Lee Calcote, Layer5 | Open Source Summit NA 2022

This is Textron TV. Hey everyone back here live in Austin for Linux Foundation open source Summit. You know, we haven't really spoken about it, but there's a large.

Expo floor up on floor four. We're on floor two some great companies exhibiting up there talking to people joining in the conversation. I want to introduce you to a company.

We haven't covered before on Tech strong on any of our Brands and that is layer five and I'm here with Lee calicoat from layer five. We get that right? That's that's correctly.

I finally Cal code you're speaking of great companies. Okay, let's talk about layer five. All right, let's jump in.

Well, before we go, what's your position with layer five? Yeah founder and CEO. So actually you're the right person to talk to that.

Hey, I think so. All right. So tell talk to me.

What what's layer five about? Yeah. Well Ben been around for a couple years now been focused on open source Community First some of we built a couple of Open Source projects from scratch their Cloud native Centric.

They're actually service mesh Centric in nature. There's about three of them two of them have recently landed into the cncf. Actually now that I think of it there's an annual review of one of them coming up.

To step back for a moment and say like a layer five sort of mission and vision in general is well, is it recognition that like the infrastructure is quite capable these days and we aim to enable service teams to expect more from their infrastructure to help them extract more value than maybe they're recognize that's there. Okay, we really think that we've had an initial focus and start toward service mesh as an intelligent layer that you can program and tell it to do various things. We think that there's a lot of untapped power in in the network and that's really important to microservices and lots of requests transiting the network.

And so we're here to we'll help people wield that power in a self-service way. Excellent. So Look when we look at.

Service Fresh right. So I've been going to cube cons and everything well before covid and all and you know before covid it really seemed like service smash was where The action was right people were using kubernetes. But now as we layered on security and network and all these Services we needed a way for them to communicate talk to each other.

Interact and that service mesh became the sort of the API Hub if you will and the lack of a better word. Yes where all that action was taken place. And then we saw several different kind of service mesh, right istio, which only recently became part of cncf, right?

It was Google. Is it Linker D is another yeah, right and you mentioned a couple that your company have. Yeah, there's well actually it's kind of interesting just within the cncf as actually one of the roles that I play is the chair for the technical Advisory Group for Network for the cncf and so with istio's recent donation or it being donated as a recent project rather is well, if I get the count right that's depends on how you count but it's either five or six service meshes Justin the cncf right and that excludes.

mesh implementations that are outside of the cncf and so Yeah, it's a crowd. Now one may look at that and say well obviously that is just or not justification. But proof that the service smash areas are really big area.

That's very important to people and and you know, it's gonna need a good solution. The flip side is the fact that there's so many of them means none of them are doing great right now. They're all kind of works in progress and we'll have to see what What comes out of this?

Yeah, how they're how the adoption how the adoption how they mature right? It's it's still relatively immature networking is a deep kind of a deep and wide area that you know, yeah. I don't know that I guess I'll commonly say that if you were to Like reflect on this this position that service meshes are in with the number of them that there are if you're looking at something relevant like container orchestrators.

So kubernetes having is enjoying the most popularity by far previously with a Litany of others that I won't I won't prattle off there's a whole bunch of them right that you know, the Road to Perdition is littered with the best of intention. Yeah right from doctor on down and I think we'll eventually eventually we might see something similar to happen with service much it. It's I guess I would put it this.

Yeah, I think that's totally true that you could we could step ourselves outside of the tech industry and just look at soft drinks and use some other relevant right? There are winners and losers and everyone but here's the other thing I think. You know taking a uniquely open source view of this whole thing is when you have so you're gonna have some open source solution, or maybe they'll be two or three solutions that are really popular and they'll be the de facto.

Winners standards that people use but then you'll have commercial companies that are harnessing those leveraging those but but that's the way of Open Source, right? So we all start here and then commercial companies build on top of it. And is that sort of where layer five once to be?

Yeah, that's about yeah. You captures it pretty well that well. We were kind of say these things are kind of deep in complex.

They're more capable than some people choose to use or really comprehend can be a big scary old thing to I'd be running well kubernetes the any of this infrastructure at at scale or or even not at scale to I know that if I were in The Operators seat gosh, I might have to just change my shorts. If I as I go to like make a change in absolutely this traffic's supposed to go there and it's crazy what goes and the amount I mean the kinds of traffic that we see now in is just crazy. So you mentioned another role that you have though besides being CEO of layer five and that is Chairman of the of the attack of advisory committee for Network for cncf.

So that includes service measures a big part of it. What else is a part of that? There are other kind of well the term Network gets expanded from there, but kind of well things like Core DNS grpc it's going to stretch my the other network Centric projects that I'm drawing a blank on at the moment, but don't don't knock yourself out.

Let's talk DNS. It was just so funny. I actually had a I call me young guy.

They're all young researcher here. Who is the Dan Kaminsky Fellowship winner and of course Dan is the guy who discovered the huge DNS vulnerability that kind of broke the internet, right? And as a result of that we DNS as a As a thing became real right people decided.

Hey, we better make sure our DNS is tight right locked down secure scalable. What what what's going on in world of cncf around DNS? Yeah.

There's um, well accordionist has a project specifically is become in the earlier days of kubernetes. There was a different DNS implementation accordionist is been sort of a cloud native implementation from from scratch and become the facto DNS offering within your group at least your vanilla distributions of Rights. There's been it's to your point.

It's DNS is a wonderful like makes for a wonderful attack factor for getting into organizations being able to slip in the middle kind of redirect some of that traffic without people knowing and it's one of the older like like TCP. Are like a lot of what the internet is comprised of it? DNS is one of your older reinherited.

and Well, like a lot of the infrastructure that we keep around it needs to leads to continue to evolve to with a real security-centric perspective. Absolutely we end up within the cncf tag Network. There are a couple of working groups within it the one that's the most active is the service mesh working group.

So back to your point about the buzziness of that topic intends to be the one that I focused the most on you know, I think it's it's going getting the most oxygen. That's for sure. You know what we didn't tell people layer five.

io? Well, la Yer number five number five with a hint toward the OSI model I guess is the layers one through so we know yeah, I already feel familiar with you. Absolutely.

So you're dealing you're all about later five. Anyway. Hey, man, we got more people lined up here.

I Want to thank you for coming up. Good luck with layer 5 keep up the great work though on the attack because that's the kind of behind the scenes work that makes this whole thing go. I appreciate that.

Alrighty. Thank you. Check out layer Five Dot IO Lee Calicut here.

We're live in Austin. We'll be right back with another interview.