As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake
Kubernetes is one of those rare cases where the industry is rallying around a technologically sound platform that emerged from the trenches, and not something that was designed to create jobs for consultants. It's great. Right now, there's a bunch of fairly traditional players such as Red Hat, but none of them are in a position to mess it up.What I'm waiting for, though, is for a big player to do a modern, clean "Kubernetes first" cloud offering. We're currently on Google Kubernetes Engine, and I'm disappointed in the lack of integration throughout Cloud Platform. GCP is great in many areas, but the Kubernetes offering is clearly an afterthought. As an example, if you create an ingress, this creates a bunch of load balancer objects (forwarding rules, URL maps, backends). But these are all given obscure names (k8s-um-production-zippediboop-f8da5e6c92f38300), and none of the Kubernetes labels transfer over. Same with disks; GCE disks don't even have labels, so they put a bunch of JSON in the "description", which of course cannot be filtered or queried. Similar things happen with VMs and other things; the "mapping" of Kubernetes to GCP concepts is basically either lossy or non-existent. Many other similar weaknesses exist: Cloud SQL (if you want to use Cloud SQL, you have to manually run the Cloud SQL Proxy as a sidecar), GCP service accounts (different from Kubernetes service accounts!), etc. GKE is solid, but everything seems like it's been put together without any over-arching design; GKE is just another thing buried in a somewhat ramshackle jungle of different services.There's an opportunity for a vendor to come in and offer a platform where you start with Kubernetes. In particular, this means that the platform should be manageable from Kubernetes, through the use of CRDs and pluggable controllers. For example, I should be able to define a persistent disk using a Kubernetes manifest, instead of having to go through some web UI or CLI ("gcloud compute disk create" or whatever).That said, it's hard to compete with GCP at this point. Whoever wants to compete in this space have to compete not just with GKE, but with the technical awesomeness of GCP.