K8s doesn't solve problems which haven't been solved before. It doesn't do any particular magic in itself. The handful of things kubernetes does, are easy to explain but the impact is big nonetheless.
It is trustworthy because it is FOSS, certified and lots of companies use it because of this.
Lets take Java vs. PHP: PHP is developed by one group of people. Thats it. There was facebook hhvm/php alternative which then became something independent of php. Quite frustrating if you were hoping that Facebook gives back to the community.
Then take java: you have a spec, you have a reference implementation and then you have validated alternatives of it. At least you had this for a long time on the JavaEE area and with the oracle support thing, you also now have independent JVMs. This makes Java, in my opinion, better. This makes it a great platform, easy to migrate out of one ecosystem and it prevents 'vendor lock-in'.
Nomad is from hashicorp. You have mesos which works well as well. But no normal cloud provider provides nomad or mesos as a service. They provide their own thing. App Engine, Heroku etc.
Kubernetes broke through this. Lots of smaller cloud providers provide a managed kubernetes. You can see kubernetes here as the universal appengine if you like. Google provides Autogke. Their managed kubernetes service which abstracts away k8s even further. This interface, k8s provides, allows you to run your k8s based workloads at home, onprem, in private, in any other cloud provider AND on Google.
Instead of having Vendor lock-in it switches the operation model of those companies: They can't lock you in as easily before so they need to make the best offering for it. It switches the mental model and the level of competition to a more consumer/customer focused level.
It is very similar on a mental model switch as what Microsoft did with linux: Instead of hating against linux, they embrase it now and incorporate it. I never considered windows as a good developer OS just because of the missing shell support or the required workarounds or the non native cli feeling it gave you. Now i can use WSL2 and it becomes a real option.
For me, k8s is THE FOSS infrastructure abstraction layer. Protected and aligned through the CNCF and certification process.
Hi you are getting into details out of the scope of this article. I want to address your points but in an article, then we can link it on HN and discuss it there.
The CNCF is an entirely different beast... which I have already started writing about already. It is the Mos Eisley of Open source. I am just kidding, it is not that bad.
You asked why I was writing this, and I told you why.
It is trustworthy because it is FOSS, certified and lots of companies use it because of this.
Lets take Java vs. PHP: PHP is developed by one group of people. Thats it. There was facebook hhvm/php alternative which then became something independent of php. Quite frustrating if you were hoping that Facebook gives back to the community.
Then take java: you have a spec, you have a reference implementation and then you have validated alternatives of it. At least you had this for a long time on the JavaEE area and with the oracle support thing, you also now have independent JVMs. This makes Java, in my opinion, better. This makes it a great platform, easy to migrate out of one ecosystem and it prevents 'vendor lock-in'.
Nomad is from hashicorp. You have mesos which works well as well. But no normal cloud provider provides nomad or mesos as a service. They provide their own thing. App Engine, Heroku etc.
Kubernetes broke through this. Lots of smaller cloud providers provide a managed kubernetes. You can see kubernetes here as the universal appengine if you like. Google provides Autogke. Their managed kubernetes service which abstracts away k8s even further. This interface, k8s provides, allows you to run your k8s based workloads at home, onprem, in private, in any other cloud provider AND on Google.
Instead of having Vendor lock-in it switches the operation model of those companies: They can't lock you in as easily before so they need to make the best offering for it. It switches the mental model and the level of competition to a more consumer/customer focused level.
It is very similar on a mental model switch as what Microsoft did with linux: Instead of hating against linux, they embrase it now and incorporate it. I never considered windows as a good developer OS just because of the missing shell support or the required workarounds or the non native cli feeling it gave you. Now i can use WSL2 and it becomes a real option.
For me, k8s is THE FOSS infrastructure abstraction layer. Protected and aligned through the CNCF and certification process.
Btw. the CNCF is from the Linux Foundation.