Kubernetes Maximalism

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2021-07-29 01:00:07

Kubernetes will become part of most infrastructure stacks. Today, platform teams try and abstract Kubernetes away from developers, but I predict that Kubernetes will become the developer platform in the future. I call this Kubernetes Maximalism.

Some background first: I don't just drink the Kool-aid, I'm the one who mixed it. I spent three years at Google working on Kubernetes and developer tools. I've spoken at multiple KubeCons and DockerCons. You might have used some of the projects I maintained: minikube (run Kubernetes on your laptop), skaffold (hot reloading Kubernetes developer tool for infrastructure and code), or Kubeflow (MLOps platform on Kubernetes). You can see the complete list of my projects on my about page.

Development/Production Parity. Differences between development and production environments create opportunities for hard-to-debug bugs. Differences between QA and production create opportunities for costly bugs. Kubernetes provides a stable API for all environments. I wrote more about this (almost three years ago!) in Should Your Developers Work in the Cloud?.

Pluggability and Extensibility. Kubernetes lets you swap out any of the significant components easily and provides countless interfaces at every level of the stack. Storage, scheduling, container runtimes, networking, and API extensions make Kubernetes flexible for most workloads. Confusion happens when abstractions are built on top of Kubernetes that belong a plugins or custom resources (i.e., horizontal integration instead of vertical).