I am making my money with Kubernetes and the ecosystem around it and I wholeheartedly disagree on K8s being the future.
However I do agree on vendor lock-in. At least to a degree. KVM and Xen didn't really prevent this for cloud environments.
I do think the main takeaway from a lot of this is the way software is designed. It is becoming more self-contained. Docker in many respects is like a static binary. FatJARs are a similar approach. Also Go in general seems to go that path.
What Kubernetes really does is providing an agreed upon standard for infrastructure, similar to what Docker gave for software packages.
They enabled concepts like Unikernels to at least become interesting, because they smoothed the way for the thinking of software that should be self-contained.
I think the future really is one where Kubernetes and Docker are just annoying overhead, where we find it odd how something "emulates" them, just how terminal emulators emulate... well, terminals.
We are in a feedback-loop where we put a more and more tight corset on the software we develop. First there were compute clouds, where developers learned it's bad to keep state around, then there was Docker, then Kubernetes where certain best practices, that have been best practices for a long time "forced" them to be followed more and more, especially because whoever provides your infrastructure and the developer are able to agree on the interface.
Docker and Kubernetes are standards due to their dominance, similar to Internet Explorer back in the days and Chrome today. As of now there is only minimal written specifications. Most of it is standardized by the implementation. Hopefully this will change some day to stabilize the interface and give opportunities for competing implementations, so more innovation can happen outside the boundaries of these projects, allowing for competition.
Maybe this has a positive influence on complexity as well.
However I do agree on vendor lock-in. At least to a degree. KVM and Xen didn't really prevent this for cloud environments.
I do think the main takeaway from a lot of this is the way software is designed. It is becoming more self-contained. Docker in many respects is like a static binary. FatJARs are a similar approach. Also Go in general seems to go that path.
What Kubernetes really does is providing an agreed upon standard for infrastructure, similar to what Docker gave for software packages.
They enabled concepts like Unikernels to at least become interesting, because they smoothed the way for the thinking of software that should be self-contained.
I think the future really is one where Kubernetes and Docker are just annoying overhead, where we find it odd how something "emulates" them, just how terminal emulators emulate... well, terminals.
We are in a feedback-loop where we put a more and more tight corset on the software we develop. First there were compute clouds, where developers learned it's bad to keep state around, then there was Docker, then Kubernetes where certain best practices, that have been best practices for a long time "forced" them to be followed more and more, especially because whoever provides your infrastructure and the developer are able to agree on the interface.
Docker and Kubernetes are standards due to their dominance, similar to Internet Explorer back in the days and Chrome today. As of now there is only minimal written specifications. Most of it is standardized by the implementation. Hopefully this will change some day to stabilize the interface and give opportunities for competing implementations, so more innovation can happen outside the boundaries of these projects, allowing for competition.
Maybe this has a positive influence on complexity as well.