Kubernetes Podcast from Google

Taylor Dolezal is a senior Developer Advocate at Hashicorp and the Kubernetes 1.19 release lead. His desire to give talks and join the CNCF Ambassadors led him to the release team and to his new job. He talks to Adam and Craig about how a TI-83 calculator started him on the path.

Constance Caramanolis is the co-chair of this week’s virtual KubeCon EU, and a principal software engineer at Splunk. Her introduction to Cloud Native came as an Envoy maintainer working at Lyft; she talks to Craig and Adam about communication: techmical, programmatic, in-person and online. We also summarise all the news from KubeCon.

Alex Ellis created serverless framework OpenFaaS while working a day job. It’s used by some big companies, but he’s resisted the temptation to join one. Instead, he’s offering consulting and seeking sponsorships, building a business from the ground up. He explains the pros and cons of independence to Craig and Adam.

Since we last spoke about Minikube 18 months ago, the project has gone 1.0, and made large performance and usability improvements. Thomas Strömberg is the manager of the Container DevEx team at Google and a maintainer of Minikube. He talks to Craig and Adam about why system administrators are the best code reviewers, the importance of surveying users, and building bikes made of bamboo.

We finally scheduled some time to talk to David Oppenheimer. David, a software engininer at Google, has been working on scheduling there since 2007, including on both Borg and Omega. That experience naturally led to him working on the Kubernetes scheduler, as well as starting SIG Scheduling.

Released on the same day as Kubernetes, cadvisor is a container monitoring daemon that collects metrics and serves them to monitoring tools. It’s built into the Kubelet, and underpins many components in Kubernetes, such as eviction and autoscaling. David Ashpole of Google Cloud is TL of Kubernetes SIG Instrumentation, and the maintainer of cadvisor; he joins Adam and Craig this week to explain where instrumentation fits in the stack, and what you should do as a Kubernetes maintainer vs. a cluster administrator.

An open source license grants rights on copyright and patents, but not trademarks. Chris DiBona has some ideas on how to address that. He has spent his career in open source, including over 15 years running Google’s Open Source Programs Office, and is one of the directors of the new Open Usage Commons. It launched last week with three projects - Angular, Gerrit and Istio - transferring their trademarks. Chris joins Adam and Craig to talk about Google’s work in open source, and why a new organisation is needed.

Before Kubernetes was launched, it could have at most 25 nodes in a cluster. At 1.0, the target was 100. Meanwhile, Borg, Omega and Mesos were all running away at 10,000. What did it take to get Kubernetes to this number, and above? SIG Scalability and GKE Tech Lead Wojciech Tyczynski tells us.

Over the past 20 years, Mirantis has grown from an outsourcing company for semiconductor engineers to a product company that is the new home of Docker Enterprise. Past and present CEO and “co-founder” Adrian Ionel oversaw Mirantis’s adoption of OpenStack and purchase of Docker’s enterprise business, and he joins the show to discuss them both.

Last week Loodse, the makers of the Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform, made that platform open source, and rebranded their company to match. Co-founder Sebastian Scheele joins us to explain how the company and platform came about, why they’ve made their changes, and what exactly a Loodse was anyway.

Two years ago, Sarah Wells from the Financial Times gave a KubeCon EU keynote about how the company moved from monolith to microservices, and how her Content and Metadata platform team moved to Kubernetes specifically. She joins hosts Adam and Craig to recap that migration, and what life has been like since. As Sarah has moved to a broader role in charge of all observability for The FT, she also invited Dimitar Terziev, the current platform lead for the CM team, to the conversation.

After 5 years at the helm of the CNCF, executive director Dan Kohn is stepping down to launch a new Public Health initiative. The new General Manager of the CNCF is Priyanka Sharma, who joins our show today. Priyanka tells Craig and Adam what to expect, talks about virtual events, and gives some hints on how to rename projects.

In a world where pods (and IP addresses) come and go, DNS is a critical component. John Belamaric is a Senior SWE at Google, a co-chair of Kubernetes SIG Architecture, a Core Maintainer of the CoreDNS project and author of the O’Reilly Media book Learning CoreDNS: Configuring DNS for Cloud Native Environments. He joins Craig and Adam to discuss CoreDNS, the evolution of DNS in Kubernetes, and how name resolution has been made more reliable in recent releases.

Over the last 10 years, Cloud Foundry has grown from “open Heroku clone” to “software used at your bank”. The Cloud Foundry Foundation and the CNCF launched within a few months of each other in 2015, and the two worlds are now colliding as Cloud Foundry replatforms on top of Kubernetes. Our guest this week is the Executive Director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, Chip Childers. He talks to Adam and Craig about foundations, the boredom of infrastructure, and the cost of every line of code you write.

SIG Network is completely rethinking the way you define groupings of applications (Service) and get traffic sent to them (Ingress) by building the Service APIs, a new set of primitives which are better suited to how different groups of users interact with them. Bowei Du is a Tech Lead on GKE and a member of SIG Network who is leading the design and implementation of these new APIs, as well as working on getting Ingress to GA in Kubernetes 1.19.