Patrick McFadin

With the help of Patrick McFadin, the Datastax database guru, Jonni Bidwell gets a handle on the wherefore and why of Kubernetes.

A t the risk of overextending an already slightly dubious metaphor, Kubernetes (k8s) is fast becoming the operating system of the cloud. But how did we get to this point? And how do complicated projects migrate to it?

We were lucky enough to chat to Patrick McFadin, VP of developer relations at Datastax and K8ssandra (an open source, cloud-native distribution of Apache Cassandra) developer. As far as projects go, they don’t come much more complicated than the Cassandra database, it powers everything from Facebook to Netflix to the New York Times.

In the past, deploying Cassandra required an expensive team of eggheads and some equally expensive infrastructure. Now, thanks to Astra – Datastax’s managed Cassandra offering – anyone can have a go. There’s even a free tier for those looking to get started. But as we’ll hear, the evolution continues and K8ssandra is at the cutting edge of it. Leveraging the power and ubiquity of Kubernetes, and using knowledge from Astra, it makes it possible for organisations to run Cassandra how and where they like. Be it in the cloud, on premises, or in some sort of hybrid arrangement.

Using K8ssandra as a case study, we’ll discover why Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for cloud native computing, and why Cassandra is such a marvellous NoSQL database.

W e like Docker because we can run programs easily and run them anywhere. In the past we might have had to jump through compilation hoops to get the latest version of Blender working on Slackware; now we can run it with a single command. And thanks to trends like Microservices and DevOps, enterprises have also been embracing containers. But wherever you have a distributed system, beyond a cluster in your basement, you have complications. Writing code that isn’t tied to an individual host isn’t something that comes naturally to most people.

But some people relish in challenge, and one of them is Patrick McFadin. He told us how he got involved in Linux, and in particular databases. “My degree was in distributed computing, and I did that back in the 90s when Sun was big. I was fanatical about them and their ‘the network is the computer’ maxim. So my computer science career grew up in terms of the Internet, which was pretty unique. But it was interesting because it was always these three things: the operating system, the delivery mechanism and the database. Those were the three things needed by every Internet thing.