Thoughts About the Importance of Serving Application Developers

A few weeks ago, I attended and spoke at KubeCon EU. It was a massive event attended by around 4,700 people. I was reminded of the OpenStack summit in Paris in November 2014. It had the same level of crazy hype, vendor displays and massive conference party at a public venue that was taken over by programmers. However, I felt there was an underlying problem with the whole spectacle: everyone I talked to was either an operator or an SRE. Where were all the application developers? Aren’t those the people that all this complex infrastructure is supposed to serve? Is this community really connected with the needs of its users? And it made me wonder: is Kubernetes too complex? Will it end up collapsing under the weight of its own complexity? Will it fade away as OpenStack has seemed to since 2014?

Ok, now that I’ve gotten a bit dramatic and hyperbolic, I should say that I ultimately don’t think that will be the case. Kubernetes has a few advantages going for it that OpenStack never had. First, it’s already more scalable, so it is actually able to deliver on the dream of cluster scheduling at scale on environments of thousands of servers. Second, service offerings for hosted Kubernetes have been opened up by all three of the major cloud vendors. In just under four short years, Kubernetes has positioned itself to become the lingua franca of the cloud and infrastructure world. Yet the problem of complexity is still a vexing one.

Source: DZone