Kubernetes: Promises and Challenges

Kubernetes as technology has been fascinating and introduced a paradigm shift to the IT world. Why is that? Well, orchestrating the containerized environment has supported the growth and managing large enterprises to keep up with demands. When your app lives in a “container” and that container can scale up and down in a matter of seconds responding to the demands, that offers unprecedented flixability. Also, the idea is to orchestrate the life of these containers and offer their application as a “service” making those containers as commodities that can be recreated and deleted with no impact on the service. All of that will come as music to many of CTOs and CEOs and it has been. However, I would say there are many things are causing the market not to adopt it as quickly as it could and here are some:

– It is a big paradigm shift into how IT infrastructure is being managed and a lot of introduced ideas. Yes, still you have network pieces, assigning computational resources, and storage. However, the whole is being built together is pretty in a different fashion. Here are some of the challenges, I believe is facing technology:
– Networks: you got multiple plugin providers and you need to understand how every one of them is used !!
– Scripting skills are needed. Even though it is not full-blown programming but yet understanding of basic scripting is needed. For most operators for years, they tend to deal with vendor-specific interfaces.
– Lack of comprehensive management UI
– Multiple technologies are glued together. Containers runtime, cloud infrastructure, monitoring applications, and many others still introduced to the environment
– Dealing with stateful apps is still a pain.

I do believe the whole thing needs an enterprise-supported version, even though #IBM with #openshift is working to fill the gap but for some reason, the market is not pretty enthusiastic about them at least from what I have seen.

Here is a home-depot case study of monitoring over 250 sites and Kubernetes clusters:


Kubernetes has been created and supported by Google and became later open-source and part of the Linux foundation.