Kubernetes for Humans

#035 - A Veteran of the Container Wars on the Past, Present, and Future of Cloud Native with Dan Ciruli (Nutanix)

This episode of "Kubernetes for Humans" features Dan Ciruli, a Senior Director of Product Management at Nutanix, who shares his journey in tech and his perspective on the evolution of cloud-native technologies. Ciruli discusses his early career as an engineer and his transition to product management, noting that the role was not well-defined in the 1990s. He recounts his experiences with startups, Google, and D2IQ (formerly Mesosphere), highlighting the rise of Docker and projects like Mesos. He emphasizes that the creation of the CNCF and support from major tech companies were key factors in Kubernetes becoming the dominant platform, stating "the CNCF was really the genius". Ciruli also explains that D2IQ pivoted to Kubernetes to focus on making it more usable for enterprises.
Ciruli discusses Nutanix's acquisition of D2IQ to enhance their container management offerings. He explains that Nutanix, founded by ex-Google engineers, sought to expand beyond VMs and needed a "good container story". According to a survey he references, 92% of companies running Kubernetes in production do not want developers managing infrastructure, and 86% of companies want to run VMs and containers on the same infrastructure. Ciruli predicts that the Kubernetes API will be the future, with various implementations and that the ultimate success for Kubernetes will be when the specific implementation does not matter. He believes the API will enable declarative deployment of applications across different environments, and notes that "the API will have lots of different implementations, but that will be that declarative deployment of applications".

#034 - Infrastructure Automation & the Future of Ops with Cory O'Daniel (Massdriver)

This podcast features Cory O'Daniel, CEO of Massdriver, an infrastructure automation platform. O'Daniel discusses his extensive background in software engineering and cloud operations, highlighting his expertise in Erlang and Elixir programming languages and their applications within Kubernetes. He explains Massdriver's role in simplifying infrastructure management for both developers and operations engineers by visually representing infrastructure-as-code. The conversation also touches upon comparisons with other similar platforms like Backstage and Crossplane, emphasizing the need for tailored solutions based on organizational needs and maturity levels. Finally, O'Daniel shares his perspective on future industry trends, predicting a shift towards simpler systems while expressing concern regarding potential security vulnerabilities.
 
Check out Massdriver's free trial and follow Cory on Linkedin. Until we come full circle on Cory's podcast be sure to give it a listen as well: https://www.platformengineeringpod.com/
 

#033 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Mirko Novakovic (dash0)

Mirko, co-founder and former CEO of Instana, led the Application Performance Management company for microservices to its successful acquisition by IBM in late 2020. In May 2023, he co-founded Dash0, an OpenTelemetry-native observability solution, furthering his contributions to the observability field. An active angel investor, Mirko supports over 60 tech startups, showcasing his dedication to fostering innovation and emerging technologies.
 
Follow Mirko on Linkedin and X. 

#032 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Solomon Hykes (Dagger.io)

Solomon Hykes began his career as a System Administrator at Fairgame in 1999 and later worked as a Junior Software Engineer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center in 2002. In 2003, he became self-employed and worked as a Tech Mentor & Instructor until 2004. Solomon then joined CEIS as a Trusted Infrastructure Engineer from 2004 to 2006. Solomon Hykes then joined SmartJog as a Solutions Engineer from 2006 to 2007.
In 2007, he co-founded Docker, previously known as Dotcloud, and served as the CEO until 2013. During this time, thheey developed DotCloud into a successful second-generation platform-as-a-service. Solomon then became the CTO of Docker from 2013 to 2018. In 2019, Solomon Hykes co-founded Dagger.
Learn more about Dagger.io on Discord: https://discord.gg/dagger-io

#031 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Daniel Bryant (Syntasso)

Daniel Bryant is the Head of Product Marketing at Syntasso. His technical expertise focuses on ‘DevOps’ tooling, cloud/container platforms, and microservice implementations. Daniel is a long-time coder, platform engineer, and Java Champion, contributing to several open-source projects.
He also writes for InfoQ, O’Reilly, and The New Stack and regularly presents at international conferences such as KubeCon, QCon, and JavaOne. In his copious free time, he enjoys running, reading, and traveling.

#030 - Kubernetes for Humans with Ellen Chisa (Boldstart Ventures)

Ellen is a Partner at boldstart. She joined the boldstart team in January 2021, after having worked with the team as a founder at Dark. Her role allows her to do exactly what she loves – investing and supporting founders building pre-product, dev-focused, enterprise companies.
Prior to boldstart and founding Dark, she worked in a variety of early stage product roles: at Lola on travel tooling, at Kickstarter on backer-facing projects, and at Microsoft on the first versions of cross-platform Office Mobile. The common thread is building tools that enable people to do creative work.
Ellen has an a M.B.A from Harvard Business School, and a B.S in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. She grew up in Rochester Hills, MI, but now lives in Somerville, MA with her husband and her cat, Gutenberg.

#029 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Elizabeth K. Joseph & Holger Wolf (IBM)

Wait, people run Kubernetes on mainframes? Yes, they do! Check out Elizabeth's 2019 KubeCon talk on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgyb_9zCaeA
 
Elizabeth K. Joseph
After spending a decade doing Linux systems administration, today Elizabeth K. Joseph works as a developer advocate at IBM focused on IBM Z.
As a systems administrator, she worked for a small services provider in Philadelphia before joining HPE where she worked for four years on the geographically distributed OpenStack Infrastructure team. This team runs the fully open source infrastructure for OpenStack development and lead to an interest in other open source projects that have opened up their infrastructures. While working on OpenStack she wrote the book Common OpenStack Deployments.
She is a former member of the Ubuntu Community Council and the co-author of the 8th and 9th editions of The Official Ubuntu Book. At home, she serves on Board of Directors for Partimus.org, a non-profit in the San Francisco Bay Area providing Linux-based computers to schools and education-focused community centers in need.
Holger Wolf
Holger started his career as a software engineer at Hewlett Packard (HP) and then spent nearly 3 decades (!) working for IBM. Currently, he's e2e responsible for OpenShift on the IBM Z and LinuxONE platforms. Working closely with RedHat on getting OpenShift versions out and on new enhancements and functions.
Prior to that, Holger was responsible for System Tests of Linux Distributions on IBM zSystems and LinuxONE Platforms. Worked with Partners SUSE and RedHat to get their Enterprise Distributions on the IBM Platform. Led the test teams in Russia and the USA, with technical ownership of the test setup as well as driving test automation.
He started to take ownership of OpenShift on IBM zSystems (now IBM Z) and LinuxONE. Setting up the effort for getting OpenShift on the Platform and interlocking with RedHat.

#028 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Chris Bailey (IBM Instana)

Chris is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO for Instana, leading the technical strategy and development of Observability and IT Automation solutions at IBM. He is a recognized technology leader across programming languages, runtimes, platforms, observability, and automated IT operations. He has pioneered projects that fundamentally enhanced open-source communities and cloud-native platforms. He is currently focused on providing comprehensive real-time observability across the entire enterprise from Business to IT, and leveraging AI and Automation capabilities to enable organizations and teams to meet their operational objectives.
 
Follow him on Linkedin and X

#027 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Ben Sigelman (ServiceNow)

Ben Sigelman is the General Manager of ServiceNow Cloud Observability, which solves for the reliability and performance of cloud and cloud-native applications while broadening the scope and leverage of the broader Now Platform.
Previously, he co-founded and was CEO of Lightstep, which ServiceNow acquired in 2021, and co-created both the OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry projects. Ben also helped define modern observability with his work on tracing and metrics monitoring at Google (the Monarch and Dapper projects) and was a pioneer in SRE best practices and tooling.
He holds dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Brown University.

#026 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with BJ Badyk (Nexxen)

BJ Badyk is a human who desires an easier life. Nerd from birth, his curiosity led him down a path through the start of ISPs, Silicon Valley during the dot-com bubble, the last few years of the Playboy brand, and into the world of Adtech.
He currently runs the platform engineering team at Nexxen, where they work on unique ways of handling millions of requests per second with Kubernetes. The team was an early adopter of Talos Linux, which they now run at scale. He presented at TalosCon 2023 and continues to pursue simple solutions to complex problems.In his free time, he can be found listening to synth-wave, motorcycling, or roaming around the woods with his ham radios.------------TalosCon 2023: https://youtu.be/WpE1EyB3fSENexxen: https://nexxen.comFind BJ @LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bjbadykYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/transmissions