Kubernetes and Opening Core Technologies at Google

THE DOPPLER

Our guest on the podcast this week is Kelsey Hightower, Developer Advocate at Google Cloud Platform.

We discuss the birth of Kubernetes at Google and how it started as part of Google’s own best practices and infrastructure, then was created into an open-source project and shared externally. It was a brand new code-base, but built based on Borg, which was an internal system at Google for over 10 years. That is why Kubernetes has a lot of design aspects of a more mature project. It is a combination of Google’s past work on containers and the new container ecosystem related to Docker so that Kubernetes can work outside of Google in any environment. Anyone can get involved and start contributing to the system. There is no enterprise version of Kubernetes, there is just Kubernetes and the different vendors and providers add value to it.

We look at the announcements from Google NEXT. There were no Kubernetes surprises because it is developed in the open, so everything you want to know about it is actively tracked on GitHub. Instead, at Google NEXT, they tried to add clarity about why Google is working on specific features like dynamic storage provisioning and custom schedulers. It’s clear Google is evolving into the enterprise cloud space and they are committed to staying ahead of the curve. For Google Cloud, that means opening up some of its core technologies such as TensorFlow and Google Cloud Spanner so that enterprises can begin to consume Google technology.

We look at Amazon’s recent decision to allow customers with Reserved Instance contracts to subdivide some of their Linux and UNIX virtual machine instances and still keep their capacity discounts. This decision was made so that Amazon could keep up with Google on flexible pricing. These types of changes are evidence of a healthy marketplace. A lot of times people try to mimic the spending habits of traditional enterprise IT which require a three-year roadmap, which is the opposite of what cloud should be. Cloud should be a dynamic world where you can scale-up and scale-down, which is why discounts should kick in based on behavior and actual usage. It’s also why Google has per-minute billing. In this way the pricing structure matches the dynamic needs of cloud computing.

Last, we discuss how small to medium-sized businesses in India can get subsidies for cloud adoption, while the US wants to tax its usage. This may be an opportunity for the US government to offer tax breaks for cloud adoption to incentivize change so that we can use these resources more positively. Some enterprise clients view cloud computing as a complex expensive endeavor. In essence, they’re right, they have archaic infrastructures and it takes a lot of work to move them to cloud, so some of the work it takes can remove the incentive to make the switch. In order to get them over the hump, they need to understand the cost savings, but it seems like a step in the right direction to provide tax incentives much like buying a Tesla can be subsidized. That should at least send the right message to companies in the US. Cloud adoption reduces data center space, saves electricity, and helps build businesses faster, which seems like a win-win for large enterprises and the US government.