Bart Farrell (00:01.744)
All right, so Wiggity Wiggity Whitney. Turns out I wasn’t the first Kubernetes rapper because you were doing it long time before. But for folks who don’t know you, who are you? What do do?

Whitney Lee (00:08.974)
Ha ha ha ha.

My name is Whitney Lee. I’m a CNCF ambassador. I host multiple streaming shows. I host enlightening. There’s a light board behind me. I’m not sure it might be cropped out. And I also host one called You Choose. That’s the choose your own adventure through the CNCF landscape. I’m cooking up podcasts. I host Cloud Native Live sometimes. And I’m currently unemployed. But I think that’ll be.

Bart Farrell (00:39.068)
Here’s an opportunity, employers. Yeah.

Whitney Lee (00:42.093)
I think that’s going to be remedied shortly. We’ll see.

Bart Farrell (00:45.471)
Very good, very good, very good. Yeah, you do a lot of stuff. And as an ambassador, you mentioned that you do Cloud Native Live. But what are some of the other things that you do as an ambassador? What’s sort of your focal point? What do you bring to the ambassador community?

Whitney Lee (01:00.784)
So some ambassadors are organizers, they organize conferences and that’s awesome. And some ambassadors are like code contributors or maybe PR approvers or hanging out in that world. That’s freaking awesome. And they’re not mutually exclusive. And there’s a third type of CNCF ambassador that is me 100%, which is the content creator CNCF ambassador. So if you, you know.

Just based on what I said I do, you can see evidence of that’s how I roll. I like to talk a lot apparently, which is funny because I was a very shy child.

Bart Farrell (01:39.41)
Well, certainly not the case as an adult. Yeah, definitely, definitely a big change there. That’s good. And not only do you like to talk, but you do it very well. And I think we all know that many Whitney fans out there is that you create context in which people feel comfortable and that makes the fluidity of ideas stronger. And that’s a great skill that if you could bottle it and sell it, you’d have a billion dollar company. So think about that.

Whitney Lee (01:40.624)
Yeah. huh.

Whitney Lee (02:02.321)
Thanks. Really what I’m willing to do is say I don’t know. And honestly, I’ll walk into a situation where I know literally nothing. I’m confident in my ability to ask questions and I don’t mind at all asking questions that might seem dumb and I don’t mind appearing like I don’t know, because I don’t know. I’m actually relatively new. I’m a career changer and I just changed careers in late 2019. I started my first job as a cloud developer. Before that, I was a professional photographer.

Bart Farrell (02:33.494)
Fun fact, did not know that or had been told and unfortunately forgot. I think that’s why really, that not knowing is a great skill. Because getting those things out in the open, sometimes people are terrified because of imposter syndrome and not wanting to raise their hand and say, you know what, actually, could you repeat that? I don’t know what RBAC does or I don’t know what are the benefits of etcd. And let’s face it, it’s a very broad ecosystem. It’s a very steep learning curve and no one should feel ashamed for not knowing one of the 10

Whitney Lee (02:34.906)
Yeah.

Whitney Lee (02:39.183)
Yeah.

Bart Farrell (03:03.4)
million things that there are to know. With that in mind, the focus of this podcast, the landscape, is that we’re looking at the different CNCF projects that are there, because now we’re talking about 200 projects. There’s a lot to keep track of. But which three are your favorites, or which three are you really keeping your focus on right now?

Whitney Lee (03:23.345)
to pivot the question a little bit and talk about ones I’ve learned about recently and in my latest season of learning that I thought were had were pretty cool for whatever reason. So I’ve been learning. I’ve been tackling observability projects and one super cool one I learned about is called Pixie. So Pixie is an eBPF based tool. And once you install it, it starts collecting observability information at the kernel level within five minutes. You’re already

collecting tremendous amounts of data. And then Pixie provides a dashboard where you could do access control and everything. And you can see like metrics, like resource metrics, you could see like a network level thing. So you could see protocol traces. But if you have to go from, if you have zero observability and you’re not sure where to get started or how it might even be helpful to you, this is a way you can get started and get some insight into what’s happening in your system so very quickly. And I think it’s pretty cool how I can go from

Zero to no in some stuff in five minutes.

Then the next one, yeah. Okay, the next one I think is cool is called Headlamp. And it’s a UI and it has a pluggable and extensible interface. So it gives you like a baseline Kubernetes UI. You can add plugins like Prometheus plugin to see a little more insight. So you can get a visual representation of what’s happening in your cluster.

Bart Farrell (04:29.468)
That’s a perk, it’s good, yeah good. Keep going.

Whitney Lee (04:52.99)
But then there’s all kinds of plugins you can add on top of that. So you can see what’s happening between applications or what’s happening more deeply the components of one application. And what it wants to do, which I think is ambitious and also pretty cool, is it wants to provide a way for any other project in the CNCF to have a UI that’s part of their project. So it wants to be able to have Headlamp as the framework and then all the CNCF projects that don’t have a UI yet and would benefit from one.

could plug that into the headlamp framework. And I like how it’s bringing everyone together.

Bart Farrell (05:29.847)
Wow.

Whitney Lee (05:29.853)
And then, yeah, so that’s number two. And then the third one I like is an old ebook goodie, and that’s Open Celemetry. And I’m just, I had done an enlightening show and learned about it some, about a year and a half ago, almost two years ago. And I thought it was cool. I didn’t know a lot then. But what they’ve, they’ve really expanded the project in their, so we have our signals, logs, metrics, traces. They’re starting to talk about a fourth signal called

profiles, but what OpenTelemetry is trying to do is make the standardization so ubiquitous that you can start to take these logs, metrics, and traces that were before like totally separate things and correlate them with one another. So it’s more like you’re getting a braid of data. So part of the OpenTelemetry, one thing that was very confusing to me about OpenTelemetry,

is it is standard, it is like standardization, it is specification and it’s actual software. And so it was hard and still is hard for me to wrap my head around. But what I like about it is, so OpenTelemetry provides an SDK. And so once it gets telemetry data, it adds a lot of context. It adds context like what else is happening in the system at this time? Like is this telemetry data I’m getting part of a larger transaction?

And then it also adds standardized metadata about what versions are being used, what like HTTP, what load balancer was hit, that sort of thing. And so it captures this moment in time. And then with all those things correlated together, you get really deep insights into what’s happening in your system at any given time. And you’re able to ask arbitrary questions of your system. Like you don’t know what you don’t know.

but when you do know what you don’t want to know, you want to be able to know immediately. You can quote me on that.

Bart Farrell (07:32.156)
Are we getting close to the hip -hop line if if you don’t know now, you know, Wow, wow you are you couldn’t have scripted that better Okay, good. It’s a very nice rundown of those three projects definitely gotta go It’s interesting in a few hours actually gonna be on the headlamp. Do you know do you talk to you walkie Marissa? Yeah, well

Whitney Lee (07:37.642)
Yeah.

Whitney Lee (07:53.365)
did, yeah, -huh.

Bart Farrell (07:55.236)
Interestingly enough, in an hour and a half, I’m gonna be interviewing him for this podcast as well. So small world. Thank you for giving me the rundown on HeadLive. That’s great. Now, KubeCon’s coming up. We’re gonna see each other in Salt Lake City in November. As always, lots of stuff happening in KubeCon. I’m sure your agenda’s gonna be crazy. You’re gonna be speaking, but what other things, before we get to your talks, what are you looking forward to about this particular KubeCon?

Whitney Lee (08:00.088)
Awesome!

Whitney Lee (08:20.803)
I always love the project pavilion because when you go there on the expo floor, you get to talk one -on -one with maintainers from projects and they’re talking about something that they love and they’re very happy to share and learn about you and your use case and how they might fit in. And it’s not like the rest of the expo floor is cool too, but they’re all kind of trying to sell you something. And with the project pavilion, it feels a little more pure. And then they also keep

upgrading the situation and now the CNCF, one of the CNCF, I believe he’s a dev rel there, has started giving tours of the project pavilion. So if you’re like, yeah, George is, -huh. And so if you’re like, I used to be, and you’re a little shy and you don’t want to just go up to someone and start talking about their technology, especially if you feel kind of clueless, you know, now you have George to help you navigate. Yeah, you understand. But first of all, if you do feel clueless, like anyone at those

Bart Farrell (08:59.271)
George Castro, yeah.

Whitney Lee (09:18.778)
Project Pavilions is gonna make you feel great and happy to explain what’s happening from zero level. So it’s okay to not know and just go there not knowing anything and just be like, hey, tell me what you do. They’re very happy to share the thing that they work hard on and that they love. But George will give you a tour of what’s happening, a tour of the projects, and then you can kind of know at least a little bit what’s what, and then maybe start those one -on -one conversations with the projects that are particularly interesting for you.

Bart Farrell (09:49.639)
Very good.

Whitney Lee (09:49.709)
So the Project Pavilion tour is I’m excited about those.

Bart Farrell (09:52.657)
Absolutely, and shout out to George and shout out to everyone that’s making that happen. Making it more accessible, more inviting, and like you said, totally beginner friendly. There’s no minimum requirements in terms of going out there and engaging with folks. And the other thing is though that you’ll be doing in KubeCon, you are going to be giving some talks. So what are they, when are they, when can we go check them out?

Whitney Lee (10:14.619)
As part of EBPF day, I’ll be moderating a panel about EBPF and security. So that’s awesome. One thing that’s really cool about that is everyone involved on the panel is a woman. So that is awesome. Yes. And then, yeah. And then during KubeCon proper, I will be doing, I’ve.

Bart Farrell (10:30.792)
Who are they? Just curious.

Whitney Lee (10:37.69)
I guess every KubeCon for a while, I’ve been doing a choose your own adventure talk alongside Victor Farsic, and this one will be focused on observability. So for our talks, which tend to fill up, you better get there early so you can get in. For our talks, we do live voting. So I’ll explain a system design choice related to observability and explain why even do it. Then I’ll talk about three different projects related to that system design choice. And then it’s up to you, the viewer, to

vote about which project you want to see Victor implement in the ongoing demo. That’s part of our

It’s fun.

Bart Farrell (11:15.661)
I like you said, it does fill up quickly. I’ve seen it fill up quickly. I’ve seen standing room only, elbow room, people standing on each other’s shoulders. So it is very, very recommendable if you’re gonna go and get there early. Whitney, this is fantastic. I thank you so much for your time and really look forward to seeing the next things that you’re gonna be doing. Whichever lucky employer is gonna get you to sign that contract. I hope you negotiate well. And yeah, we will see each other in Salt Lake City. Looking forward to it.

Whitney Lee (11:40.335)
Hahaha.

Whitney Lee (11:44.701)
Can’t wait and if you see me around there viewer, please do say hi. I always have stickers with me. Ask me for a sticker

Bart Farrell (11:51.23)
Whitney’s very friendly, very approachable. Get that sticker, folks. Come on, go reach out. Take it there. Cheers. Bye bye.

Whitney Lee (11:54.47)
you