Kubernetes as a Distro

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2025-01-05 22:30:06

I recently read this great piece by Timur Tukaev discussing how to approach the growing complexity of Kubernetes. You can read it here. Basically as Kubernetes continues to expand to be the everything platform, the amount of functionality it contains is taking longer and longer to learn.

Right now every business that adopts Kubernetes is basically rolling their own bespoke infrastructure. Timur's idea is to try and solve this problem by following the Linux distro model. You'd have groups of people with similar needs work together to make an out-of-the-box Kubernetes setup geared towards their specific needs. I wouldn't start from a blank cluster, but a cluster already configured for my specific usecase (ML, web applications, batch job processing).

I understand the idea, but I think the root cause of all of this is simply a lack of a meaningful package management system for Kubernetes. Helm has done the best it can, but practically speaking it's really far from where we would need to be in order to have something even approaching a Linux package manager.