Kaslin Fields and Mark Mirchandani host this week’s episode of the podcast as we celebrate one of our favorite Google products, Google Kubernetes Engine! Anthony Bushong and Gari Singh join the party to talk about GKE’s life journey, what’s new, and what’s coming up for the service.

Each guest brings their unique perspective to the show starting with their definitions of Kubernetes and GKE, tailored to a six year old. How does Kubernetes relate to cookies, Disney World, and Pokemon? Kaslin, Anthony, and Gari break it down.

Next, each guest talks their favorite GKE features and what makes the service different. Kaslin loves the persistent storage feature, among others. Anthony appreciates the evolution of GKE to a place where it supports many different workloads and situations for clients and how easy it is to get started with GKE. GKE’s ability to connect easily to other GCP products and features and GKE Autopilot are some of Gari’s favorite things about the service.

Best practices and advice for new users are shared by our guests. From practical tips for project planning to encouragement with long-term problem solving, our guests offer listeners resources and ideas for a successful GKE project. Kaslin, Anthony, and Gari share their favorite customer stories with us and talk about the fun, interesting events Google has hosted for GKE customers.

The future of GKE looks bright, with new options for Windows containers, expanded Autopilot uses, and multicluster support. KubeCon is coming up soon, so keep an eye out for more Kubernetes and GKE news!

Anthony Bushong

Anthony Bushong has been working in the field with production GKE users, both large and small, for almost 5 years now. In Kubernetes time, since Kubernetes v1.3!

Gari Singh

Gari Singh is an Outbound Product Manager focused on GKE and Anthos. In this role, he has the opportunity to work with many customers and help align their needs with overall product direction.

Kaslin Fields

Kaslin Fields is a Developer Advocate at Google Cloud, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Ambassador, and a contributor to Open Source Kubernetes. As a Developer Advocate, she engages with Open Source communities both as a member, and as an advocate for their needs as users (or potential users) of Google Cloud’s products. She is passionate about making technology accessible to a broad audience through making the information available in many forms, such as videos, blogs, documentation, and even comics which she illustrates herself!

Cool things of the week

• Try a tutorial in the Google Cloud Console blog
  • GCP Podcast Episode 180: Firebase with Jen Person podcast
• Migrate, Manage & Modernize: Windows Workloads Powered by GKE and Anthos site

Interview

• GKE site
• Kubernetes site
• Explain Like I’m 5: Containers VS VMs blog
• Introducing GKE Autopilot: a revolution in managed Kubernetes blog
• Best practices for running cost-optimized Kubernetes applications on GKE docs
• Discover and invoke services across clusters with GKE multi-cluster services blog
• The evolution of Kubernetes networking with the GKE Gateway controller blog
• Bringing Pokémon GO to life on Google Cloud blog
• Bayer Crop Science seeds the future with 15000-node GKE clusters blog
• Helping researchers at CERN to analyze powerful data and uncover the secrets of our universe blog
• Optimize costs in GKE with monitoring systems video
• Monitoring for efficient cluster binpacking in GKE video
• Monitoring for app right-sizing in GKE video
• Cloud Next 2021 site
• KubeCon site
• GCP Podcast Episode 210: Kubernetes Config Connector with Emily Cai podcast
• GCP Podcast Episode 234: GKE Turns Five with Alex Zakonov and Drew Bradstock podcast
• GCP Podcast Episode 252: GKE Cost Optimization with Kaslin Fields and Anthony Bushong podcast
• GCP Podcast Episode 257: GKE Autopilot with Yochay Kiriaty and William Denniss podcast

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Kaslin is working on a ton of things, including Kube Essentials and GKE Essentials (coming soon), KubeCon panel and keynote addresses, and Fields Tested - CNCF Twitch - CTF.