Not to mention probably the hardest bit, which is how does it do persistent storage? Running k8s on the various cloud providers tends to use storage engines for those providers (ebs, etc)...
Does it ship with ceph out of the box? Some in-house block store? What happens when it breaks? Persistent volumes are IMO the very hardest thing to get right, and for me it's the big reason why I'd rather put my trust in a hosted solution in the first place.
If they solve this, and make it as seamless and easy as using cloud storage offerings, they've completely changed the game. Somehow I think they have a ways to go.
I can attest that persistent storage is the hard part! Full disclosure, I work for a company[1] who makes a persistent storage solution for containers/Kubernetes. We are absolutely seeing that our large customers (folks like GE, Verizon, Dreamworks, Comcast, etc) are running "cloud native" applications on-prem as well as in the public cloud so this is a really smart move for Google.
I assumed they would punt persistent storage for the first release, kinda like they launched Cloud Filestore with only NFSv3 support and without snapshots. As you say, it's a tough problem to tackle. If they to ship with something, I'd expect them to go for Ceph. As far as I can tell, if you squint hard enough, its lowest layers are the ones that resemble the most those at Google (Colossus/D).
Do you have a source for this? Is there documentation anywhere that says GKE On-Prem is using rook? Or are you just saying "people who use kubernetes on-prem often use rook.io"?
Jesse here. I'm the eng manager for GKE and GKE On-Prem Storage lifecycle over at Google. For basic persistent volumes, we have working vSphere (block) support, which allows us to do a lot (including persistent/stateful services).
We also have great storage abstraction layers built into K8S - CSI, FlexVolumes, and a large suite of in-tree plugins - so adding additional ones is pretty easy.
I think you're talking about something else however - specifically scaled/distributed storage services.
We're investigating options here, though keep in mind you should have no problems running containerized storage services in GKE On-prem. They would be on top of the existing block support I mentioned above. I saw a couple comments in other threads from some vendors that sell solutions that do just that.
For storage systems that don't containerize, that is a different discussion. Happy to talk more.
Does it ship with ceph out of the box? Some in-house block store? What happens when it breaks? Persistent volumes are IMO the very hardest thing to get right, and for me it's the big reason why I'd rather put my trust in a hosted solution in the first place.
If they solve this, and make it as seamless and easy as using cloud storage offerings, they've completely changed the game. Somehow I think they have a ways to go.