Kubernetes for Humans

Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative and original author of Chef, explores the evolving landscape of infrastructure automation. He reflects on Chef's journey alongside EC2 and its impact on configuration management. Jacob introduces System Initiative, aiming to create digital twins for infrastructure, moving beyond mere code. He critiques existing tools like Helm and Terraform, advocating for a behavior-driven approach. Finally, Jacob forecasts exciting innovations in the realm of infrastructure, urging for bold new ideas to reshape the future.

Dan Ciruli, Senior Director of Product Management at Nutanix, shares his tech journey from startups to giants like Google. He highlights the evolution and dominance of Kubernetes, thanks to the CNCF’s pivotal role. Ciruli reveals insights from his experience at D2IQ and Nutanix’s strategic acquisition to enhance container management. He emphasizes the need for seamless integration of VMs and containers, predicting the Kubernetes API will pave the way for flexible application deployment across infrastructures. His views on IT management preferences paint a compelling future for cloud-native technologies.

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/  

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. 

In this engaging discussion, Solomon Hykes, co-founder of Docker and Dagger.io, shares his remarkable journey in tech. He dives into the challenges he faced while scaling Docker and reveals how Dagger is revolutionizing continuous integration by addressing traditional CI tool limitations. The conversation highlights the importance of community support and innovative solutions for enhancing software development processes. Hykes also discusses how emerging tech like AI is shaping the future of DevOps practices.

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.

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.

Elizabeth K. Joseph, IBM Z developer advocate, and Holger Wolf discuss running Kubernetes on mainframes, debunking misconceptions, exploring open-source mainframe community dynamics, and IBM's role in the open source community and acquisitions.

Chris Bailey, IBM CTO for Instana, discusses evolving from Java to Node.js, cloud-native development with Kubernetes, and utilizing AI for efficient IT operations. He explores monitoring tools for dynamic scale, distinguishing vendor capabilities, and managing complex technologies in modern architecture.

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.