Now what? Beyond Kubernetes and Cloud Native | Kelsey Hightower

[Kelsey:] How many people want to be here? [Laughter from the audience] A lot of conferences your boss sends you, are like, - go to this conference, I've paid for it already. The last time I got asked this question - about the future of our industry or software, I decided to retire. 42 years old, I had surfed a lot of the waves, the DevOps wave, - configuration management wave, the container wave, - the Golang wave, the Kubernetes wave. I thought they wouldn't stop. There's the saying that it's not a race, it's a marathon, - and that's wrong. You can't run forever. It's a relay race. You need to figure out how to pass something off to someone else. Usually that someone else needs mentoring. Ideally you do that in a way that they get a running start. You don't want to pass the baton when you're dead tired. So at 42, I decided that I still had - a lot left in me, but I would pass the baton. I'm lucky my daughter is one of those people to receive it. She's 17, she's in college for computer science. She texts me all the time; Dad, I love this database class I'm taking. I remind her to keep that energy. You're going to need it, because it's going to be your turn - to run really, really quickly. She does ask me questions. Is this industry still going to be worth going to school for? I have to be honest with her and say, I don't know. Things change all the time. She asks, what should I do? I say, well, - the people who do the best at predicting the future are the ones who work on it. Everybody else is just guessing. That's it. The people building things decide. You wait on them. You can nudge the future, do bug reports, you can complain on the internet, - but it's the people who look at that stuff that actually fix it, they decide. So I've told her that she should learn how to build things so she could decide. She could probably create a job for herself - if she thought the situation was dire. I thought about how I would answer the question, what's the future? The truth is, I don't know. But if I was being very honest, I actually don't care. People say, what? It's very liberating not to care. I think any idea has a shot. I say to a lot of startup founders that anything can work at this point. Execution matters more than anything else. It's the part where I help them solve their own Rubik's Cube - that still has me excited. Whether they solve it or not, whether you like the way they solved it, - is less interesting to me these days. Instead of answering the question, - I'm going to show you my thought process - that I've used over the last two decades of being in this industry. I think it's more useful than me guessing like the rest of them. I'm going to leave a lot of time for Q&A. For the first time in my career, I have nothing to sell you. [Laughter from the audience] I work for no one where it matters what I say, - so you're going to get the most transparent version of Kelsey ever. What I've noticed a lot in the industry is, people... have you ever seen kids play – you call it football here, right? Soccer, that's what we call it in the States. But have you seen kids play soccer? What do they do? They all chase the ball - at the same time, and they just cluster together. All the coaches on the sideline, what the hell are they doing? No strategy, no matter how many games they watch, - no matter what you try to tell them, - their natural instinct is to go where the ball is. I look at grown people in the enterprise, they do exactly the same thing. Any new idea that comes out, they all pretty much run to the same ball. You can't miss it. This thing is coming, you don't want to be a laggard. Then they all run to the same ball. Wow, they've been doing this this long, - and they still don't understand the strategy. I remember, it was around 2004, the MapReduce paper came out. - the whole idea around big data. Some people read the paper and get super excited, oh, this is the future. We read these white papers as if they provide a peek into something to chew on, - we had an extreme amount of power for the last 30 to 40 years. We got away with a lot. I think our field is starting to mature to a point where things will change. So, stay excited. I do think that it will change. This will be taken way more seriously. I, on purpose, left 20 minutes, because the Q&A section is always my favourite. Any question is fair game, I have nothing to sell you - and I promise thorough and honest answers. This is the end of the presentation part before we move on to the Q&A. Thank you. [The audience applauds] [From the the audience:] Hello. On your last point, I'm interested to get your view on - enterprises or large organizations that have - concerns about regulation and the legalities of using open source. Do you see OSPOs being an integral part of how they address that? [Kelsey:] I worked in financial services and when I got there, - I thought, this is the big leagues. There are audits and there's all this compliance. I watched the worst security practices in the world - get a rubber stamp, so they could do business. I don't know if auditors are enough anymore. Most auditors will relax standards so that people can do business. To me, these days, it's more like due diligence. I did enough. We've created a checklist. We bought vendors a product. We used it based on their documentation. Not solely my fault. When I was at Google, this did come up. What if we told the world how bad it was? The problem is, no one has a solution. There's no solution right now. Right now it's like red, yellow, green, make it turn green, right? If it turns green, that's enough to get the due diligence stamp. You are secure as far as you know it. But we know that's not security. That's compliance. The security practice now will involve, - at least on the sovereignty level, who are you? I think that 'who are you' will inform ourselves that - do we even want this software? This is why Red Hat is so successful. Red Hat provides a little bit of t