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Video: How Docker brought containers mainstream
Half of the story of hyperscale is about the construction of vast, new infrastructure where there was none before. The other half is about the elimination of walls and barriers that would make one think the world was smaller than it actually was.
The road(s) ahead
From a market standpoint, all these developments point to Google having successfully seized control of all roads that lead to effective containerization in the data center. Containers are pointless without portability, and a staging and orchestration environment that is less than ubiquitous may be less than valuable to data center customers.
There remains a huge challenge for Kubernetes going forward, however. Specifically, it could become so ubiquitous and so standardized that it becomes too difficult for any vendor or open source contributor to create competitive advantage around it.
F5 Networks’ principal technical evangelist Lori MacVittie explained the situation this way: We are past the point in the evolution of networks and distributed systems, MacVittie believes, where proprietary methods or multi-protocol options are either viable or marketable. No one other than the organization that composed and packaged its own workload containers can, as VMware’s Pat Gelsinger put it, “own the workload now and forever.” On the other side of the scale, so to speak, is the danger of enforced conformance — essentially, building a platform that is so readily commoditized that it becomes impossible for any participating vendor to gain a competitive edge.
“There’s really only two options,” MacVittie told ZDNet. “You could write a standard that is very well-defined, rigid, and fixed so that everyone has to conform to it in order to be interoperable. And in many cases, that is a very good thing. Or, you leave room for people to do things differently, and destroy interoperability. That’s the problem with standards, when you start narrowing it down. There’s only one way to build an IP packet today, because we basically narrowed it down to, ‘This is how it works,’ and if you fail to do that, you’re the bad guy, not everybody else who’s implemented the standard.
“Because things are changing so much, I think we have to leave it open,” MacVittie continued. “We’ve got at least another five or six years before things settle down, but you’ve still got so much moving. Locking something down would stifle maturity and forward movement.”
The jury may still be out as to whether this move will inevitably benefit Google most of all. Microsoft now has serious stakes in Kubernetes’ success. With all of the big three cloud providers squarely in the Kubernetes space, each one will need to discover its own value-add — that margin that makes its own cloud service more attractive than the others. Google may play its partnerships with Pivotal and VMware, and also with Cisco, as providing its customers with the virtue of choice.
But whenever you’re a service provider, your revenue and your success comes from steering your customers along the most profitable course, through the right turnstiles at the right time. When customers have alternate routes (as Apple knows better than anyone else), the market is trickier to control.
For the data center, Kubernetes’ sudden prominence means this: In the past, a public cloud-based PaaS platform such as Heroku and the original Windows Azure was only as useful as the resources and languages it supported. With Kubernetes, everything one’s platform should support is inside the container, not outside. This helps to equalize the service providers somewhat, since all of them now provide the same interface, if you will, for acquiring and hosting their customers’ workloads. It also narrows the room that those providers have to compete with one another on service. Whenever a market becomes commoditized, its survivors are the ones that can compete on price.
Kubernetes may have plastered completely over Docker’s message in 2017. But that’s no guarantee for Google, or anyone else, in 2018.
Related Topics:
Cloud
Hardware
Servers
Networking
Storage
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