The fathers of Kubernetes: where are they now?

Author | Tina

Kubernetes has taken the software development world by storm, being adopted by countless enterprises that need to use containers due to its high scalability, elasticity, and reliability. According to CNCF’s 2021 annual survey, 96% of organizations are using or evaluating Kubernetes. As the de facto choice for container orchestration and scheduling, Kubernetes was originally founded by Joe Beda, Brendan Burns, and Craig McLuckie and first announced by Google in 2014. Now, new leaders are emerging to pass the torch.

where are they now?

The development and design of the Kubernetes system is heavily influenced by Google’s Borg system. “Kubernetes is in a way the spiritual successor to Borg,” Kubernetes co-founder Joe Beda described in a 2021 interview.

Kubernetes came about because of a combination of the right technology, the right timing, and the right people. Before that, Googlers were working on Google Compute Engine, Google’s version of EC2, they also used Docker and, inspired by the potential of Docker tooling and container standardization, set out to create a “minimum viable orchestrator” for containerized The application provides various functions such as resource scheduling, deployment and operation, service discovery, and expansion and contraction.

Kubernetes was open sourced in 2014 and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2018. The project is now supported by a wide range of institutions and community members, far beyond Google’s control. Kubernetes co-founders also continue to do extraordinary things – so where are they today?

Joe Beda

Joe Beda is now “semi-retired” and his most recent position was Principal Engineer at VMware.

Beda has an illustrious career at VMware, Split Software, Heptio, Shippable, CoreOS and Microsoft. A senior software engineer at Google, Beda is the co-founder and technical lead of Kubernetes. During his 10 years at Google, he also contributed to many other important projects, such as Google Hangouts and Google Compute Engine.

According to his GitHub data, Beda remains an active open source contributor, with recent contributions to Kubernetes, VMware Tanzu, ngrok-k8s, and other projects. What impressed Beda was the huge uptick in Kubernetes adoption, Beda said at a conference, “We didn’t foresee that.”

Brendan Burns

Kubernetes co-founder Brendan Burns is now a vice president at Microsoft, responsible for DevOps-related Azure projects, including K8s on Azure. Burns’ recent work has focused on working on a client library for use with the Kubernetes API. During the Borg era, Burns was a senior software engineer at Google. He worked at Google for eight years.

In 2017, Burns said in an interview that he joined Microsoft to help Microsoft use containerization more flexibly, especially in hybrid multi-cloud environments.

Craig McLuckie

Kubernetes co-founder Craig McLuckie is now a self-proclaimed self-employed Stay-at-Home Dad, formerly Principal Product Manager and Group Product Manager at Google, and original product lead for Google Compute Engine.

After leaving Google, McLuckie became the founder and CEO of Heptio, and served as VMware’s vice president of R&D after VMware acquired Heptio in 2018. MckLuckie is also a major proponent of the birth of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “We made infrastructure technology very, very boring,” McLuckie said in a 2019 TechCrunch interview.

Who is the current successor?

These innovators of the year take a back seat, so who will continue to succeed them? We took a look at some of the KOLs in the open source cloud-native world, and here are some of the key people at the helm of Kubernetes today.

Kelsey Hightower

Anyone familiar with enterprise software architecture trends knows that Kelsey Hightower, currently employed by Google’s cloud computing division, is Google’s chief engineer and is responsible for developing Google’s cloud platform. At Google, Hightower helped develop Google’s Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Cloud Functions.

Hightower has been a Kubernetes evangelist and continuous contributor since 2014, the most famous speaker in Kubernetes, and a prominent figure in cloud computing. He founded KubeCon in 2015 and even co-authored a book with Kubernetes co-founders Beda and Burns, Kubernetes: Up and Running, published by O’Reilly in 2017. He has a special background as a self-taught programmer.

James Governor

James Governor, analyst and co-founder of RedMonk.

According to Governor, the focus is now on growing the community, broadening the platform, and strengthening the hype for event-driven computing and serverless.

Brian Behlendorf

Brian Behlendorf is the head of the Open Source Security Foundation under the Linux Foundation and the executive director of Hyperledger, an open source blockchain hosted by the Linux Foundation.

The future of K8s and cloud native

Kubernetes has become an essential tool for enterprise software development. Without a doubt, it is one of the best ways to manage large container clusters at scale. Thankfully, Kubernetes also benefits from a vibrant community culture with over 26,000,000 online and offline attendees at the latest KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022. In addition to those names mentioned above, countless contributors are pushing the platform forward.

Craig McLuckie is also bullish on cloud-native edge computing: “From a future perspective, it’s all about the edge. It’s going to be a huge growth area, and it’s going to be a very disruptive area of ​​innovation in the next few years. .”

The text and pictures in this article are from InfoQ