Ask HN: Is Kubernetes the New Computer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is Kubernetes the New Computer?

1 pointzubairq8 comments

Maybe we should be treating Kubernetes as he new IBM PC and designing cross platform Kubernetes operating systems or apps?

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No. Kubernetes is a complicated piece of orchestration software that codifies some of the techniques giant tech companies like Google and Facebook have developed to work at their scale.

Under the hood you still have to configure and manage the actual computers and their operating systems, which means you're also running Chef, Puppet, or the like. You need to have a pretty big engineering organization (handwavingly, the few hundred engineer range) before it makes sense to run both the config manager and Kubernetes.

Managed Kubernetes may change this equation for you if you're going that route.

So what is your opinion of this article? https://thenewstack.io/kubecon-2018-kubernetes-is-the-new-os...

It's an ad from a conference about Kubernetes.

But I guess you don't always need to configure the systems underneath, if you buy Kubernetes as a service from Google or Amazon, is that correct?

Yes, and if you buy managed databases as a service you don't have to do your own backups (though you probably should copy their backups offsite on a regular schedule).

That doesn't mean you should regard k8s as the new OS. If you wanted to go that route, the relevant things to look at are Inferno, Plan 9, and clustered VMS.

Ok thanks, I'll check out Inferno, Plan 9, and clustered VMS then, if they are the future of IT world

Kubernetes might not be the new IBM PC, but it is in fact the new platform that is the de facto standard to deploy and manage web services and the infrastructure used to run them. There's no way around it, and that's good thing.

Well since most new apps are web services and kubernetes is the standard then shouldn’t we be treating it as the new OS later?

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