KASLIN FIELDS: Hello, and welcome to the Kubernetes podcast from Google. We're your hosts. I'm Kaslin Fields.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: And I am Abdel Sghiouar.

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This week, we interviewed the Kubernetes 1.26 release lead. Leonard is a computer science master student, contributes to Kubernetes, and is a co-chair for the new environmental sustainability technical advisory group.

KASLIN FIELDS: I'm really excited about this conversation because as a contributor to Open Source Kubernetes, it's always exciting to hear about what folks in the community have been working on coming up into each release. I've also been part of a release team for a past release.

My normal work in the Kubernetes project is running a sub project of the special interest group for contributor experience, which is called Contributor Comms, so our whole thing is making sure that contributors know what's going on in the project, and also making sure that the external community knows about the awesome work that contributors are doing. So releases are of course, really important for us, and we help to do a lot of communications around them, as well as sometimes being directly involved with the release team as part of the comms team, so always excited to hear about what's going on with the release.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, it was a very interesting interview. Leonard is a very busy person and somehow manages to sleep eight hours per day. I don't know how he does it, actually.

[LAUGHTER]

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah, you mentioned he was a student, too, right?

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, he's still finishing his master's degree, and we talked a little bit about some strategies of balancing Open Source work, and actual work, and being a student because he's also a part time consultancy in a company.

KASLIN FIELDS: That's amazing. I actually meet quite a few students in the Kubernetes community. It's always so awesome to meet folks there who are just starting out in the industry, and not even starting out quite yet, and are starting to get familiar with the technology, and how it works to be part of Open Source, and all of this stuff, and so many of them, like you say, are very busy doing all kinds of stuff.

One of the folks that I met through my contribution is Kunal Kushwaha, whose last name I probably pronounce poorly, but he used to be a member of the Contributor Comms group. You might have seen him around because he has a major YouTube presence. He does a lot of content creation.

He's a really good teacher and a really good advocate for students in the community. He actually worked with the CNCF to get them to start a student track so that student perspectives would be better represented at KubeCon.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah.

KASLIN FIELDS: So a lot of really exciting stuff going on in the community to support students.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, I looked at the schedule for KubeCon EU 2023, and there is a student track. It's still kind of early. They haven't announced everything, but actually started looking back in history, and I found that there was a report from 2021 which talks about the fact that one of the virtual editions of KubeCon 2021 had 1,600 students registered, and the fact that they need to have more kind of student focused things, so I think that's one of the reasons why they created the dedicated track for students.

KASLIN FIELDS: And there's also, of course, the scholarships that the CNCF offers to help folks get to KubeCon.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Of course, yeah.

KASLIN FIELDS: And a lot of the time, those go to students. They don't always go to students, of course. I've met a lot of folks who have come to KubeCon on those scholarships who are part of the industry or in all sorts of circumstances in their own lives, but it's a great way for students to be able to come to the event as well.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. That's awesome.

KASLIN FIELDS: And with that--

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Let's get to the news.

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KASLIN FIELDS: The Kubernetes blog on removals, deprecations, and major changes in version 1.26 is out now. The container runtime interface os v1alpha2 API will be removed in 1.26. Users should move to the v1 version of the CRI API. This removal will mean that containerd version 1.5 and older will no longer be supported in Kubernetes 1.26.

Additionally, the beta versions of the flow control API group and Horizontal Autoscaler APIs will also be removed in 1.26. These APIs also have more recent versions, which have been generally available since 1.23. Remember that deprecation means a feature's use is no longer recommended, as it will soon be removed. Removal means the feature is no longer available.

Check out the blog post and the rest of this episode for more information on the upcoming changes in 1.26. An additional blog will be posted after the release with additional information about new features.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: The CNCF project Flux for continuous delivery has achieved graduated status. Flux is a set of continuous and progressive delivery solutions for Kubernetes that are open and extensible, enabling GitOps and progressive delivery for developers and infrastructure teams. It is the 18th CNCF project to graduate.

KASLIN FIELDS: AWS Reinvent occurred in Las Vegas, Nevada from November 28th to December 2nd. The event included a number of Kubernetes focused sessions and workshops. Breakout sessions and keynotes from the event will be available on the AWS YouTube channel shortly after the event.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: GKE has had a number of features reached general availability recently, including Kubernetes Control Plane logs for Standard-mode clusters, the GKE Gateway Controller for single clusters, and an update to GKE deprecation insights, which allows it to now show certificate incompatibility issues in addition to the misconfiguration and API deprecation issues it featured before. The GKE gateway controller is Google implementation of the Open Source Gateway API, which makes exciting updates to Kubernetes Ingress capabilities.

KASLIN FIELDS: Congratulations to Prometheus for becoming 10 years old. What started at SoundCloud by ex-Googlers Matt and Julius went on to become one of the most successful Time Series Databases, used by hundreds of companies to monitor microservices based environments. Prometheus was also the second project to join the CNCF after Kubernetes.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: If you are interested in learning more about Prometheus, we will leave a link in the show notes to the self-paced training, authored by the founders.

KASLIN FIELDS: And also don't forget to check out the Prometheus documentary by Honeypot.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Starting with Kubernetes 125, container images have been migrated from k8s.gcr.io to registry.k8s.io. The new registry spreads the load across multiple cloud providers and regions, function of a sort of content delivery network or CDN for Kubernetes container images. If you run restricted environments with firewalls or proxies that apply strict policies to external endpoints, you might want to look into updating these policies to support the new registry.

KASLIN FIELDS: LeakSignal announced a firewall for — you guessed it — microservices. LeakSignal Micro-waf, or web application firewall, is a WASM or webassembly based plugin for Envoy, Istio, and any proxy or API Gateway that supports WASM. It allows you to implement inline L7 policies that inspect traffic and warn you when things don't look right.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: The CNCF announced some changes to the maintainer track for KubeCon. The new changes focus on diversity and equality for speakers in this track.

KASLIN FIELDS: The CNCF Technical Oversight committee has an election coming up in January. The TOC is a body which provides technical leadership to the cloud native community, including making decisions such as approving or determining the status between sandbox, incubating, and graduated of CNCF projects.

The seats open this cycle are one end user appointed seat and three governing board appointed seats. Nominations are open, and you can find more information in the show notes, and that's the news.

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ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Hello.

LEONARD PAHLKE: Hello.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: How are you doing, Leonard?

LEONARD PAHLKE: I'm doing great. How are you?

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: I'm good. I'm good. So welcome to the Kubernetes podcast.

LEONARD PAHLKE: Yeah, thank you for an invitation.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, so you are a very busy person. So you are a sustainable software engineer. I found this on your blog, right?

LEONARD PAHLKE: Yeah, I mean, you can like title it. At the end, I would say I'm just a software engineer doing all these things.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Sounds good, but I still want to go through the titles because I think it's very funny, so sustainable software engineer. Cloud native consultant at a company called Liquid Reply. You are the Kubernetes 1.26 release lead, and the CNCF tag environmental sustainability co-chair, and you're also a student in computer science.

LEONARD PAHLKE: Yes. That's true.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Do you sleep? Do you like-- how many hours per day do you sleep?

LEONARD PAHLKE: I'm always sleeping eight hours.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: OK.

LEONARD PAHLKE: I cannot really sleep less, otherwise I'm super tired, so eventually I would get my eight hours every day.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Awesome. I just assume that you are a very busy person, considering all the stuff you are doing, but let's get going. So the first question, can you tell us a little bit about yourself beyond the titles? What's your background?

LEONARD PAHLKE: I'm a student. I'm studying computer science. I'm doing now my master's in Hamburg. I'm based in Hamburg, and yeah, I'm very passionate about open source and about the cloud.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Nice. Well, I think you are a very humble person because you have quite a lot of contributions. So you're still finishing your master's degrees, right? In computer science?

LEONARD PAHLKE: Yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Are you interested in doing a PhD, just out of curiosity?

LEONARD PAHLKE: At the moment, not really because I'm not sure how. I mean, there's like some opportunities maybe where you can integrate like academia and open source together, and also like all the cloud space, big data, and everything is a big science and academia topic as well, so I could see that this would be like very interesting, but at the moment, it's not my plan. But I mean, plans change all the time, so.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Of course.

LEONARD PAHLKE: And I still have one year, around one year after I'm graduating, so in one year, a lot of things can change, so who knows.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, that's awesome. Well, we'll follow you on LinkedIn and see how it goes. So how did you go to open source? Like what was your first contribution?

LEONARD PAHLKE: I got into open source during my bachelor's. I was working for a company, mainly focusing on AWS, so I was kind of already in this cloud space, and a couple of colleagues were very into Kubernetes and Cloud Native in general, so as things basically kind of started. I mean, they started a couple of years before that, but I was kind of introduced just like two years ago into this entire space, and some of my colleagues were just showing me Kubernetes and this entire space, and I think it was super interesting to see how Cloud Native technology can be used anywhere.

It's not like dedicated to any provider, so I thought this would be like an interesting step besides AWS, so I got introduced into Kubernetes, and with that, also into cloud native. And because everything is open source technology, I got introduced into open source with that, which was great.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Nice, and do you remember what was your first contribution? What was your first port request?

LEONARD PAHLKE: Probably documentation, but I don't know. I need to look it up. I guess probably something in SIG release.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Mhm.

LEONARD PAHLKE: So, yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: I think we can look it up in the history in GitHub, but so actually I was reading your blog where you wrote an article about contributing to open source, and one of the recommendations you gave was actually start with contributing to documentation, right?

Like you don't have to write code from day one if you want to contribute to open source. You can still start with documentation, so I think it's a very common thing for people who are starting with open source to start with contributions to documentation first, and while they're getting familiar with how the project works, right?

LEONARD PAHLKE: Yeah, and I think the biggest thing I also wanted to mention with this article was that open source is not just about writing code or writing features. There's a lot to it besides just writing the feature to get basically a successful, like open source project at the end, and in the article, I outlined setting up meetups like hosting meetings, pinging people.

I mean, this is like with bigger projects, a lot of more like topics which you need to care about, so that's something that probably most of the folks who are not contributing directly to open source maybe don't know exactly, but a big open source project. There's a lot of things you need to handle, yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. Yeah, so a project like Kubernetes has also people doing coordination work, doing communication work, like my co-host, Kaslin. She is in the contributor SIG, and she, among other things, hosts the contributor summits at the KubeCon every year.

So then, can you tell me a bit, because you have, you are doing a lot of things. You are working, you're doing the Kubernetes stuff, and you're also studying, so how are you able to balance work, open source, and studies? Like how do you just go crazy?

LEONARD PAHLKE: Yeah, I usually try to kind of do multiple things at once. So if you, for example, study, you can often define your focus, at least in the masters. You can set your focus, and my focus is set on basically cloud, and green software, and also open source.

So if you basically have this focus, and then you contribute to open source, you kind of do multiple things at once, so maybe you can also have, for example, like a bigger presentation in the University. You can also write a blog post about that, for example, so you can basically just join forces kind of, or do multiple things at once is maybe the secret sauce at the end.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, so basically doing things in the open source that would be giving you credits towards your studies.

LEONARD PAHLKE: Yeah, kind of.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: So that's like hitting two birds with the same rock. And so then, I think that the main question for me is, why open source? What do you like about it?

LEONARD PAHLKE: Obviously the technology itself is very interesting, so all the projects in the cloud native space. I think it's from a technology side very interesting to get basically just into all these different areas and see how everything can come together and build these huge distributed systems, but for me, also the community aspect is probably the even more important one, which is also at the University.

Not that, I mean, it's not often part of a course. At least at my University, it was not part of the studies, so basically how open source development works and how regular software development works, where are the differences? And for me, this collaboration was very interesting.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Would that be something that you recommend for other students? Is this, like, you think it's valuable to work in the open source as a student, in the open source space in general?

LEONARD PAHLKE: Yeah, I think in general, it's something very interesting to try out at least or to get some information. There's a lot of cool projects where you can actively contribute to, but it's at the end very personal preference, I would say, so it's probably not something which you can say, OK, every software developer should do open source work. I don't think that's the case, but it's something which might be very cool to get into.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Cool. Can you then tell us a little bit about your journey toward becoming the release lead for Kubernetes 1.26? Like where does it start? I assume it was not like, hey, welcome Leonard. You're the release lead, right?

LEONARD PAHLKE: No. So, yeah, I was introduced kind of to this entire release team program by some colleagues, so basically as I studied or started getting into these open source topics, I also directly got introduced to Kubernetes and the release team, and there are a couple of like opportunities to get started with open source, mentorship programs, and other things, and the release team is also one of them, so you can apply with like just very minimal knowledge about Kubernetes in general.

It's not a problem, and you can basically just go from release to release in different roles and see how basically this entire release comes together and how different teams work together, and that's what I did, so every cycle, I applied for a role.

The first one was for CI Signal as shadow, so you observe basically jobs, so test grid in particular, so the CI pipelines, is everything green, other flaky jobs, failing jobs, and you report on that, dig into the stack traces, and so on. And I can continue that to cycle after 1.24, and then I shadow the release lead last cycle, and here I am as now the release lead.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: For 1.26, yeah. We're going to talk a little bit about 1.26 and kind of what that version is bringing, but I would like to talk also about this new effort which I think was announced at KubeCon North America this year, the TAG environmental sustainability, right?

LEONARD PAHLKE: Yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: So what does the TAG stands for first, and then what is the environmental sustainability TAG? What do you guys do?

LEONARD PAHLKE: The TAG stands for Technical Advisory Group for the CNCF. There are multiple TAGs basically in the CNCF, focusing on special areas, I would say, of technologies. So there's TAG security, TAG storage, and so on and so forth. And we founded now the TAG environmental sustainability because, I mean, it's an important upcoming topic.

I think everybody kind of agrees on that, and it's also something that will stay, so it's nothing that you solve maybe in half a year or something, and then it's gone, so it's a continuous effort, and it's still kind of new, I would say, in the sense that it's not like part of a lot of development cycles, software lifecycle, or whatever, and so forth.

So there's still a lot of things that you need to research, and also to advocate, and to share with the community, and that's the reason why we founded this Technical Advisory Group because we think in the cloud space especially, we have quite a big impact.

We operate huge systems, huge distributed systems, especially with Kubernetes and other things, so the impact of our software in that sense is quite huge. It's getting used over everywhere basically, so if we focus on environmental sustainability, we hopefully can have like a big impact on improving all these things.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Cool. Nice, nice. Can you tell me a little bit about 1.26? What's to expect? What's new? What's up with this release?

LEONARD PAHLKE: This release features, again, a lot of features, also some deprecation and removals, so to summarize maybe a little bit. So this release, we don't have a one major like big feature which is like standing above everything else. We have a lot of smaller changes, some involve a lot of code, but they are still in the works, alpha stage, for example, and so on.

So if you want to group it up maybe, we have a couple of ones which fall into the wider space of security. So for example, we have a KEP about signing the release artifacts, which graduates to beta. We have Windows privilege containers, which sort of also falls in this category, and also a KEP around admission control, and also a lot of things in the storage direction where we migrate, or continue, or to advance this with this year's In-Tree migration.

So for example, Azure files, vSphere drivers are graduating so stable, and we also remove cluster FS, Openstack, Cinder from Kubernetes, which are now available externally, so you can basically use it. I mean, they are still supported. You just basically have, it's not Antrea for Kubernetes anymore.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah.

LEONARD PAHLKE: And there's also some changes with metrics, for example, and just a lot of things. We have a project board with all the enhancements, and we also publish a blog post which basically walks over the major themes and gives a lot more details.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, we're going to have a link to that in the show notes for this episode. You mentioned KEP, which I think stands for Kubernetes enhancement proposal, right?

LEONARD PAHLKE: That's correct, yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: What is a KEP?

LEONARD PAHLKE: So a KEP basically describes a change to Kubernetes, or enhancements change, or proposals in general, and this is basically just a form, like a very detailed template which you have to fill out, so if you have, for example, an idea. You want to make some improvement to Kubernetes, and the proposal is sort of big enough.

I mean, if you just have like a bug fix, for example, you don't need a KEP, but if you have like, for example, I don't know, you want to add another flag or something to it, then you need to write down a KEP, contact the specific SIG, and work with the SIG basically on getting this KEP into the release, and so on and so forth. And basically, with the KEP, we have like this process around it, so that we can track it also, yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. That's pretty cool. I would like to get to a stage where myself, I can propose an enhancement. I just don't know what should be enhanced yet.

[LAUGHTER]

Let's talk a little bit, then, about something interesting with the releases which are the themes, right? I'm looking at the page of the theme, so 1.26 is electrifying.

LEONARD PAHLKE: So every release has basically a theme which does not need to make a lot of sense. It's basically just for the release team to leave a mark on Kubernetes, so for this release, as you said, it's electrifying, and there are a couple of ideas around electrifying.

So the first idea was Kubernetes hosts huge systems, and they use just a lot of energy which is kind of a problem, right? So we need to advocate that this is a topic that we need to work on, and that probably in the future also maybe plays like a bigger role also in Kubernetes, so perhaps we will see also some KEPs in this space to improve on that.

But it also has like the idea of that inside of the release team, we use a lot of like automation tooling that we have like project bots and automation just to improve our life inside of the release team, and also, I mean, it also stands for just the fact that the community is electrifying itself. So it has multiple meanings, so you can pick the one that you like the most.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, that's actually pretty cool. I'm looking at the logo. It gives me like an 80s vibe logo with a bunch of palm trees. I'm thinking that would be a very cool sticker to have on your laptop, actually.

LEONARD PAHLKE: Yeah, if you joined KubeCon Amsterdam and maybe also some other conferences where I will be around. I will for sure have some stickers.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: All right, I'll take you on that offer then. I'll be in Amsterdam.

LEONARD PAHLKE: Awesome.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Let's talk about a couple more things. I've been reading that whole blog post is coming that you have. Thank you for sharing, actually, that you have shared with me, so thank you for that.

One major change that happened, that's happening for this release, I don't know if it's related to Kubernetes 1.26 or it's independent, but basically the community is moving away from GCR, Google Container Registry, so instead of having the artifact hosted on k8s.gcr.io. They are hosted on registry.k8s.io. Is that impacting the release or is it totally irrelevant for you?

LEONARD PAHLKE: So the release engineering team has worked like very hard and very long on this change, so there's like a lot of effort which went into this change, but this doesn't really affect the release team itself. So this is basically like separate from the release team.

The release team focuses more on the processes. Is everything correct? Everything works well, and so on, and the release engineering, basically — I mean, this was a KEP introduced last cycle, and for this release, we now publish just for registry.k8s.io, so this is kind of separate to the release team. It's under a SIG release, but it's some other folks.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: All right, so this means basically for people listening to us, if you are relying on the old repository, which is the k8s.gcr.io. You have to update your stuff, and that might involve updating file rules and proxy configurations to allow yourself to pull software from the new registry. Can you tell me a little bit about what does it mean to be release lead? Like what are your main responsibilities?

LEONARD PAHLKE: As release lead, you have quite an organizational role in the community, I would say, so you have a lot of other teams focusing on certain parts of the release. So for example on documentation, on the communication side blog posts, and so on, so they are then dedicated leads for this singular purpose, and you kind of orchestrate all that. So you need to make sure that basically all these processes are coming together kind of to build the release.

It's an organizational role. You need to write a lot of messages. You follow a lot of processes, and just keep in touch with a lot of people to see where the KEPs, for example? Where are the enhancements? Is everything on track? Do you need help, and facilitate basically this effort of the community, and make sure that everything is on track. It's quite a lot of work.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: It's quite a lot of coordination work mostly, right?

LEONARD PAHLKE: Yes. Coordination work.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: You get to work late in the night because some people are in the US?

LEONARD PAHLKE: Yes. So my rhythm is kind of messed up because of that, but it's not a problem. I'm usually working more or less in the afternoon and evening or night, but that's fine. I mean, university is before that, and then everything else starts.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, that's why I ask you earlier if you get enough sleep, right? All right. Are you going to be at KubeCon this year? The Amsterdam one?

LEONARD PAHLKE: Yes.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Cool, then I'll see you there.

LEONARD PAHLKE: Awesome.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: All right. Thank you very much, Leo, for your time.

LEONARD PAHLKE: Thank you.

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KASLIN FIELDS: It's always so exciting to hear from the release lead leading up to a Kubernetes release. It can be so hard to keep track of what's going on in each release, which is kind of what the release lead does, and he's a student, which I think is amazing. He was very humble about it. [LAUGHING]

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yes, he was extremely humble, and it was quite interesting to see somebody in his shoes being a student and being very excited and interested in the open source world. It's a lot of work. I mean, he has to study, he has also a job, and then he has to do all this Kubernetes release stuff on the side. It's a lot of evenings. That's why actually in the beginning of the episode, I ask him, do you get enough sleep, right?

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah. I know a number of students in the community, and I'm always wondering the same thing.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. Yeah, I remember my days as students. They were not fun. Well, it was a lot of fun, but not sleeping was the not fun part of all that.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: But yeah, Leo is a very, very interesting person. Very humble as you said, and the release lead is arguably quite a lot about coordination and communication, so knowing who to talk to, and trusting that people are doing their parts, and just making sure everybody is aware of what they're doing, so it's pretty good.

KASLIN FIELDS: And they also have the more fun job. I feel like all of the release leads I talk to love the part of the release where they get to decide the release theme, so I was glad to hear you all talk about that.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, I actually, I am looking forward to meet with Leo or meet somebody from the release team in one of the upcoming KubeCons to get their sticker. It's pretty awesome.

KASLIN FIELDS: Oh, I guess they do usually have stickers printed. That make sense. I don't think I've ever gotten a release sticker.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: He promised to give me one if I go to Amsterdam, so now I have to find an excuse to go there.

KASLIN FIELDS: Nice. I feel like, I think they probably don't do that every time. I was part of the release team on a previous release as part of the communications team, making sure that folks know what's going on with the release, and then we get all of the feature blogs done in coordination with all the SIGs and things like that, but I don't think we had stickers.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Oh, he promised me a sticker, so we'll see.

KASLIN FIELDS: I think it'll happen. I believe. And one of the other upcoming changes that you'll talk about that I am always excited to hear about is more updates to Windows stuff, so I wanted to point out that. I always like to hear that.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, if you look at the enhancement list for 1.26, which we will have a link for it in the show notes, there are quite a lot of new features or new enhancements for Windows, like privilege containers is one of them, and a bunch of other interesting things. I think that this release does not really have — and Leo touched on that — does not have one major theme.

It's just a bunch of enhancements that are just getting together. If I want to sum it up, it's three main things. Windows, a lot of security stuff, so you know signing and verifying the signature of the releases, et cetera, and a lot of in three code removals, so removing some specific implementations for storage from Kubernetes itself and pushing it to CSI.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah, a number of beta APIs as well going to—

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yes, and that.

KASLIN FIELDS: Or alpha APIs going to beta. Something like that.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Alpha APIs graduating to beta, yeah.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah, that's the way to say it.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Exactly. Exactly.

KASLIN FIELDS: So it's a lot of the like key work that goes into making Kubernetes and improving Kubernetes. You see all of these little pieces that go into it. I think that's always good to see.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, and I think it's actually why I could see this would be very hard for the release lead because since it's all pieces of work coming from different SIGs, and maybe even coming from different companies because the drivers or the code for the storage that's not specifically Kubernetes itself, it's the different cloud providers implementing or providing their own implementation, getting all that code into the cut to make the release would be quite challenging because you're working with different parts, right? Or different people.

KASLIN FIELDS: And Kubernetes is such a huge community. It's the second largest open source project in the world, next to Linux last I heard.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah.

KASLIN FIELDS: So the release lead has such a big job in coordinating across all of the various SIGs, and there are ridiculous number of SIGs, and not just like the chairs of those SIGs or anything like that. It's coordinating all of these folks who are working on the different parts of the release, and it's a lot.

If you're interested in getting involved with the Kubernetes community, by the way, the release team has probably the strongest shadowing program in the community, so you can apply to be a release shadow in a variety of different areas. So a lot of people will apply to that. It can be kind of hard to get into that shadowing program because it is so strong, but if you do get in, it's a nice way to learn a little bit more about the project.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: It's a good way to get involved in open source, yes.

KASLIN FIELDS: Absolutely. So thank you so much, Abdel, for doing that interview. It's always good to hear about the release, and I'm looking forward to 1.26, electrifying.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Thank you.

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KASLIN FIELDS: That brings us to the end of another episode. If you enjoyed the show, please help us spread the word and tell a friend. If you have any feedback for us, you can find us on Twitter at KubernetesPod, or reach us by email at kubernetespodcast@gmail.com.

You can also check out the website at Kubernetespodcast.com, where you'll find transcripts, and show notes, and links to subscribe. Please consider rating us in your podcast player so we can help more people find and enjoy the show. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.

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