KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2017

At KubeCon EU, in Berlin, I got up on stage and stated that "Kubernetes Sucks (but all software sucks)". While we still have work to do, in the past several months the community has done great work to solve a whole host of issues to make Kubernetes “suck less.” In this talk I will outline the ways that the community has made this happen both in the core project and in the wider ecosystem.

Things are still developing, but here are the areas that I want to highlight. Hopefully we'll have talks on many of these so that I can highlight where and when folks can find out more. I won't be able to cover everything happening in the ecosystem but I can hint at the diversity and commitment to solving these issues.

* *Simpler application description.* As a community we are continuing to build more tcapable and simpler tools for describing applications through projects like ksonnet, OpenCompose, Kompose, and Helm.
* *Serverless platforms.* Through “function as a service” like systems we can abstract much of the nitty gritty around getting code packaged and running. In addition, scaling can be easy and automatic as code is run only when needed.
* *Simpler cluster install and admin.* kubeadm and how it is becoming a common toolkit. Similar work is ongoing to explore the idea of standardizing the description of a cluster at the infrastructure level through projects like Kubicorn. In addition, new APIs, such as the certificates API, are key building blocks for getting secure clusters up and running.
* *Curated development experiences.* Systems like Draft help to automate the build/launch/update cycle for development workflows. Others are also exploring ways to connect developers to clusters.
* *Making Kubernetes boring.* Kubernetes is maturing as a platform. As that happens, things in the "nucleus" are slowing down. In the past 6 months we've seen a concerted effort to encourage new features to be built with extensibility mechanisms as much as possible. This allows those projects to move fast while enabling exploration of the problem space.
* *Conformance.* Another key enabler for widespread Kubernetes adoption is conformance. There has been a wide set of folks involved in describing what should get to be called "Kubernetes". Tools like Sonobuoy point the direction to making this be an automated process that anyone can run against any cluster.
* *Observability.* Prometheus continues to be the go-to OSS solution for monitoring in the Kubernetes world. In additions, systems like linkerd and Istio/envoy enable introspection at the microservice mesh level.

We still have many challenges. Many of these are going to take long concerted efforts to fix. We are trapped, in some ways, by our promise of backward compatibility. It is often better to live with something annoying than to force breaking changes on our user base.

*Call to action:* Great job community! But the job isn't done. Let's keep working hard to bring Kubernetes to a larger and larger set of users and environments.