Comment by fhrow4484
8 years ago
Interesting article, I'm trying to figure out:
What are people trying to commoditize with Kubernetes. But even more importantly: How is this helping them? (since in my head the 'what' being commoditized is the same thing the big players contributing to Kubernetes make profits with)
Google and everyone supporting Kubernetes are trying to prevent AWS from becoming the de facto cloud "system call API", i.e. for provisioning computing resources like CPU/memory/storage/network, and for higher level services like monitoring, access control, backup, dev tools, etc.
They want to make it easier to move off of the market leader, AWS. If a customer's programs are written to AWS APIs, it becomes incredibly expensive to even try a new cloud provider.
So basically every other cloud provider besides AWS wants standard interfaces. They can all rent more computing resources if it's easier for customers to move off of AWS. That's why Microsoft supports Kubernetes. And that's why everyone got on board with Docker too -- it's (supposedly) a standard application format, or at least a cloud-vendor-neutral one.
It's exactly analogous to Windows vs. Unix. Windows locked users into its proprietary APIs, with exactly one implementation, and made tremendous profits. With POSIX, you can port applications from Solaris to IBM Unix to Linux, etc.
Kubernetes was called "POSIX for the cloud" as far as I remember.
It's related to the "commoditize your complements" model, but I don't think that's exactly the right way to describe it. Maybe it's more like "commoditizing your competitor's product", to erode their profits.
In theory I don't see a problem with AWS owning 95% of the cloud market share and Google still making billions of dollars on ads (with free complements like search, apps, Android, and the browser).
I think AWS is more threatening to Microsoft, because Microsoft sells enterprise products like SQL Server and so forth. Cloud services are the complement to a lot of enterprise products that MS sells.
Google isn't nearly as big an enterprise business as Microsoft is, and the customers for AWS/Cloud are typically enterprises and not "consumers".