Google's Lead Kubernetes Engineer Joins Microsoft

As more and more people will confirm, Microsoft may have finally, truly warmed up to Linux and open source. CEO Satya Nadella has been much in the news for his comments on how he "loves Linux" and he has claimed that basically a third of Microsoft's Azure cloud is already Linux-based. The company has also announced Docker images and more on the Azure platform, and it is worth noting that Nadella previously ran Azure at Microsoft.

Now, Microsoft has hired Brendan Burns, a top engineer at Google who worked over several years building out the development of its Kubernetes open source orchestration technology for Docker containers. Some very big contributors have been committed to the Kubernetes project, including IBM, Microsoft itself, Red Hat, Docker, CoreOS, Mesosphere, and SaltStack. Burns can possibly give Microsoft even deeper roots in key open source territory.

As CRN notes:

"Burns, who created the Kubernetes project along with two other Google engineers, is leaving after an 8-plus year run at the company, he announced in a tweet Sunday. Burns previously worked on Google Cloud Platform and on the vendor's search infrastructure team, according to his LinkedIn profile."

 Kubernetes is a tool that Google developed and used to make containerization more approachable and effective by making it possible to manage containerized applications. Microsoft's new hire confirms that it is committed to the container model.

Burns will be joining Microsoft’s expanding Azure team as a development manager for the Azure Resource Manager software tool. Notably, he announced in his tweet that he will continue to work on Kubernetes itself, which has a whole community rallying behind it.

Microsoft has said that Azure is fully embracing Docker as a core part of application and infrastructure investments going forward, and it is obviously expanding its Kubernetes focus.