Kubernetes: The Documentary
I love Kubernetes, but this documentary makes me sad. The story of PaaS is absolutely worthy of a documentary, but to imply that Google is the protagonist is just pandering to the "rich kid" who brought little more to the table than money and influence.Here's a better sketch for the story. It starts with Ruby, itself a game-changing language, that inspired a new culture of developer-centric best practices like Rspec's TDD and Bundler's lockfiles.Ruby made the first PaaS possible, Heroku (a YC startup), which itself inspired a whole new way of thinking about software. I don't think enough people realise just how influential Heroku's 12 Factor App manifesto[1] was, in fact I'd argue it's the real hero in this whole story. The 12 Factors are just text, it's not even software or hard and fast requirements, they're merely best practices for the entire experience of writing, collaborating, testing, deploying, scaling and maintaining software. The 12 Factors aren't just about pushing your app on Kubernetes or whatever, they're just as much, if not more so, ideas that make _you_ a better engineer. Heroku made money for sure, but they did something beyond money, they upped the level of our craft as a whole.The central concept in Heroku is the dyno. If you follow the 12 Factors, then you magically get almost infinitely scalable dynos. It plays right into the heart of the new gold rush world of startups, where anybody can have an app idea and leverage the global marketplace with the abstractions of datacentres and the cloud.Docker is the open source dyno.So many PaaS projects apart from Kubernetes have risen and fallen around Docker. Deis, Flynn, Dokku, Swarm, to name but a few. So many of the core concepts of Kubernetes were innovated and explored, and arguably mastered, before Kubernetes came on the scene. Kubernetes is a success not because of its innovation, but because it's backed by The Rich Kid. The world was already heading in this direction, Google just threw big numbers at it to make sure they took the biggest piece of the pie.1. https://12factor.net