Cloud Native Computing Foundation KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 - Virtual, 4 Sep 2020

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From YouTube: Kubernetes Steering Committee AMA

Description

Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming events: EnvoyCon Virtual on October 15 and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2020 Virtual from November 17-20. Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conferences feature presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.

Kubernetes Steering Committee AMA - Lachlan Evenson, Microsoft; Aaron Crickenberger, Google; Paris Pittman, Apple; Nikhita Raghunath & Davanum "Dims" Srinivas, VMware ; Derek Carr & Christoph Blecker, Red Hat

https://sched.co/cq9c

A

Hello and welcome how's everybody doing enjoying kubecon, it's wonderful to be here. We miss you very much. We miss you all very much, but I'm glad that we can be here on this virtual platform enjoying kubecon.

A

We've got a real treat in store for you right now. We have the kubernetes steering ama. So the way this session is going to work is we have all of steering here we're going to go through who we are as kubernetes steering what we do uh very briefly and then open it up for ama. So we ask that you all uh or any questions you have. Can you please place them in the q, a box or we'll also be monitoring the slack channel as well.

A

So there's a thread there in the two dash kubecon dash maintainer channel. Please feel free to ask any questions, and when we go to the ama section we will take those questions on. So thank you for being here. It's wonderful to see you all. We have all of steering here and let's get into it, so I'm going to pass it over to intros so who we are and what we do. I'll kick it off and then we'll go through the rest of the team here as all joining us, so my name is lachlan evenson.

A

I work for microsoft as a principal engineer at microsoft um and I've been on steering for the last few months uh and in the last few months we've been working hard and excited to share everything. We've been doing so you can find me at uh on number seven there lockheed83 on kubernetes slack. If you want to chat, I will pass it to kristoff.

B

Hi everyone, my name, is christoph blecker. I work for red hat, doing site, reliability, engineering work, I'm also a technical lead for the contributor experience, special interest group and I'm based out of british columbia, canada I'll pass it over to.

C

Derek hey everyone, I'm derek. I also work at red hat and I'm a distinguished engineer, uh working in product engineering.

C

um Also, uh I've been serving now- I guess my third year in steering and it's been fun and it's always a pleasure to meet both virtually and in person here and with that I will pass it on to dims.

D

Hear me I work for vmware, I live in boston and I help out with cig architecture and a few other things cross-cutting, six as well I'll pass it on to nikita.

E

Hey everyone, uh I'm nikita, I'm in india and I work at vmware with dems and I'm a co-technical lead, foster contributor experience with kristoff um with that paris.

F

And I think I think we ended here- hi everyone, I'm paris, I work at apple. I live in california. uh This is my first year on steering, I think, we're first completed here um and I'm just so happy to be here. I miss everybody. I wish we were on site right now, but um we're still happy to be here.

F

And lucky, I think that's it.

A

Yes, did we miss aaron as well.

G

It's fine, I I know I wasn't at the last kubecon, so uh hi, I'm aaron krickenberger. This is also my third year on steering I'm a chair of sig testing. I served as the 114 release lead and I'm organizing the kaitsin for working group alongside dims and bartsmikla, excited to be here lockheed back to you.

A

And I'm gonna quickly pass it back to nikita.

E

I already did the intro, but I can do it again, uh so I'm all the way in india work with them said we aware and uh with good technical lead with kristoff on contributor experience.

A

Wonderful. Wonderful! Thank you. So much and sorry about that. I had trouble keeping track, but that's okay! It's okay! Two intros are better than none fantastic. So next we're going to get into who we are and what we do. So I'm going to pass it back to dims dims. Take it away.

D

uh We are here for cloud native con kubecon, so we are technically you know linux foundation, cncf and then the kubernetes project comes under cncf and we are essentially the the steering committee is the one-stop shop uh for everything related to kubernetes when it comes to the legal structure and organization and stuff like that, so we have liaisons to cncf. We request funding, we work with them around trademarks and copyrights um and a whole bunch of other things. So back uh back to you lucky.

A

Thanks tims and next we're going to hand it to derek who's, going to show us a little bit about the organizational structure of kubernetes as a project I'll pass it to you, derek.

C

Thanks lucky so uh kubernetes has a grown to be a very big project now uh about five or six years into its lifecycle um and so within. Steering what we largely do is look to provide uh project-wide governance, but we aspire to delegate decision making to local interest groups uh as much as possible.

C

So the overall structure of uh interest groups, both domain, specific and horizontal, are largely overseen by the steering committee and then issues related to project-wide governance policies like code of conduct, etc, are largely uh driven out of steering or delegated to appropriate subcommittee.

C

Many folks, when they interact with kubernetes, actually never need to interact with steering, and that's actually a sign that I think we're doing a pretty good job in many cases, because we've delegated appropriately. So many folks who engage with the project might engage with a particular sub-project like the scheduler or the cubelet or api machinery, and each of these sub-projects tend to get sponsored by a higher order.

C

Special interest, group and special interest groups would be things like node or where you have a very domain specific uh interest, or you have horizontal groups who kind of uh keep the cross project structure wheels, going things like architecture or release, but within steering we're here to try to make sure that we can adjust the project structure to meet the present needs. And if you do find yourself needing to engage with us, we're always happy to help, learn and adjust on what we can do better in the community.

C

I will pass it back to you lucky.

A

Thank you derek, so we did actually place the link. You can see it there at the bottom. If you want to reference that diagram, it's a great diagram to print out and have on your wall as you're, interacting with the kubernetes community. So you can find the right place to engage for whatever you need or whatever way, you'd like to contribute. Thank you for derek next we're going to move to nikita and we have a few items that we've been working on um the past few months.

A

So nikita is going to give us an update there I'll pass it to nikita.

E

Hey um so we've been working on a bunch of cool stuff, uh so one big change that we've rolled out uh last month was requiring unconscious bias, training for all sick chairs and technically it's we understand that a third human trading isn't gonna eliminate bias completely, but we hope that this is going to be a first step towards at least identifying the languages and behaviors that could be problematic uh for proliferating. This bias.

E

um The other thing that we work on is uh running the court of conduct committee elections, so we did that this month uh and congratulations to karen tim and celeste for winning the election and joining the committee and big thanks to trace jennifer and carolyn for all that time. On the crew of conduct committee, uh one of my really favorite things that we've been working on is the steering committee liaison.

E

Certainly uh so, each community group, like six working groups and user groups, are assigned a steering committee point of contact and the point of contact is used um to like for everything uh and they basically act as a main uh feedback loop for maintaining the group's health and could be used for something like reshaping project priorities or identifying problem areas and celebrating wins. uh We also have something very cool about annual reports, but paris is going to go into detail about that after this.

E

uh Something else that we've been looking into is improving our uh steering meeting structure to make sure that we're using we're consistently using the raise hand, feature in zoom time, boxing discussions and making sure we don't really have that loudest voice in the room kind of a thing um so yeah. These are some of the cool things that we've been doing these days and back to you lucky.

A

Thanks nikita, as you can see, you know we're very active in the community taking steps to help grow it. So thank you for sharing that with everybody nikita excellent uh next we're gonna move on uh and aaron's gonna share a lot about sigs and the scope of the project so I'll pass it to aaron. Thank you.

A

G

G

G

Non-Hierarchy, it's sort of made up of a bunch of non-hierarchical groups. There are many different areas you within which you can contribute. We try to have some sense of organization. Not all groups are the same. uh Some of them focus on deep verticals, like you know, node or networking or storage, whereas others are more horizontal across the project cross, cutting concerns like api machinery or multi-cluster, and then you have things that are more trying to set project policy like architecture release or testing or contributor experience.

G

Working groups are things that sort of span, multiple sakes and then committees, as derek pointed out earlier, are points of escalation. uh So the other important point here is for every single one of these boxes. There are about two or three people who would be happy to chat with you about. What's going on in that area of the project back to you, lucky.

A

Excellent, thank you aaron, and so, as you can see, the project is massive and scales out. There are many different functions inside the kubernetes project, committees, uh sigs working groups, so in order to actually manage the scaling and making sure that all those different parts of the kubernetes project are managed well and taken care of we're actually introduced annual reports, which paris is going to take us through over to you.

F

Hi everyone, so this year, one of the major initiatives that we've been working on is annual reports, uh as aaron showed you with that diagram. We have 37 groups. uh That is a ton to keep up with. We also have a monthly community meeting where our groups have been giving 10 minute updates, but after after a while things start to accumulate and updates, become a massive uh and our end, users are wondering how they can find out information about individual groups on a certain cadence. So we've introduced this concept of annual reports.

F

Other open source projects that run very large scale distributed groups like we do have very similar structures as well, and this will actually unfold for most special interest groups uh in january of 2021.

F

uh We're actually rolling it out right now, as we speak to our working groups, because our working groups are a little bit more temporary in nature anyway, so it makes sense to kind of roll things out with them first, um so we're working out some of the process there with them too.

F

We actually have already had two working groups that are about to kind of roll down and think about what their roll down process looks like now that we've kind of engaged with them to see you know what their community needs are, as nikita mentioned, the liaison bit is a big part of this, because we're really trying to make further connections within our ever-growing community and, as things spread wider and wider, it's really important for us to just hone in on what's working and what's not in some of these groups and really help out uh in a more proactive fashion.

F

um But that's about it lockheed back to you.

A

Thank you, paris. Now, a hot topic, that's happening in the community right now. We're going to have kristoff. Take us through our steering committee elections, I'll pass it to kristoff.

B

So the seven of us here were all elected out of the community to steering um we had a couple years ago, a bootstrap process that kind of kicked off and as we developed and figured out how to govern a project, the size of kubernetes.

B

So at this point all seven of us are actually elected from the community um to to have a seat on steering and to um contribute our voices to to the discussions and such that we're we're talking about um the election process for 2020 uh has actually kicked off. It kicked off about a week ago, or so um so there right now we're in the um nomination period.

B

uh There is uh details in the links there about um where to go, to to nominate somebody or self-nominate to to run on the um for the kubernetes hearing committee. What the criteria is to be able to vote.

B

This nomination period closes on september, the 8th uh and then uh mid-september around the 14th, or so the ballots will end up going out uh for this year's election. So if you're interested in learning either how to nominate somebody or checking if you're eligible to vote in this year's election, please check out those links. A lockheed back to you.

A

Thank you kristoff, so I'm just going to go through how you can connect with steering. So we have a couple of different forums. If you're in the kubernetes slack there is the steering dash committee channel, please feel free to go over there and ask any questions you have of us or of steering we monitor that channel. So thank you uh mailing lists. We have both a public and a private mailing list for conversations to start or different things that you might want to raise with steering, and then we have meetings.

A

So we have public meetings on the first monday at 11 a.m: u.s, pacific time you are welcome to join. We publish an agenda there. If you have any items you'd like to add to that agenda, please feel free and we'll um slot them into subsequent meetings. We also publish a youtube playlist as well from all past meetings. So if you have a topic that you're interested to learn more about or how decisions were made, all those decisions are posted publicly on the youtube playlist.

A

I will find a link to that and you can obviously file an issue upstream using the kubernetes steering github repository, so they are just different ways. You can interact with us and obviously we're all around as well as individuals. If you want to find us on kubernetes, so we'd encourage you to come talk to us and we'd love to connect you into the kubernetes community and hear from how the community is working uh with them for you.

A

So there are different ways you can find us now we're going to move over to a time of ama. So I'm again going to ask that people enter questions in the q, a box. So any questions that you might have about anything you just learned or anything about the kubernetes community, whether you're a long-time contributor or a brand new contributor, we'd love to answer your questions and we also have in the maintainer channel of the kubecon eu slack a place there to ask questions that we'll be monitoring as well.

A

So we're gonna put everybody up on screen um and I have a question here already. So we should see everybody roll in wonderful. You can see all of us fantastic, okay, excellent, so I am going to read out the question we have here, hello.

A

Okay, what do you know now that you didn't know when you started on the steering committee and what advice do you give people based on what you've learned.

A

Anybody like to dive in go, get, go ahead, aaron and then and then perish.

G

So so I is his people. First and foremost, I got introduced to the project just sort of trying to contribute code and uh make things better that way, but I very quickly realized that there are a bunch of people who care very deeply about what we do and how we do it and that, in order to effectively get real things accomplished, involved or better or for worse talking to people, uh but it turned out to be not such a scary thing, I think, being able to interact with the community really quickly slack or asynchronously.

G

Yet discuss or you know, having a chat on issues or pull requests was incredibly helpful, and so, although sometimes it was really intimidating, the level of scrutiny my code might get or the level of feedback. My suggestions for change might receive.

G

I quickly realized it all came from a place of people. Caring and the most important thing to do was to figure out. How could we like make incremental progress uh and move forward and uh yeah? That's that's the advice that I would give.

A

Thank you. Yeah go ahead. Paris.

F

um I was gonna say that um not everything that comes to steering needs an answer right away: I'm coming from a community back a community manager background and I'm very used to giving or finding solutions very quickly. um Some of the problems that come to us are a little bit more ambiguous in nature. That's why they're here!

F

That's why they're coming to us- uh and I think that asking for context and getting more context and doing more digging is actually very much required for this position, uh and I think that, like my listening skills too, have also um have also you know, I don't want to say improved, but.

C

E

F

Like they also have improved as well, because when you take uh when you take different types of public service positions, I feel like uh listening is like one of the first and foremost skills that uh that you should have and and try to strive to be better with uh and I've. Definitely I feel like have been working on that um tremendously over the last year. uh So I think that um not everything needs to to have an answer right away and listening are two takeaways for me.

A

Thank you, paris, uh derrick hattie's hand. Are you okay to go up to? Are you going to go after.

C

Peter as well, that's fine um near me.

C

I would strongly echo what paris just said, like um I think, prior to my own participation in steering, I think, there's a lot of um uh maybe different perceptions on what the role is versus the reality, and I think the key thing with role like steering is um it's a position and a body that has a lot of power and like all power, it's best used um responsibly and that key importance on like acting responsibly requires like not necessarily the greatest rate, and so sometimes, I think, even within the steering committee- and this is kind of like the second and a half steering body.

C

I've started with like partly with the bootstrap and then this new election. um uh We often look back and question well what we accomplished. What did we get done and um sometimes there's ways you can look at that and say like oh well, uh we could have done so much more, but I think there's actually value to like uh changes happening at a rate that a community of our size can digest um and not causing rapid churn just to keep stability in place.

C

And so um we deal with a lot of people who engage with kubernetes on a part-time basis as well as a full-time basis and like making massive changes around how a project is structured actually can hamper that engagement and so to me, like I'm, most proud, where we can make small subtle tweaks in steering that can have large impacts, um and I would say, like the experience the last three years has kind of shown that that's um uh what's been most surprising to me.

A

uh Dive in nikita.

E

Yeah, I was just gonna say that uh when I joined steering, I wasn't aware of like I knew that there were going to be ambiguous problems to solve. But I wasn't aware how, like the range of ambiguous problems that would need to be solved like it's, not just like conflict resolution or process oriented, uh there's a ton about like public public relations or marketing, also that I've learned here.

E

uh So I think one piece of advice that I'd have to understand what kind of problems that we'd be solving is also just to attend public steering committee meetings that we have to get an idea of what we are solving, how we solve it and what goes on.

A

Go for our dims.

D

uh I think uh direct covered both the points that I was going to make, but uh I just want to add a little bit color to it. um So we have a position uh in this committee. uh We have a lot of power for sure, and we can. We need to make sure that we use it wisely um and best not to use it, um especially when it comes to the people that we are governing, as well as the things that we can do in the larger ecosystem.

D

Kubernetes is a extremely important project right now, um so we have to keep it going and we have to figure out ways to make sure that we can use the long tail of people who are helping out and make sure that they are able to um help, make changes to kubernetes and keep that going. The other one that I wanted to poke at was.

D

um We are constantly evolving right um so and we have the the syrian committee has the ability to make changes and how the community works, uh how we interact with cncf and whatnot. So uh there's a lot of context and history that we should understand or try to understand, so we always rely on people who have been in steering before and who are currently serving, but you know have more context. So we try to learn.

D

You know what what happened, how it happened, why it happened and try to understand the background of the problem well before like move fast and break things uh kind of uh approach. uh So the incremental progress, uh like derek said, is definitely an important part of it as well. um Back to you lucky.

A

Excellent did anybody else? uh Did everybody have an opportunity to answer? I think we're? Okay! Oh oh.

B

B

So something I didn't know or realize, prior to joining, steering so prior to joining, steering I've been involved with a lot of uh horizontal um sigs and working groups, and things like um contributor experience and testing and attending sick architecture meetings, and things like that. Those are some great ways to follow like bigger picture ideas that are going on the project, but prior to steering and really like digging into the breadth and width of the kubernetes project.

B

There is so much going on and it is hard to keep track of it all um the thing that I learned there is just like the where there's so much real work being done in all these little sub projects, all over that are incrementally making the project better moving it along just inches at a time, and we have to move it. Those little small incremental pieces along in small incremental pieces, because it's such a large project. That's that's! That's moving!

B

That's trying to move forward and trying to move forward in a way that is um not going to break folks um but try and continue to bring value to what core kubernetes is um and yeah you. Don't you don't really know unless you kind of go out and seek, um and, and you know so the thing that I, the advice that I would give is maybe attend a meeting that you wouldn't normally attend uh like go check out a sig that you haven't.

B

You haven't checked out before, even if it's not something that is very obviously on the surface. Interesting to you, there's probably some really cool things happening that uh that you didn't that you didn't know about, and it's a great way to learn about all the different things that are going on in the project.

A

Excellent. Thank you all. We have another question here. uh What have the biggest challenges been for steering in 2020.

B

um Well, there's a couple fairly obvious ones uh for, for example, uh moving to entirely virtual and missing out on some of the like in-person meetings and sessions and and collaboration that we would normally have um you know, most of the time, like kubernetes being a global community, we're fairly remote most of the time anyways and we're collaborating with folks all over the world. So in in some in some ways things haven't changed, but also it still has made a big impact like you know whether.

C

B

Changed your day-to-day. It's made kind of this impact on everybody being able to like have the headspace even to be able to like okay, I need to like go to meetings. I need to to to um still do pr reviews.

B

I still need to like do do all these things, as our lives have been changing around us uh outside of the specific things that we might do with kubernetes, and you know even doing this session, like I miss y'all and I'm eager for the opportunity for when we we get to kind of come back together and be able to work in person, because you know there's some things that you just can't necessarily do virtually.

B

So that to me is like one of the biggest most obvious problems that we've we've been trying to tackle, steering and figure out. You know what are tweaks we need to make in the in the community. Like um you know, at one point, we sent out a message saying hey: if you need to like cancel or postpone or like change. Your meeting schedule around, like that's okay, like adapt to what our contributors end up needing um as opposed to forcing everybody into a rigid schedule of okay.

B

You still need to have your meetings in in you know a perfect cadence and such.

A

I think I saw derek I'll pass it to derek and then I saw dimms's hand too.

C

Yeah, I would say, like um I feel it's important here as the steering committee body like to say that the challenges that everyone feels we feel- and so I think uh kristoff did a great way of communicating that to me, I think the biggest challenge and the biggest growth I've seen in cube as a project this year is just kind of um I've noticed that we've become more uh empathetic towards each other, like we all feel like we're we're living through a uniquely interesting time.

C

Even as I'm speaking here, I was joking with our colleagues that my daughters might come rushing in at any moment during this presentation, and that would be both cool and weird at the same time.

C

So um I think in general it's been healthy, that uh as the project matures, we also kind of emotionally mature and kind of grow, our empathy towards uh our contributors and our peers, who may have less time uh and an energy to invest than they might have normally, and that gives opportunity and space for new uh fresh blood to uh infuse the project with new ideas and energies.

C

So I actually think it's uh been a challenge and a blessing and for those who are wanting to engage like try to see if you can find gaps to fill- and um this is a great time to to kind of ask somebody hey what can I do to help out because um everybody's struggling to to meet the present needs.

D

um So one one thing that I don't know people feel or not. We have to listen a lot. We have to listen to uh people in the community. We have to listen to people outside our community. We listen to what's happening in the news, uh twitter, uh anything related to kubernetes. We we try to talk about it. We try to analyze, what's happening where and why and is there something we can do when you say things like okay, some sig is not very responsive or some pr's are not getting merged.

D

Some owners files are, uh you know, not up to date, so there is a problem, so all the problems that you can think of, we do think about them. So it's it's. How much we can do what we can do and when we can do governs uh you know. So, if, if you feel that we are not listening, uh please believe me. We are trying and please do bring it to our notice. um Even if you are not able to do something about it right away, we'll uh try to make sure that we put it.

D

uh We put enough thought into it as as a team and get back to you one way or another, and and try to make progress over a period of time. So please be patient with us and we are really trying here back to you lucky.

A

Thank you very much. Did anybody else want to respond to this.

A

Question we have one more question here and I think that'll round out our time. uh What do you see as the biggest challenges for kubernetes going forward?

A

Did you want to uh paris or nikita.

F

Nikita take it.

A

E

Yeah, I think sustainability is the biggest one. uh We have the problem about not having.

A

Enough reviews.

E

uh Not having enough approvals and uh not having enough responsive approvals is like a very big challenge for us, and also our project is very skewed towards people who can contribute full-time over part-time. So I think figuring out a process where we can enable people who even work part-time or just can contribute like a few hours to it per week is something we need to figure out. We're trying to work towards that. But I think we still need to do a lot of work to get that rolling.

E

F

um Plus one in in true kubernetes fashion looks good to me. um Aaron.

G

uh You'll be shocked to hear as chair of sig testing, I feel like the project has a lot of challenges uh in its test code base. It is extremely painful to contribute to kubernetes at times because tests you didn't write are failing, um and I think, that's sort of a tragedy of the commons problem that we definitely need uh help with. I think that it aligns with the steering committee's challenge of how do we encourage people to do the right thing, as opposed to trying to force people to do something right so anyway,.

D

So sometimes when you look at it from sorry somebody else.

A

D

A

D

You when you look at it from outside, it seems like there's a lot of people working on a lot of things within kubernetes, but we still really need you. What you bring to the table is really important and we could use your help, even if it is a simple taking notes. uh Doing writing some documentation. Writing some tests. Whatever you can do, we will take it with uh you know with you know with great uh humility. So please, please do try from your side what, whatever you can be doing.

A

Excellent, thank you so much. That concludes this session. I want to thank everybody uh for showing up and asking these wonderful questions, and I want to thank steering uh for actually taking the time to meet with the community and answer their questions. The conversation doesn't have to stop here. I know we'll all be in the slack. uh The kubecon eu slack channel so feel free to join us and ask any questions there, but we thank you for joining. Have a wonderful kubecon cloudnativecon eu enjoy the virtual experience.

A

As I know, I am and we'll see you all in the community. Thank you very much. Bye, bye.