DUSTIN KIRKLAND: Hello, my name is Dustin Kirkland.
I'm a product manager at Google.
And I'm here with Weston Hutchins,
who's also a product manager working on GKE.
Everyone loves a good origin story.
Wes, you've been with GKE On-Prem since the beginning.
What is the origin story of GKE On-Prem?
WESTON HUTCHINS: So, thanks for having me here, Dustin.
You know, GKE On-Prem really started
by talking to GKE customers.
So these were people that had decided
they were using Kubernetes.
And they were loving the manage experience we give them
in the cloud, but they needed a solution
that runs in their own data center,
for a variety of reasons, mainly regulatory.
Some of them had workloads that they couldn't really
bring up to the cloud quite yet, legacy things.
And they were looking for a solution
that worked in both places.
They had been using primarily do-it-yourself Kubernetes,
which is pretty easy to get up and running.
But the real challenge comes on the day-two operations.
So things like securing your cluster,
doing it in high availability mode,
just being able to scale up the cluster up and down,
these are all things that GKE does really well.
And we talked to a lot of them.
And I went and talked to a couple of devs
inside and said, hey, is it possible to take
the GKE management stack, all the cluster management that we
do and a lot of the node features,
wrap that up into a package and bring it into a customer's
On-Prem environment?
And at first, people were like, oh, I don't know.
But over time, we started to pull together
prototypes and pieces.
And we built a package that we could give off
to customers that was then connected back
to our hosted control plane that offers a local Kubernetes
cluster running in a data center.
And you know, when we talked a lot about Anthos at Next
this year, Kubernetes and GKE On-Prem
really formed the base of that package.
And we then start to layer other types of services
and, I will say, ease of use features for developers,
like Istio and Knative, that can run
in this portable environment where you can run it
in other clouds, and you can run it in an On-Prem place.
So that's really how GKE On-Prem came about.
DUSTIN KIRKLAND: And GKE On-Prem is ultimately
the heart of Anthos.
WESTON HUTCHINS: It is.
The Kubernetes is the base underpinning
of all of the stuff we build on.
It gives us that portable environment,
that infrastructure abstraction, that
allows you to run the same workloads in different places
without having to change anything.
DUSTIN KIRKLAND: It all starts with the GKE On-Prem.
And then the Anthos pieces plug in around that.
WESTON HUTCHINS: Correct.
Yeah, the base layer is Kubernetes.
It is the portable infrastructure abstraction
that allows us to run in an on-prem environment
and in the cloud.
And then the other ones build on top of that.
DUSTIN KIRKLAND: But Kubernetes by itself
just isn't enough, right?
So what are the other key pieces that plug in that
make it enough?
WESTON HUTCHINS: Yeah, Kubernetes
is extremely powerful.
But for a lot of customers I talk to, especially developers,
they don't really want all the bells, and whistles,
and knobs of Kubernetes.
And this is really where Knative and Cloud Run fit in.
They say, you can take the normal app development workflow
that you're used to-- so push to deploy, build in the cloud,
build an app, have different versions,
scale those out-- and under the covers, that will actually
go and configure traffic splitting
services in Kubernetes, ad load balancers,
scale up apps, scale down apps.
That's really what Kubernetes is supposed to be.
It's the base layer that gets it done,
but we want to make things easier
for developers and operators.
DUSTIN KIRKLAND: And is this meeting,
those same customers that you talked to
at the beginning that didn't want
those day-2, day-92 operations, don't
want to worry about those operations and that management,
are we hitting the mark here?
WESTON HUTCHINS: Yeah.
You know, for the most part, most customers don't really
want to be in the business of operating and managing
their own cluster.
They would rather let someone that
knows how to do this at scale with many, many customers
take that over for them, so they can just focus on writing apps.
DUSTIN KIRKLAND: Right.
And what are you hearing in terms
of hybrid workloads and the challenges and solutions
to hybrid computing?
WESTON HUTCHINS: Yeah.
So the biggest challenge that we ran into is just a lot of these
customers either have data that cannot leave the data center
for regulatory reasons, or maybe they need to run workloads
at the edge, so super fast, low latency processing.
They have standardized on Kubernetes.
They said, that is the app platform
that we want to use in the cloud and in these environments,
but we really need a full managed stack
running in these places.
And so GKE On-Prem does give them that ability
to keep data local, to work within their existing
regulatory environments, but also offers them a path forward
to cloud.
This is the real big, key benefit of Anthos
is that you can start to use cloud workflows, right?
You can start to think about writing
apps that are resilient to clusters,
nodes that can go down.
You can start thinking about global apps
and how to do traffic splitting across them.
But you can use that in your own environment when you're ready.
You can move up to the cloud at your own pace.
DUSTIN KIRKLAND: It's a real hybrid world.
WESTON HUTCHINS: Yeah.
For a lot of customers, it really
is about training and the people that you
hire, training them on the right tools,
so that they don't have to learn different types of tooling
for these different environments.
That's a lot of the magic of what Anthos brings.
DUSTIN KIRKLAND: Wes, thank you very much.
WESTON HUTCHINS: Absolutely.
Thank you.
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