Dan Luu

What does it mean that some Google execs think they gave away the farm with k8s?

Added 2020-09-18 07:49:11 +0000 UTC

Matt Klein has this Twitter thread (https://twitter.com/mattklein123/status/1229513048378888193) where he talks a bit about k8s politics and says the politics "are primarily driven by a few execs who believe that Google "gave away the farm" when they moved K8s into a foundation".

I've seen other comments on Twitter that also indicate that k8s politics are real and vicious, but I haven't seen anyone publicly discuss what this means in concrete terms.

Here's a story I heard, which you should take with a grain of salt since it's from someone who isn't a super reliable source and I haven't gotten independent confirmation, but it's thematically consistent with some other stories I've heard even if I haven't confirmed this particular story.

One of the scaling limits of k8s is due to its dependency on etcd. This is a serious issue for companies that want to use k8s "at scale" and people have all kinds of terrible workarounds for this. At one point, some etcd folks volunteered to swap in a more general API, which would make it easier to drop in a replacement for etcd. Google folks, who had control over this decision, denied this request.

At the time the request was denied, Google was pretty far along on a project that wrapped one of its highly scalable internal systems in the etcd API, which would allow hosted Kubernetes on Google to get around this scaling limit that exists in the open source Kubernetes.

If you're a very cynical person, you'd expect this or similar outcomes as a result of the incentive structure here.