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I have no stake in this, and am in no position to make any judgement at all, but I'm still hesitant to conclude that K8s has "won" or something. There was a sto

I have no stake in this, and am in no position to make any judgement at all, but I'm still hesitant to conclude that K8s has "won" or something. There was a story here two weeks ago about the absurd complexity of it. All I know is that it's heavily promoted left and right, and like for most tech products this decade, big media has won the attention grab, and has been successful in creating the perception that k8s is the orchestration software most people are using or look forward to using. Not saying it isn't, but I've yet to see any figures supporting that statement. What Google is up to here is pretty clear IMHO: they want to be perceived as the go-to provider for k8s based clouds. It's not like the iPhone-vs-Android situation at all where Google's goal is to maintain influence over advertising channels rather than push Android sales per se.

ironjunkie 8y ago
What google wants to do is to make their complement cheap. ie, they want to make Kubernetes an open-source de-facto solution so that people can spend more money on cloud providers.
- raducu 8y ago
  I have a very limited experience with kubernetes, and to me it is indeed very complex (as a user). I can only imagine how complicated it would be to offer a kubernetes solution as a cloud provider. So all of the complexity works in favor of google, but as long as users actually use it, it's a fair game.
bonesss 8y ago
If Google wants to be the go-to provider of clouds their open source Kubernetes strategy is pretty backwards. As it stands, though, they've got their competitors reselling their orchestration platform technology giving them platform control moreso than a selling point for their cloud. > I'm still hesitant to conclude that K8s has "won" or something Take a look at Azures container offerings (kubernetes itself or kubernetes compatible), along with the AWS equivalents. All three major cloud platforms have managed kubernetes solutions now. That doesn't mean competing orchestrators are dead, but they're hiding in their bunkers hoping that the worst is over... > There was a story here two weeks ago about the absurd complexity of it. Yeah it's absurdly complex, except when compared to the absurd rats-nest of almost-there not-quite-compatible technologies it has replaced ;) There are lighter weight solutions for lighter weight problems, but map the DevOps cycle from A to Z and Kubernetes is head-and-shoulders simpler than competing solutions. Simpler, more comprehensive, standardized, and better documented. Add in cross-cloud portability and you've got something hard to compete with.
auslander 8y ago
> ... absurd complexity of it Nuff said
- jrs95 8y ago
  It's really not that bad. Set up a Kubernetes cluster manually, then go set up a Nomad/Consul cluster manually, and you'll see that while just Nomad and Consul is much simpler, you haven't really gotten where you need to be unless you plan on having each of your clients to make separate DNS SRV requests beforehand AND have client-side load balancing. If you want that to be handled transparently for you, you're going to need some kind of virtualized networking or service mesh. You get this out of the box with Kubernetes, and in practice you don't need to set up these clusters manually. That's only valuable to help you understand each of the components better. tl;dr both fully managed (GKE, EKS) or semi-automated (kops) Kubernetes deployments are less operationally expensive than the "simpler" alternatives. If you think Docker in general isn't worth it relative to just VMs...than you may be right for your use case. But I and many others will tell you that they've migrated from VM based environments to Kubernetes and it's done a lot to reduce operational overhead and increase productivity.
  - auslander 8y ago
    > Docker in general isn't worth it relative to just VMs... Thats not what I think. I have load balancing, autoscaling, health and update management with AWS ECS just fine, using just a couple of Cloudformation templates, each is a fixed text file. Two files with parameters is all I need :)

ironjunkie 8y ago

What google wants to do is to make their complement cheap. ie, they want to make Kubernetes an open-source de-facto solution so that people can spend more money on cloud providers.

raducu 8y ago
I have a very limited experience with kubernetes, and to me it is indeed very complex (as a user). I can only imagine how complicated it would be to offer a kubernetes solution as a cloud provider. So all of the complexity works in favor of google, but as long as users actually use it, it's a fair game.

bonesss 8y ago

If Google wants to be the go-to provider of clouds their open source Kubernetes strategy is pretty backwards. As it stands, though, they've got their competitors reselling their orchestration platform technology giving them platform control moreso than a selling point for their cloud. > I'm still hesitant to conclude that K8s has "won" or something Take a look at Azures container offerings (kubernetes itself or kubernetes compatible), along with the AWS equivalents. All three major cloud platforms have managed kubernetes solutions now. That doesn't mean competing orchestrators are dead, but they're hiding in their bunkers hoping that the worst is over... > There was a story here two weeks ago about the absurd complexity of it. Yeah it's absurdly complex, except when compared to the absurd rats-nest of almost-there not-quite-compatible technologies it has replaced ;) There are lighter weight solutions for lighter weight problems, but map the DevOps cycle from A to Z and Kubernetes is head-and-shoulders simpler than competing solutions. Simpler, more comprehensive, standardized, and better documented. Add in cross-cloud portability and you've got something hard to compete with.

auslander 8y ago

> ... absurd complexity of it Nuff said

jrs95 8y ago
It's really not that bad. Set up a Kubernetes cluster manually, then go set up a Nomad/Consul cluster manually, and you'll see that while just Nomad and Consul is much simpler, you haven't really gotten where you need to be unless you plan on having each of your clients to make separate DNS SRV requests beforehand AND have client-side load balancing. If you want that to be handled transparently for you, you're going to need some kind of virtualized networking or service mesh. You get this out of the box with Kubernetes, and in practice you don't need to set up these clusters manually. That's only valuable to help you understand each of the components better. tl;dr both fully managed (GKE, EKS) or semi-automated (kops) Kubernetes deployments are less operationally expensive than the "simpler" alternatives. If you think Docker in general isn't worth it relative to just VMs...than you may be right for your use case. But I and many others will tell you that they've migrated from VM based environments to Kubernetes and it's done a lot to reduce operational overhead and increase productivity.
- auslander 8y ago
  > Docker in general isn't worth it relative to just VMs... Thats not what I think. I have load balancing, autoscaling, health and update management with AWS ECS just fine, using just a couple of Cloudformation templates, each is a fixed text file. Two files with parameters is all I need :)