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3 episodes with Mark Burgess
This episode is sponsored by House of Macadamias -- Click Here to get our specially curated box that also comes with the free snack bars and 15% offer for CURVA MUNDIAL listeners! Also, be sure to visit our merch store!Mark Burgess, founding member and singer of acclaimed Manchester punks The Chameleons joins CURVA MUNDIAL to talk about his love of Manchester City, his hometown, new music and the time he stopped making music to help work for his club.
Baxie welcomes back Mark Burgess from The Chameleons! The Chameleons have just released their 2nd EP over the last ten months (“Where Are You” and Tomorrow Remember Yesterday”). These two new releases represent their first batch of new music since 2001. A new full-length album is due later this year. The Chameleons are one of the great yet most overlooked bands of all time. If you know The Chameleons, then you know what I'm talking about out. If you don't know them—you need to. They were a band that could have (and should have) been in the same conversation with the likes of The Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen, and The Cure. Instead, they chose a different path. You can hear more about that in my interview with Mark Burgess from May of 2024. This time we talk about reforming the band, recording new music, and the power of their live performances over the years. The Chameleons are coming to Big Night Live in Boston on April 30th. Just a magnificent band. And I don't throw that word around lightly. Listen on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and on all Rock102 digital platforms! Brought to you by Metro Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram
Morry Waked, the founder of Vinva Investment Management, sits down in conversation with Mark Burgess, Magellan's Head of Distribution, to explore the world of systematic investing. Morry explains how Vinva's investment process stands apart from traditional quantitative investing and breaks down how Vinva uses data-driven insights, disciplined processes, and new technologies to generate strong investment performance. He discusses the role of machine learning, the importance of human expertise in distinguishing signal from noise, and why people — not just algorithms — are the key to success and pivotal to Vinva's investment process and portfolio construction.
Mark Burgess, CEO of Iceberg Digital, is focussed is on applying the future of technology to the estate agency industry. After the last few years of exponential advances in tech, this is a crucial conversation for agents to hear, regardless of whether you are on the front lines or in a strategic role. What the future of technology in our industry will do, and how the best agents leverage it todayHow consumers make decisions over which agent to invite to a Market AppraisalThe fallacy of touting strategiesA business journey from magazines to AI, and everything in between.What the best entrepreneurs taught Mark about structuring a successful company... and what are the things estate agents get wrong most!Technology causing deflation, instead of the inflation we are used toHow to find, and leverage, a network of experts to improve your businessPlus, how to think, and act, strategically rather than reactively in your company, which is arguably even more valuable insight than the vision of the future of technology. Don't miss this episode!
We'd love to hear from you! Click here to send us a text. Season 5, Episode 98The Chameleons were known as one of the great post-punk bands of the 80s and 90s. But they never left. In this episode we're excited to present an interview with lead singer/bassist/original member Mark Burgess. We talk about the early days of the band, their influences and who've they've influenced, newly released music, an upcoming album and much more. The Chameleons:https://chameleonsband.com/Enjoy the podcast? How about buying us a cup of coffee? https://www.buymeacoffee.com/newwavemusicSupport the show
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Mark Burgess, a San Diego Rotary Club 33 Board Member and Chair of Club's Camp Enterprise 2025, is joined by Rotary Club President, Mia Harenski, to shout out the Club's history, impact and vision; its premier program--Camp Enterprise 2025; and its new Rotary 4 Way Test Essay Contest.
Episode Notes Our guest is Niall Murphy, CEO of Stanza - a company founded by a group of experienced SREs with a vision to provide the tools, coding platform, culture and community to give any organization industry-leading reliability. Niall previously worked at Google where he co-authored the book "Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems" (2016). In this podcast episode, we discussed Niall's extensive experience including his role within an important era for Google's infrastructure transformation beginning in the late 2000s, and the wider contemporary challenges in the SRE landscape. Niall's reflections on operating distributed systems has lead him to the conclusion that there is still a profound missing gap in SRE tooling between discovering 'signals' and taking 'actions'. The conversation begins by alluding to a couple of other recent podcasts we've recorded on distributed systems in 2024, one with Mark Burgess and the other with András Gerlits. Happy listening!
Bryan Brasher, Mark Burgess, Rex Reagan and Max Moody join host Thom Abraham on this episode of Bassmaster Radio.
Episode Notes In this podcast episode, JUXT CTO Malcolm Sparks, JUXT Head of Delivery Joe Littlejohn, and XTDB Head of Product Jeremy Taylor spoke with guest Mark Burgess, an independent researcher and writer. Formerly a professor at Oslo University College in Norway and the creator of the CFEngine software and company, Mark was invited to write the foreward (https://sre.google/sre-book/foreword/) to Google's 2016 book: "Site Reliability Engineering - How Google runs production systems". They discuss Mark's journey to developing Promise Theory and explored techniques to 'scale simplicity' in the creation of large, reliable systems. One common (yet false) assumption is that all components of a system can be trusted to be 100% reliable. This misconception can lead to costly workarounds in production. They touch on the 'congruence' debate, considering whether and to what extent we should be concerned with the inherent inefficiencies in 'the automated building of things from scratch.' They also discuss the counter-intuitive observation that digital systems are far more complex and less resilient than analog systems, and how this may be due to the absence of an error-correcting mechanism in digital systems to maintain equilibrium. Please let us know if you have any points to add or if you were inspired by any part of the discussion. Happy listening!
We're happy to present an interview with Mark Burgess of legendary UK act Chameleons on this week's podcast. The band was in town on the first leg of their Strange Times album tour, but are also hot on the heels of their first new material in over two decades, so there was a lot Mark was enthused to discuss with us. In addition to offering our own thoughts about the Chameleons show, we're also throwing in our two cents about the Praga Khan/Lords of Acid tour which made its was through Van.
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Baxie talks with Mark Burgess from The Chameleons! While The Chameleons were, perhaps, one of the most overlooked bands of the 80's, many believe that their greatness should have put them in the same conversation as The Cure, The Smiths, and New Order. I happen to be one of those people. Mark talks about that and a whole lot more. This includes an in-depth discussion about the release of their first set of new music in 20 years! Their upcoming album is slated to come out later this year! As a fan of The Chameleons for nearly 40 years--it was a real treat to speak with the leader of one of my all-time favorite bands! Available on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, Spotify, and on the Rock102 website. Brought to you by Metro Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram of Chicopee
Send us a Text Message.In this podcast episode, we interview Mark Burgess, who provides valuable insights on the connection between consumer connections, AI, and the agent's communication plan to generate new business from seasoned data. During the conversation, Mark explains how agents can leverage AI to improve customer engagement and drive sales. He also shares his expertise on communication sequences such as seven, eleven, and four, proven methods for building solid customer relationships. Whether you're a business owner or a marketing professional, you will want to attend this informative discussion on how technology changes how we connect with customers' life cycles. Hosted by Lee Woodward and brought to you by Realtair. Prospect, list and sell real estate with one login with Realtair.
On this weeks podcast, Kevin welcomes Mark Burgess, owner of the Ozark Lunkers! Ozark Lunkers is a professional indoor football team based right here in Springfield MO! We are very thankful for Mark's partnership with The Warrior's Journey! If you would like to learn more about the Ozark Lunkers or purchase a ticket, please click the link below: https://www.ozarkslunkers.com Learn more at TWJ Social Media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thewarriorsjourney/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thewarriorsjourney/ Website: www.twj.org Contact us: info@twj.org
Navigating Change: How to Embrace and Harness It The healthcare industry is going through a period of rapid growth and change. Workforce shortages, AI implementations, innovative technologies, changes to workflows, and more are stirring up the waters. Russ Branzell, President & CEO of CHIME, quizzes Mark Burgess, President of AGFA HealthCare, NA, on how he and his organization are adapting to this period of uncertainty. Mark shares over 25 years of insights on how to embrace change, achieve success, and ultimately get where you need to go. “You can embrace change, or you can resist it. You need to have a model. It's very important for people to understand their role during change. And it's important for you to have the right mindset. You need to know where you're starting from and where you're trying to go. There will be deviations from the flight plan on the way, but you need to remain focused on the destination." Listen now for more insightful tips from Mark on traversing the current healthcare IT's ever-changing landscape, how to lead and develop people, and “how to start with the end in mind”.
The sky's the limit when it comes to aerospace, and ASX-listed Quickstep taking that literally. I spoke with Mark Burgess, MD and CEO, about the stellar growth the company has had in recent years, growing from a staff of 12 to 265 just on one manufacturing site alone. The company has diversified from being primarily focused on the international military market and now includes commercial transport, including sophisticated commercial drones. We discussed the hard recruitment and employment decisions Mark had to make to turn the company around when he took the helm some six years ago. It was a fascinating interview that will leave you in no doubt that Australia is at the leading edge of this important industry. Useful Links Mark Burgess on LInkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mark-burgess-43238b49/ Quickstep Website: www.quickstep.com.au/ Richard Triggs LinkedIn: au.linkedin.com/in/richardtriggs Arete Executive website: www.areteexecutive.com.au Richard's book on Amazon: areteexecutive.com.au/free-book/
In this episode, Christina chats to Mark Burgess managing director and CEO at Quickstep Holdings (ASX:QHL)
Muere la legendaria cantante Tina Turner, la reina del rock. ,La cantante y compositora estadounidense Juliana Hatfield ha anunciado el lanzamiento de un nuevo disco de versiones dedicado a la mítica banda británica Electric Light Orchestra. El dúo británico de productores Jungle ha lanzado un nuevo adelanto “Dominoes” de lo que será su próximo disco “Volcano” que estará en la calle el 11 de agosto. The Chameleons vuelven a nuestro país y lo hacen con dos de sus miembros originales, Mark Burgess en el bajo y voz y Reg Smithies en la guitarra. El motivo no es otro que celebrar los 40 años de su disco de debut, Script of the Bridge.B-SIDE FESTIVAL presenta su 18ª edición (Arde Bogotá, Lori Meyers, Hinds) y hablamos con @Daniel F Moncho que nos pone al tanto de las novedades. Fiesta de Presentación V edición del Cordillera SurMurcia Fest. Yana Zafiro no para. Está entregando las mejores canciones de su carrera. Ya disponible 'Un beso de verdad', el nuevo gran hit de la artista ucranio-española .Se ha perddo un niño estrenan hoy su EP, CXMD.Vuelve el cantante de Los Ensayos, Juan Ramón Sánchez, y este sábado presentará en Loco Loco su nuevo proyecto, Los Sonidos. Aprovechamos la ocasión para charlar con él, conocer sus planes y escuchar grandes canciones del grupo de los 80 que grabó para el sello DRO.En la agenda de conciertos del finde reseñamos a Sex Museum, Una Noche fuera, Neuman, Parade, Ara Malikian, Bob Floydm Samuel SLZR, Homenaje a Pepe Risi, Nerve Agent, Nepal Napal, y Susana Drone, La M.O.D.A., La Plata, Roger Waters desde Praga...
FROM THE ARCHIVES: "I promise..." What if we applied the idea of a promise to engineering, systems design, and how we interact with each other? Join host Jay Hrcsko and special guest-host Jonathan Magen as they sit down early in the morning to chat with the brilliant Mark Burgess, creator of Promise Theory. Make sure you've had your coffee before you listen, this just may change how you interact with everyone! Mark's Website Mark's Twitter Promise Theory: Principles and Applications Thinking In Promises: Designing Systems for Cooperation Jonathan's Twitter
CU1 is known by the rest of the industry for top talent, cold temps, and colorful shoes. ServiStar has had the privilege of working along side their management team as 50 of their leaders participate in our highly coveted, research based leadership development program. To celebrate our 25th year of helping credit unions with topics such as leadership development, their CEO and President, Mark Burgess joined the podcast to give his take on leadership development at CU1 in Alaska. Mark Burgess President/CEO Mark started his career in IT for both small and large organizations, and his passion is finding elegant technical solutions to drive organizational efficiencies. Before serving as CEO of Credit Union 1, Mark moved to Alaska from New Hampshire in 2018 to serve as CU1's Chief Technology Officer. He was responsible for day-to-day IT operations, project management, information security, and facilities. In his newest role, Mark brings immense knowledge, innovative thinking, and a commitment to lead with empathy, compassion, and service to others. Mark finds ways to give back whenever he can and serves on the Alaska SeaLife Center Board, the Alaska State Council on the Arts Commission, and the Alaska Public Broadcast Commission. He and his wife, Hannah, are also avid birders who are always searching high and low for new birds - and trying to see more birds in a year than his dad
We're closing out 2022 with another twofer! This week we get to hear from 80s pop starlet Tiffany. At 16, Tiffany became the youngest female singer to reach #1 when "I Think We're Alone Now" took over the world. Pop stardom can be fleeting though, and in a short time she had to rethink her career. Since then she's done a little bit of everything - country and dance music, acting, cooking shows and more. Last month she released her latest album, Shadows, which is a fantastic collection of rock songs. She fills us in on everything she's up to these days. Then we go a different direction and hear from Mark Burgess, frontman for the excellent alternative rock band The Chameleons. Mark is very forthright on what it takes to be a fully independent artist. He also gets into his relationship and falling out with the late Chameleons drummer, and former guest of the pod, John Lever. We also discuss the music of course. They really were one of the most underrated bands ever. Enjoy! www.tiffanytunes.com www.chameleonsmark.com www.patreon.com/thehustlepod
Niamh Loader was a young Australian UWA student who passed away in Bali earlier this month after travelling to the holiday island to receive some minor dental treatment. The 25-year-old told her family that her treatment went well, prompting them to now question how their fit, healthy and talented daughter could have died. Mark Burgess, Author at the Spectator and colleague of Niamh, told 6PR Mornings host Gary Adshead that he last spoke to Niamh three weeks ago, prior to her travels.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark has a BA from The University of Melbourne majoring in History and is a passionate advocate for classical liberalism. He is a former intern at the Institute of Public Affairs and was the 2016 School Captain of Xavier College in Melbourne. While currently working in the retail-property industry, Mark remains devoted toward pushing the case for greater economic and political freedom. He fervently believes that libertarianism is the most effective way in enabling the flourishing of individuals, and as such, humanity as a whole. https://www.young-voices.com/advocate/mark-burgess/ Four reasons to scrap ‘diversity and inclusion' https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/four-reasons-to-scrap-diversity-and-inclusion/ This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at Betterhelp.com/gml and get on your way to being your best self. Join the private discord & chat during the show! joingml.com Invest in your future & your human capital today natescrashcourse.com Like our intro song? https://www.3pillmorning.com Advertise on our podcast! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Your Heard Tell for Friday, November 18th, 2022, is turning down the noise of the news cycle and getting to the information we need to discern our times by talking thankfulness as a mindset, not just a holiday, and as an important counterpoint to the caterwauling of headlines and narratives. Our guest and movie critic Luis Mendez of the Mendez Movie Report returns to Heard Tell to talk movies, what has happened to the romantic comedy as it's more Hallmark Christmas and less big box office, Martin Scorcese at 80, reviewing "Bones and All", and the business of making movies for theaters v streaming. Plus, guest Mark Burgess takes us down under to Australia to talk a netball scandal that crosses a bunch of political and cultural streams , talks the politics and forthcoming election in Victoria, Aussies after COVID-19 lockdowns, and asks host Andrew about the worlds perseption of Austrialia's COVID response.All that and more on this Friday edition of Heard Tell.--------------------Questions, comments, concerns, ideas, or epistles? Email us HeardTellShow@gmail.comPlease make sure to subscribe to @Heard Tell , like the program, comment with your thoughts, and share with others.Support Heard Tell here: https://app.redcircle.com/shows/4b87f374-cace-44ea-960c-30f9bf37bcff/donationsSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/heard-tell/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
[ORIGINAL PATREON AIR DATE: 1/14/22]This week we're tying up some loose ends by covering The Sun and the Moon. Formed by Mark Burgess and John Lever of The Chameleons, these guys are perfect if you're hankering for more Chameleons. Mike and Alex are less fond of this album than Burgess and Lever's previous work, but it's still worth a listen for fans of post-punk, new wave, and goth. Be sure to check out our full episode on The Chameleons!Episode 87: The ChameleonsSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6naIUiCSX9oJYhrdTWsbZ0?si=bdb716fdce644c47Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-87-the-chameleons/id1477239952?i=1000522232096Patreonhttps://www.patreon.com/everyalbumeverMerchhttps://pandermonkey.creator-spring.com/Mike's EP:Pander Monkey on Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple,Instagram:Mike @pandermonkeyAlex @motherpuncherHistory Tom's stuff:Debut album on Bandcamp, Spotify, AppleSubstackInstagramTwitterFacebook
On this episode, Gina is joined by Mark Burgess. Mark is an Englishman who left England over 15 years ago to go on mission in Lima, Peru. He'll share a bit of that story, and he'll share the amazing thing God did for his church during Covid. But Gina's main focus with Mark is on exploring the ways in which he has learned to listen to the Lord and step out in faith in areas like prophetic words and healing.
In this episode Mark Burgess, CEO of Iceberg Digital and Rob Brady, Award winning Elite Performance Coach to agents, discuss in in's and out's of why staff leave and how to build a destination organisation as opposed to one where your staff see you as a stepping stone.
In this episode Mark Burgess, CEO of Iceberg Digital and Rob Brady, Award winning Elite Performance Coach to agents, discuss in in's and out's of why staff leave and how to build a destination organisation as opposed to one where your staff see you as a stepping stone.
Mark Burgess has been voted as one of the 30 most influential people in the property industry and has been featured on Forbes as one of the entrepreneurs in the world making a difference. He is the author of 2 best-selling books around marketing and data and has lead a technology company to an 8 figure valuation. In this talk that took place at EA X 7 he looked at the evidence that shows what might be holding your company back from greatness and how to overcome that hurdle.
Mark Burgess has been voted as one of the 30 most influential people in the property industry and has been featured on Forbes as one of the entrepreneurs in the world making a difference. He is the author of 2 best-selling books around marketing and data and has lead a technology company to an 8 figure valuation. In this talk that took place at EA X 7 he looked at the evidence that shows what might be holding your company back from greatness and how to overcome that hurdle.
Mark Burgess turns the tables on industry legend Christopher Watkin by turning the interviewer into the interviewee! In this episode Mark asks Chris about his background and what he has seen as the secret to success from interviewing and helping 1000's of agents over the years .
Mark Burgess turns the tables on industry legend Christopher Watkin by turning the interviewer into the interviewee! In this episode Mark asks Chris about his background and what he has seen as the secret to success from interviewing and helping 1000's of agents over the years .
We talk to Mark Burgess - Singer and Bassist of The Chameleons. Formed in the early 80s, the Manchester band have been described as 'Post Punk's Most Influential Lost Band' making their mark and legacy on future generations of musicians from The Verve, The Editors, Interpol and Oasis. Mark takes us back to his childhood and introductions to The Beatles, his beloved Manchester City and his first steps into becoming a musician and the early days of the band. We learn of how influential the legendary John Peel could be for unsigned artists when The Chameleons were given the opportunity of a BBC Radio 1 Session which would forever change their lives and set the band on a journey that still gives birth to new music and influence to this very day.This episode is brought to you by our friends Dead Skull Coffee.https://deadskullcoffee.co.uk/discount/STVPlease visit The Straight To Video Patreon Page to find out how you can help grow this show. https://www.patreon.com/stvpod
Mark Burgess from Iceberg Digital came to Grantham in the Summer 2021. NB as with all 'watkinsofa' chats - no payment was made or consideration given for this chat
Mark Burgess from Iceberg Digital came to Grantham in the Summer 2021
Mark Burgess from Iceberg Digital came to Grantham in the Summer 2021
Mark Burgess from Iceberg Digital came to Grantham in the Summer 2021
Mark Burgess from Iceberg Digital came to Grantham in the Summer 2021
DJ MIx with Mark Burgess and John Mahoney
DJ MIx with Mark Burgess and John Mahoney
Mark Burgess from Iceberg Digital came to Grantham in the Summer 2021
Welcome to episode 67 of Just Havin a Crack. This week we speak to one of Australia's best property Auctioneer Phil Parker.Growing up in Parkes NSW, Phil drove a milk truck for a living. With a chance opportunity and meeting George Hadgelias Phil began his real estate career and then Auctioning.Phil has always been a fast-talking, fast-living guy. Meeting past guest Mark Burgess transformed his life. Now with some 38000 auctions under his belt. Phil talks about auctioneering, Family and his love of Ray White.
In this episode, I'm joined by Mark Burgess. Mark founded CFEngine, Promise Theory, and Infrastructure as Code. Mark holds a Ph.D. in physics. He is an author of several books, including one of my favorites, "In Search of Certainty." He has been working on a project called the Semantic Spacetime Project for over a decade. I've known Mark for almost a decade now, and we always have a great time discussing important IT topics. In this episode, we discuss Dr. Deming's work through the lenses of complexity, non-determinism, and quantum physics. You can find all of Mark's work on his website ( http://markburgess.org/index.html ).
In this episode Gary is with Mark Burgess. He is a successful entrepreneur, international speaker, best-selling author, TV personality and recently featured on Forbes.com. Mark has worked in and built businesses around the property sector for the past 20 years. Mark is the founder of Iceberg Digital who has offices in the UK and Asia. He is the author of the best-selling book ‘Where Did My Industry Go?' written specifically for estate and letting agencies to understand digital marketing and the new landscape they face. He writes about why previously successful agencies are now in danger and how a new dawn can turn them back into great businesses. From motivation to mindset, personal branding to perseverance, you will learn tried and tested ways to generate leads, increase your sales and build a strong lifestyle business. Gary Das takes you on an entrepreneurial journey of education, inspiration and motivation to help you become a Pro of your industry! What Is Covered In Today's Episode Of The Financial Pro Podcast: Tips for hiring the right employee Importance of shared values for a company How to stay connected with your team Choosing self-development over complacency What does being PRO mean to Mark Visit Financial PRO website www.financial-pro.com Follow Gary Das on Facebook and Instagram Connect with Mark Burgess https://www.therealmarkburgess.co.uk/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-burgess-ba905419/
Nick Black has a late night chat with Mark Burgess, pioneering post-punk vocalist and bassist for The Chameleons. They trace a lineage from Alice Cooper to The Chameleons to Soft Kill. The post Ep. 72 – Mark Burgess (The Chameleons) first appeared on comfort monk.
Mark Burgess, Chairman/Investment Committee Director at HESTA was interviewed LIVE on the Traders Network Show, hosted by Matt Bird, at the 2019 Greenwich Economic Forum in Greenwich, CT.To inquire about being a guest on this show or others: Matt Bird CommPro Worldwide C: +1 (646) 401-4499 E: matt@commpro.com W: www.commpro.com
Today on the show we have esteemed Kubernetes thought-leader, Kelsey Hightower, with us. We did not prepare a topic as we know that Kelsey presents talks and features on podcasts regularly, so we thought it best to pick his brain and see where the conversation takes us. We end up covering a mixed bag of super interesting Kubernetes related topics. Kelsey begins by telling us what he has been doing and shares with us his passion for learning in public and why he has chosen to follow this path. From there, we then talk about the issue of how difficult many people still think Kubernetes is. We discover that while there is no doubting that it is complicated, at one point, Linux was the most complicated thing out there. Now, we install Linux servers without even batting an eyelid and we think we can reach the same place with Kubernetes in the future if we shift our thinking! We also cover other topics such as APIs and the debates around them, common questions Kelsey gets before finally ending with a brief discussion on KubeCon. From the attendance and excitement, we saw that this burgeoning community is simply growing and growing. Kelsey encourages us all to enjoy this spirited community and what the innovation happening in this space before it simply becomes boring again. Tune in today! Follow us: https://twitter.com/thepodlets Website: https://thepodlets.io Feeback: info@thepodlets.io https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/thepodlets/issues Hosts: Carlisia Campos Duffie Cooley Bryan Liles Michael Gasch Key Points From This Episode: Learn more about Kelsey Hightower, his background and why he teaches Kubernetes! The purpose of Kelsey’s course, Kubernetes the Hard Way. Why making the Kubernetes cluster disappear will change the way Kubernetes works. There is a need for more ops-minded thinking for the current Kubernetes problems. Find out why Prometheus is a good example of ops-thinking applied to a system. An overview of the diverse ops skillsets that Kelsey has encountered. Being ops-minded is just an end –you should be thinking about the next big thing! Discover the kinds of questions Kelsey is most often asked and how he responds. Some interesting thinking and developments in the backup space of Kubernetes. Is it better to backup or to have replicas? If the cost of losing data is very high, then backing up cannot be the best solution. Debates around which instances are not the right ones to use Kubernetes in. The Kubernetes API is the part everyone wants to use, but it comes with the cluster. Why the Kubernetes API is only useful when building a platform. Can the Kubernetes control theory be applied to software? Protocols are often forgotten about when thinking about APIs. Some insights into the interesting work Akihiro Suda’s is doing. Learn whether Kubernetes can run on Edge or not. Verizon: how they are changing the Edge game and what the future trajectory is. The interesting dichotomy that Edge presents and what this means. Insights into the way that KubeCon is run and why it’s structured in the way it is. How Spotify can teach us a lesson in learning new skills! Quotes: “The real question to come to mind: there is so much of that work that how are so few of us going to accomplish it unless we radically rethink how it will be done?” — @mauilion [0:06:49] “If ops were to put more skin in the game earlier on, they would definitely be capable of building these systems. And maybe they even end up more mature as more operations people put ops-minded thinking into these problems.” — @kelseyhightower [0:04:37] “If you’re in operations, you should have been trying to abstract away all of this stuff for the last 10 to 15 years.” — @kelseyhightower [0:12:03] “What are you backing up and what do you hope to restore?” — @kelseyhightower [0:20:07] “Istio is a protocol for thinking about service mesh, whereas Kubernetes provides the API for building such a protocol.” — @kelseyhightower [0:41:57] “Go to sessions you know nothing about. Be confused on purpose.” — @kelseyhightower [0:51:58] “Pay attention to the fundamentals. That’s the people stuff. Fundamentally, we’re just some people working on some stuff.” — @kelseyhightower [0:54:49] Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: The Podlets on Twitter — https://twitter.com/thepodlets Kelsey Hightower — https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower Kelsey Hightower on GitHub — https://github.com/kelseyhightower Interaction Protocols: It's All about Good Manners — https://www.infoq.com/presentations/history-protocols-distributed-systems Akihiro Suda — https://twitter.com/_AkihiroSuda_ Carlisia Campos on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlisia/ Kubernetes — https://kubernetes.io/ Duffie Cooley on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/mauilion/ Bryan Liles on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryanliles/ KubeCon North America — https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/events/kubecon-cloudnativecon-north-america-2019/ Linux — https://www.linux.org/ Amazon Fargate — https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/ Go — https://golang.org/ Docker — https://www.docker.com/ Vagrant — https://www.vagrantup.com/ Prometheus — https://prometheus.io/ Kafka — https://kafka.apache.org/ OpenStack — https://www.openstack.org/ Verizon — https://www.verizonwireless.com/ Spotify — https://www.spotify.com/ Transcript: EPISODE 7 [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:08.7] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Podlets Podcast, a weekly show that explores Cloud Native one buzzword at a time. Each week, experts in the field will discuss and contrast distributed systems concepts, practices, tradeoffs and lessons learned to help you on your cloud native journey. This space moves fast and we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. If you’re an engineer, operator or technically minded decision maker, this podcast is for you. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:41] CC: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to The Podlets, and today we have a special guest with us, Kelsey Hightower. A lot of people listening to us today will know Kelsey, but as usual, there are a lot of new comers in this space. So Kelsey, please give us an introduction. [00:01:00] KH: Yeah. So I consider myself a minimalist. So I want to keep this short. I work at Google, on Google Cloud stuff. I’ve been involved with the Kubernetes community for what? 3, 4, 5 years ever since it’s been out, and one main goal, learning in public and helping other people do the same. [00:01:16] CC: There you go. You do have a repo on your GitHub that it’s about learning Kubernetes the hard way. Are you still maintaining that? [00:01:26] KH: Yeah. So every six months or so. So Kubernetes is a hard way for those that don’t know. It’s a guide, a tutorial. You can copy and paste. It takes about three hours, and the whole goal of that guide was to teach people how to stand up a Kubernetes cluster from the ground up. So starting from scratch, 6 VMs, you install etcd, all the components, the nodes, and then you run a few test workloads so you can get a feel for Kubernetes. The history behind that was when I first joined Google, we were all concerned about the adaption of such a complex system that Kubernetes is, right? Docker Swarm is out at the time. A lot of people are using Mesos and we’re wondering like a lot of the feedback at that time was Kubernetes is too complex. So Kubernetes the hard way was built as an idea that if people understand how it worked just like they understand how Linux works, because that’s also complex, that if people just saw how the moving pieces fit together, then they would complain less about the complexity and have a way to kind of grasp it. [00:02:30] DC: I’m back. This is Duffie Colley. I’m back this week, and then we also have Michael and Bryan with us. So looking forward to this session talking through this stuff. [00:02:40] CC: Yeah. Thank you for doing that. I totally forgot to introduce who else is in this show, and me, Carlisia. We didn’t plan what the topic is going to be today. I will take a wild guess, and we are going to touch on Kubernetes. I have so many questions for you, Kelsey. But first and foremost, why don’t you tell us what you would love to talk about? One thing that I love about you is that every time I hear an interview of you, you’re always talking about something different, or you’re talking about the same thing in a different way. I love that about the way you speak. I know you offer to be on a lot of podcast shows, which is how we ended up here and I was thinking, “Oh my gosh! We’re going to talk about what everybody is going to talk about, but I know that’s not going to happen.” So feel free to get a conversation started, and we are VMware engineers here. So come at us with questions, but also what you would like to talk about on our show today. [00:03:37] KH: Yeah. I mean, we’re all just coming straight off the hills of KubeCon, right? So this big, 12,000 people getting together. We’re super excited about Kubernetes and the Mister V event, things are wrapping up there as well. When we start to think about Kubernetes and what’s going to happen, and a lot of people saw Amazon jump in with Fargate for EKS, right? So those unfamiliar with that offering, over the years, all the cloud providers have been providing some hosted Kubernetes offering, the ideas that the cloud provider, just like we do with hypervisors and virtual machines, would provide this base infrastructure so you can focus on using Kubernetes. You’ve seen this even flow down on-prem with VMware, right? VMware saying, “Hey, Kubernetes is going to be a part of this control plane that you can use to Kubernetes’ API to manage virtual machines and containers on-prem.” So at some point now, where do we go from here? There’s a big serverless movement, which is trying to eliminate infrastructure for all kinds of components, whether that’s compute, database as a storage. But even in the Kubernetes world, I think there’s an appetite when we saw this with Fargate, that we need to make the Kubernetes cluster disappear, right? If we can make it disappear, then we can focus on building new platforms that extend the API or, hell, just using Kubernetes as is without thinking about managing nodes, operating systems and autoscalers. I think that’s kind of been the topic that I’m pretty interested in talking about, because that feature means lots of things disappear, right? Programming languages and compilers made assembly disappear for a lot of developers. Assembly is still there. I think people get caught up on nothing goes away. They’re right. Nothing goes away, but the number of people who have to interact with that thing is greatly reduced. [00:05:21] BL: You know what, Kelsey? I’m going to have you get out of my brain, because that was the exact example that I was going to use. I was on a bus today and I was thinking about all the hubbub, about the whole Fargate EKS thing, and then I was thinking, “Well, Go, for example, can generate assembler and then it compiles that down.” No one complains about the length of the assembler that Go generates. Who cares? That’s how we should think about this problem. That’s a whole solvable problem. Let’s think about bigger things. [00:05:51] KH: I think it’s because in operations we tend to identify ourselves as the people responsible for running the nodes. We’re the people responsible for tuning the API server. When someone says it’s going to go away, in ops – And you see this in some parts, right? Ops, some people focus a lot more on observability. They can care less about what machine something runs on. They’re still going to try to observe and tune it. You see this in SRE and some various practices. But a lot of people who came up in a world like I have in a traditional ops background, you were the one that pixie-booted the server. You installed that Linux OS. You configured it with Puppet. When someone tells you, “We’re going to move on from that as if it’s a good thing.” You’re going to be like, “Hold up. That’s my job.” [00:06:36] DC: Definitely. We’ve touched this topic through a couple of different times on this show as well, and it definitely comes back to like understanding that, in my opinion, it’s not about whether there will be a worker for people who are in operations, people who want to focus on that. The real question that come to mind is like there is so much of that work that how are so few of us are going to be able to accomplish it unless we radically re-sync how it will be done. We’re vastly outnumbered. The number of people walking into the internet for the first time every day is mind-boggling. [00:07:08] KH: In early days, we have this goal of abstract or automating ourselves out of a job, and anyone that tried that a number of times knows that you’re always going to have something else to do. I think if we carry that to the infrastructure, I want to see the ops folks. I was very surprised that Docker didn’t come from operations folks. It came from the developer folks. Same thing for Vagrant and the same thing from Kubernetes. These are developer-minded folks that want to tackle infrastructure problems. If I think if ops were to put more skin in the game earlier on, definitely capable of building these systems and maybe they even end up more mature as more operations people put ops-minded thinking to these problems. [00:07:48] BL: Well, that’s exactly what we should do. Like you said, Kelsey, we will always have a job. Whenever we solve one problem, we could think about more interesting problems. We don’t think about Linux on servers anymore. We just put Linux on servers and we run it. We don’t think about the 15 years where it was little rocky. That’s gone now. So think about what we did there and let’s do that again with what we’re doing now. [00:08:12] KH: Yeah. I think the Prometheus community is a good example of operations-minded folks producing a system. When you meet the kind of the originators of Prometheus, they took a lot of their operational knowledge and kind of build this metrics and monitoring standard that we all kind of think about now when we talk about some levels of observability, and I think that’s what happens when you have good operations people that take prior experience, the knowledge, and that can happen over code these days. This is the kind of systems they produce, and it’s a very robust and extensible API that I think you start to see a lot of adaption. [00:08:44] BL: One more thing on Prometheus. Prometheus is six-years-old. Just think about that, and that’s not done yet, and it’s just gotten better and better and better. We go to give up our old thing so we can get better and better and better. That’s just what I want to add. [00:08:58] MG: Kelsey, if you look at the – Basically your own history of coming from ops, as I understood your own history, right? Now being kind of one of the poster childs in the Kubernetes world, you see the world changing to serverless, to higher abstractions, more complex systems on one hand, but then on the other side, we have ops. Looking beyond or outside the world of Silicon Valley into the traditional ops, traditional large enterprise, what do you think is the current majority level of these ops people? I don’t want to discriminate anyone here. I’m just basically throwing this out as a question. Where do you think do they need to go in terms of to keep up with this evolving and higher level abstractions where we don’t really care about nitty-gritty details? [00:09:39] KH: Yes. So this is a good, good question. I spent half of my time. So I probably spent time onsite with at least 100 customers a year globally. I fly on a plane and visit them in their home turf, and you definitely meet people at various skill levels and areas of responsibility. I want to make sure that I’m clear about the areas of responsibility. Sometimes you’re hired in an area of responsibility that’s below your skillset. Some people are hired to manage batch jobs or to translate files from XML to JSON. That really doesn’t say a lot about their skillset. It just kind of talks about the area of responsibility. So shout out to all the people that are dealing with main frames and having to deal with that kind of stuff. But when you look at it, you have the opportunity to rise up to whatever level you want to be in in terms of your education. When we talk about this particular question, some people really do see themselves as operators, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Meaning, they could come in. They get a system and they turn the knobs. You gave me a mainfrastructure me, I will tell you how to turn the knobs on that mainframe. You buy me a microwave, I’ll tell you how to pop popcorn. They’re not very interested in building a microwave. Maybe they have other things that are more important to them, and that is totally okay. Then you have people who are always trying to push the boundaries. Before Kubernetes, if I think back to 10 years ago, maybe 8. When I was working in a traditional enterprise, like kind of the ones you’re talking about or hinting at, the goal has always been to abstract away all of these stuff that it means to deploy an application the right way in a specific environment for that particular company. The way I manage to do it was say, “Hey, look. We have a very complex change in management processes.” I work in finance at that time. So everything had to have a ticket no matter how good the automation was. So I decided to make JIRA the ticketing system their front door to do everything. So you go to JIRA. There’ll be a custom field that says, “Hey, here are all the RPMs that have been QA’d by the QA team. Here are all the available environments.” You put those two fields in. That ticket goes to change in management and approval, and then something below the scenes automated everything, in that case it was Puppet, Red Hat and VMware, right? So I think what most people have been doing if you’re in the world of abstracting this stuff away and making it easier for the company to adapt, you’ve already been pushing these ideas that we call serverless now. I think the cloud providers put these labels on platforms to describe the contract between us and the consumer of the APIs that we present. But if you’re in operations, you should have been trying to abstract away all of these stuff for the last 10 or 15 years. [00:12:14] BL: I 100% agree. Then also, think about other verticals. So 23 years ago, I did [inaudible 00:12:22] work. That was my job. But we learned how to program in C and C++ because we were on old Suns, not even Spark machines. We’re on the old Suns, and we wanted to write things in CVE and we wanted to write our own Window managers. That is what we’re doing right now, and that’s why you see like Mitchell Hashimoto with Vagrant and you’re seeing how we’re pushing this thing. We have barely scratched the surface of what we’re trying to do. For a lot of people who are just ops-minded, understand that being ops-minded is just the end. You have to be able to think outside of your boundaries so you can create the next big thing. [00:12:58] KH: Of you may not care about creating the next big thing. There are parts of my life where I just don’t care. For example, I pay Comcast to get internet access, and my ops involvement was going to BestBuy and buying a modem and screwing it into the wall, and I troubleshoot this thing every once in a while when someone in the household complains the internet is down. But that’s just far as I’m ever going to push the internet boundaries, right? I am not really interested in pushing that forward. I’m assuming others will, and I think that’s one thing in our industry where sometimes we believe that we all need to contribute to pushing things forward. Look, there’s a lot of value in being a great operations person. Just be welcomed to saying that what we operate will change overtime. [00:13:45] DC: Yeah, that’s fair. Very fair. For me, personally, I definitely identify as an operations person. I don’t consider it my life’s goal to create new work necessarily, but to expand on the work that has been identified and to help people understand the value of it. I find I sit in between two roles personally. One is to help figure out all of the different edges and pieces and parts of Kubernetes or some other thing in the ecosystem. Second, to educate others on those things, right? Take what I’ve learned and amplify it. Having the amplifying effect. [00:14:17] CC: One thing that I wanted to ask you, Kelsey is – I work on the Valero project, and that does back and recovery of Kubernetes clusters. Some people ask me, “Okay. So tell me about the people who are doing?” I’m like, “I don’t want to talk about that. That’s boring. I wanted to talk about the people who are not doing backups.” “Okay. Let’s talk about why you should be doing maybe thinking about that.” Well, anyway. I wonder if you get a lot of questions in the area of Kubernetes operations or cloud native in general, infrastructure, etc., that in the back of your mind you go, “That’s the wrong question or questions.” Do you get that? [00:14:54] KH: Yeah. So let’s use your backup example. So I think when I hear questions, at least it lets me know what people are thinking and where they’re at, and if I ask enough questions, I can kind of get a pulse in the trend of where the majority of the people are. Let’s take the backups questions. When I hear people say, “I want to back up my Kubernetes cluster.” I rewind the clock in my mind and say, “Wow! I remember when we used to backup Linux servers,” because we didn’t know what config files were on the disk. We didn’t know where processes are running. So we used to do these PS snapshots and we used to pile up the whole file system and store it somewhere so we can recover it. Remember Norton Ghost? You take a machine and ghost it so you can make it again. Then we said, “You know what? That’s a bad idea.” What we should be doing is having a tool that can make any machine look like the way we want it. Config management is boring. So we don’t back those up anymore. So when I hear that question I say, “Hmm, what is happening in the community that’s keeping people to ask these questions?” Because if I hear a bunch of questions that already have good answers, that means those answers aren’t visible enough and not enough people are sharing these ideas. That should be my next key note. Maybe we need to make sure that other people know that that is no longer a boring thing, even though it’s boring to me, it’s not boring to the industry in general. When I hear these question I kind of use it as a keeps me up-to-date, keeps me grounded. I hear stuff like how many Kubernetes clusters should I have? I don’t think there’s a best practice around that answer. It depends on how your company segregates things, or depends on how you understand Kubernetes. It depends on the way you think about things. But I know why they’re asking that question, is because Kubernetes presents itself as a solution to a much broader problem set than it really is. Kubernetes manages a group of machines typically backed by IS APIs. If you have that, that’s what it does. It doesn’t do everything else. It doesn’t tell you exactly how you should run your business. It doesn’t tell you how you should compartmentalize your product teams. Those decisions you have to make independently, and once you do, you can serialize those into Kubernetes. So that’s the way I think about those questions when I hear them, like, “Wow! Yeah, that is a crazy thing that you’re still asking this question six years later. But now I know why you’re asking that question.” [00:17:08] CC: That is such a great take on this, because, yes, it in the area of backup, people who are doing backup in my mind – Yeah, they should be independent of Kubernetes or not. But let’s talk about the people who are not doing backups. What motivates you to not do backups? Obviously, backups can be done in many different ways. But, yes. [00:17:30] BL: So think about it like this way. Some people don’t exercise, because exercise is tough and it’s hard, and it’s easier to sit on the couch and eat a bag of potato chips than exercise. It’s the same thing with backups. Well, backing up my Kubernetes cluster before Valero was so hard that I’d rather just invest brain cycles in figuring out how to make money. So that’s where people come from when it comes to hard things like backups. [00:17:52] KH: There’s a trust element too, right? Because we don’t know if the effort we’re putting in is worth it. When people do unit testing, a lot of times unit testing can be seen as a proactive activity, where you write unit tests to catch bugs in the future. Some people only write unit test when there’s a problem. Meaning, “Wow! There’s an odd things in a database. Maybe we should write a test to prove that our code is putting odd things. Fix the code, and now the test pass.” I think it’s really about trusting that the investment is worth it. I think when you start to think about backups – I’ve seen people back up a lot of stuff, like every day or every couple of hours, they’re backing up their database, but they’d never restored the database. Then when you read their root cause analysis, they’re like, “Everything was going fine until we tried to restore a 2 terabyte database over 100 meg link. Yeah, we never exercised that part.” [00:18:43] CC: That is very true. [00:18:44] DC: Another really fascinating thing to think about the backup piece is that especially like in the Kubernetes with Valero and stuff, we’re so used to having the conversation around stateless applications and being able to ensure that you can redeploy in the case of a failure. You’re not trying to actually get back to a known state the way that like a backup traditionally would. You’re just trying to get back to a running state. So there’s a bit of a dichotomy there I think for most folks. Maybe they’re not conceptualizing the need for having to deal with some of those stateful applications when they start trying to just think about how Valero fits into the puzzle, because they’ve been told over and over again, “This is about immutable infrastructure. This is about getting back to running. This is not about restoring some complex state.” So it’s kind of interesting. [00:19:30] MG: I think part of this is also that for the stateful services that why we do backups actually, things change a lot lately, right? With those new databases, scale out databases, cloud services. Thinking about backup also has changed in the new world of being cloud native, which for most of the people, that’s also a new learning experiment to understand how should I backup Kafka? It’s replicated, but can I backup it? What about etcd and all those things? Little different things than backing up a SQL database like more traditional system. So backup, I think as you become more complex, stays if needed for [inaudible 00:20:06]. [00:20:06] KH: Yeah. The case is what are you backing up and what do you hope to restore? So replication, global replication, like we do with like cloud storage and S3. The goal is to give some people 11 9s of reliability and replicate that data almost as many geographies as you can. So it’s almost like this active backup. You’re always backing up and restoring as a part of the system design versus it being an explicit action. Some people would say the type of replication we do for object stores is much closer to active restoring and backing up on a continuous basis versus a one-time checkpoint. [00:20:41] BL: Yeah. Just a little bit of a note, you can back up two terabytes over 100 meg link in like 44 hours and a half. So just putting out there, it’s possible. Just like two days. But you’re right. When it comes to backups, especially for like – Let’s say you’re doing MySQL or Postgres. These days, is it better to back it up or is it better to have a replica right next to it and then having like a 10 minute delayed replica right next to that and then replicating to Europe or Asia? Then constantly querying the data that you’re replicating. That’s still a backup. What I’m saying here is that we can change the way that we talk about it. Backup started as conventional as they used to be. There are definitely other ways to protect your data. [00:21:25] KH: Yeah. Also, I think the other part too around the backup thing is what is the price of data loss? When you take a backup, you’re saying, “I’m willing to lose this much data between the last backup and the next.” That cost is too high than backing up cannot be your primary mode of operation, because the cost of losing data is way too high, then replication becomes a complementing factor in the whole discussion of backups versus real-time replication and shorter times to recovery. I have a couple of questions. When should people not use Kubernetes? Do you know what I mean? I visit a lot of customers, I work with a lot of eng teams, and I am in the camp of Kubernetes is not for everything, right? That’s a very obvious thing to say. But some people don’t actually practice it that way. They’re trying to jam more and more into Kubernetes. So I love to get your insights on where do you see Kubernetes being like the wrong direction for some folks or workloads. [00:22:23] MG: I’m going to scratch this one from my question list to Kelsey. [00:22:26] KH: I’ll answer it too then. I’ll answer it after you will answer it. [00:22:29] MG: Okay. Who wants to go first? [00:22:30] BL: All right. I’ll go first. There are cases when I’m writing a piece of software where I don’t care about the service discovery. I don’t care about ingress. It’s just software that needs to run. When I’m running it locally, I don’t need it. If it’s simple enough where I could basically throw it into a VM through a CloudNet script, I think that is actually lower friction than Kubernetes if it’s simple. Now, but I’m also a little bit jaded here, because I work for the dude who created Kubernetes, and I’m paid to create solutions for Kubernetes, but I’m also really pragmatic about it as well. It’s all about effort for me. If I can do it faster in CloudNet, I will. [00:23:13] DC: For my part, I think that there’s – I have a couple of – I got follow on questions to this real quick. But I do think that if you’re not actively trying to develop a distributed systems, something where you’re actually making use of the primitives that Kubernetes provides, then that already would kind of be a red flag for me. If you’re building a monolithic application or if you’re in that place where you’re just rapidly iterating on a SaaS product and you’re just trying to like get as many commits on this thing until it works and like just really rapidly prototype or even create this thing. Maybe Kubernetes isn’t the right thing, because although we’ve come a long way in improving the tools that allow for that iteration, I certainly wouldn’t say that we’re like all the way there yet. [00:23:53] BL: I would debate you that, Duffy. [00:23:55] DC: All right. Then the other part of it is Kubernetes aside, I’m curious about the same question as it relates to containerization. Is it containerization the right thing for everyone, or have we made that pronouncement, for example? [00:24:08] KH: I’m going to jump in and answer on this one, because I definitely think we need a way to transport applications in some way, right? We used to do it on floppy disks. We used to do it on [inaudible 00:24:18]. I think the container to me I treat as a glorified [inaudible 00:24:23]. That’s the way I’ve been seeing it for years. Registry store them. They replace [inaudible 00:24:28]. Great. Now we kind of have a more maybe universal packaging format that can handle simple use cases, scratch containers where it’s just your binary, and the more complex use cases where you have to compose multiple layers to get the output, right? I think RPM spec files used to do something very similar when you start to build those thing in [inaudible 00:24:48], “All right. We got that piece.” Do people really need them? The thing I get weary about is when people believe they have to have Kubernetes on their laptop to build an app that will eventually deploy to Kubernetes, right? If we took that thinking about the cloud, then everyone would be trying to install open stack on their laptop just to build an app. Does that even make sense? Does that make sense in that context? Because you don’t need the entire cloud platform on your laptop to build an app that’s going to take a request and respond. I think Kubernetes people, I guess because it’s easier to put your on laptop, people believe that it needs to be there. So I think Kubernetes is overused, because people just don’t quite understand what it does. I think there’s a case where you don’t use Kubernetes, like I need to read a file from a bucket. Someone uploaded an XML file and my app is going to translate it into JSON. That’s it. In that case, this is where I think functions as a service, something like Cloud Run or even Heroku make a lot more sense to me because the operational complexity is kind of hitting within a provider and is linked almost like an SDK to the overall service, which is the object store, right? The compute part, I don’t want to make a big deal about, because it’s only there to process the file that got uploaded, right? It’s almost like a plug-in to an FTP server, if you will. Those are the cases where I start to see Kubernetes become less of a need, because I need a custom platform to do such an obvious operation. [00:26:16] DC: Those applications that require the primitives that Kubernetes provides, service discovery, the ability to define ingress in a normal way. When you’re actually starting to figure out how you’re going to platform that application with regard to those primitives, I do see the argument for having Kubernetes locally, because you’re going to be using those tools locally and remotely. You have some way of defining what that platforming requirement is. [00:26:40] KH: So let me pull on that thread. If you have an app that depends on another app, typically we used to just have a command line flag that says, “This app is over there.” Local host when it’s on my laptop. Some DNS name when it’s in the cluster, or a config file can satisfy that need. So the need for service discovery usually arises where you don’t know where things are. But if you’re literally on your laptop, you know where the things are. You don’t really have that problem. So when you bring that problem space to your laptop, I think you’re actually making things worse. I’ve seen people depend on Kubernetes service discovery for the app to work. Meaning, they just assume they can call a thing by name and they don’t support IPs, and ports. They don’t support anything, because they say, “Oh! No. No. No. You’ll always be running into Kubernetes.” You know what’s going to happen? In 5 or 10 years, we’re going to be talking like, “Oh my God! Do you remember when you used to use Kubernetes? Man! That legacy thing. I built my whole career porting apps away from Kubernetes to the next thing.” The number one thing we’ll talk about is where people lean too hard on service discovery, or people who built apps that taught to config maps directly. Why are you calling the Kubernetes API from your app? That’s not a good design. I think we got to be careful coupling ourselves too much to the infrastructure. [00:27:58] MG: It’s a fair point too. Two answers from my end, to your question. So one is I just build an appliance, which basically priced to bring an AWS Lambda experience to the Vsphere ecosystem. Because we don’t – Or actually my approach is that I don’t want any ops people who needs to do some one-off things, like connect this guy to another guy. I don’t want him to learn Kubernetes for that. It should be as simple as writing a function. So for that appliance, we had to decide how do we build it? Because it should be scalable. We might have some function as a service component running on there. So we looked around and we decided to put it on Kubernetes. So build the appliance as a traditional VM using Kubernetes on top. For me as a developer, it gave me a lot of capabilities, like self-healing, the self-healing capabilities. But it’s also a fair point that you wrote, Kelsey, about how much do we depend or write our applications being depend on those auxiliary features from Kubernetes? Like self-healing, restarts, for example. [00:28:55] KH: Well, in your case, you’re building a platform. I would hate for you to tell me that you rebuilt a Kubernetes-like thing just for that appliance. In your case, it’s a great use case. I think the problem that we have as platform builders is what happens when things start leaking up to the user? You tell a user all they have to care about is functions. Then they get some error saying, “Oh! There’s some Kubernetes security context that doesn’t work.” I’m like, “What the hell is Kubernetes?” That leakage is the problem, and I think that’s the part where we have to be careful, and it will take time, but we don’t start leaking the underlying platform making the original goal untrue. [00:29:31] MG: The point is where I wanted to throw this question back was now these functions being written as simple scripts, whatever, and the operators put in. They run on Kubernetes. Now, the operators don’t know that it runs in Kubernetes. But going back to your question, when should we not use Kubernetes. Is it me writing in a higher level abstraction like a function? Not using Kubernetes in first sense, because I don’t know actually I’m using it. But on the covers, I’m still using it. So it’s kind of an answer and not an answer to your question because – [00:29:58] KH: I’ve seen these single node appliances. There’s only one node, right? They’re only there to provide like email at a grocery store. You don’t have a distributed system. Now, what people want is the Kubernetes API, the way it deploys things, the way it swaps out a running container for the next one. We want that Kubernetes API. Today, the only way to get it is by essentially bringing up a whole Kubernetes cluster. I think the K3S project is trying to simplify that by re-implementing Kubernetes. No etcd, SQLite instead. A single binary that has everything. So I think when we start to say what is Kubernetes, there’s the implementation, which is a big distributed system. Then there’s the API. I think what’s going to happen is if you want the Kubernetes API, you’re going to have so many more choices on the implementation that makes better sense for the target platform. So if you’re building an appliance, you’re going to look at K3S. If you’re a cloud provider, you’re going to probably look something like what we see on GitHub, right? You’re going to modify and integrate it into your cloud platform. [00:31:00] BL: Of maybe what happened with Kubernetes over the next few years is what happened with the Linux API, or the API. Firecracker and gVisor did this, and WSL did this. We can basically swap out Linux from the backend because we can just get on with the calls. Maybe that will happen with Kubernetes as well. So maybe Kubernetes will become a standard where Kubernetes standard and Kubernetes implementation that we have right now. I don’t even know about that one. [00:31:30] KH: We’re starting to see it, right? When you say here is my pod, and we can just look at Fargate for EKS as an example. When you give them a pod, their implementation is definitely different than what most people are thinking about running these days, right? One pod per VM. Not using Virtual Kube. So they’ve taken that pod spec and tried to uphold its means. But the problem with that, you get leaks. For example, they don’t allow you to bind to a host 4. Well, the pod spec says you can bind to a host 4. Their implementation doesn’t allow you to do it, and we see the same problem with gVisor. It doesn’t implement all the system calls. You couldn’t run the Docker daemon on top of gVisor. It wouldn’t work. So I think as long as we don’t leak, because when we leak, then we start breaking stuff. [00:32:17] BL: So we’re doing the same thing with Project Pacific here at VMware, where this concept of a pod is actually a virtual machines that loops in like a tenth of a second. It’s pretty crazy how they’ve been able to figure that out. If we can get this right, that’s huge for us. That means we can move out of our appliance and we can create better things that actually work. I’m VMware specific. I’m on AWS and I want this name space. I can use Fargate and EKS. That’s actually a great idea. [00:32:45] MG: I remember this presentation, Kelsey, that you gave. I think two or three years ago. It might be three years, where you took the Kubernetes architecture and you removed the boxes and the only thing remaining was the API server. This is where it clicked to me as like, “This is right,” because I was focused on the scheduler. I wanted to understand the scheduler. But then you zoomed out or your stripped off all these pieces and the only thing remaining was the API server. This is where it clicked to me. It’s like [inaudible 00:33:09] or like the syscall interface. It’s basically my API to do some crazy things that I would have write on my own and assembly kind of something before I could even get started. As well the breakthrough moment for me, this specific presentation. [00:33:24] KH: I’m working on an analogy to talk about what’s happening with the Kubernetes API, and I haven’t refined it yet. But when the web came out, we had all of these HTTP verbs, put post git. We have a body. We have headers. You can extract that out of the whole web, the web browser plus the web server. If you have tracked out that one piece, the instead of building web package, we can build APIs and GraphQL, because we can reuse many of those mechanisms, and we just call that RESTful interfaces. Kubernetes is going through the same evolution, right? The first thing we built was this container orchestration tool. But if you look at the CRDs, the way we do RBAC, the way we think about the status field in a custom object, if you extract those components out, then you end up with this Kubernetes style APIs where we start to treat infrastructure not as code, but as data. That will be the restful moment for Kubernetes, right? The web, we extracted it out, then we have REST interfaces. In Kubernetes, once we extracted out, we’ll end up with this declarative way of describing maybe any system. But right now, the fine, or the perfect match is infrastructure. Infrastructure as data and using these CRDs to allow us to manipulate that data. So maybe you start with Helm, and then Helm gets piped into something like Customize. That then gets piped into a mission controller. That’s how Kubernetes actually works, and that data model to API development I think is going to be the unique thing that lasts longer then the Kubernetes container platform does. [00:34:56] CC: But if you’re talking about – Correct me if I misinterpret it, platform as data. Data to me is meant to be consumed, and I actually have been thinking since you said, “Oh, developers should not be developing apps that connect directly to Kubernetes,” or I think you said the Kubernetes API. Then I was thinking, “Wait. I’ve heard so many times people saying that that’s one great benefit of Kubernetes, that the apps have that access.” Now, if you see my confusion, please clarify it. [00:35:28] KH: Yeah. Right. I remember early on when we’re doing config maps, and a big debate about how config maps should be consumed by the average application. So one way could be let’s just make a configs map API and tell every developer that they need to import a Kubernetes library to call the API server, right? Now everybody’s app doesn’t work anymore on your laptop. So we were like, “Of course not.” What we should do is have config maps be injected into the file system. So that’s why you can actually describe a config map as a volume and say, “Take these key values from the config map and write them as normal files and inject them into the container so you can just read them from the file system. The other option also was environment variables. You can take a config map and translate them into an environment variables, and lastly, you can take those environment variables and put them into command line flags. So the whole point of that is all three of the most popular ways of configuring an app, environment variables, command line flags and files. Kubernetes molded itself into that world so that developers would never tightly couple themselves to the Kubernetes API. Now, let’s say you’re building a platform, like you’re building a workflow engine like Argo, or you’re building a network control plane like Istio. Of course, you should use a Kubernetes API. You’re building a platform on top of a platform. I would say that’s kind of the exception to the rule if you’re building a platform. But a general application that’s leveraging the platform, I really think you should stay away from the Kubernetes API directly. You shouldn’t be making sys calls directly [inaudible 00:37:04] of your runtime. The unsafe package in Go. Once you start doing that, Go can’t really help you anymore. You start pining yourself to specific threads. You’re going to be in a bad time. [00:37:15] CC: Right. Okay. I think I get it. But you can still use Kubernetes to decouple your app from the machine by using objects to generate those dependencies. [00:37:25] KH: Exactly. That was the whole benefit of Kub, and Docker even, saying, “You know what? Don’t worry too much more about C groups and namespaces. Don’t even try to do that yourself.” Because remember, there was a period of time where people were actually trying to build C groups and network namespaces into the runtime. There’s a bunch of like Ruby and Python projects that they were trying to containerize themselves within the runtime. Whoa! What are we doing? Having that second layer now with Containerd on C, we don’t have to implement that 10,000 times for every programming language. [00:37:56] DC: One of the things I want to come back to is your point that you’d made about the Kubernetes API being like one of the more attractive parts of the projects, and people needing that to kind of move forward in some of these projects, and I wonder if it’s more abstract than that. I wonder if it’s abstract enough to think about in terms of like a level triggered versus edge triggered stuff. Taking control theory, the control theory that basically makes Kubernetes such a stable project and applying that to software architecture rather than necessarily bringing the entire API with you. Perhaps, what you should take from this is the lessons that we’ve learned in developing Kubernetes and apply that to your software. [00:38:33] KH: Yeah. I have the fortunate time to spend some time with Mark Burgess. He came out with the Promise Theory, and the Promise Theory is the underpinnings of Puppet Chef, Ansible, CF Engine, and this idea that we would make promises about something and eventually convergent to that state. The problem was with Puppet Chef and Ansible, we’re basically doing this with shell scripts and Ruby. We were trying to write all of these if, and, else statements. When those didn’t work, what did you do? You made an exec statement at the bottom and then you’re like, “Oh! Just run some batch, and who knows what’s going to happen?” That early implementations of Promise Theory, we didn’t own the resource that we were making promises about. Anyone could go behind this and remove the user, or the user could have a different user ID on different systems but mean the same thing. In the Kubernetes world, we push a lot of that if, else statements into the controller. Now, we force the API not have any code. That’s the big difference. If you look at the Kubernetes API, you can’t do if statements. Terraform, you can do if statements. So you kind of fall into the imperative trap at the worst moments when you’re doing dry runs or something like that. It does a really good of it. Don’t get me wrong. So the Kubernetes API says, “You know what? We’re going to go all-in on this idea.” You have to change the controller first and then update the API. There is no escape patches in the API. So it forces a set of discipline that I think gets us closer to the promises, because we know that the controller owns everything. There’s no way to escape in the API itself. [00:40:07] DC: Exactly. That’s exactly what I was pushing for. [00:40:09] MG: I have a somewhat related question and I’m just not sure how to frame it correctly. So yesterday I saw a good talk by someone talking about protocols, like they somewhat forgotten power of protocols in the world of APIs. We got Swagger. We got API definitions. But he made the very easy point of if I give you an open, a close and a write and read method, or an API, you’d still don’t know how to call them in sequence and which one to call it off. This is same for [inaudible 00:40:36] library if you look at that. So I always have to force myself, “Should I do anything [inaudible 00:40:40] or I’m not leaking some stuff.” So I look it up. Versus on protocols, if you look at the RFC definitions, they are very, very precise and very plainly outlined of what you should do, how you should behave, how you should communicate between these systems. This is more of a communication and less about the actual implementation of an API. I still have to go through that talk again, and I’m going to put it in the show notes. But this kind of opened my mind again a little bit to think more about communication between systems and contracts and promises, as you said, Carlisia. Because we make so many assumptions in our code, especially as we have to write a lot of stuff very quickly, which I think will make things brittle overtime. [00:41:21] KH: So the gift and the curse of Kubernetes that it tries to do both all the time. For some things like a pod or a deployment, we all feel that. If I give any Kubernetes cluster a deployment object, I’m going to get back out running pod. This is what we all believe. But the thing is it may not necessarily run on the same kernel. It may not run on the same OS version. It may not even run on the same type of infrastructure, right? This is where I think Kubernetes ends up leaking some of those protocol promises. A deployment gets you a set of running pods. But then we dropdown to a point where you can actually do your own API and build your own protocol. I think you’re right. Istio is a protocol for thinking about service mesh, whereas Kubernetes provides the API for building such a protocol. [00:42:03] MG: Yeah, good point. [inaudible 00:42:04]. [00:42:04] DC: On the Fargate stuff, I thought was a really interesting article, or actually, an interesting project by [inaudible 00:42:10], and I want to give him a shout out on this, because I thought that was really interesting. He wrote an admission controller that leverages autoscaler, node affinity and pod affinity to effectively do the same thing so that whenever there is a new pod created, it will spin up a new machine and associate only that pod with that machine. I was like, “What a fascinating project.” But also just seeing this come up from like the whole Fargate ECS stuff. I was like – [00:42:34] KH: I think that’s the thread that virtual kubelet is pulling on, right? This idea that you can simplify autoscalling if you remove that layer, right? Because right now we’re trying to do this musical chairs dance, right? Like in a cloud. Imagine if someone gave you the hypervisor and told you you’re responsible for attaching hypervisor workers and the VMs. It would be a nightmare. We’re going to be talking about autoscalling the way we do in the cloud. I think Kubernetes moving into a world where a one pod per resource envelope. Today we call them VMs, but I think at some point we’re going to drop the VM and we would just call it a resource envelope. VMs, this is the way we think about that, Firecrackers. Like, “Hey, does it really need to be a complete VM?” Firecracker is saying, “No. It doesn’t. It just needs to be a resource envelope that allows you to run their particular workload.” [00:43:20] DC: Yeah. Same thing we’re doing here. It’s just enough VM to get you to the point where you can drop those containers on to it. [00:43:25] CC: Kelsey, question. Edge? Kubernetes on edge. Yes or no? [00:43:29] KH: Again, it’s just like compute on edge has been a topic for discussion forever. Problem is when some people say compute on edge, they mean like go buy some servers from Dell and put it in some building somewhere close to your property as you can. But then you have to go build the APIs to deploy it to that edge. What people want, and I don’t know how far off it is, but Kubernetes has set the bar so high that the Kubernetes API comes with a way to low balance, attach storage, all of these things by just writing a few YAML files. What I hear people saying is I want that close to my data center or store as possible. When you say Kubernetes on the edge, that’s what they’re saying, is like, “But we currently have one at edge. It’s not enough.” We’ve been providing edge for a very longtime. Open stack was – Remember open stack? Oh! We’re going to do open stack on the edge. But now you’re a pseudo cloud provider without the APIs. I think what Kubernetes is bringing to the table is that we have to have a default low balancer. We have to have a default block store. We have to have a default everything and on or for to mean Kubernetes like it does today centralized. [00:44:31] BL: Well, Doors have been doing this forever in some form or another. 20 years ago I worked for a Duty Free place, and literally traveled all over the world replacing point of sale. You might think of point of sales as a cash register. There was a computer in the back and it was RS-232 links from the cash register to the computer in the back. Then there was dial-up, or [inaudible 00:44:53] line to our central thing. We’ve been doing edge for a long time, but now we can do edge. The central facility can actually manage the compute infrastructure. All they care about is basically CPU and memory and network storage now, and it’s a lot more flexible. The surety is long, but I think we’re going to do it. It’s going to happen, and I think we’re almost right – People are definitely experimenting. [00:45:16] KH: You know what, Carlisia? You know what’s interesting now though? I was watching the Reinvent announcement. Verizon is starting to allow these edge components to leverage 5G for the last mile, and that’s something game-changer, because most people are very skeptical about 5G being able to provide the same coverage as 4G because of the wavelength and point-to-point, all of these things. But for edge, this thing is a game-changer. Higher bandwidth, but shorter distance. This is exactly what edge want, right? Now you don’t have to dig up the ground and run fiber from point-to-point. So if you could buy in these Kubernetes APIs, plus concepts like 5G, and get in that closer to people, yeah, I think that’s going to change the way we think about regions and zones. That kind of goes away. We’re going to move closer to CDNs, like Cloudflare has been experimenting with their worker technology. [00:46:09] DC: On the edge stuff, I think that there’s also an interesting dichotomy happening, right? There’s a definition of edge that we referred to, which is storage stuff and one that you’re alluding to, which is that there may be like some way of actually having some edge capability and a point of presence in a 5G tower or some point with that. In some cases, edge means data gravity. You’re actually taking a bunch of data from sensors and you’re trying to store it in a place where you don’t have to pay the cost of moving all of the data form one point to another where you can actually centralize compute. So in those edge cases, you’re actually willing to invest in a high-end compute to allow for the manipulation of that data where that data lake is so that you can afford to move it into some centralized location later. But I think that that whole space is so complex right now, because there are so many different definitions and so many different levels of constraints that you have to solve for under one umbrella term, which is the edge. [00:47:04] KH: I think Bryan was pulling on that with the POS stuff, right? Because instead of you going to go buy your own cash registry and gluing everything together, that whole space got so optimized that you can just buy a square terminal. Plug it on some Wi-Fi and then there you go, right? You now have that thing. So once we start to do this for like ML capabilities, security capabilities, I think you’re going to see that POS-like thing expand and that computer get a little bit more robust to do exactly what you’re saying, right? Keep the data local. Maybe you ship models to that thing so that it can get smarter overtime, and then upload the data from various stores overtime. [00:47:40] DC: Yup. [00:47:40] MG: One last question from my end. Switching gears a bit, if allow it. KubeCon. I left KubeCon with some mixed feelings this years. But my perspective is different, because I’m not the typical, one of the 12,000 people, because most of them were new comers actually. So I looked at them and I asked myself, “If I would be new to this huge big world of CNCF and Kubernetes and all these stuff, what would I take from that?” I would be confused. Confused like how from [inaudible 00:48:10] talks, which make it sound like it’s so complex to run all these things through the keynotes, which seems to be like just a lineup of different projects that I all have to get through and install and run. I was missing some perspective and some clarity from KubeCon this year, especially for new comers. Because I’m afraid, if we don’t retain them, attract them, and maybe make them contributors, because that’s another big problem. I’m afraid that we’ll lose our base that is using Kubernetes. [00:48:39] BL: Before Kelsey says anything, and Kelsey was a Kub contrary before I was, but I was a Kub contrary this time, and I can tell you exactly why everything is like it is. Well, fortunately and unfortunately, this cloud native community is huge now. There’s lots of money. There are lots of people. There are lots of interests. If we went back to KubeCon when it was in San Francisco years ago, or even like the first Seattle one, that was a community event. We could make the event for the community. Now, there’s community. The people who are creating the products. There’s the end users, the people who are consuming the products, and there are these big corporations and companies, people who are actually financing this whole entire thing. We actually have to balance all three of those. As a person who just wants to learn, what are you trying to learn from? Are you learning from the consumption piece? Are you learning to be a vendor? Are you learning to be a contributor? We have to think about that. At a certain point, that’s good for Kubernetes. That means that we’ve been able to do the whole chasm thing. We’ve cross over to chasm. This thing is real. It’s big. It’s going to make a lot of people a lot of money one day. But I do see the issue for the person who’s trying to come in and say, “What do I do now?” Well, unfortunately, it’s like anything else. Where do you start? Well, you got to take it all in. So you need to figure out where you want to be. I’m not going to be the person that’s going to tell you, “Well, go do a sig.” That’s not it. What I want to tell you is like anything else that we’d have to learn is real hard, whether it’s a programming language or a new technique. Figure out where you want to be and you’re going to have to do some research. Then hopefully you can contribute. I’m sure Kelsey has opinions on this as well. [00:50:19] KH: I think Brian is right. I mean, I think it’s just like a pyramid happening. A the very bottom, we’re new. We need to get everybody together in one space and it becomes more of a tradeshow, like an introductory, like a tasting, right? When you’re hungry and you go and just taste everything. Then when you figure out what you want, then that will be your focus, and that’s going to change every year for a lot of people. Some people go from consumer to contributor, and they’re going to want something out of the conference. They’re only going to want to go to the contributor day and maybe some of the deep-dive technical tracks. You’re trying to serve everybody in two or three days. So you’re going to start to have like everything pulling for your attention. I think what you got to do is commit. If you go and you’re a contributor, or you’re someone what’s building on top, you may have to find a separate event to kind of go with it, right? Someone told me, “Hey, when you go to all of these conferences, make sure you don’t forget to invest in the one-on-one time.” Me going to Oslo and spending an evening with Mark Burgess and really talk about Promise Theory outside of competing for attention with the rest of the conference. When I go, I’d like to meet new people. Sit down with them. Out of the 12,000 people, I call it a win if I can meet three new people that I’ve never met before. You know what? I’ll do a follow-up hangout with them to go deeper in some areas. So I think it’s more of a catch all. It’s definitely has a tradeshow feel now, because it’s big and there’s a lot of money and opportunity involved. But at the same time, you got to know that, “Hey, you got to go and seek out.” You go to Spotif
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