From Google to the world: the Kubernetes origin story
Its an interesting article. Though, I kinda feel like we're missing a good chunk of the story. As dominate as AWS is now, it was probably even more dominate in the time period we're talking about due to really haven gotten a big head start. And every time that AWS rolled out some new proprietary feature, it tied users even more tightly to the AWS platform.IMO, what Google realized they needed was a technology prevent people from getting more dependent on AWS. Being open source is key to that goal - if they just offer another proprietary service, its hard to go to someone and tell them not to use an AWS proprietary service but to instead use a GCP one. However, with Kubernetes being open, it means that users can host their own cluster and make it easy for them to move between cloud providers. For customers on AWS, I feel like this provides a bit of an incentive not to use too many AWS proprietary services or otherwise they lose the advantage of mobility. For everyone else, GCP gets to offer the strongest Kubernetes implementation and draw customers in that way.Its pretty win-win for Google. The article talks about the decision to open source Kubernetes as some sort of decision for the betterment of the world. But if that were really the only reason, why not open source Spanner of BigTable? And that's not to say that Google did anything wrong - corporations are designed to make decisions that are in their own best interests. What I think is interesting, is that this is a really powerful example of how sometimes things that are generally beneficial to the world AND business interests line up together, and when that does, kinda cool things can happen.