PodCTL - Enterprise Kubernetes

2017 Kubernetes Year in Review

December 18, 2017 Brian Gracely & Tyler Britten
PodCTL - Enterprise Kubernetes
2017 Kubernetes Year in Review
Show Notes

Show: 19

Show Overview: Brian and Tyler talk how the Kubernetes community and technology have evolved in 2017, and make a few predictions for 2018
 
Show Notes:

Topic 1 - GETTING STARTED: People said that getting started w/ Docker Swarm was easier than Kubernetes. Kubernetes community created tools like Minikube & Minishift to run locally on the laptop, automation playbooks in Ansible, Katacoda have made it simple to have online tutorials, multiple cloud offerings (GKE, AKS, EKS, OpenShift Dedicated) make it simple to get a working Kubernetes cluster.

Topic 2 - ENSURING PORTABILITY: Enterprise customers wants Hybrid Cloud environment. they need to understand how multiple cloud environments will impact this decision. The CNCF’s Kubernetes Conformance model is the only container-centric framework that can ensure customers that Kubernetes will be consistent between clouds.

Topic 3 - INFRASTRUCTURE BREADTH: Other container orchestrators had ways to integrate storage and networking, but only Kubernetes created standards (e.g. CNI, CSI) that have gained mainstream adoption to create dozens of vendors/cloud options.

Topic 4 - APPLICATION BREADTH: The community has evolved from supporting stateless apps to supporting stateful applications (and containerized storage), serverless applications, batch jobs, and custom resources definitions for vertical-specific application profiles. 

Topic 5 - SECURITY: There were concerns about K8S security. the community has responded with better encryption and management of secrets, and improved Kubernetes-specific container capabilities like CRI-O and OCI standardization.

Topic 6 - PERFORMANCE: Red Hat (and others) have started the Performance SIG to focus on high-performance applications (HPC, Oil & Gas, HFT, etc) and profiling the required performance characteristics of these applications in containerized environments.

Topic 7 - DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE: One of the themes of KubeCon was focusing on developer experience, and in just a few months we’re seeing standardization around the Helm format (for application packaging), Draft to streamline application development, Kubeapps to simplify getting started with apps from a self-service catalog. We also seen security model of non-root containers (vs. the Docker model of root-enabled containers).

Topic 8 - APPLICATION EXTENSIBILITY: Kubernetes community decided not to reinvent the wheel, instead working with the Cloud Foundry Foundation to create the Open Service Broker API. Within a year, we’re now seeing implementations that have not only ported all the functionality to Kubernetes, but have extended it beyond Cloud Foundry’s previous capabilities to include support for external clouds (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCP), as well as additional services such as Ansible playbooks and other 3rd-party capabilities.

Topic 9 - IMPROVING OPERATIONAL EXPERIENCE: As Clayton Coleman (Red Hat) discussed in his KubeCon keynote, companies like Red Hat are using their online environments to improve their operational experience and ultimate feed this knowledge back into the upstream products.

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