It was a gutsy decision back in 2009. Video distribution pioneer Netflix Inc. was weighing its options on whether to stay with its traditional data center model or move its fledgling movie streaming service to public cloud provider Amazon Web Services Inc.

Nine years ago, the cloud service model was not the robust solution it has become today. Cloud was viewed with skepticism inside the information technology industry, stoked by security and unreliability fears. But the man in charge of making key IT decisions for Netflix convinced the company’s management that going all-in on the cloud would be the right decision over the long term.

The decision proved fortuitous for AWS and Netflix, as both have become industry juggernauts. And the man who made the fateful move to the cloud in 2009 is now with AWS, tasked with convincing other businesses to follow the same path he took nearly a decade ago.

Adrian Cockcroft (pictured) joined AWS in October 2016 as vice president of cloud architecture strategy. He brought with him a deep familiarity with the open-source community, having played a major role in the implementation of NetflixOSS, open-source software for use by others in building cloud infrastructures at scale. Now he is building a team to move AWS more boldly into the open-source world.

“We really didn’t have a team focused on outbound communication of what we were doing in open-source until I started building this team a year ago,” Cockcroft said. “That was the missing link. We were actually doing a lot more than most people realized.”

Cockcroft stopped by the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Austin, Texas, and spoke with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu). They discussed the AWS decision to join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, recent announcements regarding Kubernetes, the role of AWS’ Fargate managed service, and key future projects. (* Disclosure below.)

This week theCUBE features Adrian Cockcroft as our Guest of the Week.

CNCF participation signals open-source commitment

One key open-source move by AWS came last August when the company announced it would join the CNCF as a top-tier member. The foundation has been a major influence behind Kubernetes, open-source software that plays a critical role in managing container applications within enterprise networks.

By joining CNCF, whose board Cockcroft also joined, AWS signaled that is was ready to tackle issues swirling around the company’s own container management platform while building an important bridge to the open-source developer community.

“How do we get AWS to listen to an open-source community and work with them?” Cockcroft mused. “We always listen to our customers and go wherever they take us.”

Where customers were going was to Kubernetes. A survey published before the CNCF announcement showed that more than 60 percent of the surveyed firms were hosting Kubernetes on AWS. When AWS joined CNCF last August, there was speculation that the cloud provider was working on a Kubernetes-based cloud service.

That speculation became reality at AWS re:Invent in late November when the company announced its support for the container orchestration system with the release of Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes, known as EKS. Fargate, a capability for customers to launch containers without having to provision servers, was also part of the announcement.

The moves by AWS are part of a strategy to offer different experiences based on enterprise needs. “Think of Kubernetes as somewhat optimized for the developer experience and ECS more for the operations experience,” Cockcroft explained. “We’re trying to bring all of this together.”

Fargate offers 50 select combinations of memory and CPU with the price scaled on a per-second basis after the first minute. Users can launch containers, let Kubernetes act as the manager, and then bring in AWS for hardware support.

“Fargate is container as a first-class entity that you can deploy to,” Cockcroft said. “You don’t have to think about what version of Linux it is.”

Future focus on deep learning

Although AWS released a dizzying array of new products and services last November, Cockcroft dropped hints that there will be plenty more to come. One key project area of focus is deep learning. Last October, AWS partnered with Microsoft to offer an open-source deep learning library for developers, called Gluon. A key element of Gluon is to provide developers with the tools for training and deploying machine learning models not just in the cloud, but among “internet of things” devices at the edge.

Another important AWS project area involves Apache MXNet. Gluon’s deep learning interface is based upon the Apache MXNet framework, and it is available today for deployment on EC2 instances.

The recent moves by AWS to more fully cement its relationship with the open-source community has allowed the cloud provider to offer a diverse set of options for enterprise computing customers. The IT consumption experience can be bare metal, virtual machines, containers or functions.

“Pick one, or pick all of them. It’s fine,” Cockcroft concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE