Thom Crowe
There is no shortage of hot solutions in the tech world, and as developers, we are always attracted to cool new technologies, hoping that new ideas will help us solve technical challenges and business problems.
The problem, however, is that until a new technology matures and is widely used, it is difficult to determine whether it is really the best choice for our use cases.
So the fact that a technology becomes mainstream, and thus the standard of the future, is not in itself a bad thing — we lose a little of the excitement of exploring the possibilities (and “pits”), but we gain reliability and convenience.
As the technology matures, simpler APIs, richer libraries, wider community support, and even technology-related things like training and certification will follow. Mature technology gives us more time to focus on solving advanced problems rather than struggling with complex technical concepts and infrastructure, in other words, we don’t have to rehash the details of best practices.
A case in point is Kubernetes, a technology that has been in the limelight since its inception and which recently seems to have passed the threshold of mainstream.
Kubernetes’ “Leap”
Earlier this year, Kubernetes became the first project to graduate from the CNCF incubator. Experts generally agree that the K8s’ “leap forward” is due to three things
First, Docker donated its container technology to CNCF at the beginning of 2017, making the Docker Container Platform Core Runtime a community-owned project that helps establish an industry standard for containerization.
Second, the world’s major cloud service providers and IT vendors have all chosen Kubernetes as the default container choreography tool, and many of them have launched their own Kubernetes solutions, platforms and cloud hosting services.
Third, CNCF launched the Kubernetes Conformance Certification Program to help suppliers prove that their solutions conform to the Kubernetes standard — giving customers confidence that they can adopt Kubernetes without being locked into a single vendor.
Boredom is business
If Kubernetes has entered the world of “certification” and “best practices,” does that mean it is no longer a hot new technology? Or to put it another way: Will Kubernetes become boring?
Many experts agree that so-called boredom is not a bad thing. Kubernetes has won the hearts and minds of container choreographer enthusiasts, but to survive in the wider world, it needs to attract people who won’t spend much time learning Kubernetes’ complex technical concepts, and who will be using K8s to solve real business problems in the years ahead — for those users, Being able to land the technology quickly and make it work is critical.
This is why CNCF is setting up a series of training and education systems, not only for Kubernetes experts, but also for a wide range of developers. If we just wanted to use Kubernetes to orchestrate the container, it would suffice.
Boring is simple
In addition to certification and training, the cloud computing service providers provide more and more hosting services and simple and easy to understand Kubernetes solutions without special learning, so that Kubernetes has become more and more widely used.
As developers, our first job is to build the app and get it running. We may eventually become K8s experts, but that’s not what we’re going to do on day one. Cloud computing service providers provide solutions, tools and platform role is in this, we do not have to worry about how to configure Kubernetes from the beginning, how to maintain, how to optimize and so on.
It’s not just cloud native apps
Kubernetes is not only suitable for new cloud native projects, it can also be used to modernize traditional applications. Through the transformation of the container of legacy applications and the arrangement of Kubernetes, we can break the limitations of the original application architecture and transform it into a new model that ADAPTS to the application needs.
The revamped application takes full advantage of cloud native advantages such as elasticity and scalability, as well as powerful routing, logging, monitoring and security tools, and we can add new microservices on top of it for extended functionality.
Explore new ‘excitement’
If Kubernetes has matured and is a great solution, where should tinkering developers look for new excitement?
Consider how the popularity of Docker containerized solutions paved the way for Kubernetes, which unlocked the Service Mesh microservice architecture… Perhaps as more organizations put Kubernetes into production, the ability to connect, manage, and secure microservices will be the next challenge to be addressed.
Rainbond is an application-centric open source PaaS that deeply integrates kubernetes-based container management, Service Mesh microservice architecture best practices, multi-type CI/CD application construction and delivery, multi-data center resource management and other technologies. To provide users with cloud native application life-cycle solutions, build an ecosystem of interconnection between applications and infrastructure, application to application, and infrastructure to meet the requirements of agile development, efficient operation, and lean management required to support rapid business development.