Kubernetes Founders Launched Startup Heptio to Bring Containers to Enterprise

I don't use k8s, so forgive my ignorance, but what are the use cases in "the enterprise"? How many "enterprises" need to manage 1K microservice containers to approve weekly timesheets? Is this just a play for companies that want to run their products/services on private cloud?

We're a consultancy doing this right now, and medium and big companies need and want this.

Just one simple example of many: think of all the software services that Tesla needs to do the fancy stuff that they are doing.

There are many car companies right now trying to catch up, building scalable and resilient services, doing analytics, navigation, M2M stuff, emergency services, car rental, lots of stuff.

Weekly timesheets of course is definitely not the use case for this.

I'm the CTO and I actually agree with you. We need to continue to make it easier to use. We want to set up Heptio so that motivations are aligned.

When integrating something like Kubernetes with existing systems and processes there will always be opportunity for additional systems and support that aren't easily built in the open. Often times these aren't fun things and so are harder to get critical mass in the open.

The first part of our plan is to help fill usability gaps for Kubernetes in the open. This will grow the pie and expand our standing in the community.

Commercially we will filling gaps unique to large companies around integration with existing systems and managing ops and dev relationships. Specifics here will have to wait until product is ready.

In general we have a value around "Honest Technology". We want to build products that just work and do what it says on the tin.

[This is Craig -- CEO of this new venture, co-founder of K8s (with Joe and Brendan), and person who started CNCF (with Jim Zemlin, and a bunch of community wonks from big tech)]

It is a funny you say this. I spent a lot of time looking around the community at what existed before starting CNCF, and agonized over this. We needed to take K8s to foundation so that it wouldn't be a 'Google project'. Google was actually the best steward of the tech you could imagine, because the plan was always to make k8s ubiquitous and just win on quality of infrastructure but the community had no way to know that.

I looked at OpenStack hard, and like the energy and enthusiasm but really worried about (1) balkanization that was emerging with no 'true north' -- it just didn't have technical taste, (2) the tragedy of the commons -- most vendors were focused on their own interests and neglected the end users, (3) lack of coherence.

When designing CNCF I tried hard to work through this by creating a better foundation structure. (1) the business board has very limited authority over projects, hopefully making sure that we avoid it being a pay-for-play affair. (2) we made provisions for little companies to get top level seats based on community contributions (ditto) (3) we created an empowered end user group that would have equal authority to any other affair to make sure real users interest are promoted (4) we added a TOC (technical oversight committee) that was the most empowered group to establish true north that is community elected -- the idea is they need to champion the projects and establish technical 'taste' (e.g. Brian Grant from Google -- the guy who drives consistency sat on this group, not me the guy who had access to the purse strings and who was focused on the business).

(side note: i picked this structure because i was geeking on government structures at the time, and figured that the separation of powers yields more sustainable administration)

Story goes like this: Joe and I did Google Compute Engine together. Once that was on rails we started looking at the gap between GAE and GCE. Joe found Docker way back before it was a household name, and we started thinking hard about the 'compute continuum'. What beyond the container format was needed. Brendan was working in the meantime on something that looked like cloud formation that we were also playing with. We had instantly good chemistry with the three of us, and he started looking at Docker too.

To raise awareness of Docker in Google, I asked Brendan to pull together a demo for our all hands. In a nutshell what he produced was the bones of Kubernetes. I remember looking at it and having a moment, he had built a mini borg cell on VMs. Basically made borg a devops accessible tool, not just a monolithic clustering tool (like Mesos was). When I saw that the product ramifications were obvious, I called Joe over to look and the rest is history.