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I dislike the deification of Ken Thompson. He's great, but let's not pretend that he'd somehow will a superior solution into existence. The economics and scale

I dislike the deification of Ken Thompson. He's great, but let's not pretend that he'd somehow will a superior solution into existence. The economics and scale of this era are vastly different. Borg (and thus, Kubernetes) grew out of an environment where 1 in a million happens every second. Edge cases make everything incredibly complex, and Borg has solved them all.

jeffbee 5y ago
Much as I am a fan of borg, I think it succeeds mostly by ignoring edge cases, not solving them. k8s looks complicated because people have, in my opinion, weird and dumb use cases that are fundamentally hard to support. Borg and its developers don't want to hear about your weird, dumb use case and within Google there is the structure to say "don't do that" which cannot exist outside a hierarchical organization.
- throwdbaaway 5y ago
  Interesting. Perhaps k8s is succeeding in the real world because it is the only one that tries to support all the weird and dumb use cases? > Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. > Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. Instead of seeing k8s as the equivalent of "cover fire" or Windows XP, a more apt comparison is probably Microsoft Office, with all kinds of features to support all the weird and dumb use cases.

jeffbee 5y ago

Much as I am a fan of borg, I think it succeeds mostly by ignoring edge cases, not solving them. k8s looks complicated because people have, in my opinion, weird and dumb use cases that are fundamentally hard to support. Borg and its developers don't want to hear about your weird, dumb use case and within Google there is the structure to say "don't do that" which cannot exist outside a hierarchical organization.

throwdbaaway 5y ago
Interesting. Perhaps k8s is succeeding in the real world because it is the only one that tries to support all the weird and dumb use cases? > Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. > Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. Instead of seeing k8s as the equivalent of "cover fire" or Windows XP, a more apt comparison is probably Microsoft Office, with all kinds of features to support all the weird and dumb use cases.