KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2025 | Kanika Gera & Alex Cristian Dobre, Adobe

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Kanika Gera

Senior Product Manager

Adobe

Alex Cristian Dobre

Cloud DevOPS Engineer

Adobe

play_circle_outline Custom CNI solution for OpenShift with Cilium integration

play_circle_outline Standardization for consistency across multiple cloud providers

play_circle_outline Presence in Cilium Slack channels for community collaboration

play_circle_outline Empowering The Open Source Community: Encouraging Curiosity, Humility, and Innovation

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Kanika Gera & Alex Cristian Dobre, Adobe

Kanika Gera

Senior Product Manager Adobe

Alex Cristian Dobre

Cloud DevOPS Engineer Adobe

In this insightful session, we welcome Alex Dobre of Adobe and Kanika Gera from Adobe to discuss their innovative contributions to cloud-native infrastructure at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2025. Joining theCUBE hosts Savannah Peterson and Rob Strechay, Dobre and Gera delve into the intricacies of deploying a custom Container Network Interface within the OpenShift ecosystem.

Alex Dobre, a technical expert focused on OpenShift adoption, and Kanika Gera, from Adobe's infrastructure team, have significant experience in managed Kubernetes platforms. Togeth... Read more

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon, open source fans, and welcome back to London, England. We're here blazing through day one of our live coverage at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. My name's Savannah Peterson in the cockpit with the one and only Rob Strechay, as always, for these events. Rob, today is really going by. I'm not even kidding when I say blazing by.

Rob Strechay

>> This has been blazing by, and I think it's been just the community, the content, and understanding how it's helping companies really move their infrastructure forward has been a lot of fun.

Savannah Peterson

>> It has been a lot of fun. We're going to continue the fun with our next guest. We have Alex Dobre and Kanika Gera. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Kanika Gera

>> Thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> Exciting week for y'all. I know that Adobe was on stage at OpenShift Commons yesterday. You're on day two. Here we are day one of our coverage. You're on day two. Can you tell us a little bit about what you presented on at that event? Kanika, I'll start with you.

Kanika Gera

>> Sure. So we presented on a custom solution where we brought our own CNI to OpenShift, which is very exciting.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's super exciting. Congratulations.

Kanika Gera

>> Yes, thank you. So we went with, I think a year back, our research into OVN, which is the default of CNI that comes in with OpenShift, and it was not meeting our specific use case requirements. We went in with adopting our own CNI, which I think was amazing, great learning curve, as well as for the team, I think it was really exciting for our engineering team to look into and bring in Cilium to plug in as our CNI.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's awesome. How long have you been working on this? I can imagine it feels quite a celebration to be able to share that.

Kanika Gera

>> I think almost a year.

Alex Cristian Dobre

>> Yeah. So I was part of the ... I was doing the adoption of OpenShift at Adobe from the technical standpoint. It took us a couple of months, seven to eight months maybe.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's still pretty fast.

Alex Cristian Dobre

>> It was, yeah. We got some good help from Red Hat, from OpenShift, good collaboration. We had great consultants to work with. Yeah, so it was about this bring your own CNI thing. As Kanika mentioned, the default networking setup that comes with OpenShift OVN and Multus is great from most of the use cases in the industry. For us, we needed something consistent with all the other providers that we have, and that was Cilium. So how to achieve that, we worked together with OpenShift. They helped us with the methods to provision the Kubernetes cluster and OpenShift cluster without any of the CNI configured at all, and that's where we take the networking configuration into our own hands with the bring your own CNI. We brought our own CNI to the picture, right?

Kanika Gera

>> Yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> So what drove you down that path? What was different that you saw that maybe others are out there that can learn from this that, hey, this is why we went down this path?

Alex Cristian Dobre

>> Yeah. So, like I said, there was the consistent driver of the entire project. We needed a way to provision Kubernetes clusters across multiple providers that are as close as possible one to each other. Since we were already using Cilium on the other providers, we wanted to go with the same one as the same CNI for OpenShift as well. From a technical standpoint, yeah, Cilium comes with eBPF, yes. That allows for programmable networking directly into the Linux kernel. There's no need for writing your own kernel module to accomplish that. That means that there is no need for any sort of hot reload, hot restart. All the security policies can be created, applied, and updated on the fly, and that's great from a scalability standpoint.

Kanika Gera

>> I think just to add to that, for our use case, the team we are part of is the Adobe infrastructure Team. So we have a platform which is a managed Kubernetes platform called Ethos. For us, we serve a lot of customers, tenants internally, which is hosting across all the clouds. We do private cloud, we do Azure, we do AWS. So we are all across. I think when we were going this route, that was a biggest factor to adopt something that would meet our needs across the cloud.

Rob Strechay

>> So part of it was the interoperability and consistency that you know how this is going to work with all of those clouds and everything like that.

Kanika Gera

>> Yes. I think generally an assumption with networking is people treat networking as plumbing. "Hey, this should work." For us-

Alex Cristian Dobre

>> True....

Kanika Gera

>> it was like this is something that's getting very, very important, enough network flexibility in a Kubernetes cloud-native world now. So we are like, okay, let's pick this challenge up, bring something of our own, see how we can bring our own CNI here.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's exciting and refreshing to hear. I can imagine that it must feel really good to have released this into the world. Yes. So let's talk a little bit about this community, open-source community. What does that mean for Adobe? I'll start with you, Alex. I saw you nodding.

Alex Cristian Dobre

>> Yeah, no, it is great. It's my first KubeCon that I ever attended.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh my gosh.

Alex Cristian Dobre

>> It feels great to be here. Yeah. Unfortunately, I don't get to say much because some family matters. Right after this talk, I'm going straight to the airport. But it feels great to be here. It was ... Like yesterday, the OpenShift Commons session. It was very well-organized. We got all this very interesting talks. We had some good, fun times prepared by the Red Hattans with the OpenShift Superhero Awards, they call it, yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> Fun.

Alex Cristian Dobre

>> Like the capes and everything. So much fun.

Savannah Peterson

>> Wait, were you both wearing capes yesterday? Were you-

Alex Cristian Dobre

>> No, no, no. We weren't getting the awards, but the celebration of that happened. Yeah, so-

Kanika Gera

>> I think Alex is going to be wearing one soon, right?

Alex Cristian Dobre

>> I don't know.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, baby.

Alex Cristian Dobre

>> Do nominate me if you want. I'm just kidding, no.

Savannah Peterson

>> Next time you're on the show, I expect the capes. That's all I'm saying.

Alex Cristian Dobre

>> All right, cool.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, yeah.

Kanika Gera

>> Perfect.

Alex Cristian Dobre

>> All right, yeah.

Kanika Gera

>> So for me, this is my third KubeCon. The most exciting one is I've attended three KubeCons across continents. One was in US, other one in India, and this is third, London. Looking forward for the next one.

Savannah Peterson

>> You're Kube coming all over the globe.

Kanika Gera

>> Yes.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's impressive. Now I'm ... Well, go ahead and finish your sentence, and then I have-up a follow-up.

Kanika Gera

>> That's what I think product personnel is supposed to do, right?

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, I suppose. I suppose.

Kanika Gera

>> Travel across the globe.

Savannah Peterson

>> Especially with the reach of Adobe. No kidding. So is there a big difference in those community? What's your experience been like in those different locations? Have your conversations been similar, or-

Kanika Gera

>> I think it's been a very interesting flavor. The reason I say is there are so many people out there who have such a different perspective and then also comes in from regions. When we are working with NA, it's like there's a different set of problem of scale. There's a different problem from cost aspects. Then when you're working with communities in India, there are so many great ideas people want to incubate. There are so many plugins, there are so many things people want to do, interestingly, and here we still do explore it It's still in day one. I think we just got to day zero. But it was amazing to see people wear that Red Hat caps. Oh my god, they're amazing.

Savannah Peterson

>> They are very iconic.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes.

Kanika Gera

>> They are.

Savannah Peterson

>> They're kind of the scene of the show floor. We'll have to bring the capes into the hats. We've got a whole thing going on.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah.

Kanika Gera

>> I think the next interview should be with all the hats.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, absolutely.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes. We had one hidden behind some of the Red Hat people here earlier, so to make them feel at home. But when you look at this and now that you have your CNI that you've built, are you seeing that people in the Cilium community are reaching out and saying, "Hey, help us understand," so that they can learn and it can be more consistent? Because to me that seems like something very not easy, but it makes a lot of sense to me about-

Savannah Peterson

>> It does make a lot of sense.

Rob Strechay

>> Because I think ... And I was at one of the hyperscalers that you mentioned, prior life, and one of the things that was always hard was networking. Networking was ... And it didn't matter if it was inside our data centers, outside our ... Between data centers, between clouds. Have you found ... Because you do a lot of that. Is this one of the steps that eases your ability to do that networking in and out of clouds? Because you're hybrid in some nature.

Kanika Gera

>> I can start with that.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah.

Kanika Gera

>> So, as I said, we work across clouds, and our main goal here was with this standardization. We as an organization or a platform team, I would not want my customers or tenants to manage multiple networking ways. We would want to have something that's, one, people do not ... I do not want developers to sit down at 2:00 AM and troubleshoot and scratch their heads.

Savannah Peterson

>> Right.

Kanika Gera

>> So that's from my perspective. I think from a product perspective is something that's more tangible and easy to use for all the developers across, and a consistent experience from a developer perspective. Alex, your thoughts?

Savannah Peterson

>> I love what you just said, and then we'll ... Well, I love to hear what Alex has to say too, but you brought up something really important. You talked about standardization. Standardization equates to simplification for the developer and the users in the community on that side ...

Kanika Gera

>> And that is part of my job, simplifying all the developers' life.

Savannah Peterson

>> Super easy job you have, hardly. It's incredibly complex.

Kanika Gera

>> Yes.

Savannah Peterson

>> Alex, you can go ahead and chime in there, too.

Alex Cristian Dobre

>> Yeah, no. So I wanted to say that equally important to this ... All the complex part of the networking is security. One thing that we learned out of all this effort that we put together was that we were re-confirmed once again that networking and security, they are not trivial things to do. No, they are not trivial to accomplish, that they are not easy, and you need to put additional effort and you need to pay extra attention to how to implement networking from a secure standpoint. That is very important for our teams because we wanted their focus to be on writing code rather than making sure their workloads are functional from a networking perspective, as well that they are secure enough not to care about it, as about leveraging the community and the open source. Yes, we are present on the Cilium Slack channels, Cilium open Slack channels, right?

Rob Strechay

>> Yes.

Alex Cristian Dobre

>> We do see a lot of requests coming in, and we try answer with our own experience, if possible, if their ... The questions that are being asked there, they overlap with what we did already, right?

Rob Strechay

>> Right.

Alex Cristian Dobre

>> Yeah.

Kanika Gera

>> So I think, as Alex mentioned, security. I suddenly was like, oh my god, have I signed up for everything difficult at Adobe?

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. I'm beginning to think so, Kanika.

Kanika Gera

>> Yes. Oh, I also manage security product management-wise for our developer platform teams. While he was talking to us, like, "Oh my fucking Lord." Okay, so we have adopted a lot of CNC projects, and this conference actually is amazing for network. You cannot imagine the value and the strength of collaboration and networking it brings out. I think we've been in situations where we've solved and ideated things just in a hallway conversations. I think that's where most great innovations happen, right?

Savannah Peterson

>> Mm-hmm.

Kanika Gera

>> Or ideas pack.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, absolutely. It gives me chills as you say that, because that is the magic of being together and getting to have these conversations. You're talking about solving ... You said that so casually, "Yeah, we're just chatting in the hallway." You're talking about incredibly complex problems that you're able to solve because of the collaborative nature. I think that's really one of the ... And I know we all probably agree on this, but that's one of the powers of the open-source community is we're here to build better to together. It's less of a ... I mean there's obviously competitors behind us, but it's not about that. It's about doing the right thing, making the developer user experience amazing no matter where you're working or what cloud you're using, to your exact point. No, I'm really glad you brought that up. Okay, so big announcements this week. Very curious to hear what's next. So I'm going to phrase this question in a way that we can lure you back onto the show when we're in Amsterdam next year for your now probably fifth KubeCon in that case, and your second or maybe third, who knows? What do you hope to be able to say a year from now that you can't yet say today? What's next?

Kanika Gera

>> Do you want to go first?

Savannah Peterson

>> Whoa. This is a tough question. Good one. So what I would like to see is at least the same level of excitement that the open-source community brings, if not more. I know that it's already at the high level, like skyrocket, but I want more. I'm in open source. I want more. Yes. Kanika?

Kanika Gera

>> I'm going to start wearing my product hat now. Okay. So I want everybody to stay curious.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes.

Kanika Gera

>> I'm so glad we're out of pandemic, so we can all sit together and chat like this. I hope people, everybody across, engineers, products, leadership, everybody stays curious, keeps building humbly, and understands the customer pain. That's most important. I want everybody across here attending this conference to be the driver of the change and not just sit down and be a facilitator, enabler, but the driver. So that's my message out there.

Savannah Peterson

>> Love that.

Kanika Gera

>> Have fun, talk to each other. I have a green badge, so talk to me for all the great ideas. And stay curious.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, that was just the perfect inspirational note to end on. I love hearing this coming from a company as well known and reputable as Adobe. Come say hi, come ask us questions, come tell us what you need. It truly is open. Y'all are practicing what this community preaches, and we really thank you both for taking the time. This has been such a fantastic segment.

Kanika Gera

>> Thank you, and you're amazing, both of you.

Rob Strechay

>> Well, thank you.

Alex Cristian Dobre

>> Thank you. Thank you for having us here.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, absolutely. Anytime. You are welcome on our stage anytime. I know I speak for Rob and I.

Rob Strechay

>> Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> Rob, thank you for a lovely conversation.

Rob Strechay

>> Thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> And thank all of you for tuning into our wonderful three days of coverage here in London, England at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.