Kelsey Hightower, AWS’s Eswar Bala on Open Source’s Evolution
There’s always been tension between the worlds of enterprise and open source software. It’s not every day that those tensions get aired in public.
“I’ll make the AWS marketing team cringe a little bit, but let’s talk about the elephant in the room,” said Kelsey Hightower, the Kubernetes pioneer, in this On the Road episode of The New Stack Makers.
Hightower appeared on a Makers roundtable hosted by TNS Publisher and Founder Alex Williams, which also featured Eswar Bala, Director of EKS at Amazon Web Services.
“The origins of open source came from fighting against the big vendors,” said Hightower. “So, when you see a big vendor do something in open source, you naturally question the motives. Like, you can’t ignore that particular truth.”
So what does it mean when we use “AWS” and “open source” in the same sentence?
The Makers conversation, recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, in London, explored the early days of open source in cloud computing and connected its evolutionary path with groundbreaking new Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects like Karpenter, Cedar, and Kro — projects built with unprecedented support and collaboration from enterprise cloud providers.
‘Your Distro Is Better Than My Distro’
Hightower, an early evangelist for Kubernetes who retired from Google in 2023 as a distinguished engineer, credits the issues of Linux Magazine he would buy from the late, great CompUSA in the early 2000s:
“Job postings for the big enterprises then were for the Solaris boxes, for AIX mainframes, but as someone who’s working fast food, you can’t even afford to learn how those systems work,” he said. “In the back of Linux Magazine, though, there’s this CD-ROM and it has this open source software. You get this whole free operating system, and suddenly there’s this David and Goliath story that’s unfolding.
Hightower continued, “For all the kids like me that didn’t go to college, for all the people that didn’t have someone they knew that worked in tech, this open source software was your in. There were no permissions, no job interviews required, you can just show up and start contributing.
“Then it became this romance of like, ‘my distro is better than your distro,’ and I understood that knowledge was accessible. So, to me, open source is a way that you can take sovereignty over your own career.”
The rest is the stuff of legend: Hightower became an early contributor to Kubernetes and was present for milestones like the very first KubeCon in 2015.
“When I started committing to Kubernetes, there was no one checking for college degrees. There was no one asking what systems I’ve worked on before,” he said.
In the early days of K8s, Hightower said, he could earn commit access because open source allows talent to emerge regardless of background, and contributions matter more than credentials.
What Do We Do With This ‘Kubernetes’?
“2014 feels like yesterday, and also a lifetime ago,” Bala mused about the emergence of Kubernetes.
Bala was in the container space since Docker’s earliest days, building a container orchestration system based on Google’s published Borg and Omega papers, when he attended the very first meetup where Brendan Burns announced Kubernetes.
“I was curious how my system overlapped with Kubernetes and was blown away by what I saw,” Bala said. “While there were many commonalities like replication sets, what impressed me most were features we take for granted today — flat network space, built-in service discovery, and namespace sharing.”
“Given some features were still lacking, I had opportunities to build components like what we called ‘singleton’ — later DaemonSet — and load balancer integration.”
In 2016, Bala joined Amazon to work on ECS, Amazon’s container system. “At ReInvent 2016, my boss Deepak Singh asked, ‘What do we do with this Kubernetes?’” he recalled.
ECS had wide adoption, but customers were also reaching out about Kubernetes issues — and EKS was born. To Bala, this demonstrates how user-led demand for the ability to use open source projects, in conjunction with enterprise cloud platforms and tools, is how open source has become central to corporate strategies in cloud computing, and inspired the cloud giants to join in.
When Cloud Providers Choose Collaboration
For Bala, AWS’s open source strategy has evolved significantly, moving from simply contributing to existing projects to creating meaningful new ones. “The open source strategy at Amazon is evolving because we are learning as part of this process,” he said.
Recent AWS initiatives include Karpenter, the open source autoscaler; Cedar, the open source policy language and authorization engine; and Kro, the open source abstraction layer for reusable APIs that allow deploying multiple resources as a single unit.
Note the use of “AWS” and “open source” together: One theme of the conversation was how competitive cloud providers collaborate in open source communities. This dynamic creates a unique environment where personal relationships transcend corporate boundaries.
Hightower believes cloud providers have come to embrace open source because their customers made them. “When you’ve ever owned a product at a cloud provider, that is the ultimate consensus builder,” he said. “If I talk to 30% of my customer base and they all start asking for the same thing, you end up having a lot of sway over what happens.”
Collaboration on open source projects has been a tectonic shift in more ways than one, also changing the way that the cloud giants approach the development work. “When we started these projects in the open source community, we went from the mindset of ‘we’re going to build and then announce’ to ‘we’re going to develop in public,'” Bala said.
Check out the full episode for much more from this wide-ranging conversation, including how established projects like Kubernetes created a foundation for innovation, how new projects gain traction and achieve community buy-in, and how Beastie, the FreeBSD demon daemon mascot, helped Hightower land his first job in tech.
