CloudNativeHacks with Arun Gupta at KubeCon Paris 2024

This is Textron tv. Hi everyone. We're back here live in Paris for CubeCon Cloud Native Con Day two seems even wilder than day one.

There's a, a constant hum, you know, on the floor and the traffic and the, it's just a great, great day. Um, I really love this event, this guy sitting next to me here, he's, he's in a big way responsible for this event. You may not know him because he, you know, he's not, not out.

Maybe he's front and center, some of the other folks. But I want to introduce you to Arun Gupta from Intel and from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and from the Open Source Security Foundation. And we can go on and on.

But Arun, welcome. Thank you for being on Tech Drug TV with us. Thank you.

I'm super excited to be here. And you know, it takes a village, a much bigger village to run an event like this. Um, so yeah, I mean, it's really a team effort.

Everybody has pitched in and it's very exciting here. Well, I will tell you, I've been going to Q Con's since Seattle, I think was the first one I went to. And this in every way measurable is the best one I've, I've been to.

I, Oh gosh. Yeah. I mean, like, I was walking down the keynote hall while the keynote was happening because I had a meeting at 10 o'clock, and when I walk at the end of the keynote hall looking at the keynote speakers, and that sea of people, 12,000 developers, 12,000 plus developers, is the largest cube con ever.

You walk around the expo hall here, you see the number of sponsors, you see the excitement, you see the buzz, you see the energy infectious. Yeah. And that, that to me is the key thing, the energy.

I'll be honest with you, I remember going to Theon in LA in the, it was kind of still in the middle of Covid. Well, exactly. And I think that was a challenge because, you know, I had to get permission from my house.

Me too. That, Hey, you know what? You are going smack in the middle of Covid because 21 stay In a hotel three days before you come home.

Exactly. It was 21, uh, 20, 21 fall. Yeah.

And the Covid was still there in 22. There was still a big covid wave. Yeah, exactly.

So in that sense, we were lucky that what we got, we got over there, but this over here is the largest cube con ever. Oh, no, it's back. Yeah.

This is back to where San Diego was. Yeah. San Diego was a Little Short of 12,000 right Before Q Con.

Yeah, exactly. That was 2019 Right before covid Excuse. Before Covid, yeah.

2019. Yep. That was 2019, uh, fall.

Yep. I, I remember it Well, I remember it well. We were there shooting and it was a great, great event.

Yeah. And then from LA on, and, and it was, this was all Covid related, but not only was it not as big, but the, the excitement, the buzz Look, we had to space out the booth, remember? I Remember that very well.

It was a nice walk from booth to Booth. I mean, like, here is very huddled space. You know, it, yesterday was, It's a huge floor.

People can't see if they're home. Just you can't see out there or this way. Yeah.

But it's a huge Floor here. It is. Absolutely.

Yep. So, Arun, I, I, I didn't mention you are the chairman of the CNCF. Yeah, I'm the chair of the governing board for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

And this is your second yearly term. So it's a two year term. Okay.

So I was elected two years ago, and then, uh, earlier this year, the elections happen again. Seems like I've done a few things. Right.

I got elected back to the second term of two years now. Congratulations. Congratulations.

And then thank you. And then pick the good man. Let's hear a little bit about your background.

What, look for anyone who's never been involved in a organization, it doesn't have to be as big as NCF, but any kind of community led organization, it's a labor of love in many ways. You don't get paid for it, right? It's a lot of work.

It takes a special person, a special drive. Where's the drive for you to do This? I honestly thrive from it.

You know what I mean? Do you? This is what keeps me going, honestly.

And part of it is also the intel culture. You know, open source is built on the shoulder of giants, and while coding is an exciting work, but a lot of it is about chop wood carry water, which is non-coding. You know, how do you review the pool requests?

How do you organize events? How do you do the meetups? You know, the governing board work, you know, a lot of administrative, reviewing the budget, make sure it's going to the right places.

And that's part of Intel's legacy, honestly. And when I joined Intel over two years ago, I wrote a blog post that Intel allows me to be my authentic self. And if a company allows you to be authentic self, it becomes so much more meaningful, so much more exciting, and so much more fulfilling.

And, you know, I love talking to people, listening to them, understanding their challenges, and how can I bring those diverse perspectives in the room and allow them to converge and emerge a consensus out of them that we don't have to agree every time, disagree and commit and move on. Yeah. But how do we make sure keeping that customer empathy in mind that we work for them and make it work?

I think that to me is what is very exciting. Absolutely. Very good.

Um, before it was Arun Group to at, at CNCF, if you wouldn't mind, just like trace your career path for us. Yeah. I moved to the US um, about 25 years ago.

So more than a quarter centuries I've lived more life in the US and I grew up in India. I've lived more life in the US now. I've always lived in the Bay Area.

Um, I've worked at Sun and Oracle for about 14 years. Uh, one of the OGs of the JDK team. Mm-Hmm.

So Used to write the JDK stack test, it interoperated, all sorts of fun stuff. Uh, spent couple of years at Red Hat Couch base, couple of years, years, a few years at Amazon, defining their open source strategy. And, uh, right before Intel, I was at Apple where I built their first open source program office, really, and really trying to bring that cultural change.

But then at Intel, Greg Lavender, who's our CTO, reached out around, we wanna bring that cultural change. And, um, they made an offer I couldn't refuse, As they say. It is very exciting.

Good for you. That's fantastic. Thank you.

Um, so I, I want to jump into Intel, but before we do great, great, great cube hunt. Where do you see CNCF going from here? How do you keep it on the upswing like that?

Yeah. One of the things that we always look for as a governing board chair, and I really push the governing board members, I push the TOC, the technical oversight committee, the LF staff, the CNCF staff on a regular basis is today we are 180 projects. We have wow.

Hundreds of members. Where do we wanna take it from there? Today we have 12,000 developers here at CubeCon.

In five years, what would the success look like? Would 30,000 be a success? Would 40,000 be a success?

If we are 180 projects, would 200 would 400 be a success? So, and I'm a runner, right? So I like to run and I know that I'm gonna run on a 10 K and what's my pace gonna be and if I'm gonna run on 10 k, that if I'm running at a nine minute pace, here is how long it's gonna take me.

And then I backtrack from there. So I think those are the kind of OKRs that we look at from the CNCF perspective that this year where we wanna take it and know. This year, of course, as you realize, the big focus is on Gen ai.

Yeah. So really building that story, working with the marketing folks within the elap, you know, working with the TOC to make sure that we are bringing the right projects. Looking at the CNCF charter, that is it inviting, you know, we wrote the charter five years ago.

Industry has changed, you know, technology has changed. Keeping that charter relevant, bringing in concepts like code of conduct that are we behaving right? You know, are we diverse?

Are we inclusive? So those are some of the elements that we think about it to make sure not only we are doing things that are required to be done, but also creating scalable processes, streamlined processes that allows us to scale to that level. So constantly kind of pushing the boundary on what are the new technologies.

I mean, today's Gen ai, we don't know what's gonna be there for five years. No. But are we set up to embrace it when it comes along?

So would you say it's fair to say you don't have a goal of necessarily 200 or 300 projects, but you want to create a framework that will allow you to take on as many projects as it makes sense given given the community, given the state of our art of technology and everything else? That's correct. I mean, uh, the CNCF philosophy is let thousand flowers bloom, right?

Right. So if it ends up being thousand projects, what we are looking at is a pipeline, right? What is the software supply chain pipeline?

And in that pipeline, they say the weakest link is how weak the pipeline is. So we are looking at what the weak points are, how can we highlight them? How can we make them more secure, more tight, you know, more collaborative, more open, and then continue to grow from there.

Excellent. I want to talk about Intel, but before we do, I feel like we should give a, a shout out and spend a little bit of time, at least on the open SSF Sure. You're the chairman of that working group as well.

I happen to be, yeah. Last year, again, the elections happened. I've been representing Intel on the open SSF governing board for about two years now.

And last year when the elections happened, I put my name in there. Seems like I've done a few things right there too. So I happen to be the governing board chair for the two, probably the largest technology open source foundations in Linux.

Yeah. It's Very exciting, rewarding, and equally humbling as well, that how do I make sure I stay connected and do the right thing. So look, our audience needs no introduction.

I mean, we do Security Boulevard in addition to the rest of them up here. Yeah. But, um, you know, there's probably nothing bigger in security today than like software supply chain security, SBOs, and this type of thing.

And open SSF is really playing sort of a pivotal role there, partnering with governments both in the US and here in the EU and in other places around the world about how, you know, short of, uh, no one wants to have big brother enforce it, but you know what, I'm, I'm glad to see the US government getting involved here. It's, It's important. Yeah.

That's not where the EO executive order 1 4 0 2 8 came in handy. Yeah. Where they said, if you wanna work business with us, get as bomb ready.

You know, Intel has been doing hardware bombs for a very long time, but now extending that concept and building that s bomb is critical for everybody that wanna do business with. Yeah. And nobody wanna kill business with federal government.

So in that sense, the big brother coming and saying, this is what we need. Yeah. So openness stuff really plays a pivotal role, as you said in there, because they, they, their charter is to improve the security of open source.

That's it, period. One simple line, what do we do for that? I mean, well, we have a very large board, very concerned members, and our CSOs and their representatives are on the board.

We have lots of working groups, just like CNCF. We have a technical advisory committee, uh, council that we will discuss regularly what are the things that we can do. One of the most popular projects from open SSF is a scorecard.

Mm-Hmm. So you can run that scorecard on your GitHub repo, it'll do the analysis, are you following the right security practices? And it gives you a score.

And once you get the score, then it tells you recommendation, Hey, you wanna go from here to here, here are the things that you can do to improve your score. Because that overall improve the security posture for open source and really is, as they say, securing the world one GitHub repo at a time or one gi repo at a time. Excellent.

Um, let's turn to Intel. So as you mentioned, they brought you in really to really anchor and open source culture within the, the, the company. What your official title there?

My, my title is Vice President and General Manager of Open Ecosystem. It's a great title for that job. Thank you.

What's Intel doing? I mean, besides letting you work with all of these foundations, how is it, how is it kind of grafting into the DNA at Intel and, and manifesting itself? Very much so.

I mean, Intel has a lot of legacy of working in the open source. So I'm here to, part of my role is Intel is internal and part of it is external and internal really is to align that strategy across different business units, make sure there is a conscious and a deliberate act of when you are contributing to open source, how is it going to a downstream product? And from that downstream product, how are the customers consuming it?

And then giving us feedback to do more in open source. So that flywheel is really critical that you're telling everybody that this is how you focus on it. So that's sort of the big element that we drive.

We have manage, uh, monthly, uh, executive meetings where we bring everybody where they share their strategy so that at Intel, we call it as one intel voice. So that there is one intel voice around that. We did a open ecosystem summit last year where we have more than 2,500 plus internal developers getting together and sharing their excitement about it.

And one of the primary reasons Intel contributes to open source, because our customers consume our product Intel Silicon, whether it is on a laptop or on a edge, or on a data center or in a cloud. By using open source frameworks, whether it's PyTorch or TensorFlow or Open JDK or Kubernetes, they expect that open source framework will work out of the box in a very streamlined manner on those instances. Right.

So that's where Intel continues to push our open source optimizations, optimizations in the open source upstream so that they're available. And so if a customer just walks down the street to Best Buy, buy a laptop, best Buy is electronic store in us. Yeah.

Yeah. So if you buy a laptop from there and you are running a stock TensorFlow or a framework over there, and if it's using an Intel chip, boom, it's just working outta the box. So there's a, one of the Intel culture, val cultural values is customer cost.

So the reason Intel contributes to open source, not just in code, but chop wood, carry water, is that customer first culture. Absolutely. You know, it's an interesting time in the, in the chip world, right?

Everybody have talks, talks about Nvidia and 2 trillion. And, but on top of that, we're also seeing back in the US huge investment in, in manufacturing chips in the us right? So in the news today, the government, I think, granted Intel eight or $9 billion.

Right? I saw the tweet by Gina Raimondo, which is the Department of Commerce, uh, secretary. How does open source fit into there?

You think Very well. I mean, Intel believes that open ecosystem creates an equitable playground. You know, every time we talk to customers, they tell us we don't like a logged wall because we cannot innovate.

We are controlled and restricted and defined by one vendor. So that's sort of where exactly, you know, open ecosystem plays a role over there. 0 model.

Up until now, Intel was designing and manufacturing chips. We'll continue to do that. But because we have that experience of running Fab at a scale, we are working with our customers and partners so that they can bring their design and we can manufacture it for them.

It's like a micro fabs and So forth. That's exactly what it is. It's a internal, is now the company is kind of structured within the company that these are the business units, and this is the fab part of it.

There is a p and l between the two that is happening. And then as much as you do the internal p and l, you'll do the external p and l as well. So that entire cultural shift is coming across.

And that's where open ecosystem plays a key role. That no, we are gonna do it on a very open, equitable playground. We don't, I'm not gonna distinguish between my internal view versus the customer.

And so that cultural change is super important. I love it. I love it.

We're probably, over time, I apologize. org. Uh, Io, io, excuse me.

org. org. com.

We have an excellent podcast. I know we talk about, we bring all exciting guests at our Intel booth here. We have a podcast recording session if you wanna show up there.

We would love to have you there. Absolutely. Arun, thank you for coming on Techstrong tv.

But thank you. More importantly, thank you for all you do in the community here. It, it must give you a tremendous sense of satisfaction to see it come to fruition like this.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Arun Gupta, Intel Open, S-S-F-N-C-N-C-F here live in Paris.

We're gonna be back in just a minute. Stay tuned.