Episode · The Peterman Pod · 2026-03-23
Books mentioned on The Co-Creator of Kubernetes On Convincing Google, Building It, and Scaling for LLMs
This is a conversation with Brendan Burns, co-creator of Kubernetes and current technical fellow at Microsoft working on Azure. We discussed what it was like building it at Google, how he got buy-in, and what he learned along the way.
Brendan Burns recommended Design Patterns by Erich Gamma and others, Leadership on the Line by Ronald Abadian Heifetz and others, and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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Design Patterns
Recommended“Well, I mean, I would say like early on the book that that impacted my career the most was a book uh was the gang of four book. Was it software engineering designs and patterns or whatever? Like it's a software engineering book. I I see it. It's design patterns, elements of reusable object-oriented software.”
Where to get it
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Leadership on the Line
Recommended“There's a much more recent book called uh Leadership on the Line that as I've become sort of a large org leader, that's uh I really like that book.”
Where to get it
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The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Recommended“And then there's this What's this book? It's called I think Five Dysfunctions of Teams, I think. That's a really good book, too, for uh from a like a how teams operate perspective.”
Where to get it
