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“Even then, if you’re using Kubernetes, you probably won’t succeed, because it isn’t in Google’s best interest to let anyone else actually compete with GKE.” G

“Even then, if you’re using Kubernetes, you probably won’t succeed, because it isn’t in Google’s best interest to let anyone else actually compete with GKE.” Google succeeds if it is anybody but AWS proprietary solutions. If they can groom a healthy ecosystem of open source and commercial solutions that target Kubernetes, then the tremendous advantage of AWS being a one stop shop for any service you can imagine starts to dwindle. As of now, amazon offers a solid compute environment and services galore, which is hard to compete with. The author didn’t do much at all to tie what happened to OpenStack with Kubernetes. K8s is deployed at scale by all the cloud providers. Both Google and Microsoft solely run containers on it in their public cloud (while AWS still has their own orchestrator). That never happened at scale with OpenStack. And regardless of how you feel about Google, Azure has a very strong vested interest in K8s success.

BinaryIdiot 8y ago
> Google succeeds if it is anybody but AWS proprietary solutions. Maybe? But don't forget Azure is bigger than Google's cloud services so they would also benefit from people not using AWS proprietary solutions and there are many smaller companies also in this space. I don't think Kubernetes necessarily helps good at all in the market place itself. Maybe with talent and admiration but almost everyone offers Kubernetes deployments now.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  Is azure really bigger? Because if you ask azure, they claim to be bigger than AWS as well. They are obviously lumping office 360 and all of their cloud software.
  - rapsey 8y ago
    It is by revenue
  - 013a 8y ago
    And Amazon lumps WorkDocs and WorkMail and Chime into their AWS line item as well. Its the same thing. Except Amazon's just sucks, so they don't generate nearly as much revenue.
  - adventured 8y ago
    Yes, Azure is universally recognized as being far larger than Google's cloud offering (at least twice the size). Google is trailing badly behind AWS and Azure, it's why Diane Greene was forced to step down. There is an endless parade of research and prominent articles pointing this out: https://awsinsider.net/articles/2018/11/01/azure-fastest-but-aws-biggest.aspx https://awsinsider.net/articles/2018/11/01/azure-fastest-but... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-13/google-may-have-to-get-used-to-third-place-in-the-cloud https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-13/google-ma... https://www.geekwire.com/2018/state-cloud-amazon-web-services-bigger-four-major-competitors-combined/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/state-cloud-amazon-web-service... https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/cloud-infrastructure-spend-reaches-us%2420-billion-in-q2-2018-with-hybrid-it-approach-dominant https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/cloud-infrastructure-spend-... https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/cloud-revenues-continue-grow-50-top-four-providers-tighten-grip-market https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/cloud-revenues-continue... https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/google-cloud-head-diane-greene-step-down-be-succeeded-oracles-thomas-kurian/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/google-cloud-head-di...
tannhaeuser 8y ago
Idk, isn't the value of cloud computing supposed to be reduced spend on ops? Then k8s in my opinion doesn't meet that criterion because of its sheer complexity - you very much need ops staff capable to diagnose and fix problems, not to mention the lock-in. OTOH if you just buy RDBMS, MQ, identity and compute service tiers directly, then you might have success with cost as an SME.
- jsiepkes 8y ago
  I think its more meant to keep spending / complexity controllable in the long term (ie. linear instead of exponential). Howeverrrrrr you will need to make sure you are actually going to need that larger scale at some point in the future. Otherwise you are probably better off with an simpler solution like Terraform. I think the k8s madness its a bit like the NoSQL craze in that sense.
- swasheck 8y ago
  I'm not sure about that. I thought cloud was primarily about consolidation of infrastructure, development, and operational headcount which does price some sort of OpEx reduction, but the primary goal being the reduction (elimination, in some cases) of CapEx from a pure infrastructure perspective. Every place I've been (or "visited") has seen OpEx increase but it's more quantifiable than work-hours which are typically tracked with project buckets in some workforce tracking application.
mirceal 8y ago
hmm. “stock” k8s still has limitations that make it look like a toy (how many nodes can you have in a cluster again? is that hyperscale?). the pattern I’ve seen is that teams/companies that go into k8s hoping it’s going to solve the problems they have replace some of their problems (which k8s does address) with the operational burden of keeping k8s up-to-date and stable. the struggle to understand new things being rolled out and keeping up with the tech is real (another way of saying this is that k8s is nowhere close to having a story around deployment and maintenance that would make it easy to operate - big players can figure it out, but chances are you are not a big player and the big players want you to pay for their shit - pretty much like Rackspace wanted you to pay for openstack) another aspect that people don’t seem to get is that k8s is what google is doing (or used to do 5 years ago) internally but without the supporting infrastructure/experience that google has internally.

BinaryIdiot 8y ago

> Google succeeds if it is anybody but AWS proprietary solutions. Maybe? But don't forget Azure is bigger than Google's cloud services so they would also benefit from people not using AWS proprietary solutions and there are many smaller companies also in this space. I don't think Kubernetes necessarily helps good at all in the market place itself. Maybe with talent and admiration but almost everyone offers Kubernetes deployments now.

jjeaff 8y ago
Is azure really bigger? Because if you ask azure, they claim to be bigger than AWS as well. They are obviously lumping office 360 and all of their cloud software.
- rapsey 8y ago
  It is by revenue
- 013a 8y ago
  And Amazon lumps WorkDocs and WorkMail and Chime into their AWS line item as well. Its the same thing. Except Amazon's just sucks, so they don't generate nearly as much revenue.
- adventured 8y ago
  Yes, Azure is universally recognized as being far larger than Google's cloud offering (at least twice the size). Google is trailing badly behind AWS and Azure, it's why Diane Greene was forced to step down. There is an endless parade of research and prominent articles pointing this out: https://awsinsider.net/articles/2018/11/01/azure-fastest-but-aws-biggest.aspx https://awsinsider.net/articles/2018/11/01/azure-fastest-but... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-13/google-may-have-to-get-used-to-third-place-in-the-cloud https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-13/google-ma... https://www.geekwire.com/2018/state-cloud-amazon-web-services-bigger-four-major-competitors-combined/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/state-cloud-amazon-web-service... https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/cloud-infrastructure-spend-reaches-us%2420-billion-in-q2-2018-with-hybrid-it-approach-dominant https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/cloud-infrastructure-spend-... https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/cloud-revenues-continue-grow-50-top-four-providers-tighten-grip-market https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/cloud-revenues-continue... https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/google-cloud-head-diane-greene-step-down-be-succeeded-oracles-thomas-kurian/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/google-cloud-head-di...

tannhaeuser 8y ago

Idk, isn't the value of cloud computing supposed to be reduced spend on ops? Then k8s in my opinion doesn't meet that criterion because of its sheer complexity - you very much need ops staff capable to diagnose and fix problems, not to mention the lock-in. OTOH if you just buy RDBMS, MQ, identity and compute service tiers directly, then you might have success with cost as an SME.

jsiepkes 8y ago
I think its more meant to keep spending / complexity controllable in the long term (ie. linear instead of exponential). Howeverrrrrr you will need to make sure you are actually going to need that larger scale at some point in the future. Otherwise you are probably better off with an simpler solution like Terraform. I think the k8s madness its a bit like the NoSQL craze in that sense.
swasheck 8y ago
I'm not sure about that. I thought cloud was primarily about consolidation of infrastructure, development, and operational headcount which does price some sort of OpEx reduction, but the primary goal being the reduction (elimination, in some cases) of CapEx from a pure infrastructure perspective. Every place I've been (or "visited") has seen OpEx increase but it's more quantifiable than work-hours which are typically tracked with project buckets in some workforce tracking application.

mirceal 8y ago

hmm. “stock” k8s still has limitations that make it look like a toy (how many nodes can you have in a cluster again? is that hyperscale?). the pattern I’ve seen is that teams/companies that go into k8s hoping it’s going to solve the problems they have replace some of their problems (which k8s does address) with the operational burden of keeping k8s up-to-date and stable. the struggle to understand new things being rolled out and keeping up with the tech is real (another way of saying this is that k8s is nowhere close to having a story around deployment and maintenance that would make it easy to operate - big players can figure it out, but chances are you are not a big player and the big players want you to pay for their shit - pretty much like Rackspace wanted you to pay for openstack) another aspect that people don’t seem to get is that k8s is what google is doing (or used to do 5 years ago) internally but without the supporting infrastructure/experience that google has internally.