Tracking technology’s evolution sometimes requires looking less at the products created and more at the people behind them. In examining the Kubernetes container management platform and its meteoric rise inside the complex world of cloud computing, it’s instructive to follow the footprints of two engineers with a special affinity for Seattle.

Joe Beda (pictured) and Craig McLuckie both worked for Microsoft Corp. in the early 2000s at the company’s headquarters in the Seattle region. They migrated to Google LLC’s lab in Seattle a few years later and worked on a little-known project at the time to build a container orchestration tool.

That project became Kubernetes, and both Beda and McLuckie decided to launch their own company, Heptio Inc., in 2016 just as Kubernetes was beginning to take off as a major force in application development and management. Based in Seattle, Heptio’s premise was to offer professional training and support services for companies seeking to adopt or enhance Kubernetes.

Heptio was acquired by VMware Inc. last month in a deal reportedly valued at $550 million — and yes, the parent company also has an operation in the Seattle area. The acquisition provided further evidence that Kubernetes has become a force in open-source enterprise computing after its humble beginnings as a cloud management project that involved the two former Google engineers.

“We knew that we had a possibility with Kubernetes to do something big. We could feel it,” said Beda, principal engineer at VMware Inc. and co-founder and chief technology officer at Heptio. “This is a product of a community. This is not a product of any single company, any single set of folks. Every time you hire a new person into a startup, every time you have a new person join the community and start contributing, it’s like another cylinder in the engine.”

Beda spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Seattle, Washington. They discussed the transformation of centralized computing, market dynamics that help drive Kubernetes growth, the impact of multicloud on the container space, continued innovation in the open-source community and the future direction of cloud technologies.

This week, theCUBE features Joe Beda as its Guest of the Week.

Sea change for centralized IT

VMware’s acquisition of Beda’s company comes at a time when the notion of a centralized information technology operation to drive enterprise computing is undergoing radical transformation. Cloud providers now offer a laundry list of information technology services for developers, ranging from compute, content delivery, and deployment to storage and analytics.

This means developers are increasingly turning to the cloud for support, at the expense of a centralized IT model where writing an application and filing a ticket before it’s finally launched can be a three-month process.

“They’re sitting there twiddling their thumbs waiting to get that ready,” Beda said. “Meanwhile they can take their credit card, go to a cloud, get a machine up and running within 30 seconds, and get their app shipped. That is a challenge for centralized IT, which oftentimes has not had any competition.”

Beda was reluctant to discuss Heptio’s strategic direction in the immediate aftermath of the VMware acquisition, but he did offer his thoughts on market dynamics that will likely shape his company’s course moving forward. Key among these is the rise of the operator persona, according to Beda. This involves a mindset that revolves around applications and policies set against a framework of automation that container orchestration technology provides.

“We’re seeing an evolution of that persona as it starts to come to grips with the world of the cloud,” Beda said. “We’re moving from a place where things are ticket-based, human-intensive to API-driven, policy-driven types of things. That’s obviously where the cloud is. But how do we take those learnings and actually apply them on-premises?”

Support for multicloud

An important factor in this transition will be continued enterprise adoption of multicloud and the role Kubernetes could play in hybrid computing. It’s a complex problem that even Beda’s fellow Kubernetes founders readily acknowledge has no simple solution.

For the present, the focus is on following the data. A number of announcements at KubeCon focused on expanding deployment into mesh and edge environments. Google updated its Kubernetes Engine to bring integrated support for the Istio service mesh, and Datawire Inc. introduced a cloud-native enhancement for microservices in decentralized edge environments.

“Multicloud and compatibility do go hand-in-hand,” Beda explained. “From the very start, we never wanted to pretend that Kubernetes was going to be this magic layer that was going to make differences between different environments disappear. We wanted to find the commonalities and minimize the extra differences that didn’t need to be there.”

CNCF plays important role

Key to the evolution of Kubernetes in a multicloud world will be the contributions of open-source developers, guided by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Beda and his colleague McLuckie were instrumental in the formation of CNCF in 2015, which has played a central role in the validation of new open-source projects.

Among the major announcements coming out of KubeCon last week was the addition of etcd — a distributed key value store in production used by organizations such as Uber Technologies Inc. and the New York Times — as a new project. CNCF now hosts 17 projects in various stages of incubation, as open-source developers seek novel solutions.

“This has been one of the things that has been interesting about CNCF,” Beda noted. “There is an idea that we want to create a set of projects that work well together, but there also is a realization that there is no one way to skin the cat.”

Finding new audiences

CNCF graduated Envoy service proxy software for general adoption in November, making it only the third such project to achieve that status, after container monitoring Prometheus and Kubernetes itself. Heptio used Envoy for a project to ingest data from hundreds of OpenStack and Kubernetes clusters in a private cloud, an indication that the software could pave the way for enterprises seeking to blend containers with legacy platforms.

“We’re at the point now where it’s about how to bring these technologies to new audiences,” Beda said. “How do we make this stuff more relevant to them? We’re moving out of this technology-focused phase into a phase that’s focused on solution and value that’s delivered.”

The Kubernetes name is from a loose translation of the Greek word for “helmsman,” and the technology’s logo is a pilot wheel against a backdrop with seven sides. In a nod toward the project he helped found, Beda recently explained that Heptio originated from “hept,” the Greek prefix for seven.

As he gazed around the throngs at KubeCon in his familiar town of Seattle, Kubernetes’ helmsman seemed a bit awed by what had transpired in only a few short years.

“I look at this, and it blows my mind,” Beda said. “You start things snowballing, and interesting things happen.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon:

Photo: SiliconANGLE