Exploring Intuit’s Innovations in Open Source and AI | KubeCon SLC 2024

This is Textron tv. Hey, everyone. We're back here live.

We just had a Danish accident. The cart with the danishes came by. They all got knocked over on the floor.

They invoked the three second rule. People were stuffing danishes in their face. Unfortunately, we didn't record any of it, but I know these are the things that happened in Cape Con.

Anyway, let me, If there's a little Danish wipe, Just wipe the Danish off his face. This little little octopus here was eating our Danish. But anyway, Lisa Marie N's here with us.

She's from Intuit. You might ask What's Intuit doing at an open source conference? Well, you're gonna find out.

Lisa, welcome. It's great to have you on here. Thanks, Alan.

It's so gr to be back on here. What a pleasure. You want Any Danish?

No, I'm, I'm gluten free, so I'm all set. Thank hope you don't need, Dan. Thank you.

Thank You. Um, so let's talk about you a little bit before we get into, in, into it, and we get into why we've got our little stuffed animals here. I've got a whole set of these on my Oh, perfect.

In my office, by the way. It, but anyway, let's talk about you though. Tell people a little bit about yourself.

Yeah. So I'm Lisa Marie Amfi. Most people know me by Lisa.

I am been A-C-N-C-F Ambassador for many years now. So I've been part of this amazing community for a long, long time. I run a very large user group outta the San Francisco Bay area, currently, it's called Cloud Native Silicon Valley.

Uh, it's now part of the CNCF user group, uh, end user groups. And I, I'm super happy to have recently joined Intuit, which is a fantastic end user company. And so after all these years of showcasing end user stories, I finally get to be at one and end user.

Yeah. You may know that Intuit won the end user award. End user of year award twice.

Really? Yeah. Well, very Cool.

Well, I know they're, they've been a huge supporter of CNCF. Yep. They've also been a huge supporter.

org, actually worked at Intuit, and they kind of really let her grow. And, and that helped grow the whole dev set Goss movement actually. So Intuit's a good, a good cookie, you know?

Yeah. When it comes to supporting open source and community led, uh, uh, community led projects like this. So how, you said you just joined into it?

Yeah. How long ago? Like about three months ago.

Oh, Really? Really? Just like, yeah.

And one of the reasons I, I had been running me to sit Intuit, and I've been part of the, the, the Argo community for a long time, um, on a, on the community side. Um, and, and even the new open source technology that they're trying to roll out over a year ago, I, I ran the first ever PMA Pro meetup. So I've been kind of aware of a lot of the open source initiatives that Intuit was contributing to, but also starting, a lot of people don't know that Argo actually started at Intuit.

Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. It, uh, I know, and this is a, you know, a story that I wanna, And that's funny.

I knew Argo for a long, long time, but We were talking, I know people also said some other amazing, um, companies. But really the, the project was started by, uh, Pratik and Ed Lee when they were, um, they were still at Blats, and then Intuit acquired Blats. And at that point, uh, they needed to bring in some of the other vendors, acuity Codefresh, which is now Octopus Deploy.

Right. Red Hat came in. Um, and that's really how the project got a lot of the velocity, and they gave it to the CNCF.

And then two years ago, it graduated with over 350 customers using it in production. Yeah. So a lot of that momentum came, um, because of the, the early days of the community.

And one of the most exciting things that happened here at Cape Con was last night, there was a documentary, you know, the C Ncf CF makes us documentaries. Um, so this, the fourth one they've done, they decided to do it on the Argo Project, and it tells the origin story. Mm-Hmm.

And it goes through with, you know, a lot of the founders and a lot of the, the, the partners that, that got on board in the early days. Um, and it, it's just such an exciting part. It's the third largest project, I think, right now in Oh, it is.

It's huge. So the room was packed last day. It, it was a amazing, So actually, I, I had people saying, oh, I'm going to the premier, the Argo movie Premier tonight.

So unfortunately, most of the people watching us live right now are def facto, they're watching us live. They're not here. Right.

So they probably didn't see it last night, but when can they see it? How can they see it? Yeah.

If you just Google inside Argo It is on YouTube right now. It is. Okay.

So not right now. Listen to the rest of our conversation. Right.

But after we're done, um, you can, you can see it on YouTube. It's, it's a fantastic documentary. It was really, well, I have to give a shout out to Chad Tobin at Speakeasy.

Uh, you probably know Chad. Chad and his team at Speakeasy created this documentary, and they were so great to work with, and they, they really made it all happen. They did.

So, I mean, you've seen a lot at no pun intended, but a lot of water under the bridge at Argo. Right. Swimming by, um, see what you did there.

Why do you, and it's, yeah, it's a, you know, it's, as you mentioned, the third largest open source project, I guess, behind Kubernetes and Open Telemetry Yeah. Are one and two. Um, what do you attribute that success to?

Yeah. Well, it solved a problem that, that needed to be solved. And the documentary will go way, way more into detail, but it's, Argo project is actually four projects.

It's Argo CD's, Argo workflows, it's also Argo Rollouts, Argo Events. And so these are four, you know, unique projects. So there's a lot of areas for the community to get involved and build these projects.

But really, Argo CD is at the heart of GI Ops. Yes, it is. It's really giving people that, um, you know, that monitoring and that visibility into, you know, their deployments.

I mean, they, you can see if your clusters are, you know, when they're actually running. You can have that assurance that, that everything is, is actually working. Um, and it's automated a lot of the complexity out of Kubernetes.

And so it really solved that problem and, you know, in a fun, easy to use way. And so I think that's why the community got behind it and, and wanted to contribute to it. I mean, we were using it at Intuit.

We were dependent on it. And when we needed a new feature, we needed to build that in. And it just got so much better when, when we, you know, teamed up with Codefresh and, and Acuity and, and Red Hat, and, and they brought all of, um, you know, their communities in, and everybody started developing and, and now there's, you know, over, I don't know what the number was.

I think Chris Hick said something like 18,000 developers or something like That. No, it's, it is, it's a, it's a crazy amount of numbers. Yeah.

And we thank you all. It's all the developers, all the doc writers, all the maintainers, uh, for, for bringing this project to life and for continuing to, to keep it going. I mean, the fact of the matter is, Argo's become synonymous with, with GI ups.

Right. You don't, you're doing GI ups. Oh, you're using Argo.

Right. Um, and it, it's funny, I remember when I first became aware of Argo and, and I mentioned to you was with, uh, Dan Garfield, who at the time was Codefresh. And, and I thought there would be other GI ops options.

And then there are, to be fair, right? There are, but none of them have kind of achieved critical mass if you Yeah. I Argo just works.

Yeah. You know, it's great. And I love Dan too.

We've run a lot of meetups together in the early days. He's still at Octopus Deploy now, who Yeah. No, I know.

Actually saw Dan yesterday. Yeah. I mean, 'cause here, here's a lesson, Lisa, I learned in technology, right?

If there's not a great solution, there's a lot of wannabe solutions in the market. If there's a great solution, you don't see a lot of other ones because it's like, there's Kubernetes, you don't see a lot of other container orchestrations orchestrators because the Kubernetes. Right.

And it's the same, I think, kind of dynamic with Argo. Yeah. And There were, you know, there was the meso sphere, there was the, No, no.

That's how the market works. Yeah. Yeah.

There's All of those. And then the kind of market makes a choice. Yeah.

And it's the default. And, you know, why, how a market makes a choice. We could do studies on that.

Right. Why aren't we all using OS two? Right.

Instead of Windows. I loved OS two, but anyway, I'm so showing my h Let me, let me, uh, let me run over. We got another toy here, though.

This is our Argo, right? Yeah. If you're not familiar with the Argo mascot, talk to me about the Polar bear.

So this is Numi. This is the newest project from the founders and creators of Argo Pratik and Ed Lee and the team at Intuit started building this internally. This is AIOps.

io, give us some stars on GitHub, please. Um, we are looking for people to, to help, to contribute. Uh, it kind of came out of Argo workflows, and it's, it's still a little bit early stages, uh, but at this conference, we, we got three or four, or maybe five talks accepted.

People are all over it. They're going to the talks and they're coming by the booth for more demos. Kelsey Hightower came by the booth Wednesday night for a long demo.

Very cool. On, on Pneuma flow. Um, so it's, I think it's gonna hopefully get the same kind of momentum as Argo we're hoping to get the vendors to come in and help support it the way that they did with Argo.

So yeah, it's, it's kind of the new hottest. io and check, check it out. How do you Spell that?

io. This is Numi the Bear. Very cool.

Yeah. Can we talk a little bit about AI at Intuit also? Well, you mentioned, talk to me, Intuit Open source, and why, why are we here?

Um, it's, it's not just Argo, it's not just Numa. GraphQL is a big, you know, we're really big in the graph QL community. Um, we have other, you know, other open source technology that we contribute to.

Istio is another big one for us. Kubernetes, of course. Um, and then we consume a lot of open source technology.

It's, it's very important to us. So we have a, a team, if you wanna join our LinkedIn group, it's our open linked, Intuit open source on LinkedIn. Um, and so we're, we're always gonna try to, um, talk about the stuff that we're doing.

We're going continue to try to open source as much as we can from internally. Uh, but it, it, open source is always gonna be super, super important to us. You know, the Argo community is great.

They, they don't need us anymore, so we're gonna get involved in the next thing, and we'll open source that and the next thing. And Frankly, they don't need you anymore. That's true.

Yeah. Not as badly. Right.

Um, there's other people. Yes, there's other, There's other people putting amazing innovation into the project. Uh, so, you know, where can we put our awesome energy in and we build stuff that we need to use.

I mean, that's kind of how it works. And so we're, you know, running the stuff internally, and then if we can open source it, we will. That's the, you know, that's the mindset.

That's the mentality. Yeah, absolutely. That's at the heart.

Um, so Intuit open source is, is a big initiative for us. And, um, you know, I'm hoping to build out an osbo and to kind of do, do more around it. Um, but open source in general, especially as AI is kind of coming in and it's finally getting some structure.

I mean, you may have noticed day one here at CubeCon was all about ai. Yes. Whereas last year, like all the days were kind of about ai.

But I think now people have really refined the conversation. Well, the, I it may here It's true. Welcome to my life.

It sucks the oxygen out of every, It's totally fair. We have all of these brands. I started one specifically for ai, so it would not stay out, but we could keep our AI stuff there, but it still finds its way into everything here.

Right. Well, it's getting more structure. And the OSI just published the definitions, I think.

Yes. They launched it all things open maybe last month. Yep.

Um, so there are, you know, and I, I just did a whole day, um, at that conference about the responsibility of, of open source in AI and, and developing responsible ai and how do you get bias out of ai? And if you're not very deliberate about, um, how we're, you know, advancing this, this technology, and especially with open source, we are going to create enormous wage gaps, particularly for underrepresented communities to the degree of, like, I think the McKinsey report just said $53 billion annually Wow. For African Americans in the United States, 53 billion annually of a wage gap.

So we have to be extremely deliberate about how we are building out this AI technology and how we use open source responsibly, and how we keep humanity at the center of it at all times. Sure. So that's a lot of the conversations that we're having now.

Um, and I'm really happy to see that there's like that initiative. How could people kind of join in that and get involved in that? Yeah.

All things Open is an amazing conference. Not to pitch another conference at a conference. Um, uh, but there, there's a lot of conferences around ai.

If you and user groups that are starting and communities that are building, depending on where you live, and you'll notice that the conversation isn't just about the technology. You'll have government folks there. You'll have, you know, compliance, you have all kinds of folks because they're talking about the people side of it.

So you don't have to just be a developer to, you know, to get No, it's not, I mean, look, I, I've said this before. I've been in technology 30 plus years. There are some things that come innovations in technology that, like the cloud, the cloud was huge for tech people.

Yeah. Right. For us, that's cloud native or cloud when you're out of tech, you know, maybe grandma says, oh yeah, my pictures are in the cloud, but you know, the average person not in tech, the cloud, it didn't necessarily change their life that they realize it, you know, that app they see on their phone, whether it lives in the cloud or at a data center, they don't know and they don't care, quite frankly.

But it was huge. The cloud, then you get things like the internet. The internet changed civilization.

Right. You don't, well, you may be remember right before there was an internet. Right?

I do Remember, but a lot of people don't, and it's changed humanity. Yeah. AI is one of those things.

Absolutely. Transformative, right? The biggest Humanity Yeah.

At a humanity civilization level. Yeah. And so, yeah, developers and how we develop software, ai, you know, I say this, I, and we've said it before, there's 27 million developers in the world.

They say, right now I'm gonna be going to 35. Well, with ai, we're gonna have 500 million developers in five years, because everybody's gonna be a developer. You, you don't have to necess may not be the developer you are thinking of, but Yeah, no, exactly.

And we talk about this a lot at Intuit. We have, we're, we're using AI all the time and we're helping our customers. We're using AI to help our customers.

And we started developing, we made a big bet on AI many years ago. And we've developed, uh, an operating system now based on generative ai, which we, we call Gen os. Um, and a lot of the development is, is coming from there.

And so you see it in now QuickBooks and TurboTax, where you have these AI assist and these done for you experiences. Um, and it's, it's just game changing. Yeah.

It's super helpful. We have I think, something like 60 billion, um, yeah. Commit, you know, uh, queries every day.

Yeah. And I think we've already written over 1000 patents in ai, ML data science. So it's a big initiative at Intuit.

And going forward, it's, it's only gonna get bigger. Don't get me started with patents. It's a whole thing here.

I don't know if you've been following that story. You see the CNCF set up a fund? Oh, yeah.

For the patent trolls. Yeah. Or against the patent trolls.

But anyway, yeah. Yeah. That was on the day one keynote's.

What They started it, they started the keynotes with lawyers and Jims That send lawyers, guns and money. I, it's like, I thought it was kind of welcome. Come To day one of K Coupon.

Exactly. Anyway, Lisa, thank you so much for coming on here. I thought this was great.

So let's go through 'em again. Numer Pro do io. Yep.

And then of course, Argo Argo Proj. That one, you know? Yes.

Yes. All Right. Thank you, Alan.

Really appreciate It. Hey, we're wrapping up day three. We are live at Q Con.

Thank you everyone. We'll see you soon.