Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Part 2 - Live from Kubecon North America 2022 - Interviews with Redis, Teleport, Instruqt, and Pulumi
303 Plays2 years ago
In this part - 2 episode of Kubernetes Bytes - live from Detroit during the Kubecon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022, Ryan Wallner and Bhavin Shah talk to guests on the show floor and learn more about what's new at Kubecon, what are their thoughts on Day 0 events, Keynotes, etc, and also share some things to do in Detroit. They talk to Brad Ascar - Principal Product Manager at Redis, Ben A - Developer Relations at Teleport, Sean Carolan - Director of Sales Engineering at Instruqt, Scott Lowe - Developer Relations at Pulumi.
Show Notes:
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Kubernetes Bites
00:00:03
Speaker
You are listening to Kubernetes Bites, a podcast bringing you the latest from the world of cloud native data management. My name is Ryan Walner and I'm joined by Bob and Shaw coming to you from Boston, Massachusetts. We'll be sharing our thoughts on recent cloud native news and talking to industry experts about their experiences and challenges managing the wealth of data in today's cloud native ecosystem.
QCon Part Two Introduction
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello, it's Ryan and Bhavan. This is going to be part two of our live from QCon episodes. If you did not get to listen to part one, it is the previous episode where we listened and heard from Peter, Gabriel, Tim, and Steven. So go ahead and check that out if you're interested to see what's going on in the sort of Vercona, EDB, Dell, and Akamai space.
00:00:54
Speaker
And this episode will be from four more. Why don't you give us a little sneak peek, Baba, of who's coming up.
Upcoming Guest Interviews
00:01:04
Speaker
Yeah. So in this part two, we'll talk to Brad from Redis. We'll talk to Ben Aron from Teleport talking about security. We'll talk to Scott Lowe from Plumey and then Sean from Instruc to talk about how people can get started with their Kubernetes journey. So exciting second part coming up.
00:01:22
Speaker
Absolutely. All right. Well, we won't keep you any longer. Enjoy.
Redis Features for Kubernetes
00:01:29
Speaker
Brad, welcome to Kubernetes Bites live here at Detroit. Thanks for joining us for a little bit of time here. How's it going? Introduce yourself. Yeah. I'm Brad Asker. I'm principal product manager for Redis for their Kubernetes ecosystem. So all things Kubernetes and containers and cloud native.
00:01:45
Speaker
Awesome. So how's the show for you so far? I know it's Thursday today. We're deep into KubeCon at this point. How's the show been? The show's been great. I think a lot of particular themes are coming out. Multiclusters are very big things. Security and build pipeline and build security.
00:02:04
Speaker
and a good bit of stuff on databases. So more people showing up in the database space. That's awesome. Yeah. So I think like Brad, we had you on to talk about Redis on Kubernetes a while back. Yep. So what do you have new for us? Like what can we talk about? Yeah. So then we talked about a little bit longer range. So now we're announcing that our Redis on Flash feature, which is the ability to have just some of it in memory, in memory database. Yep.
00:02:27
Speaker
but we can also do it on disk. So when you have terabytes of terabytes, it's cost prohibitive to do all of that in memory, right? And so we've had the capability within the Redis product, but inside of Kubernetes, we hadn't exposed that capability. Okay. So now inside of Kubernetes, you'll be able to do to do and expose that functionality and do it in the exact same way that you would if you run VM or
00:02:52
Speaker
Okay, that's awesome. So still using the operator, maybe different. Yeah, you're still using the operator and it does a lot of the sequencing of it. And it's actually going to be one of the easiest places to run Redis on Flash because we take care of a lot of the stuff that you would have to manually do otherwise. Gotcha. And is this a feature that was announced this week? Do we have any customers already using this?
00:03:13
Speaker
So we've got beta customers that are using it and customers have used Redis Unflash. It's like four-year technology, right? So it's not like new. It was just exposing inside of Kubernetes. So that's what's happening this week. The other thing we've got is a private preview of a new technology. We've always been able to do what we call Active Active.
00:03:35
Speaker
Active is geo replicated databases right for for Spanning longer distance conflict free replication technology. Yeah We're announcing a private preview on that and the cool thing is is that inside of Kubernetes? You'll be actually be able to describe it in YAML files on both Both clusters and then tell it I want to create a database that does this and under the covers It does all the work for you the Kubernetes clusters don't have to talk to each other just the databases
00:04:05
Speaker
And then it generates all the objects so that you can still manage it in a declarative YAML kind of way. And so when we're done doing that, there's going to be a new controller. So our product is an operator and three controllers right now. Add another controller for that. And then it'll be the easiest place with a couple of YAML files. And the extension is literally like four lines in one YAML file and three in another. And now you've got a database that can span geographies. And it just does it all and wires it all up for you.
00:04:32
Speaker
I like that, I like that. And those YAML files that you're managing in each cluster, are you pretty much just handing these to an operator that's running in each cluster as well? Yeah, that's exactly how it is. The databases have to talk to each other. The databases have to have credentials to talk to each other. But the way we did it is Kubernetes clusters don't have to talk to each other. Just the Redis databases on the covers.
00:04:52
Speaker
No, I think that's helpful, right? Like you don't want to expose your API server on any public facing things. Exactly. Okay. So what about distributions under the covers? Like do I need to have the same Kubernetes distribution on both sides? Nope. All your needs Redis. In some cases you can have a slightly mismatched versions of Redis as long as you're not using new features of the highest version.
00:05:14
Speaker
OK, this private review sounds amazing. It does sound amazing. And so does this replication also support the Redis on Flash capability as well? So if you're running that, you could do the same thing. That is something that we do not have at the junction. It's a lot of moving parts of that. Yeah, I mentioned a lot of moving parts. That's good. So we'll change gears a little bit here and talk about what you thought about Keep Gone and Detroit. I heard earlier you were from the area. So what's your favorite part about this area and Detroit so far?
00:05:43
Speaker
Yeah, so growing up, we would come over to Detroit. I'm a little bit older than most of the attendees. I kind of remember some of the hay days in Detroit, and then some of the decline, and then it's really great seeing kind of the revitalization of the downtown area. I think so too, yeah. So a lot of really good stuff going on here. And it's just nice to come back. I actually had a chance to go over to my mom. Nice, yeah. And she's in an area about two hours away from here. So combine a little work and personal.
00:06:09
Speaker
That's awesome. Yeah, I know. My hotel is out in Dearborn. And we take Washington Ave in every day. And what Ford is doing with the old train station, that is a beautiful area. And you could tell there's just so much money coming in. A lot of new buildings, like construction everywhere. So it's been eye-opening. I've only been here a couple of times, but I feel like it's changed every time I've been here. Yeah. My brother's in tech, and he moved north of Detroit about a year ago. He's really enjoying the area as well. OK.
00:06:39
Speaker
I didn't know that you were a native to the area. I took Ryan's suggestion yesterday and went to Buddy's for some Detroit style pizza.
00:06:46
Speaker
Is that it was that a good decision or do you have some other recommendations? No, I like, I like Detroit style pizza. I like pizza from everywhere. Everywhere. Okay. You're just a pizza everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. Buddy's buddy's is a good decision. Well, Brad, I appreciate you stopping by and, um, hopefully you enjoy the rest of the conference and we'll talk to you again soon. I'm sure. Enjoy the conference. Yeah. Thanks.
Teleport's Identity-Native Access
00:07:14
Speaker
All right, Ben, thanks for joining us at Kubernetes Bites and taking the time for us. Why don't you introduce yourself for everybody? Yeah. My name is Ben Arendt. I'm a Developer Relations Manager at Teleport. Yeah. Awesome. Well, so it's day three now here at KubeCon. And I don't know when you got in. I got in Sunday night with Bob into Ben here. It feels like a full week already. How's the show going for you?
00:07:35
Speaker
Yeah, the show is going great. I've been primarily helping out on the booth. Nice. And it's been great to meet a whole bunch of our customers and also sort of teach people more about Teleport. Yeah, absolutely. So what's Teleport doing here? What's new? What's going on? Is everybody interested at Teleport?
00:07:54
Speaker
Yeah, Teleport has been a long time support of the CNCF. It's like a CNCF project and we're an open core product. So majority of our development happens in the open, it's available on GitHub. It's GitHub gravitational Teleport.
00:08:11
Speaker
Probably ever since it started, maybe like at least five years, we've supported Kubernetes. It started off with SSH and Kubernetes access. And over those years and the versions of Kubernetes, the product just keeps getting better. And so it's great to also like see some of our customers here having teleport and like tens of thousands of Kubernetes clusters as well.
00:08:30
Speaker
Got it. I know you've probably been doing a lot of this at the booth already, but maybe give the elevator pitch of what Teleport is and how you use it. Yeah, Teleport provides identity-native access to infrastructure. And there's a lot of words in there. Yeah, break them down.
00:08:50
Speaker
So what we say by identity native is we tie every connection to access back to the individual identity. And so, you know, you know that it's me accessing this group system masters, you know, I'm accessing like this Ubuntu user.
00:09:06
Speaker
And in the background, it all uses short-lived certificates for access. And so it's very secure. And I think one of my pitches here, since KubeCon is full of practitioners, as I say, it's really liked and enjoyed by the developers and the engineers. Often you get these tools which there's always a tension between security and development. And we sort of bridge that gap. So it's really a nice UX for developers. And the security team is really happy because we have all this sort of best-in-class security features as well.
00:09:36
Speaker
Right. So how does it work with something like I know port security policies and the thing but how does it work with native community security constructs and how does teleport add on to that?
00:09:47
Speaker
Yeah, so the way in which it works is you map your users to roles, groups, and permissions within Kubernetes clusters. And so if you... One primitive that we have inside Teleport is the concept of labels. So when you add Kubernetes clusters to Teleport, you add labels, and then we have like world-based access control based on labels. So that just gives...
00:10:09
Speaker
you know, access or deny or for that cluster, then you go into where, how do you map? So the worst case example is like you map to system masters. So you don't want to do that.
00:10:22
Speaker
So what you do is actually walking through a potential prospect earlier today of they have like 300 engineers. And when there's 200 engineers, they use often, you lose like LDAP, so they use like Active Directory. And then the Active Directory, they have different groups, different permissions, which goes across everything. So you can pull in those groups and then you map them to sort of roles within your Kubernetes cluster.
00:10:47
Speaker
And so often, you'd have the SRE team might have one user, which you've predefined within your Kubernetes cluster. So you set that once. And then the 30 people in the SRE team can use that. And then when it goes back to identity, you can say, that person was the person who accessed that cluster and that pod. And we have an audit log of the commands. And then we even have a session recording. It's like Netflix for your kubectl execs. Oh, nice. I like that. Does it also give you recommendations? Sorry.
00:11:17
Speaker
Yeah, I know. I feel like the UX and that experience is definitely something that's so important now that where we are with the Kubernetes ecosystem. I was having a conversation earlier today with a couple of people and they're like, oh, there's a lot of security people here. That makes a lot of sense though. Given where I think we've come in the last five, six years with Kubernetes, we've adopted it. Now it's de facto. Now everybody says, well, now how do I do this securely? How do I do it with good UX? And I feel like Delport does a little of both of those, given what you were talking about.
00:11:47
Speaker
Yeah, I think in an ideal utopia world, everything's like GitOps. You write your push to code. It's automation like you never touch infrastructure.
00:11:58
Speaker
That's not really true. Everyone actually has to touch infrastructure at some point. And so when people do touch infrastructure, you know, you just want to go onto a pod and pull logs. You want to know, okay, who was doing what actions. And I think this is also a good time to go back and be like, Oh, let's read the session recording. See what you did. Now we can make like an automated tool. Maybe we could sort of fine tune that and remove that manual process.
00:12:18
Speaker
Right. So I do want to clarify one thing, because I'm not actually that familiar with Teleport. So what's the benefit of bringing something like Teleport in over the sort of traditional way that you go and set up users or service accounts in Kubernetes today? Yeah, I think there's two parts to that question. One is just the amount of users that you have. OK. So if you have an organization of 50 to 100 or 1,000 developers, it quick becomes unwieldy. Sure.
00:12:47
Speaker
and you end up basically recreating, you know, like LDAP internally, which is never good, and then there's like two places to do it. So it's good to have one extra external source. The other part of it is if you're adding, you know, like 10, oh, actually we've talked to lots of people here, so lots of retail will have a large department store, and each store has a Kubernetes cluster. And if you're a popular hardware store, you might have thousands of
00:13:14
Speaker
stores. And how do they get access to those thousands of stores? It becomes like an administrative overhead to paying for all these things. It's nice to have one consolidated place for access because if you don't consolidate it and there's pieces, there's always going to be sort of like attack factors into your infrastructure. So is there a way like this sounds like teleport the support multi-cluster?
00:13:33
Speaker
So if I add a new cluster, do I inherit every policy that has been set for all other clusters? Or this is something that, okay, I just, I can select the subset of policies or roles, users that I want to give access to the new cluster. Yes, we have two Helm charts. One, which is a cube agent and that sort of like dials back. Once you deploy that cube agent, that Kubernetes cluster get registered in a root cluster. And we store like thousands of sort of agents back.
00:14:01
Speaker
And then that's when you use labeling. But then you can just use labeling in combination with your communities, groups, and users to scale that infrastructure access. OK, makes sense. All right, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about what you've been up to here in Detroit. I know there's been a lot of events at night. I don't know when you got in, but have you eaten something you've really enjoyed or visited anywhere in the city that have you been here before? It's my first time in Detroit.
00:14:27
Speaker
I actually came in from Florida from vacation. So I was like, I came in my beach shorts and a hat. And then it suddenly felt very autumnal. There's like some ginkgo trees near my hotel. It's like a beautiful, like this is like pretty beautiful. Like the architecture is super cool here. Yeah, it is. And near my hotel, there's a really good cafe and I had a
00:14:50
Speaker
Mediterranean bagel, which is made there. What is a Mediterranean bagel? I really don't know. I had just some cool Mediterranean spices in it. OK. It was very tasty. It was called, I think it was like John or James Oliver. All right. Which I think, you know, like Jamie Oliver is like a UK chef. Unrelated. But it's very good. Worth checking out. Got it. Awesome.
Instrukt's Virtual Labs Platform
00:15:11
Speaker
Well, you know, we'd love to have you back on the show for a full episode. I think that'd be really fun. But thanks for stopping by and spending a little time with us here at the show. OK. Thanks for having me.
00:15:24
Speaker
Sean, welcome to Kubernetes Bites live at Detroit. Thanks for taking some time with us. Introduce yourself and what are you up to? Sure. Thanks for having me. My name is Sean Carolyn and I'm the head of pre-sales at Instrukt, a virtual labs platform. Awesome. So give the listeners a little bit of rundown of what Instrukt is all about.
00:15:41
Speaker
Sure. Instruct is a browser-based labs platform that you can use for demos, workshops, test drives, pretty much anything where you need temporary infrastructure to run things on.
00:15:56
Speaker
Cool. What makes Instruc different? What are you doing that's maybe new to those at Qcon? What are you talking about at your booth? Anything there? I think one of the things that makes Instruc unique is the fact that we use real infrastructure inside the labs. So if I need a Kubernetes cluster, I can get everything from a small K3S instance all the way through your large GKE, AKS, DKS clusters. Yeah.
00:16:24
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So are these labs available for anyone to use on your website or do you help other vendors showcase their products using these labs? Yeah, we have some of those. So we have plenty of demo tracks, sample tracks people can use for free. And then our customers also publish, many of them publish tracks that you can use for free as well. So you could take a Kubernetes course, for example, using our platform and the vendor kind of sponsors it for us.
00:16:52
Speaker
No, that's awesome. I think, so I was working the Portworx booth this week, right? I did have a few conversations where even though they were at KubeCon, people were still in that training phase or learning more about Kubernetes. I had a discussion where the person didn't know much about storage. They're like, I'm still at the point where I think HCD is the place where everything is stored. So yeah, I think for people like that,
00:17:15
Speaker
something like instruct is really cool as they can get their hands dirty without even having to spin up a cloud account or spin up a Kubernetes cluster on their own. Yeah, it really starts to feel like we're entering the early adopters phase, the tech adoption curve. A few years ago, it was the innovators and the early adopters. Now the early majority is starting to come in. And I can tell because you see a lot of laptops with few or no stickers on them, right?
00:17:40
Speaker
You're new, right? Maybe it's a new laptop. It could be. It could have just had a tech refresh. I think now I know why Ryan has been capturing all different stickers and putting it on his laptop. I got a brand new laptop to sell. I got a brand new laptop to sell. Your credit is insane.
00:17:55
Speaker
Exactly. So maybe those listening that are part of this community, they're used to going to the Kubernetes docs. And I know if you peruse the Kubernetes docs, you see like, try this out, right? And I think there's sort of a platform there called Killer Coda or something they've been using. How is it sort of different? How is it similar? What makes instruct unique?
00:18:15
Speaker
Yeah, Killer Coda is a descendant of a product called Catacoda. So it's backwards compatible with Catacoda. Those tracks are a little bit more lightweight than what you get with Instrux. So a little more limited in functionality, but it's also a nice, fast, easy way to get your hands on with the tool, which we love.
00:18:38
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So if I had sort of a, you know, if my developers say had a full blown AWS environment or something like that, and they're used to using those tools, can they bring that to instruct to use or get that experience of Kubernetes on a cloud? Absolutely. Yeah. In most cases you can. If you have any kind of automation code, like a Helm charts or some Terraform or Ansible, it's helpful. But we provide these temporary AWS accounts where you can run anything.
00:19:07
Speaker
including an EKS cluster. So it just takes the little bit of automation to kind of stand up what you want to run, and then you can use it just as you would with your own account. Yeah, so what level of automation or tooling do you use for that? Most folks will pick a tool like Terraform. We support cloud formation as well for the AWS native folks. But even for simple use cases, you can use something like just the AWS command line.
00:19:35
Speaker
Right. Okay. And so a simple script with a few AWS commands in it can be enough to stand up a VM and get you going.
00:19:43
Speaker
So they actually can manage that script and kind of control what those environments look like. Yeah. Everything in instruct is infrastructure as code. Okay. So it basically boils down to your YAML markdown and some scripting. Awesome. So let's switch gears a little bit. I like to, um, you know, give a little bit, a taste of Detroit. I don't know how long you've been here. I know Bob and I have been here since Sunday. So I feel like it's been a full week and a half already.
00:20:07
Speaker
given how much time we're awake these days. But have you eaten something? Have you gone somewhere in Detroit that's really kind of sparked your interest at all? Yeah. So before I came, I set a goal for myself and that was to find the Detroit style pizza. Okay. Yeah. Big pizza fan and did my research and found a place called Buddies. Oh yeah.
00:20:28
Speaker
That's where I was last night. OK. So you've experienced Buddy's. Amazing Detroit style pizza. If you haven't had it, it's cooked in a rectangular tray and kind of a thicker crust than your traditional Italian pizza. I'm a fan of all types of pizza. So Buddy's definitely should be on your wish list.
00:20:48
Speaker
Yeah, I wonder how many people from KubeCon rolled through Buddy's week. I was there Monday. Yeah, it was packed pretty much with KubeCon people. And where are you from? Amsterdam, right? Our headquarters is in Amsterdam. You're not. I'm based in the US. I live in Austin, Texas. I was the first US-based employee of Instrukt. Now I think we're up to nine. Got it. So the pizza in Texas is rough, I imagine. It's different, yeah.
00:21:17
Speaker
There are some spots. I feel you can find good pizza anywhere in the world if you look hard enough. I'm from New York. I can't agree with that comment. New York's not a pizza. It's a big floppy slice. There's nothing quite like it. Exactly. You have to fold it, too, to even correctly. Yeah. It's near pizza or go home, pretty much. I mean, the North End and Boston's all right, but we make do.
00:21:42
Speaker
Okay, well, I have a question for you then. Feelings on pineapple. Oh, it's terrible. Don't do it. Oh, I'm broke. Yeah. The thing about this question is there's no in between one spectrum or the other. Yes.
00:21:59
Speaker
Cool, so you know obviously we'd love to have you back on the show for a full episode But where can you know folks find more? Where do they go to to either get a hold of you or learn more about? Yeah, just start with instruct calm There's a button that says test drive. Yeah, you can even you can even try the product without talking to a sales You do like humans you can reach out to me as well Awesome. Well, thanks for taking the time here at keep kind of choice. Appreciate it. Thanks. Thanks for having me
00:22:31
Speaker
Scott, thanks for coming to Kubernetes Bites over here in this little nook and cranny of KubeCon Detroit. I appreciate you coming. Give yourself an intro and tell everybody what you're about. Yeah, sure. So my name is Scott Lowe, and I currently work for Pulumi Corporation. I'm on the developer relations team, so I'm DevRel. But a lot of folks know me from previous gigs that
00:22:57
Speaker
Niceera, VMware, Heptio, VMware, that kind of thing. Books, my own podcast with Packet Pushers, the Full Stack Journey podcast, that sort of thing. Yeah, I think I have some memories of my SDN days working when I was way back at EMC and like 10 years ago evaluating Big Switch and Niceera. And I'm pretty sure we had cross paths back then at some point. Yeah, I'm fully sure that we did. Absolutely.
00:23:26
Speaker
Nice. So I think I've followed Scott. And again, you were on the podcast before when we spoke about cluster API. One thing I've noticed you do at these kind of trade shows is live tweet the keynote, or live blog the keynote, actually. Yeah. Well, I used to live blog and live tweet. But I think my typing is getting slower. So I can't keep up with both of them. Either that or the presenters are going faster. I'm not sure which. I like live blogging because it's a little more permanent.
00:23:55
Speaker
and easier to go back in reference later, but it's easier at times just to live tweet. So I wanted to get some sort of information out for folks who couldn't make it. Yeah. I know there are a lot of people who could not make it to the show for a variety of reasons.
CNCF Day 1 Keynote Reflections
00:24:11
Speaker
And so I figured, I figured at least setting out some tweets about the keynote and then a couple of the sessions I was in.
00:24:19
Speaker
to share information with folks would be useful. What were the couple of highlights that you would like to share from the keynote, like day one or day two? I don't want to say I was caught off guard, but it was a little unexpected for the day one keynote to focus so much on
00:24:40
Speaker
what felt like convincing the maintainers that CNCF had their backs. You know, it was Priyanka was up there and talked, you know, multiple times like maintainers, we're here for you maintainers, we've got you, you know, that kind of thing, right? And anytime there's an open source project of this size, we've seen it before, you know, it's challenging to maintain excitement in the industry and excitement in the contributor maintainer community and
00:25:05
Speaker
You need an ongoing diverse set of contributors and maintainers. There's some burnout that happens in large projects. I think they may have been trying to address some of that. I don't have it inside tracks. I don't know. It's something that jumped out at me out of the day one. The day two keynotes, which happened this morning,
00:25:26
Speaker
Um, nothing really surprising or unusual out of that. Um, but I do find it interesting, uh, how CNCF, you know, it feels like it's necessary to provide these, um, project updates that is like somebody standing up there and just going flat out for like 10 minutes. And we did this and we did this and we did this and we did this, you know, and so, I mean,
00:25:48
Speaker
I get it. You want to make sure that attendees know that projects are growing and that kind of thing. I just, I don't know if there's a better way of doing that or not, but I felt bad for folks who had to talk for 10 minutes nonstop about project updates. I know. It's difficult to retain as well all of that information. Sure. Yeah. Maybe I can just look at a slide later on or a blog.
00:26:08
Speaker
Are we watching? Yeah. I mean, you know, but either way, I do I do appreciate the hard work by the volunteers who get up and present. So, you know, I'm not trying to dump on them at all. Oh, yes. You know, it was it was a lot of information and all at once, you know, on those project updates. So this is actually enlightening for me because I didn't go to either keynote. Yeah. So thank you, I guess. No, I'm not quite right. Happy to happy to help. So that's great. So you did tweet some of the keynote out and everything like that this week then.
00:26:38
Speaker
Yes, I did tweet from a portion of yesterday's keynote. I had to step out early for a meeting. My day job has me doing some press and analyst meetings. And then I tweeted the keynote from this morning, and then I also shared some information from an interesting session on chaos engineering that was shared by Goldman Sachs.
00:27:02
Speaker
which I thought, and I share this in my tweet stream, it was a very informative, very down-to-earth, practical, useful session. It was one of the sessions that as a practitioner, if you're thinking about like, I want to go into a session and I want to get
00:27:20
Speaker
real world information from somebody who's been there. Yeah. This is exactly what it was. That's nice. I mean, and, you know, very, very just on point. So huge shout out to the presenter and Goldman Sachs for that presentation. I thought it was very well done. Awesome. Where do people find you on Twitter? Oh, yeah. Well, if you want to get inundated with tweets, then follow me at Scott underscore low. Awesome. On Twitter. So, yeah.
00:27:44
Speaker
Awesome. And I think last time when you were here, we just spoke about cluster API. Now that you work at Pulumi and in the dev rel team, can you share what was announced
Pulumi's Kubernetes Operator Updates
00:27:53
Speaker
this week? Just a quick couple of highlights? Sure. Yeah. So we announced this week, as you would expect, some Kubernetes focused things. So we announced a new version of our Kubernetes operator. And the Kubernetes operator is really cool because what it allows you to do is to take
00:28:11
Speaker
Pulumi programs. And for those of you that aren't familiar with Pulumi, the idea here is that we're doing infrastructure as code, but we're allowing you to do that in any general purpose programming language. So you don't have to learn a tool specific DSL. But the operator allows you to take any Pulumi program and
00:28:30
Speaker
define that as a custom resource in Kubernetes and then have the operator continuously reconcile that resource. So then go and manage infrastructure as code via Pulumi from within Kubernetes, which is super cool. And so we added some improvements in the operator itself, but one of the other big things was integration with Flux, which is, of course, the super popular GitOps platform.
00:28:55
Speaker
which allows us to tap into Flux's sources functionality, like where it can source stuff from in our operator. And also we even have a provider for Flux, which means we can provision and configure Flux via Pulumi, as well as use Flux to run Pulumi to do other things. So it's a little bit of inception kind of stuff there.
00:29:18
Speaker
So those were the focus of the announcements this week, Kubernetes stuff, and then we have some interesting stuff that we'll be announcing soon as well. Great. I think, you know, thinking back to the keynote number one, and we have your backs, I'm wondering, because I can't help but think back to my OpenStack days. Is this PTSD from the OpenStack project? You know, I have asked myself that same thing, and
00:29:44
Speaker
there are reasons why you could make that comparison and there are also reasons why you could not or should not, right? Like I think one of the things, and I've called this out before, one of the things I think the Kubernetes community has done really, really well is actually focus on solving problems within the project itself. A great example of this is the work that happened with the cube ADM and then later with cluster API in terms of making cluster setup
00:30:10
Speaker
not as much of a chore, right? And in OpenStack, that was always left for the vendors. Like OpenStack was like, we're going to build this and somebody else will make it easy to install. And instead nobody's like, no, no, no, nobody else can make it easy to install. We're going to make it easy to install, right? We're going to simplify it. We're going to write the best practices for it, which I think is a huge improvement.
00:30:28
Speaker
But where I think you can make a comparison is just this is a massive open source project. And they shared numbers about numbers of maintainers and numbers of contributors and all of that in the keynote. And I don't remember any of them, but that's okay. But the fact is, it's a massive project. It takes lots of people with lots of effort to maintain. And I think that was also true too with OpenStack. And yeah, I think there is the risk of
00:30:54
Speaker
some maintainer contributor fatigue. And maybe as we follow the hype cycle for technology where people begin to, they're not as excited, quote unquote, excited about Kubernetes. I mean, it's still a critical, important thing moving forward, but they're just not, it's not the new cool thing, right? When it becomes, quote unquote, boring.
00:31:17
Speaker
then I think people lose interest and they just kind of assume that like, oh yeah, it's fine, right? But the reality is that people still have to be contributing and still have to be maintaining and all that, even when it's no longer exciting.
00:31:28
Speaker
Um, one other thing I want to call out the Kubernetes community. I mentioned this on Twitter as well, but like one of the things I love about the community community is the fact that they take the time to highlight that, um, unglamorous work that gets done. They have the phrase, um, you know, chop wood and carry water. Um, which I learned from Joe and Joe beta from heptio and Brian Lyles also from heptio that actually came from Sarah Novotny, who is.
00:31:52
Speaker
wasn't Microsoft, I believe, and now is somewhere else. I don't know where I apologize, but, um, it just, it just to highlight that, you know, like the work that has to be done in open source isn't always glamorous and, you know, uh, whatever. Sometimes it's just doing the necessary things that the community needs. And, um, so I do want to, you know, just shout out to the community for taking the time to recognize that because I think a lot of times that, that goes unrecognized.
00:32:15
Speaker
Absolutely. Shout out to the community. It is a tough place to be a maintainer and not always glamorous, as you say. So thank you as well, I guess. I know. Most of these people are not doing this as part of their day job. It's after hours, after you get done with your day job, this is when you are spending this time. Thank you. When everybody does their best work. Or even if you are doing it as your day job, which is fine. There are lots of paid maintainers.
00:32:42
Speaker
My experience has been that generally they're doing it because they're passionate about what you're trying to accomplish with the project. And so it's not just a day job. And so it ends up being something more than that. And I guess that's what drives a lot of their commitment and going above and beyond.
00:33:03
Speaker
Absolutely. So let's switch gears a little bit. We've been here since Sunday. We've been asking everybody what they've been up to throughout the week in Detroit. I know I've been here a couple times myself, although it seems like everyone we ask or we talk to has rolled through Buddy's Pizza. So I know Detroit pizza is a big topic. Have you had it? What's your favorite thing you've done so far?
00:33:24
Speaker
Right. So I have had pizza here in Detroit, but not from buddies. OK. So I haven't rolled through buddies. I got late approval to attend the show. And when I went to make all the travel arrangements, all the hotel blocks downtown were just so sweet. Absolutely. I'm exorbitantly expensive or something just crazy stupid. So I ended up finding an Airbnb, which is a couple miles east of the downtown area. Now, I'll be frank, it's not the most
00:33:54
Speaker
Wonderful. Love neighborhoods. Washington Ave? No, Jefferson. So it's like a straight shot down to the conference center, but it's still, you know, like.
00:34:04
Speaker
a little older neighborhood. But that being said, there is a fantastic, locally owned pizza shop right around the corner called Happy's Pizza. Happy's Pizza, right? And I went in there, I got into town on Sunday, and it's a little bit of a food desert kind of around the Airbnb where I am, like there's just not much there.
00:34:27
Speaker
But I found happy pizza and I walked over there and the owner's in there and he's like, you know, Hey, how's it going? I'm good. You know, and he saw that I had been to the grocery store and picked up some pop as he called it. Um, you know, and so I ordered a pizza. He's like, Oh, you can have some pizza and pop. And I'm like, yeah, man, you know, sounds like a good night.
00:34:44
Speaker
You know, it's always a little bit of a risk when you go into, you never know. Right. Rolling dice. But no, it was a really good, uh, thin crust, uh, pizza. Um, just, uh, yeah, really enjoyed it. Shout out to happy pizza on East Jefferson, but isn't happy. He's happy with happy.
00:35:00
Speaker
Yeah, I think I've been really impressed. I know, you know, I come down sort of from the east as well into the conference center every day through Uber because I booked really late as well. But just sort of all the construction and all the money and the old sort of train station that Ford has taken over.
00:35:18
Speaker
One of the Uber drivers told me they're putting like a billion dollars into that area, and it's beautiful. So it's really nice to see. I think this is a pretty unique city, a lot of brick, a lot of architecture that has surprised me. I spent a couple of times here, but not as much time downtown. And Ryan has had like the most interesting Uber rides this week. So I have. Yeah, I know. I had one Uber driver basically go like 25 minutes north when I might. Yeah, yeah. And they said, why is he telling me to turn? I'm like, because that's the direction we're supposed to go.
00:35:49
Speaker
here, neither here nor there. Scott, I really appreciate you stopping by and telling us about what's going on at KubeCon. And we have, you know, thanks for being on the show previously. And yeah, yeah, of course. And I appreciate the opportunity to jump on and shoot the breeze with you all and talk about KubeCon. So anytime happy to join again sometime in the future, if you like. Thanks.
KubeCon Reflections and Takeaways
00:36:14
Speaker
So we have spent the last few days interviewing a bunch of people in the Kubernetes community. I think it's been a really wonderful treat to be in person with everybody and ask them about their experience here at KeepCon. I know I missed Valencia. Me too. Yeah, you too. And before that, we had everything going on with the pandemic. You were in LA, but tell us about the energy difference we did in LA in here.
00:36:40
Speaker
Like there is maybe 50%. This is better because LA, we had maybe 4,000 people. Half of them were just vendors talking to each other. We didn't have as many users at KubeCon LA. This year, things have definitely improved. Like there's more excitement, more people, lots of fun conversations, a lot of announcements. So yeah, this was way better. And I'm glad that we are moving in the right direction again. I know pandemic put a pause on things and things are not headed in the right direction, but now I'm excited for Amsterdam.
00:37:08
Speaker
Yeah, I've had a number of different conversations, I think, with people about sort of what their take on Kubernetes is, not just on the show, just like around the show floor. I think the hallway track has been very high quality. I mean, we both work at companies that have booths here, and we're at the booths every day talking about things. But I think what we've really noticed is sort of everything outside those booth conversations have been about excited about getting back together with everybody, about working as a community to take Kubernetes to the next level.
00:37:37
Speaker
And it's been really rewarding. So, you know, give us a little bit of a recap about all the guests maybe we have on the show, your take on some of the things we talked about maybe. And yeah, anything you want to talk about? Yeah, sure. I think we started the week right off right by doing the DOK panel, right? I know we spoke about that in the intro, but then just extending that focus by talking to guys from Percona and talking to Gabriel again from Enterprise DB.
00:38:05
Speaker
just following that theme about running databases and running stateful applications on Kubernetes. Orkona definitely had improvements to their operators. I know Gabriel spoke about how cloud native PG now supports Postgres 15 and now can do the, what did he call it? More, not much, but the thaw and freeze for database operations. So that was really cool. Something was also new though, I think.
00:38:28
Speaker
Yes, yeah, the merge was new in post was 15, Cloud Native Fiji had the feature in it. I think I liked the conversation with Brad earlier today, where he spoke about how they have a new all the access program for that multi cluster setup. I know that's a thing that database vendors are adding. I remember when we spoke to Patrick from data stacks,
00:38:49
Speaker
A few months back, he said, Kate Sandra already has something similar for Cassandra as well. So I see a lot of progress moving towards that highly available geo-ridden architectures in terms of databases. But yeah, let's cover the other vendors as well. Yeah, I think, you know, I'm going to take a little different tactic about talking about everyone that we met with this week and focus on sort of the overarching themes is that I feel like we interviewed a bunch of people from different companies that really represent a sort of a wide range of what's going on here today, right?
00:39:18
Speaker
I've had a lot of conversations this week about how there's a lot of security focus. And we talked to Teleport earlier today and what they're up to. And then we have still a large focus on data and Kubernetes, right? This is near and dear to our hearts, but that's still a big, I think, problem that we're tackling.
00:39:35
Speaker
And then we, I think we also noticed that we're really graduating from the sort of experimental phase to really people pushing this and really adopting it. And that's really, I think, where I'm seeing a large focus on user experience. Whether that is in educational platforms, like we talked about construct, or what Scott was talking about, and even Brad, right, about, you know, make a complex thing actually seem more simple, right?
00:40:00
Speaker
the developer wants that experience of, Hey, I want to write a few YAML, throw it at my operator. And this complexity is sort of wrapped up in a, in, you know, think about multi-cluster replication of any data, right? Any database, any data. Doing it on a distributed architecture.
00:40:15
Speaker
That's a that's a huge problem right in a traditional IT world and to say that you can kind of install these things we operate or throw some stuff on there and things just work I like that focus from everyone we've talked to on sort of what they're doing what they're contributing back to so you know that's I think where I'll leave it also
00:40:35
Speaker
We talked to a lot of people that went to Buddies. If you are in Detroit, check out Buddies. It is very good and happy. Yeah, Happy's is good. Happy's. I didn't go personally, but it is a wonderful city and it's beautiful. Yeah, I think we can publish this episode not just as a live from KubeCon, but also a Detroit travel show.
00:40:53
Speaker
Yeah, there you go. Exactly. So for those listening, we'll put as many links that we can in our show notes that represent everyone who we talked to, what they're up to, what they talked about, as much as we can remember. And if we forgot something, just get a hold of us and we'll reach back out to you. But I think that brings us to the end of today's episode. I know. End of KubeCon. All right. I'm Ryan. I'm Robin. And thanks for joining another episode of Kubernetes Bites. Thank you for listening to the Kubernetes Bites podcast.