It’s a Kubernetes world, but it would be nothing without community collaboration.

The open-source powerhouse has emerged as the de facto platform for managing containers — packaged software applications — across the hybrid landscape of public and private clouds. Its rapid adoption means players large and small are serving up their own flavor of Kubernetes, connecting everyone to this burgeoning and agreeable ecosystem.

“We’ve contributed back to a fair amount of community projects, and I think a lot of them are in fact around how to just make Kubernetes work better on AWS,” said Abby Fuller (pictured), principal container czarina at Amazon Web Services Inc. “What’s made Kubernetes so amazing is that everyone feels very actively engaged, and I like seeing us push the boundaries.”

Fuller spoke with Stu Miniman, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Corey Quinn during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona. They discussed some of the features and services being released through the Kubernetes community, how Amazon is committing to AWS projects and what customers specifically seek to manage in their businesses (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s Note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Miniman: Are people trying to understand all your various pieces? Are they excited about some of the new features [with Kubernetes]? What’s the energy you’re capturing?

Fuller: I think it’s both. On the [Amazon] EKS side, there’s always the balance in the Kubernetes community between, “How can I have more power and flexibility?” And then, “How can you carry the pager for more of this?” I think it’s always an interesting balance between the folks that are like, “Do you think you could manage that for me as well?” and the folks that are like, “I want to be able to pass in control plain flags,” so there’s always an interesting balance. There’s a lot of questions about version upgrades.

I think this always seems to be on top of one’s mind because the Kubernetes community moves so fast. So compared to a lot of other products and how quickly they can release new versions, Kubernetes moves so fast, so if you don’t have a good upgrade strategy, you’re in trouble.

Quinn: There are 1,900 major service and feature releases emerging in the next 12 months. How did all that come to be?

Fuller: A lot of talking. All teams at AWS work the same way, which is backwards from what the customer is asking for, so we have a lot of customer meetings. We have a lot of customer conversations. We talked to a lot of people on social media or through blogs and livestreaming. But, ultimately, at the root of it, we all follow the same process, and I think the roadmap is really an extension of that. We’re working with customers a little faster, but also, how can you have a voice that we hear so much more loudly? You could be the smallest startup or the largest enterprise, and you can open a GitHub issue just the same and say, “I’d love to see you do that.”

The other thing is that everyone has an AWS story where they built something custom to work around or to add a feature, and then six weeks later say something like, “We shipped it!” and that’s awesome. It’s a good problem to have, and being able to detect code is one of everyone’s favorite problems.

Quinn: What are customers doing with [AWS] Fargate? What does the paradigm look like that’s different from what you might have expected?

Fuller: I think of Fargate as a capacity provider for us too, so when you think about the kinds of levels of control, maybe the orchestrator level, so an ECS or an EKS, if you start by using an ECS with Fargate, you’re not interacting directly with the two, so how can I control and define everything? Adjust the container level just at the task definition level without having to think about underlying instances, and they’re still there before someone tells me that the server list still has servers, but you’re not the one that’s managing that.

We’re managing … them on your behalf. All you care about is your workload itself, and then you can go a step deeper than that and say, “I want control over those EC2 instances. I want to manage them myself.” Ultimately, it’s about the level of control you want.

Miniman: There are some out there that think Amazon isn’t fully committed to Kubernetes. How do you help us understand what’s going on?

Fuller: Bob Wise [general manager of EKS] and his team spent a ton of time working on the community. The whole team does write for one of the biggest contributors. I think it’s about having a quiet community involvement. It’s about chopping wood and carrying water and being present and committing and showing up … having experts and answering questions and being present.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: This segment is unsponsored. Red Hat Inc. is the headline sponsor for theCUBE’s live broadcast at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Red Hat nor any other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE