Only three years old, Kubernetes has quickly gained popularity among enterprises as a leading method for automated deployments and container management. Despite the 4,100 attendees at this year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Austin, Texas, the system wasn’t always so widely accepted.

“Google had been on containers for so long; that was their mindset. … We decided Kubernetes was going to be the thing … and we knew that for it to be effective, it couldn’t just be Google doing it alone. We had to do it in a way that would bring the rest of the industry with us,” said Joe Beda (pictured), founder and chief technology officer of Heptio Inc. Through Heptio, Beda is working to support and advance Kubernetes use for enterprise customers.

Beda spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. They discussed the journey of Kubernetes inside and out of Google, and how Heptio is delivering on Beda’s mission to match the experience of Google developers working with enterprises transitioning into the cloud.

Entering the next phase of Kubernetes

As its utility was proven, Beda developed Heptio to improve customers’ success with the Kubernetes system. “We’re doing work, both Heptio and the community, around conformance to make sure that we actually have a solid base that folks can build on top of,” he said.

Heptio provides services, support and training, backup disaster recovery and conformance testing to ensure streamlined functioning. “Into 2018, we’re going to be offering more products, projects and services that really start targeting the special needs of larger enterprises,” Beda said.

Expanded support is just the beginning of what Beda has planned for the future. With innovation now enabling customers to focus on improved functioning as opposed to building systems from scratch, Beda is excited at the opportunities Heptio and Kubernetes will open for companies in the future. “I think we’re going to see a shift not just to cloud-native, but also … see a set of applications that are Kubernetes native. … We’re going to see amazing things happen when we really democratize the plumbing for building distributed systems,” he said.

With the announcement of Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes, or EKS, from Amazon, that next phase of Kubernetes appears to be rapidly approaching. “Kubernetes at its heart is a platform for building platforms … and I think we’re only now starting to see what things people are going to be building with that toolbox. That larger ecosystem is going to be much larger than Kubernetes itself,” Beda concluded.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE