With Oracle on board, Kubernetes has to be the de facto standard for container orchestration

Now that Oracle has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and expressed its plans to incorporate Kubernetes into its container service, I think it’s fair to call Kubernetes the de facto standard for how enterprises will do container orchestration. 

At this point, literally (right?) every U.S.-based technology vendor / cloud provider that matters is a CNCF member and most have a clear and active Kubernetes strategy. Microsoft, in particular, is putting a lot of resources into hiring Kubernetes talent and making it easier to use. Kubernetes startups have raised a lot of money—including, today, $25 million by Heptio, which counts two Kubernetes creators as its founders—and their early efforts at commercializing the technology are maturing.

There will certainly be edge cases where alternative container platforms are used and probably outperform Kubernetes, but the tech community has spoken about where its energy will be focused. Kubernetes is what customers want, it’s where companies are investing their resources and, therefore, it’s going to be the focal point of most container-orchestration plays going forward. 

Summarizing what I wrote last week when Mesosphere announced a Kubernetes integration for DC/OS: Not supporting Kubernetes at this point is akin to just leaving money on the table. Smart companies will embrace it as the standard for managing containers and building cloud-native applications, and then figure out how to differentiate on top of and around it.

Now, of course, the big challenge for Kubernetes is not becoming the next OpenStack. There are a lot of reasons I think that won’t happen—ranging from the companies involved to the project’s bottom-up adoption pattern—but that’s a subject for another day.

In other CNCF news, the foundation also added two new projects into its fold: Jaeger, a distributed tracing system developed by Uber; and Envoy, a service mesh platform developed by Lyft. The latter move is intriguing because CNCF already has a service mesh project in Linkerd. Adding Envoy is likely welcome news to folks building cloud-native applications and to large vendors integrating pieces of the CNCF stack, but I would assume folks working on Linkerd—and the team at Buoyant, which created it—are less excited about competing for attention within the same foundation. Choice is great and all, but being the only game is town certainly has its merits. 

Anyhow, I spoke with Buoyant CEO William Morgan on the ARCHITECHT Show podcast recently. You can listen to that interview and read some highlights here.