This rings true every time I see someone talking about K8s. Companies just want something that is customizable to their workflow, they don't want a ready-made PaaS offering. Google's play was to provide an industry standard API interface that is available everywhere (which is essentially what Kubernetes is). Now that the control plane for compute is commoditized, GCP et al can sell complements - BigQuery, TensorFlow, GCS etc.
I think Anthos-like solutions are the future. Just buy the cheapest hardware from your local Datacentre or BareMetal providers like Hetzner and run GCP, AWS or some other flavor of software on top of it. This is also where Teleco Clouds are moving with OpenRAN and 5G, they are tired of being locked-in to full stack vendors like Nokia and Ericsson and want interchangeable solutions compatible through a common interface
Well done sir or madame.
It's a powerful abstraction and it's very liberating.
I understand the cynicism, don't get me wrong, but that doesn't mean it's all bad. It definitely feels like a net positive to society even if at times it's unbearable.
Somewhere between "I'm small enough that all of the cloud providers are about the same" and "I'm big enough that I can leverage them against each other to get a better deal, but still small enough to not be on metal" there is maybe a sweet spot where I really do need to be mobile across providers in a push-button way. People in e.g. blockchain use k8s to good effect because they want to run a big distributed system with loose-ish central organization, and that's a real thing. It's also a niche.
I never said Kubernetes was useless full stop. I said that places where it's the right call are niche.
My current gig is humble, a usually-raman-profitable type garage band, we're like 5 engineers with Ethernet cables in our living rooms and a bigger AWS bill than feels fair, and if I proposed to any of the ex-FAANG type people involved that we should get serious about Kubernetes they'd laugh themselves pink in the face and resume typing. We can give our machines names and remember them all, there are a few dozen of them, but that's still "pets".
If we're fortunate and hard-working enough to need 1k machines, I'll spin up a ZK instance or something and write a little Nix/bash.
I won't be networking at KubeCon 2023 unless I lose a bet to one of my peers. I've got work to do.
I do entirely agree with you, I think: there are too many companies using Kubernetes prematurely, but...
It's kind of turned out okay? Because of this, the ecosystem seems to be improving and it's easier than ever for small shops to get started. And selling software that targets Kubernetes is leagues better than targeting Ubuntu or Red Hat or specific kernels.
> I'll spin up a ZK instance
If I never have to run another ZooKeeper instance again I'll die happy.
My point was that unless you’re running on metal, the cloud people built all this shit, and much, much better than k8s (or Tupperware for that matter).
They’ll stick you Docker container inside a VM happily because people pay them to do it, but it’s redundant.
Google didn’t OSS Tensorflow out of the goodness of their hearts, they did it to sell TPU hours on GCP.
k8s is likewise not charitable giving: it’s to sell managed Kubernetes on GCP, and subtle nudges to get people to make it their careers are uh, just business I guess.
Provisioning as code is in a sad state: Chef/Ansible/Salt/friends can’t deliver on idempotency, Nix is too complicated for most. So people use a container primitive (Docker) to work around that.
This has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with service discover and failover and auto-grow and other Kube shit.
AWS does all that already. Better.
This is a borderline-cynical business strategy on the part of the cloud providers, and judging from the religious fervor around k8s (someone upthread has it in their username for Christ’s sake), it’s working.