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RETO MEIER: Welcome back to the "Next" live show.
As promised, fellow developer advocate Kelsey Hightower
is here to join us.
Thanks for being here, Kelsey.
KELSEY HIGHTOWER: I'm happy to be here.
STEPHANIE WONG: So earlier we heard TK's keynote.
What are you most excited about?
KELSEY HIGHTOWER: Well, given my background in Kubernetes,
I'm most excited about Anthos, which
is kind of giving Kubernetes to more
people and their environment, so they can run it on-prem,
you can run it on Google Cloud.
Also I like the addition of Istio,
so giving people the ability to manage their networking playing
like they do for their compute.
And I think the other thing I'm most
happy about is more managed databases,
so now having SQL server.
Lots of our customers ask for SQL server,
so pairing managed databases with something like Kubernetes
is kind of a perfect match.
STEPHANIE WONG: Right.
And Google has a really strong tradition
of developer teams passing on creative software innovations
to our emerging developer audiences.
What tools can you tell us about that are also
empowering our enterprise developers with years
of experience and proprietary systems?
KELSEY HIGHTOWER: Yeah, I think for the biggest thing
is meeting developers where they are, so kind of integrating
with their IDEs, giving them familiar open source
technologies.
So a of developers are running things
like Docker and Kubernetes on their laptop--
Envoy packaged in Istio.
So what we're doing is taking all of these open source
projects that you may be using on your own machines,
maybe even internally, and we're just
adding a lot of that support stuff
that you would need to run it in production in the enterprise.
RETO MEIER: So we can see that values are shifting up
the stack with higher level sets of services
and new abstractions.
How is automation evolving the developer experience?
KELSEY HIGHTOWER: Previously, we've
been trying to automate a lot of bad practices, right?
If you automate directly on the virtual machine, for example,
now you're starting to automate around scripts,
we had a lot of configuration management tools,
but the APIs weren't there.
Now, as you move up the stack, things like Kubernetes
give us a declarative interface for deploying on a distributed
system--
so containers, batch drops, con jobs.
So now we start to think about automation.
You're finally targeting APIs.
So what we were able to do for traditional software
development, we're now able to do for infrastructure.
So bringing things like Istio, which gives you
a declarative API for the networking,
things like our service add on give you a declarative API
for your serverless stack.
So when you look across the spectrum
now for infrastructure, you're now programming, finally,
towards well-defined APIs.
STEPHANIE WONG: So this is sort of supporting people
where they are.
And I want to talk about GKE on-prem and hybrid workloads.
What are some of the benefits of it,
and what can sys admins kind of reap from that?
KELSEY HIGHTOWER: Yeah, I think since Kubernetes came out
everyone was like, I want it, right?
And GKE, when you click that button,
you just get this magical cluster--
production ready, ready to go.
And the next thing is, well, what
about my existing environment?
And many people have kind of tried to do it
and not everyone has the same level of expertise or time.
So the nice thing about this is that we're
going to take GKE, the same bits that we used to host on GCP,
we're now bringing that into your data center.
So we've given people clear guidance on the lower level
requirements, and then we just layered GKE on top,
and then we do the same APIs, the same control plans.
So if you're using things like Terraform on GCP,
you're now able to point that same stack
in your on-prem environment-- get that same workflow
that you love so much on GKE.
RETO MEIER: Nice.
Now, Kubernetes is being adopted and adapted
to meet more and more technical needs.
Tell us about how GKE hub helps admins with hybrid environments
do their jobs better.
KELSEY HIGHTOWER: Yeah, so GKE hub--
so once you kind of get a taste of Kubernetes,
the next thing is you want Kubernetes everywhere, right?
Every problem you see, you want to rub Kubernetes on top of it.
So a lot of our customers have more than one cluster.
If you think about it, a lot of our customers
value high availability, they'll have a cluster
per region or per zone.
So once you start to have a collection of clusters,
even you bring in on-prem into the mix,
you need a place to aggregate all of those things.
So a GKE hub represents is the ability
to aggregate all of your Kubernetes clusters, even
the ones on-prem, and then once you have that,
you have a centralized place to do things
like policy management.
So once you have a Kubernetes cluster,
the thing you have to think about
is security across all those clusters.
And one thing that's kind of hard or error prone
is you have to try to figure out how
to get your configuration correct across all
of those clusters.
So the hub is going to be the anchor point where
we build a lot of those additional tools that
allow you to manage everything from a central place.
RETO MEIER: Nice.
Well, thanks, Kelsey.
We really appreciate you taking the time.
KELSEY HIGHTOWER: Awesome, thank you.
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