Leading Cloud Native: CNCF’s Growth, AI’s Impact and Driving Diversity – Tech.Strong.Women. EP39

Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Techstrong Women, where we feature amazing women doing amazing things in tech. I'm Jody Ashley, executive producer here at Techstrong, and here with my co-host Tracy Reagan, creator and CEO of Deploy Hub, and very active Linux Foundation participant.

Before I introduce today's guest, I wanna give you a quick update about what's happening here at Techstrong. We've got a couple new sites launched out there, you should go check out, and we have some virtual events coming up at the end of the year. com to register.

And also, I heard yesterday that RSAC 2025 has just opened its call for papers. So ladies, jump in there, get your papers in. We wanna see you at RSA Techstrong is there doing livestream interviews all week long.

So we'd love to see you there at, at RSA And be sure to tune in every day to Textron TV for great shows and interviews. Hey, Tracy, what's on your mind? Well, it sounds like RSA should be on my mind.

I know. Submit. I know, I just heard that and I'm like, I will submit.

I would hope that we can get more women at these, uh, security type conferences because I feel like after the Palo Alto Networks lampshade debacle, we really need to have more women in the room and el stronger voice. But that's not what's annoying me just to today. That's annoying me constantly since I saw that image.

That was my bad. That's okay. Um, to today, there was an article in, um, yeah, it's probably not a magazine that most people would be watching.

Uh, it's called, uh, air and Space Force Magazine. And they often have a lot of articles about, most of it's about hardware and, you know, new military, um, uh, equipment. But there one came up today I found really interesting, and it's, it was titled, solving DOD Software Dilemma with Continuous Authorizations to operate what they like to call C aos.

So I read deeper into it, of course, I would, and I found it really fascinating because they start talking about the need for, um, improving software deployments and getting deployments out the door quicker and doing that in containerized environments. So, um, so the military has always has pushed, um, HP high computing per, uh, high performance computing systems for quite a long time. Most of it being built around VM images, because those are the most isolated.

So containers are starting to show up and Kubernetes is starting to show up in the military, but now they're starting to understand that continuously deploying out to these sites, or what they're calling continuous authorization to operate is becoming more and more prevalent. And when I dug deeper, some of the I issues, not just the fear of doing a deployment, and I relate to the fear of doing deployment because I've managed deployments for quite a long time, and I found that even the CrowdStrike, um, oops, I really had sympathy for CrowdStrike. I felt bad for the, probably the team that de deployed it because it was such a failure.

Um, they can be scary deployments can be scary to do, and sometimes that keeps us from doing them, but trying to establish a continuous way to do this with testing and security. And they talked about security, and they talked about the need for continuously monitoring vulnerabilities at the edge, because imagine all of the edge points that the military has that they have to actually fix when a problem comes up. It is a massive problem for them.

And this article came out just today. Uh, it references, uh, some of the mil, the, the DODs documents on what they call this continuous author, uh, authorization to operate how they wanna implement, um, this process. And they also talk about their DevSecOps strategy, which requires a plan to continuously monitor vulnerabilities at the edge.

And when I think about doing this, I think about all the tooling out there that requires agents. If you listen to me on the gang, I complain about agents all the time, and I'm just, just that the problem that they have to address is pretty massive when it comes to thinking about having an agent on every single military endpoint that's out there. And in the, in all the arenas that they play in that theater is huge, and they have thousands of endpoints.

So this is a massive, uh, question that the DOD must solve. And, you know, check it out. com.

Uh, and there's links to what they're talking about and how they wanna solve it. So if it's some an area that you're interested in and it fascinates you, like it did me, I recommend taking a read, Everything fascinates you And this space, it does the I know, idea of solving that. It seems so huge.

I Know, I know. And Priyanka, tell us about your, you know, I, I'm sure Jody's gonna ask this question, but I really want you to speak to that in terms of Kubernetes and what you're seeing in the industry in general. First off, we need her to introduce herself.

We've got Priyanka Sharma with us today, Priyanka, introduce yourself. Give us a little bit of background, and then Tracy will remind you about the question. Sure thing.

Sure thing. This is so fun already. I love it.

Hello everybody. I'm Priyanka Sharma. I'm the Executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

We are where containers really grew up and became mainstream because Kubernetes was, um, a container orchestration platform, as you all may know. And today we have 190 plus projects in addition to Kubernetes. We have 750 plus member companies.

These are folks who support the foundation and its efforts to make the cloud native ecosystem ubiquitous. So, and I think we're doing a decent job there. 1 billion developers around the world, and we host some of the, in my opinion, most fun and largest open source conferences in the world, uh, called Cube Con, cloud Native.

We do love a good cube con. Yes. Common Salt Lake City.

We're working on the plans now. When, when is Cron this year and where is it? Yeah, it's, uh, for North America.

The one coming up is in Salt Lake City, Utah. It's in November, uh, 15th to 19th. Let me double check the dates because, so It's the 12th through the 15th, because 12th, I'm setting it up because Techstrong has been invited, and we will be there live streaming, um, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

So for the event. So yeah, we're, we're geared up and ready to go for that one. We're excited.

Awesome. Mr. Love, if you have, Let's go back to that, that article and this idea of, you know, when we first started running, you know, Kubernetes cluster, did we ever think it was gonna be put on our phone?

Right? Right. A lot, a lot has happened For sure.

And the, the, the number of endpoints and the problem that the DOD faces, you know, there is a, there, it's true. It's doing deployments are scary, right? Um, there's, there's a lot of risk associated to it.

And you know that when you push the button, you just, like, you, you're hoping for the best. I used to put it that way. But sometimes you pray, you wanna have a little prayer before you do push the button to say, go, but a human shouldn't be really pushing the button anymore, right?

It should be pushed through a pull request and the automation continues forward. But with the complexity of these decoupled architectures, talk to us about what, you know, uh, what you hear through the open source community. And of course, we have this weird problem right now where everything is about ai Mm-Hmm.

And we've forgotten almost completely about security, and we have probably a five to 10 year learning curve on really implementing true AI tools. So does security get pushed to the back? Where are we, where's our head?

And what's the, what's, what's the Linux Foundation this and CNCF talking about in these areas? For sure. So first off, you're absolutely right.

Deployment's really scary that one. We are all in agreement on across foundations, across, um, other organizations. I think beyond that, uh, you know, this, the DOD is not alone, is what I would say.

Of course, they have a scale that most of us don't understand. They have a level of complexity with the things that are confidential, mission critical life or death that, uh, is unusual. However, this problem of having multiple stakeholders, of having multiple edge points, it's, it's only growing.

Especially now we're talking soon six G, right? Like 5G is here, six G is coming. So all of that accelerates the, uh, um, the focus on the edge, edge world.

And speaking of ai, which, you know, is everyone's paper topic right now, I think that also plays into making edge that much more important because so much of the features that we're expecting to land will be on edge devices. So I think things are coming together in a way, and that the trends are converging to be of concern to, like most people will have similar concerns. Like before it was like, oh, this con this, this organization cares mostly about edge.

This con uh, this organization concerns itself mostly with security. Now, I think things are a bit more, it's a stew melting pot going on right now. But to your point, I think, uh, the realization of the AI value will come over the next few decades as we see what are the tools, features, products that are built that really change labs.

So what we are seeing right now is, uh, organizations big and small, just gearing themselves up to take the most advantage of it. I'm really happy to say that cloud native, I, I think I said in my introduction, right, that we were where containers became, uh, a a bigger and bigger enterprise force. And now that same group of individuals have, beca have morphed into the platform team, so to speak, right?

That manage the tooling and infrastructure for organizations and their developers. And these are the same people being tasked to create the platform for running AI workloads. And the reason for it is that AI is not special.

It is part of your entire, entire software system. You know, like the code base contains some AI workloads and many not, and it all has to work together. So the trend I'm very much seeing is that the platform teams are the unifying layer who have to think about the ultimate delivery and deployment.

And that's actually good news because those people will always care about, uh, reliability. They'll always care about security observability. All the things we've grown to learn are critical to successful software systems.

Yeah. I feel like AI is actually a more of a problem than it is, um, a solving any solution, solving any problems. It's creating problems for us because we now have new types of tooling that we have to start worrying about.

We haven't even figured out how to stop a data breach on a basic database, much less how to start managing these, um, LLMs with, you know, I don't know, 13 billion parameters that could easily be tweaked. And we're not, they're not versioned, right? Right.

So how do we start seeing into that? So, I I, and when it comes to dev, and we should add SEC to this now Mm-Hmm. DevSecOps, we don't have the flexibility that we need in these brittle workflows to be able to progress in the, at the rate that AI is progressing.

Right? So Our very much in the infancy, I think the support around it. Support around it, yes.

And, but just supporting our existing, uh, workflows, just take our regular, our, our just take a, okay, first we had a monolith, right? And then Kubernetes, you know, put a bomb in it and broke it all apart, which was good because now we have small containers and we can, we can release smaller pieces. So that deployment's not quite so scary.

Yeah. But at the same time, that one container could have a massive blast radius, right? And at the same time, every single container is running the same, is is pulling in the same package.

So Log four J is not just running in a hundred of our applications, our monolith applications. It's running in thousands of containers, right? Absolutely.

So it is, it is that tight. And that's just in, that's just thinking about the, the architecture of the application structure, right? A logical application.

It's not talking about now push all that out to these end points that we have to manage. Yeah. So it's a, it get, it gets big.

It's a wonderful Magnitude problem. Yes. Huge.

It's a hard problem to fix. I was recently at a, a conference and they were talking about deep tech Mm-Hmm. Uh, and really difficult problems to fix.

Interesting enough, they didn't consider this problem a deep tech problem. It's only shallow tech. How do we qualify to be, It's, it's, it's kitty pool end of the deal, not the diving end of the pool.

Like what's the deep tech then? And they're like, robots. And I'm like, Okay, alright.

Because I feel like this problem fits into a deep tech problem because it requires, um, contribution for many different organizations. And that's why the CNCF is important because, and the continuous delivery Foundation and the open SSF, it's gonna require all of us at the table to really sort this out as the ability for new tooling to be born, um, without having to have the word AI in front of it. Yeah.

And to your point of, a lot of people have to come together. A lot of different disciplines have to come together. The AI story is so much a data story, right?

Yes. Ly it's actually a parallel to the DevOps movement where the developers and operators needed to understand each other now. And then it became developers, security professionals, operators with DevSecOps.

And now we really need to have, build empathy with our friends in the data science world, the people who live in Jupyter Notebooks. Uh, same goes then towards the AI engineers who really are up the stack, right? They're, they're, uh, involved with the pie torches of the world.

That's where they live. And how do you make sense of it all, it all to like the infrastructure folks, the platform folks that we have in Cloud Native as, and, and bridge the gap with the data teams, with the AI engineer teams. Because if we don't do that, we'll have the same problems that we did in the past when Devon Ops were separate, but with a much larger magnitude because there's that much more complexity.

The, it's just that much harder, which is fine, because that's kind of how it goes, right? Things get more complex over time, but it also makes it that much more important for us to come together at the table. And I think we're seeing that slowly start to happen.

The benefit of coming after the cloud native revolution, in my opinion, is that we have a little bit of a vocabulary, a little bit of a blueprint of how we did this before for DevOps. And we need to replicate it and amplify it for this new era and ERAS hence forth. Right?

But our problems gonna be all those statically coded workflows. Yes. Yeah.

I mean, there's gonna be so many problems. Yes. But, but that's why we're in business, right?

It's like Yeah. Instinct, job security. Right?

That's why I'm telling We have, that's So important. It's so important to bring people in at the table, which the, I think the CNCF has done a great job. Uh, I would hope that in the future, this is just, you know, for all the next foundation projects that have things in common, I, I would like to see more collaboration between the CD foundation, the open SSF, and the CNCF, because it's gonna require all of them.

But tell us about, you know, for the, for the, for our audience, which obviously probably mostly women watch this, even though we get pretty technical, and men are certainly, um, we, we we're glad that they watched too. But tell us how, uh, more women can get involved in some of the CNCF projects because it's, it's been a, you know, diversity and open source is an issue. It's a problem.

Uh, they, it, it, and I, running an open source project myself, I can see how women show up and we really, really have to, uh, support them and make sure that they know they're welcome. Mm-Hmm. Uh, you know, is the CNCF working on that?

And can you tell us a little bit about why somebody should get involved in one of the projects and the best way to do that? Absolutely. I think diversity equity inclusion is baked into the fabric of Cloud Native and CNCF as who we are.

Uh, I am a beneficiary of that factor because, so I was involved in cloud native since, since the first year, uh, as part of this, uh, observability project called Open Tracing. And we be, we became third project to join N-C-N-C-F. And I got, I, this was the first community, I have to say, where I felt welcomed from minute zero.

I remember actually walking into a Kubernetes beat up in Seattle before the second coupon. And I was so nervous because I was by no means an infrastructure expert. I just started learning about telemetry and observability and loving it, but not an expert.

Not even like, but not even close. And I remember walking in super nervous because clearly everybody else had spent, you know, had a lot of miles under their feet. And just as I was standing there, these, this group of people were like, oh, come enjoy anything.

And I walked over and they were interested. They wanted to talk to me and hear about why I was there, what I was working on, and offer any support that they could. And that was the beginning for me.

What ended up being a very fruitful association, first as a contributor, then I actually got elected to the c nnc f governing board, and then eventually leading the foundation. I was given up opportunities every step of the way. I was very proactive about that.

I was very much like, hi me. Um, but the foundation's been set up in a way that, do we want to see, uh, diversity, equity, inclusion, whether it's on the keynote stage, whether it's on the ladders that we are building for con contributors, whether it is in the scholarships that we give out to people to attend our CubeCon. And so we try our best.

But, you know, I say this in a good way. Nothing is good at us, so we have to keep at it. And I think what we have done a good job of is representation.

We have some very solid female leaders who are there and very much part of the community. I think where it's much harder is where in the contributor ladder for projects, uh, that is where it, I mean, I, I think starting in open source is hard for anyone. It's just generally speaking, but you call the, but you know, the, the inequities compound is what happens.

And so you see fewer and fewer participation. But we are working towards, uh, a lot of initiatives around like mentorship, uh, with like Google Summer of code with LFX, our own LF initiative to pull in more diversity. I think it's, it's, uh, you know, you have to keep at it, and you have to, you have to combine macro and micro, in my opinion.

So macro is programmatic, right? How are we structuring things so that you bake in diversity and micro is every interaction you have with somebody who should be pulled in, could be pulled in, make that extra effort. I tried, I know everyone on my staff tries to do it, and I know people of the community teach us how to do it.

So we are no, by no means perfect, but I think we, I think we put our best foot forward. And I, I appreciate that there's a focus on it, because what I have observed in open source over the years from the, the Eclipse Foundation, when I was first involved in that, um, up until, you know, working with the CDF and Open SSF, is that there are more women in the beginning. Yeah.

And then they feel like they get flushed out by the onslaught of men that, that come in. And they, once that happens, um, their voice is somewhat diminished. Yeah.

Is the best way to describe it. Uh, and, and it's hard to keep the balance when you don't have an, uh, in the industry in general, we don't have that many women in it. I don't know what the percentage is.

Let's say it's 20% women and 80% men. So when you have an open source project that first start gets started, you may have 50 50 kind of ratio between men and women. This is at least what I've seen with, uh, Orelia.

Once it gets bigger, there's more men coming in, and the women seem to step back. And I'm, I'm constantly trying to work and, and encourage them to step forward and take on, uh, things that maybe is out of their comfort zone, because I see men willing to do that more often. Right, Right.

That, and that makes sense. It's, I think it's even on a macro long-term level, hasn't this this been the story of computer science? It was so much of a tled thing in the beginning, and all those code breakers in the World Wars, all of that, they were mostly female.

And over time, things changed. And I think that's what you're seeing reflected in the projects that you work on. It, it happening in a, you know, much short, shorter try timeframe.

I think what I've seen is definitely that there are certain disciplines that just have traditionally had more men, uh, in the last, let's say decade or two decades. And those, like the projects that come are, you know, they, they, they contain those people. Some of them though, really make an effort and are able to pull in, you know, strong technical women to contribute and then eventually grow, grow the ranks to being maintainers.

And then if, if that desire is not that strong because it's hard work for others, it's less likely to happen. So that's kind of the unfortunate dichotomy that I observe. At the same time, I think it's important to keep building the pipeline.

So I'm actually going to be doing a keynote at, uh, the Day Zero, I think it's called for Grace Hopper this year, to talk about women joining into open source and how important it is simply from a purely personal individual perspective, it's good for your career. It was good for my career, it's good for every person I know that's involved in their career. So just do it and see, very, see what opportunities global went up for you.

I think the more pipeline we build, the more like people will drop off. That's just how it's gonna go. But you have more people who might potentially stay till the very end.

So I'm a big believer in uplifting existing talent and also build the pipeline, educate where you can, because for whatever reason, and this is a big frustration of mine. Open Source runs the world, it powers the internet, and yet it's, it's a little bit of an obscurity amongst the general public. And I'm like, how is this, it's, how is this happening?

It's as if people didn't know about, uh, roads and Bridges. It feels like that. Right.

Right. And I just want everyone to know so that they can make the choice whether it's interesting for them or not to get involved. I, that is a really great analogy.

And it's true. Most people don't understand what open source is. And it is like them not knowing, understanding Rosen Bridges and how federal government gets involved and Yeah.

No, I don't know. But it does happen, right? We don't, people don't understand about it.

Most people have no idea about open source packages that you consume. Oh, for they have. They're completely, um, it's so obfuscated.

It's not, it's, you can't see it. Yeah. I think you can't touch it and smell it and pick it up.

It's hard to really conceptualize it. And there's also, in my opinion, now this is a bit of a tangent, but I think there's a lack of, um, lack of storytelling around open source in a way that other previously obscure areas have actually successfully done. So think about like finance and, uh, you know, wall Street a lot, everything they do is intangible as well.

But there's so much fiction around it. There are movies, there's storytelling that everybody gets it. Okay, finance is a vertical, this is what people do.

Generally speaking over there, open source has had no stories. Maybe we just need to not write the next Great American novel that's about open source and that that'll do it. I think you guys are right.

I mean, even I'm a newbie to all of this, obviously. And just as a goofy example, um, I got a new Kindle over the weekend, and all of my books are Nook books. All my library and Barnes and Noble got rid of their whole web interface so that you couldn't move stuff around anymore.

And my husband, who's the CTO of our company and works with you guys day in and day out, hold up an open source thing that someone had written that allows you to convert all of your books from Nook to Kindle. And he spent, like, all day Saturday, he, there was a glitch. He emailed them, they told him what to do, and now all of my like 380 books are now on my Kindle.

And I'm like, open source does that. And he's like, yeah, but you know, I never would've thought right, to do that. But it, I mean, that's like every day people super helpful thing.

How many people are struggling with that? So I just think it's crazy. I just had no idea.

And that's sweet. I just think of it as what you guys are talking about. Not like the world in general.

That's such a sweet, what That is truly a man who loves you. I Know Ju love right there. Half of those books are his too.

So all stuff that he lived Yeah. You know, he does. You I think it was fun.

I think he enjoyed the process, like Yeah. Trying to figure it out. And, uh, yeah, he just sat there and took, got it all done.

And I was like, yeah, he's the best. He's the best. You guys know him.

He is the best. He is. So, Priyanka, why don't you give us a little bit of your background.

How did you get into technology? There seems to be a, a, a common thread with women getting into technology. What is your story?

Um, so for me, I started my career at Google many, many years ago in, in a business role. And I was, uh, doing partnerships for AdSense, but by chance I started working with internal engineering teams to build, uh, like dashboards for the sales team to, to co to utilize the information to get, um, to get better, uh, intelligence, et cetera. And I found myself so enamored.

I had so much far, you know, Google has that concept of 20% project. So this was my 20% project, and I found myself just raving this, this work. And so I did more and more with those folks, and I thought I got along with them better too.

So I was like, oh, this is a good sign. I'm happier here. And eventually I actually ended up getting an offer to join that organization.

Uh, but then I decided to go down the startup route because that was a parallel, uh, passion of mine. Uh, I, I was at startups, uh, that, you know, I did different roles, learned a lot about building a company, eventually did my own company and that crashed and burned. But that's where I got into open source because we tried many ideas.

And the one that worked was a time tracking application for developers. And, uh, the way we designed it, it had plugins that were open source that anybody could build. So if you want to build a plugin or data collection from anything, whether it's your, uh, different, uh, text editors or, uh, whatever, what have you, you can, um, build your own plugin if it's something obscure that we won't have already.

And that's where I saw this magic of people just building, because it kind of like the story you told about your, uh, husband helping you, uh, you know, uh, and go decode your books is people have a use case. They'll go ahead, try what's available and then contribute what they need to to get the job done. And that I saw, I saw the amplification effect, you know, the, the economies of scale, uh, so to say that happen when you have that kind of a community add to that, that it was just a fun group of people.

So I was like, okay, I'm liking this situation. And then, um, and then, you know, uh, while the startup didn't go farther, I was clear after that experience that I want to be an open source. I started, at that time, there were not that many, uh, go-to market folks who were, um, working in, uh, dev tools.

And I started working, um, with this, uh, incubator called heavybit, who focused specifically on dev tools. And I was helping out their companies with how to work with developers, how to go to market, et cetera. And, uh, I ended up joining one of their portfolio companies called LightStep.

And that was a huge change for me because while they had an open source project they were building, it's all exactly what I was looking for. It was also orders of magnitude more complex because this was suddenly in the infrastructure realm. This is where they were building an observability product for distributed systems.

So I had to learn a lot and quickly ideally. So that was, uh, that was a daunting but awesome experience. I think for about couple of three months I was in meetings where I would hear words being used, English being used, but the sentences were not making sense.

And then slowly though, I guess osmosis, doing my own practice, trying to, you know, like do down, uh, you know, uh, try out demos and stuff that were available on GitHub and just talking to people, I started building a mental map of how this all, how these systems work and what we are trying to build here. And that was the open tracing project, which I absolutely fell in love with. I built mid T-shirts that said, tracing is fun.

I still have a few. Um, and I got involved. That's when I got involved with CNCF.

Uh, a lot of work I did was with end users or folks who you utilize this technology, but are not vendors in this space. So think of your traditional Fortune 5,000, right? Um, and that was an awesome experience because we were learning together these folks and I, and then as I grew in this community, as this community and ecosystem grew, we all became more ex, uh, you know, had more expertise.

And today, I'll tell you, like having gone from contributor to board member to vector director, now when I'm talking to end users, they are so sophisticated. They don't need a vendor to really handhold them as much as to enable them. And they're able to call the shots more and en enable this ecosystem to be a better ecosystem for everyone.

So that's been my journey and I've loved it. That is quite the journey you've been on. You've, you've hit on, you've got to, like, you've done so many things working for startups, working for, you know, a vc, um, A startup VC foundation.

Yeah. Do It all. Yeah.

The found, which one's been the most fun? Oh boy. I would say I think startups are really fun for me personally.

And actually, CNCF feels like a startup, which is the, uh, which is good and bad, right? Because you work a lot, but it's a startup. But the energy, the pace, and the desire to change things, that's really intoxicating.

And actually, that's something what I credit this AI wave bit, because before everybody started talking about generative ai, uh, cloud native containers, Kubernetes were becoming very much defacto default for a lot of the workloads. And we were seen as a mature foundation. Now with the rise of gen ai, we have new work to do, right?

Like the vendors are talking to me like, I wanna be the storage solution for AI workloads on Kubernetes, and it's like blank space, let's go work on it. And then many other such things. So it's rein infuse this energy in this like solve all these crazy problems and I'm really enjoying it.

Yeah. Anytime we have new tools we, that we can put to work means we can build better software, which means we have to go back and say, where can it be applied? Right.

Right. And that's the question I think that we're facing with AI is, you know, where, where can this be applied? Uh, I was, the conference I was at last week, I mentioned to somebody who was a writer, I think for Forbes, and they were really excited about AI and talking about it.

And I said, you know, the problem with AI is it's not a product. AI not a Product in that way. Yeah.

Any more than a database as a product. Oh, yeah. What you mean?

Yes. It's not product, it might give us new features. Correct.

So AI are features of a product, but it's in itself is not a product. She disagreed with me. Um, completely.

Uh, but you know, as a developer, I see AI as being a, a set of tools, but those tools do have a place and have to be managed in production environments. That's the key point. Yeah.

Yes. And if you don't do that, you're not gonna be able to see the reality of this promise. Right.

And I'll be wasted. Which brings me back to why the DevOps and the DevSecOps is still an important discussion. Absolutely.

It is extremely important. And I feel, I feel like, you know, DevOps got kind of long on the tooth, but boy, we have a lot to do still, when you think about that article that the, the, um, the military just wrote. Yes.

They're just out thinking about doing continuous deployments, which is really what that means. Uh, we have a long way to go. We have not solved that problem yet.

And we're adding quite a bit to the stack to manage all those AI agents There. And, and, you know, when there's fraud in the industry doesn't help. Um, and, and I think we're a little bit in that space, the, the one, uh, with this whole age agentic workloads, et cetera, the one thing that's just gonna be a reality, and I'm hard of people for whom it is a reality, is that the bills are what keep people in check.

Right. So, you know, just as it happened in the early days of, uh, cloud computing when suddenly developers had access to infra directly where builds went and nobody realized they were doing that, it was not intentional and then people had to get more disciplined around it. I, I'm hearing similar stories around AI workloads where, oh, I just added a zero to our bill.

Whoops. And, and I think that goes back to why the platform engineering teams who initially may have been told that they didn't know what they were doing when it came to AI workloads are now being called like, help me right now. Because we need to design, uh, the platform engineering to work in a way that the engineers have ability to experiment, but we don't, you know, bring the house down with the costs.

So I think that kind of provides a bit of a checks and balance, so to speak. But I really hope that the productionization productionization of these workloads alongside the rest of the application is something that we can work in lockstep as an industry on. Because without it, I just don't see the larger success coming that we are looking for with a GI and this and that.

Yeah. If we can't get it out to production in a safe and secure way that people aren't gonna trust it and it's gonna, it's gonna have problems, right? That's the case.

That's the case with all software. But like I said, we're expanding our stack and we're expanding the, the, the dependencies. We're expanding the, the attack surface and the DevSecOps pipeline has to still be brought forward and considered in this.

And solving It needs to evolve and like expand. It needs evolve. And I think, I think without the pro the, um, the right amount of focus and weight going there, organizations will not be successful if they don't prioritize the, the structure of their platform is not gonna be successful.

I, I agree completely. 100%. We have to shift, right?

We have to pivot the, we're not building monolithic applications anymore. And everything we've done in DevOps is based on monolith. And we've never, we never pivoted when we started going to containers, we just created that many more workflows.

True. Right? Everything is independently deployed.

So now we have millions and millions of workflows that we can't even add an SBO to. And then you add agentic workflows, it's like, wait, what? Now I added an order of magnitude more.

So we gotta solve that. Absolutely. Well, we won't today, so I know we're gonna come out.

We thought we were gonna solve all the world's problems. That was the stuff. Bianca, tell us a little bit about yourself.

What do, do you do when you're not thinking about, uh, software and projects? Gosh, well these days it's all taken up by my 15 month old who is a big ball of energy. I thought it was hard just after he was born the first year.

No, it was a breeze. This the fifth, I think. Well, I've had the terrible twos come early.

I don't know. But my kid's really independent, really active and trying to jump off couches all the time. So trying to protect him from himself.

That's, that's where a lot of time goes. But it's very rewarding. It's, it's a whole, you know, it's a whole different like, uh, order of magnitude of complexity when you have a life that has, before I was all about my work life and now I have this big other priority.

So I'm learning how to be a working mom is where I'm at these days. I'm glad you came back. So many women don't come back after starting a family, because that can be a, you're balancing two big things.

Yeah. Being executive director of the c, ncf F and being a new mom, those are two heavy things. Yeah.

And you know, the mom stuff goes like zero to a hundred real fast. Is the pro like the career you've built up over time, right. And you've slowly thrown into it.

This mom thing is like when day you learn a on the next day you are, and it's a full, full big responsibility. So adjusting is hard. And you know, I think it's cha it's challenging everywhere, but like, particularly in the United States, it's very challenging because of the way the care structures are set up.

I I am, I don't blame anyone who decides that they need to do things a little differently right after they have children. However, it's a shame for the ecosystem to lose great talent. And I really hope that more employers, more structurally, we do more for society as parents and as not just employers, but as governments and everything.

Because why would you lose half your workforce? That just doesn't make sense to me. No, it absolutely doesn't.

So we have to vote, people vote, Vote here Because those things are on the table to, to be improved upon, so we gotta vote. Yes. No, I know what you're saying though.

It, it's with kids, you know, work, you can control some of it, but with little ones, they are evolving at a rate of speed where you don't wanna miss stuff. But it's like always changing. Like, my kids are all grown up and, and out of the house now, but yeah, that, that time when they're little is so important.

Yeah, Yeah. It's Goes by fast And then like hopefully, you know, they have their own, this is what I'm hoping that he'll have his own school time, et cetera. And that changes the rhythm a little bit.

But before school is a real thing. I think the care situation is, it's tricky sometimes. You're like, man, it would just be easier if I just did this.

You know? Absolutely. The scheduling and the logistics.

So it, it adds up. But I'm really grateful that I have so far been able to manage, you know, uh, you to walk that tight rope and manage boats because it, it's worth it on. Like, I love my work and I love my kid and it's nice, it's nice to be able to do both.

And it's great that the CNCF recognizes that and the Aly Foundation recognizes that and supports you in doing both. And I think for a lot of, a lot of companies that may not be there, Yeah. We have six months maternity leave, which is, and I could break it up, which was awesome.

So I took bits and pieces depending on my personal preferences and my work schedule. So I think employers really need to be, uh, flexible. And I think LF has done just such an amazing job supporting all my parents that are I in the organization.

And I encourage all, all other employers to do the same because people, if they are supported, they will come back. They will want to do better, more for an organization that did something for them during a time that's so meaningful as an, as a human being. You know, for years, uh, computer Associates, which is now Broadcom mm-Hmm.

Um, they used to be the one of the number one places to work. Mm-Hmm. Okay.

The number one. And you know why They probably had onsite daycare. Bingo.

Yep. Oh, very cool. Onsite daycare.

A lot Of big, big companies did that single office. Yep. Everything.

Bring your kid to work with you and you could go down and have lunch with them. Oh, and, And then, yeah. And if you were nursing, if you were a nursing mom, you could go down and do that during the day.

I've worked, I worked for a couple really big companies that had that and it was a big deal, but I did the same thing. I like stopped, I finally just stopped working. 'cause it wasn't something, you know, we could afford to do the both things.

It was just easier. And then I came back to the workforce, you know, like five, six years later, once my kids were both school aged. That's so good.

And with tech, that's just too hard though because Too hard because speech changed so fast. You know, I wasn't in the industry doing what you're doing and I could come back for what I was doing back then and just kind of pick up where I left off. With tech, it's so hard.

Is Just at six months on your technique, what happened. Absolutely. Exactly.

It's very hard right now. The pace has been fierce. Mm-Hmm.

To try to keep up on understanding what's happening in the AI market, understand what's happening in the cyber market, and then just in general trying to take products to market without having to take on all these new things, all these new technologies and everything you have to learn. It has been really hard for everyone, much less someone who, you know, took six months off and came back and had to try to get back into it. And I, I, I really believe that's probably the number one reason why we have, uh, so much attrition in the, in the women in, in the workforce and technology.

Well, and Covid multiplied it by 20. Yes, it did. So many moms had to do so much and they just didn't come back.

It, it, it must have been, I'm so glad I kind of missed that timeframe because it sounds so hard. Every day of school is telling you different rules every day things are changing. How do you handle that?

Well and homeschooling your kids while you're trying to work from home too, because everybody's locked up Hard. Yeah. And Hard stuff.

Really difficult. But yeah, I agree with what both of you're saying. Family life is probably a big reason a lot of people stop out or don't ever come back unfortunately.

And I don't blame them. No, It's not at all. Like, how are you supposed to manage?

Yeah. Family always should be, in my world, family is always first. If something's happening, your, your employer should be understanding enough to like Yeah.

And that's not, that's on the other side of life too. That's on, you know, caring for an elderly parent. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. Actually it's not just children.

I agree with that. Right. And that side of the of life gets less kind of, uh, sympathy than, oh you have a, you know, you have a 2-year-old at home as opposed to you have a 90-year-old at home.

Right. Oh, I'm so agree with you. And it's so unfair because those are the people that raised you, right?

Yeah. And it just, yeah, I, you know, my husband is Swedish, so I see a lot of how the, the Sweden, the Nordic system works for these things and they really have it better, I have to say. Oh yeah.

It's, I went to visit somebody's grandparents and they're in their like early nineties and there was somebody hanging out with them, just hanging out with them for like a couple of hours and they were like, oh yeah, this person is from this government agency. She comes to check in on us and hang out with us. That's wonderful.

It's Nice. Well, Priyanka, I would like to actually hang out with you sometime in person. Same Thing.

And, And, and, um, we're gonna have to, we're gonna have to call it ladies 'cause as usual, I let it go way too long. But you know, I'm the boss so I kind of, I want, um, I love it. This is an amazing conversation.

I'm so excited. We've, we got you on. We know we've been trying forever and schedules are crazy.

So thank you so much for being here. Tracy, you wanna add anything? No, I just wanna thank you and good luck with a 15 month old.

I, you know, I have a feeling you're two, you think you're going through terrible twos way till terrible Threes. It's not. I know.

That's my, Yeah, but once they get to the threes, they can go to preschool, the life, get the bathroom. Yes. I just need to, again, this has been such a fun, fun To look forward to.

Thanks For everybody. Thank you Priyanka. Thanks for tuning into another episode of Text Strong Women.

Please stay tuned. There's a lot more to watch today, so keep watching Text Strong TV and we'll see you next time on Techstrong Women. Thanks everyone.