Kubernetes in China with Dan Kohn

Chinese Internet companies operate at a massive scale.

WeChat has over a billion users and is widely used as the primary means of payment by urban Chinese consumers. Alibaba ships 12 million packages per day, which is four times the amount of Amazon. JD.com, a Chinese ecommerce company, has perhaps the largest production Kubernetes installation in the world.

China’s rapid adoption of Internet services, combined with a large population and a growing middle class has led to the creation of Internet giants on par with the social networks, ecommerce sites, and ridesharing startups of the United States.

Last November, I attended the first KubeCon China and saw firsthand how the Chinese Internet companies are using open source software to scale their infrastructure.

Despite the differences between the US and China, the culture of technologists at KubeCon felt familiar. In some ways, it was just like any other Kubernetes conference that I have attended: large numbers of engineers trying to find the cutting edge of technology, and learning how to solve the problems they are facing back at the office.

There were presentations on scaling databases and service meshes and machine learning on Kubernetes. Outside of these presentation halls, there were tables where you could pick up a translation device so that Chinese-only and English-only presentations could be understood by the other nationality.

Dan Kohn joins the show to talk about Chinese Internet companies and how they are adopting Kubernetes. Dan is the executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, an organization within the Linux Foundation that organizes KubeCon. Before joining the CNCF, Dan worked as an entrepreneur, engineer, and executive at several technology companies.

Transcript

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