Speaker 1: This is Techstrong TV.
Alan Shimel: Hi everyone. Hey, we’re back. We’re here in Chicago for KubeCon, wrapping up our three days of coverage here in Chicago. It’s our last day. I think we have maybe one or two more. I think that the expo floor closes around two o’clock Chicago time today-
Michael Cade: Yeah, it does. Yeah.
Alan Shimel: … So we got to wrap it up. But in many ways, we saved the best for last, right? Let me introduce you to my friend Michael Cade. Unfortunately, I don’t get a chance to see Michael as much as I’d like. I think the last time was Amsterdam at KubeCon, so I’m going to assume I’ll maybe see you in Paris.
Michael Cade: We will indeed. It’s my wife’s birthday though, so I’ll have to-
Alan Shimel: It’s my wife’s birthday too.
Michael Cade: So you are going to have to bring either-
Alan Shimel: We got a party to make there, man.
Michael Cade: Either we’re bringing them with us or…
Alan Shimel: Oh, I’m bringing them.
Michael Cade: Yeah, exactly.
Alan Shimel: I’m bringing her.
Michael Cade: I said it now, it’s on camera. Maybe she’ll watch.
Alan Shimel: Well, look, for a small fee I’ll make sure this never sees the light of day. Kidding, but yes, my wife is going to be there for her birthday. If you’re there with your wife, let’s do drinks.
Michael Cade: Yeah, very good. Yeah, will do.
Alan Shimel: Alrighty. Hey, for those who don’t know, Michael is with Kasten by Veeam. And before we get into anything else, Michael, there are people who are watching this who says, “I never heard of those guys, or I think I heard of them. I know Veeam, but I don’t know Kasten.”
Michael Cade: Yeah, that’s fair. That’s fair. So we’re focused on Kubernetes backup, right? Or in fact, a little bit more than… It’s easy just to say Kubernetes backup. Think about data management, data resiliency, in particular in Kubernetes. Now Veeam is a platform we can back up virtual machines, physical, unstructured data, NAS, cloud, SaaS. We’re focused here, we’re focused on Kubernetes data protection, data resiliency. So when you put your database inside of Kubernetes, we are going to give you the ability to protect that, orchestrate that, offload that onto a different cloud if need be, provide that mobility of that. But equally, if you’ve got a data service such as AWS RDS and your bit of your application lives in Kubernetes, we can protect the whole story, the whole application.
Alan Shimel: Sure. I got it.
Michael Cade: So it’s really the two minute this is who we are and this is why we’re here.
Alan Shimel: You know what, that’s a good start of where we’re going. Now, we are here though, and you guys have been, as always, right? There’s always things going on with Kasten by Veeam. For our audience, and this goes to the people who do know who you are as well, what have you guys been announcing or highlighting at the show?
Michael Cade: So every KubeCon we bundle up everything that we’ve done over the last six months or whatever it was since the last KubeCon, right? So this week was around 6.5, so K10, 6.5, and there’s two key focuses, one is around security. Everyone’s talking about security, data backup, or data resiliency. You have to have security involved in that. And then also about scalability. One thing we’re seeing is people are deploying multiple clusters, not just one but as well as, or one big massive cluster that holds everything. A bit like what we saw in the virtualization days, right? You just have a big, big cluster full of virtualization and that would be where you’d run all your workloads. From a security point of view, it’s about integrating into your scene type projects or products like Datadog. So we know what our swim lane is. We’re not going to go and create our own Datadog type offering.
Alan Shimel: No.
Michael Cade: So we’re going to leverage the best ones on the market. We’ve made it extensible. We’re launching it with Datadog, but-
Alan Shimel: Really? Oh, very cool.
Michael Cade: It can really go to any other scene that’s available, and that’s really about… I talk about, or the US Navy’s talk about, they talk about left and right of bang. If you think about a bang being something bad happening like a security threat, malicious activity, ransomware type situation, if you think about left being prevention, I want to prevent something bad from happening or at least give me visibility of that, and then right of bang is remediation. How do I get things back as fast as possible? That left of bang is more the Datadogs. How do I get insight when something bad’s about to happen and what can I do? What would we do from that point of view?
It might be take a backup. It might encourage us to then start a replication or migration of that workload into a different cloud. So that was a big part there. The other part of that security story is around secure supply chains. So we’ve always had that secure supply chain building our software, but a lot of the DOD Fed type environments, they use a secure hardened repository called Iron Bank. So that’s another part of our launch is making sure that we’ve got Kasten K10 in Iron Bank, secure, safe, and we’re the only data protection, enterprise data protection service inside of that Iron Bank repository.
Alan Shimel: It’s big stuff. It’s big stuff. We do a lot of work with Datadog and AWS with them as well. That’s got to be a huge channel for you guys, right? And to have that integrated in there, as you said, rather than trying to go out and reinvent the wheel and get someone to… The last thing we need in the world is people have to adopt another interface.
Michael Cade: Exactly. They already know, right? And that ecosystem trend of us partnering with these enterprise solutions, whether it be like Kyverno or whether it be an open policy agent or OpenShift and all the good stuff that come with OpenShift around like guard duty and ACS, we’re not going to go and build it ourselves. People want to roll their own platform with their choice and that freedom of choice is important to keep.
Alan Shimel: You can’t shove it down people’s throats. It don’t work, simple. Let’s talk what else have you got coming on here?
Michael Cade: So another big thing that we did, so we’ve had an open source project called Kanister probably since 2016, 2017.
Alan Shimel: I think I’ve spoken to you about it.
Michael Cade: Yeah, and the focus there was around enabling the community to have something that would allow them to take a consistent copy of their database or data service. And what that means is that, let’s say with Postgres for example, they use a tool set, a built in tool set called pg_dump, and then we offload that off into object storage. Kanister gives that functionality to be able to do that. So what we’ve done is we’ve donated Kanister to the CNCF landscape as a sandbox project. And that’s really our aim as Kasten, is to drive and raise awareness of data protection, but also application consistency across data services within and external to Kubernetes. And this gives us that capability for the community to go and use this framework to try to get to where they need to be from a protection point of view.
Alan Shimel: Absolutely. Let me peel the onion back a little bit on that because I think not everyone in our audience knows what it means to donate a project to CNCF. So CNCF at this point, I think they have like 140 or some weird number. There’s a lot of CNCF projects. But when a company like Kasten by Veeam does, you’re actually handing over the IP management and marketing of that project to the Linux Foundation and CNCF.
Michael Cade: Exactly that.
Alan Shimel: Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and they own it. They operate it. Now, that’s not to say that you orphaned it or you shoved it out the door and say, “Hey, you’re on your own.”
Michael Cade: Yeah, we won’t stop maintaining it though. Yeah.
Alan Shimel: You’re still going to be, I imagine, very involved in the maintaining of it.
Michael Cade: Absolutely.
Alan Shimel: And of steering it, right? Of help managing where it’s going, what the audience needs. The flip side of that though is that this now becomes part of the ecosystem. This now becomes part of the class, if you will, where all of these projects begin working together. They have some common road mapping and there’s an end game in store here where these…
Michael Cade: Yeah, absolutely.
Alan Shimel: … Play nicely together. And I mean, in many ways, if you love something, set it free, right? And you set it free, it really grows, and so it benefits not just you, and not to sound corny, but it benefits the whole community.
Michael Cade: Exactly that. And the value of that is that we’re already drinking from our own fire hose.
Alan Shimel: Agreed.
Michael Cade: So the perspective that we can get from the community, the feedback that we get from the community will help us take the blinkers off and we can get really into what is it you need. I expect we’ve been working quite closely with EnterpriseDB around Postgres. So having that community meet in the community type model, which, I mean Kanister, it’s not like it’s a brand new project. It’s been around for 5, 6, 7 years.
Alan Shimel: Absolutely.
Michael Cade: But open source is different to a CNCF guided visibility and a community. It’s a focused community around everything that we do, so…
Alan Shimel: And it’s also in an environment where they have… It’s a very structured environment. We say, “Okay, how many contributors do we have? How many downloads do we have? How many maintainers do we have? Based upon what we know a successful open source project needs to be really successful, these are the metrics we want to see the project happen.”
Michael Cade: Exactly that. Like so you can’t just go, “Oh, I’ve created something open source and throw over the fence and CNCF will go, ‘Well, we’ll have it.'” Right?
Alan Shimel: That don’t work, yeah.
Michael Cade: There are entry requirements to get in there, whether it’s stars and this and that.
Alan Shimel: And then there’s the graduation.
Michael Cade: Exactly that.
Alan Shimel: Which you were sandboxed, right?
Michael Cade: So we go sandbox, then we’ll look into that incubated and then graduated. If you look at that as well, like you mentioned, if you go and look at the CNCF landscape, because I’ve spent a lot of time on there, there’s over a thousand projects and logos everywhere. Then you start drilling it down to what is not a commercial or a proprietary bit of software, it starts to slim down. And actually, if you look at the graduated and incubated and you start filtering that out, there’s actually 55, 56, I think it’s 55, of actual projects that are in that incubated and graduated phase of there. And the likes of Kubernetes and the likes of Helm and Prometheus, the big ones, right? They’re the ones that you expect to see.
Alan Shimel: Sure, open telemetry. Actually, the third biggest one I found out this week is Argo.
Michael Cade: Yeah. I can quite believe that. Literally you walk around this show floor and everything is using Argo and we integrating backup into your CICV pipeline. A hundred percent big fan of Argo CD and what that brings to the…
Alan Shimel: Absolutely. But no, but when I say that’s the class you’re in, that’s what I mean.
Michael Cade: Exactly that.
Alan Shimel: You’re in that class and they’re all going to the same school, if you will.
Michael Cade: Yeah.
Alan Shimel: Right? As a parent, parents out there, you want to send your kid to the school where the other smart kids are so they network and they do their thing. It’s the same kind of thing.
Michael Cade: Exactly that, and hopefully-
Alan Shimel: Smart raising a good open source project today.
Michael Cade: And hopefully come Paris where you’ve got the open source, I think it’s called the Project Pavilion, where you see all of those graduated incubated projects-
Alan Shimel: You’ll see Kasten.
Michael Cade: Yeah, hopefully we can get a Kanister one over there and I’ll be excited to share.
Alan Shimel: I will have you there. Bring your wife with you.
Michael Cade: Yeah, there you go. She can demo Kanister.
Alan Shimel: We’ll sing happy birthday and then have her demo Kanister here for us.
Michael Cade: Yeah, very good.
Alan Shimel: Sounds great. What else do we have, Michael?
Michael Cade: So I think the other thing is that evolution of the conversation. When I first started coming to KubeCon, we were talking to developers, engineers. I’m not a developer or an engineer, a hacker at best. But now we’re starting to see, and this probably started in Amsterdam where we’re now starting to see people that are responsible for the data. And I think that’s another important milestone that we’re seeing. So you’ve got the developers still they’re here, but equally the SREs, the platform engineering, the people that keep the lights on, the people that are responsible for when bad things happen. They’re not necessarily always ransomware or newsworthy headlines, but people make mistakes. We delete stuff all the time. So we might need to recover that workload. So conversations-
Alan Shimel: Happens all the time.
Michael Cade: Yeah, conversations is a big evolution that we’re having here as well. Definitely got people coming up to us at the booth, “Oh, I know Veeam. What do you do for Kubernetes?” So we then tell them that whole story, right? What we started the session with around we can back up Kubernetes workloads.
Alan Shimel: Very cool. Hey, last area I wanted to ask you about. So you’re a KubeCon veteran. What’d you think of the show this year here in Chicago?
Michael Cade: I think the weather’s been pretty good.
Alan Shimel: Could’ve been worse. I mean, look, I’m from South Florida. It’s not exactly been good, but it could have been worse.
Michael Cade: Oh yeah. Well, I’m UK so this is basically summer.
Alan Shimel: It’s good for you. Yeah, I get it.
Michael Cade: But weather aside, I think the show floor, great conversations. I think the maturity of some of the projects that we’ve seen, maybe that would’ve been in that the start-up row are now they have a bit bigger, like they’re maturing.
Alan Shimel: Yeah, no, it’s definitely progressive.
Michael Cade: And I think that’s exciting to see, the different telemetry observability, the storage, the security side. I think there’s some incredible projects and products that we have here and I think there’s a maturity around where there’s open source, there’s always an enterprise requirement for supportability and actually just-
Alan Shimel: Well, and some enterprise features that really doesn’t appeal to the mass that tends to… Open source projects work on volume, I mean that’s part of the CNCF, right?
Michael Cade: Exactly that.
Alan Shimel: But a lot of enterprise type features may not appeal to the broad base. It’s like a pyramid.
Michael Cade: Yeah.
Alan Shimel: And so if you want the top of the pyramid kind of functionality, I mean that’s the open source business model right there.
Michael Cade: Exactly that. That funnel, right? That funnel.
Alan Shimel: Yeah. Yep. So I get it. And that’s what a lot of these companies up and down, all these rows, they’re here for.
Michael Cade: Exactly that. Yeah. It’s been good. It’s been, like I say, conversation, community. Big part again of the CNCF is around that community. I think there’s still a lot of people on their learning journey.
Alan Shimel: There is.
Michael Cade: I think that’s great to see as well, that change. But people embracing change. There’s one constant in IT or tech, there’s always going to be change, right? Every 10 years, I’m quoting Kelsey Hightower’s talk that he did on our booth, but basically he said, “You have to look to reinvent yourself every 10 years.” And I think we are definitely seeing that.
Alan Shimel: I think we do. Yeah. I think we are coming up on that boundary.
Michael Cade: Yeah. It feels like we’re on the cusp of that. The adoption is real.
Alan Shimel: Oh, the adoption’s real. I think you have one. It’s like being the scrappy kid on the block, the underdog who has to fight for every inch versus being the heavyweight champion of the world and defending your title.
Michael Cade: Exactly that.
Alan Shimel: Staying on top.
Michael Cade: I think the other thing as well that I’ve been excited about is seeing virtual machines. Think about like, so Kubernetes, and I know it’s not just about Kubernetes here, it’s about cloud native.
Alan Shimel: Absolutely.
Michael Cade: But Kubernetes being that container orchestrator, and we’ve always said about it being a container orchestrator, but now think about it as a control plane, an API that can drive anything. So speaking to OpenShift, and they have OpenShift virtualization running VMs inside of Kubernetes. And MongoDB, they have an operator that controls their paths, MongoDB Atlas. So it becomes a reconciliation loop for so much more than just containers. So we’ve focused over the last year about protecting those virtual machines, OpenShift virtualization, using KubeVirt, all of that. So it’s been exciting to see as well. And there’s some stuff out there in the virtualization space that is maybe a potential some bumps in the road coming from acquisitions and stuff like that. I think that is very interesting for KubeVirt as a project, but also OpenShift virtualization. SUSE have a harvester that does something similar. Kind of flips things on its head a little bit if you start running virtual machines under the Kubernetes hood. I think that’s exciting for me coming from that world.
Alan Shimel: Last question for you. So I’m hearing rumors that yes, Paris in March, Salt Lake City next fall for the US, and then London.
Michael Cade: Oh, wow.
Alan Shimel: Have you heard that?
Michael Cade: I haven’t. I have not heard that.
Alan Shimel: Oh, well.
Michael Cade: So I have heard though that there is going to be a KubeCon in India as well. I know there was one in China.
Alan Shimel: Going to be in New Asia. Yeah, there was Shanghai.
Michael Cade: But I think there will also be one in India.
Alan Shimel: Be nice to do one in India, they should.
Michael Cade: Yeah. I think a lot of projects and a lot of the talent is also there.
Alan Shimel: There’s just a lot of people there too.
Michael Cade: Exactly that. Exactly that.
Alan Shimel: You got to know where the people are.
Michael Cade: So, excited for that. I might see you there.
Alan Shimel: It’s not my wife’s birthday, but…
Michael Cade: There you go. Michael, always a pleasure seeing you, mate. We’re live here. We’re wrapping up. I think we have one or two more interviews before we conclude our day three coverage here at KubeCon Cloud Native Con. Stay tuned. We’ll be back on in a moment.
