Kubecon 2019 - Bryan Liles Interview
Transcript
Heyy how's it going - Keith Townsend from the CTO advisor and we are still here in beautiful San Diego Kubecon 2019 I'm joined by co-chair of the Kubecon and I like to call it Cub-a-con because it's kubernetes but evidently I've been corrected by the 12,000 people that have already been part of this community is Kube con so I'll I'll submit. And senior staff engineer at VMware right now Bryan Liles Welcome to the show. Yeah thank you for having me. So right before we get started you you know we we've been back and forth just on Twitter and in-person about the culture of Kubecon and the difficulty of integrating the two different audiences for the for a super technical show but supercritical.
I mean over 200 sponsors and booth - you walk knew you bought the show for us in two different spaces twelve thousand people. If this is - this is the real thing now. This year definitely I haven't been to one people told me that it was great but this is for me this feels like a enterprise conference coming from the outside but - to some of the more traditional CNCF crowd etc this is this looks a little bit different to them can you kind of use the parable you explain - You shared with me.
All right so what I was saying earlier is the way that I look at a lot of things but typically this whole merging of kubernetes with enterprise and the community that created it. The way I look at it is like this. So, let's say you have a person who comes up and they say oh it's a car it's red parts of a fast car and all those things are true about the car but then you have a race fanatic or mechanic and they come up and say oh no that's a 2018 Ferrari 488 Pista.
Now look it's kind of a special insignia on on the seats. They're talking about the same thing but they're looking at it in different ways and I don't know who which side you put the enterprise on on which side to put the community on but understand that we really need to understand that this is not kubernetes is not just a thing it represents a whole bunch of things depending on who you're talking to and in the context That you're talking to the man in that and I think traditionally I've always looked at kubernetes oh that's a fast car.
The - I looked at it as this thing is a way to package it's a way to orchestrate containers and manage containers. But when you come into the keynote yesterday it's man it's these other projects Helm, etcd, Yeager which I found that I did I didn't know anything about Yeager and I sat down with a guy who's like man does these amazing things and is amazing and uh but that's not that's not part of the core project So when I get you know when I'm in my lab and I'm doing my Kubeadm and and and KUBECTL and all these things there's so much more to to it it's hard to it's really hard for me as an enterprise guy to come in and get my arms around it and say oh this is what I need to start out with and this is the different pieces.
I love the anology that everyone is used. That it's all really very small parts that come together kind of like Lego or minecraft. It's very small things that come together that form these complex things that do the complex parts but in the enterprise we haven't typically thought that way. You know we get Windows and Windows is this huge thing that does everything that we needed to do. And if it doesn't do what we needed to do we have Windows. Right so we've been through this before think about when Linux came and hit the and Linux and the enterprise is a big thing.
No one even talks about Linux in the enterprise anymore we just do it. So think about this Linux came out. I was using Linux in the mid are in the mid to late 90s and downloading it and having it configured and it still took from the 90s to the mid like 2005-2006 where people were actually like oh okay this is going happen. Yeah like a real thing. Yeah but think about with Linux is. When we think about Linux Linux is a kernel and then you have your distributions whether it be the you know Ubuntu from canonical or REHL from Red Hat and it took a long time for us to get to that place but we always had Linux and I look at kubernetes the same way.
We have kubernetes. We're still trying to figure out we understand that it solves our set of problems and enterprises should you pay attention because it definitely solves your problems. We need to figure out how to package it and that's what a good distribution is but this is different now because we don't want to make the same mistakes Linux distributions made. How many ways have there been over the years to package up a Linux application and even still today you have you have Deb's and you have rpms and and don't you talk us to the arch people or the Gen 2 people because they have their own thing.
Right! So, what we're gonna do and this cloud native and specifically in kubernetes we want to keep that that kubernetes piece pretty pure and we want to take a different method this time and we want to build on top of that but at least keep the base of it pure. So one of the things that's kind of unsettling is the speed at which is happening. Like this is happy way faster than Linux did. I remember in Linux in between the mid-90s to 98.
When I first got into IT proper IT job and we were still compiling you know distributions or the kernel directly etc. If you really want to play with it. There were people who are doing tricks like blowing up monitors by messing around with the video drivers. Now what I think what scares a lot of enterprises is that you can get a enterprise-ready distribution of kubernetes and build some enterprise-class applications - mission-critical stuff on. Then the fear is that the underlying stuff just goes away - from a specific project.
I was using this project for messaging now this other project is now the message the message dejur. How do you help enterprise is kind of negate that fear well. So the first thing I tell them is okay because if this is a simple answer we would have been solved it. And but a lot of the things that you're using now can be used inside of kubernetes. You might have to package them different they might have different operational things that have to deal with but what we're gonna figure out as a community and as as organizations providing software is that we're gonna - we're not just talking about open source we're gonna need real plans for basically cots common off-the-shelf software.
We're gonna need we're gonna need real plans for services we don't provide like what the ISPs provide. And that can't come until we have a good base and I think enterprises are basically trying to put the cart before the horse and they're saying well we need all this before we even get to the base and guess what they're people and I understand why they're doing it but what we have to realize is that this can happen at the same time and it is moving faster than anything we've seen before but the process that we're using right now to build kubernetes is making it fairly stable.
We're still getting new features so we have to look at instead of looking at next month or maybe even six months with a look 12 to 18 months out because we look 18 months ago and we're kubernetes was versus where it is now. Or if I'd go back 36 months and made some predictions we're way further so 36 months ago Mesos- was still a player. Docker Swarm was like all right maybe this will work and you know people were like well we're just gonna run everything on marathon our Auora on top of Mesos.
What it Mesos do recently? They got kubernetes projects and we just have to realize that we have to start from somewhere and we're at the beginning and you don't have to go wholesale on the kubernetes right now. You're running your software You're running it you know you have your vSphere clusters online you have whatever cloud that you're using you're doing that now. Well guess what you can continue doing that but keeping in mind that this Kubernetes thing will help you use your resources whether you know memory compute and network more efficiently and that's where we're moving to.
And at an enterprise and enterprise scale what's another year? In enterprise scale not that (much). That'so funny is this in humanity world years. It's 20 percent of the lifetime of Kubernetes and enterprise scale gear you know I'm still running hp-ux I'll still be running in hp-ux a year from now so there's other reasons for that that's beyond technology. Nut a year is not well... We have a conversation of why you run in HPUX though. it's really it's because it's related so in this scenario was a healthcare organization mm-hmm the application SAP validated on each box.
It costs ten million dollars to revalidate. That's fair. So you know do I spend two million dollars and get off each box and spend another ten million too .. or spend two million dollars to spend on each box or spend ten million to revalidate it and the two million to get off. So those are the types of challenges that we then that get meet head-on with enterprise and when we look at kubernetes. We are like, oh wow I can't make that mistake of betting on a project that's gonna go away and I have these other processes that will stop me from moving forward.
Right but also a million dollars two million dollars ten million dollars it's not a lot I mean this healthcare organization not a lot yeah yeah so the it's a it I think this this conversation was for some really other interesting conversations about where where's the real value and if we're pursuing value and the the kubernetes journey you just not just Kubernetes but this technology journey... Oh it's worthwhile well let me go on a little rants about kubernetes value okay and this is this is assume value or future value or in some cases current value so imagine that you had a platform where you didn't have to optimize you could optimize based on the application that was delivered.
So, instead of having to think about how many versions of this thing I'm running in production your developers and your operations team can actually think about the things that make you money. That is the whole premise behind Kubernetes. If we can abstract this running of software on one or more machines and then make sure that we have things like service discovery. We can have file systems where they need to be. We can have the proper security. We can isolate things.
Now that's actually the value of kubernetes. Like I think sometimes we get lost in the concepts of deployments and and staple sets and replica sets. I've had the same I thing. I've had yet anyone articulate that to me and when I usually talked to kubernetes. The reaction is typically you know you can do all these cool technical things in them I don't care I can do a lot of those things today I don't really care about that helped me understand the value.
Yeah. And I think you articulated yeah no one no one cares and and and that's what I think some people from you know from my my sphere and influence that's that's something they get caught up in you know if you have you have a software that needs to run and you want to scale it up and down that's the deployment but you have software that you need to make sure that you run on every single node maybe because there's some kind of scanner you know that's a daemon set and that's only important in the in the context of the pulling the application.
Sometimes he the application developer shouldn't have to worry about it. So, in theory what we instead of we should be working on improving our stack but instead of finding better ways to manage this this the YML mess that would that people get lost in why don't we just skip it why are we not thinking at a higher level of abstraction because guess what when you work for a bank and you have 1300 or 1400 or 5000 dev teams and some larger banks do they don't care about that.
They care am i making software so I am having I am not losing money on the money that we bring it we want to pay our dev teams We want to pay them fairly but we don't want to lose money on waste and that's where that's where I think a lot of people who are unity Kubernetes community think now but then your whenever you're butting up against these CIOs they're thinking of this other level of thinking of what how efficient are we and kubernetes is a great tool for getting us there but we have to make sure that we're building tools that allow us to get there and we got to start filling in that middle space because it's actually not kubernetes on this now.
Now what we mean is like the grand scheme of how to build software on top of kubernetes I think you just answered my question of why. That was the perfect argument against why I hate kubernetes so much and why at the same time I'm personally the my business is sponsoring open vats like why do I sponsor at OpenFaaS. But I hate kubernetes. I don't hate kubernetes I love OpenFaaS and I want that functionality and I just the kubernetes stuff just needs to take care of itself.
So that I get that functionality and we can't get there until kubernetes. Right, and then and then also and then we don't help ourselves because there's a lot of board developers out there and a lot of really motivated people and we get things like AWS released lambda years ago now and and now everything they were first mover's really in that space kind of and then the whole ecosystem has followed suit and I actually just had a conversation when I was walking here and we're talking about serverless and I said why do you severless?
Oh you know I can serve this functions and I said all right that's cool but you can do that as an app and I'm just absolutely and I said well so really you just created something new what's a good piece about serverless I can tell you not many people can answer that question but actually the real power of serverless is something else the real power of serverless is having basically unbounded compute to do random things and a good example would be something like what Capital One does Capital One built this thing called custodian and what custodian does is it cleans out there are resources it saves the money because they have so many accounts and then it goes through their s3 and make sure that things aren't unencrypted that's the power of service now now our actual compute can scale whatever we want is a and and and the neat thing about capital one that I can actually share is that they don't use service functions or they don't use it like that and the reason why is because when AWS introduced lamda and you had the use api gateway it wasn't encrypted so you would basically have encrypted traffic unencrypted hop encrypted and that wouldn't and that did pass the honors so what I mean what I'm encouraging people to think about is let's think about if we're gonna think about Surrealists and kubernetes does allow us to do a lot of things like K native and another things let's think about instead of thinking about different ways to do what we're doing now why don't we think about new ways so we don't have to do some of these things now and that's what kubernetes gives us the platform to figure out so instead of instead of just thinking of surfing think about well now I just have this huge batch processing thing that goes away when I'm not using it well okay well hold on here batch processing super simple and now I don't have to spend any money on it when I'm not using it so we're getting the haut-brion we can go on and talk about this obviously we go on lower than our typical CTO DOSE well I have to catch Brian at a later date thank you for tuning in for the CTO adviser CTO goals and Kubecon 2019 we'll catch you next CTO does follow you want to whip at CTO Dose.
