Send us a text

Ever wonder how free software ended up running the world’s biggest clouds? We pull on a thread that starts with the hacker ethos—access, transparency, community—and follows it through OSCON memories, Docker’s breakout moment, and the quiet power shift that came with Kubernetes. From early research culture to the realities of running production systems, we map how open source moved from ideal to infrastructure and why today’s cloud thrives on community-built code.

We look at why Docker’s elegant packaging changed developer workflows but didn’t solve the hardest problem: operating at scale. That’s where Google’s history with Borg mattered, and why Kubernetes arrived fully formed with controllers, declarative state, and battle-tested ideas. Crucially, governance moved to the CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, letting every major cloud offer a managed Kubernetes service without locking users in. The result is a durable model for the cloud era: keep the core open and portable; offer the complicated parts—control planes, upgrades, reliability—as a managed service; and let teams build higher with confidence.

If you care about how software is built, funded, and run at scale, press play.

Links to topics from the show:
Hackers - By Steven Levy
Docker
Kubernetes
CNCF
Open Container
Podman

LinkedIn - Logan Gallagher
LinkedIn - Jon Gallagher