It seems K8S is gaining real traction and every system is integrating with it or on its way. It’s also a good way to avoid cloud vendor lock-in. Is it safe to say that it's another Cloud?
It's an orchestrator for containers, and you can get by with scripting declarative stuff here and there for smaller to mid-size Docker deployments.<p>If you're using containers and scaling becomes a consideration however, Kubernetes is a natural choice because of its granularity and ubiquity as you rightly mentioned.<p>Following this logic, I think investing in the inherent complexity of k8s pays wonderful dividends when you begin to use it in a multi-cloud scenario. Scaling and healing workloads across different providers/regions is a game changer and that's where the abstraction makes the most sense (and bangs the most buck).
I’m not sure it helps or hinders lock in, compared to the alternative of managing some Linux VMs. If you have a bunch of Linux VMs and run free software you aren’t locked in. Kubernetes might make it easier to manage and administer things but that is a controversial topic, with some people saying it adds complexity and requires even more refined sysadmin skills than running stuff straight on the machines.<p>For a personal project I’m using a cheap VMs and just the Debian package manager to install what I need, plus a list of steps I could turn into a shell script if required. I’m not worried about being locked in.
No. It is safe to say that it is another OS. If kubernetes manage processes (aka containers) (including placement, resource management,etc) across machines, it can be treated as a distrubuted os. It can run on a cloud (on prem or public cloud).