The Inevitable Future of Kubernetes: Why the Orchestrator Should Follow the Path of the Linux Kernel

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Chicago on November 9, Tim Hockin, one of the early developers of Kubernetes, delivered a talk (here’s a summary) highlighting one of the orchestrator’s major challenges: the relentless growth in complexity. His main point was straightforward: Kubernetes is being applied to an ever-widening range of specialized use cases, such as machine learning.

As a result, user demands on K8s keep increasing, developers strive to keep up, and Kubernetes becomes so complex that it creates two significant problems:

To address this, Tim proposed introducing a “complexity budget.” This approach would allocate a fixed “budget” for the project’s complexity, where each new feature in a release would consume part of that budget. In his view, this could help control the project’s complexity.

While this idea is reasonable, I believe the broader ecosystem — including Kubernetes developers, businesses leveraging it, and engineers deploying it — needs to rethink their expectations of an orchestrator in the coming years.

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