| The GKE reference is a lot more relevant than you think, it's just a bit deeper below the surface. Google's relationship with k8s and GKE and in particular their motivation for creating an open-source orchestration service is well documented and frequently retold, but ironically appears to not be well-understood. With any sufficiently complex compute solution, you're going to need both a platform and some sort of management. Typically vendors sell you their management service (for which you often pay a recurring fee) by locking you into a proprietary platform. What's more, the management service can be dismal but you'll pay anyway because your app is built on their platform. It happens everywhere, the industry is full of examples, and anyone could see that it was going to hit Cloud sooner rather than later. And the result would be ... bad ... for everyone (customers and providers alike) but the dominant platform. So Google took an exceptionally gutsy gamble. Google excels at platform management. They invented SRE. They posited that in a level playing field, all else being equal, Google would have the best platform management service, and people would pay for it based on its merits alone. By making k8s open source, they leveled the playing field. It was by far the best tool for the job, and everybody could have it at no cost; neither money nor burden. So there was no business model or justification for building a lock-in sub-par alternative. The platform became a commodity; nobody could own it. Which is where we are now, and what this article depicts. You still need a management strategy, k8s doesn't change that. But now everyone's management service has to compete on its own merits. Nobody gets to play the lock-in game. Google's management service is GKE. It's good, but not because Google started Kubernetes. Rather, Google started Kubernetes because Google has the expertise and experience to make GKE good. |
At some point something will become "the standard". Up to that point Google will have to be making huge investment in their own tooling to operate at their scale...
If "the standard" is someone elses, they're playing second fiddle in the big picture. If "the standard" is different than their own tooling they're paying a premium in dollars and a premium in talent-time to train new hires.
Giving away their tooling and supporting it to become a 'best of breed' solution outsources their training costs and 'onboarding' time to the greater industry. Facebook, MS, and VMWare are paying people to get good at Google tech and selling Googles tech in the Entprise. Their open source strategy also ensures, as you said, a 'level playing field'. A level playing field where they are guaranteed to not get locked out, and where where their size, strengths, and deep competencies of product and domain give them a massive competitive advantage.
It's smart on a lot of levels.