Dagger, with Solomon Hykes

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Hi, and welcome to the Kubernetes Podcast from Google. I'm your host, Abdel Sghiouar.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
And I'm Kaslin Fields.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:16)
In this episode, we speak to Solomon Hykes. Solomon is the co-founder of Dagger, who is probably best known as the creator of Docker. We spoke about Dagger, CI-CD and more.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:26)
But first, let's get to the news.
CubeADM is moving to a new configuration version with the release of Kubernetes 1.31. The V1 Beta 4 introduces some changes to the configuration file used to deploy Kubernetes with CubeADM. The old version, V1 Beta 3, is officially deprecated and will be removed after three minor Kubernetes versions.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:52)
The 1.32 release cycle for Kubernetes began on September 9th, with an expected release date of December 11, 2024 We wish the release team good luck and look forward to interviewing the release lead.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:05)
The CNCF announced updates to the CKA exam. The certified Kubernetes Administrator Certification was one of the first to be available for platform administrators. The new updates introduced changes to competencies required for passing the exam and will go into effect no earlier than November 25th, 2024

**SPEAKER_1** (1:24)
The CNCF and Linux Foundation Research are running a 2024 Generative AI Survey. The survey aims to understand the deployment, use and challenges of Generative AI technologies in organizations and the role of open source in this domain. The target's population for the survey is professionals familiar with the use of Generative AI in their organizations. It should only take about 10 minutes to complete the survey. If you are interested in participating, you can find the link in the show notes.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:50)
Microsoft's Azure container Networking Team has announced new enhancements to Advanced container Networking Services. Advanced container Networking Services is a new product offering designed to address the observability and security challenges of modern containerized applications. The updates include introducing fully qualified domain name filtering as a new security feature. And that's the news.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:14)
Today, I'm talking to Solomon Hykes. Solomon is the co-founder of Dagger. He is probably known as the creator and co-founder of Docker, the tool that changed how developers package, run and distribute software in the last 11 years or so. His impact on our industry is undeniable. And I'm incredibly honored to have him on the show today. Welcome to the show, Solomon.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:35)
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:36)
I think that we don't really need to do any introductions. People pretty much know you. If you have used Docker, you have used your software before, right? But we are here today to talk about Dagger, which I learned about. And the more I dig into it, the more it became intriguing to me as a concept, especially what you are trying to achieve. Let's hear it from you. What is Dagger? How can you describe Dagger to people?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:01)
Dagger is an engine that can run your pipelines and containers and can run them anywhere. So that's our short version. It's most commonly used to improve CI, continuous integration, which a lot of times is a mess in a lot of software teams. It's something that you just kind of cobble together over time as you ship to your app, and it just kind of gets more complicated and messy, and you ignore it because you have to move fast, and then eventually, if your project lives long enough, you can't ignore it anymore, and it breaks. It becomes super slow, or things just stop working. Maybe the person who wrote the first version is gone now. It's kind of just glued together. And so Dagger is an attempt at fixing that, and we're doing it in a way that's very similar to how Docker actually fixed very similar problems for the application. So the insight is that the problems that you have in your CI-CD pipelines are very similar to the problems that people used to have with their applications, starting with the fact that you can't run it locally, and then trust that it will run the same on the server. It was also very hard to run them across different servers.
So that was just reality before Docker. Every server was kind of a unique snowflake, right? Reproducing environments was very hard. That's still the reality today with your pipelines. So the application now is more portable, but the pipelines that deliver the application aren't.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:36)
So it's interesting the way you described Docker when you started talking about it is you said it's a way to run pipeline. But from my understanding, at least when I was looking into it, it's also a way to define the pipeline because you have the SDK Components, which is available in TypeScript, Node.js and Go, right?