GKE Turns 7 with Tim Hockin

Tim Hockin joins Kaslin Fields and Anthony Bushong to celebrate GKE’s seventh birthday! Tim starts with a brief background on GKE from its beginnings in 2015 and its relationship to Borg to the visions Google developers had for the software. GKE is meant to help companies focus on what they’re good at and leave the rest to Google’s managed Kubernetes service.

Tim talks about his acting gig in a Kubernetes documentary, including some fun facts about Kubernetes’ early days and the significance of the number seven. Over time, the teams working on open source Kubernetes and GKE have worked together, with advances in the open source software influencing updates in GKE. Kubernetes 1.25 was released the day this episode was recorded, and Tim describes how much work and thought goes into building these updates.

GKE offers GCP users unique ways to leverage Kubernetes tools like scaling, and Tim shares stories about the evolution of some of these tools and his experiences with networking. Talking with the Kubernetes community has helped refine GKE mult-icluster tools to help companies solve real problems, and Tim tells us more about other features and updates coming with future iterations of GKE. KubeCon is in October, so come by and learn more!

Tim Hockin

Tim Hockin is Principal Software Engineer working with Kubernetes at Google Cloud.

Cool things of the week

• What’s new with Google Cloud blog
• • Power Your Business with Modern Cloud Apps: Strategies and Best Practices site
• Securing apps for Googlers using Anthos Service Mesh blog

Interview

• GKE site
• Kubernetes site
• Anthos site
• Borg: The Predecessor to Kubernetes blog