The container orchestrator landscape
The main purpose of K8s is just to run microservices. It makes things convenient by automatically restarting services, running multiple copies across servers, routing from one load-balancing port to many ephemerally-allocated ports, collecting logs, providing a consistent control API, limit system resources, networking, secrets...<p>...All things Systemd does. Some bored admin just needs to make a patch to make systemd processes talk together, and half the point of Kubernetes will be gone.<p>All the extra shit like CNI and Operators are there because K8s&#x27; own abstraction is too complicated so they had to add more abstractions to deal with it. Managed Distributions of K8s go away if every Linux distro can do the same things out of the box. &quot;Managing fleets&quot; just becomes running more Linux VMs or not. You wouldn&#x27;t need &quot;clusters&quot;, you&#x27;d just run a bunch of boxes and run replicas of whatever service you wanted, and all resources would be managed using normal Linux system permissions and Systemd configs. No volume mounts or persistent storage setup, it&#x27;s just regular filesystem mounts and disks. Containers would be optional, eliminating a huge class of complexity (static apps make a lot of containerization moot).<p>And most importantly to admins - no more bullshit 15 month upgrade death march. Imagine just sticking to a stable Debian for 3 years but still having all the power of a distributed orchestrator. Imagine not having 50 components with APIs listening on the internet to be hacked. Imagine just using IPTables rather than custom plugins that change based on the Cloud provider just to filter network traffic, and not letting everything on the network access everything else by default.<p>K8s is just too expensive, complicated, and time consuming to survive. As soon as Systemd can network as a cluster, the writing&#x27;s on the wall. The only reason it hasn&#x27;t happened yet is the Systemd developers are basically desktop-oriented Linux fogies rather than Cloud-focused modern devs.<p>I also predict RedHat will block patches to make this happen, since their money comes from K8s. But someone just needs to make a Systemd fork using Systemd&#x27;s own API and we can finally fix all the crap Systemd devs like to pretend is somebody else&#x27;s bug.