UPDATED 10:23 EDT / JANUARY 05 2018

CLOUD

Google found success with Kubernetes, but that’s only part of the story

It’s often a common theme in the tech world that the rich get richer. Amazon.com Inc., an already successful online merchandiser, starts a cloud business (Amazon Web Service Inc.) that becomes an enterprise colossus. Apple Inc., a household name in personal computers, decides to enter the smartphone space and ends up poised to become the world’s first trillion-dollar company later this year.

Then there is Google LLC The search giant continues to dominate the ad revenue market thanks to a smart bet on YouTube with its acquisition in 2006. Google is projected to reap more than $40 billion in U.S. digital ad revenue with Facebook a distant second. And Google also gambled that containers could become an important part of the computing world when it began running them in production (under a project named Borg) in the early 2000s.

In 2015, Google released Kubernetes as an open-source endeavor in anticipation that information technology shops would be looking for more consistent ways to run applications and manage workloads. Since then, Kubernetes has grown to become an essential orchestration tool, with more than 70 percent of users relying on it for container management, according to a 451 Research survey.

Yet there is a sense from Google executives that Kubernetes represents only a small part of the cloud-native tale and the company has welcomed major technology players (such as Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware) into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which manages Kubernetes.

“Our goal is to bring everything we know from Google into the Kubernetes community,” said Chen Goldberg (pictured), director of engineering at Google. “There’s more to that than just bringing it to the open and creating a community. It’s also about culture and values.”

Goldberg stopped by the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Austin, Texas, and spoke with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu). They discussed the role of Google’s corporate philosophy in driving open-source projects, the importance of chief executive-level buy-in, keeping Kubernetes relevant across the enterprise, and the value of a robust partner ecosystem. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Chen Goldberg in our Women in Tech feature.

Empowerment makes a difference

Make no mistake about it. The companies holding hands inside the Kubernetes tent are fierce competitors. But the open-source nature of the container orchestration project has helped drive innovation and ideas for new business among those involved.

This is exactly the kind of empowerment that is an important ingredient in Google’s corporate philosophy. “This is really one of the core values on the engineering culture in Google,” Goldberg said. “Anyone can come up with a great idea.”

As the major players have shifted deployment strategies to Kubernetes, there has been a veritable fountain of new use cases, particularly over the course of the past year. Microsoft acquired Deis, a Kubernetes deployment platform company, and promptly installed its technology on Azure. In June, Oracle declared its support for Kubernetes as an element of its partnership with CoreOS. Amazon rolled out a managed service (Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes) to make it easier for enterprise clients to run Kubernetes on AWS. Even Docker announced a Kubernetes offering as a staging platform equivalent to its own container technology.

Implicit in this spate of activity during 2017 is that not only are engineers and developers raising the Kubernetes flag, but the C-suite has been more than willing to plant the pole. “I’ve been an engineering manager for many years, and in my mind the key to building a strong team is with the alignment of the leadership,” Goldberg said. “Once you have that, you can do whatever you want.”

If there is anything that IT administrators crave today it is consistency. They want to run applications in both private and public clouds with a minimum of hassle. Google’s engineers are mindful of catering to the needs of hybrid IT and, with the emergence of Kubernetes as a container orchestration standard, they are looking across the enterprise stack.

“Much of the abstractions that we are trying to build in the Kubernetes community, we are trying to make sure that they will be relevant outside of the Kubernetes scope,” Goldberg said.

New integrations for hybrid cloud

Relevance for Kubernetes will be an important theme worth watching in 2018. Despite the tool’s rise in popularity over the past 12 months, container management acceptance is dependent on whether it remains simple and accessible across multiple clouds. New integrations, such as Pivotal Cloud Foundry 2.0, are coming into the pipeline to enhance enterprise hybrid cloud management at a time when some engineers dispute concerns about complexity with Kubernetes implementation.

“Spinning off the cluster is not hard,” Goldberg said. “There are still harder problems, and we are building this ecosystem around us that can help us.”

The ecosystem surrounding Kubernetes today is an important component and bodes well for its future. Dell Technologies Inc. recently backed the Container Storage Interface Project, a microservices-focused initiative that includes Kubernetes in its interface. Kata, a hypervisor container environment that is part of an Intel project, recently received backing from the OpenStack Foundation, which uses Kubernetes as its primary orchestration. Another project called CRI-O is seen as a way to further establish Kubernetes’ runtime interface in many production environments.

For Google, the acceptance and growing importance of Kubernetes in enterprise IT is a welcome trend, and there is plenty of room for more technology companies to join the party. “If you look around us, the amount of companies that innovate on top of Kubernetes is something I’m super happy about,” Goldberg said. “That’s a dream come true.”

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. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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