KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2021 Keynote: Welcome to Cloud Native, We're here to Help - Vaibhav Kamra, Kasten by Vee

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2021 Keynote: Welcome to Cloud Native, We're here to Help - Vaibhav Kamra, Kasten by Veeam - October 29, 2021

Thank you, Stephen. Good morning, hello, everyone. I'm so excited to be here. My name is Vaibhav Kamra. I'm at Kasten by Veeam where we focus on backup, disaster recovery, and data management.  

I want to take a few minutes, today, to talk to you about some of the challenges we see new users in cloud native facing and what we, as a community, and what we, specifically as Kasten are doing to help. 

So, our community continues to grow. We've heard about this over the last few days and there are many ways to measure this. One way to measure this, for example, is KubeCon attendance. But what's often missed when you look at one of these graphs -- or at least, you got to look into it -- is that if we're seeing this kind of growth, what that means is, a majority of us every year are new to cloud native. And that is leading to some of the challenges, as with anything with scales, you're going to see some challenges with this kind of growth. 

So, when we talk to folks, here at lunch, or at the booth or with customers or inside our own companies, and we ask them what the challenges are, there are a few things that start to bubble up. 

The first one is just the complexity. I mean, we've talked about how much choice there is within cloud native, but that can also lead to complexity - which distribution am I going to use? Which storage system, which plug in? That leads to complexity. 

We're often not just adopting these new technologies, but going through a cultural change, moving from IT to DevOps and when some says infrastructure-as-code, if we're not doing that already, it can be challenging. The lack of access to help guide us through this starts to show up.  

So, the news is that what you will see, here, at this event and at other forums, is that we really are all here to help with this. We do realize the challenge and there are many ways to get involved. Like the SIGs we were just talking about, getting involved with open source, open-source tooling, just making your expertise available to the community are ways to go about this. I want to talk about two initiatives over here. 

The first one is Learning.kasten.io, it's free Kubernetes training that we just released a few days ago. It's a learning website where you go, and you have labs that are created for the community by the community. So, experts in the community are coming in there, they're creating these hands-on labs environments that are completely free to take.  

As you go through the modules, you're going to get badges that you can use to track your progress, you can put them on social media. What we've already seen in just a few days that it's been up there, is that we've had over 3,500 people go through this, go through the labs, and we're already starting to see some of that community flywheel where people are going through the labs, and they want to give back to the ecosystem.   

So this allows you to come in - if you want to be an instructor, if you want to build a lab, work with our team, and we'll just create a lab around whatever module you want. So, we're really excited about this, please do check this out. 

The other one I wanted to quickly talk about is something we’ve been working on for the last few months and we’ve had a few releases go out there. This goes back to that complexity of choice challenge and what we found was, we were working with people and helping them navigate the ecosystem, they would ask us, what ecosystem should we use? We took that expertise and codified it into an open source solution called Kubestr.  

Kubestr is a collection of tools. It allows you to discover all the different storage solutions out there. What are the different capabilities that are available to you. Actually, when you install something in your environment, it will let you go test it, benchmark it and then finally as you’re deploying your applications, we’re now adding debugging capabilities in here. So if you want to go debug your applications, use the tool, it will give you a clone and you can go debug your application. Do check this out, especially if you’re using storage and trying to navigate that ecosystem I think this is going to be a great tool and we’re always looking for contributors, so do check it out. 

So that’s really what I wanted to mention. There’s a link there that lists all of the resources. We are also demoing all of these at our booth and would love to get hands-on with you on these projects. Thank you so much, have a great, great conference.