| I think it'll be quite interesting to see how the smaller players organize themselves around the multitude of cluster resource management tools emerging as a natural reaction to Kubernetes growing out of the work Google's done on Borg. I am curious to see how long of a shake-out period will exist before there's either a de facto stack of "compute resource" tooling, or if there's always going to be a highly fragmented and diverse way to accomplish your goals. Just off the top of my head (and there's way more) I'm thinking about Tectonic[1], Mesosphere[2], Rocket [3], Kismatic [4] as a few examples. As a technologist and a planner, it's been challenging to see far enough into the future to decide on what tools to devote myself to learning at this point. I do think we're certainly in a "post-public cloud" timeline where we're getting good enough (or will be in 6-12 months) at abstracting virtualization right up to a millimeter or two below the application layer of our stacks. How we choose to do so seems to be currently up in the air. In my mind, this opens up the possibility of compute as a resource much wider than had previously been possible. We'll be less reliant upon Azure, AWS, and GCP's mixture os Paas and Iaas and much more interested in compute as a resource, likely from bare metal or private cloud providers. I'm looking forward to the increased efficiency (both through compute power and cost) and security available in moving from a application-level virtualization to operating system-level virtualization. [1] https://coreos.com/blog/announcing-tectonic/
[2] https://github.com/mesosphere
[3] https://github.com/coreos/rkt
[4] https://github.com/kismatic |
I think your observations are interesting. From my (somewhat biased) viewpoint I don't think we will enter into a 'post cloud' world. There are very real efficiency gains from running at public cloud provider scale, and the economics you see right now are not what I would consider 'steady state'. Beyond that the systems we are introducing with Kubernetes are focused on offering high levels of dynamism. They will ultimately fit your workload precisely to the amount of compute infrastructure you need, hopefully saving you quite a lot of money vs provisioning for peak. It will make a lot of sense to lease the amount of 'logical infrastructure' you need vs provisioning static physical infrastructure.
There are however legitimate advantages to our customers in being able to pick their providers and change providers as their needs change. We see the move to high levels of portability as a great way to keep ourselves and other providers honest.
-- craig