I don't think it's fizzling out, it's kind of becoming a basic standard. And if your use case is simple enough to not need Kubernetes, then doing it with Kubernetes isn't that much more complicated either.
Why, why, *WHY* does each SF service need to have some terrible wrapper code that forces it to run in, and only in, SF? Oh ya.. vendor lock-in.
No thanks.
Yes, I'm aware that MS added support for docker containers in SF. That integration is dreadful. They did about as good a job of it as the WCF team did of shoe-horning "RESTFul Services" in.
> Windows doesn’t have “distributions”, so there’s less need for containers in that space.
I don't follow. What does distributions have to do with need for containers?
A lot (but not everything).
It's important to recognise where the "stable API/ABI boundaries" are. In Linux, the stable boundary is the kernel. Userspace is unstable. There are many distributions, with many small and big differences. Different C runtimes, different folder structures, different configs, modules, etc...
In Windows, the stable boundary is the Win32, COM, and .NET APIs, which are in user space. The kernel boundary is not stable[1] however, which also matters.
Even Linus Torvalds has trouble distributing his hobby dive-computer software to Linux![2] He has no issues with MacOS and Windows, because they have stable APIs and distribution mechanisms. With Linux, the kernel is stable, but essentially nothing else is. If you want to distribute software to everyone, then this is a complex problem with many moving parts that you have to manage yourself.
Containers sidestep this by packaging up the distribution along with the software being deployed. This works because the kernel ABI is stable.
[1] In the Windows world you don't really need to package up the "Windows distribution" because there is only one: Microsoft Windows. Conversely, Windows containers aren't truly portable because the Windows kernel ABI isn't stable. However Microsoft changed this with Windows 11 and Server 2022, the kernel ABI is now "stable", or at least sufficiently stable for Server Core containers to be portable for 5+ years as-is.
[2] He's complaining about "desktop applications", but the exact same rant would apply to server software also. This one talk made me understand containers and why they're so important in the Linux world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/windows/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/windows-faq?tabs=...
Some of the very recently closed issues were jaw-dropping, such as totally broken networking in common scenarios.
DNS resolution is very different in Windows compared to Linux, making much of the "neatness" of Kubernetes pod-to-pod communication not work.
There is no maximum memory limit in Windows kernel "job objects" (equivalent to cgroups), so one memory leak in one pod can kill an entire node or cluster. This is very hard to solve, and I've seen it take out Service Fabric clusters also.
Etc, etc...
https://cloudbase.it/cloudbase-init/
In theory this means they could be managed then by something like KubeVirt instead of treating them like a worker node. https://kubevirt.io/user-guide/virtual_machines/startup_scri...
Excited to see this space continue to evolve for sure.
New Windows VMs are generally built using PowerShell DSC or a similar native tool.
Different distributions run different kernels. A container from a different distribution will probably work, until it doesn’t.
Not so much, no. Linux is the kernel, and all Linux distros, every single one, employs Linux as its kernel, or else it would not be Linux. Stepping back from my pedantry, I believe what you must mean is that different Linux distributions will customize the kernel a bit. That doesn't change what it is. Just because you have automatic windows and I have cranks, and you have leather interior and I have plush doesn't mean our vehicles aren't the exact same year, make and model.
If you run kernel version A in docker, and try and run a container that was designed to use kernel version B you may run into problems.
K8s is not Borg. Not even close. It's a toy that has limited use.
The revolutionary tech is the Linux kernel features that enabled containers, overlay filesystems and docker image format.
The no vendor lock is looks great on paper but you are locked in day one. (Eg on aws you probably use IAM, LB, ASG for K8 Nodes - you can maybe move it to another cloud but the effort is going to be significant). Cloud agnosticism is a lie.
At the K8s level, it seems like the introduction of the Gateway API is probably a good level of abstraction to work towards that will keep things about as flexible as possible without all of the insanity that comes with going beyond that to keep everything 100% vendor neutral.
Even just sticking strictly to the K8s space, there is nothing even close to matching GKE standalone, let alone GKE autopilot that I am aware of. In the world of serverless the gap looks to be even bigger.
I couldn't imagine a situation where I would even consider something else in a greenfield project / company honestly.
At least some of namespaces were contributed by OpenVZ