Video: OpenStack on Kubernetes or Kubernetes on OpenStack?
The excitement around Docker and containers at last year’s OpenStack Silicon Valley transformed into a general interest in Kubernetes at this year’s OpenStack Silicon Valley 2016.
It’s a continuum that speaks to the overall maturity of the container ecosystem. Platforms now supersede containers as a more holistic way to view infrastructure.
Here’s my take on it, from the back porch of The New Stack headquarters in Portland, Or.
Apps built upon OpenStack and Kubernetes will increasingly be developed with containers, but the platforms will define how development integrates with the infrastructure itself.
Kubernetes is rapidly becoming the dominant orchestration platform for OpenStack. Two years ago, at OpenStack Paris, Docker was the focus of conversation from a container point of view. But now it is different. The conversation has turned to orchestration, and Kubernetes is at the center of that discussion.
Mirantis is building out a more modular version of OpenStack application using Kubernetes and Docker containers. And Kubernetes will run on OpenStack.
Alex Freedland of Mirantis said at our pancake breakfast that containers will change infrastructure and Kubernetes has the most community momentum. Infrastructure will be “Dockerized” and every bit will be delivered through orchestration. Everything, including OpenStack, will be orchestrated through Kubernetes.
The lines will blur. Both approaches will be adopted. Google’s Craig McLuckie said at the breakfast that running Kubernetes on OpenStack can be a great place to start.
OpenStack has capabilities that Kubernetes does not have. For example, OpenStack supports object storage — something that Kubernetes lacks. Kubernetes is becoming more enterprise-oriented, as we see in Kubernetes 1.3.
There is still a lot of room for making orchestration platforms more production ready. No one platform in the container ecosystem has the dominant hand. Apache Mesos, which can be seen as a rival of sorts to Kubernetes, is used every day in production environments for companies such as Twitter and Airbnb.
Docker is a sponsor of The New Stack.
