future? This beautiful future that is coming now. Our path forward is doubling down on our end user driven open source.

This foundation of yours, from the programmers to the foundation staff, to the event managers, to the docs writers, to the opensource lawyers, to the learners, everyone is going to be focused on one thing end user driven open source. As we do that, the foundation recognizes we have to enable and uplift to develop our education and engagement around the world is critical, and that's where our flagship events such as KubeCon come into place. We are...

It's an aggregator, but everyone comes together and learns and engages and gets better. Same applies with our training and certifications that we offer for folks to be certified. Kubernetes admins or Kubernetes application developers.

These these certifications give you that stamp of approval, make job hunting that much easier, and also standardize the knowledge level of the new cohort of the Cloud Native developers. And finally. We will continue to build a global, robust organization that is a gold standard for opensource, that's the ground zero for Cloud Native innovation.

And I hope you will be part of that journey. You in the audience, you can be part of this story. You're all part of team Cloud Native, whether you're an end user or whether you're a vendor, whether you're someone hacking on the project, join us and get part of the story.

You get lots of benefits, lots of fun, and you further open source as you do that. You all belong in team Cloud Native and you all should join us. And step one for you could be welcome to KubeCon CloudNativeCon Virtual North America happening November 17 to 20.

Registration is open. And today, this is October. So we are still in the early bird price.

Also money should never be something that prohibits people from attending. So if you read a scholarship, if you need financial assistance, you just need to ask. The schedule was just announced today, so I highly recommend you check it out.

I'll be doing a keynote. Lots of much more impressive people will be there, keynoting, and speaking. And I think we'll have a lot of fun over there.

So with all that said, thank you so much for listening to me. I had a great time delivering this talk because I got to really think about the past, present and future of Cloud Native. And I hope I was able to paint a picture for you that is exciting, and encouraging, and inspirational.

So as I said before, I'm always on Twitter, so find me there and start any DM or message me on. My door is always open. And now for anyone who wants to talk further, please join me in the zoom room that will be shared on the chat so we can hang out and have a good time.

One on one. Thanks so much.