It’s all about people, human out of the loop, and automation

Bob: This is the first KubeCon I've been to since before COVID. Before that, I had been to most of the KubeCons. Joe Beda and I formed the first Kubernetes SIG all the way back, SIG Scalability. I am so happy to be back here with my people after such a long break. I'm so happy to meet new people and reconnect with my old friends.

Bart: Kubernetes is turning 10 years old this year. What should we expect in the next 10 years to come?

Bob: I was talking with various people today. I think there's still a lot of... There's a big chasm to cross still for people to get the humans out of the loop when it comes to deploying and operating software. So I think the next 10 years is going to be a lot of what the last 10 years has been because that leap is still so hard.

Bart: A lot of people think Kubernetes is still really hard.

Bob: It's all people problems. Whenever I meet with customers, almost all of the discussion I have is not about technology. It's about people. We organize people. How do you work? Who does what work? How to deal with automation? So it's all organizational and people problems, and the technology is just helping us solve those problems. That's why it's going to take a while because it isn't about developing technology. It's about developing new habits, new organizational approaches, new training, and all of those things. And of course, we have this new wave of generative AI coming along, which is going to make all of those problems actually bigger and harder to solve. We're having a lot of robot workers join our human workers at the same time. So the effective workforce is getting bigger and more complicated, but we still have the same issues.

Women: Talk about organizations and people and things like that you just mentioned. Are you talking about Kubernetes having a really good fit with whatever organizational structure or hierarchy you have? AWS is always debating serverless or Kubernetes. So serverless and Kubernetes. So serverless. started from scratch, it started with a new organization. Let's say you're trying to determine your hierarchy and levels. How would you get that to fit your organizational structure, like having a more natural fit?

Bob: If you look at high-performance organizations like Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, companies that have a reputation for operating really well versus many other companies, one of the differences is that, from my time at AWS, we were terrified if human beings touched the software between development and production deployment, whereas many other customers I've seen are terrified if humans aren't touching it. The big chasm to cross is how to get people comfortable with the fact that automation is taking over all of the deployment and operational work. Kubernetes and containerization technologies like Docker, pipeline technology like Argo, and GitOps technology like Flux are helping everyone cross that difficult chasm from humans touching everything to automation doing most of it.