Bart Farrell: First things first, who are you? What's your role and where do you work?
Christopher Tineo: my name is Christopher. I'm a DevOps engineer at a company called Game Plan Tech.
Bart Farrell: Which three emerging Kubernetes tools are you keeping an eye on?
Christopher Tineo: I think I'm keeping an eye on LightLLM. I think I'm keeping an eye on Crossplane and maybe Backstage also. We're running some experiments there.
Bart Farrell: managed Kubernetes services keep promising to remove operational burden. At what point does abstraction stop being helpful, because your team can no longer explain or debug what happened in production.
Christopher Tineo: I think we use a lot of managed services to remove that burden. But depending on the industry we're working on, sometimes we can delegate those responsibilities to managed services. So I think we should evaluate how the team knowledge can put in a balance based on what the team is good at and where it can spend the most time to get the best return on investment because it also could be adding a lot of complexity if you're just adding a lot of tools and abstractions that end up adding more cost and time to bring solutions to the customer. Try to find that balance where you're efficient you're not investing a lot of time and money but at the same time you deliver as fast as possible.
Bart Farrell: As more and more people are starting to use AI and Kubernetes, what do you think is the best place to start? And what are some areas that you don't touch?
Christopher Tineo: I think you could start with improving the developer experience to make the devs worry the least on how the apps are being deployed or how to build secure container images, build a standard and easy to use CI and CD pipeline for them. I think what we're doing, we're building skills to abstract a lot of that complexity to our devs, our internal customers. And I think it's a good place to start. We're building company standards using the skills builder with cloud, for example.
Bart Farrell: Gregor said using managed Kubernetes services makes things easier because it takes a lot of work to set up and operate a cluster. However, it also comes with its own set of challenges. What challenges have you faced with managed Kubernetes services?
Christopher Tineo: I think the main challenge we have seen is when some services are not available in IL5 versus IL6 environments in Google Cloud. But I think the Google team is working to get those on the roadmap throughout the year. So to solve that, sometimes we have to use search and solutions in the open source or the CNCF landscape. But other than that, that's the main challenge I've seen so far.
Bart Farrell: What's next for you?
Christopher Tineo: I'm trying my best to contribute the most that I can to the CNCF projects and community. I became a Kubernetes maintainer recently, and I think I recommend everyone to contribute more. All the CNCF projects need maintainers, and Kubernetes is growing so fast. At the same time, there's a lot of challenges that the AI is adding to it. The maintainers are overwhelmed. There's now a lot of security patches that they need to work on, but at the same time, they are looking for maintainers to help and reduce the amount of backlog that we have. Please join the Kubernetes project and we will welcome you in the SIG Contributor Experience.
Bart Farrell: If AI could do one thing to make your life easier on Kubernetes, what would it be?
Christopher Tineo: Make things as easy for both devs and platform engineers and use AI to build the abstractions that could ensure we're deploying secure software, but at the same time enabling everyone in our teams to be more efficient in production.
