5 Reasons Why Kubernetes is the real deal!

I spent last week at the KubeCon/CNCF Summit in Austin. I've been to a lot of tech conferences in my life, but there was something different about this one. Sure there's a ton of hype around Kubernetes but it's something more. Not only did attendance go up by a staggering amount vs. last year (over 4000 people were in Austin) but it was about WHO was and wasn't there. The content was solid, the Linux Foundation did its usual fabulous job running the event, but the real highlight for me was about the WHO. Developers showed up in droves, as did end users. It is quite unique to have such user attendance without a huge influx of sales people and the usual lurker crowd. It frankly reminded me of the early days of VMworld or possibly OpenStack. In a totally unscientific poll of some of the brightest people I know, every single one is convinced that Kubernetes will be at the heart of a large and growing % of infrastructure. On-premises and in the Cloud. WHY?

1) Kubernetes solves a REAL problem

The beauty of containers is that they're both cheap to run and easy to spin up / spin down. The result is that if you start using containers the one sure thing is you're going to have a lot of them. Not only a lot of them, but also a lot of change.

2) Kubernetes is NOT a Science Project

Many Open Source projects come from one developer's crazy/beautiful idea...but lots and lots has to be done before the use cases are built out and proven. In this case, similar to MapReduce/Hadoop, the primary use case and even most key foundational technical elements have been proved out, in production at Google for years.

3) Commercial support is already here

Like many early adopters of other Open Source technology, early users of Kubernetes are picking up the raw upstream bits and making it work. BUT, like hiking with a good buddy, should you stumble there's someone ready to give you a hand. RedHat is clearly the clear leader here with a very impressive offering in OpenShift. Kudos to them for building a solid commercial offering while being one the top contributor* to the ecosystem after Google. But if OpenShift ain't your thing, there are a number of credible startups also ready to help (Heptio, Platform 9, CoreOS, and Kublr come top of mind). Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, VMware, and pretty much every major infrastructure incumbent either already has or is sprinting to provide top shelf support for Kubernetes.

4) Plenty of meat is left on the Kubernetes bone for a thriving ecosystem

As important as container orchestration is, no one would ever argue that it's all you need to run a cloud infrastructure. HW, OS, virtualization, storage, networking, monitoring, services...all represent real $$$ kubernetes users will spend. There's a race on to show users that X technology is the bestest partner for your Kubernetes deployment. As the pie continues to grow, look for this rush to only grow...but there should be plenty of money to go around for those successful in showing customer value.

5) There's no elephant in the room

Often in the early days of an open source project, one company dominates the community. Naturally everyone else wonders about their motives, complains about their motives, struggles to get a voice. Often the project's spiritual leader(s) struggle with community vs. monetization. In this case, Google's motives are super clear - Strong Kubernetes adoption is more better for Google's Cloud Platform than other options (especially pure VMs). Because this threatens few players in the ecosystem, this means that there's a surprisingly low amount of political bickering and positioning in the project compared to what you might otherwise expect. This is an impressively functional community compared to other projects (Looking at you Node and Docker/Moby).

The fact that Kubernetes is part of larger umbrella (CNCF) also means that new projects can be incubated outside of Kubernetes, but in the same family. It's a great model and helps deal with the "focus vs. let 1000 flowers bloom" conundrum many open source projects struggle with.

Bonus reason # 6)

Kelsey Hightower is dope y'all! Having the industry's most impressive evangelist, able to pull out a brand new demo for every conference he goes to, imminently relatable, widely liked, and representing the largest, most respected contributor to the project is a huge boon. Google, if you're reading, give the man a raise!

Conclusion

Kubernetes is here to stay. I predict an explosion of interest, investment, and bandwagon jumping to occur around Kubernetes over the next couple years (some may argue I'm a year late w/ this prediction and wouldn't be completely off). The only caution here is that Kubernetes' growth is inherently limited by the speed and appetite for re-writing legacy apps in a cloud-native way. It's going to be a fun few years.

* Correction: Original article stated RedHat may be the top contributor to Kubernetes. They are in fact 2nd to Google. Thanks to Janet Kuo for providing graph of Kubernetes contributions. Original source is the Linux Foundation: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/participating-open-source-communities/