Google Thanks Docker, and Solomon Hykes Comes Home

Kelsey Hightower and Solomon Hykes sat a few chairs apart at the Kubernetes 10th anniversary for a chat in front of an auditorium hall at Google headquarters. It felt like group therapy.
Their conversation followed an emotional presentation led by Eric Brewer, Google’s vice president of infrastructure, a Google fellow, and the senior executive at Google in 2014 who oversaw the Kubernetes pitch to the Google executive team. Brewer choked up a bit, and so did several in the crowd. His history, friendships, and work at the University of California at Berkeley researching container technologies - well, it all welled up.
However, Hykes, Docker’s founder and now the co-founder of Dagger, did not have that camaraderie back in 2014, unlike the other Google engineers who spoke at the “Kubertenes” event. Not at all. Hykes thought of him and his team as outsiders, nobodies who moved from France to San Francisco to build Docker.
“I mean, it’s all personal,” Hykes said. “You build these things. You’re so invested in it. It can’t not be personal. And I’m really appreciating this, this event and this phase of the community, where it feels like, OK, this is the container family. And I feel part of it, I feel welcome in it, and I enjoy this phase because I didn’t feel that way before.”