Kubernetes and CNCF with Oracle’s Sudha Raghavan at KubeCon Paris 2024

This is Textron tv. Hey everybody. Welcome back to KubeCon five, native Con Europe, 2024 Paris.

This is literally our, our last interview. We have the best, we saved the best for last. Matter of fact, one of our keynote speakers, I'm extremely pleased to be joined by SDA Raghavan, correct?

Yes. Welcome, welcome. That.

Great, great to have you on. Tell us a little bit about what you do here with Oracle. Tell us what you, uh, about what you do there.

My day job, I am the Senior Vice President for Oracle Cloud's Developer Platform. Uh, that is a fancy way of saying every internal and Oracle internal and external developer, the tools that they use to, you know, do their source code management, building, testing, deploying, operating, managing, all of that is part of the platform, uh, that my team builds. Uh, along with the re many other services, the most used one is our Kubernetes engine.

I just also called Oracle Kubernetes Engine, and it's a managed version of Kubernetes. Wow. You're kind of, uh, DevOps, platform engineering, you know, cloud engineering all wrapped into one for developers.

Yes. More or less. Yes.

Okay. That's exciting. Very cool.

So you, you had a a, I heard a great, really great keynote. I've been tethered to the camera all day, so I didn't get to hear it. So we'd love to hear about what you talked about.

Maybe recap couple points from that. Absolutely. Um, I think there were two key points to what I was trying to style in the keynote.

One is illustrate the broad history that Oracle has of contributing to open source. You don't really think of Oracle and OP open source in the same frame. Uh, but we have had over 500 open source projects that we have contributed to and are continuing to do.

So, latest to join this family is the CNCF projects and primarily around Kubernetes. The second part of the talk was more on ai. No surprises there.

Well, you know, you set things off, right? And, um, uh, in AI in particular, again, we spoke about how, um, Oracle, all of our Gen AI services use Kubernetes as their, as their underlying infrastructure. Nothing else.

We didn't even think of anything else. Not just Kubernetes, the entire Kubernetes ecosystem from CDA to helm to, uh, you know, cube flow, you name it. And we probably use it in some form or another.

Uh, and, uh, what that enables us to do is not just learn about the new things that CNCF, uh, projects are contributing to, uh, but also contribute back our learnings. We run these systems at cloud scale, probably not all companies do that. And as a result, we have unique value and unique problems that we find with that software that we use, and whatever we find we contribute back.

So, excellent. Uh, that was our story. And, um, Oracle, when we built our cloud, we built the cloud to be very, very open.

Meaning we want to embrace multi-cloud, hybrid cloud built to standard interfaces. So a customer can decide between multiple infrastructure choices, cloud provider choices on-prem choices with the same application software. You don't have to write it for each provider.

And so ubiquity is part of CCFs mission, and that's how Oracle fits into that mission as well for ai. We wanna bring that notion of democratizing ai similar concept, want to see how we can standardize AI chip sets, AI platforms so that it's a little more accessible to everybody. Don't focus just on the heart to get GPUs.

Can we get CPUs to do some of the work? CPUs are more available, more cost effective? Can we do some of the things we do with GPUs, with CPUs?

We tried it and found we could Mm-Hmm. And not just any CPU, we have a special partnership with MPR, and so we run a lot of inferencing workloads on arms CPUs and have found them to be very performant for smaller models with about 7 billion parameters. So if you're running inferencing on smaller language models, uh, large language models, which are below 7 billion parameters that you can tune, you can run them on arm.

And last, but not the least in Q Con Chicago, Oracle donated $3 million of arm credits to CNCS. I Remember that. Yeah.

And those credits can be used for AI influencing workloads today. Very cool. So that was kind of just, You know, ARM is kind of a big thing.

Uh, more and more it comes up and, you know, I've talked to folks that are about talking about ARM and how to make sure that CNCF project support, you know, deploy on, on arm or take advantage of it. Absolutely. But also AI workloads and things like that.

Mm-Hmm. So it's great to hear that that's a part of the ecosystem of the Oracle cloud. Absolutely.

And one of the things that we find really, really interesting about ARM more than any other chip provider is how efficient they are with the energy usage. Mm-Hmm. You know, um, climate change and globally reducing the usage of energy is important and is more than just for technologists.

It's for everybody that lives and breathes in this world. And so arm using that little bit lesser power, more energy efficient over the cloud scale, those few watts really add up. Oh Yeah.

At scale it makes a big difference. Absolutely. I, we're a big sustainability community and, and, uh, topic and push a tech strong.

Tell us a little bit about, uh, do you have any, give us an idea of how many developers you're supporting on the platforms that you're in charge Of? Absolutely. So, uh, at Oracle Cloud, we have over 15,000 developers that just do cloud services.

Oracle at large has over 40,000 developers and our platforms, depending on whether you are building cloud native products or more of the traditional SaaS and database products, you may use all of our products or some of them. Mm-Hmm. But every developer at least uses one of the things that I produce.

So if you wanna spin up a K eights environment to do some development on a hundred percent pull down from the Oracle interface and library. How about, um, this platform? I mentioned platform engineering earlier.

Is that something that's happening at Oracle? Oh, A hundred percent. Um, you know, we believe in standardizing things.

So, um, Oracle, our cloud infrastructure growth has been different than the other larger cloud providers. What do I mean by that? We try to go close to where the customer is close, as in physically close to their regions where they want cloud to be, whether it's for data sovereignty purposes, whether it is for latency purposes, whatever be the reason the customer wants it that way.

This means we are talking about scale of regions, not scale within one region, which some of the larger cloud providers talk about. But scale of number of regions in the last six and a half or so years that OCI has been a cloud provider within five years, we overtook both Azure and AWS in terms of the number of public cloud regions that we support today between our public cloud and our private cloud regions, or dedicated cloud regions. We have over 75 regions that are live that's scale of regions that nobody else has done before.

To operate that efficiently, you need a lot of the platforms to be, um, homogeneous. That's when you can, you know, DevOps workloads can become easier and cheaper And more transportable, More transportable when you make that platform very opinionated and very homogeneous. Mm-Hmm.

So that's exactly what platform engineering is all about. I don't wanna know more layers of abstraction, don't wanna know about the actual physical network. Don't wanna know about the actual physical box I'm running in, don't even wanna know about the vm.

That's how, you know, came up to the containers. Now, even with containers, I need to schedule my own container for my own type of workload. Why?

I can give you parameters that say, I am a container that needs so much memory, so much disc, um, and you know, I don't want CPU to ever grow about this. Find the right, the cheapest and the most efficient place to run it and run it for me. Right.

Take care of the scale as TPS, like the number of queries increase, scale it up, ready, decreases, scale it down to zero mm-Hmm. Make it very efficient. Don't make me the application owner.

Worry about that platform. Have to pre-provision more than I need. Exactly.

Overprovision, just, just, I'm curious about the region part of this Uhhuh. Why, why is having, uh, much larger regions, uh, a benefit? What's the, why is that more important than maybe what other cloud providers have done on their distributed architectures?

So it's not the scale of a region, not larger regions, more number of regions, More number of, okay. Right. So, uh, for example, we run a lot of sovereign clouds.

Now, sovereign cloud implies it has to be in the country. And not just that by the na definition of cloud, it has to have what we call disaster recovery regions. So at least two regions in the country geographically separated.

Now think about the number of countries in the world. Think about the number of sovereign governments that want that data in there. That's where we come in.

So if you keep adding this, not, so this is just about the country and the government workloads. Think about the banks and healthcare industries that really don't want to share their region with anybody else. We used to, in the old terms, call them private cloud.

Mm-Hmm. We don't call them private cloud anymore. Okay.

It is public cloud, but with only that one customer, the reason it's public is because we, at OCI believe in everything everywhere, which means you don't have to decide whether this service is available in my region, my dedicated region, or is it only in public. And so if I want that, then I need to go deploy there versus this, I deploy no, everything everywhere. Not only that, we also give our customers the flexibility to do hybrid cloud.

Mm-Hmm. Which means, you know, the enterprise segment that Oracle is so popular with does not move all of their detailed old software in one shot to cloud. Even if we dedicatedly build a cloud for them for many years, they operate in hybrid manner.

Right. But they want hybrid to work. Like it's one thing, the latency shouldn't be there.

Uh, you know, to the operators, security operators and DevOps, it should look and feel the same. So this is why the number of cloud region's strategy is so important to Oracle, again, for our customer base and what they want from the cloud. Makes sense too.

I would imagine it also helps with, uh, regulatory governance, things like that, that are gonna be different across countries. Tell us about, uh, what's your impression of the conference and things that are happening? What sort of stands out that, that, uh, when you leave and you go back and talk to friends when you're, you know, travel back to your home, wherever that is, where are you based?

Seattle. Seattle, okay. Makes sense.

Um, when you go back to Seattle, you know, what are kind of things you're gonna share about, this is really cool. I saw this, I heard this is great. This is happening.

Yeah. So, um, I think, uh, first the energy, it's just vibrant, right? 12,000 plus people.

I'm part of the CNCF board, and that gives me the ability to see these unique numbers. 51% of attendees are first timers. Really Interesting.

Impressive. Wow. Okay.

Right. Like, um, that's amazing actually. It's amazing.

Exactly. And people have flown from all over the place. Um, and people who are not techies, but wanna know and understand that crowd, and they're all developers, they want to, you know, do boot camps with Kubernetes and get started.

Mm-Hmm. It's, it's been amazing. Uh, the variety of people that have come in.

Um, from a project side, you know, a few things really stood out. The Wasm, uh, you know, I saw that in the keynote. Um, and that's a space that is, uh, I believe pushing cloud to the edge, like literally to the edge.

Uh, and that's something that, uh, I am excited to see, uh, what possibilities we have at Oracle to either contribute or use that technology as this new, uh, I also got to learn about the school, um, you know, GPTK eight, SGPT, mm-Hmm. Um, Kubernetes is used for running AI workloads. What if we used AI to better Kubernetes itself?

Mm-Hmm. And that project was, uh, quite interesting to understand. And just seeing all the projects graduate, like, you know, this is the first time I've seen, um, um, multiple projects come from incubation to graduation in the CNCF journey.

And, um, it's just, uh, amazing to have the energy and the excitement come from a community and not being driven by one company or even a group of companies. It's just, uh, just a Fabulous separate community. Yeah.

It's, and it's, and it's great. So many, uh, organizations, companies like Oracle contributing to this. You know, one of the things that we also have been talking about is, uh, there's there a large number of projects within CNCF, and of course the big ones get a lot of attention.

Of course, you know, where it's hotel or Kubernetes, Kubernetes or Argo, um, are, when you look, consider being part of a project, maybe it's something you wanna start up. How do you, how do you go, how do you decide that internally that this is something we really should do through CNCF? You Know, that's a great question.

In fact, in this part of what I'm taking back from here, I met a lot of these, um, what I call grassroots developers who are just beginning projects and are looking for contributors. Mm-Hmm. A few of them, um, resonated with the business that, you know, uh, we Oracle are in.

And so it will be synergistic to make those contributions happen to not just help the vibrant, you know, uh, uh, startup and developer community, but it's also useful for Oracle and Oracle's developers to know and understand that we wanna give back to the community. We have taken so much from, especially the open source committee. Very good.

I feel like we're in the airport terminal here when they come on with the announcers. Yes. Obviously things are wrapping up here, but we've got plenty of time.

Um, how long have you been part of the CNCF board? Um, I've been there for less than a year. Oh, okay.

Uh, but, uh, you know, I've already learned so much, met so many people. It's been wonderful again, to see a such a small actual board come and put on something this big. I don't know if you knew CNCF Foundation only has 50 odd full-time members.

Mm-Hmm. They pull in such an event. It's amazing to see this happen.

And again, it's a sense of community. Everybody contributes what they can Mm-Hmm. And, um, it's just lovely to see that.

Great. I, I'm, I'm curious about the 61% are new attendees and so many of them of attend one attendees being 51 51. Yeah.

Okay. Um, are you being developers, practitioners, things like that? Um, I'm more curious what kind of questions that you get maybe after your keynote or people that you're interfacing with.

What are they looking for when they come to K coupon? It's, it's, um, so first Oracle, um, as a brand, lots of people were surprised still that Oracle has a cloud and that Oracle gave credits, uh, for CNCF projects. So got a lot of questions around Oracle.

Um, and then there was another group of people, uh, which, uh, you know, the, the gender that I represent, uh, um, they had a lot of questions around, uh, how do we empower more women to join this community? Absolutely. So it was wonderful to see, um, the intent, uh, of, uh, actually DNI in being more inclusive.

And that is seen on a lot of, in, in, even in c uh, CNCS mission statement. You know, they wanna make things ubiquitous, accessible to everyone, and that is including the members in that community. Mm-Hmm.

And so I got a lot of questions on, um, you know, will Oracle be participating? Or like you were asking me, you know, can you contribute to my project? Can I come and co-develop with you some things?

So it was very interesting. Also, got to meet a lot of analysts was not expecting so many analysts to be here. Mm-Hmm.

But they, they're rare. And they had their own set of, you know, futuristic vision oriented questions. And, you know, again, for a group of us, for the Microsoft and the Google and the Oracle to come together and say, what do all of you visionaries in your own space, think about where this thing is going altogether?

Again, the sense of community was a very pertinent team throughout the conference, and that's very energizing. Excellent. Excellent.

Are you gonna be attending, uh, Utah, the u the North America? A Hundred percent, yes. All right.

We'll be there. Let's, uh, get back together again and chat. Absolutely.

So well safe travels back home and, uh, congratulations again on the great keynote. Glad it went really well, and thanks for the contributions. Uh, the whole Oracle team is making a part of this community.

Thank you for having me, me on the show. You bet. Suda.

Reg Reon. Did I say that right? Yes.

Ragga, SDO Raghavan. It's, it's getting it a long week here. Um, my tongue's a little tied.

So anyway, that's the last, uh, interview that we're doing here. Last conversation that we're having. All of these are available up on Textron tv, along with some commentary that we've done in our Textron Gang show.

So please check those out and stay tuned. We have many more conferences that we're, that are coming up, that we're being part of. Uh, some other things like Open Source Summit, of course, RSAC.

We are doing some, uh, individual technology provider conferences. You'll see us at, uh, ServiceNow and Atlassian number of folks. So stay tuned.

Always, always good content. Always fantastic folks that we talk to. So thank you for joining us here on Techron TV Live from KubeCon Pod Native Con Europe in Paris.