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As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake

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Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake

#11

Post by praseodym »

atombender wrote: post #3

Kubernetes is one of those rare cases where the industry is rallying around a technologically sound platform that emerged from the trenches, and not something that was designed to create jobs for consultants. It's great. Right now, there's a bunch of fairly traditional players such as Red Hat, but none of them are in a position to mess it up. What I'm waiting for, though, is for a big player to do a modern, clean "Ku…

Actually it is already possible to create persistent disks through Kubernetes by creating a persistent volume claim (pvc) which triggers an actual persistent volume to be created. Cloud provider controllers take care of this, just like they create load balancers for services.

Also there’s already work being done on supporting cluster management from Kubernetes itself: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api

Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake

#12

Post by rubiquity »

atombender wrote: post #3

Kubernetes is one of those rare cases where the industry is rallying around a technologically sound platform that emerged from the trenches, and not something that was designed to create jobs for consultants. It's great. Right now, there's a bunch of fairly traditional players such as Red Hat, but none of them are in a position to mess it up. What I'm waiting for, though, is for a big player to do a modern, clean "Ku…

> and not something that wasn't designed to create jobs for consultants.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Consulting companies are drawn to operational complexity, of which Kubernetes has a lot of, like bears are to honey.

https://kubernetes.io/partners/

https://www.google.com/search?q=kubernetes+consulting&ie=utf...

Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake

#13

Post by atombender »

rubiquity wrote: post #12
atombender wrote: post #3

Kubernetes is one of those rare cases where the industry is rallying around a technologically sound platform that emerged from the trenches, and not something that was designed to create jobs for consultants. It's great. Right now, there's a bunch of fairly traditional players such as Red Hat, but none of them are in a position to mess it up. What I'm waiting for, though, is for a big player to do a modern, clean "Ku…

> and not something that wasn't designed to create jobs for consultants. I wouldn't be so sure about that. Consulting companies are drawn to operational complexity, of which Kubernetes has a lot of, like bears are to honey. https://kubernetes.io/partners/ https://www.google.com/search?q=kubernetes+consulting&ie=utf...

Kubernetes came out of the engineering team at Google. It was created by engineers for engineers. The fact that it's being exploited by enterprise consulting types doesn't change that premise.

Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake

#14

Post by lobster_johnson »

praseodym wrote: post #11
atombender wrote: post #3

Kubernetes is one of those rare cases where the industry is rallying around a technologically sound platform that emerged from the trenches, and not something that was designed to create jobs for consultants. It's great. Right now, there's a bunch of fairly traditional players such as Red Hat, but none of them are in a position to mess it up. What I'm waiting for, though, is for a big player to do a modern, clean "Ku…

Actually it is already possible to create persistent disks through Kubernetes by creating a persistent volume claim (pvc) which triggers an actual persistent volume to be created. Cloud provider controllers take care of this, just like they create load balancers for services. Also there’s already work being done on supporting cluster management from Kubernetes itself: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api

That's not what I meant, though. A Kubernetes PV is an abstraction that causes a controller allocate a GCE disk (which of course is another abstraction), but if you create a GCE disk through the CLI/UI/API, then you don't get a PV.

Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake

#15

Post by colemickens »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #14
praseodym wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it is already possible to create persistent disks through Kubernetes by creating a persistent volume claim (pvc) which triggers an actual persistent volume to be created. Cloud provider controllers take care of this, just like they create load balancers for services. Also there’s already work being done on supporting cluster management from Kubernetes itself: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api

That's not what I meant, though. A Kubernetes PV is an abstraction that causes a controller allocate a GCE disk (which of course is another abstraction), but if you create a GCE disk through the CLI/UI/API, then you don't get a PV.

I think the point is that I don't have to touch the cloud provider's control plane in 99% of cases. Which brings the portability that first attracted me to Kubernetes.

Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake

#16

Post by daxfohl »

atombender wrote: post #13
rubiquity wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and not something that wasn't designed to create jobs for consultants. I wouldn't be so sure about that. Consulting companies are drawn to operational complexity, of which Kubernetes has a lot of, like bears are to honey. https://kubernetes.io/partners/ https://www.google.com/search?q=kubernetes+consulting&ie=utf...

Kubernetes came out of the engineering team at Google. It was created by engineers for engineers. The fact that it's being exploited by enterprise consulting types doesn't change that premise.

But there's this from a fairly influential former googler: https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/honestly-i-cant-stand-k8s-48...

It's a quick read, but to summarise: it's almost as complex as google's internal borg system but the benefit isn't even close (partially because nobody else has google problems). I can't down K8s personally, as I've never used it myself. But I wonder if there's the possibility of a system that's more 80/20 of google's borg rather than the seeming 20/80 coming from k8s. And I wonder if Grab will release it next year.

Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake

#17

Post by ghaff »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #9
navaati wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well RedHat's OpenShift.com is kinda that, have a look at it !

Maybe. I'm skeptical of Red Hat. The openshift.com web site, which is definitely not geared toward engineers, doesn't give me any confidence that this is what I'm after. Not that Google is better here, but I already know what GCP provides; something that wants to compete with GCP/GKE really needs to explain why they're a viable competitor. (And to people who design these things: If you need to have a "Products" dropd…

A lot of people come to websites looking for specific products. When you don’t offer an obvious path to what they’re looking for, they get frustrated. I know I do.

Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake

#19

Post by daxfohl »

atombender wrote: post #3

Kubernetes is one of those rare cases where the industry is rallying around a technologically sound platform that emerged from the trenches, and not something that was designed to create jobs for consultants. It's great. Right now, there's a bunch of fairly traditional players such as Red Hat, but none of them are in a position to mess it up. What I'm waiting for, though, is for a big player to do a modern, clean "Ku…

Many of the k8s founders have left google. Google doesn't use it internally. I'd actually start looking away from gcp at this point for k8s, given google's history of dropping stuff that they're bored with.

Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake

#20

Post by rubiquity »

atombender wrote: post #13
rubiquity wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and not something that wasn't designed to create jobs for consultants. I wouldn't be so sure about that. Consulting companies are drawn to operational complexity, of which Kubernetes has a lot of, like bears are to honey. https://kubernetes.io/partners/ https://www.google.com/search?q=kubernetes+consulting&ie=utf...

Kubernetes came out of the engineering team at Google. It was created by engineers for engineers. The fact that it's being exploited by enterprise consulting types doesn't change that premise.

I like to believe that nobody creates anything for sole intentions of extracting consulting bucks (there probably are cases of this happening in tech, but I like to be benevolent). So I don't believe Kubernetes was created for that and I don't think that OpenStack was either. But regardless of what the creators want, opportunists see new platforms and want to attach themselves to them.

Kubernetes isn't simple. Some of that is due to the problem its trying to solve, some of it is because the design, some if it is because the ecosystem that has evolved around it with regard to meshes/load balancers/control planes and overlay networks. We are after all replying on an article about a startup ecosystem being created around Kubernetes.

Tools like Kubernetes gaining adoption are partly based on technical merit/need and part based on fashion. Developers like toys and for some people the toys are what gets them through the day. Most of the people adopting Kubernetes probably don't need it. Developer Advocates and consulting shops are the ones making people think they need Kubernetes when they don't. This is an industry problem and that's all well and good. Let's just not pretend there isn't some influence from startups (typically backed by VC, which exacerbates the pressure) and consulting shops.

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