Microsoft launches new open-source projects around Kubernetes and microservices

I’ve really thought that something like this was needed for a long time. Why isn’t there standardised containers for user management and permissions, authentication, scheduling things, processing events, caching say... there are off the shelf containers for simple things like proxying but nothing that understands your application. And it looks like they have taken it further to include Functions and Actors which might be useful and allow easier scaling of certain things. Let’s hope this goes some way to addressing that.

Maybe a better link: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/10/16/annou...

and to the GitHub projects themselves https://openappmodel.io/

https://github.com/oam-dev/spec/ https://github.com/oam-dev/rudr/

Dapr looks like Microsoft's answer to Istio - anecdotally, I've never gotten Istio to work (as recently as a few months ago) so I'll have to give this one a try at some point to see if they've done a better job.

OAM though, perplexes me. Even the justification - that k8s is out of scope of the developer, and is handled by ops - speaks to a misunderstanding of some of the advantages clusters provide. Some research [1] tells me that developers author "components" which encapsulate singular parts of an architecture, and are connected by operators into an application. And then auto-scaling is handled by "traits", which are entirely separate? It's interesting, but it seems to largely replicate (and act as a translation layer for) existing k8s features. Maybe that's the real value prop here, and the techcrunch article buried the lede - by defining components and traits through OAM you can move to any cloud-based model that supports the manifest spec (thus avoiding the high learning curve of something like k8s). Even so, I have a sinking feeling that most of this will be folded into the ever-changing definition of devops, so small teams that manage an app's entire lifecycle (and are told to get on board with the new-fangled dealio by management) will have another layer of indirection to debug when something inevitably goes wrong. If Azure comes out with an implementation of OAM that uses their VSIs, I'll get interested. Then it'll at least provide real value/choice, and hopefully make it easier to migrate existing workloads that don't need an entire machine for themselves onto a k8s cluster.

[1] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/10/16/annou...

First I thought dapper, but that was google, and it was about distributed tracing... but sounds very close (and have some relation - e.g. you need sidecar to capture network traffic, and propagate tokens for distributed tracing - that is unless you want to change your source code to do so)...

I haven't used k8s that much, so I can't see what features OAM (or the implementation, rudr) adds to k8s. Could someone provide me with some insights?