CoreOS (YC S13) Raises $12M to Bring Kubernetes to the Enterprise
> we set out to build and deliver Google’s infrastructure to everyone else<p>This statement rings pretty true as Kubernetes (also known as k8s) has some Google biases. Not all cloud providers will have such an easy time providing all the infrastructure necessary to run CoreOS + k8s smoothly.<p>For example, Kubernetes assigns each Pod (k8s unit of computation) an IP address, which is only simple to do if your cloud provider supplies something like a /24 private block to your nodes. CoreOS came up with the VXLAN-based Flannel project to make this model more portable[0], but Layer 2 over Layer 3 isn't something I'd like to throw haphazardly into my production environments. Google Compute Engine conveniently provides this setup as an option.<p>Another example of Google-favoritism is the strong preference of centralized storage--particularly GCEPersistentDisk. At first I was concerned about centralized storage by default as we know disk locality is a Good Thing (TM), but after reading a paper that claimed networking is improving faster than disks are[2], I felt somewhat better about this. However, it's still pretty obvious that a Google Persistent Disk is the way to go with k8s[3].<p>That said, I'm really happy that Google has open-sourced this project because it is indeed a functioning, tested, and easy-to-use distributed system. I'm sure that the devs aren't aggressively shutting out other cloud providers and that these biases are probably just a side-effect of their resource allocation process and the problems that they intend to solve (e.g. GCEPersistentDisk used to be a core type instead of a module--it has since gotten better). It's still important to evaluate a technology's biases and potential evolution before throwing your product on it.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/coreos/flannel" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/coreos/flannel</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes/blob/master/docs/volumes.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes/blob/maste...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ganesha/disk-irrelevant_hotos2011.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ganesha/disk-irrelevant_hotos2...</a><p>[3] Do you see any other providers here? <a href="https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes/tree/master/pkg/volume" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes/tree/maste...</a>