Sounds like full employment theorem at work. I haven't kicked the tires on kubernetes yet but I don't really see what all the fuss is about. I liked AMPLab and Mesos but I guess that doesn't have the branding power of big G.
100% the case. k8s is not a terrible thing and there are good uses for it, but the vast majority of people who are using it don't understand what it's doing, and don't understand that their application is not equipped to handle that type of execution model.
Just yesterday I had someone tell me "Kubernetes was like magic and it made everything easy". This is absolutely not the thing a serious/honest Kubernetes user would say. Kubernetes is a big heavy thing, and it's a lot of trouble to maintain it; generally, far more trouble than using sane configuration management on VMs would be (you need sane configuration management in k8s too, so you aren't swapping one complexity for another). We're reaching "MongoDB is web scale" levels of hysteria around Kubernetes.
Example of the insanity: my account on HN has been censured for the "tedious" nature in which I would assert that Kubernetes is not a good platform for databases.
There is a serious, concerted effort by Google to put k8s at the forefront, and they are not playing games with it.
I'd also say "kubernetes is magic". It's an insanity to understand and set up once, but once you've done that, and keep up with changes, it makes deploying services much easier.
For example, in the past I first ran several services directly on bare metal, but Ubuntu's LTS versions didn't have the packages yet (and libraries were incompatible) for one service I needed, and while debian had these, it didn't have them for a second service I needed.
So I went with containerization, and properly split these things up, so I could run all services I needed together. But I had two servers, and manually migrating them whenever I needed to restart one server for updates became painful. And it made automated updates impossible, so every ~3 days a crontab would run apt to update, and if a reboot was necessary, email me. So every 3 days I had to manually migrate containers over, and restart. Very annoying. Plus all the ingress rules complications.
Then I started using kubernetes, and despite needing 8 months to actually understand it, and work with it, it actually is magic. I don't have to manually check every 3 days if apt fucked again with the packages. I don't have to check if I need to reboot, and migrate containers. Thanks to k8s and container linux everything migrates automatically and reboots. I don't have to worry about all this stuff anymore, it just works. Yes, I have to worry about k8s updates, and keep my configs up to date — but that's another amazing thing: recently I had to rebuild my cluster from scratch, and thanks to container linux's cloud-init and kubernetes I could simply restart all servers with the new config, and they'd automatically recreate the cluster, and load the storage data back from backups. In 25 minutes the entire cluster was rebuilt from scratch and everything was back up.
Yes, kubernetes is the opposite of easy for setting it up, but that's a constant cost. All additional services you run on it are basically free in terms of maintenance cost.
> There is a serious, concerted effort by Google to put k8s at the forefront, and they are not playing games with it.
Well no, and why would they? Containerisation is one way to crowbar workloads out of VMs and AWS. Since they're coming from behind, their best strategy is to deny everyone else any oxygen by creating an opensource winner. And it worked: Amazon have added EKS to ECS, Azure added AKS to ACI.
Google does a lot of good, but they don't sink millions upon millions of dollars into things just for the hell of it.
In general they have been pretty aloof at product marketing and development. Microsoft came in with a weaker product early on and has really been cleaning up with Azure going head to head with Amazon and GCE.
G as a whole has always been pretty much the opposite of Apple in terms of fit and finish, and in the past it was no mongo in terms of dev swoon. But I agree with cookiecaper, they have somehow cracked the code for mongo level of installing meme based software architecture on the masses. I would _love_ to understand how that works, for selfish entrepreneurial reasons :)
I agree that Google is coming from behind in enterprise sales. AWS have the long headstart and Microsoft have an existing, massive sales org.
Cloud computing fits almost none of their DNA. It requires intensive sales rather than automation. It's a volume business with thin margins (rather than a network-effect business with fat margins).
But it's also a business in which they have the best technology out of the three and the first plausible alternative revenue stream they've ever found. I don't think they are going to stop elbowing their way into this, and neither are Microsoft.
The difference is, Google is the only company that is both trying to sell cloud services, and giving their product away to their competitors.
The company I work for uses multiple cloud providers, but does not use GCE. They don't even think about it. I think the reason is a lack of confidence, along with other business and technical reasons. Google just isn't a serious company when it comes to supporting large businesses. Like it or not, that old adage about never getting fired for buying IBM is still true.
