Kubernetes Usability Special Interest Group, 22 Nov 2019

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From YouTube: SIG Usability: Intro and How to Get Started - Tasha Drew, VMware

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SIG Usability: Intro and How to Get Started - Tasha Drew, VMware

SIG Usability is a new SIG focused on the core end-user usability of the Kubernetes project. This covers topics like user experience and accessibility. The goal of SIG Usability is to facilitate adoption of the Kubernetes project by as diverse a community of end users as possible. We do this be ensuring that each end user’s interaction with Kubernetes, from discovery to successful production use is seamless and positive. Examples of efforts include user research, internationalization and accessibility. Join us at this session to learn about the SIG, what we've been up to, and how to get involved as a new contributor!

https://sched.co/Uaii

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Okay, I know it's still 224 and 30 seconds, but I'm gonna call it and get started so hi everybody I'm Tasha, drew I'm a co-chair for the sake usability. This is an intro session. I do see a bunch of really friendly faces. Who I know are very involved in cig usability. Already? Is anyone here new to the cig structure or hasn't been to a cig usability meeting before awesome yeah?

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So this is really intended to be an overview of what we're doing with cig usability and how to get started so I'll go over some basics and then also go over some of the basics of some projects that we're working on right now in case there's anything people are interested in starting to contribute to, and we do have some of the leads of some of those projects here which is awesome, and so, if we have some extra time at the end, if you have any questions or want to dive into anything, we can absolutely do that.

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So why did we start? Cig usability is kind of so Ross, the great Ross, COO, kolinsky I'm. Sure everyone here has read him before, but he said in cute. Kubernetes is infrastructure. Software made by infrastructure engineers for infrastructure, engineers and I think that we can all really empathize with this statement, but looking at kubernetes and how it is today.

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It's sometimes really hard for people to get started, and so look thinking about how we can make that better and how we can make sure that we understand that the people using kubernetes may not be sort of those infrastructure. Engineers who really specialize in kubernetes anymore about people who are trying to get other jobs done using kubernetes as a platform is something that we really want to look into.

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So last year, at koukin you Xavier, salver and from bitNami, did a really interesting overview where he went through Stack Overflow and looked at all of the questions being asked about kubernetes and then bucketed them into different buckets, and then he and bitNami could start to figure out what people were really struggling with and start to provide tools, services and document to improve that.

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But, as part of his deep dive into into the over stackoverflow data, he came up with sort of what he thought, kubernetes as a project needed to do and I highlighted in purple kind of his call to action, which was, should we start a special interest group and user experience, and this is an idea- that's been floating around the project for a couple years now we had Matt Farina, who runs cig apps, say it just hit me that kubernetes has no cig UX, and that says a lot about how we got to where we are.

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As far as UX goes, and then this article is actually just from a few days ago in bold font, UX is kubernetes biggest short-term challenge, and there were a couple. Choice quotes in here from various people complaining about kubernetes on twitter and they stack. Oh sorry, new stack also did a highly scientific poll with a hundred respondents that shows that admin operator and developer experience is one of the top areas the kubernetes project needs to address in 2020.

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So with all of this kind of ramping up as we look at the kubernetes project, I I guess we kind of got here in an interesting way, so we have started a new sig, and that is the sig that I'm here to talk to you about today. It's sig, usability and kind of there was a lot of people, seeing that this was probably something that we needed to start really focusing on as an open source project. But the way this kicked off was I had a really simple request.

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I wanted to ask if we at VMware could possibly partner with the community to start having uniform iconography, and it turned out that no one knew even where I should go to answer that question, and so a couple different SIG's got involved and started. Saying oh, like we should start a sub project. Let's do this: let's do that and then we had the dev mailing list to propose our sub project and one of the creators of kubernetes brandon burns came back and was like.

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Actually, I've wanted us to have a cig that focuses on experience for a really long time, he's especially passionate about accessibility in the project, and he wants to make sure that we're focusing on making it accessible for everybody. And so, after a lot of conversation, we kicked it off. I got ratified, and now we have same usability. So that's awesome, but we're a brand new sig, and what that really means is that we have to chart our own path about what we're going to do.

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There's a ton of opportunity I think it's also a really cool opportunity for people who may not be traditional contributors to kubernetes to get involved. It's a place where we can both have developers and infrastructure engineers, but also start to open it up to designers, user researchers and everybody who can look at the project and say: okay, how can I get started as a contributor I think that this is really a space that we can open it up to more and more people.

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So that being said, we have now sig usability for people who aren't acquainted with contributing to kubernetes. We have four chairs, so there's me: there's Valerie, there's Raji and there's Himanshu who's here today and also Himanshu brought our cig usability button. So if anyone wants a cig usability button to sort of show your pride in usability and the kubernetes print yeah, please grab one from him, but the way to get started with cig usability is that we have a home page.

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We have a repo and kubernetes sig for us to start collaborating as we build stuff out, but the the best way to really start getting started is to join the Google group, and this applies to every second working group. If you join the Google group, you can just go to groups at google and type in kubernetes sig usability.

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That gives you access to all of our calendar appointments and all of our conversations as a group, and then it becomes very easy to kind of figure out what we're doing get the links to the meeting notes and then also get the links to our github repos. So I would suggest that we have every three weeks meeting that everyone's super welcome at and we do videotape those meetings for people who want to check them out later. So you know join the mailing list, hop on a meeting and we would love to chat with you.

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I'm gonna go I'm. Gonna now spend some time just kind of going over some of the projects that we've been stuck and everyone is super- welcome to say, hey. This is something I'm interested in I'd really like to participate and also look at our Docs. So first, what we're looking at is understanding the users of kubernetes. So right now, a lot of the different vendors and the kubernetes space are spending a lot of time.

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Doing user research doing design for their core customers and understanding how their core customers want to use kubernetes, we want to have that be part of an upstream process where we define some user research initiatives that the community should take on and fund and then do that to better understand the users of kubernetes. So, from my perspective, I think optimizing.

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The new user experience is really important and we can't optimize the new user experience unless we are tracking it and unless we are really understanding who's coming to us and what jobs are they trying to get done when they come to us and how can we make sure that they can get the answers quickly to the questions that they have, so they can take the next step and so like? How are we just optimizing that entire technology adoption cycle? So we also want to understand and I know.

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People usually talk about this in a sass terminology, but are we turning users right? Like are people like okay, I heard about this kubernetes thing? It's really cool, and then they come to our site and they just get frustrated and run away right like and if that's true, you know why and like how can we make it better? So we need to really have a more holistic understanding of rough edges.

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Users are running into and then we also need to start understanding who's using kubernetes as kubernetes becomes more and more ubiquitous, there's more and more people trying to accomplish different things, so there's application developers who are trying to automate their application behavior using the kubernetes control plane, who may not care about other aspects of the system and who may be very different from the traditional infrastructure operators who are coming to kubernetes at the beginning.

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Additionally, the infrastructure operators who are coming to us may not be as we gain more more users may not be from super hip cloud native deployment shops. They might be more traditional virtualized infrastructure users who need who understands architecture a little differently and may need us to simply provide different organization to our Doc's. So these are all things that we're looking at and things that we're actively sort of investigating and I'll go into a couple of the different projects that we've been scoping out.

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So you can check out the docs and kind of add your feedback and ideas to them. So one thing that we have been talking about that we haven't really moved forward on, but that we feel very passionately would be excellent, for the kubernetes project is doing an inclusive design initiative. Microsoft has a really great inclusive design page where they explain how they approach as an organization designing all of their products so that it is an ink so that their products are accessible for people.

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Usable for people who may be coming from many different backgrounds have different speeds of Wi-Fi like all kinds of stuff so like. How can we make sure when we ship a product that this design is inclusive of many different needs? So in some ways you need to recognize how products have been historically exclusive.

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You also need to solve for many people, and then you need to learn from diversity, and so Microsoft has put together this page, where you can go and see all of the tenants of their design process, and we would like to do that in an open-source way for kubernetes, so that anyone who is designing something for the kubernetes community can come to this site and understand the guidelines that we're providing to them so that they're doing it in an inclusive way.

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Another thing that we've been working on is a kubernetes user survey proposal and gabby moreno csr has been working on this and she's sitting in the back, and you know we are happy to talk about this in more detail later, but the link is online.

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So if you go to our Google Docs page and all of these links are available in the meeting notes that you'll get sent the link to if you join the Google group, so it's Turtles on top of turtles, but you can find stuff and we also have a links page on our github.

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But basically what we're looking at with this is: let's gather quantitative data on our end user community: let's recruit users for future qualitative studies and start having people that we can start reaching out to as we're starting to better understand different pockets of our community and let's also build awareness of sig usability.

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We think that we know that there was a ton of interest when we launched this project just because of the reactions we got from the mailing list, and so we want to make sure that we are that people are aware of the work, we're doing the progress, we're making and kind of build a ramp towards more and more successful interactions with the rest of the kubernetes project.

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What we'd like to do as part of this user survey that is really in a in a really nice draft form right now, is identify top tasks that end-users do with kubernetes inform top barriers to adoption and successful production use also inform our persona development. So right now we know that the people who maintain kubernetes are super users and maintainer zuv kubernetes. But do we understand the users of kubernetes who are not the maintainer Xand?

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How are they different and what are they trying to do and can we develop some personas that we all, then think about as we're developing different tools and services?

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We'd also like to start engaging end users who are not necessarily involved in the community and making sure that they know that we have you know the strong community effort and that we'd like to hear from them and that we really value their user experience as they use our tools and services and then we'd like to present those results, obviously in a very open forum, probably at a coop con, but also as part of our regular meetings.

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Another proposal that we've been working on is a jobs to be done. A proposal, so jobs to be done is a methodology for how you, so that's a little bit differently different than the traditional persona driven development. So the idea is, instead of making up these carefully crafted personas with names that we then sort of say well. What would Bob do in this situation and we all kind of like feel like we have a relationship with them.

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Let's think about what jobs are our users trying to do and really focus it on it from that perspective? So what we want to understand is how kubernetes fits into what users hope to achieve and really understand their end goal, and so by breaking their desired outcome into measurable steps. We can then provide statistically significant results on the areas that have the most opportunity to be improved within the kubernetes project. So the big questions that we want to kick off with are who are the main users of kubernetes? What are they trying to achieve?

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How does kubernetes fit into it? How will they go about doing so, and then what are our top opportunities for improving the project, and then this proposal is also totally open for comment. If anyone would like to check- and all these slides are also up on the event page in PDF, so you can just click on the links.

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Himanshu has been working on a cap for coop, cuddle events and so coop cuddle get events is a command that you can use within the kubernetes CLI. It does have some limitations, so there's a backlog of feature. Requests of what people would like out of this event feature that we haven't been able to implement because of some architectural restrictions on how get events itself was written so right now, any modification to watch functionality for events also changes watch for coop cuddle gap, which is a very widely used command.

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Since events is dependent of get so being able to extend, have extended behavior for the watch commands, it becomes very difficult to implement. So he has a cap out that basically lays out this usability problem with the events command and then is getting a lot of feedback on how we can provide these updates to it. So this is an open cap that he presented at one of our meetings that were seeing a lot of good interest in.

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Finally, one of our other co-chairs Valerie, who will be presenting on this in depth this evening, has been working on security by default or sorry. Tomorrow afternoon, it's been working on security by default. This touches on work that a lot of other SIG's and working groups have also been thinking about, but when I spin up a kubernetes cluster right now, when we look at current formants checks and everything in order to sign off on a cluster is completely confirm it with upstream kubernetes.

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It has to be completely not locked down so open its probably running the console. So when you have a conformant kubernetes cluster, you by default have a very unsecured cluster. So what valerie is looking at is what should the defaults for a cluster be so that we're baking in security by defaults as people are coming newly to our project and spinning up new clusters. So as part of that she's?

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Looking at what do you need to customize to have a good, secure experience with good in quotes, and then she also breaks down feature by feature that what she would use to secure a cluster to say what obstacles are in place with those features themselves to successfully use them.

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So this is a very cross-cutting look at the various security features of of kubernetes, including pod security policies are back and a bunch of other stuff to say: here's how you could have a secure clustered, here's how we could improve these features, to make them significantly easier to adopt and turn on with the end goal at some point being that this becomes just simply your conformant cluster, like we could have a secured conformant cluster that everybody could then easily use. So she will be going into that in a great deal of depth at the cig.

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Usability deep dive, which is tomorrow and I, definitely encourage everyone to check that out. She also did a really nice presentation on secure by default at the contributor summit yesterday, which should have been recorded, I think so. So, basically, that's that that's all of the work that the cig usability currently has in flight. Again, we would really yes, dr. NIC, the oh, so the icons panel. What about the icons.

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Yeah so I think that that's just one of the projects that we think would be really cool to have like uniform iconography for like what is a pod. What is a cluster like when I'm looking at different user interfaces?

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How can I have like a really nice uniform understanding at a glance of what I'm looking at and so pamel has put together a really nice presentation showing all those icons and then people keep pointing us to a different icon site, which is actually optimized for presentations so like, if I'm, showing the kubernetes logo like how many pixels should I have and like it's like what kind of square? Is it, and that's not the icons that we're talking about it?

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Also, it kind of just shows how early we are in the whole process that but yeah we have. So there is a clarity, design website that has open source icons for all of these already and then we're just wondering if, like we can move towards having more like uniform iconography in the upstream project as well great question I can see we're listening cool. So these are our follow up. Presentations.

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Gabby is going to be going over building an IBM kubernetes service and she also wrote a really cool medium article, all about cig usability, how we got started and a bunch of feedback that we've gotten from different people and some projects that we have going on and then Valerie will be giving her presentation on her deep dive on sort of secure by default and how we could potentially achieve that tomorrow.

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So that's kind of everything that we've got going on a super open to questions or anyone who wants kind of talk about their perspective on usability within the kubernetes project. But yeah.

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Well, thanks yeah.

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Yeah, that's a really good question, so there's actually several different SIG's. That have sorry repeat the question. So the question was how what is the overlap with contrib, X and cig usability, and so the answer to that is that cig usability has overlapping concerns with a bunch of the different SIG's. So, for example, sig Docs, sig, UI sig contributes, and what we want to do is make sure that we're adding something, unique and then also working with everybody, on what they're doing SiC contribute.

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X is awesome, because what they're really focused on is making sure that as a contributor, I can get started. I have like a clear mentorship pathway to become a contributor and that we are providing like this really nice equal footing for people who come from different backgrounds and like that, we are providing the tools and services that everyone needs to get started as a contributor and then we're really focused on the end user experience of kubernetes.

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So it's as someone who wants to use kubernetes I come to kubernetes, IO, presumably, and then I try to figure out like what's going on here. What are you?

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What are you doing right, and so, obviously that does end up overlapping with the UI team in some ways like they also own, like the dashboard and some other pieces, but then we kind of come in and say: okay, like let's do some user research like let's do some design work and like let's push the Polish this by other people and get their feedback and then kind of we can take all of that data and really use it to inform some of the more like some of the coding work that the other teams are doing.

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So it's a more you end user, focused piece of research, yeah and actually one thing that we might be doing is we've had someone recently reached out and offer to redesign the kubernetes website for us, and so they want us to tell them like work with them on like what every design would look like from a usability perspective, so that maybe some work that we help advise on in the future.

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Any other questions is that is anyone wondering about how to get started as a contributor or anything like that yeah.

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So the best way to get started as a contributor is to hop on the Google, Group and then you'll start to get just updates about what we're talking about at our meetings and links to our github and then also links to all of the docs which are in the meeting notes. So you can just kind of hop in and provide feedback and like offer up new ideas and we're very open to new projects as well.

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So if there's something that you see that you would really like to kind of start driving as a way to improve the kubernetes project feel free to show up give a presentation, you know kind of see if other people are interested and want to hop on, but that's kind of how all of the different SIG's and working groups work is just it's supposed to be very open. You can add yourself to the agenda. It presents on other work that you're doing and then asked to collaborate.

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Any other questions: okay. Well, thank you. Everybody very much.