You kinda have the right idea with the commoditization behind k8s, but I don't think you seen just how deep it goes. Every cloud platform needs its own managem

You kinda have the right idea with the commoditization behind k8s, but I don't think you seen just how deep it goes. Every cloud platform needs its own management layer to make the hardware infrastructure useful, and it's at this management layer where lock-in happens. Google made this layer a commodity with k8s, but took it a step further by making the trend toward open infectious and one-way. Google's gamble was that if providers have to compete directly on a level playing field, Google will win because they're better at it. It's a bold move, and we'll eventually see if they were right. In the mean time k8s is still at work leveling the field. Here's the key that makes k8s a one-way de-proprietarization mechanism: it's not just infrastructure for building systems, it's infrastructure for building infrastructure, and it's better than anything you could come up with otherwise, and the infrastructure it builds is natively open and extensible. K8s is trivial to extend, but it's REALLY HARD to extend it to become a proprietary system, while still keeping it useful. This is true for gke as much as anything else. The value-add for gke is that someone is managing it who knows wtf they're doing. The value add isn't (and can't be) any Google-specific magic sauce they add to k8s, because k8s is only really useful if the customer themselves can extend it using known interfaces. And you can't make gke meaningfully proprietary without breaking that extensibility. Sure they can have gke-specific components, just like how Amazon can have aws-specific controllers if they need to. But those have to be extensions to an open base. If such things could result in lock-in, then they would also result in a lock-out of common tools and extensions, which would kill the platform dead.