Sheng Liang was the lead developer on the original Java Virtual Machine. Today he works as the CEO of Rancher Labs, a company building a platform on top of Kubernetes. Sheng joins the show to discuss his experiences in the technology industry. The container orchestration wars had many victims. The competing standards for how an

Kubernetes has made distributed systems easier to deploy and manage. As Kubernetes has become reliable, engineers have started to look for higher level abstractions we can define on top of Kubernetes. An operator is a method of packaging, deploying, and managing a Kubernetes application. Operators are useful for spinning up distributed systems such as Kafka,

Cloud computing was popularized in 2006 with the launch of Amazon Web Services. AWS allowed developers to use remote server infrastructure with a simple set of APIs. But even with AWS, it was still not simple to deploy and manage a web application. In 2007, Heroku launched a platform built on top of AWS. Heroku

Software engineering is an art and a science. To manage engineers is to manage artists and scientists. Software companies build practical tools like payment systems, messaging products, and search engines. Software tools are the underpinnings of our modern lives. You might expect this core infrastructure which modern humans rely on to have been constructed with

Machine learning allows software to improve as that software consumes more data. Machine learning is a tool that every software engineer wants to be able to use. Because machine learning is so broadly applicable, software companies want to make the tools more accessible to the developers across the organization. There are many steps that an

The software market changes every year. As individuals and enterprises become more willing to buy software, there are new markets for entrepreneurs to sell software to. Good software has high margins and high retention, so even a niche software business can prove profitable. As software spreads across the world, developing countries are showing a willingness

Google Cloud was started with a vision of providing Google infrastructure to the masses. In 2008, it was not obvious that Google should become a cloud provider. Amazon Web Services was finding success among startups who needed on-demand infrastructure, but the traditional enterprise market was not yet ready to buy cloud resources. Googlers liked the

Containers are made to fail gracefully. When your container shuts down due to a hardware or software failure, your distributed application should be able to tolerate that failure. One simple way to be able to tolerate such a failure is to make all of your application logic “stateless.” If your application does not maintain state,

Amazon Web Services is the leading cloud provider by a large margin. Amazon established its lead by being first to market in 2006, with Google and Microsoft taking several years to catch up to the huge business opportunity of the cloud. Since 2008, Google Cloud has been working on cloud products for developers. It started

Containers offer a lightweight abstraction for running a server. Cloud providers are able to manage billions of containers from different users, allowing for economies of scale so that each user can pay less. Today, there is a variety of ways that users can deploy containers on a cloud provider. These containers can run in managed