kubernetes-executive-summary

The problem it solves

• Utilization
  • Computers in datacenters are under-utlitzed.
  • Virtual machines are the wrong level of granularity for applications
  • By containerizing applications, you can get significantly better utilization, leading to lower costs
  • By abstracting the underlying compute, you can utilize on-premise compute and burst to cloud.
• Discreet layers of operations
  • Hardware (actually racking servers, wiring machines together etc.)
  • Cluster operations
    • create and maintain the clusters
  • Application developers
    • easily use resources provided by the cluster
    • Kubernetes helps abstract away heterogeneity of underlying hardware so devs don't have to think about that
    • Eases creating microservices
• Abstracting compute
  • Move more easily between on-premise and cloud-based computing
  • developers can run exact same services locally, too.

Why is it so interesting?

• Google
  • brings their expertise
    • has more than ten years experience running containerized services
    • It's their third-generation platform, many core contributors to their first platform are contributors to Kubernetes
  • will continue to be heavily invested in it
    • Runs their one-click container engine hosting platform on Kubernetes
    • One of their key areas of growth (taking away from Amazon's AWS business)
  • have built as a community project
    • ceded control to a foundation run by the Linux Foundation
    • Built off of best-of-breed open source components (like etcd from CoreOS for key-value store)
  • Why?
    • Easiest way to get people onto their hosting platform. Extremely minimal lock-in lowers barriers. Google can just sell compute.
• Other companies (Google is less than half of the contribution now)
  • Amazon
    • Have a competing platform, ECS, which has more limited functionality, and nobody is using outside of AWS.
  • CoreOS
    • had their own offering, called Fleet, which they dropped immediately after seeing Kubernetes in action
    • Have been contributing to Kubernetes
    • Have a higher-level dashboard aimed at enabling CI/CD on Kubernetes (called Tectonic). This is going to be an interesting space for a bit.
  • Docker
    • Docker Swarm's popularity is way down.
    • Kubernetes will also be adding support for the competing rkt container format
    • Docker has been pulled into the Open Container Initiative, because the writing is on the wall.
  • Engine Yard
    • Deis is another PaaS built on top of Kubernetes.
  • Microsoft
    • hired one of the Kubernetes creators away from Google
    • He will head up their efforts to provide Kubernetes hosting on Azure (in beta now).
  • Box
    • Runs several clusters of production services on Kubernetes
  • Red Hat
    • Contributing extensively to Kubernetes, and is basing their OpenShift PaaS on top of it
  • Startups
    • The other two co-founders have also left Google and created a startup to monitize enterprise integration.

Referring Pages