| CoreOS was CoreOS before I got there. I came to CoreOS because of the open source nature of the company and the awesome collection of projects such as etcd, CoreOS Linux, and their work around containers. The release of Clair proves this will continue without me. While much of my work at CoreOS was seen through the eyes of people attending conferences and readers of my blog entires, my true contribution was helping grow a community around containers, and more importantly exposing the benefits of distributed computing to a much larger audience. Based on feedback, I consider my community efforts largely successful for many reasons including the following: * I've been willing to help anyone learn this stuff by doing 1:1 hangouts, engaging in social media, or writing a book on Kubernetes. Whatever it takes. * Building and sharing open source projects like confd[1], and my collection of prototypes such as motorboat[2], or exploring new integrations between tools like Docker Compose and Kubernetes[3]. I also spent a fair amount of time hacking on open source projects at CoreOS including rkt, etcd, and working with the community to ensure they could adopt our technologies, then incorporating feedback from users when we (CoreOS) made it hard too. As a result I gained Product Management responsibilities to go along with my advocacy work. During my time at CoreOS Kubernetes came out, which represented a turning point for what I consider the majority of the industry (well the part that cares about application containers). Kubernetes represented many of the ideas we had been working towards at CoreOS, and in many ways was the perfect addition to the CoreOS stack. I was an early code contributor of Kubernetes, which resulted in gaining commit access. But once the number of outside contributors grew, I felt I would have a larger impact building tools to fill in the gaps between Kubernetes and people adopting the platform. One of those tools being kube-register[4], which made it easy for people to automate the scaling out of a Kubernetes cluster using fleet. Overtime I started to shift focus towards education, because what use is a platform for next generation infrastructure if no one knew how to use it? So came the workshops, book, and more conference talks. In many ways I'm doing the exact same things -- working to improve the future of computing based on containers and core concepts of distributed computing, but at a different company, Google, which has many of the same core values regarding open source, community, and vision. What happens to CoreOS? I expect CoreOS to keep shipping stuff based on the same core values that attracted me there in the first place, and regardless of who provides my paycheck I'll always be a member of the CoreOS family. This is the power of community. I never had to leave. [1] https://github.com/kelseyhightower/confd [2] https://github.com/kelseyhightower/motorboat [3] https://github.com/kelseyhightower/compose2kube [4] https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kube-register |
Thanks Kelsey for distilling your perspective on your time at CoreOS -> Google here.