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Microsoft doubles down on Kubernetes for Azure

blogs.dxc.technology

21–30 of 61 posts

Re: Microsoft doubles down on Kubernetes for Azure

#21
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just hope that MS doesn't add in too many platform-specific pieces that would encourage vendor lock-in. That's Microsoft's main strategy though. Example: Users can't even install Firefox or Chrome on Windows 10 S. Microsoft announced: "Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate HTML and JavaScript engines provided by the Windows Platform." I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised to see similar things hap…

> "Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate HTML and JavaScript engines provided by the Windows Platform." This seems like a thing that platform owners are doing more and more (iOS has a similar clause, and ChromeOS, well, uses Chrome). Is this just purely a move to stifle competition from web apps that could threaten control of the platform? Or perhaps I am missing some nuance behind these kinds of decision…

> This seems like a thing that platform owners are doing more and more (iOS has a similar clause, and ChromeOS, well, uses Chrome).

Shame on all of them. If it continues, the next generation will not know what it's like to have technology freedom like we currently do (in the US, for the most part).

Re: Microsoft doubles down on Kubernetes for Azure

#22
post #16
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just hope that MS doesn't add in too many platform-specific pieces that would encourage vendor lock-in. That's Microsoft's main strategy though. Example: Users can't even install Firefox or Chrome on Windows 10 S. Microsoft announced: "Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate HTML and JavaScript engines provided by the Windows Platform." I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised to see similar things hap…

That's a different product, with different goals. You're right about 10 S, but it's kinda unrelated to Azure.

I've lived through the experience of using non-MS products since the early 2000s, and all of those things are related. It has been one of their core strategies and still is, though the techniques are shifting.

Re: Microsoft doubles down on Kubernetes for Azure

#23
post #6

This is a good thing; Microsoft will increase competition in this space by applying its expertise in dev tools to Kubernetes. I just hope that MS doesn't add in too many platform-specific pieces that would encourage vendor lock-in. For example k8s ingress right now is based on controllers and GCE controllers support/don't support a wide variety of things compared to nginx ingress... these areas of Kubernetes make me…

Fortunately there's a bunch of ingress controllers you can use: Traefik, Voyager, HAProxy, and probably several others. And it's surprisingly trivial to write your own. So ingresses is not currently a weak point in relation to vendor lock-in happens. And Kubernetes already supports plenty of non-Google tech; as an open source project, Kubernetes is refreshingly non-Google-focused (there are a bunch of players, notabl…

>> As an aside, the current ingresses (including the Nginx one and Google's own GLB one) all have annoying deficiencies

Agree, this is along the lines of what I meant. For example GCE ingress allows you to reference a global static IP while this is not possible with solely nginx ingress due to limitations with the TCP load balancer. There are separate ingress annotations for GKE/nginx/haproxy, etc. If I want to use the global-static-ip GCE annotation, this will make it a little harder to move to Azure.

Re: Microsoft doubles down on Kubernetes for Azure

#24
post #6

This is a good thing; Microsoft will increase competition in this space by applying its expertise in dev tools to Kubernetes. I just hope that MS doesn't add in too many platform-specific pieces that would encourage vendor lock-in. For example k8s ingress right now is based on controllers and GCE controllers support/don't support a wide variety of things compared to nginx ingress... these areas of Kubernetes make me…

Note that Microsoft Azure was a launch partner this month for the Certified Kubernetes conformance program, which is explicitly designed to reduce the chance of forking and lock-in by defining the standard Kubernetes APIs that all platforms and distributions must support.

https://www.cncf.io/certification/software-conformance/

(Disclosure: I'm executive director of CNCF and helped lead the conformance efforts.)

Re: Microsoft doubles down on Kubernetes for Azure

#25
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You write "Microsoft's offering does not seem to charge you for the masters ever". The article says "You will only pay for the virtual machines (VM) that you use for managing your Kubernetes cluster". Do you have a source that disagrees with the article? Edit: to those replying correcting the article, if you were to create a top-level comment on this thread correcting the article, we could upvote your comments and be…

https://docs.microsoft.com/gl-es/azure/aks/intro-kubernetes > "you pay only for the agent nodes within your clusters, not for the masters."

Which is to be read "the price of the Master is incorporated into the amortised price per unit time of the agent nodes". Microsoft is not giving you something for nothing here.

Re: Microsoft doubles down on Kubernetes for Azure

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://docs.microsoft.com/gl-es/azure/aks/intro-kubernetes > "you pay only for the agent nodes within your clusters, not for the masters."

Which is to be read "the price of the Master is incorporated into the amortised price per unit time of the agent nodes". Microsoft is not giving you something for nothing here.

To be fair to MS here, the agent price is the same as the stand-alone VM pricing, so there really does not appear to be a premium/hidden cost here.

Re: Microsoft doubles down on Kubernetes for Azure

#27
post #6

This is a good thing; Microsoft will increase competition in this space by applying its expertise in dev tools to Kubernetes. I just hope that MS doesn't add in too many platform-specific pieces that would encourage vendor lock-in. For example k8s ingress right now is based on controllers and GCE controllers support/don't support a wide variety of things compared to nginx ingress... these areas of Kubernetes make me…

Note that Microsoft Azure was a launch partner this month for the Certified Kubernetes conformance program, which is explicitly designed to reduce the chance of forking and lock-in by defining the standard Kubernetes APIs that all platforms and distributions must support. https://www.cncf.io/certification/software-conformance/ (Disclosure: I'm executive director of CNCF and helped lead the conformance efforts.)

So, on a tangent, what does your directorship in CNCF entail and how does one end up in a position like this?

Re: Microsoft doubles down on Kubernetes for Azure

#28

I really, really hope aws joins the game. re:invent is around the corner.

Didn’t AWS just join the Kubernetes foundation earlier this year? If so, we’ll see what comes.

One thing ECS does is fully integrate ALBs and NLBs with containerized services and makes the plumbing and scaling pretty easy to set up (at least IMO.

If they can swap out the custom ECS service that manages containers with K8s, that makes sense to me and would mean all the major cloud providers are centralizing on K8s... which in turn means we could stop building a new container orchestration layer every month and move on to some new problem :)

Re: Microsoft doubles down on Kubernetes for Azure

#29
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that Microsoft Azure was a launch partner this month for the Certified Kubernetes conformance program, which is explicitly designed to reduce the chance of forking and lock-in by defining the standard Kubernetes APIs that all platforms and distributions must support. https://www.cncf.io/certification/software-conformance/ (Disclosure: I'm executive director of CNCF and helped lead the conformance efforts.)

So, on a tangent, what does your directorship in CNCF entail and how does one end up in a position like this?

It mainly involves replying to HN threads on the weekend.

More seriously, this slide deck gives an overview of all the areas in which CNCF is involved, from the Certified Kuberenetes program to providing marketing and other services to our projects to offering training and certification.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BoxFeENJcINgHbKfygXp...

We're also running KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in a week, with over 4,000 people expected.

http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/kubecon-and-cloudna...

As to how to get into it, you can take a look at my background and also look at opportunities with our parent, the Linux Foundation.

https://www.dankohn.com https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/careers/

Re: Microsoft doubles down on Kubernetes for Azure

#30
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just hope that MS doesn't add in too many platform-specific pieces that would encourage vendor lock-in. That's Microsoft's main strategy though. Example: Users can't even install Firefox or Chrome on Windows 10 S. Microsoft announced: "Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate HTML and JavaScript engines provided by the Windows Platform." I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised to see similar things hap…

> "Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate HTML and JavaScript engines provided by the Windows Platform." This seems like a thing that platform owners are doing more and more (iOS has a similar clause, and ChromeOS, well, uses Chrome). Is this just purely a move to stifle competition from web apps that could threaten control of the platform? Or perhaps I am missing some nuance behind these kinds of decision…

A JavaScript JIT requires memory that is writable and executable. W^X is a security feature and required for the security model of walled gardens. Otherwise you could pull down unapproved code and make the walled garden useless.

They don’t want shitty JavaScript interpreters making their platform look bad, so they force you to use their system JavaScript engine.

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