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In this exclusive interview, Hightower talks about Kubernetes, open source culture, and his personal journey.
Kubernetes is known as the ‘Linux’ of the cloud world. Everyone is using it today – from Amazon to Docker. What’s so unique about this open source project? There are many different answers. While the technology is relatively new, the ideas behind it are old and have been in use at Google for decades. These are practices from large scale web companies.
“I think the reason why you see adoption across the cloud providers is because they understand these ideas,” said Kelsey Hightower, Staff Developer Advocate at Google Cloud Platform, in the interview with TFiR.
People knew that they could implement these ideas themselves, so why not take all that they learned in the last 15-20 years and roll them into a real project instead of just a white paper.
“Now you can download an idea and actually use it, contribute to it,” said Hightower, “I think this is why it has such widespread adoption because it actually solves real problems that people have.”
Another critical factor is the API driven design of Kubernetes. As a result it, doesn’t really matter whether you run it on Microsoft Azure or AWS, every component lives as a first class citizen through the extensibility. “Anything that they build and extend will look just like the other first class components that use the same extension points,” said Hightower.
During the interview, we also discussed several points including but not limited to these:
- What are the new challenges for Kubernetes?
- Why has Kubernetes become a commodity?
- Should you build or buy Kubernetes based solution?
- Can Kubernetes serve the growing IoT space?
- How to keep Kubernetes from losing focus as it’s adoption is skyrocketing?
In addition to these Kubernetes related topics, we also talked about the open source culture, it’s influence on Hightower and how he helped build a great community around the project.
Hightower also shared his personal journey of he became a developer.
