Kubernetes, the way to Private Cloud?
During Kubecon, I sat with people that managed developers and I asked a lot of questions.
Can you get public cloud by deploying Kubernetes? That’s a question I posed in an earlier CTO Short. The short answer? It ain’t that easy. Kubernetes can be a part of the solution but isn’t the solution in itself. Or at least that’s that impression I received after talking to three developer managers.
During Kubecon US held in Los Angeles, CA. I encountered the two ends and middle of companies on a Kubernetes journey. One company created a Developer Experience group that ensured developers could simply write code and hit deploy. It is a cloud-like as private cloud gets. However, the team did a lot of heavy lifting around the cloud-native stack to create the experience.
On the other end of the spectrum is a developer manager struggling to teach his team basic processes such as creating packages using Docker commands. That second developer team spends a lot of time simply getting a container environment working on each team members laptop.
What about that “middle?” The last team uses tooling such as Jenkins X to streamline the development environment effort. K8s can and may be the best platform to get to a private cloud infrastructure. It ain’t a easy path.