We Didn’t Start the Fire: Communication Breakdowns and How to Preven... Ian Coldwater & Kat Cosgrove
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 14/05/2021

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We Didn’t Start the Fire: Communication Breakdowns and How to Prevent Them - Ian Coldwater, Twilio & Kat Cosgrove, JFrog

When the Kubernetes project was smaller and fewer people used it, core maintainers could assume shared context, and we didn't have to think about communication as much. We've grown a lot since, but we haven't always adjusted these assumptions. We don't all know each other anymore, and can no longer rely on everyone sharing the same context or concerns. With more growth, communication becomes more critical.


Design decisions and the way we communicate about them are affected by the assumptions we make about each other. If we aren't careful, problems can arise for everyone. The Dockershim deprecation conflagration is one example of how this can go wrong, but it wasn't the first or the last communication breakdown of its kind. Let's look at this history together, learn from it, and figure out how we can prevent such breakdowns in the future.


It's on all of us to work together to address this. We can do better when we come together, communicate more, and check our assumptions. We've got this.