Meet the Bitnami Team: Sebastien Goasguen

The Bitnami team is a diverse group of talented people distributed all over the world. Get to know them better through this series of blog posts.

Sebastien Goasguen is our Senior Director of Cloud Technologies and an avid outdoor sports enthusiast.

Sebastien and his family enjoying a visit to Camp Nou

A brief bio: 

I am not a freshman anymore so I have done a few things. I spent a long time in academia, not only getting a Ph-D (2001), but after that I stuck around and only left in 2012 when I joined Citrix. I had the chance to work on some big grid computing projects in the US and in Europe, I spent couple summers at CERN working on their first cloud, then I worked on CloudStack for a while, before writing the O’Reilly Docker cookbook. That was the signal for me that it was time to take a chance.

I discovered Kubernetes while writing the book, fell in love with the system and decided to create Skippbox. It was a major challenge doing it out of Europe and with a handful of remote engineers, but I am very proud of what we managed to accomplish with almost nothing. As a fun bio fact, in 2009 , the European Space Agency recruited a new set of Astronauts. I applied and made it to the first selection in Hamburg, unfortunately I stopped there. Imagine, Bitnami could have had an engineer in space, talk about being remote!

Why you joined Bitnami and what excites you about working here? 

I joined Bitnami because it was a perfect fit to get Skippbox to the next level. I knew that we needed to grow to have a more significant impact (4 engineers is not enough). Bitnami has a strong foundation and is focusing on applications. When we look at our industry, I feel that the Cloud is fulfilling its promise to make infrastructure a utility, it is time to go back to applications. Containers and systems like Kubernetes make that switch natural. As you start using them you immediately forget about the infrastructure and think about the apps.

It is this focus on applications that I liked about Bitnami. They have delivered apps on bare-metal, VM, Clouds and now are delivering apps to new formats. I wanted to help them do that as well as pioneer some new applications framework like serverless.

I also have to admit that I liked the fact that Bitnami had strong european DNA and was operating for the long term, helping customers navigate these evolutions of technologies and software practices. It is not just about the latest fancy tech, it is about applications environments for the long term.

What are you working on? 

I lead our container and Kubernetes efforts. This involves everything related to building awesome containers: Make sure that we follow best practices, have small image sizes, are automatically updated and run well on any container platform. It also means all our Kubernetes upstream activities in the open source community, things like our involvement with Helm charts, Monocular, and of course Kubeless. Kubeless is our new serverless framework, that I started with Tuna at Skippbox. Kubeless fits well with the overall apps strategy of Bitnami so we are continuing our effort. We hope to build a solid community around it and stay close to the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Generally speaking, since we see applications moving towards a container format and a Kubernetes deployment environment, I lead all our efforts in that space to make sure we do a great job for our users and also help the community grow by contributing directly to the ecosystem.

What do you like to do for fun? 

I am a sports guy, a bit out of shape these days but sports is my definition of fun. I get out of my house and I go run, bike, hike, camp. I just bought a new mountain bike and I am slowly shaping up to be able to climb the Jura. If everything goes well I will be back in shape to run a half-marathon in the fall. I have ran 6 marathons dating back to Chicago in 2004. I ran the Chamonix Marathon in 2011, which was an 8 hour “fast” hike with 7500 feet of climb (2600+ meters). I also play golf a couple times a year, my wife being a Golf teacher we hang out at golf courses quite a bit, and I usually hit couple buckets of balls every week, it is good to get out of the office (or shall I say basement).

Interested in working with Bitnami and Sebastien? Apply for one of our open positions!