Last night a very special event offered over three hours of insights and history about the world’s second-largest open source project (after Linux). As Kubernetes celebrated its 10th anniversary, Google’s Mountain View campus hosted a parade of key figures from the community who all helped make it happen.
As the evening rolled along, speakers came from every level of the project:
- Dawn Chen spoke after 17 years at Google — as one of the leads of its fateful Borg project.
- Sarah Novotny presented a whirlwind history of Kubernetes from her perspective as program manager for the Kubernetes community (from 2015 to 2018) and head of open source strategy for Google Cloud Platform (2017-2019).
- The evening closed with longtime staff software engineer Janet Kuo thanking the audience and the Kubernetes community “for keeping this Kubernetes community so innovated with your brilliant ideas.”
But it seemed like everyone shared their own testimonials of persistence, their remembrances of the work of individuals and communities, and their best stories from those hopeful moments spent collaborating on a project that they really believed could change the world.
And it all came from the people who were there — and who still remembered it fondly…
A 59-Year Vision
One of the most moving moments came when an emotional Eric Brewer (a Google VP of infrastructure) explained that “It’s not 10 years for me. It’s 30.” In 1997 he’d co-authored a paper on “Cluster-based scalable network services,” and it proposed an always-on computer utility that, as he told the audience “can implement all the things.”
But amazingly, that paper had also included a quote with a similar vision from 1965 — from the paper introducing the seminal multics system. “In my mind, these three — multics, and my work in the ’90s, and Kubernetes — are all attempts at the same vision.”
So why was it Kubernetes that finally succeeded, and only now on this third attempt? Brewer notes the multics era had no internet. (“They really thought there were going to be five computers in the world, and that we’d all connect through time-sharing into one of those five computers…”) In the 1990s humanity came closer to realizing the vision of a utility that could implement everything. “We had cloud-like services — we really did… They were process-centric, they were stateless, they had APIs and services and all this support. But they ran directly on the hardware, and real machines are hard — they’re not elastic. It’s very difficult to build those kinds of systems.”
Then Brewer arrived at Kubernetes, saying with real fondness that “It is delivering this vision, for real…” But it’s not just because elastic infrastructure is available — Brewer says it’s “because of the community.” Looking back over the last 59 years, Brewer’s face showed visible emotion. “In retrospect it’s obvious. But if you want to serve all the things, the community has to write all the things. There’s no other way…
“I think that’s probably my greatest thanks for this community — is that you wrote all the things.”
The Early Team Speaks
Kelsey Hightower introduced Kubernetes co-creator Craig McLuckie, who remembered their original team as “incredibly scrappy”. Later Kit Merker, who was a Google product manager for Kubernetes, described the team as “rebellious.”
Ville Aikas, also an early member of the team, noted even the project’s famous first commit was actually preceded by much earlier work at code.google.com. (“It no longer exists, unfortunately…” Aikas added. “When that went away, we lost a whole bunch of history.”) His point was that it’s important “to understand the truly humble beginnings of where we started from.”
And speaking later, Kubernetes staff software engineer Tim Hockin said, “Everybody worked on everything… We all did whatever we needed to do to get things done.” (Though Hockins was assigned to networking, his background was actually in operating systems. “One of my first jobs at Google was writing BIOS in assembly.”)
As his story progressed, Hockin emphasized how this impacted the project. “Now remember, I’m still not a networking person. But neither are most application developers, and I believe deeply to my core that they shouldn’t have to be…. And I keep that in my heart, and that was my goal and will continue to be my goal.”
Docker Thoughts
McLuckie told the audience his concern at the time was that Amazon had “effectively created this incredibly disruptive way to commercialize open source.” But a key piece of Kubernetes’ response was how Docker “just did this amazing job of unlocking a lot of the core technologies that Google had built on — and making them accessible to developers. Solomon [Hykes] really put lightning in a bottle in terms of creating an immediately accessible developer experience.”
It was a theme that kept coming up. Working on Google’s earlier Borg system, Hockin had already had the idea of giving every job its own IP address. But that idea was shelved — until a few years later, when Docker’s use of namespaces brought it back. “I thought… ‘This is the user experience that I wanted’… It really described a user experience that felt like magic.” Hockin called it “the birth of that IP-per-pod model that we’ve all come to know and…maybe love.”
And then, Hightower brought on to the stage, Docker’s original creator, Solomon Hykes, for a special one-on-one interview. “I don’t think Kubernetes exists without Docker,” Hightower began…
Hightower said Docker’s user interface really impressed the Kubernetes team — and that competition pushed both projects forward. But Hykes remembered their team as true outsiders and nobodies. “We came from France — you know, we packed our bags and just moved to a new country to get a shot at this startup that no one cared about. And we were five years in, of doing the container thing — and literally nobody cared…” But then after an interactive process of designing and listening to users, there was suddenly “mass hysteria…”
“At some point, it became just super-competitive and the stakes were so high…” Hykes said, before arriving at a more conciliatory thought. “But in the end, you know, it’s funny, because Kubernetes and Docker are very complementary projects, actually. And in the end, they integrated, I think pretty well… ”
Kelsey Hightower made a point of thanking him. “I want you to know, with absolute certainty, that you created this foundation that was strong enough to hoist a project this big to last 10 years…” And the audience applauded. Hykes then said, slowly and thoughtfully that he was appreciating, “this event and this phase of the community,” saying he feels welcomed and part of “the container family. I enjoy this phase because I didn’t feel that way before…”
“It was a very abrupt transition for — for me, at least, maybe for the others on the Docker team — from ‘Go away, no one cares,’ to ‘Thanks, we’ve got it from here. Also, go away.'” He laughed. “I mean, it’s true, we were sort of — you know, we were a little inconvenient… We were, like, taking too much space. I think really we wanted to be included… ”
“This is my language. It’s my people. And it’s nice to — it’s nice that over time, it ends up the great engineering and the best practices and the open source principles win out in the end.”
Thanking and Remembering
The event acknowledged the community again and again. An early slide showed the names of the top 25 contributors, drawing a round of applause — with another slide acknowledging all the Release Leads.
Chris Aniszczyk thanks Release Leads at Kubernetes 10 celebration in Mountain View.
But that was just one piece of what made it all work together. During a panel discussion, Paris Pittman, Kubernetes program manager for developer relations remembered how longtime Google software engineer Brian Grant also urged her to create more roles. “People needed ownership. People need to have incentive… I feel like that is the true secret sauce.”
As the evening began, the CNCF’s CTO Chris Aniszczyk also took a moment to remember Dan Kohn. “He truly cared about bringing in people into this community, helping out with scholarships, trying to be inclusive.” While Kohn passed away recently, “I think he really had an important role in shaping this organization. So I just want to thank him and remember him for what we’ve all built together as a community.”
Another look back came from Ian Coldwater — now at Docker, but originally a platform security engineer at Heroku, and before that an independent penetration tester. Coldwater began by remembering those formative days, of being “a mom in the midwest, when I got a job at a company of very early adopters of this really weird new technology that you kind of weren’t supposed to be running [in] production, but we were doing it anyway.” Coldwater had been asked to try break Kubernetes, and “As it turns out, I could break it… Kubernetes back then was pretty easy to break.”
“You could execute commands as root on a cluster with an unauthenticated curl call. We have come so far — as a project, as a group, as a community. We have done it together. We have built this thing together, and I am so proud of all of us.”
But then Coldwater gave shoutouts to people who’d helped make its security “wildly different than it used to be. It’s actually, I would argue, pretty good in a lot of cases.” And that list started with Kris Nova, who “did so much work that was anonymous and uncredited.” Nova died last August at age 36, and Coldwater remembered “she was not interested in taking credit for it. So posthumously — when she’s not around to be embarrassed by this — I want to give her credit for it. She was responsible for so many things that y’all never knew she was responsible for.
“She was amazing, and we miss her.”
There were more shoutouts to security people like Rory McCune and Brad Geesaman “and all of those folks in the very beginning who figured out how to hack this thing — with no documentation — and then figured out to document it!”
Coldwater has a now grown-up son — but says that maybe “we’ve grown up — as a project, as people — together. I’m so excited to get to level up, to level all of you up — and to get to do that together.
“I’m so excited to get to grow with you.”
Ian Coldwater at the 10-year celebration of Kubernetes.
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