Viktor
00:00:00.000
I think that if this KubeCon was in Miami, there will be couple thousand more people. 'cause kind of, uh, yeah, I wanna go to or make it Mexico move, move to Mexico. You'll have more attendance for sure, because everybody wants a free vacation paid by their company in Cancun.
Darin
00:01:21.329
Well, here we are. It is November of 2025. KubeCon us. Just finished up in beautiful, sunny, warm Atlanta, Georgia.
Darin
00:01:33.515
I am lying. It's what I'm doing, I believe, right? I believe that's the correct ferries. Uh, victor's here. Whitney Lee is along with us, just like normally as we do these cube con reviews. it was not warm and comfortable and sunny in Atlanta. It was like real wintertime. That normally happens in January.
Viktor
00:01:59.662
Whole, I mean, I arrived on Friday, so Friday afternoon and uh, Saturday it was warm and sunny. I made a terrible mistake that I brought one of the two sweaters I have on that sunny day and I wore it, and then I was desperate. The rest of, uh, Atlanta, I had to take swags, which I never take just to stay warm.
Viktor
00:02:23.992
Yeah, I scavenged over there, the ambassadors, uh, whatever, kind of gimme everything.
Whitney
00:02:32.257
But the thing is, it was colder than it ever is in Atlanta, Georgia. Like it was unseasonably cold.
Darin
00:02:37.912
It was unseasonably cold. Yes. It it's not as, it's not as bad as it's been there before I'd lived there, so I looked at it and saw it and it's like, oh, okay. This again, like I said, it's more January weather than November, but if you were to go back and take a look at the weather charts, there was this big polar semi vortex that dropped down just over Tennessee into Atlanta, and then it was nice south of Atlanta.
Darin
00:03:12.112
Well, it shouldn't have been that way, but, okay. So me again. We'll, we'll get into the real stuff in a minute. How was it compared to Salt Lake? Salt Lake last year? Was it as bad as Salt Lake? Weather-wise? Yeah.
Viktor
00:03:23.842
salt Lake was okay. I mean, not, not Miami. Okay. But it wasn't terribly cold. I, it even snowed one day or something like that, and then it was still warmer than
Darin
00:03:34.882
Yeah. Yeah. When it gets cold in Atlanta, it's bad. I was there in the Snowmageddon of 1993 because that's when my daughter was born and we just had her a week before we walked out, held her in the snow. We had 12 inches of snow on the ground. That doesn't happen in Atlanta.
Viktor
00:03:52.162
the real problem, being cold when I'm in my hotel is perfectly fine because. Uber comes directly to the entrance. I spent half a second between exiting the Koland being in a car. Now, in the venue over there, there is quite some vogue between the, the exit and, and, and Uber, and that was unacceptable. This is a message to CNCF Fox, kind of like if Uber don't, uber cannot arrive to the, to the entrance. I'm not coming unless it's, uh, Miami or something like that.
Darin
00:04:39.896
Now, typically, we record these on sort of the last day, but there was some scheduling conflicts and we had to skip over it. So we're
Viktor
00:04:46.166
Sketch scheduling conflict was that Viktor got, had a, had a hangover and couldn't record. That's the scheduling conflict.
Darin
00:04:59.441
I, I wasn't gonna call him out on it. I just wasn't. So anyway, we are actually recording this as I'm sitting right now, it's 1150. Central time on Monday the 17th, which means I'm gonna be editing like a banshee to have it out for Wednesday, but that's okay. I have the time now, just in case anybody's wondering. Yes, I did get laid off. but let's not talk about that right now because that's a sore subject. How was Cube Con? There is one thing I want to bring. So I, I'll mention it now, but let's not talk about it. Ingress. NGINX. So just remember, we're gonna get there.
Darin
00:05:33.585
Yeah. But ignoring that, how was everything? Was it well put on? I mean, normally it is, right? It's a nice, large venue. So you're not fighting for space. I mean, how, how was the event itself?
Whitney
00:05:45.126
Uh, it was well organized. You know how to get from one place to another. It was really big. Like there were, if you went from what, there were two different buildings, and if you had two different things to see in the two different buildings, it was a long, long walk. And I'll say too, that. All the sessions I gave, well gave and attended both, like both that none of them ever had a full room and sometimes it was even less than 50%. like in Europe. Sometimes there could be lines or definitely like every room is at least 75% full. It didn't feel like that. Overall, cavernous getting from place to place, cavernous in the rooms big.
Darin
00:06:19.757
Whitney, since you've been doing more events stateside than Viktor has, does that seem normal right now for us?
Darin
00:06:30.947
Well, in the past year, probably in the past year, you have, even if it's smaller, smaller events you've done.
Whitney
00:06:36.808
in general, I think, uh, US events have died down and, and Europe events have picked
Darin
00:06:41.353
That's what I was trying to get to because that's what I've been seeing from other places,
Viktor
00:06:45.103
That's probably because you folks know something that we did not realize yet. Whatever that something is. I mean, usually, you know, usually tech comes from us now, China as well. So kind of we need couple of years to pick up. So if you are. If you're going down with, with, uh, CNCF, Kubernetes Cloud Native type of events, that means that, uh, we just need to get the memo.
Whitney
00:07:08.829
I talked to an organizer of a US event during KubeCon, and he was salty for sure, and he was saying the reason US events have slowed down is that Americans are too comfortable and they've gotten lazy. That's his take on it. What do you think about that?
Viktor
00:07:25.717
I think that if this KubeCon was in Miami, there will be couple thousand more people. 'cause kind of, uh, yeah, I wanna go to or make it Mexico move, move to Mexico. You'll have more attendance for sure, because everybody wants a free vacation paid by their company in Cancun.
Whitney
00:07:46.612
Next year is Salt Lake City, but the year after is New Orleans. Do you think is, is
Darin
00:07:56.347
Does that mean in two years we won't be recording this until we're actually releasing it because he'll be so hungover
Viktor
00:08:05.752
Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, witness is a problematic one here, right? Because she actually does go to talks, right? And she has something to say about Cuon. But I can record before the Cuon, right? My story is gonna be the same anyways. Yeah,
Whitney
00:08:21.682
we'll just get some sound bites from him and you and I can do the live recording.
Viktor
00:08:30.668
Yeah. I spend most of the time on shop floor. It was typical cube. I mean, uh, my all observation really is that. I have impression I cannot prove it with numbers, is that the number of ex exhibitors who are company behind CNCA projects is going down, down, down, down, down. Right. I, I could hardly see actually, Hey, companies behind CSA projects, companies using C Ns A projects somehow. Yeah. Plenty. Right? But I'm talking about companies that are formed on top of project, you know, that pays for maintenance like Abound. Yeah. But there are others, but near matter for example. Yeah. Companies like that. I, I have impression that that's going, going down, which is a bit concerning for me.
Darin
00:09:20.842
Okay, let's step into it. So the big news that I saw at least from afar was ingress X being, they're classifying it as deprecated. Okay, great. No big deal, but being deprecated in four freaking months,
Viktor
00:09:35.735
You know, if you follow the N NGINX, I mean this, this was long time coming. So I think that this is just acknowledgement of the reality kind of that that exists for years now.
Whitney
00:09:47.593
As far as I know, there are two people who maintain that project and neither one of it does they, they both do it as volunteers. Neither one is paid to do it. Yeah.
Viktor
00:09:58.410
that's actually, I feel somehow related to what I was commenting before, right? If companies behind the projects that are trying to monetize on top of projects are going down.
Viktor
00:10:11.775
Then the num, then paid maintainers who actually do keep those projects alive are going away and projects are going to die slowly or fast depending on the project. Right. that's the danger.
Whitney
00:10:26.284
I talked to one of the maintainers and he said. That 40% of Kubernetes clusters use ingress NGINX worldwide. It's just a huge number. But, but they don't have a clear path. The Gateway, API and they're
Viktor
00:10:40.234
FF five. F five is jumping in. I can tell you that right away and I know know how, I know that I got an email only two hours ago.
Viktor
00:10:54.094
F five is a company behind NGINX, so there is NGINX Ingress and Ingress NGINX, and nobody knows which one is which.
Whitney
00:11:03.049
why does F five want to pay for Ingress? NGINX, the one that's supported by CNCF.
Viktor
00:11:09.909
Well, the question is really when they chose to. Brick on opensource version. Why they didn't jump into, at that time existing Kubernetes NGINX or whatever it's called. That's a real question. Uh, somehow related with, uh, disappearance of companies, they probably could not do that while still maintaining business on top of it, right?
Whitney
00:11:39.655
But my understanding is even if a company jumps in to maintain it, it's still out of the CNCF now.
Viktor
00:11:46.055
Uh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, and nobody's jumping to maintain it. Uh, I can tell you that in advance because there is only one company with interest that's a five. Uh, uh, because other, there are other rees and, but they're not engineers based, right? Uh, and F five has their own stuff going on. They have no interest in it.
Darin
00:12:04.821
I saw somebody from, uh, the company behind traffic commenting about all of this. I don't know what's gonna happen, but let's, let's circle back to, you didn't see as many, I'm gonna call 'em vendors on the show floor that are behind products.
Viktor
00:12:22.168
as maintainers. Yes. So there, there are plenty of companies that are behind products that simply use those projects without ever, contributing to them that yes,
Darin
00:12:32.119
so if we have sort of this maintainer body count going down, does that really mean for the ecosystem?
Viktor
00:12:38.949
slow and painful, that no, no. So this is all bit. Throwing random theories here, right? I, I feel that we are going towards the, the, the world in which big corporations like Microsoft, AWS, Google what not, are the companies that can pay people to maintain those projects, which is fine. Nothing against, that would mean that there are, there is a limited number of projects that will survive, right? because that, those must be the projects that they're directly. Really monetizing on Kubernetes to begin with, right? Uh, Google is going to continue doing something with, uh, Istio because, you know, it's part of their offering. but for everything else, it's gonna be tough If I'm right and I might be wrong,
Viktor
00:13:31.677
My theory is that simply the next round, uh, none of those companies are profitable. Let's start with that, right? I mean, outside of AWS or the world, none of them are profitable. And my theory, and this is not hard to guess, is that none of them is getting next round of investment until, unless they say ai, and then everybody says AI and then nobody gets investment.
Darin
00:13:52.481
Well, that was gonna be my next question. Is it because of, well, let me, it's a two part question. So first, first off, how much AI did you see feel here? And secondly, is it because of the AI investment that we are, you know, nobody's paying attention to the other stuff. That's sort of the underpinnings of everything right now.
Viktor
00:14:10.265
It is not that nobody's paying attention to other stuff. I think that a lot of people pay attention from the user perspective to other stuff. Uh, I would actually say even that, hey, if you want to, uh, have low attendance in your talk, then you say AI and you will see how much people care about it in our area.
Viktor
00:14:31.828
not only tired, but I think that AI was. Did not yet reach the adoption threshold amongst operations. I'm gonna call it, you know, SRE, DevOps. Uh, I think that it did not stick yet. Whether it'll be or not, that's a different thing, right? It's some other areas, like if you go to a marketing conference, I'm pretty sure that everybody marketing now is using ai. Or if you go to Pure developer application conference, you will see a lot of that, right? But our people are kind of. Uh, no. Right. Uh, doesn't work.
Darin
00:15:16.623
How much was the push for AI though at the conference? Was it as big as it was last year? Because I think last year it was like, oh, it's the new bright, shiny, was it as bright and shiny still this year?
Whitney
00:15:30.191
And it was in the keynotes. It was pretty heavily featured too. But this time it was more about like AI conformance and AI safety than it was about, uh, you know, the, the magic of it. I,
Darin
00:15:43.228
Once we realized that it's not really magic, but it's just really fast, ETL, it doesn't matter anymore.
Whitney
00:15:48.482
it is just a tool. But they are putting together a new working group, an AI conformance working group that's part of Kubernetes, and they're trying to establish, rules so that your, platform can be AI platform certified or some such thing.
Darin
00:16:12.283
uh, I mean, it's been one thing to have SIGs around. Okay. SIGs around core things and so, but SIGs around how people are actually making money. that definition of safety, it's like safety for Viktor in Europe is very different than safety for me and Whitney that live in Texas, right? 'cause Texas, Hey, as long as you ain't hurting anybody, you're good.
Darin
00:16:41.206
It's literally the wild west still, I mean, okay. A little bit tongue in cheek, but there is a, I think a great truth in that because Europe in general is a lot more risk averse than the US
Viktor
00:16:54.456
That's absolutely true. Yeah. Which can have both positive and negative. Just to be clear, uh, there are a lot of problems with that as well, but it's true. Yes.
Darin
00:17:02.931
Yeah, the positive is you guys have more people show up conferences than us don't,
Whitney
00:17:14.196
Also related, tangential to ai. I heard more about Spiffy and Spire in this conference than I have in a long time. Spiffy Inspire is being kind of touted as, yeah. Yeah. They're, they're the, bell of the ball, if you will, because with Spiffy Spire, you can automate workload identity for your AI workloads, and then put, Policy in place about what it can and can't do in your system.
Viktor
00:17:39.007
No, no, that, that's one of the big missing pieces, or mostly missing pieces, right? Because okay, one thing is capabilities of something, right? Oh, AI can do this or that. But then when we get to enterprises, you know, there is a bunch of things that most people are really bored doing, but without which you cannot sell it, And securities is definitely the top one, right?
Darin
00:18:03.809
How far do you think we're really at before we have good solid enterprise AI workloads running on Kubernetes?
Darin
00:18:14.022
Yeah. Like 30, 40% normally accepted. Are we still a couple years away from that?
Viktor
00:18:19.977
I think that most of it is Kubernetes, right? Kubernetes is heavily used both to train models and for inference because what, what else is there? Now agents could be a different story, right? I think that logical for agents, logical is Kubernetes. But you can argue, hey, if there is Lambda like feature in AWS and then kind of it get gets up when, when I need it and goes down. Yes. but inference training, that's Kubernetes.
Whitney
00:18:51.503
and a lot of work's already been done in terms of integrating GPUs into Kubernetes clusters and, and in terms of dynamic resource allocation, I don't know. I, I feel like it's getting
Viktor
00:19:01.713
Yeah, and you know, I feel that actually the necessity of using something like Kubernetes and Kubernetes is arguably the only thing. Only player is much bigger now than it was before. Because before, okay, so I have five servers that are right now not doing anything. Oh my, oh my. I'm not gonna go bankrupt. And uh, right now is we have the whole warehouse of the size of, uh, uh, big airport not doing anything right now. That's, that's a problem, right? You need that dynamic allocation of, okay, oh, you can do now this and that. Moving around distributing stuff.
Darin
00:19:44.603
Is it At the end of the day, we're just always gonna have servers running somewhere in the back room, and that's it.
Viktor
00:19:50.328
As servers are always there, the question is how you use servers, kind of what is the utilization of them, right? If you go back 20 years ago, you can easily come to conclusion, and I, I, I'm not exaggerating because I've seen those things that, like 20% of your server capacities used on average. Right? Really, and the goal is to get, I dunno, 80%, 90.
Darin
00:20:14.321
Let me phrase it this way and we'll see how y'all react to this. For people that don't know how to code today. They're using AI to help code. Once you learn how to code, or once you have it coded, you can run it on Kubernetes. You've got a lot of waste in between those things. If people, if enterprises, let's put it that way, if enterprises think that's gonna be their answer, we're gonna see a lot more enterprises wasting more money than they've ever wasted before, versus. What I think would work is, I'll give you my use case right now. My daughter has a project for me to do. This is not enterprise scale by any imagination. I'm working on the project. I'm doing it in Go and Rust because I need multi-platform static binaries. I don't know how to write go or rust, but it's getting me there. I can read Go and Rust, but as I'm having it write, I'm learning how to read it. I'm learning to manually edit when I have to. Key point when I have to, and then I'm initially probably gonna run it on like Google Cloud run, right? Just something like that. In theory, once I get it right, it'll probably run just fine on a single server with a, a single static binary 'cause that's all it needs. So I'm talking about if, if you think about like a funnel at the top, I'm using all this stuff, but at the end of the day, once I get on the bottom of the funnel, I've got a nice, clean, deterministic, everything else and I don't need a big pool of things. Is that what we're gonna come back full circle to that or we headed back towards, I'm gonna call it like micro computers, like just a step this other side of mainframe in that cycle.
Viktor
00:21:56.627
The question is really for what? Because the, the, I think that the attempts to have heavy workloads, AI related, are disappearing. And when I say heavy workloads, I mean training or inference. I, I think that that's going away because companies are realizing we cannot train our own models. We, we cannot do that. Right. I, I mean, we can try and then, um. Couple of hundred millions later, we'll realize we are still short. Kind of like, oh, we just put a hundred million into this. We were under, uh, we, we did not have even fraction of the budget we need. What should we put a trillion into it? Or, or billion or should we just give up? And they give up? Right? So what you will be doing as a company is potentially is go down to the agent level. Right can basically, okay, so my model models are trained somewhere else and Tropic does it. It's running somewhere else. AWS does it, or you know, Azure, whomever. And the only thing left for me is to create an agent. If I do that, and that's Google Cloud Run. You don't need anything special for that.
Darin
00:23:08.536
Okay. Sorry, I, I sent this down a really bad path. We should be talking about KubeCon. Um. But to me I was, it feels like there was some consolidation this year, not consolidation of companies, but AI wasn't as big of a buzz, or at least not in the whizzbang way. It was more standard operational, I guess is the better way to say it, right. Of how we're gonna deal with it from that perspective.
Whitney
00:23:29.037
Yeah. Securing, um, observing and then the infrastructure underneath the bigger pieces.
Viktor
00:23:42.006
No, no, absolutely not. No, no, no. A hundred percent no, no, no, no, no. Far from pouring. I think that the problem is different. Uh, problem is that we had quite a few atoms in last couple of years in, let's say cloud native companies to, to kind of put it in in a box. Were doing something. And that failed miserably simply because. Okay, so just putting a wrapper around GPT, that's not something that people are going to buy, especially since most likely next photo, GPT will have that wrapper baked in. Kind of like, come on. Right. So quick hacks did not work. Thank God. Right? And. Yeah. Now companies are trying to figure out, okay, so I know that I need to do something with ai. I don't know what, because I have no skills in, in my company, I'm talking about startups now. Right? So zero people experienced with it an amazing competition. Like if you look at Cursor Canada, that company did not exist few years ago, and now it's bigger, that single company than all the startups in our landscape combined. That's how big it is. And so we are trying to figure out what to do
Whitney
00:24:58.596
bef I see tremendous, uh, success with. AI in terms of chat bots like chat, GPT or in terms of coding assistance, but I'm not seeing where it's making a big splash anywhere else. What am I missing?
Viktor
00:25:14.219
so what you're missing is that, who make those coding existence companies that is not in our landscape. Right.
Viktor
00:25:22.439
Okay. So, and now something, something amazing happened with AI that haven't happened in many, many years, and that's that you realize that actually developers can be buyers.
Viktor
00:25:35.845
Because developers for not buying anything for the long, long time, right? Kind of who was in charge of that 10 million bill to AWS, not developers, right? Who's buying this, uh, 500 KA year license for whatever, not developers, right? and AI vendors realize that developers are probably the first adopters. Right. And they are,
Viktor
00:26:00.805
I can sell it to them. And if I can sell to developers, why would they ever sell From the external perspective, why would they even bother trying to sell to, to you people ops? Because I actually did statistic, this morning, on average, there is anything between 10 and 30 developers for every ops person, right? So kind of, it's a, it's a minuscule market. Head wise, if you're selling something per seat, it's, it's in significant market, right? Uh, so they're not, it's, it makes sense for a company like Tropic to say, okay, so I'm going to target 90% of the company, not 10, and they're buying it before they were not buying it. So it doesn't matter who you target, they're buying it. So it needs to come from us in a way, or that kind of, once you sell it to all developers, let's think about other people, right? and they're thinking about other people. Marketing is buying it. salespeople are buying it. Just that didn't trickle down to us or it'll come from us. Uh, hypothetical us right now. The problem with hypothetical US is that if you're a small company, and I've seen that in my previous companies. Three choices say, no, I'm going to continue my business as usual because that brings me some revenue. Today
Viktor
00:27:20.827
I'm going to go pull down and ignore the revenue today and go with all 50 developers I have go into this new thing that will kill me because I cannot survive a quarter without any revenue, no matter how insignificant that revenue is. And third option, which is what kills most of the companies. I'm going to go in both places. And then you cannot maintain the, the factory that is producing some revenue because you don't have any enough people. And you put insignificant people in this, in this new thing. And don't build anything tangible.
Viktor
00:27:57.781
No, it just takes time until it trickles down to us or we or somebody will. Figure it out, uh, kind of way. I, I suspect that, and this is going to put me to trouble, uh, I suspect that the innovation in this space will come from new companies, not from existing ones. That's what I suspect. Somebody who does not have a baggage from before, right? So there is no IP to protect. I'm just company to seeded. Today I'm seeded very well. I'm seeded more than CC companies because everybody puts money into AI and I'm going to do it from scratch. 'cause when you start from scratch, actually you go faster. It counterintuitive because everybody thinks, oh, I have this thing that is already giving me a jumpstart. But very often it's not.
Whitney
00:28:49.668
So basically we need to be a. help make rules between ai, which is non-deterministic, and developers, which are non-deterministic. Like, how can we prevent bad things from happening? Like maximize output, maximize good output, let's say, and minimize disasters. Does that fall to ops?
Viktor
00:29:11.673
Yeah, that falls to us creating some kind of rules. Uh, it's not all two things. First, kind of how do you do the things you need to do without messing up everything because, uh, does not care about our internal company rules and how do we teach it to do something tangible in a way that makes sense. The problem. That I suspect is that the rules that we have in a typical enterprise company, you know, the company you don't wanna work in ever, uh, are simply are not going to be to cut it. And we are going to realize a couple of years from now, it's kind of, okay, so we have this heavy process that takes three days for something to reach production
Viktor
00:30:03.633
and. Even if you put AI on it, it's still going to be three days because it's, those three days is actually only two hours of actual work. So kind. You cannot make it faster without changing the rules. when you say, okay, so I spent two weeks on this, I spent a month on this. Three days is not much. You can live with that, right? But now you have developers say, oh yeah, I just did it during the meeting.
Viktor
00:30:31.377
So one, once, once you, once the, time that it takes non-productive time becomes actually larger than the time it actually took to, did do it. We will see trouble.
Whitney
00:30:44.681
I've heard like we shouldn't be looking for developer productivity, but de development productivity and more of like the problem of our systems being able to take in so much code now that like 30% more codes being generated, uh, we need, as ops folks need to figure out how to handle that extra input.
Viktor
00:31:15.070
because becauses are bound to rules made by somebody nobody knows When. Right. If you go to a typical enterprise, I dare you to find me ops and to be able to, that the person that will be able to explain to you why we do things this way, I dare you to find that person because it doesn't exist, right? It's simply, oh, we have to do it like this. I don't know why, and, uh, I spent my whole career making it. Work like this. I
Viktor
00:31:52.830
Exactly. Exactly. It's, it's the only way you can find out why we are doing it like this is that if you bring the whole construction company to lift off the building where you're working to check the foundation because it's buried somewhere there with dead bodies. Right. Those, those reasons why we are doing it like that.
Whitney
00:32:13.170
Which takes you back around, to your point earlier, is that it's gonna have to, like real AI innovation will come from companies that are younger that don't have these heavy processes in place.
Viktor
00:32:23.850
Yeah, but true. Those are actually two separate things, right? Uh, one thing is how do we, how do you jump on a new wave
Viktor
00:32:40.395
If you look at waves, whichever wave you want, let's say Kubernetes, right? How many companies, you know, excluding big giants like AWS, how many companies you know that actually built something tangible, useful, good, that had the pro uh, a product before Kubernetes. This is there Now. of you can answer
Viktor
00:33:07.725
and. And No, no, the still is around that I, I know examples. But you say, Hey, this amazing x like service mesh, uh, whatever is, uh, is, is a great solution for Kubernetes. And it was built by company that is not giant,
Viktor
00:33:44.820
right. It's always new companies emerge. New startups that go a hundred percent for this are going a hundred percent Kubernetes. Right. I'm not trying to fit my existing business into Kubernetes and going a hundred percent in Right. And you can see that all around, right? Unless it's a Microsoft and then you say, oh, I'm just gonna put thousand engineers on it, and some, some three will. Happen. Right? I I don't even know what's the subject? What did you ask, Darin?
Darin
00:34:17.385
Is it Christmas time yet? I, I can't remember. I've lost track. Um, I can't think of a good company that ever did what you were trying to explain. Nobody. I mean, I, I, I, I really can't think of anything.
Darin
00:34:29.280
Oh, okay. I, I think I'm sad 'cause I was hoping to hear something that's like, dang, I'm, I really wish I would've been there and I haven't heard one thing that y'all said that I wish, yeah.
Viktor
00:34:51.660
uh, was just as good as any other cuco, give or take. parties were just as good as parties are. Cuco are, you know, by the fact that I canceled the next day. was a typical and I enjoyed. It's great.
Darin
00:35:05.186
What do you think Amsterdam is gonna look like in, when is it March, April timeframe?
Whitney
00:35:13.541
I think it'll be bigger than this one. And I think I really, I, I think it's at the same venue it was at before, which was a really nice venue with natural light in the expo area and red carpet.
Whitney
00:35:28.474
that's, that's why there, it's easy to remember. I, I think Europe ones are, are generally more excited, like better to attend. And therefore more exciting and also just, um, European cities are more walkable and there's more stuff to do right by the venues. So as a rule, I prefer the European Cube coupons.
Darin
00:35:48.574
Do you think there's gonna be any major pivots technology wise, between now and that end of March for Amsterdam? Or is is Amsterdam just gonna be Atlanta light
Darin
00:36:06.182
No, but as far as you know, what changes are gonna be happening in the, basically the next five months that's gonna make it feel like, okay, I really should have been in Amsterdam.
Whitney
00:36:17.115
Victor's, predicting a slow and painful death of the CNCF ecosystem. So I think according to Viktor, that's what we have to look forward to.
Darin
00:36:37.305
Yeah, I, I, I don't know. It's, uh, so to me, uh, alright, you've stuck your neck out. I'm gonna stick my neck out. Uh, it is now, no, November 17th, 2025 By November 17th, 2035, 10 years. C NCF F will no longer exist.
Viktor
00:36:56.707
It'll exist, but it'll not be such a huge and profitable organization. It'll be like Linux like. Linux still exists and Linux Foundation still exists and we all use it and we all need it, but we are not going necessarily in tens of thousands of people to conferences. Right. ' cause it's simply there. It's it's boring and that's fine. Boring tech is is perfectly fine. It just, it's not good for, uh, startups. You don't innovate on kernel kind of thing. You're not seeing new operating systems popping up. Oh, in this conference, we just got 20 new operating systems
Darin
00:37:47.621
I know I, I like boring, but also I need those, uh, stock market returns to still be very strong to help me carry through, carry me through my retirement. Um,
Viktor
00:37:56.205
So good news, good news. All those that I predicted will disappear, uh, are not on a stock market yet
Darin
00:38:07.545
Okay, good. good. Good, good, Uh, whew. Alright, so next up is Amsterdam. Have they already, they've closed call for papers. That was like end of last month, I think end of October,
Whitney
00:38:20.790
That that was day zero call for papers. End of last month, they closed the Q con proper, uh, call for papers the month before I think.
Viktor
00:38:29.655
Which is very confusing because I have muscle memory. That tells me the first thing you do when you return from Cube Con is that then you submit
Whitney
00:38:44.850
Yeah, and like being at Cube Con gives me ideas about things to submit, and then I would have those ideas and be like, oh. I guess not, I guess I'm not gonna do that. So I feel like maybe you're missing out on like, like we should be learning from each other first and then putting together talk ideas.
Viktor
00:39:04.780
is very fine. Call speakers, kind of oh, oh, oh, you know, couple of gin tonics or juices, whatever you're, you're having, and, uh, you figure out the talk. That's how it works.
Whitney
00:39:18.775
I did have people tell me that at the party you were trying to be cos speakers with anyone who came within five feet of you.
Viktor
00:39:25.705
It's a blur, Whitney. It's a complete blur, bigger blur than my typical blur. It wasn't good. And, uh, I publicly apologized to everybody on that party for whatever I might or might not have done.
Darin
00:39:41.740
So one thing I've held off to the end here, somehow or another, Whitney, you as A-C-N-C-F ambassador we're all over the place. You were tagged along with a first timer, right? You guys, you weren't going to explain to me what happened there because I was, I'm just curious.
Whitney
00:40:00.325
uh, CNCF has a new marketing team and they asked if they could follow me around and make posts about what I'm doing, but then they didn't follow me around all that much. So I think it's just a couple of random posts. uh, we'll see if they use more. I like, as I was taking videos and stuff myself, I shared them with the C Ncf F internally, but they haven't posted anything. I think they didn't realize like what a stone cold weirdo they choose to, to lift up. And they're, and they're like, oh God, what have we done? And, uh, they're hoping it goes away now.
Darin
00:40:34.326
Wait, you mean we actually have to, she, we actually have somebody that's providing content to us and that means we have to work. Did I say that out loud? I'm retired. I can say what I want. Um.
Viktor
00:40:44.316
I imagine a meeting where they started with, Hey, can, can we ask Viktor? And somebody said, hell no. Go for witness. She's nice.
Whitney
00:40:53.526
Yeah, that's, I seem sweet, but I'm not gonna do anything I don't wanna do. I'm kind of, uh, persnickety.
Darin
00:41:00.156
What? No, not you. Uh, what, what do you wish you could have done that you didn't get to do?
Whitney
00:41:07.749
I don't know. I, I pet the puppies. What else? That's the cherry on top. I, there are people who I, I meant to see who I didn't see, like maybe I should have scheduled that, but like in terms of, I don't have any fomo, like I missed out on anything really. Do you Viktor.
Viktor
00:41:23.555
No, not really. I mean, I, I always approach Cube Corner. I give up on kind, I need to see person X or y kind of whatever happens, happens, kind of whomever passes the same hallway at the same time, is is whom we are going to meet?
Whitney
00:41:38.600
I did my best where I'd arrive at 7:00 AM for platform coffee and like be engaged all day until the parties at the end, and then go home and sleep and do it again. So. I did my best. No regrets.
Darin
00:42:08.787
We love you, Viktor. Just, just lay off a little bit. If not for yourself, for us. Come on.
Darin
00:42:18.822
the problem. Enough said. Okay. So overall, Atlanta 2025. Thumbs up. Thumbs down.
Darin
00:42:33.132
Thumbs up. Okay. predictions for Amsterdam. what what do you think is gonna be the, so tell me what the key theme was for Atlanta. And then tell me what you think the key theme is going to be for Amsterdam.
Whitney
00:42:48.382
Atlanta, it was settling into the boring bits of ai, making it operationalizing ai and then I'd say there was a good, a healthy dose of platform engineering in there too.
Darin
00:43:16.443
Yep. Okay. Well there you go. There's our review from the Atlanta 2025 Cube Con. Uh, if you got any comments, head over to the Slack workspace, look for the podcast channel. Leave your comments there. Whitney Viktor. Thank you so much.
Whitney
00:43:31.675
Thanks for having me. We hope this episode was helpful to you. If you want to discuss it or ask a question, please reach out to us, our contact information and a link to the Slack workspace or at DevOps paradox.com/contact if you subscribe through Apple Podcast. Be sure to leave us a review there that helps other people discover this podcast. Go Sign up right now at DevOps paradox.com to receive an email whenever we drop the latest episode. Thank you for listening to DevOps Paradox.