Open at Intel open.intel

We had a fun chat with Abdel Sghiouar of Google about his work in the Kubernetes world, being a cloud native road warrior, and his thoughts on where the ecosystem goes from here. Abdel shares his transition from a data center role at Google to consulting and finally into developer relations, emphasizing the importance of in-person interactions and learning from community engagements. He reflects on Kubernetes' evolution, its application beyond traditional computing environments, and the shift towards more developer-friendly infrastructure management tools. We also explore the cultural and technological shifts within the tech community, stressing the perpetual relevance of foundational computing skills, the potential of emerging technologies like WASM, and the critical nature of security in development practices. 
00:00 Welcome and Intro01:45 From Data Centers to Kubernetes04:25 The Evolution and Impact of Kubernetes07:40 Navigating the Kubernetes Ecosystem and Community Growth13:52 Addressing the Complexity of Kubernetes for Newcomers15:20 Fundamentals to Cloud Transition17:29 The Never-Ending Journey of Learning and Adaptation20:49 The Future of Tech: Kubernetes, AI, and Beyond24:51 The Simplicity Behind Complex Tech Solutions26:19 Looking Ahead
Guest:

Abdel Sghiouar is a Cloud Developer Advocate @Google Cloud. His focus areas are GKE/Kubernetes, Service Mesh and Serverless. Abdel started his career in datacenters and infrastructure in Morocco before moving to Google's largest EU datacenter in Belgium. Then in Sweden he joined Google Cloud Professional Services and spent 5 years working with Google Cloud customers on architecting and designing large scale distributed systems before turning to advocacy and community work. You can follow him at @boredabdel.
 

Niki Manoledaki and Stephanie Hingtgen from Grafana discuss their open source community roles and contributions toward environmental sustainability. Niki serves as a co-chair of the Green Reviews Working Group within the CNCF Environmental Sustainability Technical Advisory Group, focusing on promoting energy and carbon efficiency. Stephanie works on both the open source Grafana project and Grafana Cloud, emphasizing the value of contributing to open source. We discuss the importance of energy consumption metrics in technology, the use of Kubernetes for event-driven auto-scaling through KEDA, and efforts to enhance operational and environmental efficiency. Nkik and Stephanie share insights on scaling applications, the relationship between cost reduction and environmental sustainability, and introduce several projects like Karpenter and Kepler.
00:00 Introduction to Grafana's Community Engagement01:40 Exploring Environmental Sustainability in Tech04:30 Diving into Open Source Contributions and Projects05:26 Scaling and Autoscaling: Insights and Challenges12:56 Cost vs. Environmental Sustainability19:06 Personal Journeys into Open Source Software21:24 Closing Thoughts on Open Source and Sustainability
Resources
How Grafana Labs switched to Karpenter to reduce costs and complexities in Amazon EKS
Guests



Niki Manoledaki is a software engineer, environmental sustainability advocate, keynote speaker, meetup organiser, and community facilitator. She advocates for environmental sustainability in the CNCF as a Lead of the CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG where she co-chairs the Green Reviews WG.


Stephanie Hingtgen is a Senior Software Engineer II at Grafana Labs. As a member of the Grafana as a Service team, her focus has been on orchestrating thousands of Grafana instances in Kubernetes for Grafana Cloud. Her previous experience includes developing a private cloud platform to provision Kubernetes resources for engineers at Comcast.

We spoke with Jimmy Zelinskie, Co-founder of AuthZed, about his significant history in the cloud native ecosystem and open source community. We learn about his start writing BitTorrent software in college and his eventual startups including AuthZed, which develops SpiceDB. SpiceDB, inspired by Google's internal Zanzibar system, aims to democratize complex authorization solutions for various applications. The discussion also covers the evolution of Kubernetes, the role of open source in fostering innovation, and the significance of community collaboration in addressing common challenges in authorization and secure system design. Jimmy's experience showcases the benefits of open source for solving intricate problems and his commitment to making sophisticated technology accessible to a broader audience.
00:00 Introduction00:14 The Buzz of KubeCon00:50 Introducing Jimmy: From BitTorrent to Kubernetes Pioneer03:41 The Journey of SpiceDB: From Concept to Adoption06:43 Navigating the Authorization Ecosystem11:55 The Future of Authorization: Innovations and Roadmap14:32 Personal Insights: Open Source Journey and Product Management19:08 KubeCon Highlights and Kubernetes API Proxy Announcement
 
Guest:

Jimmy Zelinskie is a software engineer and product leader with the goal of empowering the world through the democratization of software through open source development. He's currently the CPO and cofounder of authzed where he's focused on bringing hyperscaler best-practices in authorization software to the industry at large.At CoreOS, he helped pioneer the cloud-native ecosystem by starting and contributing to many of its foundational open source projects. After being acquired by Red Hat, his focus shifted to the enablement and adoption of cloud-native technologies by mature enterprise stakeholders. To this day, he still contributes to cloud-native ecosystem by building the future on top of these technologies and maintaining standards such as Open Container Initiative (OCI).

We explore the importance of good user experience (UX) in open source software with Máirín "Mo" Duffy from Red Hat. Sharing her journey from an OG Linux contributor to her studies in Human-Computer Interaction, Moe highlights how her academic and professional path has been shaped by the intent to make open source software more accessible and user-friendly. She shares the unique challenges of integrating UX practices into open source development, the relationship between software developers and UX designers, and the impact of UX on software usability and adoption. Moe discusses her work on Podman Desktop, a tool aimed at simplifying Kubernetes environments for developers, and emphasizes the significance of education and accessibility in open source tools for the next generation of developers. The conversation also touches on the potential roles and benefits of AI in enhancing UX and solving human-centric problems within technology.
00:00 Welcome to KubeCon Fishbowl: A Dive into UX in Open Source01:06 The Journey from Linux Enthusiast to UX Pioneer04:20 Embracing Open Source Tools for Accessible Design05:57 The Unique Challenges of UX Design in Open Source08:57 Podman Desktop: Bridging Developers and Kubernetes15:33 Exploring the Impact of Cloud Native Training on New Graduates16:29 The Power of UX in Open Source Development17:47 Practical Steps to Start in UX Design20:28 The Role of UX in Software Development and Adoption26:17 Leveraging AI for UX Design and Beyond
Guest:

Máirín "Mo" Duffy is a Sr. Principal Interaction Designer at Red Hat. A recipient of the O’Reilly Open Source Award, Máirín has over 15 years of expertise in UX & design working upstream in FLOSS communities. Her portfolio is wide-ranging, from OS management tools; to OS infra UIs; to the cloud-based medical image processing project, ChRIS; to the developer-oriented Podman Desktop. She has an M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction and a B.S. in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Stephen Augustus, Head of Open Source at Cisco, and Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent, discuss Cisco's acquisition of Isovalent, which has closed since recording, bringing together two teams with long-standing expertise in open source cloud native technologies, observability, and security. The two share their excitement about working together, emphasizing the alignment of Isovalent with Cisco's security division and the potential enhancements this acquisition brings to open source projects like Cilium and eBPF. They explore the implications for the open source community, and the continuous investment and development in these projects under Cisco's umbrella. We discuss the ways this merger could innovate security practices, enhance infrastructure observability, and leverage AI for more intelligent networking solutions.
00:00 Welcome and Introduction00:22 Cisco's Acquisition of Isovalent00:53 The Excitement and Potential of the Acquisition02:14 Strategic Alignment and Future Vision04:03 Open Source Commitment and Community Impact06:53 The Road Ahead: Integration and Innovation19:49 Exploring AI and Future Technologies at Cisco26:03 Reflections and Closing Thoughts
Resources:
Cilium, eBPF and Beyond | Open at Intel (podbean.com)
The Art of Open Source: A Conversation with Stephen Augustus | Open at Intel (podbean.com)
Guests:

Liz Rice is Chief Open Source Officer with eBPF specialists Isovalent, creators of the Cilium cloud native networking, security and observability project. She was Chair of the CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee in 2019-2022, and Co-Chair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in 2018. She is also the author of Container Security, published by O’Reilly.She has a wealth of software development, team, and product management experience from working on network protocols and distributed systems, and in digital technology sectors such as VOD, music, and VoIP. When not writing code, or talking about it, Liz loves riding bikes in places with better weather than her native London, competing in virtual races on Zwift, and making music under the pseudonym Insider Nine.


Stephen Augustus is a Black engineering director and leader in open source communities. He is the Head of Open Source at Cisco, working within the Strategy, Incubation, & Applications (SIA) organization.
For Kubernetes, he has co-founded transformational elements of the project, including the KEP (Kubernetes Enhancements Proposal) process, the Release Engineering subproject, and Working Group Naming. Stephen has also previously served as a chair for both SIG PM and SIG Azure.
He continues his work in Kubernetes as a Steering Committee member and a Chair for SIG Release.
Across the wider LF (Linux Foundation) ecosystem, Stephen has the pleasure of serving as a member of the OpenSSF Governing Board and the OpenAPI Initiative Business Governing Board.
Previously, he was a TODO Group Steering Committee member, a CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) TAG Contributor Strategy Chair, and one of the Program Chairs for KubeCon / CloudNativeCon, the cloud native community’s flagship conference.
He is a maintainer for the Scorecard and Dex projects, and a prolific contributor to CNCF projects, amongst the top 40 (as of writing) code/content committers, all-time.
In 2020, Stephen co-founded the Inclusive Naming Initiative, a cross-industry group dedicated to helping projects and companies make consistent, responsible choices to remove harmful language across codebases, standards, and documentation.
He has previously held positions at VMware (via Heptio), Red Hat, and CoreOS.
Stephen is based in New York City.

 

We talked to Roman Yegorov, Director of Solution Engineering at Granulate, now a part of Intel. Roman discusses Granulate's role in Intel's strategy to monetize software through acquisitions aimed at enhancing its software portfolio with a focus on AI/ML and performance optimization. He highlights Granulate's expertise in improving application performance across platforms and their open source profiler, gProfiler, which aids developers in optimizing code efficiency. Roman shares insights into the potential environmental benefits of optimized coding, and the future goals of expanding educational resources on code profiling. Additionally, Roman recounts his career transition from networking to software and emphasizes the importance of fun and engagement in technical training. The conversation concludes with an emphasis on Granulate's holistic solutions for VMs, Kubernetes, and big data, encouraging community participation and contributions to their projects.
00:28 The Intel Acquisition: Granulate's New Chapter01:18 Granulate's Performance Improvement Mission01:45 Open Source and Community Engagement at KubeCon02:48 The Evolution of GProfiler04:53 Future Plans and Environmental Impact08:32 From Networking to Software10:02 The Art of Technical Training and Keeping It Fun14:38 Explaining Gprofiler with Legos17:34 Granulate's Holistic Solution and Community Invitation