We spoke with Jimmy Zelinskie, Co-founder of AuthZed, about his significant history in the cloud native ecosystem and open source community. We learn about his start writing BitTorrent software in college and his eventual startups including AuthZed, which develops SpiceDB. SpiceDB, inspired by Google's internal Zanzibar system, aims to democratize complex authorization solutions for various applications. The discussion also covers the evolution of Kubernetes, the role of open source in fostering innovation, and the significance of community collaboration in addressing common challenges in authorization and secure system design. Jimmy's experience showcases the benefits of open source for solving intricate problems and his commitment to making sophisticated technology accessible to a broader audience.

00:00 Introduction

00:14 The Buzz of KubeCon

00:50 Introducing Jimmy: From BitTorrent to Kubernetes Pioneer

03:41 The Journey of SpiceDB: From Concept to Adoption

06:43 Navigating the Authorization Ecosystem

11:55 The Future of Authorization: Innovations and Roadmap

14:32 Personal Insights: Open Source Journey and Product Management

19:08 KubeCon Highlights and Kubernetes API Proxy Announcement

 

Guest:

Jimmy Zelinskie is a software engineer and product leader with the goal of empowering the world through the democratization of software through open source development. He's currently the CPO and cofounder of authzed where he's focused on bringing hyperscaler best-practices in authorization software to the industry at large.



At CoreOS, he helped pioneer the cloud-native ecosystem by starting and contributing to many of its foundational open source projects. After being acquired by Red Hat, his focus shifted to the enablement and adoption of cloud-native technologies by mature enterprise stakeholders. To this day, he still contributes to cloud-native ecosystem by building the future on top of these technologies and maintaining standards such as Open Container Initiative (OCI).