Another great KubeCon talk from Abby Bangser imploring the Kubernetes people to remember how important platforms are: they make all of his stuff usable for developers and valuable to the organizations that run it all. Without a platform, you’re just put another bottleneck in place.
Also, see the go she started, along with others, at codifying what makes a good platform, at a technical level, here.
Kubernetes is the bottleneck.
She would never really put it that way, and maybe even disagree. Abby is the positive, helpful and hopeful voice of platform advocacy. And better: accurate and true.
Some of us who slogged through and lost the “container wars” of the 2010’s can’t shake off defeat and the reversion to CaaS-chaos. Which is to say:
“Kubernetes is the bottleneck” is my way of saying it.
Here’s more of my rewording in through the jaundiced eyes of the salty. Whatever type of infrastructure you have (in the modern day, IaaS and CaaS) is going to become a bottleneck unless you put a good platform in place. It’s going to harm more than help if what you want is to use software to run your organization. Once your developers 10x+ their speed of releases with AI, this bottleneck is going to become glowing red-hot obvious.
Infrastructure as bottleneck happens over and over. If you’re building out and/or running Kubernetes, pay attention to what she’s telling you - and see part one of Abby’s ongoing platform engineering thinking in her Atlanta talk, another important talk to watch if you haven’t.
Get a platform now. Layer it on-top of Kubernetes if you feel like you need Kubernetes. Having a platform on-top will save you years of puttering around at the CaaS level, millions of dollars, and that pushing on a bruise feeling of IT transformation failure.
You’re going to end up with a platform no matter what. It can be an accidental platform that just becomes another hunk of tech debt and “we spend 80% of time on maintenance” - more likely, dozens to hundreds of little accidental platforms that embody the yoke of “not my fault, now my problem” for ops…or it can be a purposefully built one.