SAAD ALI: All right.
Hello, everyone.
My name is Saad Ali.
We're here at KubeCon Barcelona, and with me today
is Aaron Crickenberger.
He has a lot of hats that he wears.
He's a Google engineer.
He is on the Kubernetes Steering Committee,
and he's been involved with a lot about Kubernetes releases.
Aaron, can you talk a little bit about the releases
that you've been involved with and how
they've evolved over time?
AARON CRICKENBERGER: Sure.
I've been involved with Kubernetes releases
since Kubernetes was version 1.4, and at the beginning,
it was just sort of a select few Google
people who were hardcore enough and had the right privileges
to make this happen.
Over time, I saw the release process gradually hand
over more and more control to the community.
I started out writing release notes,
you know, attempting to sort of reverse engineer
a coherent narrative out of this chaotic, open-source process.
And over time, grew into other roles such as issue triage--
keeping track of how do we actually
know what's happening within the release,
and make sure the right things are being focused on--
to CI signal-- you know, how do we
make sure that a given Kubernetes release is actually
healthy and ready to ship out the door?
And that sort of culminated in me acting as a release
lead for Kubernetes 1.14, which I was especially proud of,
because it was the release with the most stable enhancements
out of any Kubernetes release.
And it was also the first release
where the community agreed to use the Kubernetes Enhancement
Proposal process, or KEP process,
to ship features, which to me, was really
a sign of just how mature the release process has come.
And while I was doing this, I was
assisted by a team of over 40 people
serving in 13 different roles to ensure
that mostly all I had to do was watch everything
proceed super smoothly.
And it culminated in me getting to create this cat T-shirt here
where every release team member gets
a piece of swag as sort of the honorary badge of running
the release for three months.
And my piece of swag was cat-ernetes,
you know, three cats looking up at the Kubernetes logo
sort of like three wolf moon.
SAAD ALI: Very cool.
And so you mentioned how this process has become better
and is more community owned.
There's a lot of other work going on
to improve the Kubernetes community.
Can you talk about some of that?
AARON CRICKENBERGER: Sure.
Back when Kubernetes first started,
we weren't even sort of very organized
in terms of what we were doing.
It was just some very driven companies
and contributors trying to push code out
as quickly as possible.
And we gradually realized that we
needed to get like-minded people together
to talk about different areas that they were
interested in coordinating on.
So I used to work with a guy named Bob Weiss who--
I worked with him to co-found SIG Scalability,
the first special interest group.
I then worked to co-found the second special interest
group called SIG Testing, all about the testing of Kubernetes
to make sure that worked well.
Today, we now have over 31 special interest groups,
and we've also created working groups
that are collaborations between special interest groups.
So we've really sort of federated out
and empowered the decision-making process
for this open-source community.
And at the same time, we've been very
intentional about focusing on inclusion and diversity
through this whole process, taking a look at how we engage
with our community members and with our contributors,
and looking at the examples that we
set to ensure that we're acting in as inclusive a manner as
possible, sort of setting up work and describing roles
to make it easier to onboard people who are maybe
intimidated or overwhelmed by contributing
to a project that is as large and fast moving as Kubernetes.
So I've really been happy to see that sort of pay off.
And I think that attitude has been reflected
in the KubeCon conference that sort of hangs around Kubernetes
where there's these diversity scholarships that happen
each year, and you sort of see this nice exponential growth
curve.
I thought it was really neat to hear the story today of Nikita
[INAUDIBLE],, who described her journey from sort of college
student to owner of very fundamental parts
of the Kubernetes code base today.
And, you know, she got there by showing up
to one of these special interest groups,
feeling like she was heard.
She found a mentor who was willing to help her out,
and she managed to get to her first KubeCon
by way of a diversity scholarship
to really experience all the wonderful stuff
that this community has to offer.
I also thought another really great thing
I saw in this KubeCon was sort of more of a focus
on mental health, realizing that because this
is such a large and overwhelming open-source
project that some people can maybe burn out or maybe
feel a little uncertain of themselves.
And so I actually tweeted about this at the last KubeCon.
It was super exhausting to me, actually.
I think I gave six talks throughout a week.
It was a lot.
And I said, hey, I think we really
need to talk about burnout.
And I heard back from over 200 people
sharing with me their experiences
and what they were up to and what
they were coming up against.
And some of the constructive criticism
that they had to offer both me as an individual, as well
as the conference organizers, to improve this.
And today, I just came out of a mental health talk
to hear how companies who contribute
to all of the projects here that are hosted by the CNCF
are taking mental health very seriously.
SAAD ALI: That's awesome.
So it sounds like there's a lot of really great work going on
to make the Kubernetes community not only more diverse, but also
more sustainable.
Make sure that we can continue to do all the great work
that we've been doing.
So thank you for all your work on that.
Last question-- what are you looking forward
to here at KubeCon this year?
AARON CRICKENBERGER: Well, like I said earlier, I
think the thing I was most looking forward to
was getting to see that mental health talk and hear the--
like, I stayed after the talk and heard
so many community members ask questions and follow-up
questions afterwards.
That was my second talk was just hearing everybody else engage
and following that conversation.
I'm also, selfishly, really interested
in my panel at the end of Thursday to talk about burnout
and how we can leverage this community
to set better norms for self care and things like that.
SAAD ALI: Cool.
Well, thank you so much for your time, Aaron.
AARON CRICKENBERGER: Cool.
Thanks a lot, Saad.
Great to be here.
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