Ep. #40, The Open Source Secret Agent with Dave McAllister of NGINX

In episode 44 of The Kubelist Podcast, Marc Campbell and Benjie De Groot sit down with Idit Levine, Founder and CEO of Solo.io, to explore the evolving world of service mesh technology. Idit shares her unconventional journey into tech, the founding of Solo, and innovations like Ambient Mesh that simplify Kubernetes networking. Dive into the challenges of microservices, open source collaboration, and the future of AI in networking.

In episode 43 of The Kubelist Podcast, Kate Goldenring shares her journey from Microsoft, where she contributed to Kubernetes edge computing and the development of Akri, to joining Fermyon to work on serverless WebAssembly. She dives deep into the technical details of Spin and SpinKube, Fermyon's open-source tools for running serverless WebAssembly applications on Kubernetes. The conversation explores the potential of WebAssembly for building efficient, event-driven applications, and discusses how this technology can lead to more sustainable cloud solutions.

In episode 42 of The Kubelist Podcast, Marc Campbell and Benjie De Groot sit down with Wayne Starr from Defense Unicorns to explore Zarf, an open-source tool for continuous software delivery in air-gapped environments. Wayne shares insights into how Zarf is transforming software deployment for the Department of Defense and beyond. They also explore other fascinating tools like Lula, Pepr, and LeapFrogAI.

In episode 41 of The Kubelist Podcast, Marc and Benjie speak with Lukas Gentele of Loft Labs about vCluster. Together they dive deep on how vCluster works and some of the new use cases that the project enables when running on larger, more mature enterprises. This technical discussion explores the problems Lucas and his team set out to solve when they created vCluster.

In episode 40 of The Kubelist Podcast, Marc and Benjie speak with open source pioneer Dave McAllister. Dave shares stories and lessons from his 40-year career in tech including working for DEC, NASA, Adobe, Red Hat, Splunk, and NGINX. Additionally, they discuss Linux’s rise to popularity in the early days of open source, SGI’s contribution to modern cinematic effects, predictions around AI, and the overlap of open source and LLMs.

In episode 39 of The Kubelist Podcast, Marc and Benjie recount their experience at KubeCon 2023 and share interviews from the event with guests like Matt Butcher and Radu Matei of Fermyon, Umair Khan of Stacklet, Anna Reale of Keptn, Solomon Hykes of Dagger, Bailey Hayes of wasmCloud, and many more.

In episode 38 of The Kubelist Podcast, Marc and Benjie speak with Jussi Nummelin of Mirantis. This talk explores the accessibility and consistency of utilizing a Kubernetes distribution with zero dependencies. Other topics explored include the K0s project from Mirantis, the evolution of container management, and the advantages of control plane isolation.

In episode 37 of The Kubelist Podcast, Marc and Benjie speak with Solomon Hykes about his new project, Dagger. This talk explores CI/CD in depth and examines the difficulties teams face when implementing it. Finally, Solomon looks back on the lessons he learned while building Docker and how they ultimately influenced the creation and trajectory of Dagger.

In episode 36 of The Kubelist Podcast, Benjie and Marc speak with Solomon Hykes, founder of both Docker and Dagger. This conversation explores the early days of containers and the origins of Docker, including the many hurdles Docker overcame early on, its unexpected virality, and its continued prevalence among the developer community.

In episode 35 of The Kubelist Podcast, Marc and Benjie are joined by Tom Preston-Werner. Tom shares insights gleaned from his open source journey including the founding of GitHub and his many side projects along the way. This talk explores themes on entrepreneurship, scaling, semantic versioning, dogfooding, and community building.