Kubernetes: Docker cluster management by Google | Hacker News Reader

Kubernetes: Docker cluster management by Google

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87 pointsproppy21 comments

Interesting.. the name, kubernetes, is Greek for helmsman or pilot. It is the root of the English word governor, but also of the word cybernetics. This puts the whole Cyborg-Governor-Schwarzenegger-Terminator thing in a whole new light...

Well, if anyone was going to become Skynet and kill us all, it would be Google. ;)

minor detail - i'd suspect that when Google will need a lot of neural net hardware the "kill" would look like a waste :)

k-Uber-net-s rhymes well with global domination.

Actually, Google seems to be slacking off in that arena, but Chris Matthieu and his team have it covered: http://skynet.im/

It's worth noting that this uses Salt as the underlying controller.

To the Kubernetes devs: It's probably worth mentioning that somewhere in the Readme. I say that partially because as an end user it's nice to know you're building on solid building blocks that have stood the test of time, and also because it was moderately disheartening to learn about Kubernetes with no mention of Salt and then later learn that it was build partially on the hard work of the Salt team.

Using their project as a building block is great, but give credit where it's due.

It seems that this is sort of a basic version of Omega (probably with Google-specific scheduling heuristics missing). I'd strongly recommend folks interested in this stuff to read the Omega paper [1] or to watch the Wilkes video [2].

[1]: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41684.html [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsXlm4wmB6o

Interesting that this is written in Go - I think it's the first open source release from Google that I've seen written in their language.

I wonder if anyone in here can comment on whether that is indicative of a trend inside Google - are people writing less Python / Java in there these days?

There is numerous ones: https://github.com/google/go-github https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gcloud-golang https://github.com/google/cadvisor https://github.com/google/mtail etc.

Thx - missed those!

We also announced cAdvisor in go. This is a container metrics monitoring component.

https://github.com/google/cadvisor

vitess was one of the first golang projects Google open sourced: https://github.com/youtube/vitess

> are people writing less Python / Java in there these days?

I don't know about "less Python/Java", but Go has been on the rise at Google internally, and has been used in public-facing services for a while.

dl.google.com (which powers Chrome downloads) and the MySQL database management layer for Youtube[0] have both been written in Go for a while now.

[0] https://github.com/youtube/vitess

I am missing the utility here. Is this just a way to run docker on the google compute cloud.

It's a way of running docker containers at scale.

So is there an example showing how to launch a large number of these. Right now all I see is how to spin up one node.

https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes/blob/maste...

Kubernetes is not intrinsically tied to GCE. It's open, and can be made to work on any cloud platform.

How does this compare to CoreOS?

This could run on top of CoreOS (I haven't tried yet though).

If we look at a very high level sketch of what a dynamic cluster system look like (https://speakerdeck.com/jbeda/containers-at-scale?slide=5) I think that CoreOS fits in at the "Managed Base OS" level.

Kubernetes is a Cluster Scheduler and a "Node Container Manager" (called the kubelet in Kubernetes).

(This deck is pre-Kupernetes. The python agent that we released will be replaced with the kubelet at some point soon.)

CoreOS has its own cluster scheduler called Fleet that seems to cover a similar ground. I'd love for someone familiar with both to do a writeup.

This is exactly what I'm really curious about

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