Panelists

Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer | Tzury Bar Yochay

Guest

Flavio Percoco

Show Notes

Hello and welcome to Committing to Cloud Native Podcast! It’s the podcast by Reblaze where we talk about open source maintainers, contributors, sustainers, and their experiences in the Cloud Native space. Today, we have a special guest joining us from Italy, Flavio Percoco, who is Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat. Flavio tells us about working at Red Hat, why he uses OpenShift, and how he stays relevant and chooses what projects he’s interested in. We also learn the moment Flavio realized he made the right choice about his profession, where he thinks Cloud Native is going, the project he is most interested in now, and his thoughts on why Curiefense is the best community right now. Download this episode now to learn so much more!

[00:02:30 ] Flavio tells us about working on OpenStack and Elastic.

[00:04:47 ] We find out why Flavio uses OpenShift versus another.

[00:06:21 ] Flavio tells us about the CNCF project Kubernetes.

[00:07:40 ] Richard asks Flavio since he’s building the tools for people, how does he stay relevant, how does he know what the clients need, and how does he choose what projects he’s interested in.

[00:12:51 ] Justin wonders what made Flavio want to go back to Red Hat.

[00:15:05 ] Tzury asks Flavio to share his “moment” in life when he realized he made the right choice with his profession.

[00:17:50 ] Flavio tells us where he thinks Cloud Native is going and how he thinks we can get there.

[00:27:14 ] Richard wonders why Flavio is doing the exact thing he is doing now, how did he decide that this was interesting to him, and why Cloud Native.

[00:30:45 ] We learn what project Flavio is most interested in right now.

[00:31:54 ] Flavio talks about Curiefense, and why he thinks this is the best community right now.

[00:35:31 ] Justin talks about what really impressed him about Flavio when the GitHub thing came out when they changed from master to main.

[00:36:25 ] Find out where you can follow Flavio online.

Quotes

[00:03:56 ] “You work with like fewer resources and you’ve got to get creative on how to build your regions and data centers, and how to automate that in a way that you can deploy thousands and thousands of those bare metal nodes.”

[00:04:26 ] “The real hard problem comes from day-to-day operations, where you have to actually manage the whole cluster, and all of your regions, and all your zones, and all that kind of things.”

[00:08:57 ] “It’s one of those stories that it works in my laptop, but like, there’s so many gotchas when you actually run yourself, then you put it in production and you actually have people using your stuff that you don’t realize then until you’re actually running it.”

[00:09:11 ] “And many times people don’t run your software through the way you think they’re doing it, and many times they’re not even using it for the stuff you created it for.”

[00:11:57 ] “It’s good to have good processes so that engineers know you know what things to work on and what things are important, but it’s also true that it’s also the engineer’s responsibility or the developer’s responsibility to go and try to find this information because at the end of the day you’re building a software that someone else has to use.”

[00:13:02 ] “To me it was a lot of people, culture, and the fact that Red Hat is an open source company.”

[00:13:26 ] “I have no time to be fighting with people. I have zero patience for people that are not willing to contribute and cooperate and stuff like that.”

[00:16:33 ] “That was the thing that really just like made me fall in love with computers is the fact that you’re bringing in this access to technology, you have the power to bring technology to many people in different places and improve people’s lives and have a huge impact in what society looks like today and what the world is going to look like tomorrow.”

[00:19:23 ] “It’s extremely important for people to have the right infrastructure to be able to develop whatever they’re doing research on and be able to do it also without having to do a massive upfront investment, which is something that tends to be a massive impediment for people to actually move on into the stuff they’re interested in.”

[00:19:47 ] “And this is the other thing that to me, not only in the Cloud Native world, but like all the open source is extremely important because I didn’t go to college.”

[00:32:20 ] “It really excites me that from day zero where we’re all being open to making the right calls that will favor community, and it will favor contribution over just pushing features and just like adding stuff to the software.”

[00:33:08 ] “But, even at the cost of moving slower or taking care of very important things like having proper CI, and I don’t mean CI in terms of we need to test our software, I mean CI in the sense of if someone comes and submits a PR and that PR is not correct, what is the best way for us to communicate that to the person that is contributing that PR.”

[00:34:37 ] “I’m extremely excited about this and this is something that it’s close to my heart, like in communities and cultures are really close to my heart way more than software is.”

Links

Curiefense

Curiefense Twitter

Cloud Native Community Groups-Curifense

community@curiefense.io

Reblaze

Justin Dorfman Twitter

Richard Littauer Twitter

Tzury Bar Yochay Twitter

Flavio Percoco Website

Flavio Percoco Twitter

Flavio Percoco Linkedin

Red Hat

Red Hat OpenShift

OpenShift Assisted Installer-GitHub

Metal3

OpenShift Assisted Installer #278-GitHub

Credits

• Executive Produced by Tzury Bar Yochay


• Produced by Justin Dorfman


• Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound


• Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound


• Transcript by Layten Pryce

Transcript

Flavio [00:02 ]: I wasn't into computers until I was probably 18 years old. In my childhood I only played outside in the mountains, in the rivers. I used to run with a machete in my hand, just like cutting grass. Man I'm from South America. That's how we do it. It is like that. I say this because I'm actually happy that I had this childhood when I could just like interact with nature and eventually just find this thing that is going to be the tool and the stu