Virtualization and automation are spreading through the entire IT environment. The cloud is allowing companies to get out of the data center business, and focus on applications and software higher up the stack. And then, of course, containers are making application development and deployment easier than ever before. What will they think of next? How about self-driving infrastructure?

Alex Polvi, CEO at CoreOS Inc, thinks a whole new infrastructure layer is emerging. “I think we’re going through the biggest transformation we’ve seen in infrastructure since cloud was invented,” he told John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team. “Containers and distributed systems, I believe, are the next major area of infrastructure investment beyond cloud itself,” he stated.

Virtualized system administrator

Polvi elplained how his company plans to optimize containers and distributed systems.”Last week we released our first set of apps that I think really paint the vision of where these things are going as this concept called operators,” he said.

“The things a human sysadmin [system administrator] would do to run a piece of open-source software — we’re encoding that into an application, and it’s called an operator, and it can do things like update a cluster, back it up or scale it up and down,” he added.

Infrastructure takes the wheel

“We’re calling this kind of whole concept self-driving infrastructure,” Polvi said. “Two weeks ago, we had two huge vulnerabilities come out — one on the Linux kernal and one on Kubernetes — and every ops team in the world had to drop what they were doing and go fix that,” he said.

Polvi then stated: “We don’t have programs to fix that stuff, and we should.”

*Disclosure: The Linux Foundation and other companies sponsor some KubeCon 2016 segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither The Linux Foundation nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE