More than 12,000 attendees gathered this week in San Diego to discuss all things containers, Kubernetes and cloud-native at KubeCon.
Kubernetes, the container orchestration tool, turned five this year, and the technology appears to be reaching a maturity phase where it accelerates beyond early adopters to reach a more mainstream group of larger business users.
That’s not to say that there isn’t plenty of work to be done, or that most enterprise companies have completely bought in, but it’s clearly reached a point where containerization is on the table. If you think about it, the whole cloud-native ethos makes sense for the current state of computing and how large companies tend to operate.
If this week’s conference showed us anything, it’s an acknowledgment that it’s a multi-cloud, hybrid world. That means most companies are working with multiple public cloud vendors, while managing a hybrid environment that includes those vendors — as well as existing legacy tools that are probably still on-premises — and they want a single way to manage all of this.
The promise of Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies, in general, is that it gives these companies a way to thread this particular needle, or at least that’s the theory.
Kubernetes to the rescue
Photo: Ron Miller/TechCrunch
If you were to look at the Kubernetes hype cycle, we are probably right about at the peak where many think Kubernetes can solve every computing problem they might have. That’s probably asking too much, but cloud-native approaches have a lot of promise.
Craig McLuckie, VP of R&D for cloud-native apps at VMware, was one of the original developers of Kubernetes at Google in 2014. VMware thought enough of the importance of cloud-native technologies that it bought his former company, Heptio, for $550 million last year.
As we head into this phase of pushing Kubernetes and related tech into larger companies, McLuckie acknowledges it creates a set of new challenges. “We are at this crossing the chasm moment where you look at the way the world is — and you look at the opportunity of what the world might become — and a big part of what motivated me to join VMware is that it’s successfully proven its ability to help enterprise organizations navigate their way through these disruptive changes,” McLuckie told TechCrunch.
He says that Kubernetes does actually solve this fundamental management problem companies face in this multi-cloud, hybrid world. “At the end of the day, Kubernetes is an abstraction. It’s just a way of organizing your infrastructure and making it accessible to the people that need to consume it.
“And I think it’s a fundamentally better abstraction than we have access to today. It has some very nice properties. It is pretty consistent in every environment that you might want to operate, so it really makes your on-prem software feel like it’s operating in the public cloud,” he explained.
Simplifying a complex world
One of the reasons Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies are gaining in popularity is because the technology allows companies to think about hardware differently. There is a big difference between virtual machines and containers, says Joe Fernandes, VP of product for Red Hat cloud platform.
“Sometimes people conflate containers as another form of virtualization, but with virtualization, you’re virtualizing hardware, and the virtual machines that you’re creating are like an actual machine with its own operating system. With containers, you’re virtualizing the process,” he said.
He said that this means it’s not coupled with the hardware. The only thing it needs to worry about is making sure it can run Linux, and Linux runs everywhere, which explains how containers make it easier to manage across different types of infrastructure. “It’s more efficient, more affordable, and ultimately, cloud-native allows folks to drive more automation,” he said.
Bringing it into the enterprise
Photo: Ron Miller/TechCrunch
It’s one thing to convince early adopters to change the way they work, but as this technology enters the mainstream. Gabe Monroy, partner program manager at Microsoft says to carry this technology to the next level, we have to change the way we talk about it.
“I would say that if we are asking enterprise developers to learn Kubernetes, we will have failed. We need to change the conversation and focus on presenting developers with as little conceptual overhead as possible to get their job done,” he said.
For CIOs who might view this as yet another new technology they must embrace out of the fear of being left behind, Monroy sees Kubernetes and cloud-native as different. “What’s different this time around is that we are doing this on a base of technology that’s open, portable and has broad buy-in across the industry,” Monroy said, a view that should help reluctant CIOs get buy-in across their organizations.
Making sound decisions
McLuckie points out that the cloud promised simplification, but in fact, a multi-cloud world has created new complexity for companies who have to work with multiple vendors and all that entails. The promise of cloud-native is that it will enable these companies to put their workloads where it makes most sense for them, but it’s not always a simple matter to get there.
“Our mission has consistently been to make sure that public cloud is a [viable] hosting destination where customers can make a choice that makes most sense to them from a cost and economics perspective, but how do we move the line from hard to easy? Technologies like Kubernetes are certainly moving the line [toward easier], as it matures and becomes applicable to a broad array of workloads and as we start to see the ISV ecosystem rally around the technology and look at it as a natural destination for a lot of what they run, it will certainly reduce the complexity. But so much of this is about skills and having access to the expertise that enterprises need to be able to make that transition [to cloud-native],” McLuckie said.
Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO at Ubuntu, says that he started his company because he cared about the open-source model and that the complexity some perceive in cloud-native shouldn’t drive additional cost.
“Some people here will make a big deal about how complex and sophisticated they can make Kubernetes. Whereas I think we’re much more interested in trying to make that zero-cost, make it so that we don’t charge anything extra for Kubernetes, and we work with the cloud vendors, so they don’t charge anything extra for the Kubernetes service, other than the underlying compute you’re using to run it.
“And in both cases, we work to make it so that the management of that is as simple and as cheap as possible. So, our interests are aligned with users around trying to be sure that operating Kubernetes itself isn’t an economic barrier to getting started,” he said.
As Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies mature, and a growing ecosystem of tools develops around it, it creates an inherent layer of complexity trying to keep up and understand all of that. If the vendors can find a way to hide some of that complexity, it will go a long way to encouraging adoption in the enterprise.
The technology has reached a point where it has to do that to take it beyond the early adopters and deeper into business. The notion of multi-cloud and hybrid only makes getting there even more critical.