Brandon Phillips, the CoreOS CTO, took a few minutes to talk with the SCALE Team about his talk, "etcd: A Cornerstone of Distributed Systems For Containers," which he is giving on SCALE Saturday at 4:30.
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?
A: Currently at CTO of CoreOS we are using and building many technologies including Linux, containers, etcd, and Kubernetes to build Linux server software and infrastructure with consistency and security as primary tenants. Before CoreOS I worked at Rackspace hacking on cloud monitoring and was a Linux kernel developer at SUSE. Between these two experiences and by partnering with my co-founder Alex Polvi, who has server infrastructure, cloud, and open source experience many of the "core" concepts of CoreOS were formed.
Q: You're giving a keynote on "etcd: A Cornerstone of Distributed Systems For Containers." Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?
A: When CoreOS introduced etcd three years ago we wanted to help people run distributed systems more easily. A corner stone of many distributed systems is a consistent fault-tolerant key/value store and this is exactly what etcd provides. We built etcd as an easy to operate, HTTP+JSON driven, and open source project in the hopes that other people would build on top.
And they have to an overwhelming degree! Open source projects such as SkyDNS2, Kubernetes cluster manager, Vitess sharded MySQL, confd configuration file tool, vulcand load-balancer and many any more have built on top of etcd.
This talk will introduce the concepts of etcd, run through some failure scenarios, and demonstrate practical use cases.
Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?
A: This is my first time visiting SCALE. But, I have heard from many people that this is an event that they look forward to every year. I look forward to connecting with the community and maybe recruiting an engineer or two to join the CoreOS team.
Q: Are there any resources people can read to learn about etcd before the talk? Can they get involved today?
A: Yes! We have many docs available for people new to etcd and building etcd on your laptop or workstation is very easily. For more information visit: https://github.com/coreos/etcd
If people want to get involved they can find the "Help Wanted" label on the etcd repo.
Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
A: I look forward to meeting everyone at the conference. Please reach out via Twitter @brandonphilips if you have any questions or requests that I can prepare before my talk.
SCALE Team interview by Michelle Klein-Hass