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by chinathrow 2346 days ago
Wait till you learn that some F-16s run with Kubernetes on board.

https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern...

"“One point for the team was to demonstrate that it could be done,” Chaillan said. He challenged the Air Force and its partners to get Kubernetes up and running on a jet in 45 days, and while that was as difficult as it sounds, the team met the goal and F-16s are now running three concurrent Kubernetes clusters, he said."

5 comments

I’m having enough trouble seeing why you’d want one Kube cluster on an F-16, never mind three.
Probably because there are tons of censors on modern jets and you need something to manage them.

However I wouldn't use a civilian made system for this, you're going to spend the rest of the program lifetime correcting security holes.

Because civilian made is not invented here?
I don't understand how you can even imply that it's because of a stupid reason like that.

No the reason is that there are fundamental differences in the risk profile of the civilian and military sector.

Adversaries will insert spies in mission critical projects if they are publicly accessible. Once the main contributors stop maintaining the project the military will have to hire people and train them for maintenance but all the people that can train the replacements have already left. The military has to verify every single line of code every time the code base is updated.

All of these problems don't exist in projects where the full life cycle is taken care of by the military.

The internet of things suffers from the same problems. Once you are dependent on a vendor and that vendor shuts down or cancels a product you're stuck with a lot of paperweights. The vendor is usually not acting in your interest.

If there's one open source project government can easily adopt it is kubernetes.

Have you heard of the cloud native computing foundation where members have committed to longterm investment in kubernetes development?

Kubernetes is the commoditization of infrastructure layers and serious forward looking companies are member of CNFC.

I assume you are aware of the history of Silicon Valley with defense contractors. And you probably also heard that the FBI approached Paypall for fraud detection capabilities. Hence Peter Thiel's venture Palantir.

https://www.cncf.io/about/members/

“One point for the team was to demonstrate that it could be done,”
I guess some sensor/radar data processing ?
I can run Kubernettes on my laptop even while in orbit.
Oh no, oh no no no... Please tell me you are joking. The good news though is that World War III is officially cancelled now. If anyone will ever decide to start it, they would probably debug crashing pods and spaghetti code in startup scripts for years afterwards.
All avionics are done these days in the form of communicating microservices, the main difference is that scheduling and routing is static and assigned upfront.
i was 100% certain this comment was a parody.. until i clicked on the link...
At least it's on board.

ODIN being in the cloud is nothing new - a big pain point with ALIS is the fact that it's cloud based.