[pm90]

Kubernetes automates and standardizes some of the best practices around building reliable systems in a platform agnostic way. We never got there with VMs: Amazon ec2 instances are not the same as GCE instances are not the same as VMware VMs but a kubernetes api is the same everywhere (and providers are incentivized to standardize their offerings). Whatever comes next would have to be something that can standardize even more.

For the next 10 years, I don’t see kubernetes going away but rather evolving into something that’s dead simple for anyone to setup and use easily. It’s flexibility in being a platform capable of easily running whatever you want to is somewhat unmatched.

Honestly the only way I see k8s being replaced is by a fork if there is some Governance dispute. I don’t see the platform changing for at least 10-20 years.

[secondcoming]

> We never got there with VMs: Amazon ec2 instances are not the same as GCE instances are not the same as VMware VMs

This is true but is that such a huge deal? We successfully moved from AWS to GCP and it wasn't a massive deal; just different terminology for the same concepts.

[pm90]

It really depends on the kind of engineering org that you operate. As a general rule, more standards and easier migration paths win.

Compare that to redeploying your k8s manifests from an EKS cluster to a GKE cluster or vice versa. Its definitely not fully platform agnostic, but it requires much less engineering effort.