[cmcluck]

Disclaimer: I work at Google and was a founder of the Kubernetes project.

In a nutshell yes. We recognized pretty early on that fear of lockin was a major influencing factor in cloud buying decisions. We saw it mostly as holding us back in cloud: customers were reluctant to bet on GCE (our first product here at Google) in the early days because they were worried about betting on a proprietary system that wasn't easily portable. This was compounded by the fact that people were worried about our commitment to cloud (we are all in for the record, in case people are still wondering :) ). On the positive side we also saw lots of other people who were worried about how locked in they were getting to Amazon, and many at very least wanted to have two providers so they could play one off against the other for pricing.

Our hypothesis was pretty simple: create a 'logical computing' platform that works everywhere, and maybe, if customers liked what we had built they would try our version. And if they didn't, they could go somewhere else without significant effort. We figured at the end of the day we would be able to provide a high quality service without doing weird things in the community since our infrastructure is legitimately good, and we are good at operations. We also didn't have to agonize about extracting lots of money out of the orchestration system since we could just rely on monetization of the basic infrastructure. This has actually worked out pretty well. GKE (Google Container Engine) has grown far faster than GCE (actually faster than any product I have see) and the message around zero lock-in plays well with customers.

[jacques_chester]

Not speaking in an official capacity, but the analogy I've seen used is that big companies don't want to relive the RDBMS vendor lock-in experience.

I'm speaking about something other than k8s (Cloud Foundry), but the industry mood is the same. Folk want portability amongst IaaSes. Google are an underdog in that market, so it behooves them to support that effort -- to the point that there are Google teams helping with Cloud Foundry on GCP.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we donate the majority of engineering to Cloud Foundry.

[roman_sf]

k8s is essentially "aws in a box" and it's a product that locks. As soon as k8s cluster is running in GKE - it becomes not that portable at all, due to operational complexity as well as tide up to the google infra.