CoreOS Fest goes to Berlin

CoreOS is gearing up for CoreOS Fest on May 9-10 in the city of Berlin, Germany. In its second year, and first time in Europe, CoreOS Fest gathers technical minds from around the world as companies look to solve issues of security, consistency and efficiency.

Hundreds of experts in open source, distributed systems, Linux containers, security, Kubernetes, and more will participate in discussions around the future of hyperscale infrastructure and how they can work together to build a more secure Internet. Those who are interested in attending the event may purchase a ticket from CoreOS event page.

There is also a one-day satellite viewing event for CoreOS Fest 2016 that will take place in San Francisco on May 9. This event will stream the Berlin keynote talk from Alex Polvi, CEO and co-founder of CoreOS, as well as feature talks from top companies and the greater CoreOS community. Speakers from CoreOS, Intel, Google, eBay and more will be featured.

I met with Polvi at OpenStack Summit to learn more about the upcoming event. Here is an edited version of our conversation.

Can I quickly ask what’s the ‘core’ goal of CoreOS?

When we started CoreOS our mission was to fundamentally improve the security of the Internet. That’s still our mission. Our view is that the key to security at the end of the day is updates. When a vulnerability comes out people can write programs to hack your infrastructure. But we can’t write programs to fix our infrastructure because the way people run their servers today is so fragile. The way we talk about it is get your server running and don’t touch it because if you change anything, something may break.

So our whole idea is to secure the Internet.

To achieve that, we need to build infrastructure that is serviceable. We need what we call GIFEE or Google’s Infrastructure for Everyone Else. It’s a style of infrastructure management that’s dynamic and container based. We’ve been spending the past three years making that style of infrastructure possible. Our end game, at the end of the day, is to build these platforms to dramatically improve the security of a company’s environment.

What was the idea behind CoreOS Fest?

With CoreOS in general we’re trying to popularize the concept of GIFEE. It’s a way of running your servers and your infrastructure that involves distributed systems. It involves containers. It involves standard or commodity hardware or virtual machines. It could be on AWS or it could be in your own environment.

We have been working on many different components of this infrastructure: we have developed Linux based distributed operating system CoreOS for containers, we developed ‘rkt’, we created etcd, fleet, flannel, dex, Clair and many different parts. Companies like Google joined us and released technologies like Kubernetes that’s essentially what Google is running internally.

All of this is the underpinning of building a distributed system.

At CoreOS Fest we will talk about all of these open source technologies that we’ve been working on. We will talk about all the work that we have been doing both at CoreOS and in the community. CoreOS Fest features all the great work that’s going on right now in the areas of security, distributed systems, and systems programming. It’s our annual developer / DevOps event and it’s a big event for us.

This is the second edition of CoreOS Fest; how much has changed since the last event?

This space is emerging very very quickly. Three years ago none of this existed at all. A year ago it was just two-thirds the life cycle of all of these latest and greatest technologies. The biggest difference around this time last year was that Kubernetes had not yet hit general availability. It existed but the 1.0 version was not released. Since then our runtime ‘rkt’ has seen the first 1.0 release. Honestly, one year ago this platform barely existed. Today, it not only exists but is also being deployed. So a lot has changed since the last CoreOS Fest.

The first event was in the U.S. Why did you choose Berlin for the second edition?

There seems to be a concentration of systems programmers in Berlin. For example, the system lead developers are based out of Berlin and there’s a number of our own developers there. It’s like Portland, with the concentration of Linux people. We wanted to have a European event and since also have an office in Berlin, we decided to do it there.

Who should attend CoreOS Fest?

The people that should be attending are DevOps. It’s more on advanced DevOps side in terms of advanced software pieces. I will give an example: last year Diego Ongaro, a Stanford PhD delivered a talk about distributed consensus. He talked about how it can be applied to operations and running your infrastructure. CoreOS Fest is really for the folks that are looking to see what’s coming next in terms of how to run infrastructure and what’s the next wave of infrastructure look like? That’s the types of folks who should be there. It’s a blend of developers and operations folks. It’s primarily on the operations side, but operations now take a lot of development because we’re writing lots of software to manage our infrastructure. In a nutshell CoreOS Fest is for all those folks who want to learn about the latest infrastructure.