Comment by cmcluck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmcluck | Hacker News Reader

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Disclosure: I work at Google and was a co-founder of the Kubernetes project.

I think your observations are interesting. From my (somewhat biased) viewpoint I don't think we will enter into a 'post cloud' world. There are very real efficiency gains from running at public cloud provider scale, and the economics you see right now are not what I would consider 'steady state'. Beyond that the systems we are introducing with Kubernetes are focused on offering high levels of dynamism. They will ultimately fit your workload precisely to the amount of compute infrastructure you need, hopefully saving you quite a lot of money vs provisioning for peak. It will make a lot of sense to lease the amount of 'logical infrastructure' you need vs provisioning static physical infrastructure.

There are however legitimate advantages to our customers in being able to pick their providers and change providers as their needs change. We see the move to high levels of portability as a great way to keep ourselves and other providers honest.

-- craig

Since we have someone who worked on these projects here, there was a report a couple of years ago about Borg and its successor, then called Omega. Is Kubernetes related to / a renamed Omega?

Edit: Wired story: http://www.wired.com/2013/03/google-borg-twitter-mesos/

Omega is a separate system than both Borg and Kubernetes.

Kubernetes is heavily inspired by both Borg and Omega, and incorporates many of the ideas from both, as well as lessons learned along the way. And many of the engineers who work on Kubernetes at Google, also worked on Omega and Borg.

Hi Craig!

Please feel free to respond to me at your leisure, but are you * sure * we will never enter a post-cloud world?

Not to say that there will be no cloud infrastructure, per se, just as mainframes still exist today.

On the other hand, I imagine someday we will have "datacenter in your pocket" type devices. The challenge will be who has the data -- obviously Google has already identified this as a key strategic advantage. The challenge will * not * be who has enough resources to compute it.

These pocket devices seem natural as a way to place strong AI at your fingertips, Siri-like agents, autonomous robots, etc. The first ones, which we have now, either use a data connection or are optimized to have small data sets, but the need for larger data sets is obvious. Once it becomes the primary limiter, I think it will only be a matter of time before "big data" is decoupled from the cloud and personal computing retakes its dominant position. Some will use laptops, some will use phones, but the effect will be the same.

There are also the privacy benefits from managing large datasets on your own device -- solutions are already available for things like how to back up your data, how to sync large sets of common data among a network of untrusted peers, and how to curate that data.

Cloudlets might be the herald of the post-cloud world.

http://elijah.cs.cmu.edu/

http://elijah.cs.cmu.edu/DOCS/satya-ieeepvc-cloudlets-2009.p...

http://www.akamai.com/cloudlets

Disclaimer: I work on Google Cloud but not Kubernetes or GKE. Also, Satya was my PhD advisor.

good AI tends to run on massive clusters. Barring some quantum leap in computing technology, I don't see how computation on local devices would fill our computing requirements.

Can you comment a little bit more on where you see the steady state economics of public cloud going? From where we are today, what factors (other than the dynamic provisioning you mentioned) will lead to better economics?

Thanks for commenting on this thread!

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