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Comment by throwawaykbfud | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of FUD in here, like suggesting that Google wouldn't use something written in Go for this purpose (lol,) suggesting an open source platform that can span multiple clouds is an attempt to lock people into GKE (lol 2x,) and suggesting that Kubernetes is "married" to Docker (CNI? CRI?) or isn't extensible (the entire gRPC/REST API? custom resources? device plugins?)

People use Kubernetes for the ecosystem, the "shit around it." They even formed a foundation for the "shit around it" called the CNCF. And if you think all of that stuff is just for GKE lockin, maybe take a look at gRPC sometime.

I don't disagree that Kubernetes is not positioned to be a replacement for Borg, at least not for many years. It has a lot to go and the Storage API is indeed a sore spot for the Kubernetes project in general. But this realization is a very long walk from "Kubernetes was designed to lock people into GKE."

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> I don't disagree that Kubernetes is not positioned to be a replacement for Borg

Good. Because that was my point, but the verbiage “don’t disagree” says a lot. We agree, except for the timeline. We will all be dead before Borg is replaced with Kubernetes. You can take that to the bank.

Kinda weird to fire up a throwaway, presumably to conceal your Google credentials, then attack a Xoogler who used to work on Borg SRE (alongside sjh under Peter Dahl, and long enough my NDA has long since lapsed) and has run Kubernetes since it was able to OOM as I described, for spreading FUD. The term FUD implies that I don’t know what I’m talking about and I’m making shit up, while I’m one of the few people, including presumably you, who can actually coherently comment on both.

It can only span multiple clouds now because other clouds had to ship Kubernetes. Remember the timeline: hello world, we made a container thing. Now we offer it as a service. Now Amazon does too. Oh, we are now multicloud. Your rebuttals are quite disingenuous, and casting them with a mocking aspersion doesn’t sell your point. It makes you come across nothing like you intend.

Get back on your real username and stop being offended I criticized Kubernetes. I know I’m one of the few who does, but there are legitimate concerns, and sharing them toward a “why Borg isn’t going anywhere” point is a weird hill for you to die on.

>Good. Because that was my point.

Fair enough, but you said a whole lot of other crap that is very much misleading in my opinion, and I was addressing all of that.

>It can only span multiple clouds now because other clouds had to ship Kubernetes

See, this is the kind of thing that makes me treat this as FUD rather than just criticism. I was running Kubernetes on AWS long before Amazon offered a service for it. If Kubernetes wasn't open source and instead each cloud provider came up with their own implementation, would that have been better?

>Get back on your real username

No thanks. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why.

> It can only span multiple clouds now because other clouds had to ship Kubernetes.

This isn't true. People were running open-source Kubernetes on AWS and Azure before either provider had a hosted Kubernetes service. In fact back when GKE was the only hosted Kubernetes service, more companies were running Kubernetes on non-Google platforms than on GCP (https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/12/06/cloud-native-technologie...).

[Disclaimer: I work on Kubernetes/GKE at Google.]

  > Kinda weird to fire up a throwaway, presumably to conceal
  > your Google credentials, then attack a Xoogler who used to
  > work on Borg SRE (alongside sjh under Peter Dahl, and long
  > enough my NDA has long since lapsed)

That's an interesting way to phrase it. I also worked on Borg SRE with Seth under Peter (for six years), and I don't remember anyone else with the same initials as me being present during that time. Just in case I was forgetting someone, I checked the Borg paper (https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...) for the SRE credits section -- I remember all of them, but none had your ... personality.

Luckily, the very first hit for a search of [[ jsmthrowaway site:news.ycombinator.com ]] is your old comment from 2013 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6750805), in which you discuss being terminated after two months due to failing a background check. That explains why I couldn't remember you, but it doesn't explain why you think two months of reading "Borg 101" tutorials has given you meaningful insight into which parts of the Kubernetes implementation are difficult to scale.

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