Episode 5 | Priyanka Sharma, GM of CNCF

Luke Schantz: What you're about to hear is a new podcast and livestream show entitled In The Open with Luke and Joe. In this series, my co- host Joe Sepi and I bring you conversations with community and technical leaders from the world of open source and enterprise tech. We do this live twice a month on Fridays at 12 noon eastern time. You can catch us on a variety of streaming platforms or here as a replay on your favorite podcast app. To find out all the details, go to ibm. biz/ intheopen, there you will find our show schedule, an embedded player of the live streaming video, as well as embeds of past episodes. Or you can link directly to the podcast page with ibm.biz/ intheopenpodcast. Thanks so much. I hope you enjoy our new series, In The Open with Luke and Joe.

Joe Sepi: Hey Luke. How are you, my friend?

Luke Schantz: Good, how are you doing, Joe?

Joe Sepi: I'm all right. The weather here is pretty decent. It's not too cold, a little windy, but I think the rain's beyond us and I'm hoping for a nice afternoon.

Luke Schantz: It is windy here as well, so I would say that we're in the same microclimate bubble this week, so-

Joe Sepi: Yeah. Yeah, watch out for the Widowmakers. We've got a lot of branches coming down over here.

Luke Schantz: That's a good point. And when we did, actually I did a call for Code Hackathon two years ago, and that was one of the topics that they was dealing with was like dealing with those tree branches ahead of time is a big safety concern for... But without further ado, let's welcome our guest, Priyanka Sharma.

Priyanka Sharma: Hello. Hi. That was an amazing intro, music and introduction graphics and everything. I was like, " This is legit."

Joe Sepi: We're pros here. We do our best.

Luke Schantz: Yeah, thank you. I was a visual effects artist in a past life.

Priyanka Sharma: There we go. There we go. Thank you so much for having me. It's awesome to be here.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it.

Luke Schantz: So maybe we could just, I'm sure many of our viewers and listeners are familiar with you, but maybe just start off with a brief self introduction.

Priyanka Sharma: Absolutely. So, hello everyone. I'm Priyanka Sharma and I'm the General Manager of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, or CNCF. I have been in part of the CNCF community since the very early days of inception. I used to be an open source contributor to the Open Tracing Project, which was the third one to join the foundation. I spent a lot of time spreading the word about observability, about distributed tracing, and really immersing myself in the community. Over time, I eventually became a board member when I was working at GitLab and I learned about the inner workings of the foundation and that was very eye- opening, I'll say that. And then eventually I was asked to come lead the foundation and it was truly a dream come true and honor, and here I am leading the foundation for you and with you and enjoying every minute of it.

Luke Schantz: That's so interesting, and I love to hear the threads and the journey that get people where they are and the fact that you were involved and you're a contributor, you were in open source so that you really, I imagine you have a lot of empathy and understanding for everyone within your community.

Priyanka Sharma: I've been fortunate to have contributed to all kinds of open source projects, all kinds of developer tools, though that's the intersection of dev tools and the open source is where we sit really in this infrastructure world. Prior to my cloud native experience, I was doing other dev tool, open source stuff, and yes, have seen a lot. I would never be so arrogant as to say have seen it all, but have definitely experienced different types of problems, challenges that people go through, have had to solve them myself when I was a startup founder, when I was helping other startups, and then in my role here. Yes, absolutely. I know the challenges we all go through and the effort we put in to create a better human experience with technology and I'm very proud of what everyone does.

Joe Sepi: That's great. Yeah, I've noticed that too. I work a lot with the OpenJS Foundation, and other Linux foundation org, and it seems like they're good about bringing people in from the community and with experience and people who really know how to do what's best, I think, for the community and work for the community. So that's great to hear.

Priyanka Sharma: Absolutely.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. And so maybe, can you tell us a little bit more about CNCF and how long it's been around and what you're excited about and all these kinds of things?

Priyanka Sharma: Yes, absolutely. So CNCF was formed when Google donated the Kubernetes project, which I really hope people have heard of, it is container orchestration. Lately people say it is the container orchestration technology, and that happened more than, was it five years ago at this point? 2016 it was alive, the foundation was already formed and, sorry, Kubernetes was our flagship project and we started there, but very quickly, Dan Kohn and Chris Aniszczyk, who led it together at the time, started bringing in more cloud native technologies because what they realized was that Kubernetes can really be a platform- like experience. It can really change the way we do things and fuel this DevOps momentum. To do that though, there are other technologies that are going to be needed, and so they opened the doors to other projects. We started, open tracing was the third one to join. Today, we are over 80 projects, so we've made a lot of progress and we have tiers because we want to highlight to the end users of the maturity level of each project involved. So CNCF has really grown. From that time in 2016 to now, we also have changed in terms of the membership. We have over 600 members in the foundation and over 145 of those are end users. End users are the people who are not building cloud native tech, they're not vendors trying to offer a cloud offering or some managed service, but rather they're building things like financial services, they're building consumer apps. Anybody who's utilizing, that's an end user. And we now actually enjoy the largest end user community of any open source foundation. So CNCF has grown, really matured with, today we have hundreds of thousands of contributors across projects from over 170 companies. Our power is because we are diverse, we have diversity powered resilience on display in CNCF and happy to answer any areas you want to dig deep into.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, I would love to dig into the diversity aspect, but I think we'll get into that in a few. But that's fascinating. So how many people, I think, did you say 600?

Priyanka Sharma: Member companies. Over 600 member companies.

Joe Sepi: Wow, that's fascinating.

Priyanka Sharma: It represents all the major cloud hyperscalers. It represents most of the people in cloud native who are pushing forward making change, and we have geographical diversity, we have members from China, we have members from European countries, we have US members, all over the world.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. That's amazing. And yeah, the cloud native landscape has just been growing, and I mention that word and we chuckle because the, what is it? Landscape. cncf. io-

Priyanka Sharma: L.ncf.

Joe Sepi: That's pretty fascinating just to look at that. I mean it's a little mind boggling and to hear you talk about how many member companies as well, but maybe you can talk to us a little bit about that landscape and how that's a lot there and it's something that people usually bring up.

Priyanka Sharma: Absolutely. As you said, the landscape is top of mind for many of us. It's because it's quite awe inspiring, whether you think of the word awe in positive or negative, but it definitely makes an impression and that's because it's full of the logos of all the people doing all the cool things in cloud native. It's actually a good thing that it is overwhelming because that just shows the amount of effort and momentum in the community. Actually, cloud native is actually the fastest growing open source community in the world, and that's reflected in the landscape that you see right there. Now, people say that, " Oh, this is so overwhelming. How am I supposed to use this?" I will tell you this, this is not supposed to be the first time you learn about cloud data. This is not the place to do that. What this is a good place for though is once you have understood the definitions, as you can see here, there are, sorry, I'm starting to point, there are categories. So you see, for example, image application definition and image build, security, platforms. These are categories which you can filter by. You can also, if you look on the left side, see all these filterings, like you can look at CNCF projects in these categories, you can do whatever you feel like. So I think this is a good, we used to have encyclopedias back in the day before the internet was all over the place. This is the cloud native encyclopedia, and it can be used as such and as for the logos over there, by the way, I'll tell you, having your logo there is high value. Many people tell us it is their largest source of referral traffic. So people come to the landscape, utilize it, and if you are working in cloud native, you should have your logo there. If you are searching for something in cloud native, you should check out the landscape too.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, and I feel funny saying this, but everybody should be cloud native. Whatever you're doing, you should be containerizing it and being able to deploy easily and scale easily. I think about this because a while ago I worked at the New York Times and I laugh because when I made my first change and asked my manager how I deploy it, and it was on the paywall, so I tested it thoroughly and I asked him how I deploy it, and this was a little while ago, but he said, " Oh, you just FTP up to the server and just copy your file over," and my-

Priyanka Sharma: Oh my God.

Joe Sepi: ...inaudible exploded. But we worked for a couple of years to really modernize the stack and we started to implement containerized solutions. This was back in VMs and Puppet and Chef and stuff, but it was really revolutionary to me to think about being able to work in an environment that you could repeat in terms of development, like to staging and UA and QA testing and then deploy its production. It's kind of the same repeatable thing. And then to think about it in terms of scaling, you can just spin up more containers or spin them down, whatever the case may be, or if things are failing, it's a great platform to be working in and everybody should be cloud native for sure.

Priyanka Sharma: I will say, your hope is coming true, and even though we've all had a very challenging time with COVID-19 and the pandemic, that has actually really accelerated the adoption of cloud native technologies. For example, at KubeCon CloudNativeCon next week, there is a keynote by an end user that talks about how they literally grew majority of their cloud native engineering staff and started building that way during the last 18 months. Everywhere you go, most workflows have moved online. So you have to ship fast and resiliently for everything now. I was also actually giving a talk at the cloud native data management day, which is a co- located event next week, and the whole conversation around stateful needs to happen on Kubernetes because as you said, we need to move to cloud native for a good human experience with technology. And if we're going to do that, we need to bring the DevOps mindset, the Kubernetes capabilities, but we got to handle the stateful as well. So I agree 100%.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, we can get into the event in a few minutes, but I'm curious, what's exciting to you that's happening right now in the cloud native space? Are there things that have got you really excited?

Priyanka Sharma: Yes, otherwise it would be a hard job to do, but no, so much is happening in our community. It would be actually hard to pick one. But really what I'm seeing is, as I mentioned, because of the pandemic, adoption of cloud native accelerated and what we have seen happen is that our technologies have emerged as the building block of this time period that we have experienced. And with that, as we are looking at future innovation, a lot of it is depending on Kubernetes, on cloud native, and that's really exciting to me. If you look at the, and I'm sorry to bridge to the event next week, but this is truly part, this is me illustrating the point, really if you look at the co- located events that are happening on Monday and Tuesday, there are all kinds of cool new things. There's Kubernetes on AI, there is Kubernetes on edge, there is a Wasm there, WebAssembly, there's a Rust day. There is all these cool new ways of utilizing cloud native. And what we are really seeing is that cloud native is becoming the building block of all future innovation. And I think, this is my personal take is that this is happening because we are such a community of doers. We are always iterating, that's in our mindset and that makes us move so fast and try all these new things. And that's leading to this, the cloud native X professional I call it, where it's like people are looking for the cloud native security developer, cloud native edge marketer. These people are starting to look for these skill sets, and that's really exciting to me because that tells me that the best is yet to come.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. And it makes me think of microservices or something too, where the landscape has gotten specialized in different areas, but that's great because those little areas can really accelerate and evolve and innovate and it all brings it all up together.

Luke Schantz: That's a great point. And I feel like what's interesting is a lot of these concepts that we're seeing play out in cloud native, they're not new concepts, they've been ideas like microservices, but now we're seeing the maturity and the infrastructure to really be able to scale them and implement them. And the one thing I have to mention, which I love about the cloud native community, and I think you mentioned it earlier when you mentioned a, " Hey, I'm excited to hear this presentation from an end user," it really is such a broad co- created ecosystem where you're hearing directly from the big cloud providers, but all the way through, you're seeing niche security folks, niche edge folks, all the way down to end users and it really is an amazing collaborative environment. And I think big part of what we want to do on this show is do a cross section and show people, " Hey, here's how you can participate in these ecosystems." And even if you're not in cloud native, " Hey, if you're looking to do open source, look at this is how it's done and it's so inclusive," as we're talking about one form of inclusivity or across the spectrum of participants.

Priyanka Sharma: Absolutely agree with you. These are the communities to get started in because we will welcome you. That's what happened to me in my life when I joined in, I was like, I didn't know much about infrastructure, I was super nervous, but everybody I talked to in the first meetup I went to actually I was so nervous and people just were like, " Hey, come on over. Hey, let's talk." And they're bringing me in and they're being so nice. And that stuck with me and I stayed all along. And I think that experience is not mine alone. I've seen it mirrored in every scholarship recipient. I've seen it mirrored in people who do mentorships with us. And to that point of how to get started, how should someone think about cloud native, you are new, today you're lucky because there's so many avenues. Something that we've realized, right? Everybody contributes to technology. Everybody contributes to open source, not just developers. You could be a product person, you could be a marketer, you could be an event organizer. And what we realized is that maybe there needs to be some general education around the topic. So at this time in KubeCon, we're actually piloting a business value sub track where people can go literally learn cloud native 101 definitions. What is this term? What is Kubernetes? What does DevOps mean? What does cloud native mean? Learn that and then start internalizing it. There's also conversations around, how do you justify using open source in for- profit environments? For people who are very new to our world, that question is big, even though for us here it's, " Oh, that debate's been solved." That's not the case for the rest of the world. And so there are conversations like that happening that you can access. There's also education material available, such as we have a Kubernetes edX course that anybody can do, Introduction to Kubernetes Fundamentals, go learn that. So there are many pathways to knowledge, and when it comes to contribution, Kubernetes particularly has a contributor experience program and they really are looking for people to get involved. And I highly recommend people check them out, there's also a LFX mentorships that we do and those are also available. So there are many entry points. Just decide what you want to do and if you have questions, ask anyone in the Twitter community, Tweet me, my Twitter handles right here. You can DM me, I'll help you out, someone will help you out and you can get going.

Joe Sepi: That's really awesome. And we should share some of these resources after the fact as well, because personally, I want some of them because at IBM we have this jumpstart program that I'm a part of where new IBMers, we try to get them involved in open source and we have internal mentors and weekly meetings. And it's funny, I do no JS and JavaScript and OpenJS kind of projects I help folks with, but I just had a meeting yesterday and it's a 90- minute meeting and there's so much of the cloud native landscape that I got bumped to the very end and I quickly just chimed in, " Let's reach out to me for inaudible." But there's so much stuff to do there and I'm really glad to hear that there are a lot of resources and people do still need to, I think lobby's not the right word, but advocate for open source internally within their companies and such. So I'm really glad to hear about those resources that you have and are developing. And another thing that I love about it is that we talk about how much there is there, but that's great because you can find different things that you want to do if you're interested in networking or tracing or any sort of deployment to strategies and whatnot, it's a big open buffet and you can just find where you want to eat.

Priyanka Sharma: Yeah. And I totally see, sometimes that can also be overwhelming, you know what I mean? And my advice to people is literally find someone you like on Twitter and Tweet at them and ask. People will guide you. That's the kind of community we are in. And I think yours is the same, Joe, where it's, just reach out and you will get help.

Joe Sepi: Yeah.

Luke Schantz: So tell us what to expect from this, and I also have a second question, which is how has the transition been from in- person events to virtual events? I imagine there's some pros and cons here, but so tell us what to expect and tell folks how to register and then tell us how it's been transitioning to virtual events.

Priyanka Sharma: Absolutely. In terms of what to expect, this is very likely our last fully virtual KubeCon CloudNativeCon, fingers crossed. Exactly. Fingers crossed. And if that goes through, it's actually a little bittersweet. And the reason it's bittersweet is because the one thing that's happened as we have pivoted to virtual is that we have been able to meet as a much larger community, people from all over the world, regardless of where they're located, have joined in. And that's been amazing. And that's a part of virtual that is unbeatable, the number of people who can attend, the places they can come from. In the future we'll always have the virtual component, so that's quite nice, but there'll be also the in- person component, which cannot wait for, to be clear, but it's been really nice to meet so many people from so many different places and have so many of these multi- threaded conversations. So in terms of what to expect, there's a lot of innovation actually that we have put into the event this time. As always, KubeCon CloudNativeCons are the largest open source conferences in the world. They're where all of us in the community come together to learn and understand what's the latest and greatest, but also make new friends. What's new this time, I would say, is that in addition to the 101 track, as I was mentioning before, we have a sub track for business value. So, hey, if you are manning the booth, if you are making the collateral for KubeCon CloudNativeCon, ask your manager that, hey, you should get to go too. So join in. Another piece is the new student track. The whole idea there is, again, we are all lifelong learners. We are all students at some level or the other. If you feel you are at the stage of education, whether you're self- taught or in a university, where you've gotten the fundamentals of computer science, but you haven't really managed a production system before. So you are an early stage learner from the cloud native point of view, then in the student track there is, we've marked the sessions we think will be particularly useful for you. There's also going to be a, can't call it happy hour because no one under 21 should be drinking in the US at least, different limits apply, but like a lounge, let's say, like a student's lounge that's going to be a kickoff where we are going to talk about how to approach the event, what to learn, where to go, et cetera. And to aid all that learning, whether you're a student, whether you're continuing education, whether you're just trying to change your area of expertise, we have the certifications that we offer, which is certified Kubernetes admin, certified Kubernetes app developer, and latest is certified Kubernetes security specialist. All of these, you get a discount for when you join, when you attend a KubeCon because we believe learning is multifaceted. So you're attending a KubeCon, you take these tests, you pass them, all of this together makes you a strong candidate. So those are some fun things that are happening. There's a lot of end user talks, as per usual. There's a keynote about how telcos and 5G is considering cloud native. Lots of really fun stuff. So all in all, there's something for everybody and there's also going to be a lot of community stuff happening on our CNCF Slack. And the nice thing about that is that your friendships and conversations will persist after the event. So, those are just some things to know. I couldn't possibly describe everything.

Joe Sepi: That's great. And I think we need to reclaim the happy hour term, because I want to use it all the time and it doesn't have to be about drinking. So that's all exciting. I was on the LF events page earlier, are there other events that are a part of it, like a Rust day and such?

Priyanka Sharma: Yes, absolutely. So the co- los, the co- located events are going to happen Monday and Tuesday. As I was mentioning before, they are a really good snapshot of all the innovation happening in cloud native right now. And so there's going to be a Rust day, there's going to be a PromCon about Prometheus, there's cloud native data management, Kubernetes on AI, Kubernetes on Edge, there's a lot of cool, awesome technologies. I recommend everyone check out like a bunch of the co- los. I actually, I co- lo hop, so I recommend the same thing because there's so much fun stuff to learn and I want to sample a lot of it. And then once I've tested the waters, then I pick a co- lo to deep dive into. This is another benefit of virtual, by the way, which is different from, in person you usually go to a room and you commit. So I highly recommend doing that. There's all sorts of new things to learn.

Luke Schantz: That is a good point. Usually the conference is so big, it may be half a mile or a mile away, you've got to find it with some sort of-

Joe Sepi: Yeah. We work at IBM where huge conferences were a thing. Oh, boy.

Priyanka Sharma: Yeah. Even in person, I remember the most popular co- los, they just get full, you can't enter for fire hazard reasons. So, none of that anymore.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, that's great. That's really great. That's one of the benefits of virtual, although I am looking forward to seeing all my friends and colleagues and no, I'm looking forward to that. Cool. Luke, do you have something you want to say?

Luke Schantz: I was going to, we talked about the diversity within the community of cloud native, but I also wanted to maybe pivot and shift a little bit. I read your blog post recently and it was fantastic, and I think there's so much interesting and important work that's going on around diversity and inclusion within the tech world. I thought maybe we could dig into that a little bit.

Priyanka Sharma: Absolutely. Happy to. So, I'll just share my broad take on DE& I and cloud native. This foundation in particular, Linux Foundation in general, these organizations do a lot to make sure there's diversity, equity, and inclusion in technology. And the interesting thing about them is how they do it. There is, of course, the need for reports, numbers, statistics. But in addition to that, you need a commitment to every day, every interaction you have, make an effort to include someone, make an effort to bring someone into the fold. And it's very hard to go stacks of efforts into stats, but I think all those, in addition to programs, make a huge difference. And I've seen that happen at Linux Foundation. At CNCF, I was a recipient of all the effort. Dan Kohn, our previous Executive Director, GM, used to put into diversity and inclusion. Every time I'd reach out, I'd meet a friendly face. He would open up doors or he would open up opportunities, he'd be like, " Oh, this would be good for your interests. Try this out." And he did all of that in addition to what we do with, we have a goal this year to have 100 mentorships done for people and we prioritize DE& I applicants. We have need- based scholarships. Same applies for KubeCon CloudNativeCons, we have scholarships based on DE& I and inaudible. And so those are efforts we do programmatically and as individuals, as leaders in our roles, we push, me and Chris every day to help anyone we can to push the push someone's career forward. And that's been really rewarding for me. I've been a recipient of it, I want to pay it forward, and I think there's just, open source has proven that the more diverse people you have involved, and this diversity can be demographic, it can be geographic, it can literally be just time zones, and the more different people are involved, the better the outcome is. And that's our approach and that's what we do. And I'm happy to jump into the blog post specifically or also any programs of interest to you.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, it's interesting. I think about, and this is a really simple and perhaps passive way, but when we were meeting in person, the idea of a Pacman circle where you always leave room for someone to step in and join the conversation, but I think being proactive and doing that in a variety of other ways really makes sense. And I agree with you, open source, it's a great place to get involved and I find that Node is a little bit daunting to get involved, but what I've been encouraging people to do is to get involved in working groups and then you get to know the people and then they support you and we all work together and try to help each other be successful.

Priyanka Sharma: Yeah, 100%. And something that happens with diversity, it's what I wrote my blog post about, is you have different opinions and that can be uncomfortable. Diversity can create conflict, but my humble opinion is that's a good thing because you can hash out all kinds of ideas if you're just comfortable with someone thinking very differently from you. And I think to create a truly inclusive workplace, leaders need to get comfortable themselves first with conflict and making it constructive, and then encouraging the right behaviors so that people can come speak their mind, even if it's completely different from what the leader thinks, what the peers think, and discuss it through. I think I personally have a hit or miss relationship with conflict and it's evolving, but it's just something I have noticed that cultures that allow for that emotional vulnerability almost, that you have to be in conflict with someone, as long as it's done in a respectful manner, they definitely do better. I've enjoyed working at places like that better. And I highly encourage anyone who's thinking about, " Hey, what are the challenges of diversity?" A lot of it can be, you may be doing all the right things, having the right programs, but maybe because of a fear of conflict, people are not comfortable expressing their views, then you are not getting the benefit of diversity even if you have a lot of diverse people. I highly encourage people to think about that.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, I agree. I think whenever you're, challenged isn't maybe the right word, but just when people are using the word conflict, when there's some sort of conflict that's different than what you're thinking or imagining or whatnot, I think it can be very creative and help you to think through things in a different lens and hopefully move things forward and make things more positive.

Priyanka Sharma: Yeah. I'll just give you the example that I have in the blog post, which is end of last year, I was like, " Okay, we've done so much," we had done two virtual events, full pivot, back to back, but I was new to the role, ready to prove myself further and further. I was like, " Okay, next year we're going to do all these other great things." And my team pushed back on me and they were like, " Hold up. This has been a challenging year. We've already done so much back to back. We need to take a step back and think this through in greater detail." And at first I was like, " Oh, come on, let's go, let's go, let's go." But they pushed back and it was the right thing to do. And what it led to was, because I realized that I was in such a different place from where my team was, and everybody seemed to be on some level of the spectrum, that it was just apparent that we have to have the uncomfortable conversations. And it also exposed the uncomfortable truth that we didn't have a good process for planning. And so what we ended up doing is a lot of one- on- one conversations about, " Hey, what do you want to accomplish? What do I want to accomplish? Where are we burned out? Where are we frayed? What are the resources we have including ourselves? Are we operating 100%? Are we operating 50%?" Because we've all struggled too, and having that little of depth in the conversation really gave me a reality check on how I can actually achieve the best case scenario by being cognizant of our human challenges. And all of that ultimately led to a public OKR presentation that we shared with our board, we shared with other people. So now we are all moving together, and it all happened because there was conflict on the team and we were able to inaudible.

Luke Schantz: I love that, because it puts forward the idea, and I think we're familiar with other parts of our lives this, that you have to do the work, maybe an analogy of fitness or even your personal relationship. You can't just assume that, oh, whatever it is, whether it's a marriage or a business relationship, that there's always work that needs to be done. And then this one is, maybe it's a little more complicated because it's organizational, it's community, it's one on one, but yeah, the work has to be done. But I love this idea of don't be afraid of the conflict. Conflict is part of that process. And yes, it may be uncomfortable, but you just need to face that and work through it and yeah, positive outcomes.

Priyanka Sharma: It's even, this message that conflict's comfortable, I wrote the blog post and I have to remind myself all the time, and I'm actually glad this blog post has come up multiple times in conversations because I often, even after having thought this through to this point, it bogs you down. It depends on people's nature. But in my case, it bogs me down when I'm like, " Oh, I hate conflict. Why can't we all be happy, friendly, happy family?" Reality is, to be the happy family, you have to accept the conflict. And just having this front and center talking about it, being open about it, I think really helps really internalize.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. And I think it's important and I'm glad to hear that you have a team that feels comfortable being able to express themselves, because I think that's half of it too is people need to be comfortable to do that.

Priyanka Sharma: Yeah. Otherwise, if they're not, then you can hire the most diverse staff in the world and you don't get any results. So was all that effort for nothing? And people aren't happy.

Joe Sepi: And I think share the load too, right? You don't have to take on all the conflict. It's great that your team feels comfortable, but we can all work together to get to where we need to go.

Priyanka Sharma: Yes. Let's find solutions. Yeah, yeah. Definitely. Definitely.

Luke Schantz: Yeah, that is a good point about wherever you're sitting, whether it's your company or within the community, yeah, don't try to bear the weight of the world on your shoulders. If there is some situation that's really uncomfortable, loop in with someone who's in a leadership position from the context of where you're talking and get a reality check and get some guidance and leadership there.

Priyanka Sharma: Absolutely. The weight of the world is heavy. There's no chance one person can carry it all, and you wouldn't want to carry it all, be honest, you'll burn out. And that's the number one thing to remember is that nothing is worth burning out. That's in my big learning in this journey over the past few years.

Luke Schantz: Yeah, especially with the pandemic. I've actually been so surprised and it's been heartening to see actually how compassionate leaders within my company and my team have been, especially to those right now being hard hit in Brazil and India and how we need to... Yeah, companies have a reputation for being heartless, but they're made up of people and we work and we build these structures and I think it's getting better and better and just, yeah, heartening to see how much compassion is even coming from what's supposed to be maybe not personable.

Priyanka Sharma: Yeah, no, I think Team Cloud Native, and I was so impressed by how people have really supported each other over the last year, and to use the very current story of our time, which is what's happening in India as an example, I've been on Twitter like crazy, just learning as much as I can, helping, and I'm seeing people who, frankly I had no idea they would have much knowledge about what's happening, what the subcontinent is, et cetera, jumping in, being like, " No, I'm calling my lawmaker, local congressperson to be like, we need to help this situation there." And people are getting together, corralling, helping out as much as possible. And then there's personal stories as well as the macro conditions, and everywhere there's just support and love, and that's the type of world we want to be part of. And open source plus pandemic, life has become very blurred, what is work, what is personal? And we're seeing actually the best of that come out in these trying times where people are like, " Hey, I worked with you to learn about certifications. Now I hear your terrible story of what's happening at home. Let me go help out in this way. Let me go do this." And it just makes me truly believe in our community, in the way we operate, and what we are going to do for each other forever.

Luke Schantz: Yeah. This is fantastic. And I'm glad we have a platform where we can talk about this, and I hope that it helps folks find their way from where they are in this complexity. Something else related, I wanted to ask you about, I know you're doing a lot of work on inclusive naming and making sure that the language that we're using in the workplace is structured so that it's considerate to where people are coming from. Could you tell us a little bit about that work?

Priyanka Sharma: Absolutely. I'd be delighted to. So, I'm so proud of the community's work on this one. So as part of diversity and equity and inclusion, you want to make people feel welcome and comfortable. And especially in light of what happened last year with the murder of George Floyd and the protests after that, there was a reawakening in our community that we have terms in our code basis, which is our output. Our creation is our code, in that we have racist terminology. We have master, slave, we have whitelist, blacklist, and there's all other kinds of problematic stuff out there. How can we let that be? How can we be okay with that? And we decided enough was enough. And inclusive naming was born because we saw this empty space of, there's some people who are part of a debate about what's worth it, what's not worth it, should changes be made. But if you move past that, there is now a critical mass of people who want to make the change, who want their code bases to not be racist. And they're looking for guidance and support on how to do it. So we leveraged the effort that was going on in the Kubernetes language work stream and all the effort they've done and brought in other partners such as IBM, who's done so much, Cisco, many other companies. Today it's literally hundreds of people from probably just that many companies, in the effort. And our goal is to provide the people, process, tools of how to make changes so that you don't make breaking changes because you're not just changing a word, right? You're changing a technology, you're changing something that connects across different code bases, there's upstream, downstream issues to think about. And so inclusive naming is that grassroots initiative. We were recently mentioned actually in the New York Times, which was a huge honor. Yeah. There was an article about just how important this change is, what's happening in different organizations about this. And inclusive naming was shared as a shining light of people coming together and getting it done the right way. So that's inclusive naming. Thank you for putting the URL over here, if anyone's interested, check us out. We meet biweekly and you can come in to share what your company has done or what your other organization has done. You can come to ask questions. You can come to get deeply involved and become part of a work stream. Any level of commitment and interest is welcome. We are here to just make our code bases a better place, starting with master, slave, whitelist, blacklist, but going beyond that to determine how do you evaluate terminology to be good or bad if it affects a certain part of your community? And then how do you keep diversity, inclusion, equity, this is all ever, you're always on the journey, you're never going to be like, " We're done now." And so the INI will help you always be inclusive and always have terminology in code that welcomes.

Joe Sepi: That's really great. I fully support that. We've been working on it in the OpenJS Foundation and the Node platform. And you're right, it's not always easy. We have some build systems that we need to make changes to to get these changes fully propagated, but it's definitely worth the energy and the effort.

Priyanka Sharma: Exactly. Because that's what I've seen sometimes when people argue about what can be done is say, " Oh, but this would break. That would break." It's like, " Yeah, people make breaking changes for things all the time. Just follow the process to do it." And I think the good news is we're at a point in time in technology that we have negated that argument that, " Oh, this will make breaking changes." Yes, so do other things. Let's follow the process.

Joe Sepi: It's funny too because we're talking about technology like, " Oh, making this change is going to break something," but in the real world, I think that's what people struggle with, trying to grow in that way is not always easy, but you've got to put in the effort and it's worth it.

Priyanka Sharma: Exactly.

Joe Sepi: Yeah.

Luke Schantz: One of the sayings that we get from our Senior Vice President, Bob Lord, is we need problem solvers, not problem explainers.

Priyanka Sharma: I love it. I love it.

Joe Sepi: That's great.

Luke Schantz: So I also want to mention here to our listeners, if you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the chat on whatever platform you're watching on, and we'll get to those at the end. I see we have about 12, 15 minutes left. So I wanted to make sure that we mentioned, I know I had discovered that you do a quarterly report called The Technology Radar.

Priyanka Sharma: Yes.

Luke Schantz: And I wanted to make sure that we get this topic in here. Could you tell us a little bit about this publication? And I feel like this is, besides obviously attending KubeCon, this is one of the places, if you want to stay current, if you want to stay plugged in, keeping plugged into The Technology Radar is the thick way to do it.

Priyanka Sharma: Absolutely. So I am so proud of the team for coming up with The Tech Radars. It's Cheryl Hung's brainchild, she's our VP of Ecosystem, she does a great job running the end user community. The idea behind the radars is that we pick a specific aspect of technology, whether let's say storage or CICD or CD, we'll pick some technology area and a task force will assemble of end users in the CNCF and they will evaluate a bunch of different products, open source projects, anything available in the space and share whether it's something they have tried this, it was amazing, and go for it in full production mode, or worth checking out, but needs to figure out some kinks, or a little early stage. And so what the radar does is provide an unfiltered view directly from end user's mouth of what they have tried and what the results have been. And so other people who are looking at solutions in a technology area can look at the radars, learn from other people's experiences and shortcut their path to success. So, it's highly useful, especially when you are going to, if you're in the building phase of your cloud native setup in a company. And to that point, I would also like to add that the people who put this radar together, the end user community, they themselves are just so valuable to connect with, be a part of. So I highly recommend if anyone's out there, wanting to find a peer group where they can just talk about, how are you implementing this today? Then consider the end user community at CNCF. Anyone who doesn't sell cloud native products is welcome to join the end user groups, and these are vendor- free environments. You have private meetings where you just talk about real talk of what's going on, what to choose, or how to think about things. So I highly would recommend checking out the CNCF end user community.

Luke Schantz: That's awesome. And that's actually an aspect I wasn't aware of, and to echo that point, building your network, this is developer real talk, building your network, a lot of times technical folks, we can be really to ourselves, whether it's in the real events or in these virtual events and virtual communities, I must say the best advancements in my career, the best things that have happened in my life have not been through a random job application submission or through a post. It's been through building that network and getting to know people or like you're saying, getting plugged in at that level and finding out at the source, " Here's what's going on," and now a light bulb goes off and you know where to look.

Priyanka Sharma: Yeah, absolutely. You and I, we met at Open Source Summit, right? In Leon, I think?

Luke Schantz: Yeah.

Priyanka Sharma: And that was awesome. That was the beginning of a friendship, of knowing each other, and we've now talked multiple times in my different roles and it's been just such a fun journey because I'm like, " Oh, I know Luke and now I'm getting to know Joe," and you go from there. And I think that's the best thing about our ecosystem.

Luke Schantz: It's true. And I would also, to reflect back on the landscape, you can look at something like Cloud Native that seems so daunting, but really as you follow your interests, it does segment down and it's manageable communities within that, so-

Priyanka Sharma: Oh, totally.

Luke Schantz: Yeah.

Priyanka Sharma: Yeah, definitely. I think our structuring has been really good on that front because we have the special interest groups and the working groups, and they're very clear, right? inaudible networking and Kubernetes is talking about networking, a lot of times they're talking about service mesh stuff, et cetera. CNF Working Group is talking about cloud native network functions, which is very relevant to telcos. And so you can identify what's most important to you pretty quickly and go focus over there. And then what you'll find, it's interesting, is that you'll have some questions or things to consider that are being worked on in a different working group. So then you go talk to them and then you've just expanded your network. And this is how friendships are made, job opportunities come about. It's pretty cool how it all works out.

Luke Schantz: Which reminds me too, I wanted to bring up, make sure we mentioned DevStats, because I-

Priyanka Sharma: Yes.

Luke Schantz: This is the counterpart to the landscape where you can actually see the inner workings of who's working on what and what levels. So let's talk about that. I'm going to put it up on the screen.

Priyanka Sharma: Yes, please. Thank you. So DevStats is a great place to go and learn about the numbers behind all the cloud native community. So you see here on the screen, again I started pointing, sorry, that there was various projects and then what did you click into? Sorry, I missed that.

Luke Schantz: I clicked on Kubernetes. I thought that was a good one.

Priyanka Sharma: Yeah, no, so there's all this information over here, but key, by the way, you don't even have to use this dashboard, you can just use the APIs to programmatically get the information. If you actually go, scroll down if you don't mind, Luke, thank you. You can look, if you click on all CNCF. I give bad direction, I was going to say.

Luke Schantz: Oh, I can go back.

Priyanka Sharma: Yes. Sorry, sorry. Yeah, so you see here, there's database dumps available, and then there's the API. Again pointing, no one can see that, and it's documented. So you can just use this to get the information that you want to pull. And then there was this thing I wanted to show you. I always forget where it is, but I'm actually going to pull DevStats up on my computer, but you can check out over here by the numbers every day where, for example, is the community in terms of diversity even. So I'm going to tell you where it is in a second. So if you click on the all CNCF one, and then yeah, then scroll down. Yeah. So here are some pre- made dashboards to look at. So you can look, if you see here, you can see the contributor chart, you can see contributor map, and it tells you some really interesting numbers. And it's always up and to the right, which is quite nice. And there are ways to pull all time data as well, it's not shown here, but you can pull all time data. You can also, if you go back, you'll see number of countries represented, there's very much fun information here actually. Let's see. Countries would be, yeah, let's check that out. And so yeah, there you go. So you see, China we're seeing is number two, Germany is number three, India's number four, US is number one. So it's like all this information is at your fingertips. Anyone in the world, go check it out. So it can be pretty fun too.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, it's really cool. We're trying, at the OpenJS Foundation, to pull some inspiration from here to show similar stats for our projects and landscape.

Priyanka Sharma: Absolutely. And Joe, in general, anything we can do from the cloud native side to support the OpenJS Foundation, we'd love to.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, there are a lot of things that I would love to talk with you about. Maybe you and me and Robin and whomever.

Priyanka Sharma: Yes, I love Robin. She's so awesome.

Joe Sepi: She's wonderful. I love it when, I'll arrange meetings with IBM and the Foundation and the IBMers will talk about their team, and then Robin will talk about her team, and she always includes me in her team. That's really fun. But yeah, the diversity work that you all have been doing, we've been doing stuff on our end too. I'd love to get together and share notes on that. But also, the DevStats stuff too, for sure. It's great.

Priyanka Sharma: Absolutely.

Joe Sepi: Great, great, great.

Luke Schantz: So I wanted to mention the Slack channel as well. This goes obviously 365, 24/7, but for next week, for KubeCon, this is obviously a place that people are going to be. Instead of being in the hallway track, they're going to be in the-

Priyanka Sharma: inaudible hallway. Exactly.

Luke Schantz: This is the hallway track here. So definitely check that out. And let me bring up the link again for the shortened link for folks. It's easy enough to find through a web search, but here's an easy link for folks who may want to, still time to register. Please check it out. And I wanted to mention, we didn't have a question, but we have inaudible says, " Oh, hey, it's Priyanka. Cool," on Twitch. Oh, thank you, Joe. Joe brought it up on the screen.

Priyanka Sharma: Oh, that's cool. You can do that. That's nice.

Luke Schantz: Yeah, that's a new feature we discovered recently.

Priyanka Sharma: Okay. It's cool. All right. Well, it's been so fun.

Luke Schantz: Yeah, let's do it again maybe later in the year after some things happen, it'd be great to check back and hopefully, maybe we could even do it live from an actual KubeCon, that would be amazing.

Priyanka Sharma: Yes, KubeCon North America is in LA and it is, I think 11th to 15th of October, and it's expected, fingers crossed, all things proceeding as expected, to be a hybrid event with a real amount of people in person in LA. So let's aim for that for sure.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, for sure. I'm putting it on my calendar right now.

Luke Schantz: Excellent. All right, thank you so much. We really appreciate you being here.

Priyanka Sharma: Thank you so much for having me. It was awesome. Have a good one, folks.

Joe Sepi: Thank you. Cheers.

Priyanka Sharma: Bye.