Taylor Dolezal
Rich: Hi, this is Rich. Before we get to the interview with Taylor Dolezal, I have a few quick updates. First, I finished my cross country move, and I should be back to publishing new episodes more frequently. I have a couple of new episodes recorded already, so stay tuned for those. For the Patreon members. I've had the billing on hold for a while now. If I get a good schedule going again, I'll resume that or I may switch over to GitHub sponsors for support.
If you'd like to chip in to help with things like the podcast hosting and you have strong feels about one of those two platforms, let me know. And last, I'm still looking for freelancer full time work. If your company would like some help telling stories about your tools, especially ones in the cloud native space, reach out to me.
My email is rich@richburroughs.dev. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Okay, let's get to the interview with Taylor.
[00:01:00] Welcome to Kube Cuddle, a podcast about Kubernetes and the people who build and use it. I'm your host, Rich Burroughs. Today, I'm speaking with Taylor Dolezal. Taylor is head of ecosystem at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. You may know him better as that guy from the KubeCon keynotes with all of the puns.
Welcome Taylor.
Taylor: Hey, well, it's, I feel seen Rich. Uh, thank you for having me.
Rich: I appreciate that you have such a strong brand. I think it's, it's a really good thing.
Taylor: Uh, it's, I love it.
Rich: Yeah. So, uh, to start off with, uh, tell us how you got started in computing.
Taylor: So, uh, for me it goes, it really goes back, uh, quite a ways. I'd say I realized what I wanted to do when I grew up, uh, probably around 13 and I was working in, uh, when was that? It [00:02:00] was, uh, yeah, it was about 13. It was in a math class where we started working with these, uh, TI-83 calculators and so graphing this, that and the other.
And then, um, had some friends that would play games on them during class, you know, totally reasonable use of time. And, uh, we were playing the Nibbles, the snake game, uh, where it would go around, it would be made of asterisks or whatever. And I had a friend jump in there like, Oh, you could change the code. You could actually change, like, we can make them like the number eights or the letter D or, and I was like, wait, what?
And so after that, and I realized that you could edit the source code for things, it was game over for me. That was absolutely what I was going to do for the rest of my life. So got into, uh, many different jobs around like software engineering.
Um, opened up my own consultancy, got into systems engineering when I got asked, Hey, this code's great, but could you, like, push this live? And I was like, Oh shoot, I have to learn how to do that too now? So, yeah, it's been a lot of twists and turns, but [00:03:00] I've loved it ever since. I think the people are truly what make it so unique, fun, and interesting.
Rich: Yeah, for sure. Uh, once you start doing deployments, I think there's no turning back at that point. It's
Taylor: We'll say some good words for you, you know, pour out a LaCroix, uh, send you some well wishes. You're starting down a path.
Rich: Yeah, for sure. So we met when you are, were an SRE at this little company called Disney, um, that people might've heard of. And we met through the chaos engineering community, which was a lot of fun. Um, it was really good to meet you there. I'm just wondering like how much you've kept up with that world? Is like that, chaos engineering is something you still pay attention to? I know there's some projects to do it in, you know, Kubernetes clusters, things like that.
Taylor: Absolutely. I think that the most that I've gotten involved, uh, with chaos engineering is hearing from teams that want to scale down their development environments for the weekend and everything goes, uh, [00:04:00] wildly out of band. Uh, no, but I think it's like, yeah, that's just shutting computers off, Right?
That's chaos engineering. Um, like, yeah, it could be.
Rich: I mean, that's kind of what the early chaos engineering was. It was Jesse at Amazon just unplugging stuff.
Taylor: It's like tripping over cables is that I was doing that way before it was cool. Um, I think that, uh, I've, I've jumped into some of those, uh, contexts, but I think it's been fun to, to hear more about some of the folks working in the security space and kind of like, what do some of those attacks look like and seeing how much they overlap with a lot of the, the chaos engineering on that front.
Um,
Rich: interesting.
Taylor: I've dipped in and out of that context. I haven't been too close to the wire, so to speak, but, um, and you know, thank goodness it's also been a very long time since I've been woken up at three in the morning, um, from PagerDuty or something like that. So yeah, definitely don't want to go back to that life, but you know, I have major [00:05:00] appreciation for the folks that are.
Rich: I have people once in a while who ping me like on LinkedIn about some, some SRE job or something. And I'm like, you, you don't even want me to do this at this point.
Taylor: I am happy that I, I am not at the place where, there were places where I'd worked prior where, um, you would typically have like your personal email or phone number as backup, um, to get messaged on some of those systems. So I think, I think as of five years ago, that hasn't happened to me, but, um, but I also feel for those people too.
Rich: Do you still get pages from any of the old ones?
Taylor: I've gotten couple emails from like real like first projects I ever worked on and I'm like Where is this health check set up and I can't find it. So yeah, so like into spam goes
Rich: Um, so after that, after you were at Disney, you moved into DevRel, um, for a little bit. And then you ended up at the CNCF. Uh, and I'm just wondering what that path into the CNCF looked like.
Taylor: It was, you know, Rich, I, [00:06:00] I, I started working with containers back in, I was working for the Cleveland Clinic. Um, so in a hospital, we were working with, uh, people with neurological, uh, disorders like stroke, Parkinson's, MS, concussion. Um, it was a fascinating job because it was, that, that was kind of like where the fork was in my life was, whether to go into healthcare or into tech, and so obviously getting to do both at the same time was really fun. And, um, I started working with containers way back then, back when they were starting to come onto the scene, around like 2014, 2015 time frame. Um, and it was kind of wild to be working on that.
Bringing a lot of healthcare into the cloud and then, um, hearing about things like Kubernetes and kind of, you know, what's going to win the scheduling wars. Uh, I remember writing Ansible playbooks and all those fun things too, but, um, that, that's where I, it started to make sense to me as far as open source.
We were working with Ruby on Rails, [00:07:00] Go, Docker, um, and then just the initial stages of Kubernetes.
Rich: It's interesting to me that you were doing containers at that place that early on, because normally I think people would think of healthcare as a vertical where it's very risk averse, right? And not at all doing kind of bleeding edge stuff. And, and that really was pretty bleeding edge in, in that time period.
Taylor: It was, it was so fun because like, like you're, like you're saying, it was like, everything was pen and paper. A lot of deployments were still drag and drop deployments, you know, and you're, we're talking healthcare, that's kind of scary, right? And, and, uh, a lot of things were still on prem, but we were using Amazon and cloud and, uh, using a specialized provider.
So kind of like .gov has its own special, uh, offerings. There weren't too many healthcare ones for HIPAA compliance. And so we needed to roll a lot of that on our own. So. Um, we did, we did the right things. We got the right backing. And then because of that proper, [00:08:00] you know, quote unquote adoption, we were able to do more and more and more, but it was early on seeing the benefits there of open source and I, you know, that was a time in my life where I was moving jobs, I, I was at the Cleveland Clinic for about two years, Disney was about four, um, and so.
I wanted to get things set up appropriately and share things out, learn new problems and work with other people on different contexts, but I wanted to stay at my jobs. So open source was the best way to do that, to learn all these things and to have an impact. Um, especially when you were feeling slower at work or kind of that lack of being able to see that progress or that momentum.
So I, I, I mean, I owe everything to the open source community and just that whole ethos. I love it. I love it.
Rich: That's great. And then, uh, you were at HashiCorp for a while doing the DevRel and, and then, um, at the CNCF. Um, so how does that work? Like how does somebody get a job at the [00:09:00] CNCF?
Taylor: You're just driving along one day and then just, you know, you materialize into the, uh, into the CNCF. Um, I was, what, it, that was a really interesting time, honestly. I was just, I remember just wrapping up some things. I went to AWS reInvent when I was working at HashiCorp. This is just on the precipice of them IPO ing as well, and going public. And I was like, okay, I could work here for quite a while longer. I had no plans on leaving HashiCorp. And then it was after the IPO that I started to see the telltale signs of really shifting into like, sell, sell, sell, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS. And that disheartened me because I had kind of done that before in an enterprise setting at the Cleveland Clinic, at Disney.
Um, that was more inner source, right? I wasn't like selling teams products for cash. But, but I was like, no, I don't, I, I, this problem space feels too familiar to me. And one of my mentors had told me that, Life is the problems [00:10:00] you choose to put in front of you and then conquer or not or just learn from. Like, interesting, I like that. So this was a problem I just wasn't interested in solving.
And at the same time, I had had, uh, Priyanka had reached out to me directly. There were some open roles for, working with end users and within the ecosystem space or community roles. And so that was a very difficult decision too. But I was like, okay, I'm not going to turn down a call with Priyanka. Uh, she reached out to me.
And so I, um, so about like January, February, that was enough time to, to talk with her, kind of see what the vision was going to be over the next couple of years and, uh, enough for me to see kind of things shifting more into a sales focus at HashiCorp. And I was like, Okay. This is what I want to do next.
This is where I can have impact, talk with people, and we can all make a change together.
Rich: That's fantastic. Yeah. It's really, uh, for people who haven't been through it. I mean, I've never been like through an [00:11:00] IPO, but I've been through many mergers and acquisitions on both ends of it, you know, and, and it's, interesting how much those kinds of, um, financial things can impact the lives of people doing the technical work.
Taylor: It's wild. Yeah. There's things that you get all this kind of like SEC trivia that you just isn't ever useful, but you know, maybe it is it's. For those that haven't been through that, it's like musical chairs, but sometimes there's money at the end. Maybe not. Uh, it can be fun. Yeah.
Rich: I had, uh, some friends at New Relic and when they had their IPO, they started doing conference talks after that. And they had this slide that was literally like like the SEC disclaimers, you know, it was just like, these are all the things that we have to say now that we're public.
Taylor: It's it's like watching old VHS tapes and you had like that one FBI warning at the, at the beginning, or a DVD where it's like you can't skip it, you know, it's just like, okay, yeah, just talk to them. [00:12:00]
Rich: I think those still exist actually.
Taylor: It's like, I haven't seen one in a while, but, but yeah, I'm still being a good citizen. I'm not, I'm not torrenting.
I'm good. I'm good. I'm good.
Rich: Yeah. So, uh, what does a Head of Ecosystem do?
Taylor: Uh, that's a great question. I try to figure that out every day. That's part of the job. Uh, it's like, what is it today? What are we doing? Um, there's, there's a couple things that it, that it really, uh, that are the pillars of this job. And it's, um, Head of Ecosystem is, is a very broad title and ecosystem is a very broad thing, especially in cloud native, right?
It's, and it does change day to day. Um, right.
Rich: I've, I've seen that landscape. It's, it's pretty broad.
Taylor: It's, it's, well, there's a secret. It's like a, it's like one of those 3D magic eyes. You get really close to the screen and you back up slowly and then something else takes shape. I don't know what it is, but, uh, you tell me. The, uh, no, yeah, not being serious. But, uh, that would be a cool Easter egg. I'll see if I can, uh, talk to the [00:13:00] leadership and we can work that in.
But, um, yeah, I like joking about that too. It's, it's kind of like a, uh, the, when you go to your eye doctor and you cover up one of your eyes, You're like, can you see? Um, but there's so much going on in the space. We're seeing, um, a lot of the talk right now is around platform engineering, developer experience, some topics as far as security is concerned, AI, you know, not surprisingly is also entering into the conversation quite a bit.
Taylor: Um, and then I work closely with our end users as well. So the people that are adopting these tools and technologies and putting them into their platforms. I'll still talk with clouds and other people as well, but, um, just to try to be a good denizen within the ecosystem. But at the end of the day, I'm truly just a human router.
I'll, I'll connect you to different people. I'll answer questions when I know the answer, connect you to someone who does, if I don't. And then working to spin up programs that are going to help the ecosystem, whether it's product adoption, education, helping to save companies time and [00:14:00] money when it comes to navigating cloud native, because that can just be really difficult.
Everywhere from where do I get started to, I want to, you know, open source. I want to work within this space all the way down to like, let's talk strategy specific to your organization.
Rich: Interesting. So, I wondered if we could talk a little bit about the CNCF itself. And I'm not, uh, asking you to dish any secret sauce here, but I, what I'm more interested in is, uh, I know some folks, um, get, I think confused at times by like, so there's Kubernetes, right? And there's the CNCF and there's the Linux Foundation and like, how are all these things related?
And like, uh, could you maybe like talk through that a little bit?
Taylor: Yeah, there's, and I do want to cite, there was a, I went to FOSDEM earlier this year that was in Belgium, and Kara Knowles from GitHub had this phenomenal, I don't have the link at the ready, but, uh, she had this [00:15:00] phenomenal presentation that, I mean, I learned a ton, and I, I, I work at the CNCF, but it's under the Linux Foundation, kind of like what Rich had alluded to.
And, uh, Kara had went through all of this, just focusing on cash distribution alone, how that's used for different foundations and such. Not just the Linux Foundation, but many others. You know, what is, what do sponsorships look like in GitHub, those things too. So, this is, yeah, obviously.
Rich: I'll see if I can find that and throw it in the show notes.
Taylor: I'll take a look too, I'll see if I can, yeah, but, uh, fantastic thing to watch is the TL;DR on that one. But, um, it's, it's a great question. I could talk for tons of hours about it. I won't, you know, because we have limited time. But, um, it's important to know that with the foundation, it's, you know, kind of, like you said, what does the foundation do? The foundation seeks to, our core mission statement is, "Make cloud native ubiquitous."
What does that mean? Um, we want to see cloud native everywhere where it makes sense. And so that's very broad, it's [00:16:00] not specific, and that's good and bad, because that allows us to shift and change with things like AI or WebAssembly or, you know, all of these things that we see kind of breaking into this into the cloud native space.
It's not just containers like it used to be, right? There's so many more specifications and standards and ways to really bind and start working within the cloud native ecosystem. Um, so, what else does the CNCF do? That sounds cool, right? But when it comes to projects and the ecosystem and community, there's a bunch of things that go on, right?
We need conferences to be able to talk about these things so that we can effectively adopt it at our organizations. It's not enough. You know, we have the internet, we have these asynchronous ways of communicating on GitHub and Google docs and all these other, um, mediums, but there, there's that magic of being able to meet face to face and work through a lot of these problems. And so having conferences, having places where we can actually physically meet is incredibly [00:17:00] important. Um, as well as the Zoom meetings and, you know, other, other kinds of publications, white papers, documents, those things too. Um, being educated within the space is something that isn't always easy and it takes us coming together as a group to, to happen.
So, we need a centralized way of sourcing all these things because, again, you know, there's over, what, 196 projects now in the CNCF. Even if those weren't all in the CNCF, It's still worth having a conversation, right? What, does this tool work for us? Does this one not? What does that look like? It's really helpful to have that central space, you know, a Google, a, you know, Perplexity, something, to be able to go search and work through this information. rather than having, you know, 80 different places you have to go search before you start to make meaningful movement forward on a project or within your personal research to put these tools, these workflows together. So that's a big thing is just that centralization and then focusing on a specific [00:18:00] goal, and that's cloud native.
It's also important to know how the foundation makes money too because it's open source, right? So that means everything's free. No, unfortunately. Um, security audits cost a lot of money, just as one example.
Rich: Yeah. And just to, just to clarify that some people may not know about this, but there are open source projects under the CNCF that the CNCF actually pays security experts to audit and make sure that the code is secure.
Taylor: And everything, uh, just about everything is, is open, you know, within reason. Like I think, um, when it comes to the foundation, that's one of the things I like about it is that working for places like the hospital and, and Disney and others, there was a lot that I couldn't say about what we were doing, even if I was like, well, it's obvious that we're doing X, Y, or Z.
They're like, nope. You can't, it's just, it opens up the company for risk. That's not the case at the CNCF. Um, so I like that we can share a lot of those things. So if there are questions that come up or [00:19:00] anything like that, please at me, message me, find me. I'm happy to have conversations.
We make money through, uh, events, through memberships, and then training and certification. And when it comes to memberships, it's a pay to sustain, not pay to play. Um, you know, by paying more money, that doesn't guarantee that you're going to get a project adopted or moved in or anything like that. It's not a declarative outcome. You know, it's very similar to like a gym membership or something like that too, or a hobby, right?
You invest a lot of time in, and the amount of time that you put in is what you see out of it. It's like gardening, gym membership, hobby, those kinds of concerns are the best analogies. And so a lot of people will say like, okay, well, you know, just as a hypothetical, Hey Taylor, I've got $20. I want to give this directly to Kubernetes. How do I do that?
Right now there isn't a way to do that because of the structures, right? Of the Linux Foundation, of the CNCF and of these projects. Projects can get what they need by reaching out and, you know, they all [00:20:00] have governance as one prerequisite, as to coming foundation. So they have kind of a, uh, andon cord they can pull and say like, Hey, we need this, we need money for this. Or we'd like coaching or guidance on how to reduce cloud cost, or we need security audit, or we are seeing this in our community, we want this to happen. So it is a very feedback loop driven kind of experience when existing as a project within the foundation.
Taylor: And then we also see one other misconception is that a lot of folks are, you know, working for free and volunteering their, their time. That's true of a subset, but it's a very small subset. And, and what's been great is, working in open source is an incredible agent and a catalyst for getting people jobs at multi, you know, multi-million, trillion dollar corporations as well. So, because they can, it's an easy thing them to see who's working within the space. You kind of have your resume on display because it's out in public too, [00:21:00] um, and so it's, that's, again, I really stick by that. It's, it's one of the biggest things that's upleveled me in my career and my ability to talk to people and just kind of my life, frankly. I've loved that. And so, uh, granted, biased working for CNCF, but I want to push you into that if you're wondering about it, like absolutely do it.
Rich: I've, talked to some guests about that before, about that idea that like being part of that community, kind of makes them less dependent on a specific employer in a way, you know, What's that phrase? It's the one project, many companies, or something like that?
Um, and I've, I've definitely seen that happen. And I think that it's a, it's a good reason to participate for sure.
Taylor: I've, I've liked seeing folks, um, even try to figure out job changes too. I mean, I've seen some people that have started in project management that have gone to, uh, into some very deep engineering roles. I've seen people go from, you know, being, being physicists, uh, jumping into SRE. It, [00:22:00] it's been wild to see, uh, just the amount of fluidity that it can bring you in certain cases.
That's kind of what the CNCF does. And then we, it's, even though a company is not family, right? You don't fire your family necessarily, or give them benefits here or there, you know? Like, yeah, Father, how's my 401k? Um, that's, that's not typically a conversation you have.
Um, but I'd say that the cloud native community is very much like that. It really feels like a big family in terms of like, Hey, I have this going on. I've had a lot of people, you know, going through just personal life events, uh, develop that closeness and that kind of support and community.
Um, I've gotten job advice and guidance. I've gotten mentorship. So it's, it really is kind of like this Costco experience of anything going on in your life in any of those categories, there's undoubtedly someone that is going to be happy to chat with you about that too. So, I love that.
Rich: Yeah. That's great. So obviously when you're talking about all the [00:23:00] projects under the CNCF, Kubernetes is the big dog, right? It's the, the big one. I wonder, um, how much time you all spend like dealing with Kubernetes as opposed to like the 900 or whatever other projects?
Taylor: It's, it's been interesting. It's, I think that because Kubernetes was the first project donated from Google way back in like what, 2015, it's, been the platform to build platforms. Even with AI coming in, there's been a lot of conversations around, what are we using for training? What are we using for inference?
And, uh, I was talking with, uh, and, and I know, you know, uh, Lachlan Evanson, uh, uh, I, I, I talked with him and had a great conversation in Paris. Uh, he works at Microsoft and works on, the cloud offerings that they have over there. And.
Rich: He's also a big fan of the Olive Garden.
Taylor: He loves breadsticks. Send him gift cards. Yeah, please. Uh, he loves those.
He and I were [00:24:00] talking about, uh, Kubernetes being this platform that builds platforms and how in a lot of this, these technical news articles, people were saying, is Kubernetes, right? You know, it was kind of like getting it, they, they were using the playbook for the hype cycle. And it was funny because a lot of the Kubernetes, like core people were coming out and saying, Hey, yo, uh, we actually figured this out already.
We know, we know how difficult this is. We can do all these things. And the news venues were like, uh, because they just weren't ready for it to be like, Hey, dinner's ready. Uh, they're wait, what? And so I think that's, that's also something that's been really interesting to, to kind of see take shape within the ecosystem as of late.
Rich: Yeah, I think that, um, you know, most of the technologists that I know who are, especially the folks who are really into open source, the experienced technologists are, you know, they tend to not be super dogmatic, right? And it's, it's like, Yeah. Kubernetes is great. And there are a lot of use cases for it. And not [00:25:00] everything is a use case for Kubernetes, you know, and I think it's, it's important to, look at what you actually need, and realistically understand Kubernetes and what problems it really solves, but again, you know, um, not necessarily feel like you have to use it for everything.
Taylor: I think one of my favorite memes is uh, there's this giant flatbed truck, um, and it has this like little tiny box like, you know, zipped onto it, just like heavily secured. And then the caption says, I deployed my blog on Kubernetes, uh, which made me laugh really hard. It's exactly that. It's, it's something that's so, it can be helpful, right?
But it's what makes sense and what's right. Um, yeah, and, and sorry, I danced around that question. I didn't mean to, but in terms of like, what does, what does the support for Kubernetes looks look like? And there are those cases where it's a great fit. And then there's some others that where it's like, nah, it's. It's too complex or there's, we just don't need it for this kind of scale, right? This might be like a hobby [00:26:00] website, or this might just be an NGINX, you know, these, this might just be docs, or we might just need a CDN to serve this. Um, Kubernetes, since it was first, it has enabled so many of these specifications and standards to take place, like, um, the container native interface, uh, the storage interfaces, and all of those things we've seen, um, more movement into, you know, things like edge networks and being able to deploy these things on prem.
Taylor: So, what is cloud native? Um, I've had a, uh, playful arguments, respectful arguments people about this in the community, but, um, some that kind of abide a little bit more by that, that, uh, initial revision of the CNCF charter and documentation, and that was, it has to have API strict, this and that, and containers, and exactly this kind of networking.
I disagree. It's, I think that it's more binding to those standards and specifications that we set up, right? Because you can have a cloud [00:27:00] native application running on a Raspberry Pi on your bookshelf. Or it could be running in, you know, Hyperscaler. So, Kubernetes is at the core of everything that we do.
And while it's getting more stable, I think we're starting to see more of a fixation and effort leading into projects like OpenTelemetry or Argo or Backstage. We've solved a lot of those core infrastructure problems, and so Kubernetes is still very much part of the mix, the equation and gets a lot of attention.
Also the API. Just that surface area alone is a lot to keep up to date on and to track. Um, you know, it's, a central piece as far as everything is concerned, but I do think it's cool how we're starting to delve into different problem spaces because we're finally feeling safe enough to do so, right?
This is predictable and declarative enough that we're starting to take a look into some other things and other pain points when it comes to infrastructure, even app, app definition and delivery.
Rich: Yeah. I don't, um, I don't really ever [00:28:00] get into those kind of, um, what is cloud native arguments. no, it's
It's almost like the, I know it, I know it when I see it thing, you know, it's, I have a vibe. Cloud native is a vibe.
Taylor: I like that. I would totally get a shirt that says that. It's like cloud native is a vibe.
Rich: So in your role, um, you work a lot with end users. And I wanted to talk about that a little bit. And just to clarify for folks listening, when we talk about end users in the CNCF, this isn't like any end user in the world, right? These are organizations that sign up with the CNCF to be an end user.
Taylor: Correct. Correct. Yeah. Rich,
I've worked here, what, two and a half years now? And I still, I still don't have my elevator pitch down for this is exactly an end user. It's very similar to the cloud native thing. But, uh, you know, go ahead.
Rich: Yeah. So, uh, so I think these tend to [00:29:00] be larger organizations, that, uh, actually are paying money to the CNCF to be an end user and that sort of gets them, in a situation where they can talk to each other and share their feedback and get advice and things like that. Does that all sound right?
Taylor: Correct. Yeah, it's an interesting subset because what we want to, the CNCF is a vendor neutral organization, right? We don't, we don't pick the winners. We want to bring in all kinds of conversation and considerations. We want to align things to what it is that people are actually using, right? So, just because a project comes in doesn't mean it's going to be around forever.
We, we want to mirror what the ecosystem looks like. You might have 10 really dedicated people working on something or, you know, contributions stop or cease. Um, it makes sense to have those things archived or refactored or kind of rethought, right? We wanna, again, it's a garden and, and, and not everything is forever.
We wanna figure out how to tilt the soil and get everything set up, give all the right water where it's appropriate. You know, I could exhaust to no end [00:30:00] that, that's, uh, comparison. But, uh, , um, seed funding. Yeah. There's so many fun puns to be made too, but.
Rich: You've got metaphors along with the puns.
Taylor: it's a, I, yeah, I won't, I won't soil any expectations on that front, but I'll leave well enough alone. Um,
But yeah, it's really, it's, it's fun working with end users cause their goal is to take these projects and adopt them. They want to be safe too, right? They don't want to be pitched by vendors, um, as they're going about figuring things out until they're ready. They, they might not have the time, they might not have the team expertise, and at that point in time they might say, hey, like, okay, Taylor, do you know anyone that can do, like, work with SBOMs and, and do that, and then I can point to folks that are also members and say, hey, these are, these are some really good contacts, I've spoken to XYZ, it just becomes a little bit more familial too in that kind of interaction.
It's not like, I'm like, yeah, sure, what, what's it going to do? How am I going to get you into a [00:31:00] cluster today? Sign here. That we're, we're, it's not that conversation, which so many people like, right? It's a real conversation. Um, Yeah. And end users really appreciate that kind of safe space to be able to talk through problems and, um, have that kind of respectful conversation around, you know, hey, we're using these ARM based processors.
Is it really faster? Well, for these workloads it is, for these it isn't. If you're using this project, maybe not. This one, yes. And then trying to establish some, uh, artifacts that are helpful for them is really nice too. Um, but there also have been the funny stories of big cloud companies, you know coming to me and saying hey, I think we're an end user.
I'm like no. You're actually a cloud company. Um, I get like yes, you're using the product, but that doesn't automatic, that's that's yes in theory that's an end user but we define end user as non-cloud company, not reselling a CNCF project and not a consultancy, or uh, or kind of like a, that, that's what constitutes as [00:32:00] more of a vendor type of company.
Rich: So these, these are companies that they have another product, right? Like cloud native is not their product.
Taylor: And we've even tried to get creative too around like, how do we frame that? And it's like, well, your, the maximum amount of your revenue needs to come from here. No, that's not, you know, it's just, it gets very wishy washy really quickly. But at the end of the day, it's, it's kind of, It's really about how you're, how are you using it?
And it's, if it's, if you're creating a product with it that's external, in many cases that's more so the vendor type of workflow. But when it's something that's internal, you know, like an Apple, a Mercedes Benz, an Intuit, um, they, they all have products and they have tons of other business offerings, but they use cloud native as the way, um, to power all of those things in which they're building, um, which, that's, that's really cool. Different kinds of, of, uh, stories that are being told on that front. And then we, there's intentional favoritism towards end users in terms of like CFP submissions. If you work with an [00:33:00] end user, um, doesn't have to be a member, but if you're working with an end user, not only is it typically a richer story, you know, when you're talking about these real world scenarios, um, but also there is, uh, we, we aim to get more end users in for, uh, talks.
If you're an end user member, you get, uh, additional KubeCon tickets and then training certification vouchers. So there's, there's more that we try to do to help because it's so difficult as an end user. Typically, you have your day job and then you have to keep up on cloud native, which, um, there's so much, but when you're with a vendor company, that is your life, right?
You're building this tech, you're, you already kind of get a little bit more. You're closer to the wire in a lot of cases, because you're, that, that's your job, that's the space in which you work. Whereas, you know, folks at Mercedes, they're building cars and platforms, in addition to trying to keep up to date on what's the latest OpenID Connect, you know, configuration or, um, code signing that like, how do we actually align to that within these [00:34:00] products?
Rich: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So I'm wondering, so you do hear a lot of stories from these end users, and I'm wondering if there are themes that emerge in terms of like the challenges that they face, you know, the, the things they're trying to tackle?
Taylor: Some of the most interesting stories and context on that front, I'd say are really about showing value. I think my personal favorites are like what we, you know, what has been in our past, you know, incidents, outages, ways you fixed things. Like those are, those are the, that's a big, a big part of the allure of taking the job in the first place was, tell me the secrets, tell me the stories. Like what am I going to see on Netflix in the next 10 to 20 years, um, before it happens.
Rich: I mean, that's, that's interesting though, because yeah, cause those things are a lot of times things that companies don't want to talk about publicly. So I, I can see how having a, a space like that of peers, you know, would be a good place to be able to share those things.
Taylor: It's, and a lot of [00:35:00] that is level setting too, right? Like, is this okay? Is this, it's like a lot of end users are, are a bit shy on sharing something within a new space too, because, they're not so much afraid that someone's going to steal that secret sauce or the way in which they're putting some of these tools or workflows together, but they're just scared if they got it right.
Taylor: Like, nobody wants to be called out in a nerdy way. No, you're doing, you're managing your cluster like that? Wrong! You know, like, they just kind of want to avoid a little bit of that, which is kind of funny. It's like, it's all good, that's how this works.
Um, and what Subversion, like, is a, is a, source code management, uh, platform. I think one of the first requests was, can we make my branch private? I don't want people to see the code I'm working on. Um, which is, it's just a historic, great, you know, ingrained thing that we kind of carry along, which is, is very funny, but I think the biggest things that end users are looking for is, adoption and then trying to figure out how they sell value to their stakeholders. We [00:36:00] still see this very big divide with folks that are focused on engineering and then people that are stakeholders that might not have as much of an engineering understanding. The people that can speak between those two types of groups are exceedingly rare, still, unfortunately.
Um, and so we have a couple groups, like our Cartografos group, um, that are working to show, what does the cloud native maturity model look like? How do we get business folks to understand what the values are here? And understand the risk portfolio of some of the things that they might want to focus on.
You know, maybe, like, at the CNCF we have differing levels of project maturity: sandbox, incubating, and then graduated. So, you know, maybe it doesn't make sense for you to go grab a sandbox project because that's kind of, that's very early on in its journey, whereas a graduated project is almost, you know, like, if you have a need for it and you adopt it, it's highly likely that you're going to find utility out of that.
Rich: Yeah, there's so many things to [00:37:00] consider too, that I think that people at smaller companies, they don't really think about as much or have the time to think about, like what's the governance on a project? I f I start using this thing is, you know, is it going to disappear in a year, or become a BSL license thing or whatever, right?
Like, and how do I know that, this is worth like investing a lot of engineering hours into implementing.
Taylor: It's, I think that's the biggest thing is people will typically nitpick over the price of the membership too. And that's another thing that's also really interesting. Uh, our prices for membership haven't gone up since I believe the foundation started. So we've had inflation go wildly up. So, you know, it's, I've heard that made as a joke several times, like, Hey, you're getting a discount cause inflation.
Um, but also to manage, you know, there are increasing costs with things like, patent trolls, litigation, new things that we're seeing, events cost more now, there's, so it becomes really difficult to manage some of those costs and things. And then [00:38:00] typically boards and other folks aren't keen to say, like, okay, let's raise this price of membership too, um, you know, so that's one part that isn't typically talked about, um, outside of the foundation as much, uh, just because, you know, it doesn't really get pulled into the spotlight all that much.
But that's, that's yet another thing to kind of consider as, as we make forward motions within the foundation. And then, like you said, so there's that initial thing as far as like, okay, should we pay for this membership? Are we getting out of it what we need? Which is valid, which is absolutely how you should look at it.
Though there's a lot of things that are hard to quantify too, like those network connections. Um, like you said, if you're a smaller team, you can really lean on the foundation for research within a space or kind of raise your hand and say, Hey, um, what does, you know, what does WebAssembly actually look like? Can we get a survey made or can we work with some other groups to understand what the footprint of that actually looks like? Um, uh, can we, you know, We're having trouble with being able to speak more at [00:39:00] conferences. Can you give us some advice? And then we help them out with that.
We even had a really big firm that was having problems with getting a spotlight on some of their engineering team internally because they don't have a blog or it's really hard to work through that PR and media process to get folks to spotlit. And so they came to us and said, Hey, could we get some help on that front? And we're like, Oh yeah, we have Humans of Cloud Native, where we focus on people doing amazing things within the ecosystem. Of course. So that creative problem solving is also a huge part of the job and yet another benefit as far as the membership.
It's not like, you know, it's not like you buy something and that's it. You never get to kind of give feedback or work with us. That's very much included with that is being able to have that conversation. Um, you can do that within the open source space without a membership too, of course, but when you, when you are focusing on some outcomes or trying to lead some strategy that, you know, we're always happy to have that conversation.
Again, that's, that's a, that's, uh, one of my favorite parts of the job. Like, oh, have a [00:40:00] conversation? You're like, no, never., that's terrible. No, I love it. It's so fun.
Rich: Yeah. I mean, it seems to me that if I was at a company that was thinking about, getting that kind of membership, that, that ability to be able to give feedback, right. And know that it's going to somebody who's actually listening and maybe in a position to even take action on it is one of the things that would be the most attractive to me.
Taylor: It's, it's fun and I, I think that that's what, again, is really standing at the center of the ethos of the CNCF is just, you know, it's, the intention is good and there's that want to help out within the space. There's no problem too big. It's always worth talking about and trying to figure out something that works for everybody as much as possible.
We'll never get to 100 percent or even 99%, you know, our CPUs will. But, um, but it's nice to align on, you know, what's, what does that 80 percent look like? How do we actually, you know, factor in a lot of these voices? And that's, that's not always easy, but it's always, I like that [00:41:00] it is a space where you can actually air those things.
It doesn't feel like you're talking at a podcast, right? You're not just yelling at something that is never actually going to answer you.
Rich: Like right now.
Taylor: Exactly. It's like, we can't hear you. Yeah. Scream louder. Thank you, Cleveland.
Rich: Um, so we talked a little bit earlier about how crazy the landscape is getting and how there's so many different projects. And I know that, when I was in my last SRE role, I struggled a lot with, I, I really had imposter syndrome, right. Because of the fact that there was so much stuff happening.
And I was one of those people who, you know, this was like, part of my job, but like a lot of my job didn't have anything to do with it. And, and I didn't have the amount of time that I would have liked to really look at that stuff and study it more. And I'm wondering what, I'm assuming this comes up with the end users and I'm wondering if there's any kind of advice you give [00:42:00] those folks in terms of like how to focus on projects or how to bake things off or, or whatever.
Taylor: Yes. Oh my gosh. So much. There's, um, it's, that's, that's one of my, I'm not a therapist. I'm not a psychologist, but I, uh, but I find that immensely interesting. And so I've, I've, uh, I've, I've been in therapy for a good chunk of my life. I, uh, I own a copy of the DSM-5, which is like the Bible for all of the, uh, for all like all these kinds of psychological things.
Rich: That is, that is pretty nerdy, to own a copy of the DSM.
Taylor: I love it. I've, I've had some, uh, I've, I've some friends that are in the medical space and when I've told them that they're like, why do you, that's, that was my textbook, Taylor. Why do you have that? Uh, giving them PTSD, which I a, go read about it, it's in the book.
Rich: I have book, I have a book that is, uh, not the DSM, but like drills into the different ADHD medications.
Taylor: It's so helpful. It's so helpful. I'm just like, okay, what does this feel like? Is this codependency? Yeah. Oh my gosh. [00:43:00] Yeah, it is. Um, say that really helps with taking a look at the ecosystem too. And things like imposter syndrome and like, again, psychology is just a, I love learning more and more and more within that space because it helps me not only in my role, but just again, in those personal relationships and, um, in kind of making sense and being able to talk to people where they'll feel that, I felt that, and you take a look around and you just look at just objective facts and data.
And you're like, look at, look at how many releases have happened across all these projects in the past month. You're never going to be able to read all of that, or even be able to comprehend the READMEs. So, you know, being able to make some points and cases where people can go, no, yeah, you're right, I'm being way too hard on myself, or being able to get the right perspective on that, I think is incredibly helpful.
Because it's easy to just look at something like that, or take a look at some other folks accomplishments, and then, uh, you know, look at yourself and you're like, [00:44:00] I am not anywhere close to what I'm seeing these other people do. How are they doing this? I'm falling behind. And then you really fall into that slump, right?
So it's, it's hard. Um. And so much easier to, once you're on the other side of it, obviously, you know, looking back in hindsight, it's like, Oh yeah, I could have, like, it's easy to have that perspective. It's easy to answer once you understand what the answer looks like. Um, so again, you know, if, if, if anyone's walking through that right now, please, please, please, please, please reach out. I'm always happy to have that conversation too.
It's a difficult road to walk and likelihood is you're, you're probably not as far behind as you think. Uh, if at all, you're probably. You might be somebody that's used to giving 150 percent and you're only giving 100 percent right now. How, gosh darn it, how, how dare you?
Um, it's just getting used to how all these things work. And then typically it's just always checking into that perspective that you have, trying to figure out new ways to be able to see all of how these things work. [00:45:00] So yeah, it's a lot of people going through that kind of either career progression or um, just those, you know, it's, everything is seasons, right? It's not always going to be summer. Sometimes you go through winter and it's, it's just, it is hard. It's hard. Um, we fight that with the people that we can bring in.
Rich: I used to, do this thing on Twitter. Um, especially a lot where, you know, so many of the times when people are posting there, they're of course talking about their best accomplishments and stuff. And, and that's the way too, with like conference talks and blog posts, people rarely will write, a blog post about the thing they failed at.
Right. It's usually going to be the thing where they crushed it and it's super interesting. And, and that's why you want to read about it. But, but I, there was one time where I caught myself, like, having the imposter thing going on when, uh, there was something that Joe Beda was doing, and I think it was maybe one of his live streams that I used to love, , that he did clear back at, at Heptio, [00:46:00] and he would just like dive into these projects that he'd never heard of before and, and, pick them apart and do all this stuff. And it just blew me away. And at one point I had to say to myself, this is one of the guys who invented Kubernetes, right? You literally will never know as much about Kubernetes as he does, right? That's just the way that it is.
Taylor: It's, it's, I, I loved when he did that too. And that's a great point, Rich. I think that a lot of time people are kind of writing for that press release and it's like, rarely do you get to see an entry out of somebody's journal, right? And that just kind of candid kind of observation. I loved, I loved that. I remember watching that too with Joe and I loved both Joe and then Chris, just like those, uh, you know, the, like Kubernetes, the Kubernetes Friday streams where they would dive into arcane or new or wild tech and just really focus on that.
I also, I remember Joe also, I remember that he had set up some kind of script or his camera would take the last [00:47:00] picture, like the last frame that it captured.
Rich: Oh, I remember when he did that. Yeah. Like every day.
Taylor: A lot of those are funny because he'd either be like smiling or on, you know, like he was just like very much like on and present. And then it was always funny because that last picture is just It's after you turn off your computer, you're just run down it's just kind of like, you know, like that face is funny to see. Like, no, it's okay. It's like, it's not always, you know, sunshine, happiness, and sparkles. Sometimes it's just like that stream is a lot. Okay. I'm going to go get lunch. Uh, it's kind of funny or the snarky, like, you know, break the fourth wall.
Taylor: That's funny.
Rich: I saw, a blog post that you wrote, um, on the CNCF blog about this thing called the Zero to Merge initiative that I thought sounded super interesting. And I wanted to have you explain that for folks.
Taylor: Yeah, yeah. Zero to Merge is something that came about when, we were in, in my DevRel days, what we learned was really successful to do was, [00:48:00] um, there's many ways that you can do developer relations. Right. And I think when you're kind of green or entering into that space, the first solution to everything is always a new blog post, always a new conversation.
If people have questions, I will individually answer every single one of them. Great intent, but oh my gosh, you get burnt out like nobody's business. Um, not scalable, not scalable. And so, how do you fix that? You take a lot of, you, you start to listen to the questions that you're having, and then you work them into a blog post, and then, or a Git repository.
Um, a, a video, right? Then you can kind of make content and things for people that is, you know, everyone learns differently and everyone's at a different place in their life. So, that's the best way to go about doing that. One of the questions that we got a lot of at the CNCF was, how do I get started with open source?
In many cases this was, these were folks everywhere from people that were students, Internationally, all the way up to people that were principal engineers and have been [00:49:00] writing code for decades. And they just didn't feel comfortable. Um, and so I, I saw this at Disney. I saw this at a whole bunch of other places that I was at.
Um, once you get to your principal title or your distinguished role, you do know how to operate within a specific capacity, but, uh, just because you've hit that and you have a title within that space doesn't mean you can't learn something new or take on a new hobby or work within open source if you don't want to.
So, that's what Zero to Merge was really focused on was, even though the true goal and anticipation is to get folks to be able to merge something in by the end of, this runs over four weeks, and we have two sessions each week. We're going to try to be running it quarterly. I think right now we've got, um, enough staff to run it about, it's just me, uh, to run it twice a year.
Taylor: Um, we're trying to beef that up a little bit and then, uh, get some more folks involved. But the goal is to teach people how to operate within the open source space and then give them enough comfort, understanding, and then even doing things that might not occur to them with like their [00:50:00] GitHub profile. Like, add a picture.
We teach you how to create that special README. So that when you go to your, your profile name on GitHub, people know a little bit about you and just like what your passions are. Makes it easier as a maintainer to go through and see like, okay, is this, you know, is this spam? Is this somebody I should be concerned about? Or like, oh, this is a person.
All of those shortcuts to make it easier for both the people contributing as well as the maintainers too. Um, so again, yeah, that's open, free. If you want to check it out, I highly recommend it. I know the instructor. Again, it's me. Um, so we have a great time. Not biased at all.
Um, and we've had, you know, we've seen tens of pull requests come in from people that just needed a friendly little nudge over the fence as far as like, you should do this. It's going to be fun. A little bit of, you know, anticipation and, and people that are kind of not fully bought in, but by the end of it, they, they see the value in, in most cases.
So, it's a really fun course. We're also taking a look at some other ones too, like, uh, Zero to Merge [00:51:00] was, is the one that we have running now, bi -yearly. Um, and then we're looking at Merge to Maintain, and then Maintain to something else. So, we're trying to get this continuity, right, as you come about in your career. So that's, that's really fun. Working with some, uh, the other folks in DevRel on that one right now. Uh, Jorge Castro is somebody, I'm gonna totally put him on blast. Um,
Rich: Jorge is fantastic.
Taylor: Jorge is, he, he just is community, right? It's, you'll find him at the project pavilion at KubeCons and he's the one that's, that's working on some of the Merge to Maintain stuff and kind of like what that, what is going to go into that program as well.
So, um, definitely reach out to him if you're, you feel further along, you've worked in open source and you kind of want to go more into that maintainer realm. Um, but, uh, yeah, George is just also just very, he's just very true to his word and he's incredibly enthusiastic. Um, I don't know how he's that enthusiastic for one person. It's incredible.
Rich: Yeah. It's funny when you mentioned, uh, um, the [00:52:00] situation of having the person who's maybe even a principal, but they've never done open source. And I definitely know that it happens. You know, I've worked with very senior people in the, in the past who'd never contributed to open source.
And it made me think of something that was related to the imposter syndrome discussion we had, because, I worked with a guy who was a fantastic guy. I really loved working with him, but there was this thing he did where he, he wouldn't post things in the channel that we had for our team as often as, he would tend to DM things.
And at one point I asked him, I was like, why don't you post this stuff in the channel? Because other people could probably benefit from hearing the answers. And, uh, he didn't want to look like he didn't know everything. And it was interesting because it wasn't about our team. It was more about other people in the company. He didn't want other people in the company to think that this senior guy on our team didn't have all the answers.
Taylor: It's so [00:53:00] funny how that works, isn't it? It's, uh, I've seen that and even, even working at Disney, there were direct things I can think of too, Rich, where I had, um, we were talking, we were moving everybody to Kubernetes within our system engineering team that I was on. We went from five people to 40.
I set up, it was under my purview to set up courses and classes as far as like working with vendor tools, as well as understanding things like Kubernetes.
And so, um, when I had introduction to Kubernetes, none of those principal people came. Because, uh, you know, they, some of them had a chip on their shoulder or their
Rich: They couldn't take the intro class.
Taylor: They couldn't be seen at class. I changed one thing. The content was 100 percent the same. What did I do? Deep Dive on Kubernetes or Learning Session on Kubernetes.
Just that was enough to, I got like 10x people to sign up for it because it wasn't as affronting as Intro To, you know, it was just like, come learn more about. So like all of these, like, and those are just, those are [00:54:00] just like little tiny findings. There's been hundreds that have come across in, like how, like, how do we sell this to developers? How do we become more authentic? And none of it is this Machiavellian thing. It's this, how do we authentically share this? Like, why are you, why don't you come to this meeting? Like, what's, what's your deal? They're like, Oh, well, uh, I'm principal. I can't, you know, it's like, it's so funny when we can just talk about it in the open air, but, um, yeah, it was wild to see.
So yeah, even just a little tiny title change like that can completely change people's opinions on what they're learning.
Rich: Yeah. I mean, it's really kind of part of inclusivity, you know, if you think about it, right? Like if something that you're doing is alienating people who could get benefit from the content, then it's really, it's a lot more inclusive to try to find a way that more people can access it.
Taylor: I think as you, as you look to all of those things too, like one big thing in open source is assume, always assume a positive intent, right? And then, like, you use that as your north star to measure a lot of the [00:55:00] interactions. And sometimes people aren't the nicest. Um, that, that does happen, but I think if you really are keen on listening, you'll hear that even through, in some cases, insecurity and all these other things, you, you hear that lack of safety for that person.
And, by listening more, you can really hear where that's at. And you can reach, again, you can directly reach, them where, where they need to be reached. Like, Oh, why don't you feel safe in this? Oh, well, I'm not, you know, I don't feel secure in my, I feel like they might have imposter syndrome too, even with a principal title.
Um, and like, Oh, I just don't know how TLS authentication works. Um, I know everything else but that, and I'm just really insecure about it. Like, okay, let's sit down and talk about it for 30 minutes. They might come out of that, you know, like, Oh, okay, I'm good now. You know? Those kinds of opportunities exist far more than you could ever imagine.
Rich: Yeah, it's interesting. I didn't have imposter syndrome early in my career. Like when I was the new I, I was the new guy, right? And so I didn't feel [00:56:00] self conscious about that at all. It's, but, but like, as I got more and more experienced, then I felt the pressure, right? And, and I assumed that people had expectations of me that maybe they didn't even have.
Taylor: It's, I, I love that paradox of the more that you learn, the more that you know you don't know. And so that's what makes you kind of like, you know, just a little uneasy. You're like, well, I don't really know a hundred percent of this. Whereas the less you know, you can be like, Oh yeah, of course. Ship it, it's Friday.
Rich: There's an old story about Lawrence Olivier that may be completely apocryphal, it may not even have happened, but, the story is that, as he got more and more experienced, his stage fright got worse, and and that it was at the point where, after he was, you know, mega famous, he would be in a play and he would have to go and throw up before he went on stage because he was so nervous.
Taylor: It's, I, I can tell you firsthand, if you just make it a point to tell a lot of puns, you get over all of that really fast. [00:57:00] You just, just bomb at the front of your public speaking career, and you're gonna be a lot more comfortable with that as you proceed. Uh, , it's like.
Rich: We kind of come full circle back to your brand
Taylor: Full circle, full circle.
I, I, I think the last time, the one funny story is about, um, I know that more folks are afraid of public speaking than they are of death, which is crazy to me. Um, but true is true. So, um, the stage is not that scary. I truly, I promised you, everybody wants to see you succeed. Um, when I was, uh, at KubeCon in Amsterdam, I was, uh, Chris Aniszczyk had just delivered the keynote and I was about to go on after him.
And, you know, it's, I feel like no matter how many times you've done that, you still have a little bit of like that, the butterflies in your stomach before you go on stage, especially for thousands of people. Um, and, and my, I was wearing an Apple Watch at the time and I got a, everything was turned off, do not disturb, completely enabled.
And I felt that bop bop, you know, on my wrist and I'm like, [00:58:00] okay, what's, is it, you know, is mom, are you calling me? Who is, who is this? I look and it says, Hey Taylor. Um, Your heart is beating, uh, over 120 beats per minute. And we sense that you're standing still. Are you okay? And I'm just like, not now, watch. I don't, I don't need this just before I go, go on stage. Um, that was the, the, the last time that happened was in Amsterdam. I've kind of leveled out since, but, uh, things like that definitely do happen. I think the last time that happened was. Um, when I was watching one of the finale episodes of Game of Thrones, uh, and then my, my friend also said like, maybe you should go to a heart doctor.
And I'm like, this is just a very compelling story. uh,
Rich: There's a guy who does a football podcast, like English football about, uh, the club that I support, Arsenal, and he, he was, some of the matches last season were crazy and he was definitely talking about his watch going off sometimes [00:59:00] with the heart rate thing.
Taylor: It's so funny.
Rich: So, uh, I saw that CERN won an end user award and, uh, I'm wondering what you know about how they use Kubernetes and cloud native tools, because it's a place that I've always been fascinated with.
Um, I worked at Puppet many years ago. And they were Puppet users. Um, and we all thought that was super cool. And someone I worked with actually got to go there, and get the tour and stuff. Um, so yeah, I'm just, I'm just wondering what, what you know about them.
Taylor: The way that they really sold me was, um, the, I got to go to a technical oversight committee meeting where they gathered at, in Geneva at CERN. Uh, CERN was wonderful to host. Um, and Ricardo Rocha was, was the person, you know, working at CERN that was able to make a lot of that happen. I'm incredibly grateful for all that because it was just beautiful.
It was a once in a lifetime, but I also hope it's not just this once that we go there, um, [01:00:00] time able to see everything and, and just the sheer scale of what they work on. Um, I got to go deep into the earth and look at the, the collider itself and kind of what it used to look like decades ago versus what it looks like now.
And all that's custom, um, right? You can't just go buy an LHC on Amazon, unfortunately. Shipping costs alone would be terrible. Um, but, um, they're working with incredible things, like they are actually looking at antimatter and all these other things. Um, Ricardo might have brought me into the future to show me all that they've done for cloud native and then back here to the current timeline.
Um, but, that's what sold me. Um, no, I think that looking at some of the things, it's the sheer scale of what they've been able to do. And then, if
Rich: It's a massive scale.
Taylor: It's just wild. And all of that data too, they ship out in a public sense, so you could go look at all of this incredible physics data that's going on. A lot of it being run with things like Kubernetes.
Some of it completely untenable to do [01:01:00] at that scale without the entrance price of zero dollars, right? You still have to adopt tools, technologies, and build out like a operational team, of course. But even hearing Ricardo Rocha's story of being the one person really advocating for this change at CERN and then building up teams. They're now donating projects and hiring maintainers. So they've also come full circle, ha ha. Um, as far as being able to work within the open source space and, and then, uh, understand the vision and, and really apply it there too. There were so many Grafana dashboards and, and, uh, so much telemetry that I got to see. It was really cool. Really fun, nerdy, sciency group. Um, heavily recommend to people if you haven't been there, it's, it's definitely worth, uh, it's definitely worth checking out.
Rich: Very cool. All right. Well, um, I am looking forward to seeing you at a KubeCon in the future and seeing one of your keynotes and trying to count how many puns there are. [01:02:00] Um, I really appreciate you coming today, Taylor. It was super fun to chat with you. Um, you're a person in the community that I'm always happy to run into.
So this was great.
Taylor: Right back at you. No, thank you so much for the invitation, Rich. I can't wait to see you next in, in, in real life, not just 2D Rich. It'll be great.
Rich: Kube Cuddle is created and hosted by me, Rich Burroughs. If you enjoyed the podcast, please consider telling a friend. It helps a lot. Big thanks to Emily Griffin who designed the logo. You can find her at daybrighten.com. And thanks to Monplaisir for our music. You can find more of his work at loyaltyfreakmusic.com. Thanks a lot for listening.
