The serfs revolt, seize the land from feudal lords, only to find freedom is not what they imagined. Sounds like the plot to a Russian novel. It might also be a parable about enterprise customers wading into open source. They love all the software choices but miss the guidance of proprietary vendors.

Working with open-source tools requires a new mindset, according to Cheryl Hung (pictured), director of ecosystem at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

“Lots of end users actually want the CNCF to just tell them, ‘Do it this way,'” she said. “The CNCF is not like that. We’re very neutral. We want companies to choose the best things for themselves.”

The amount of choice in open-source can be overwhelming to companies used to fully-baked, serviced solutions. “We all kind of agree that Kubernetes [CNCF’s container orchestrator] is the way to go,” Hung said. “But now there’s another 500 tools that you could evaluate out there.”

CNCF feels companies’ pain. It wants to create communities for peers to help each other zero in on the best tools and practices.

Hung spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Seattle, Washington. They discussed how community can stand in for vendor handholding in open source. (* Disclosure below.)

CNCF face time

There are remote opportunities for peer-to-peer interaction, like mailing lists, Slack, GitHub, etc. However, “I really think there is no substitution for the face-to-face stuff, at least initially,” Hung said. 

Before Hung joined CNCF, she organized the Cloud Native London meetup group. It attracts about 200 to 300 attendees each month. The group is diverse. Some are just dipping their toes in; others are actively contributing.

“I think it’s really important that the more experienced … people who are further along in their journey have a chance to talk to people who are at the beginning, kind of mentor them,” she stated. 

This year, the CNCF plans to host small, one-day community events in a number of regions. It wants cater to cloud-native users who lack the ability to attend huge, rarely-held events like KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Hung concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: Cloud Native Computing Foundation sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither CNCF nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE