On June 6, 2014, Joe Beda published the first code commit for the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration project. Four years later, Kubernetes has become a core enabler for cloud native technology and benefits from the support of all the major public cloud providers and many major enterprise IT vendors as well.
When Beda made the first code commit, he was an engineer at Google. In 2018, Beda is now the co-founder and CTO of Heptio, which provides commercial support and services for Kubernetes. In a video interview with eWEEK, Beda discusses the scope of Kubernetes, what it is and what it isn’t as well as providing some insight into what’s coming next.
“As a member of the Steering Committee, one of my goals is to make sure that Kubernetes maintains a relatively well-defined scope,” Beda said. “I think it’s important for the health of the project to keep Kubernetes focused and then provide extension points to be able to do stuff more widely.”
Some in the Kubernetes community see the open-source project as a set of abstractions and APIs that can enable a host of different cloud features including containers, application delivery, networking and storage.
“I wouldn’t say that Kubernetes is a set of APIs as much as it sort of a toolkit,” Beda said.
In Beda’s view, Kubernetes is somewhat like the Linux operating system in many different respects. He noted that Linux can run everywhere from a cell phone up to the world’s most powerful supercomputer. Beda said that with Linux it’s not the exact same code that runs on the smallest devices and the largest servers, but it is the same framework and way of thinking about things across different domains. He sees the same model working with Kubernetes.
Improving Kubernetes
In a keynote at the Kubecon EU event in March 2017, Beda told the audience that Kubernetes “sucks” and needed to improve to be able to attract more users and developers. Now in 2018, Beda said that his goal for the 2017 keynote was to make sure that the Kubernetes community continues to focus on new users and make the platform easier to work with. Over the past year, Beda said that a lot of progress has been made on making Kubernetes friendlier for new users.
“I think the Kubernetes as a whole has done a good job of continuing to focus on ease of use and continuing to make it more approachable for more people,” he said.
Watch the full video interview with Joe Beda above.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.