🗂 Kubernetes, what it’s for

The reason that Kubernetes is successful is because people look at it and they don’t understand why they need it until they see it do stuff. Then they say “Oh my God, I need that!”I can’t say how many talks and presentations I’ve done in front of skeptical audiences where they don’t understand what it’s for. Just by showing short and simple features like “let’s do a rolling update” I watch what happens. I stop it halfway through and then roll it back and they’re like ”that’s what I do by hand. It takes me a ton more energy than what you just did.” So I think it captures things that people really wanted.

On DevOps-oriented app teams vs. SREs:

I’m a little bit sad how complex Kubernetes is right now. In some sense Kubernetes is not for end users, it’s for people who set up clusters and clusters are for end users. At Google, we’ve always separated the roles that were involved in cluster management into two very specific ones: the cluster operators and the application operators.

The cluster operators know everything about Borg and they know a little bit about each application that runs on Borg in a profile they understand, but not the details. They’re able to keep the Borg clusters up and running and they have SLAs around that and so forth. The application teams (like Google search or Gmail) come in and they say “I know how to use Borg but I don’t know how Borg runs and I don’t need to.” They come in and they run their applications on top of Borg and that split gives people a really nice ability to focus. Kubernetes is really aimed at those cluster operators. thenewstack.io/kubernete…