In this podcast, Daniel Bryant sat down with Kelsey Hightower, Staff Developer Advocate at Google. Topics covered included: the extensibility of Kubernetes, and why it has become the platform that other platforms are being built on top of; creating event-driven architectures and deploying these onto Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms like the Kubernetes-based Knative and Google Cloud Run; and the benefits of learning, sharing knowledge, and building communities.

Why listen to this podcast:

- Kubernetes is a platform for building platforms. It may not be as opinionated as traditional Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings, but it has become popular due to its extensibility. There are PaaS-like solutions built on top of Kubernetes, such as OpenShift, Knative, and Cloud Run.

- The creation of common interfaces within Kubernetes -- such as Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), Container Networking Interface (CNI), and Container Runtime Interface (CRI) -- enabled the adoption of the platform by vendors and the open source community without everyone needing to agree on exactly how to implement extensions.

- Although not every workload can be effectively implemented using an event-driven architecture, for those that can the Kubernetes-based Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms like Knative and Cloud Run can handle a lot of the operational management tasks for developers.

- Engineers may be able to get ~90% of the “service mesh” traffic management functionality they need from using a simple proxy.

However, the separation of the control and data planes within modern service meshes, in combination with the rise in popularity of the sidecar deployment model, has provided many benefits within Kubernetes.

- A lot of learning within software development and information technology is transferable. If you spend time going deep in a technology when you begin your career, much of what you learn will be useful when you come to learn the next technology.

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