[jeethsuresh]

Dapr looks like Microsoft's answer to Istio - anecdotally, I've never gotten Istio to work (as recently as a few months ago) so I'll have to give this one a try at some point to see if they've done a better job.

OAM though, perplexes me. Even the justification - that k8s is out of scope of the developer, and is handled by ops - speaks to a misunderstanding of some of the advantages clusters provide. Some research [1] tells me that developers author "components" which encapsulate singular parts of an architecture, and are connected by operators into an application. And then auto-scaling is handled by "traits", which are entirely separate? It's interesting, but it seems to largely replicate (and act as a translation layer for) existing k8s features. Maybe that's the real value prop here, and the techcrunch article buried the lede - by defining components and traits through OAM you can move to any cloud-based model that supports the manifest spec (thus avoiding the high learning curve of something like k8s). Even so, I have a sinking feeling that most of this will be folded into the ever-changing definition of devops, so small teams that manage an app's entire lifecycle (and are told to get on board with the new-fangled dealio by management) will have another layer of indirection to debug when something inevitably goes wrong. If Azure comes out with an implementation of OAM that uses their VSIs, I'll get interested. Then it'll at least provide real value/choice, and hopefully make it easier to migrate existing workloads that don't need an entire machine for themselves onto a k8s cluster.

[1] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/10/16/annou...

[vturecek]

The overarching idea with OAM is to standardize the model by which applications are composed and operated, regardless of the environment you end up working in. So as you go from one platform to another, you have a consistent experience and a transferable process. We fully expect the implementing platform capabilities to differ, and the model is designed around this assumption. I think some standardization here is valuable.

At the same time, we aim to improve application modeling on systems like Kubernetes that currently focus more on container infrastructure.

disclosure: I'm one of the spec authors.

[jeethsuresh]

Interesting - if you don't mind indulging me a little, it was surprising to me that you chose kubernetes as the first implementation for this standard. After all, if a large part of OAM's functionality is provided by k8s out of the box (auto-scaling, for example) it's not very useful to someone who knows the existing tech. Kubernetes is, by and large, already portable with minimal dev resources between the major cloud vendors and/or on-prem resources.

On the other hand, if you can pair already-written software with a collection of VMs and place an OAM layer between the machines and business logic, the portability of your code between OAM-compatible vendors becomes a selling point for the standard. I know a large project like this is a team effort, but can you shed any light on the reasons behind your decision-making and prioritization towards kubernetes?

[resouer]

OAM is the app mgmt API for K8s, while not only for K8s. So implement it firstly on K8s is a natural choice. You may argue hey why I need app mgmt API for K8s. Well, have you ever tried to expose full Deployment api for developers to describe their app? My personal experience is super messy ...

[williamallthing]

Dapr is definitely not Microsoft's answer to Istio (see e.g. [1]). But if you are looking for something like Istio but that actually works out of the box (zero config), I'd highly recommend checking out Linkerd.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21283956

[jeethsuresh]

Good to know - I haven't been keeping up with this thread.

I'll have to check out linkerd, thanks for the rec!

[gabrtv]

> If Azure comes out with an implementation of OAM that uses their VSIs, I'll get interested.

Gabe from the Azure team.

VSIs? I'd love to understand this better.

[jeethsuresh]

Virtual Server Instances - VMs :)