Meet the Project Management Team Plotting the Kubernetes Roadmap

Aug 30th, 2017 2:00pm by Scott M. Fulton III

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There was a time when the operating system was the platform, and all software was written for a specific OS. Inter-application communication (IAC) meant “speaking” to a registered entity of the operating system, in terms expressed using the OS’ native language. The Component Object Model, and its later variants (e.g., DCOM) were wedded to Windows.

In a containerized environment, there are still operating systems, and we still call most of the units that serve as vehicles for processes “Linux containers.” But IAC is no longer something that is facilitated by an underlying OS platform. As an orchestrator, Kubernetes facilitates the networking that takes place between components. And how that facilitation will take place from here on out, is a key topic of conversation for the people who assemble the Kubernetes Roadmap.

For a special edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Google — a sponsor of our upcoming ebook “The State of the Kubernetes Ecosystem” — assembled three of the members who oversee and contribute to the Roadmap project:

Aparna Sinha, Product Management Lead, Google Cloud Platform.
Eric Brewer, Vice President of Infrastructure, Google.
Ihor Dvoretskyi, Product Manager for Kubernetes Community; Program Manager, Mirantis.

“What the Kubernetes community does, architecturally, is to define an interface,” Sinha said. “And the Container Runtime Interface is one of those interfaces. We have a networking interface and a storage interface, and other types of interfaces. And with that interface definition, there are multiple, different container runtimes that can conform to that interface definition, and can, therefore, integrate with Kubernetes.”

“It’s not necessary that a Kubernetes distribution integrate many different runtimes, but it is an option. Kubernetes defines a runtime interface, as there are many runtimes that users would like to use with Kubernetes. And therefore those teams, or sets of users, create the runtime plugin for a particular runtime.”

In This Edition:

4:29: Exploring the Kubernetes conformance program.
12:18: Managing strategic business needs with the Kubernetes core.
22:18: What should Kubernetes evolutionary responsibility be going forward to the other components of the CNCF stack?
31:52 Balancing short-term and long-term security management in Kubernetes architectures.
43:16: Future secure management of pods on multi-tenant Kubernetes nodes.
44:53: Where Kubernetes will stand three years from now within the ecosystem.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Google are sponsors of The New Stack.

Feature image via Pixabay.

Scott M. Fulton III leads the developer content team at Neo4j, and before this, was a 37-year veteran producer and editor, including for The New Stack, where he created the Context podcast. He produced the Scale blog for ZDNet, was...