Brian Douglas, CNCF

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More from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2025

Brian Douglas

Head of Ecosystems

The Linux Foundation

play_circle_outline Trends in cloud native technology adoption by EU telcos

play_circle_outline MLOps becoming a focus, need for cloud-native AI solutions

play_circle_outline Collaboration and knowledge sharing among diverse community members

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Brian Douglas, CNCF

Brian Douglas

Head of Ecosystems The Linux Foundation

Brian Douglas of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) joins us at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon EU 2025 in London to explore the dynamic landscape of open-source technologies.

In this interview on theCUBE, hosted by Savannah Peterson and Rob Strechay, Douglas discusses their role at CNCF, focusing on interactions with end users and the evolving trends within the ecosystem. The conversation highlights the exciting developments in cloud-native technologies, including the growing influence of artificial intelligence (AI) and data sovereignty in the EU.... Read more

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What are some trends related to businesses in the EU adopting cloud native technologies and considering data sovereignty? add

What are some developments in the integration of machine learning and cloud-native technologies? add

What are some benefits and advancements that have come with the evolution of AI in the past few years? add

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Brian Douglas, CNCF

Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon Cloud Native community and welcome back to London, England. We're here coming to the back end of day two of our three days of coverage in London, England here on theCUBE. My name is Savannah Peterson here with Rob Strechay, as you've probably come to expect at this point, at this show, which is exciting.

Rob Strechay

>> At this time.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes, absolutely. -

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, we've done a number. We've done the last three, you and I, the whole time.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. Yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> It's been great. I think what's been great is really just getting here and the vibes from the community and the ecosystem and just the energy of KubeCon is like, CloudNativeCon is fantastic, and one of my favorite shows, the two favorite shows of the year, now five or whatever it is.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. We got to start branching out and this side of the world. I wonder what we're going to do next. Who better to talk to us about that community that you're talking about and the companies that benefit from open source technology than Brian Douglas. Thank you for taking time today.

Rob Strechay

>> Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, we are stoked to talk to you. I'm really excited to talk to you actually. We had Jim from the Linux Foundation on yesterday, and he was telling us that the estimated market value of open source software is $9 trillion. Pretty wild data point and powerful data point because I think there's sometimes a little bit of a tension between open source and doing things for free and the value of that. You are the person in the ecosystem side that gets to work with a lot of these companies, hear these stories and I cannot wait to know what's going on. Tell us some of the trends that you're seeing. It's got to be such an interesting time to have your job.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, yeah. My role is head of ecosystem and I work with end user specifically within the foundation. The way we describe end users is if the cloud was deleted, how much of that $9.1 trillion would affect your business? Would your business continue without the cloud or would it just completely scratch to a halt? Trends we're seeing right now is very popular here in the EU with telcos now, just now they've been around for years, but now they're getting on cloud native technologies and really just adopting it with the new NeoNephos Foundation. Things obviously, AIs, it's big, it's a verb.

Savannah Peterson

>> Is it?

>> It's a noun. It's an adjective. It's all out there as well. Then, with the EU, like data sovereignty as well, so being cloud native helps you knowing where your data is going to be or your user's data is going to be as well. That's been remarkable. Some things we've been seeing in AI, and I'm sorry, I'm just rambling.

Savannah Peterson

>> No, this is great.

>> I heard a note and I failed to actually go and look up own, do my own research, but as far as all the GPUs that are out and that are provisioned for folks to be leveraged and doing AI, we're looking at less than 10% usage. I think a lot of people are actually looking to do something with AI, but they're actually deploying stuff just yet. They're hoarding, I guess, if you will. What's going to be exciting in the next six months is seeing people actually leveraging some of that technology using cloud native.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think that's a really good point. Rob, are you hoarding any GPUs?

Rob Strechay

>> I am not hoarding any GPUs, but I know people who are hoarding GPUs. What I think is interesting though is there's so many projects that are going on. I actually had the pleasure of doing a panel, helping run a panel for data on Kubernetes yesterday, and we actually asked the audience, "How many of you are doing training of AI?" 600 people in the room, 10 hands went up.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, I believe it.

Rob Strechay

>> Then, we asked about inference.

Savannah Peterson

>> Wow, that's all? 10?

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, 10. Then, I think there was maybe 15 that were doing inference. We broke it down that way and we looked at it and I think, to your point, I think a lot of people are looking at the stack. Do you hear from the ecosystem that, hey, what we're trying to do is really focus on usability, ease of use, because to me, that would seem like it helps them in their day jobs as well as when they're here doing the open source-y type of stuff.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's what we're seeing right now is a lot of folks are using your GitHub and your cursors or Windsurf that test the waters and you get to a certain extent of, yes, it works, but am I going to use this in my behind the firewall for my engineers? Maybe yes or no, it's up for a debate, but I think what we're going to see route as a trend of more controls, so you can now leverage some of the big hyperscalers and big clouds to go ship and deploy your own solutions. Again, low usage for GPUs at the moment. We need to get more tooling in the partner tool chain to be able to be cloud-ready. I think the one thing I'm seeing right now in the conversation I've had at this event is MLOps is a thing. We have this pillar of ML data, everyone's got their technology that's working. Then, you have these developers that are shipping projects on the weekend with vibe coding that exists. Then, what's cloud native? What's AI native? I think we're going to see more of a melding of those two situations together where ML's got their perfect ops situations to dissect and infer a bunch of data and do some data science on that. We've got the cool Vibe bros that are doing really good stuff on this side. Now, we need to build things that are cloud-native, and we're seeing this with KServe is now getting some more maturity. We're seeing some other stuff that within Sandbox and the CNCFs in the architecture ecosystem. It just needs more adoption. We need more people, our end users, to start using this technology for real features, for real use cases and things that are ready for production and not just for toys and hobbies.

Savannah Peterson

>> Do you have any examples of those end users that are the early adopters and achieving success in a little bit of ROI so far?

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of folks. The challenge is that we need more people to talk about their stories. We had the Ant Group today. They were one of our end user case studies. Well, they were the top end user award today. I'm mixing what the two things.

Savannah Peterson

>> Congratulations to them.

Savannah Peterson

>> They have some really cool things they've been doing at the Ant Group and solving AI. The individual Richard, he's actually based in Hangzhou, which is the city of DeepSeek. It's right there in the middle of all what's happening. There's a lot of cool things that are happening right now and I'm going to be working with him later to see if we can get some case studies from the Ant Group, but we also have a bunch of other folks who are doing really good work. I used to work at GitHub, I spent five years working out there. They obviously are known for co-pilot at this point. They're a company built on co-pilot, a lot of really good ideas and thoughts at Microsoft of building AI. My role is going to be basically becoming best friends with these folks and providing standards and best practices on how to engage with this.

Savannah Peterson

>> I appreciate that your job is to befriend smart people.

>> Yeah. I like to think I'm pretty friendly. Yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes. How does it go? Again, you had Apple up on stage earlier today and they were talking about how they're using some of the open source as part of Apple Intelligence, a lot of the actual security actually layer of that as well for over the networking. How do you get and help encourage those folks as well because they're using, and they're buying and they're building, so they're sometimes a vendor and they're sometimes an actual end user of the technology as well.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, and I can't speak for an Apple specifically and their details, but they're doing really cool stuff and getting an AI agent, getting LLMs to work on your phone, specifically their SLMs, small language models, you don't want to burn a hole in your pocket while it's dissecting your messages and trying to do things securely. You touched on a really good, interesting part about the security thing and networking. That's the thing that's not being talked about in the whole AI engineering phase and that's very important when it comes to cloud native. That's why we need folks within this community and at KubeCon to really start thinking about those stories and building tools that are GPU ready to be able to very clearly build for this technology. I don't know if the term is AI native. We're going to stick with cloud native for now, but there are AI native solutions that we should be thinking through that's going to work on our infrastructure, on our metal, and more of those stories are just going to help us get to that point.

Savannah Peterson

>> I can imagine you're having a lot of conversations with members of your community or end users here too, about what this future is going to look like when it plays out. If you could tell everyone, "Well, leverage the platform that we're on right now," to tell all of these potential end users or existing end users maybe of different parts of the CNCF ecosystem who are now starting to think about AI, something magical wave your little magic wand and they all of a sudden understood something, what would be that thing you wanted to tell them?

>> Yeah, the one thing I would tell you, and I don't know if you guys will add clips after this and have the nice little piano music, and this is, the more you know segment at the end of this.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes.

>> The idea is open source is built on storytelling. I shared a story on the keynote when I was on stage about Pixar. First success of open source was Bruce Perrin's saw the bug within Pixar's technology to get their editing working or their animation software working for Toy Story. It wasn't Toy Story yet, it was early concepts of it, but it was called Electric Fence and he just threw it up on a message board and shared that story and that would just eventually caught waves and other people who edit and do animations got to leverage that success. I think what it is open source cloud native, we only as good as the information that's readily available and shared. This is why we have a non-competitive environment where everyone is represented on stage and within these conversations that can share these stories and there's ways that you don't need to share private information and stuff like that. We just want to talk about the tech that you're using. We've got over 200 projects within the CNCF. If using 10 of those, there's a story of how you compiled those and made that work to be AI native and AI ready. That's a story that we should really start getting out there and I think we're ready for that. Again, we want to be production ready, we want to be confident that this is secure, want to be data sovereignty and think about how we're leveraging the data, how it's being trained, and we don't want the government to tell us how to do this. I know it's been a thing with SB1047 as of recent, no longer-

Savannah Peterson

>> Regulation is definitely a conversation. Yeah.

>> Yeah, but we should be in those stages in those conversations and if you see something, say something. Let's bring the community along for the ride.

Rob Strechay

>> I guess that's an interesting thing because you are an advocate for the ecosystem as well. Is that something that you see as you're bringing back into not just CNCF, but the Linux Foundation? We had a number of people on and we talked about, hey, the umbrella of the Linux Foundation is doing stuff for CNCF and for its members that you get leverage out of that. Is that one of the big things?

>> Yeah, mean's a huge benefit folks. I've got neighbors and I'll talk to my neighbor about his lawnmower and be like, "Hey, I've got issues with these corners. What are you using? How are you doing this? Share some knowledge." I was an engineer in San Francisco for a small startup. I remember we had a hard time working with payments and it blew my mind when my CTO is like, "Who do we know that are friends that work in the city that have solved this problem?" We literally just had folks come for a happy hour and we chatted and we were able to solve our little small rinky-dink problems for a small startup by just talking to some of our friends at bigger companies. It's not necessarily big companies talk to small companies all the time, but some folks want some mentorship, we want some roadmaps of how people have done this stuff. It really just comes down to, it doesn't have to be competitive. We can share stories, we can talk about how we are shipping cloud and how we're basically getting adoption and what are the trends publicly that we're seeing are also privately. Those are all things that, what I love about this community, and this is true already for the end user community, is they're doing this. If you're not an end user or if you just show up to the events and maybe you have 10 tickets of your staff that are coming, probably consider joining officially as a member to start getting involved in some of our, we have a TAB, which is our technical advisory board. We have TOC is our technical oversight committee that oversees project end user engagement as well. Then, obviously we have a governing board for higher level members to really steer what's happening.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah.

>> We just had a meeting just about an hour ago just talking about AI and what's happening. TBD on that stuff.

Savannah Peterson

>> How big is your team internally out of curiosity?

>> That's a good question. Internally, I've only been on this team for 34 days, so that's a hard answer. I could say the Linux Foundation is about 300. For the CNCF, I'd say sub 50, sub 40. We have quite a few contractors, but

Savannah Peterson

>> A lot of people contribute, but you all do a lot with a small amount of resources because of that culture of collaboration, like you're talking about. I mean, it's not just about the size of the company, like your startup example, which is a good one. It's also about the diversity and the power of that diversity of thought in this room. I mean, something like of the 14,000 people here, I believe there's roughly 100 countries represented. We've got a bunch of different people thinking about solving these problems differently and helping really raise the water level together, making what these end users like you're talking about, these bigger companies, these apples or whatnot, they're able to build more sustainably, smarter and then help everybody out. I mean, it's so interesting how some of these companies will go head-to-head in very, very visible aspects of the economy and in the world and in the business game and then when it comes to stuff like this, it's like, okay, let's work together so that we make sure this is all more secure for everybody, or when your phone deep links to my financial firm that this is safe. It's just cool. Is there anything that has surprised you in the last 34 days of having this job that you weren't necessarily expecting, perhaps?

>> Honestly, what's really surprising is how friendly people are. The folks that ... Stop.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah.

>> No, but in reality.

Savannah Peterson

>> Stop. It's true.

>> The folks that are spending their time, and when we talk about the TAB and the TOC, these are volunteer roles. These are folks who have a day job who did show up for an hour call, a virtual call, to basically chat with a bunch of other folks from different organizations.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah.

>> Folks are willing to share and tell and showcase. It's been really exceptional to see from high-level VPs to staff principal engineers participating in these conversations and really just rolling up the sleeves and really thinking through like, hey, how do we plan for what this evolution of AI is? I think that if you were to ask 20 years ago, we didn't have Kubernetes 20 years ago. We had a whole different world of how we were doing ops and sysadmin stuff and managing networks.

Savannah Peterson

>> 100%.

>> 10 years ago we got Kubernetes. It's been so much easier and it's been a wave of how we've be able to extend and really just ship products and infrastructure so quickly. Now with the advent of things like AI and again, we'll keep harking at this AI thing, but it really isn't what this has actually unlocked and it's not just productivity benefits, but it's also knowledge sharing and transfer, but also how quickly we can develop feature development to support our customers and end users. It's a bit unreal.

Savannah Peterson

>> It is a bit unreal. I'm always just so impressed. I mean, you jokingly did a little tear. I actually cried on the show last night talking to the deaf and hard of hearing working group at CNC after the BIPOC initiative. I actually just saw Malad walk by who's a part of that group as well and gave him a little smirk over your shoulder. There is this incredible openness and no pun intended with it being open source, but it is this desire to really help everybody get on the same page rather than these siloed innovation and siloed development. It always makes me happy. All right, I've got two more questions for you. When we are hanging out in, let's call it Amsterdam next year, next spring, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say now?

>> Yeah, I would love to say, I mean, I imagine this is going to be true, but we're going to have some pretty clear playbooks and pretty good ideas of how you run AI at scale.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah.

>> I think we've gotten the last year a lot of good stories around multi-cluster environments, and that's been great to see. People are now being able to do multi-cluster and also multi-cloud. That's been top of mind. I come from a company, two companies ago, where we had a multi-cloud setup. We were also another rinky-dink startup as well, and it was very innovative on how we were able to pull over and move over to different clouds for the benefit of credits. In reality, there is a lot of necessity of, we need to have standards. We didn't have a playbook on how can we start being ... I'm just going to start writing blog posts around AI native because I think that might be the term I go forward with. Yeah, being, sorry, AI native, but also AI ready. I would love to next year, it's a box that's been checked.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's going to be awesome. I think I support your decision on the blogging, but I do think you're right. I think we'll get closer to a standardization, which equates to the simplification of the ability to deploy and start to scale up quicker. My final question for you, since we casually joked about it before we went live, who do you think is the most underrated player in the NBA?

>> Underrated player in the NBA? Man, that is a good question, man. I mean, I'm a Warriors fan.

Savannah Peterson

>> Let's go.

>> I'm biased to a certain extent.

Rob Strechay

>> You would say Jayson Tatum then?

>> Jayson Tatum. Jayson Tatum, he gets a lot of hate for the team he plays, but also because he's a bit mild-mannered, I'd be quite honest. He's great, but honestly, I'd say I love Jaylen Brown.

Rob Strechay

>> I think Jaylen Brown is awesome. Yeah.

>> I think he is great at what he does. Also, adjunct professor for Harvard.

Rob Strechay

>> The amount of work he does in the community doesn't get talked about half enough-

Savannah Peterson

>> I agree with that.

Rob Strechay

>> That he's really plugged in in Boston, which is fantastic.

>> Yeah, I'm pro-smart NBA players, basketball IQ, but also IQ IQ is good

Savannah Peterson

>> A bit of EQ there mixed in as well as a little bit of sensitivity and awareness. I think it's awesome. I love that. Brian, I had to sneak in some NBA stuff for you just because.

>> Oh, yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> I was a sideline girl before I was an enterprise tech sideline girl.

>> Okay.

Savannah Peterson

>> We're speaking the same language.

>> I get the Sports Center.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah.

>> I was up at 3:00 A.M. two nights ago watching the Warriors play.

Rob Strechay

>> Nice.

>> I'll probably up again watching NBA here.

Rob Strechay

>> Very nice.

Savannah Peterson

>> Love that. Brian, thank you so much for taking the time.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, and thank you, Rob, as always. I hope all of you are enjoying these fun chats about end users, the open source community, and the NBA here on theCUBE from London, England. We're at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.