And I thought I was being tinfoil-hat-y about Google's true motives in pushing Kubernetes so hard and the benefits of it being so popular. It enabled the first true cross-cloud experience, that Google just happens to be the creator of and have control over (no matter how much you hear that it's "community driven", the only project I've seen that is actually lives up to that is Rust). Yeah, Kubernetes is massively useful and I'm grateful, but that doesn't stop me from being very cynical about it -- the complexity and learning curve is a consultant's dream (disclaimer: I'm a consultant) and at this point it looks like a 5d chess move to improve their cloud offering by basically backdooring themselves into every single other cloud and the headspace of millions of developers.
Condolences to Crossplane[1]. Hyperbole yes, but I do not envy any companies that have to try and compete with Google in the current regulatory (captured) marketplace. If they didn't buy you but entered your space it's gotta be bad news on some level.
Luckily, the fact the kubernetes is open source and at least in some part community driven (i.e. the wide ecosystem of plugins) means that companies like Crossplane can still exist if they work hard to out-sell and out-market google, and there is a slim possibility that the barrier to creating a "cloud platform" being lowered so much might mean that all the little mom & pop shop VPS providers and bare metal providers will get in on it, and force the bigger guys to compete on price somewhat (we all know big enterprise is going to go straight to AWS/GCP/Azure anyway).
[EDIT] - I just realized that while I was harsh on Crossplane, they arguably just became an extremely valuable acquisition target for every other large cloud provider that wants to buy their way in. Probably not Amazon but Azure/IBM/Orcale/etc probably.
Google very much does not own Kubernetes. They have vested interest in a number of SIGs but the SIGs have been good about preventing the chairs from being Google dominated.
Redhat, Microsoft and vmware are major contributors to the product. Few of the founders work for Google anymore. Google probably has the largest influence but it is very much a community.
just want to note that I do not disagree -- but until Google has a minority influence it's still worse than Rust. I had this same opinion of Rust's governance (and was proven wrong, and changed my opinion accordingly), I have yet to come to the same conclusion about Google & Kubernetes.
For example the decision to avoid donating Istio to the CNCF[0].
> That was Google's standard response about Istio for years. But people familiar with Istio's behind-the-scenes discussions said that Google had changed its mind late last year, driven by a faction within the company that believed donating Kubernetes to a foundation was a strategic mistake. When contacted by Protocol earlier this year, Google declined to clarify its plans for Istio.
Google is not completely evil, but it is not my friend, it's a corporation that isn't even a not-for-profit nor non-profit.
I'm wondering how native Anthos integrate with other clouds. They are standardizing on Kubernetes level, i.e. you can schedule pods from on-prem GKE to AWS cluster. But are you able to use RDS similar to how k8s config connector makes CloudSQL available via CRs? Crossplane has the advantage of being equally integrated to all clouds.
Also, if the point of multi-cloud was vendor lock-in, aren't you now GCP locked-in when you use Anthos? It's not open source and may die any time like other Google projects.
Sorry I think I might be misunderstanding the specifics (since you work at crossplane) of the difference, but at this point I would assume that Google can dedicate engineers to taking any approach Crossplane takes. Basically the answer to how any of this will work is CRDs and Operators -- it becomes a grind of ensuring good ergonomics, good integration and marketing after that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Crossplane introduces CRDs that paper over the differences between the provider (ex. `OmniDatabase`), rather than just offering CRDs that correspond to a platform's offering (ex. `RDSDatabase`) though I assume you can access those too, and I don't see why Google won't do both. That's the thing about being a monopoly player in the space -- unless a smaller player is doing something so next level that you can't copy it, you can just offer underpriced mediocrity until they fold (forgive the cynicism and hyperbole).
Crossplane has a huge head start and probably the least buggy implementation of this concept, and was one of the first to innovate in this field (I saw a few talks from previous kubecons) so wishing you good luck in the future!
And I thought I was being tinfoil-hat-y about Google's true motives in pushing Kubernetes so hard and the benefits of it being so popular. It enabled the first true cross-cloud experience, that Google just happens to be the creator of and have control over (no matter how much you hear that it's "community driven", the only project I've seen that is actually lives up to that is Rust). Yeah, Kubernetes is massively useful and I'm grateful, but that doesn't stop me from being very cynical about it -- the complexity and learning curve is a consultant's dream (disclaimer: I'm a consultant) and at this point it looks like a 5d chess move to improve their cloud offering by basically backdooring themselves into every single other cloud and the headspace of millions of developers.
Condolences to Crossplane[1]. Hyperbole yes, but I do not envy any companies that have to try and compete with Google in the current regulatory (captured) marketplace. If they didn't buy you but entered your space it's gotta be bad news on some level.
Luckily, the fact the kubernetes is open source and at least in some part community driven (i.e. the wide ecosystem of plugins) means that companies like Crossplane can still exist if they work hard to out-sell and out-market google, and there is a slim possibility that the barrier to creating a "cloud platform" being lowered so much might mean that all the little mom & pop shop VPS providers and bare metal providers will get in on it, and force the bigger guys to compete on price somewhat (we all know big enterprise is going to go straight to AWS/GCP/Azure anyway).
[EDIT] - I just realized that while I was harsh on Crossplane, they arguably just became an extremely valuable acquisition target for every other large cloud provider that wants to buy their way in. Probably not Amazon but Azure/IBM/Orcale/etc probably.
[1]: https://crossplane.io/