UPDATED 14:30 EDT / DECEMBER 12 2017

CLOUD

Many cloud-native hands try to make light work of Kubernetes

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, home of the Kubernetes open-source community, grew wildly this year. It welcomed membership from industry giants like Amazon Web Services Inc. and broke attendance records at last week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference in Austin, Texas. This is all happy news for Kubernetes — the favored platform for orchestrating containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications). The technology needs all the untangling, simplifying fingers it can get.

This is also why most in the community are happy to tamp down their competitive instincts to chip away at common difficulties. “You kind of have to,” said Michelle Noorali (pictured), senior software engineer at Microsoft and co-chair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America & Europe 2017. “These problems are really hard.”

The mission of Kubernetes today is to keep all the nuanced elements that make it tweakable for diverse users while simplifying it to the utmost possible. The hints, gripes and demonstrations of the community’s many voices offer the best hope of achieving this, according to Noorali.

“It’s good to learn from different organizations that have come across these projects or problems in the space before,” she said. The CNCF organizes events such as this one to bring them together to collaborate and improve Kubernetes.

Noorali spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event.

This week, theCUBE spotlights Michelle Noorali in our Women in Tech feature.

In it to win it for companies, community

CNCF’s number of hosted projects shot up from four to 14 this year; in the past few months, AWS, Microsoft, Oracle and VMware signed up for membership. Last week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon drew more attendees than all previous cloud-native or Kubernetes events combined. The involved parties are not competing to build different container orchestration platforms; Kubernetes has that part down and has taken steps to prevent community forking. They are instead working to build helpmate services around it which improve the user experience.

“Knowledge is power; perspective is power also,” Noorali said. “Being involved helps give you a perspective to see where those gaps are and then come up with those services that are profitable or those tools that are profitable.”

Does the hot fuss over containers and Kubernetes reflect enterprise adoption rates? One would think the percentage of companies running containers would be higher than the 25 percent recently reported by Cloud Foundry.

“Although there is growing interest and rapid adoption of containers, running them in production requires a steep learning curve due to technology immaturity and lack of operational know-how,” stated Arun Chandrasekaran, research vice president at Gartner Inc.

If we’re talking huge fleets of containerized applications at large enterprises, then management becomes a giant headache, potentially. This is what platforms like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm and AWS Elastic Container Service try to solve for. But what if these so-called solutions aren’t exactly cake themselves? Setting up a Kubernetes cluster has earned a reputation as a cluster-you-know-what.

One can’t accuse Kubernetes leadership of not feeling users’ pain. It’s actively trying to makeover its rep as a brain drainer. At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, attendees from contributing companies like Google (which first developed and open-sourced Kubernetes) said they wanted to make it so simple as to be “boring.”

Tooling away at complexity

Kubernetes, however, doesn’t want to miff any users by arbitrarily tossing out elements they may be attached to. “It takes a spectrum,” Clayton Coleman, architect of containerized application infrastructure at Red Hat Inc., told theCUBE last week. Kubernetes has a wide array of users from devout cloud-native startups to older enterprises using the platform sparingly.

“This is where an ecosystem really comes into play,” Coleman said.

That ecosystem includes companies and open-source communities that build delivery models, services and tools that simplify Kubernetes use. Noorali and others are listening to the community and users and baking their feedback into fixes. “I mostly work on developer tools that are open-source that help people use containers and Kubernetes a little more easily,” she said.

One such project Noorali is active in is Helm, which manages charts — packages of pre-configured Kubernetes resources. Another, Draft, is for streamlined Kubernetes development. And Brigade event-driven scripting helps developers and operations teams work briskly by triggering any ordered workflow of containers via arbitrary events.

“These are just things that we’ve seen, pain points that we’ve experienced. And we want to kind of share our solutions,” Noorali said.

Helm uses a pluggable architecture, by which diverse users can hook into Kubernetes’ various software pieces. This allows Helm to keep its core code base free of possible encumbrances. “If we accepted one thing, it would really just interrupt somebody else’s workflow,” she said.

Microsoft also leverages pluggable architecture in its just-announced Virtual Kubelet connector for Azure cloud, which streamlines container management.

The fruits of CNCF’s and Kubernetes’ ecosystem labors should arouse much interest among enterprise technology teams. Despite complaints about complexity, the number of global organizations using containers will jump to 50 percent by 2020, Gartner predicted. Let’s hope orchestration and management are boring by then.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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