5 ms·

Note that this is just some people who helped start the project when they were at Google, and both of them have since left. Kubernetes is managed by the Cloud N

Note that this is just some people who helped start the project when they were at Google, and both of them have since left. Kubernetes is managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and a very large number of companies are involved in managing the project's direction with an open governance model. There are diverse enough interests already that there isn't really any risk of one company's interests driving the project off course in a way that's harmful for the larger Kubernetes community.

gtirloni 10y ago
Like OpenStack?
- josh2600 10y ago
  God, I don't think I've ever groaned audibly while reading a comment like this before on HN. It's totally correct and true and apt, but I hope it's wrong over the long term. I'm hopeful k8 won't go the way of openstack because the problem domain is simpler and more well defined, but I'll be damned if I ever believe a "diverse" group of enterprises with shared interests can reliably produce good software. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on the standards committee.
  - brazzledazzle 10y ago
    I feel like openstack will end up being the subject of an interesting book that will explore all the ways it ended up screwing itself despite (or perhaps because of) corporate sponsorhip.
- stonith 10y ago
  K8s has a significantly more solid base today than OpenStack did upon its public release by NASA. It was barely functional, and gained the ascendency by virtue of Eucalyptus somehow managing to be even worse.
- praveenster 10y ago
  OpenStack has begun to feel more of a vendor marketplace with each of them trying to see if you can adopt their flavor. It looks somewhat similar to the large number of the Linux distros that were popular about 10 years ago, except that these are much more opinionated and have serious vendor lock-in possibilities since it relates to enterprise. Kubernetes, on the other hand feels like a harmonious and homogeneous solution to a specific problem.
  - dmourati 10y ago
    I don't know. I got the same feeling at Kubecon with all the booths and their big signs promising to "solve enterprise devops" and "virtualize your network providing seamless connectivity."
    - preillyme 10y ago
      I did as well.
  - hueving 10y ago
    Kubernetes has exactly the same issue. The core of openstack compute doesn't have much fragmentation, but all of the flavors come about when you snap in different deployment technologies, different storage backends, different networking backends, etc. Kubernetes is not prescriptive for any of these things either, so it will end up in exactly the same place as openstack with its current trajectory.
- cmcluck 10y ago
  [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)
  - harlowja 10y ago
    So being a PTL in OpenStack I have some various comments and questions that would be nice to have your thoughts on. In terms of looking at OpenStack hard; and reaching decisions based on various <things> did you do any reach out to the OpenStack community to actually communicate the things you found or heard or concluded so that the group there (including myself) can actually work on improving itself (or perhaps some of the reasons you stated aren't even correct and the community could have helped you clarify those)? If not then it concerns me that you may have reached conclusions without actually talking with that community (but I don't want to jump to any conclusions without getting your thoughts/input). So far from looking outwards in on the CNCF and seeing how it compares to the OpenStack community (which I am more involved with, including other small side-communities that I also work in) I've yet to understand what exactly the CNCF is targeting. It seems to be a body that is just adopting various projects that align to some mission (?); I have personally a hard time understanding the reasoning some of the projects have been adopted, maybe you can shed some light on that (what is true north for the CNCF, where is it written down, what is the TOC actually making adoption yes/no decisions on? what criteria? what is the technical taste you talk about, where is it written down?) The nice thing about OpenStack is that they are writing most/all of this down and agreeing on those kinds of questions in public: https://github.com/openstack/governance/tree/master/reference https://github.com/openstack/governance/tree/master/referenc... (github is a mirror, not the source of this repo, but easier for browsing purposes).
SEJeff 10y ago
I think you're undervaluing Joe Beda's work. Him, Brendan Burns, and Craig Mcluckie founded kubernetes. They didn't just help start the project, they started the project. Subtle, but notable difference. Otherwise, you're spot on!
- jbeda 10y ago
  To be clear -- Kubernetes was built on ideas that were proven out at Google over 10 years. While it was a new code base, those ideas were the product of a cast of (literally?) thousands. What Brendan, Craig and I did was (a) meld those ideas with the external-to-Google world (including Docker), (b) motivate releasing it as Open Source (not the default model for Google TI) and (c) work to seed a really open community that we wanted to participate in. Soon after we started some other folks from around Google and beyond joined in. From Google, those include Ville Aikas (not super active these days, doing other stuff at Google), Tim Hockin, Brian Grant, Dawn Chen, Daniel Smith. Most of these folks had worked on Borg and/or Omega. From outside Kelsey Hightower got involved very early (long before Kubernetes was a thing for CoreOS) and the folks from RedHat (led by Clayton Coleman). I'm sure I'm forgetting folks but hopefully that gives some context.

gtirloni 10y ago

Like OpenStack?

josh2600 10y ago
God, I don't think I've ever groaned audibly while reading a comment like this before on HN. It's totally correct and true and apt, but I hope it's wrong over the long term. I'm hopeful k8 won't go the way of openstack because the problem domain is simpler and more well defined, but I'll be damned if I ever believe a "diverse" group of enterprises with shared interests can reliably produce good software. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on the standards committee.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  I feel like openstack will end up being the subject of an interesting book that will explore all the ways it ended up screwing itself despite (or perhaps because of) corporate sponsorhip.
stonith 10y ago
K8s has a significantly more solid base today than OpenStack did upon its public release by NASA. It was barely functional, and gained the ascendency by virtue of Eucalyptus somehow managing to be even worse.
praveenster 10y ago
OpenStack has begun to feel more of a vendor marketplace with each of them trying to see if you can adopt their flavor. It looks somewhat similar to the large number of the Linux distros that were popular about 10 years ago, except that these are much more opinionated and have serious vendor lock-in possibilities since it relates to enterprise. Kubernetes, on the other hand feels like a harmonious and homogeneous solution to a specific problem.
- dmourati 10y ago
  I don't know. I got the same feeling at Kubecon with all the booths and their big signs promising to "solve enterprise devops" and "virtualize your network providing seamless connectivity."
  - preillyme 10y ago
    I did as well.
- hueving 10y ago
  Kubernetes has exactly the same issue. The core of openstack compute doesn't have much fragmentation, but all of the flavors come about when you snap in different deployment technologies, different storage backends, different networking backends, etc. Kubernetes is not prescriptive for any of these things either, so it will end up in exactly the same place as openstack with its current trajectory.
cmcluck 10y ago
[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)
- harlowja 10y ago
  So being a PTL in OpenStack I have some various comments and questions that would be nice to have your thoughts on. In terms of looking at OpenStack hard; and reaching decisions based on various <things> did you do any reach out to the OpenStack community to actually communicate the things you found or heard or concluded so that the group there (including myself) can actually work on improving itself (or perhaps some of the reasons you stated aren't even correct and the community could have helped you clarify those)? If not then it concerns me that you may have reached conclusions without actually talking with that community (but I don't want to jump to any conclusions without getting your thoughts/input). So far from looking outwards in on the CNCF and seeing how it compares to the OpenStack community (which I am more involved with, including other small side-communities that I also work in) I've yet to understand what exactly the CNCF is targeting. It seems to be a body that is just adopting various projects that align to some mission (?); I have personally a hard time understanding the reasoning some of the projects have been adopted, maybe you can shed some light on that (what is true north for the CNCF, where is it written down, what is the TOC actually making adoption yes/no decisions on? what criteria? what is the technical taste you talk about, where is it written down?) The nice thing about OpenStack is that they are writing most/all of this down and agreeing on those kinds of questions in public: https://github.com/openstack/governance/tree/master/reference https://github.com/openstack/governance/tree/master/referenc... (github is a mirror, not the source of this repo, but easier for browsing purposes).

SEJeff 10y ago

I think you're undervaluing Joe Beda's work. Him, Brendan Burns, and Craig Mcluckie founded kubernetes. They didn't just help start the project, they started the project. Subtle, but notable difference. Otherwise, you're spot on!

jbeda 10y ago
To be clear -- Kubernetes was built on ideas that were proven out at Google over 10 years. While it was a new code base, those ideas were the product of a cast of (literally?) thousands. What Brendan, Craig and I did was (a) meld those ideas with the external-to-Google world (including Docker), (b) motivate releasing it as Open Source (not the default model for Google TI) and (c) work to seed a really open community that we wanted to participate in. Soon after we started some other folks from around Google and beyond joined in. From Google, those include Ville Aikas (not super active these days, doing other stuff at Google), Tim Hockin, Brian Grant, Dawn Chen, Daniel Smith. Most of these folks had worked on Borg and/or Omega. From outside Kelsey Hightower got involved very early (long before Kubernetes was a thing for CoreOS) and the folks from RedHat (led by Clayton Coleman). I'm sure I'm forgetting folks but hopefully that gives some context.