Microsoft has recently increased their stakes in the Kubernetes community through a variety of actions. For example, they acquired Deis, a company that specialises in Kubernetes container management technologies. And, Microsoft became a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which is the home of the Kubernetes project.
Microsoft also continues to increase their engagement with the Kubernetes community with a talented team of engineers. In 2016, Brendan Burns, one of the three co-founders of Kubernetes (along with Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie), left Google and joined Microsoft as a distinguished engineer.
We spoke with Burns at DockerCon Europe to find out more about Microsoft’s engagement with the Kubernetes community. Here is an edited version of that discussion:
Linux.com: First things first, why would an ex-Googler and Kubernetes co-founder join Microsoft?
Brendan Burns: Microsoft is a company with a history that’s unique in the world of computing. Microsoft is a company that has been enabling developer productivity. It has been helping people who may not have thought of themselves as application builders or developer builders in the first place. But Microsoft enabled them to become people who are capable of building applications.
I have seen this with my friends who I went to college with. They took products like Visual Basic and Access to build businesses or consulting jobs. They created businesses to build applications using these technologies. These technologies empowered those people. I think cloud misses that. There is a gap where it’s hard to build reliable, scalable applications on the cloud.