I don't hate Kubernetes anymore
You see son, over the years a relationship goes through changes.
It has taken a long time. But I finally got Kubernetes. I don’t mean I get Kubernetes from a technology perspective. It’s a fairly straightforward concept. You have containers, and you need a solution to orchestrate containers. There’s the cluster, pods, etc. What I didn’t get was the why. What problem did containers and, by extension, K8s solve?
If you wanted a modern application development experience, why not simply adopt a public cloud provider? Why go through the pains of containers and K8s?
It has taken me years of having on-the-ground conversations to understand the problem. I support enterprises that build or buy, deploy, and manage monolithic applications. I don’t get to “see” the problem Kubernetes solves too often. Most of those customers selected the AWS control plane.
I’m an operator. The A16z report on cloud paradox helped a lot. I understand cloud repatriation. Trying to replicate public cloud services on-premises proves a futile challenge. At Lockheed Martin, we went through those pains back in 2012.
I accept the idea of a born in the cloud company needing to reproduce existing common cloud patterns on-premises while making the developer experience as simple as or more straightforward than the public cloud. Thus, repatriation is an excellent anchor use case for me to grock cloud-native.
It doesn’t hurt that the Kubernetes community as a whole no longer dismiss legacy IT. Seeing how Google Anthos embraces vSphere shows that the cultures are starting to realize the need for harmony.