Serverless Containers with Sean McKenna

After two weeks of episodes about Kubernetes, our in-depth coverage of container orchestration is drawing to a close. We have a few more shows on the topic before we move on to cover other aspects of the software. If you have feedback on this thematic format (whether you like it or not), send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com

Today’s episode fits nicely into some of the themes we have covered recently–Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, and the changing landscape of managed services. Sean McKenna works on all three of these things at Microsoft.

We spent much of our time discussing the use cases of container instances versus Kubernetes. Container instances are individual managed containers–so you could spin up an application within a container instance without having to deal with the Kubernetes control plane. Container instances might be described as “serverless containers,” since you do not have to program against the underlying VM at all.

This begs the question–why would you want to use a managed Kubernetes service if you could just use individual managed containers? Sean explores this question and gives his thoughts on where this ecosystem is headed. Full disclosure: Microsoft is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.

Transcript

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