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Kubernetes -> Envoy -> Istio. Yeah, yeah, it's not rockets to mars or whatever, but I think we've spend DECADES trying to figure out how to abstract away the lower parts of the stack. The last big leap was AWS, and it forced a choice for a lot of people: do you want to work at AWS? or do you want to work on applications that run on AWS? The API is so strong that you can't do both. There's a similar thing around operating systems, networking tools, and containers. Heroku was a cool PaaS, but ultimately is a little too inflexible to work for everybody. Companies keep rebuilding these internal PaaS systems, and I think Kubernetes has finally nailed it. It's lacking the primitives to do traffic management and introspection, and Envoy / Istio provide those primitives. Many people see these technologies as an endgame to themselves, but the Istio community has started talking about how they're a platform themselves, and that feels correct. Like AWS, you can abstract away a TON of this stuff, and you will divide people into those that keep a cluster running vs. those that build apps on top of it. The specialization gains will be on the same level as dynamic infrastructure, imho. Disclaimer: I work at a company that wants to build on top of this new world, but I joined them because I believe this, not the other way around. |
3 -4 years go in my sector cloud felt very much like an emerging thing. Now it's absolutely "here", and I would encourage anyone with an interest in staying current over the next 5 - 10 years to get into this stuffif you're not doing so yet!