The 10 top Kubernetes Podcast episodes of 2024

Here at the Kubernetes Podcast, we’ve been bringing you news and interviews from the Kubernetes and Cloud-Native technology space since 2019. And this year, Kubernetes turned 10 years old. We celebrated the milestone by focusing on open-source maintainers, including four Kubernetes 10-year anniversary special episodes, the usual release episodes (1.30, 1.31, and 1.32), and interviews with industry experts and end users.

In case you missed it, check out our most-listened-to episodes of 2024.

1. Cilium and eBPF, with Bill Mulligan
One of our first episodes of 2024 was also one of our most popular. In this episode, Bill Mulligan of Isovalent, the company behind Cilium and eBPF, gives an approachable intro to these kernel technologies. eBPF gives users the ability to run code in protected environments at the kernel level. Cilium is an eBPF-based technology for networking, observability, and security. It’s also fitting that Google Kubernetes Engine runs Cilium with its Dataplane V2 add-on.

2. API Machinery, chaos and dishwashers, with Lucas Käldström
If you’ve been involved with Kubernetes for any period of time, you’ve likely heard of API Machinery. We were curious about it too so we brought in Lucas Käldström, one of the maintainers. What we did not expect was a deep dive into the promise theory, entropy, dishwashers and chaos engineering. Believe us, we covered all these topics, but we don’t want to spoil anything for you. You will have to listen to the episode for yourself.

3. Creating Envoy, with Matt Klein
Matt is the brain behind Envoy, one of the most popular proxies on the market today. Envoy is at the core of the popular service mesh, Istio, but is also used as a standalone proxy by many organizations. We talk to Matt about the story of the creation of Envoy and its popularity.

4. Postgres on Kubernetes, with Álvaro Hernández
The popularity of stateful apps on Kubernetes has grown immensely in its first decade. Databases in particular have been a point of contention, namely, how and why to run them on Kubernetes. To teach us how to make databases on Kubernetes work, we invited an expert. With Álvaro, we discussed the state of databases on Kubernetes, why Operators matter, and why you should use them. Plus, we take a bonus look at some cool stuff that Álvaro and his team are working on.

5. Kubernetes v1.30: "Uwubernetes", with Kat Cosgrove
For our first episode of 2024, we continued the Kubernetes Podcast of interviewing release leads. If you are wondering what Uwubernetes means, it was the theme of this particular release: Kubernetes v1.30 makes your clusters cuter. Kat walked us through the choice behind this particular theme and the most important features in the release, including deprecations or removals.

6. Kubernetes stale reads, with Madhav Jivrajani
etcd is at the core of Kubernetes. The NoSQL database acts as the source of truth for everything happening inside the system. In a blog post earlier this year, maintainers explored a curious stale read issue that users were encountering. So we invited Madhav to talk about it and learn more about what maintainers were doing to solve this issue.

7. AI/ML in Kubernetes
If we were to summarize 2024 in a few words, “Artificial Intelligence” would be very high on that list. As a solution for distributed systems, Kubernetes is well-positioned to tackle the new technical challenges posed by these resource-hungry workloads. Maciej Szulik, Clayton Coleman, and Dawn Chen are prominent leaders who are driving new AI initiatives in the open source community. And in the case of Clayton and Dawn, they’ve been around since the very beginning. As part of our 10 year anniversary coverage, we asked these Kubernetes maintainers for their thoughts on what AI means for Kubernetes.

8. Observability & Engineering Management, with Charity Majors
Charity is a major name in observability engineering; she even wrote the book on it! From working on distributed systems at large companies, to founding Honeycomb.io and the idea of “observability 2.0,” Charity is a pre-eminent expert with a lot to share. In this episode we discuss observability, managing engineering teams, and blogging best practices.

9. Container Security, with Michele Chubirka
Are containers more secure than virtual machines? To explore this seemingly endless debate, we brought security expert Michele Chubirka to the show — plus some extra special security-focused guest hosts! Michele explored a wide variety of container security topics, from the basic to the advanced, while expertly managing a panel of curious podcast hosts.

10. Falco Graduation, with Mike Coleman
Falco is a very popular Kubernetes runtime security tool that became a Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF) Graduated project this year. To explore what Falco does and celebrate its graduation, we welcomed Mike Coleman to the show. Mike’s storied history with container technology leads into his involvement with the Falco community. In this episode, he explains the basics of the technology and what graduation means for the community.

We recently published our 2024 recap episode, where co-hosts Abdel Sghiouar and Kaslin Fields and guest host Mofi Rahman reflected on how 2024 has been for the cloud-native and Kubernetes space.

If you’re looking for a podcast to enjoy over the holiday season, we invite you to subscribe to the show and catch up on these conversations, as well as many others we’ve had over the years. You can also visit our website to find links, notes, and transcripts.