CaaPuccino: A frothy mix of containers and platforms.

Check out Krish Subramanian’s (@krishnan) Modern Enterprise podcast (audio here) today for a surprisingly deep and thoughtful discussion about how frothy new technologies are impacting Modern Enterprise IT. Of course, we also take some time to throw some fire bombs at the end. You can use my notes below to jump to your favorite topics.

The key takeaways are that portability is hard and we’re still working out the impact of container architecture.

The benefit of the longer interview is that we really dig into the reasons why portability is hard and discuss ways to improve it. My personal SRE posts and those on the RackN blog describe operational processes that improve portability. These are real concerns for all IT organizations because mixed and hybrid models are a fact of life.

If you are not actively making automation that works against multiple infrastructures then you are building technical debt.

Of course, if you just want the snark, then jump forward to 24:00 minutes in where we talk future of Kubernetes, OpenStack and the inverted intersection of the projects.

Krish, thanks for the great discussion!

Rob’s Podcast Notes (39 minutes)

2:37: Rob intros about Digital Rebar & RackN

4:50: Why our Kubernetes is JUST UPSTREAM

5:35: Where are we going in 5 years > why Rob believes in Hybrid

• Should not be 1 vendor who owns everything
• That’s why we work for portability
• Public cloud vision: you should stop caring about infrastructure
• Coming to an age when infrastructure can be completely automated
• Developer rebellion against infrastructure

8:36: Krish believes that Public cloud will be more decentralized

• Public cloud should be part of everyone’s IT plan
• It should not be the ONLY thig

9:25: Docker helps create portability, what else creates portability? Will there be a standard

• Containers are a huge change, but it’s not just packaging
• Smaller units of work is important for portability
• Container schedulers & PaaS are very opinionated, that’s what creates portability
• Deeper into infrastructure loses portability (RackN helps)
• Rob predicts that Lambda and Serverless creates portability too

11:38: Are new standards emerging?

• Some APIs become dominate and create de facto APIs
• Embedded assumptions break portability – that’s what makes automation fragile
• Rob explains why we inject configuration to abstract infrastructure
• RackN works to inject attributes instead of allowing scripts to assume settings
• For example, networking assumptions break portability
• Platforms force people to give up configuration in ways that break portability

14:50: Why did Platform as a Service not take off?

• Rob defends PaaS – thinks that it has accomplished a lot
• Challenge of PaaS is that it’s very restrictive by design
• Calls out Andrew Clay Shafer’s “don’t call it a PaaS” position
• Containers provide a less restrictive approach with more options.

17:00: What’s the impact on Enterprise? How are developers being impacted?

• Service Orientation is a very important thing to consider
• Encapsulation from services is very valuable
• Companies don’t own all their IT services any more – it’s not monolithic
• IT Service Orientation aligns with Business Processes
  Rob says the API economy is a big deal
• In machine learning, a business’ data may be more valuable than their product

19:30: Services impact?

• Service’s have a business imperative
• We’re not ready for all the impacts of a service orientation
• Challenge is to mix configuration and services
• Magic of Digital Rebar is that it can mix orchestration of both

22:00: We are having issues with simple, how are we going to scale up?

• Barriers are very low right now

22:30: Will Kubernetes help us solve governance issues?

• Kubernetes is doing a go building an ecosystem
• Smart to focus on just being Kubernetes
• It will be chaotic as the core is worked out

24:00: Do you think Kubernetes is going in the right direction?

• Rob is bullish for Kubernetes to be the dominant platform because it’s narrow and specific
• Google has the right balance of control
• Kubernetes really is not that complex for what it does
• Mesos is also good but harder to understand for users
• Swarm is simple but harder to extend for an ecosystem
• Kubernetes is a threat to Amazon because it creates portability and ecosystem outside of their platform
• Rob thinking that Kubernetes could create platform services that compete with AWS services like RDS.
• It’s likely to level the field, not create a Google advantage

27:00: How does Kubernetes fit into the Digital Rebar picture?

• We think of Kubernetes as a great infrastructure abstraction that creates portability
• We believe there’s a missing underlay that cannot abstract the infrastructure – that’s what we do.
• OpenStack deployments broken because every data center is custom and different – vendors create a lot of consulting without solving the problem
• RackN is creating composability UNDER Kubernetes so that those infrastructure differences do not break operation automation
• Kubernetes does not have the constructs in the abstraction to solve the infrastructure problem, that’s a different problem that should not be added into the APIs
• Digital Rebar can also then use the Kubernetes abstractions?

30:20: Can OpenStack really be managed/run on top of Kubernetes? That seems complex!

• There is a MESS in the message of Kubernetes under OpenStack because it sends the message that Kubernetes is better at managing application than OpenStack
• Since OpenStack is just an application and Kubernetes is a good way to manage applications
• When OpenStack is already in containers, we can use Kubernetes to do that in a logical way
• “I’m super impressed with how it’s working” using OpenStack Helm Packs (still needs work)
• Physical environment still has to be injected into the OpenStack on Kubernetes environment

35:05 Does OpenStack have a future?

• Yes! But it’s not the big “data center operating system” future that we expected in 2010. Rob thinks it a good VM management platform.
• Rob provides the same caution for Kubernetes. It will work where the abstractions add value but data centers are complex hybrid beasts
• Don’t “square peg a data center round hole” – find the best fit
• OpenStack should have focused on the things it does well – it has a huge appetite for solving too many problems.