Meet the Container Experts: Gabe Monroy

Tell us a bit about yourself and your background, how did you get involved in containers and join Microsoft?

I’m Gabe Monroy, the lead Program Manager for Containers at Microsoft Azure. My counterpart on the engineering side is Brendan Burns, the co-creator of Kubernetes. I came to Microsoft about a year ago as part of the Deis acquisition, where I was the co-founder and CTO. At Deis we helped companies like Hearst Corporation and OpenAI succeed with containers and Kubernetes in production. Today at Microsoft I do roughly the same thing, just with a lot more customers and at a much bigger scale. Though today as a PM I focus on product, business, and customer concerns, I come from an engineering and SRE background. Back in 2014, I was the largest external contributor to the Docker project.

What projects most excite you in the container ecosystem at the moment?

That’s a hard one because there’s so much innovation in the container ecosystem right now. I’m always excited about projects like Helm and Draft that are trying to democratize use of container technology, which is still too hard for most developers. I’m also eager to see service mesh technology mature, since it offers a lot of benefits to customers deploying complex microservice architectures — things like end-to-end TLS and automatic tracing infrastructure, to name a few. Most of all, I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with projects like Metaparticle which help bring distributed systems concepts into programming languages, making YAML/JSON configuration less necessary.

Is there someone in the container community who you admire for their work?

I’m a big fan of Matt Butcher, who leads the open source developer tools group inside Azure Compute. Matt manages to be visionary and pragmatic, which is why he’s able to lead a team that innovates with breathtaking speed: Helm, Draft, and most recently Brigade, which is unlike anything else in the container ecosystem. I’m also a big fan of Brendan Burns, of course. His work pioneering serverless containers (e.g. Azure Container Instances) and Metaparticle continues to set the tone for what’s next for distributed computing.

Without giving too much away, what three things will people learn from your Container Camp AU talk?

The container space is moving incredibly fast. We are going to pause and reflect on where we’ve been and where we are going with Kubernetes and the CNCF more broadly. Attendees will walk away with concrete actions they can take to accelerate container adoption inside their organization, as well as common pitfalls to avoid.

Join Gabe Monroy in Melbourne for his opening keynote at Container Camp AU on May 23–25th, 2018.