Go Systems with Erik St. Martin

Go is a language designed to improve systems programming. Go includes abstractions that simplify aspects of low level engineering that are historically difficult—concurrency, resource allocation, and dependency management. In that light, it makes sense that the Kubernetes container orchestration system was written in Go.

Erik St. Martin is a cloud developer advocate at Microsoft, where he focuses on Go and Kubernetes. He also hosts the podcast “Go Time,” and has written a book on Go called Go In Action.

Recently, Erik helped build the virtual Kubelet project, which allows Kubernetes nodes to be backed by services outside of that cluster. If you want your Kubernetes cluster to leverage abstractions such as serverless functions and standalone container instances, you can use Virtual Kubelet to treat these other abstractions as nodes.

Erik also discussed his experience using Kubernetes at Comcast—which was a great case study. Near the end of the show, he also talked about organizing Gophercon, a popular conference for Go programmers—if you are organizing a conference or thinking about organizing one, it will be useful information to you. Full disclosure: Microsoft, where Erik works, is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.

Transcript

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