Hello Increment readers,

On a beautiful early spring day in New York City, I overheard some neighbors chatting about the Evergreen, the now-infamous container ship that stole hearts, sparked memes, and threw a veritable wrench into global trade when it ran aground in the Suez Canal this March. They were fascinated not just with how the ship might get moving again, but with the sheer number of shipping containers impacted, and just what, exactly, might be inside all those containers.

Of course, they weren’t talking about the containers a software engineer is likely to use, but while working on this issue—which marks four years of Increment—any discussion involving containers as a conduit for curiosity and conversation would naturally catch my attention. 

In this issue, we don’t explore any nautical misadventures, but we do examine the container ecosystem’s scope, scale, and panoramic possibilities. Among other things, you’ll find practical considerations around containerization, as in Nočnica Fee’s primer on core container technologies and their use cases and Liz Rice’s discussion of container security; an interview with Kubernetes co-creator Joe Beda; and some grounding perspective from Tramale Turner on how sometimes good leadership can be the best container migration strategy of all. 

Will these articles solve the logistics challenges of future cargo ships traversing the aforementioned waterway? Probably not. But they may offer insight and direction should you have containers on your mind.

All the best,

Sid Orlando
Editor in Chief
@ohreallysid

P.S. If you picked up this issue in print, might you be looking to check your crossword answers?