Hacker News Reader

Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

Who is this "Brendan Burns" dude and why is everyone treating him like a deity? I've never heard of him even though I spent nearly a decade at Google, some of it in Google Cloud. Much of what Kubernetes is is basically a "lightweight" take on Borg. It even comes through in naming: borglet <-> kubelet, borgmaster <-> kubernetes master. The story of Kubernetes is very much about standing on the shoulders of the giants, and most of those giants (members of the Borg/Omega team) are still there, at Google.

View on HN

I feel like that's like working at Microsoft and having never heard of Alex Kipman. The creators of Kubernetes are very open about it being based around Borg's structure. That's no secret.

Sure, but to say that just because Burns works at Microsoft now is a good reason to think that MS is a containerization leader is a total non-sequitur. Google, however, is _the_ containerization leader, having created CGroups and having run everything in containers for a decade before they became "cool".

Microsoft is undoubtedly A containerization leader at this point, I never claimed they were THE containerization leader. The fact is that there is likely not a huge difference at this point between the big 4 (I'd include IBM since they bought RedHat.) Kubernetes is no longer that new and all 4 big cloud providers have had plenty of time to more or less be on par with each other. I'm sure Google has some other insight, but I doubt it's so much that many people are flocking to their service for it anymore.

> Microsoft is undoubtedly A containerization leader at this point

If that was remotely true then what product/service does Microsoft offer that is remotely comparable with Docker/Kubernetes and is neither Docker or Kubernetes?

Why would that matter? If their kubernetes infrastructure is the most polished and production ready of the bunch, then I’d say they’re the leader.

> Why would that matter?

Because you lead nothing if all you do is reuse the tools developed by the actual leaders. That's what followers do, not leaders.

Service Fabric.

Now, I happen to think Kubernetes is better, but you asked. Service Fabric was available to the public in 2016 but has been used internally since 2011.

FWIW, Google certainly led on cgroup development for a while, but the cgroupv2 maintainer works at Facebook, and we're active in upstream container development in both linux and systemd.

I don't necessarily think you're wrong; I just think your argument, as stated, is weak.

OP never said it was the leader, just catching up quickly. Microsoft have released a ton of tools lately for Kubernetes.

The author of the first version of Kubernetes. Author as in the person who wrote the code and bootstrapped the project. If memory serves well. Haven’t been at Google for a while, but in early 2010s would have been unrealistic to attempt to externalize Borg/Omega. I still remember a high level architecture diagram of Borg covering a whole wall.

Here is his LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-burns-487aa590

Strange you work at Google and not know about him.

Why would it be "strange"? At the time I left Google it was 60K+ people. You'd need to be someone of Mike Burrows' or Jeff Dean's stature to even register on the radar.

I work at Google, I neither know Brendan Burns nor Mike Burrows. According to his LinkedIn Brendan was a Senior Staff Engineer at Google, i.e. Level 7. That is not a particularly high position.

My previous manager was a Principle Engineer (Level 8). I am pretty sure no one here ever heard her name.

Most people who do follow the development of Kubernetes in the community do know him though. What matters is not whether people know him or not, just that Azure has done lot of cool things around k8s in the last few years and lot of top folks who are part of the community are working at Azure / Microsoft.

This Mike Burrows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burrows. If you've used a Mutex or a CondVar at Google, you've used his code.

Mike Burrows keeps a very low profile but he was actively involved in the creation of Chubby along with the more... subtle... aspects of synchronization primitives. He also co-invented Burrows Wheeler encoding (bzip2 uses it). Google would not have been able to build its empire without his contributions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com