Is Kubernetes Betamax? | Hacker News Reader

Is Kubernetes Betamax?

medium.com

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Mesos was Betamax, Kube is VHS, Nomad is laserdisc

What's Napster?

Terraform maybe?

And Cloudflare Workers are like early iPods / iTunes.

Kube may be VHS, but DVR is coming. Get ready for all your investment to be obsoleted.

It's a faulty analogy. VHS/Betamax was important because we don't want two popular formats for distributing consumer content.

Any team can choose Kubernetes, VMs, serverless or what-have-you without much trouble. We don't want to have competing solutions that solve the same more narrow deployment goals. Kubernetes is winning its area, so in a way Kubernetes is Betamax as it was superior to VHS technically.

No it is not. Why you might ask? Because it does what it does very well, what is it you may ask again? It is exposing unified interface over many cloud resources, compute, networking, security, etc ...

Betamax did what it did very well, too. Better than VHS, which was its more popular alternative. I think that's the author's point.

The question is not whether Kubernetes is technically excellent or superior. It's whether Kubernetes will continue to dominate the service orchestration space in spite of its greater complexity.

The analogy doesn’t fit, because in spite of its complexity, Kubernetes won the orchestrator wars. So, as mentioned in another comment, Kubernetes is VHS: Developed by a vendor that was more interested in spreading it than locking it down and monetizing it, thus ensuring that it gathered support by other vendors. Other orchestrators are still being used, but they’re not the default option that most would know about. And that’s fine.

There’s no reason to believe Kubernetes will stop dominating the orchestration market. There’s going to be more pressure from existing vendors to make it cheaper, better easier to deploy and and less complex. Likewise with VHS, you could rent a VHS Player (MovieBox) along with a movie if you didn’t feed comfortable with the investment of a VCR.

What’s going to kill Kubernetes, if anything, is likely a move away from container orchestration to something else, where the Kubernetes resource model somehow isn’t a good fit.

Likewise, VHS didn’t lose dominance, the videotape market just became irrelevant. IBM still dominates mainframes, Windows NT++ still dominates office/workgroup servers, and VMware still dominates virtualization.

Just looks like a Mirantis commercial.

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