Kubernetes, The Competitive Play
Was Kubernetes just a ploy from Google to gain a better foothold into the cloud computing market, or at least even the playing field?
This has been a rumor over the past several years, when people get to discussing why Google released the Kubernetes container orchestration platform as open source at DockerCon 2014, and subsequently provided seed money to start an independent organization, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, to manage the technology. Why not just keep it for itself, as a competitive feature for its own platform?
At the time, the Google Cloud Platform was a distant third in cloud computing market share, trailing Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. One of the more interesting aspects of Kubernetes today is that, in theory, it allows users to run workloads across multiple clouds. In effect, K8s — based on Google’s own internal software for managing virtual containers — could threaten to turn any cloud service providers into interchangeable commodities. One of the greatest fears for any technology company executive, of course, is to have its company’s technology become a commodity, one that is easily replicable by others.
Now, in an exciting new documentary underwritten by Honeypot.io, "Kubernetes: The Documentary” certainly provides more context around the release of Kubernetes at the time.
One telling quote in the doc came from one of Kubernetes’ creators, Joe Beda, who recalled the thinking at the time:
How do we change things up — how do we shake the snow globe in a way that may not be all about Google, but at least gives Google a fighting chance to be able to start grabbing some of these customers, and to start being that balance against the dominance that AWS had at the time.
The doc also notes that many Google execs were hesitant to open source the technology. Google’s head of technical infrastructure, for instance, wondered what Google would get out of it.
Kubernetes, of course, became a huge success, gaining considerable traction in the open source community. By 2016, anywhere from 600 to 1,000 outside contributors were involved in each release. And today Kubernetes is the de facto container orchestration engine and, perhaps more importantly, the foundation for cloud native computing.
But has Google benefitted from its release? Certainly, Google’s engineer expertise in this complex technology has brought in customers. But it is still only in third place in the cloud provider race for revenue, with both AWS and Azure also making bank with their own customized Kubernetes services. And the dream of easy multicloud deployments is still a ways off.
But in any case, the industry as a whole has certainly benefitted from Kubernetes — which points to a direction of more dynamic and flexible “cloud native” computing. And for that, we can thank Google.
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