DUSTIN KIRKLAND: Hello, I'm Dustin Kirkland,
a product manager at Google.
I'm here with Tim Hockin, tech lead for the Kubernetes project
at Google.
Tim, you've been around Kubernetes since the beginning.
You've seen the past, the present,
and maybe have some ideas about the future.
Walk us through the past, present, and future
of Kubernetes.
TIM HOCKIN: Sure.
So know Kubernetes was born at Google, obviously.
It took a lot of ideas from Google,
but it is not exclusively a Google thing.
This community is an amazing thing that has happened.
The past, you know, we've spent five years
building this system.
We're here now with 8,000 of my best friends
talking about Kubernetes.
It's amazing to have gotten here.
Five years ago, I would never have
believed that we would be here in Spain talking about this.
Here we are today, we're still working in Kubernetes.
It is still maturing.
It is servicing way more than we initially
thought we would possibly be able to address, more use
cases, more users, more scale.
And future-- you know, it's still growing.
We're still doing more.
We're tackling new use cases every day.
We've got customers and users here all the time
talking about this new use case, this new problem,
and so I'm excited to see how much more we're going
to grow and tackle what's new.
DUSTIN KIRKLAND: And Google is one
of the leaders in the Kubernetes project, but not the only one.
There's a lot of vendors involved
in and around Kubernetes and other projects.
How do you see the role of vendors
in and around the Kubernetes community?
TIM HOCKIN: I'm one of the tech leads of the project.
I work on a lot of different areas within the project,
obviously, and I oversee a lot of work.
And I work at Google, and you might
think that would be conflicting, but I think it's not, really.
The leads of the project are very much fanatical
about being vendor neutral, about being open,
about being very transparent.
The project is set up in a way that everything we do
can be seen by anybody who wants to pay attention.
And I think that shows in the quality
of the code, the quality and number of contributors,
where they're coming from.
We have contributors from every time zone on the planet,
from almost every continent.
I still haven't proved whether we have someone in Antarctica
or not.
If you're in Antarctica and you're contributing
to Kubernetes, call me.
This has been a really important part.
The vendors are a critical piece of our ecosystem.
Kubernetes would not be successful
without the ecosystem.
We knew this from the beginning, and I
am happy to say that we're really successful there.
But it is still a community-driven project
that is not tied or locked in to any one vendor.
While we have a ton of people at Google
who are working on Kubernetes, myself included,
they are not exclusively focusing on Google's work.
They're working to build the project at large.
DUSTIN KIRKLAND: And you've got a lot of insight
with a lot of customers, a lot of users,
and a lot of community members working with Kubernetes.
What are some of the trends you see emerging,
maybe some unexpected trends or patterns you've seen emerge?
TIM HOCKIN: So, I do.
I talk to a lot of customers, and I've definitely
seen some emerging trends.
We've passed the point where people
are struggling to figure out if they need Kubernetes.
It's more or less assumed now if you're building big systems,
Kubernetes is the way to do it.
But the patterns that are emerging now are scale--
large size.
How big can my clusters get?
How many pods can I run on a node?
What's the density that I can achieve?
How do I drive my utilization?
We're talking about multi-cluster situations.
I've got clusters around the world, around the country--
how do I link them together and make them work together?
Some of these problems are sort of
at the very edges of Kubernetes itself,
but I think there's a lot we can do within Kubernetes to make
it easier to build solutions that
are solving these problems.
Hybrid is a really hot topic right now.
The reality of, you know, people are stuck in other clouds,
or they're stuck on-premises, and there are really
good reasons for that, and they're
trying to find ways to work across these different
environments.
DUSTIN KIRKLAND: Tim, thank you very much.
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