SAAD ALI: Hello, everyone.
We're here at KubeCon Barcelona, and with me is Vila Aikas.
He is one of the most humble engineers I know.
He wants me to introduce himself as a software engineer,
but he is co-founder, one of the original co-founders
of Kubernetes, as well as a co-founder of Knative.
So let's start with Kubernetes.
Can you tell me about how it's evolved over time?
And this is probably one of the biggest KubeCons we've been to.
VILLE AIKAS: This is amazing.
It's amazing how it keeps growing.
Every year, you come in and you just
see how much it's growing, how many new users are coming,
the solutions that people are building on top of Kubernetes.
It's just beyond wildest dreams of when we started it.
SAAD ALI: Yeah, it is absolutely crazy.
There are so many people.
Now you've been involved with a new project, Knative,
which has turned into a hosted Google
solution called Cloud Run.
Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
VILLE AIKAS: Sure.
So Knative grew out of the fact that we
were like, Kubernetes is great, but it's really
hard for the developers to use.
There's a lot of pieces you need to understand about it.
So I like to think of it always as Kubernetes,
we did the cloud native assembly language.
And with the Knative, we are building
tooling on top of it that allows people to then build
cooler things on top of that.
So it started out as an open source product called Knative.
It provides server-less computing primitives
and building blocks that you can go ahead and use
to build your own software much easier,
rather than having to deal with the native primitive Kubernetes
resources.
And it is also an API spec.
So what you see is on the Cloud Run,
we were able to go ahead and provide a hosted product, where
you can use the API without not even having a Kubernetes
cluster to manage yourself.
But we understand that there's a lot of environments
where we're going to provide these computing capabilities.
So Cloud Run is one where you don't even see any cluster.
There is no cluster.
It's the cluster-less compute.
And then all the way to your own host,
if you have a bare-metal Kubernetes,
you can run it on there.
And we are seeing more and more products
also being built on top of Knative.
So Cloud Run is one of them.
There's others-- Pivotal, Red Pad.
I think Rancher just launched something yesterday or today.
So it's grown as well.
SAAD ALI: Nice.
So what is the current status of Knative and of Cloud Run?
VILLE AIKAS: Sure.
So we are-- on the Knative side, we
are on a six-week release schedule.
So every six weeks, we will cut a new release.
We have a couple of different stacks
there, so we want to make sure that you can come in and either
take all of them, and I think the term being described
is Voltron effect.
When you use all of them together,
everything works much, much, much better.
But you can also go ahead and come in and host only
the pieces that you care about.
So some of those are serving and eventing, also has build.
So if you, for example, have your own build system,
you're happy with that, great.
We don't care.
You can just use serving or eventing itself.
So what we have working on the serving side
is really closely--
we are working very hard to getting it to 1.0 release.
We just dropped two weeks ago 0.6,
and eventing is a little bit behind.
So we are going to go ahead and release serving first, and then
eventing.
But hopefully sometime in the fall time period,
we'll be in the 1.0 release.
SAAD ALI: So as a customer, why would I
choose to run on Cloud Run?
VILLE AIKAS: Ease of management.
So you don't have to care about-- you just
give us the code, and we run it for you, scale it down to zero.
So you truly get the server-less benefits of scale to zero,
pay only for what you use, request base, and so forth.
So on the Cloud Run on the hosted,
you just give us the code, we run it for you,
and you don't have to worry about managing anything.
You can also do this on GKE.
So we have Cloud Run on GKE, where if you have a cluster,
or you have other computing needs that you
want to go and do on GKE, then the great thing
is that you can just go and install a Cloud Run GKE add-on.
And then you can go and still use the same API.
So you can pick and choose.
And then, of course, you can install the open source
Knative yourself onto any cluster, any Kubernetes
cluster.
SAAD ALI: Very cool.
So basically, you can use the Knative API through Cloud Run.
But if you want to drop down into a lower level,
you can basically go and access a GKE cluster directly.
VILLE AIKAS: That's correct.
Yup.
SAAD ALI: Very cool.
So where are we going in the future?
What are you excited about next?
VILLE AIKAS: I'm excited about a couple of different things.
One of them is getting it to GA, 1.0 release, where
we feel that it's ready to go.
The second thing is seeing the community grow.
So again, kind of like what we see with the Kubernetes
in the early days, it's great to go and come up with thoughts
and ideas and share them.
But what's really interesting is when people start then
building products on top of that, like we've seen,
as well as the users.
So we are seeing a lot of developers
coming in and joining the community
and providing a lot of great ideas, great contributions.
It's awesome.
SAAD ALI: That is great.
So last question.
What are you looking forward to at KubeCon this year?
VILLE AIKAS: Just seeing a lot of old friends,
seeing all the cool things that are being built, and--
yeah, and just the community.
It's just awesome.
SAAD ALI: All right.
Thank you so much for your time.
Take care.
VILLE AIKAS: Thank you so much.
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