STEPHANIE WONG: Hey, everyone.
This is Stephanie Wong, Cloud Developer Advocate.
And today, I am really, really excited,
because we have our Google Fellow here, Eric Brewer.
He has been here helping to build Google and Google Cloud's
infrastructure over the last like decade.
And we are so honored to have him here today.
So Eric, thank you so much for being here.
How are you today?
ERIC BREWER: I am fantastic, hanging out
in wonderful Marin County, enjoying
being remote for today.
STEPHANIE WONG: Same here.
I am just a stone's throw away from you.
But I do want to jump into it right away.
I was actually able to dig up this tweet
that you had a while ago.
I think it was about 10 years ago.
And you were talking about your initial plan
to help build infrastructure here at Google
and how much work there was left to do.
So what was that initial plan, and how did it pan out?
ERIC BREWER: Well, that was based on my thinking
really from the '90s.
So before VMs were a big deal, I was
working on what you would now call
cloud computing at UC Berkeley.
And it was really based on a model
that used a lot of processes, and services, and APIs.
And I still like that model better.
So when I got to Google, I kind of
felt like we need a new cloud that's
a higher level of abstraction.
And of course, that led to Kubernetes and all the things
we do in the modern version of that.
STEPHANIE WONG: What's it like to see that come to fruition
and have the industry adopt it over time?
ERIC BREWER: It's incredibly exciting.
Even when you plan something-- like, oh,
we should do a new orchestration layer based on containers,
because it's more like how we think the cloud should work,
it's more like how Google works internally--
that's fine to say that.
But then you have to create the projects.
And you have to decide to open source them.
You have to get fellow travelers,
as I say, other groups that want to bet on this journey.
And of course, you need to get adoption.
And all that happened.
And after maybe eight years working on Kubernetes,
it's in a remarkable place.
STEPHANIE WONG: And it's taken quite some time for us
to get to where we are today.
I'm curious, what was it like to be
one of the first and biggest supporters of Kubernetes,
working on it from a very early stage?
Were there any unexpected challenges
that you underwent in implementing it across Google
and also across the industry?
ERIC BREWER: Well, I think there were two obvious hurdles
internally.
The first was we already had App Engine and VMs.
Why do we need a third way to do computing?
And so there's some natural resistance to change.
And the answer is because the third way is
better than either one alone.
And the second one is, this is such a big deal.
Why would we open source it?
And we didn't tend to do much open sourcing of systems
things, as we do now.
That's a bit of change in philosophy.
But for Kubernetes, I just felt it
was too big a change for the industry for us
to do it by ourselves, and open source
was an important part of getting the fellow travelers
that we needed.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yes.
Yes, and it's had quite an impact, as we know today.
But tell me a little bit more about the open source
ecosystem, what it's grown to be,
and what it's looking like over the next 10 years.
Is the cloud going to continue to change?
Are we moving towards more higher level of abstractions
or opinionated surfaces?
ERIC BREWER: Well, yes, yes, and yes.
So Kubernetes is about, I think, the second-largest open-source
project now behind Linux, which makes a lot of sense
and is an achievement in itself.
But really, it's because it's now the cloud platform,
or the enterprise platform.
And the reason for that is it's both versatile--
you can do many things with it-- but also,
that it's easier to operate than just the raw VMs or raw disks.
And so it's a good platform to build on.
But again, I think it's better viewed
as a platform for platforms.
If you say, well, I really like Cloud Run.
It's easier to use than Kubernetes--
that is absolutely true.
Cloud Run is not as general purpose as Kubernetes.
So the way I think about that is,
I want many opinionated things that are vertically oriented
on top of Kubernetes.
Kubernetes is great for building those things,
both inside the enterprise and out.
And in the end, the collection will
be Kubernetes becomes less visible, because you're
using the things on top of it in your daily experience
with your future cloud.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yes.
And what I love about the cloud space
is that it's all about providing both developer
freedom and flexibility, but also empowering
them to have that optionality for these opinionated services.
They want cloud providers to give them
the best-of-breed security, for example.
ERIC BREWER: Yes.
It's actually good that there are
many functions as a service built on top of Kubernetes.
And some will be great.
Some will be less great.
But the fact that there's many of them
is actually a good thing for everybody.
STEPHANIE WONG: Right.
Now, OK, you've done 10 years of this type of work.
It's changed at a speed that I'm sure nobody had expected.
But what are you hoping to achieve over the next 10 years?
Anything that you might predict will be the next wave
or fundamental shift?
Or is it really hard to say based
on your experience so far?
ERIC BREWER: Well, I think one big one
that we're in the middle of is how
to combine the philosophy you can get from something
like Kubernetes and CI/CD with the security we clearly
need as a nation, and in general, for all nations.
And so a classic view of security is to say,
oh, I don't want to change anything.
There might be vulnerabilities.
But it turns out it's the exact opposite.
If you really want to be secure, you
have to be able to update your software quickly,
because there are latent security problems that
will be discovered and you'll then need to fix them quickly.
And so my biggest focus at the moment
is really around open-source security, the supply chains
and its security, and how to really make
that a much more opinionated stretch, from source code
to actual deployment, having better metadata,
better control of all those steps, better attestations,
which can make proof statements about those deliverables.
And so you'll understand what your real risks are,
and of course, minimize as many attack points as possible.
And that is going to be a big change, also.
STEPHANIE WONG: Well, that is a perfect tee up,
because in our next video that we're doing together,
we are going to be talking more about how you have been helping
to build a better security process for software supply
chains and how trusted software providers are the future.
So thank you so much, Eric.
Everyone else, stay tuned.
We are going to keep these conversations coming at you.
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