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
#2I didn't realize all the pieces of the cloud stack that CNCF was working on and how each piece gives you more flexibility to move between cloud providers. Kubernetes and rkt replace servers and orchestration of course but you also have Open Policy Agent and Spire to replace IAM, Envoy and Jaeger replace X-ray, VPC, Security Groups, Rook replaces S3, etc.
It's kind of interesting because Google and Microsoft have opened a new front against Amazon to counter their strategy of locking you in with services. If software from CNCF is good enough to be used in place of these services on each cloud provider then you can nullify AWS's advantage there and Google can lure you in with ML and Microsoft with their enterprise experience.
But I'm not sure these projects can make progress faster than AWS can release and update their fantastic array of services. Kubernetes being the obvious exception (when is EKS GA?!?!)
Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake
#3Kubernetes 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 "Kubernetes first" cloud offering. We're currently on Google Kubernetes Engine, and I'm disappointed in the lack of integration throughout Cloud Platform. GCP is great in many areas, but the Kubernetes offering is clearly an afterthought. As an example, if you create an ingress, this creates a bunch of load balancer objects (forwarding rules, URL maps, backends). But these are all given obscure names (k8s-um-production-zippediboop-f8da5e6c92f38300), and none of the Kubernetes labels transfer over. Same with disks; GCE disks don't even have labels, so they put a bunch of JSON in the "description", which of course cannot be filtered or queried. Similar things happen with VMs and other things; the "mapping" of Kubernetes to GCP concepts is basically either lossy or non-existent. Many other similar weaknesses exist: Cloud SQL (if you want to use Cloud SQL, you have to manually run the Cloud SQL Proxy as a sidecar), GCP service accounts (different from Kubernetes service accounts!), etc. GKE is solid, but everything seems like it's been put together without any over-arching design; GKE is just another thing buried in a somewhat ramshackle jungle of different services.
There's an opportunity for a vendor to come in and offer a platform where you start with Kubernetes. In particular, this means that the platform should be manageable from Kubernetes, through the use of CRDs and pluggable controllers. For example, I should be able to define a persistent disk using a Kubernetes manifest, instead of having to go through some web UI or CLI ("gcloud compute disk create" or whatever).
That said, it's hard to compete with GCP at this point. Whoever wants to compete in this space have to compete not just with GKE, but with the technical awesomeness of GCP.
Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake
#4Kubernetes 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…
Well RedHat's OpenShift.com is kinda that, have a look at it !
Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake
#5Kubernetes 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…
Digital Ocean are working on their Kubernetes product offering.
https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/
Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake
#6Kubernetes 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…
Digital Ocean are working on their Kubernetes product offering. https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/
We were on DigitalOcean before GCP. They're okay. They're cheap, but can't really compare to GCP in terms of performance, stability, networking, object storage, etc. Their Kubernetes offering is also a GKE competitor, not a "Kubernetes first" cloud.
Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake
#7Kubernetes 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…
You might want take a look that service brokers which provide a way to manage Cloud Provider resources like Google Cloud SQL as CRDs from k8s/GKE.
Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake
#8Kubernetes 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…
Well said.
Operationalizing K8s can be fraught with vendor specific parts. It doesn't help documentation wise when many things gloss over a concept that is offloaded into GCE or GKE.
Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake
#9Kubernetes 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…
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" dropdown filled with unexplained product names, you're doing something wrong.)
Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake
#10Kubernetes 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…
You might want take a look that service brokers which provide a way to manage Cloud Provider resources like Google Cloud SQL as CRDs from k8s/GKE.
Thanks, I know about service brokers. My point was that there's an opportunity for a vendor to do this better out of the box.