INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
More than 12,000 attendees gathered this week in San Diego to discuss all things containers, Kubernetes and cloud-native at
KubeCon.
Kubernetes, the container orchestration tool, turned five this year, and the technology appears to be reaching a maturity phase
where it accelerates beyond early adopters to reach a more mainstream group of larger business users.
That not to say that there isn&t
plenty of work to be done, or that most enterprise companies have completely bought in, but it clearly reached a point where
containerization is on the table
If you think about it, the whole cloud-native ethos makes sense for the current state of computing and how large companies tend to
operate.
If this week conference showed us anything, it an acknowledgment that it a multi-cloud, hybrid world
That means most companies are working with multiple public cloud vendors, while managing a hybrid environment that includes those vendors
— as well as existing legacy tools that are probably still on-premises — and they want a single way to manage all of this.
The promise
of Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies, in general, is that it gives these companies a way to thread this particular needle, or at
least that the theory.
Kubernetes to the rescue
Photo: Ron Miller/TechCrunch
If you were to look at the Kubernetes hype cycle, we are
probably right about at the peak where many think Kubernetes can solve every computing problem they might have
That probably asking too much, but cloud-native approaches have a lot of promise.
Craig McLuckie, VP of R-D for cloud-native apps at
VMware, was one of the original developers of Kubernetes at Google in 2014
VMware thought enough of the importance of cloud-native technologies that it bought his former company, Heptio, for $550 million last
year.
As we head into this phase of pushing Kubernetes and related tech into larger companies, McLuckie acknowledges it creates a set of new
&We are at this crossing the chasm moment where you look at the way the world is — and you look at the opportunity of what the world might
become — and a big part of what motivated me to join VMware is that it successfully proven its ability to help enterprise organizations
navigate their way through these disruptive changes,& McLuckie told TechCrunch.
He says that Kubernetes does actually solve this fundamental
management problem companies face in this multi-cloud, hybrid world
&At the end of the day, Kubernetes is an abstraction
It just a way of organizing your infrastructure and making it accessible to the people that need to consume it.
&And I think it a
fundamentally better abstraction than we have access to today
It has some very nice properties
It is pretty consistent in every environment that you might want to operate, so it really makes your on-prem software feel like it operating
in the public cloud,& he explained.
Simplifying a complex world
One of the reasons Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies are gaining in
popularity is because the technology allows companies to think about hardware differently
There is a big difference between virtual machines and containers, says Joe Fernandes, VP of product for Red Hat cloud platform.
&Sometimes
people conflate containers as another form of virtualization, but with virtualization, you&re virtualizing hardware, and the virtual
machines that you&re creating are like an actual machine with its own operating system
With containers, you&re virtualizing the process,& he said.
He said that this means it not coupled with the hardware
The only thing it needs to worry about is making sure it can run Linux, and Linux runs everywhere, which explains how containers make it
easier to manage across different types of infrastructure
&It more efficient, more affordable, and ultimately, cloud-native allows folks to drive more automation,& he said.
Bringing it into the
enterprise
Photo: Ron Miller/TechCrunch
It one thing to convince early adopters to change the way they work, but as this technology enters
Gabe Monroy, partner program manager at Microsoft says to carry this technology to the next level, we have to change the way we talk about
