Heptio’s Craig McLuckie On Kubernetes Orchestration’s Start at Google

Heptio’s co-founder and CEO sits down with ITPro Today and talks about how the Kubernetes orchestration platform got started at Google.

Later this month, Container World is set to roll into Silicon Valley and set up its tent at the Santa Clara Convention Center. On opening day, the last of six keynote addresses, “Containers and Orchestrators: A way to navigate lock-in and get the most out of pure open source solutions,” will be delivered by Craig McLuckie, co-founder and CEO of Heptio,a software startup centered around the Kubernetes orchestration platform.

McLuckie knows Kubernetes. Five years or so ago, he and his Heptio co-founder Joe Beda, along with Brendan Burns, now a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, developed Kubernetes while at Google and released it as open source. Before that, he and Beda were the developers of Google Compute Engine, Google’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service product. In addition, McLuckie led the creation of the Linux Foundation’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation, where the Kubernetes orchestration platform now calls home.

ITPro Today recently had the opportunity to talk with McLuckie, and we asked him about his days at Google when Kubernetes was just getting off the ground.

ITPro Today: Kubernetes was first announced by Google in 2014, but you, Joe Beda and Brendan Burns, had already been working on the project. Can you give us an idea about how that came to be?

McLuckie: If you wind back time a little bit, Joe and I were working together at Google. We built a product called Google Compute Engine and it was an interesting project. We were basically bringing the world of legacy IT to Google’s data centers, constructing what looks to the outside world like a very traditional way of running applications on Google’s infrastructure. Once that project was sort of tracking along, Joe and I started looking at what was next and thinking about it from other perspectives.