[Editor’s note] The Kubernetes community is building a competitive infrastructure design approach that may have a big impact on AWS.
Public infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds are huge and growing all the time, IDC said in its report. So how big is it? Total revenues will reach $43.9bn by 2020, up from $12.5bn in 2015.
There is no doubt that Amazon Web Services (AWS), by far the largest IaaS solution in terms of revenue, is expected to continue to dominate the IaaS market “with economies of scale and a continued investment-driven adoption and growth cycle.”
Despite its many supporters, OpenStack has failed to slow down AWS. OpenStack is still a public cloud option with high technical barriers for enterprise customers, meaning it is difficult for these users to easily achieve the same benefits.
However, Kubernetes, as a container-managed project, could have a presence in “everything but Amazon” and pose a huge threat to AWS, says James Governor, an analyst at Redmonk.
Kubernetes with AWS
Container technology continues to gain popularity in the developer community because it is more productive, safer, and offers a host of other advantages. So far, however, managing containers at scale remains difficult. It was under such historical conditions that Kubernetes came on stage.
Kubernetes, built and open-source by Google, is arguably the strongest technical community in container choreography. However, this seemingly peaceful community may be a serious threat to AWS as it grows. Governor offers his own opinion:
Microsoft, Red Hat and Google Cloud Platform have all rallied around Kubernetes. While at first glance this new alliance of strange bedcompanions may seem like a response to the rise of Docker and the popularity of the Docker model — in fact, The positive push for Kubernetes is also due in large part to companies’ concerns about Docker having too much of a say in new infrastructure — but I think it has become the number one threat to Amazon.
On the surface, there seems to be no reason why Kubernetes and AWS cannot coexist (because they can and will coexist in many enterprises). However, Erez Rabih’s report comparing Kubernetes with Amazon’s Elastic Container Service (ECS) shows that things are not that simple.
“As more and more enterprises begin to use Docker as their primary infrastructure and delivery mechanism, choreography frameworks are becoming the heart of the system and affecting how we develop, distribute, run, and update software,” Rabih noted.
The OpenStack project is intended to help companies gain access to competitive cloud systems, but it largely serves as a means for companies to pretend to transform their data centers into “clouds” without realizing the real advantages (especially agility) that the public cloud prides itself on.
Where will the cloud go?
But Kubernetes and the containers it manages represent a more fundamental way of building and delivering infrastructure.
This is not to say that Kubernetes is somehow crowding out clouds, public or private. In fact, Kubernetes runs smoothly in AWS and other cloud environments.
But that is exactly the point. Kubernetes has the potential to end the idea of running everything in a single specific cloud. As Rabih says, “Kubernetes has cloud neutrality. “You can run your cluster on AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, and it doesn’t really make a difference.” Having all cloud assets in one place certainly has its advantages, but Kubernetes will be a very logical solution for enterprise customers who want to avoid Amazon cloud lock-in.
Of course, the final decision is still in the hands of the CIO. Developers love containers, and they (and the operations teams that support them) also love Kubernetes. This love of AWS won’t stop the growth of AWS, but it can lead to new, compelling and competitive ideas for enterprise infrastructure planning that are increasingly being embraced and adopted by more enterprises.
Original link:Why Kubernetes may be a bigger threat to Amazon than Google’s cloud