Cloud Native Ecosystem at Cloud Native Now 2024

Hey everyone. I'm Alan Shimel, CEO editor-in-Chief for Techron. I'm really happy that you're joining us here today for our Cloud Native Now virtual event.

This is about the fifth, I think, fifth or sixth here, that we're doing a cloud native virtual event. We like to do it in between the European, uh, NCF Kon and the North American Cloud Native Con and Kon. Uh, so we generally do in the summer like this, and we appreciate you joining in.

We have a full day, as you've probably seen, of great sessions around cloud native content. But I'm really excited to be sitting in and bringing you this particular session. It's a fireside chat with my friend Jorge Castro.

George is with CNCF, uh, developer relations and, and ecosystem and so forth. He'll give you his exact title. I don't wanna mess it up.

But, um, George has been in the industry, what, 25 plus years now, George and what, 20 plus years? Certainly. Yeah.

And, you know, and during that time he's worked on a bunch of the different kinda big open source projects, trends, and some of the companies that were in them. It's a great earth set to talk about the NCF, the ecosystem communities in general. So, welcome my friend Jorge Castro.

George, welcome. Thanks for being on today. Thank you for having me.

I'm always excited to talk about the, you fell for the trap, or you thought if you go in between two cube cons that it slows down and that never slows down. That's not true. Well, well, the fact is there's usually a, a cube con in Asia in the, in the in between as well.

Right. In Hong Kong in a few weeks. I will be there, yes.

With, with some of my coworkers. Um, it's in Hong Kong this year. Really excited.

Yeah. Hong Kong's a great city. I know.

Was it last year with Shanghai and in the years past? Yeah. I don't know.

I haven't really been involved. One of the reasons I volunteered to go is I've never been involved in that area of the world. So I'm really excited.

Oh, really? No, I had the pleasure. I've been to China probably four times, but I, I usually wind up going to Singapore a lot, and I've been in island in that whole area of the world.

And then of course, Australia and a and down there. Yeah. It's a beautiful, beautiful, enjoy your time there.

Don't run home. Get there plenty early. So you acclimate, you know, stop and smell the flowers.

'cause you don't know what you're headed back that way for sure. Lots of noodles. Oh, Kong noodles.

Yeah. You gotta eat. Yeah, everyone's Try that.

I I've gotten every checklist from everyone and, um, we're doing India this year as well. Are you? Oh, great.

So that's, I won't be going. Yeah. No, I haven't been to India yet either.

I, I was supposed to. And then Covid got in the way. Mm-Hmm.

And I never made it back. Anyway, George, I I kind of muffed your, your title, your role with CNCF. Why don't you clarify that with people?

No worries. So, uh, I'm a developer relations on the projects team. So, uh, my role, I'm on a team of folks, and our role is basically to ensure that the projects in the C ncf F are healthy.

There's 190 projects in the Mm-Hmm. ccf F and mostly people just like is they think of Kubernetes, right. But, um, there's an entire ecosystem of projects around, around cloud native and the rest, I'm gonna try to look at the camera here, uh, around, uh, the rest of the ecosystem and keeping that healthy, um, brings different challenges, right?

Because Kubernetes is like a big city. It's like trying to figure out sanitation in New York City, right? And yeah.

But then you also have projects that are small, small towns, right? Some of them might want have aspirations to be a big city, and some of 'em are just gonna end up, you know, wherever they end up based on, on an ecosystem. So it's a lot of the same challenges, but the approaches that we take are different.

So our team is a comprise of people who have been open source maintainers before. So I've worked on Kubernetes, I've worked on non-cloud native, open source, like Ubuntu, uh, and things like that. And really, our job is to listen to what the maintainers who make the stuff want, and then listen to the end users who are consuming the stuff.

Um, and see how that ecosystem matches. So the ecosystem is alive, it's thriving. So I kind of think of us as park rangers.

I I'll be using the park ranger analogy here a lot because I, you know, as, as we get into this conversation, one of the things I want to drive across as a point is we are looking at these things now more as naturalists, as biologists, uh, because that includes people, processes, and the software where I think when you're in a hyper-growth stage, right? And a thing's just coming out, everyone's all about the tech, tech, tech tech, tech tech, right? Yeah.

Um, and then later on you're like, oh, no, how do we feed these things? Um, you know, so that's, that's kind of what our team does here. Um, day to day, you'll kind of find us in Slack.

And then during your CubeCon, uh, we run the project pavilion, which are those booths that have all the project, uh, logos on them. And then my job is just to get you in there and kind of be your tour guide, um, to, to help you understand where each of these organisms fit with each other, with you, with your organization, and just to help people figure out how to use, how to use it, because it's, it's great stuff. Absolutely.

Absolutely. So, George, I know you've been, uh, giving a talk recently around like sort of a dinosaur theme, if you will. Yeah.

Right around this whole I echo system around this whole kind, it, and I, I love your analogy as to naturalists. This is truly a biosphere almost, right? Right.

Yep. More than an ecosystem, because all of these, the symbiotic relationships, there's all kinds of different relationships between the different players within the industry. And, you know, there's end users, there's, there's developers, there's platform engineers, there's companies, there's startups, there's end user organizations.

It really is a, a thriving, you know, metropolis when you think about it. And, well, we're gonna get into more of that, but let's talk about this talk you've been giving and an analogy Yeah. With dinosaurs and stuff.

Yeah. So one of the things I've always found interesting is, you know, when, when the open source in the early maturity model, right? It's that the excitement you found New tech CubeCon 2017, right?

Um, the CubeCon 2024 largest ever, right? In Paris, we just had this, um, same great community vibe, but our challenges are also different depending on the project. So when projects first started out, it was all about everyone wants to play.

How do we make sure everybody gets a chair at the table? You know, um, how do we, how do we keep it fair? How do we, you know, do this kind of thing?

And the reason I've kind of, I think about things like dinosaurs is, as human beings, we have a very awful, um, perception of time. Like, the concept of deep time is very difficult for our, for our primate brains to understand, right? So usually the analogy I like to use is the companies that we work for, they go per quarter.

They wanna see quarterly results. They wanna see a charts going up to the right, right? But when you look at the life lifecycle of a tyrannosaurus wrecks as a species covering, you know, dozens of millions of years, you know, or, or an excellent species here today, whatever animal you're into, right?

The lifecycle and health and everything about population of, of creatures and things has to be looked at by zooming out, right? And one of the fallacies, uh, you know, I, I didn't come up with this, A friend told me he is like, the problem is, is that we only ever think in short term, you know? Um, but the science shows us that long term sustainability is the way to go.

So open source. Now, it's, it's kind of the evolution from, you know, the early days when, you know, uh, like you had to convince people to use Linux, right? Like, it's not like today where it, that it's just there, you know?

So we went this gen, we went from this generation that kind of started at the advocacy level, getting it in there, you know, uh, showing the value that it provides, right? And then having that innovation create an entirely new industry, right? Like this just happens all the time, right?

Mm-Hmm. So that sure. Generation of, of open source, right?

It's kind of like the early trias, you know, where it was like, Mm-Hmm. There's certain body plans. Some of 'em are gonna make it, maybe some of 'em aren't, you know, and then there's a story.

Yeah. And yeah, and there's shifts in the industry, right? May or may not be an extension event of certain sizes, right?

But the organisms and things like that, you know, continue to evolve over time. And one of the reasons when someone pointed this out to me is like, when we are talking about open source and sustainability, one of the first things I think we need to mention is the, the logical fallacy that our brain starts off with, where we look at something and then we say, oh, I can fix these things this quarter. I can, you know, and you're gonna do those things, right?

Um, because that's the job. But also, we need to step back sometimes and kind of look at the longer term health of things and invest in the kind of background day-to-day work that's important for open source that, um, might have not gotten as much attention in the early days, right? Like, um, a maintainer being burned out, wanna get, get rid of responsibility, right?

And then someone who is untrusted ends up in a tru in a trust position, right? Like, what happened with xz? Like, this is the, just the reality of dominating the entire planet, right?

So like, dinosaurs dominated the planet, open source dominates technology. That's, you know, that's how I look at it. So now, you know, there's a reason that supply chain security governments are interested.

The en, you know, the entire Fortune 1000, right? We have this, what happened, like the first part of open source was we're gonna take over the world, right? And then the second part is like, oh no, we took over the world.

You can't put one you wish for, right? How do, how do we, there was just an outage that disrupted, you know, the entire planet on Friday, right? So, you know, we find ourselves in the situation where the amount of innovation continues to accelerate.

Like there is no, there's no story where it's like humankind's desire for, you know, more compute, you know, more science, all this stuff. Like we, we, that's never going to go down. But at the same time, the innovation and the software that we're using to make this stuff is exploding.

It's, it's so much to manage, right? So now it becomes, in my opinion, it becomes more of a, okay, let's, let's look at the strategy now of how we make these organisms long lived in a healthy manner. We're this is the first time we are having generations of people cycle out, you know?

Yeah. Absolutely. The people that actually invented this stuff when I got in, were, were in the industry already, right?

And those people are cycling out, they're retiring. Um, and now the, the job, you know, when I wake up in the morning is how do we get more people in there? Because we know there's people that are out there that are smart that just don't have access to get in, right?

Yeah. So the next, that's part of this, that great innovators are in our communities right now, right? And then the trick is getting them on that path in a way that's sustainable, improves the products, improves the software, right?

And then just kind of, uh, you know, there's some, sometimes you just have to sit there and watch this. You have to watch the organisms for a while, you know, and see how they play out. So that's, that's like the long that's a bad pitch.

Um, is, is how, yeah. Oh, I love It. Is how I'm looking at it right now.

Well, you know, a couple, a couple of observations on there. First of all, evolution is messy. Yeah.

Brad is a little bit of a chacha dance there. One step back, two step forward, one step back, right? And, and repeat.

And, and it doesn't go necessarily linear. It, it's choppy. Mm-Hmm.

Right? Progress. The other thing though is, look, the dinosaurs aren't here today.

There was an extinction adv event, right. Depending who you believe and where it happened and what was the reason. But there was an extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs, though.

Birds they say are dinosaurs. Yeah, that's true. Defendants, yeah.

Um, you know, quite frankly, open source, I'd say over the last year or two has somewhat been a victim of its own success. 100%. Yeah.

Right? All of a sudden people are saying, huh, you know what? I'm not so sure about the security of this open source.

I'm not so sure that it, it's a viable business model. You know, we were lucky enough, uh, he'll. And, uh, we have another CNCF member who I do, I'm doing a chat with for today's show, our friend Robert Reeves, who's VP of Biz Dev over at CNCF.

And you know, we're gonna talk about, um, the business model of open source. Does open source help your bottom line, right? Because sometimes free isn't free, as in beer free is free as in freedom.

But in any event, you know, there've been, there've been whispers that, you know, this open source thing, it maybe it's not as good as we thought, or it's not as, you know, pick your word in there as we were hoping it was going to be. Yeah, Yeah. Well, I clearly don't believe that, right?

Mm-Hmm. It's almost like, um, this is infrastructure stuff, right? Like, I'm sure there was a time in the Roman times people sitting around saying, I don't know if this cement thing is a good idea.

What a pain in the ass it is to me, you know? Mm-Hmm. And it's like, well, you kind of, you can't uninvent it, you know?

Um, and it's still around you. Exactly. That actually.

Yeah, exactly. So like, I, I think especially for us, when we look at infrastructure software in general, and the, the criticality of it, you know, on the, on the eve after a global outage, right? The, um, I think we are long past the point, especially for infrastructure project, where if it is important and load bearing to the modern world, I think that businesses and governments and users are gonna demand that it be open source like that.

Agreed. That is the, that is the, that I don't, I don't consider that controversial. I know, you know, if someone say, is open source a good idea?

I was like, yeah, it's a fantastic idea. But we also have to remember, you know, in the grand scheme of a timeline, open source is this has lived, is a, is a brain new animal, right? It's still young.

We, it's still early days. Like if you look at the timeline, when people say humanity figured out computing, we are still in the, in, in the early days. So, yeah.

You know, in, in, in the early days, it was a little bit fast and loose, right? I found a cool library on the internet, right? I added it to my product at work.

Nobody said anything. It was, it was pretty awesome. You know, still it wasn't, you can, yeah.

You kind of can't do it anymore. So it's not the wild west anymore, right? No.

So we go through these, you know, maturity models where, you know, the, the early, the early ways to do it, um, you know, got us to where we are today. And let's be honest, the overwhelming success is, is kind of a testament to the work that those amount of people put into it, right? But also now we have those same people as well.

We're kind of like, Hey, it needs to evolve to a point where it's, you know, it, it's the victim of, of your own success is, is almost like, you know, but you have x amount of limited resources in an environment, right? And in open source, that resource is developers, right? Right.

So it's, we have all this stuff, right? But we have a limited amount of resources now. So there's two, two ways we can fix this problem.

A we can make that interaction more efficient, right? Make developers more efficient, make sure that we're learning best practices. This is what the CNCF does day to day, right?

That's like our tactical, here's our plan. Make this more efficient. If a large project learn a lesson, you know, I need to make sure that other projects understand what that is.

If we need to write something down, then that's the thing, you know? But on the other hand, you also have that long-term vision that you have in the back that's saying we need more bodies. Like, like we need more bodies.

Sometimes it does feel that way, where the amount of growth that the software had, right? The amount of contributors did not grow at that same, that same hyper J curve that's almost very vertical. You know, like open source is big, but considering the amount of value that it brings to the world, those main, that list of maintainers in open source is relatively tiny, you know, compared to what the they produced, right?

So I, when I explain this to my family, you know, sometimes they're like, well, that seems like a really, you know, in other industries, dude, it's technology makes that possible, right? In other industries, right? They can't grow to that level.

They're locked to the amount of people that they have, you know, uh, based on that. But open source tech, I, I was just thinking about what to say on this show earlier, um, that I was in the shower and I was like, distributed version control. You know, that was a thing that we led another piece of technology, you know, and we are now, everything that was invented in that first age, you know, the trias all of a sudden now is giving us geometric output when it comes to productivity, right?

Um, I, I'll throw another word at you there, ai, right? Yeah. Yeah.

So what's going to be the impact of AI on all of this stuff? Do you want to talk about, you know, supernova kind of, uh, explosions of, of diversity and stuff? Yeah.

Let me, let me, And that's all built on cloud native, right? You need, you need a Kubernetes To, you need you, you wouldn't have it without it in some ways. Yeah.

George, let me play devil's advocate a little bit here though. Mm-Hmm. You're a newbie.

You're a newbie in, in the world of cloud native. And, you know, maybe, maybe you live out in Salt Lake City or, or somewhere out that way, New Mexico, Arizona, and you say, Hey, this, this, this coop thing's coming here in the fall. Yeah.

I'd like to learn more about Cloud native. And you think you're going to go there and there's gonna be this monolith cloud native monolith, right? Yeah.

That we're all praying to. And then you get out, let's see, you come on Monday, right? Project day.

Yeah. And, you know, CNCF has now what? Now?

Like 160 or something like that, projects 190 Up to 190. Wow. Yeah.

I think it's 30 more than it was in Paris, maybe, but, you know. Mm-Hmm. There's 190, almost 200 products there.

Yeah. What's a newbie to do? Pull his hair out, run away, freeze out.

How does wood, you know, we want, it takes an ecosystem. We get that. Yeah.

But where, like, where, you know, you're on the yellow brick road, it's not like the house just fell on the witch's head, and now I started the yellow brick road going to Oz. I don't know where the road starts. I don't know where the road goes.

I don't know what road I should even be on. Yeah. How, how does a newbie make Sense to this?

So this is something we've been investing in a lot, right? Like, uh, CubeCon is, you know, easily over 10,000 people now, and we are very cognizant of, um, people that can't make it, right? So, like this, that's why I'm always, I encouraging people, if it's your first one, apply for a scholarship, you know, uh, start working in a project, whatever, whatever gets you in that room is always, is always great.

So, some of the things that our team has been working on actually is, so on Mondays, um, we are actually, we started a new thing in Paris that are Project Lightning talks that like, if you don't have anything to do, if you have no idea what to do, you just go in there, in that room and we had an extra registration in Paris. And every seven minutes a project comes up and gives you a pitch on what they do. Right?

Um, and we make it nice and fun. You can leave at any time, you know, hang out in the back. We got snacks.

We, we recognize that some people are gonna come in, you know, sample a few things and, and then leave. And then we do that, we do that for the entire day. And what we are growing, what we're growing this with in Salt Lake City is myself and, uh, you know, my teammates and stuff, we will be in that room with you and kind of taking a more active role into, you know, like they had me hold up a sign like information desk, but it's not like the information desk as in like, where's the bathroom?

It's more of the, um, you know, uh, my, my company's deploying this, this, and this. Who do I talk to? Right?

Um, and that ties into our new Revamp Project Pavilion, which is, um, we've centralized it now at CubeCon, and we put all the projects there, and literally, our job is to match end users to projects. So one of the things, um, that I wanted to talk about is here in the Jurassic now, is, um, we learned that this is more end user driven than developer driven at this point in the lifecycle. So early days, you're trying to get developer buy-in, um, it's usually all the tech companies that, you know, want to go in because they're building products, things like that, you know, move forward a few million years, right?

And it's, it's the end users who are consuming those things that lately have been taking, I don't wanna say it's like a passing of the torch, right? But, you know, in the early days of Q Con, you would be like, yeah, how's Google using this? How's, you know, uh, how's Microsoft using this?

What are all the tech companies things? Whereas now, later in the lifecycle, you're like, how's Walmart consuming this Mercedes-Benz, right? Yeah.

The end user community at, now that we're in the point of the lifecycle, the expertise has moved to that end user level. And of course, the contributors and things are more important. That's our team's focus, right?

But now we're more cognizant of who is consuming this and why, and are they getting the value of talking to the maintainers? Because something like, you know, as complex as cloud native needs to have, the person who created it and the people that use it in anger have a great relationship, right? And that, I almost say that's what the, that's what the CNCF does, right?

That's our job. And Absolutely. Let me, let me stop you there a second, George.

So that's, again, that's one of the beautiful things about this ecosystem though, right? Is because when Mercedes or some of these, or Walmart or some of the other companies you mentioned, when they consume software prior to open source and all of that, they were called customers. Yes.

Right? Yes. Could they paid and they were customers, and they get the service a customer gets, and they have the input a customer has, but in the cloud, native world and CNCF environment, they're not just customers, they're community members.

Yeah. They have a say in Yeah. What's being developed, why it's being developed, how fast it's being developed, what, what is going on, right?

They, they're members of the community, they're part of the ecosystem, and they are heard. And and hopefully that's what you guys are doing here, by, by joining them up with the maintainers, by joining them up with the developers, they, it, it makes, it may, it takes a, it takes a village, it takes community, and they're big members of it. Yeah.

You've reached the thesis of what I, you know, what, what I've wanted to say is like, the end users end up with mastery of their own. They make their own fate, right? And Yep.

Earlier, earlier, I think in the process, it was like, you should use PU source, it's the right thing to do, and it's open, and you could do things like that. And now we're finally getting to the point where the science is documented enough where we can show you, these are end user organizations that are investing in open source. Exactly.

By participating, right? Mm-Hmm. And now we have the science, the data that shows long-term, they are saving money.

They are, they are participating in projects, adding features, right? But they're also taking the features that they haven't developed and shipping those in production, right? There's certain, there's so many places for so many businesses where they want that commoditization.

They want that to be as cheap as possible. Right? The trick is explaining to organizations in a way that they can understand that that investment is a long-term investment and not a short-term investment.

Not according, according The financial, um, benefits better products, right? Like your charge, you know, sometimes one of the coolest things I get to do about this job is talking to both. And sometimes I, I'll have a main, an end user tele a maintainer.

Yeah. We're using your stuff in production for x many nodes, right? And then the end user, You get Rey's, like, I had no, I had no idea.

We didn't evenly for that many. I should go talk to them, right? Yeah.

Really that happened a lot in the early days. It was ad hoc. It's like, it is a good thing.

I ran into that hallway conversation, right? Right. Now we professionalize it, right?

So the end users have an actual path that, you know, here are the issues we have, right? And here's how we communicate to maintainers. And this is just a thing relatively recently compared to the rest of the explosion of Cloud native.

But I think this is, this kind of shows how, you know, before it was like, okay, the cool kids know how to do it. If you know a cool kid, they'll teach you how to use it. Right?

Now it's like, okay, this, the, the open source flywheel has spun enough amount of times now people are expecting to see better tooling, better science, the numbers should match up. You know, like you should be able to look at a thing in the CNCF, look at it and be able to apply, you know, those things that we learn and, and, you know, pitch your boss, right? Here are three, we have to solve a problem.

Here are three competing technologies, right? Like, you know, we end users are kind of looking for those different angles for different ways to do this, right? Because the nice thing also about cloud native, as you were hinting at, is you can build it all yourself if you want.

You could build a Lego kit, but you want, or you could just pay a vendor to do it all for you. But people often forget that gradient in between is just so diverse, right? Where some people want managed stuff for things that aren't important to their business, but things that are crucially important to the business they wanna drive, right?

They wanna stick shift at that point. So, you know, that gradient starts from, they're cons, they're a customer, right? And they're a consumer, but now the lines are blurred, right?

And some things we're consumers, customers, and in some things we wanna drive that thing. That thing is important to our business. You know?

So that a, that gives you that diversity. And also what makes it so complicated? Well, the, the deal is that you, you know, it gives you options.

Everything from, as you mentioned, like DYI do it yourself, DIY, do it yourself. Yeah. Through, Hey, do it for me all the way.

Yeah. And, and variations there. You know, another thing though, George, when we talk about the cloud native ecosystem is, and I, I had this, I'm gonna be speaking about this with Robert Reeves as well from CNCF.

And that is, you know, we think open source and we think cloud native. And you say, okay, what are the industries that probably are not big open source, cloud native fence? Well, industries that are highly competitive and highly regulated, financed, but all contract, there's, I think finance probably leads the list in, in consumers of open source and contributors to open source.

You know, many of the biggest banks, they're hiring the maintainers. Yeah. Because they realize having the maintainer close by, like that is, is the key to the, to the puzzle.

Yeah. They've done it. Cap, uh, cloud custodian came out of Capital One, you know?

Yeah. They understand. Absolutely.

They, they understand, you know, there's certain things that, uh, you know, cement is, is important to everybody. If you're a cement company, you know, the, the, uh, the mixtures and all that stuff, yeah, sure. You know, they're, they're hyper competitive about that stuff.

But the general person from the infrastructure side looks at it as it's a thing that holds two things together, you know? Mm-Hmm. Um, so like, I think a lot of, especially those maintainers that are working within those companies that are innovating on things like this, the, the amount of work open source, uh, project offices with, within these companies, um, hospitals used to be a thing that were mostly only in tech companies, you know?

Uh, yeah. And now we're talking to companies that my parents would've heard of that want to do open source. And it's not just because, you know, hey, we have nerds that want to open source some stuff, right?

But now, these days, as, as the science gets more popular, it's like, and we also, like, we need to remain competitive with our competitors, right? Like, yeah. Um, yeah.

I have to, That's another aspect. I have to compete with these system, right? Yeah.

Well, it's coopetition. Yeah. Right.

Very. That's a, a big part of the ecosystem. George, we're running low on time.

There's another part of the ecosystem we haven't spoken about though, and I want to talk about that. It's people like you, eh, right? I mean, uh, oh.

Listening to you, we hear your passion. We hear your passion. We hear how you've really kind of taken this apart and, and, you know, dreaded a story in this case, the naturalist story of Yeah.

Kinda evolution and, and so forth. Um, a lot of people, like, you don't do this for the big bucks. Right.

You could probably make more money out there working for some startup or some established company. A lot of people volunteer, like you said, you're volunteering to go to Hong Kong. Yeah.

You know, it's people like you George, to what it is. I I like to think of it as like, you know, I help represent what 190 other nerds have. Right?

Those of us had a, grew up in the industry, you maybe you've been to a foss or a scale, and you kind of live the stuff, right? Like, you really, really live the stuff. It's, it's similar to how, uh, you know, some people listen to music and some people wanna play guitar, you know?

Right. And there's always going to be enthusiasts like me who want to do this stuff, you know? And I've always thought, I've always thought that, um, getting these people in, in, into this industry in order to help solve these problems, you know, it's, you know, it sounds kind of cliche, you know, we need more people that care about the cement.

You know, like it's, yeah. You know, that's not making the headlines, uh, you know, any news organization. No, it's, it's not the guy who's designing the aqueduct or this would help you.

Right. You know, you need those cement mixers. Yeah.

And, and that's, that's why I think, you know, a lot of us, I think you see this kind of culture song, anything, I'm, I'm not that special. Right. I kind of, a lot of us are this way where, um, you know, it takes 1000 people to feel the Formula One team, but only people only care about the driver, the the driver.

You know? And there's people like us who love being that person in the back, in the picture with the small thing you like, yep, I did that. Yeah.

Not, I'm one of the best of the world at doing that. And a lot of maintainers, they feel that way, you know? Um, and that, That's, I Agree.

Yeah. And that's also what leads to the stress and the, you know, that's, that's why we have to take the, you know, things like the health of our maintainers, mental health, how we take care of each other's stuff. It's so critical, because for a lot of us, you know, uh, it, it is part of our identity.

Right. You know, but We, and we need those people to be healthy and happy and bumped because they are the, the linchpin of this ecosystem as much as the software is, it's the people. And we can't forget that either.

Yeah. And you'll get a piece of that. Come to Salt Lake City, you'll see our vibe come to the Project Vili, we have the best couches in the conference center.

It'll be hanging out. We have caffeine. And you could just, that's the best part.

You could just come to the safari Absolutely. And watch them. And I'll, and I'll be your tour guide.

So if you do come and you get lost, you're overwhelmed. There's always someone to help. Everyone's been there.

You know, I'm, I'm thinking you gotta do something like Gates Open and it says, welcome to Jurassic Park. Trying to get one of those wacky inflatable tube things. You Know, I don't, wh well just tell by the third day Cube, Kanye.

Not for that. Hey, George, thank you for coming on here. Thank you for all that you do for the community and for the cloud native, uh, ecosystem.

Hey, pleasure having you on. And we'll see you in Salt Lake. Yeah.

Remember, Alan, we can't do it without you. So Absolutely. Part of the team, whether are you looking, We'll be there.

We'll be there, George. Thank you so much, everyone. Have a great conference.

Thank you. Bye-Bye, George. All right.

Stay tuned. We have, there's a whole day full of cloud native. Now go check it out.

Back at the hub. This is Alan Shimel. We're out.