There are tons of container-adjacent tools, services, and products, along with new ones being released almost daily. Just yesterday there was an announcement from AWS that it has a new Linux offering centered around containers. GitHub (Microsoft) just announced that it has a new container registry service.<p>It looks like this trend is going to continue for a while as providers converge on similar offerings - either baked in-house or using common components (e.g. K8s) - that are likely (hopefully!) based off of the same standards (e.g. OCI).<p>After this happens...What's next?
How do companies differentiate their offerings in a future where they're providing the same tools? What do you expect they'll need to consider to remain relevant? What happens to vendors like Red Hat, VMware, and Rancher who offer solutions similar to the current cloud providers, but will presumably be offering commodities at that time? What does all this mean for the end customer? If you're in this industry, what does this mean for your future?
Great question...<p>Amazon’s offering wasn’t really about containers, even though it was.<p>It was about maintaining the heterogeneity of their brand and offerings by requiring competitors to allocate resources to compete in a space that really didn’t exist. It also provides AWS even more “stickyness” with their customers, giving those same customers LESS choice due to the scope of the offering which really can’t be found anywhere else, for now.<p>It’s happened before, many times, just with different scope.<p>Look at cloud. Before cloud, there was no AWS, no GCP, just virtual servers. Now everyone in the game is copying everyone else. The difference here is in the direction of scope. In the cloud scope, it’s getting bigger. Adding container support to tradition EC2/VPS is just making cloud bigger and harder to compete with for new entrants.<p>The question is, was AWS container OS release a red herring, or a signal that Amazon has even more interest in binding customers to its platforms by offering AWS platform compatible layers and versions of existing tools.<p>Their OS already exists in Rancher and CoreOS. It’s nothing new, except that it’s designed to only work with AWS services.<p>No reason to assume it won’t be the same on the container front.<p>What I would like to see is more network transparency, allowing locomotion of containers across the various cloud providers, but that would require the big players to work together to make their offerings compatible with each other’s, and I don’t see that happening any time soon.<p>It will be a 3rd party player who provides a cloud overlay across all the major cloud services, much like overlay networks subsume nodes, and that player will be acquired quickly because they present a threat to the heterogeneity and branding of the major players.<p>I don’t see FaaS taking off as it’s too atomic and 10x harder to maintain individual functions across the cloud than services as a whole, so I expect more brand-vertical offerings to be seen along with competition-stifling patents to keep the competitors from duplicating them.