Kubernetes for Humans

In this special KubeCon episode, Itiel sits down with Jono Bacon of CNCF fame to talk about his career in building developer and user engagement for open-source technologies. Jono shared his early experiences with Linux and how it sparked a passion for community building. They discuss their current coaching company, Stateshift, which helps various tech companies, including those in the CNCF ecosystem, improve their community outreach, brand building, and user adoption. Examples of successful community building, like GitLab and Dagger, are mentioned. Jono concludes with advice on how companies can stand out at events and in their broader engagement strategies by being unique and fostering genuine interactions.

In this episode, Itiel sits down with Kasper, a Developer Advocate at Dash0. Kasper discusses his background, including his extensive experience building platforms on Kubernetes at Lunar, a Nordic challenger bank. He shares insights into the challenges and successes of using cutting-edge cloud-native technologies in a regulated banking environment. Kasper also touches upon his involvement in the CNCF community as an ambassador and co-chair for KubeCon. The discussion explores Lunar's philosophy of leveraging open-source projects and their journey of adopting Kubernetes and other cloud-native tools.

Kasper also explains his move to Dash0, emphasizing his passion for observability and the potential of Open Telemetry.

Ricardo from CERN, who leads the platform infrastructure teams, discusses CERN's significant role in particle physics research with the Large Hadron Collider. The conversation covers how CERN manages the massive amounts of data generated from experiments using a worldwide computing grid. Ricardo shares CERN's journey with adopting Kubernetes for various applications, including critical systems controlling detectors and accelerators. He also touches upon CERN's involvement with the CNCF and the Kubernetes community. The discussion includes their strategy for managing large-scale deployments and their perspective on the future of Kubernetes in scientific computing, including the potential impact of GenAI and specialized hardware.

In this episode of Kubernetes for Humans, we speak with Ahmed Bebars, a Principal Engineer at the New York Times and a CNCF Ambassador, who offers a unique perspective on cloud native technologies. Ahmed recounts his professional journey in accounting before transitioning into the technology sector, leading to his current deep involvement with the Kubernetes ecosystem. He shares his initial introduction to Kubernetes almost a decade ago, recognizing its capabilities in container orchestration.

Ahmed provided his insights on the appropriate use cases for Kubernetes, emphasizing the importance of identifying the problem before selecting a solution. The discussion also covers service mesh technologies such as Istio, along with Ahmed's perspective on their complexities and benefits. Looking ahead, he shares his thoughts on the evolution of the Kubernetes ecosystem, including the potential impact of GenAI.

Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative and original author of Chef, discusses the evolution of infrastructure automation and his career-long passion for infrastructure. Adam reflects on the history and context of Chef, its emergence alongside EC2, and its role in configuration management. He shares insights into the competitive landscape of configuration management tools like Chef, Puppet, and Ansible, and touches upon the transition of Chef to Progress. Adam also introduces System Initiative, explaining its ambitious goal to revolutionize infrastructure automation by building digital twins of digital things, moving away from treating infrastructure as code. He also predicts more attempts to rethink infrastructure automation and encourages "wild swings" to improve upon the status quo.

** Follow Adam on Linkedin, X, and BlueSky.

** Check out System Initiative: https://www.systeminit.com/

This episode of "Kubernetes for Humans" features Dan Ciruli, a Senior Director of Product Management at Nutanix, who shares his journey in tech and his perspective on the evolution of cloud-native technologies. Ciruli discusses his early career as an engineer and his transition to product management, noting that the role was not well-defined in the 1990s. He recounts his experiences with startups, Google, and D2IQ (formerly Mesosphere), highlighting the rise of Docker and projects like Mesos. He emphasizes that the creation of the CNCF and support from major tech companies were key factors in Kubernetes becoming the dominant platform, stating "the CNCF was really the genius". Ciruli also explains that D2IQ pivoted to Kubernetes to focus on making it more usable for enterprises.

Ciruli discusses Nutanix's acquisition of D2IQ to enhance their container management offerings. He explains that Nutanix, founded by ex-Google engineers, sought to expand beyond VMs and needed a "good container story". According to a survey he references, 92% of companies running Kubernetes in production do not want developers managing infrastructure, and 86% of companies want to run VMs and containers on the same infrastructure. Ciruli predicts that the Kubernetes API will be the future, with various implementations and that the ultimate success for Kubernetes will be when the specific implementation does not matter. He believes the API will enable declarative deployment of applications across different environments, and notes that "the API will have lots of different implementations, but that will be that declarative deployment of applications".

This podcast features Cory O'Daniel, CEO of Massdriver, an infrastructure automation platform. O'Daniel discusses his extensive background in software engineering and cloud operations, highlighting his expertise in Erlang and Elixir programming languages and their applications within Kubernetes. He explains Massdriver's role in simplifying infrastructure management for both developers and operations engineers by visually representing infrastructure-as-code. The conversation also touches upon comparisons with other similar platforms like Backstage and Crossplane, emphasizing the need for tailored solutions based on organizational needs and maturity levels. Finally, O'Daniel shares his perspective on future industry trends, predicting a shift towards simpler systems while expressing concern regarding potential security vulnerabilities.

Check out Massdriver's free trial and follow Cory on Linkedin. Until we come full circle on Cory's podcast be sure to give it a listen as well: https://www.platformengineeringpod.com/

Mirko, co-founder and former CEO of Instana, led the Application Performance Management company for microservices to its successful acquisition by IBM in late 2020. In May 2023, he co-founded Dash0, an OpenTelemetry-native observability solution, furthering his contributions to the observability field. An active angel investor, Mirko supports over 60 tech startups, showcasing his dedication to fostering innovation and emerging technologies.

Follow Mirko on Linkedin and X. 

Solomon Hykes began his career as a System Administrator at Fairgame in 1999 and later worked as a Junior Software Engineer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center in 2002. In 2003, he became self-employed and worked as a Tech Mentor & Instructor until 2004. Solomon then joined CEIS as a Trusted Infrastructure Engineer from 2004 to 2006. Solomon Hykes then joined SmartJog as a Solutions Engineer from 2006 to 2007.

In 2007, he co-founded Docker, previously known as Dotcloud, and served as the CEO until 2013. During this time, thheey developed DotCloud into a successful second-generation platform-as-a-service. Solomon then became the CTO of Docker from 2013 to 2018. In 2019, Solomon Hykes co-founded Dagger.

Learn more about Dagger.io on Discord: https://discord.gg/dagger-io

Daniel Bryant is the Head of Product Marketing at Syntasso. His technical expertise focuses on ‘DevOps’ tooling, cloud/container platforms, and microservice implementations. Daniel is a long-time coder, platform engineer, and Java Champion, contributing to several open-source projects.

He also writes for InfoQ, O’Reilly, and The New Stack and regularly presents at international conferences such as KubeCon, QCon, and JavaOne. In his copious free time, he enjoys running, reading, and traveling.