Post

On the eve of Kubecon I think it's time we acknowledge the cloud hasn't lived up to the hype It is an amazing tool that provides a ton of convenience, but long term the promises turn out to just be marketing hype

All the Kubernetes shifting and "modernization" is also causing long term re-platforming with a lot of added complexity

True. When I worked for an MSP (of 19 years) we set up multiple environments for customers to leverage VMware; Private and Dedicated environments. However, once Azure and AWS started being tossed around, we had a number of customers decide to leave because "It was better."

Of course, better also meant a number of things that people didn't realize. Cost to move all that data to the cloud, the lack of hands-on which didn't exist in the cloud and the complexity of moving to the cloud. I saw a number of customers who did leave, eventually come back.

So many companies are hoping a platform will save them from the complexity without realizing how difficult it is to build a platform and how impossible it is to build useful abstractions on top of a complex and constantly shifting base They're building illusions, not abstractions

Companies have shifted from moving to the cloud to get rid of "undifferentiated heavy lifting" and now they're all doing the same thing - cost optimization - reducing cognitive load

I've been skeptical of Kubernetes for a long time for the same reasons, but recently I started reconsidering. Self-managed k8s is less of a pain than it was five years ago, and - if well thought - it can enable interesting levels of standardization/simplification.

I agree. Making self managed k8s dead simple is why I joined @siderolabs.com I’ve tried a lot of k8s products and Talos + Omni is the easiest to maintain But I also think for a lot of companies VMs are a better fit for what they need and are usually less complex

Your first level, 600k year on cloud, and you have “teams” doing cost opt. Hint: that would be silly.

I agree. That’s not what I said

Isn’t that what this says?

Iiiiiiiiif you can get and keep talent. And success disasters can’t happen. And you can weather outages. And you rock at cybersecurity. And capital is cheap. And you can predict needs in advance. And no innovation from three multi-trillion dollar multinationals could possibly help your business.

How did it work in the past if all those things are requirements?