CoreOS (YC S13) Raises $12M to Bring Kubernetes to the Enterprise

Maybe it&#x27;s just me, but I fail to see how all those project make the developer&#x2F;devops person&#x27;s life less complex. I don&#x27;t have the experience to have managed a cluster of 1000s of machines but I HAVE managed a cluster of ~50 nodes with MySQL, ElasticSearch, RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ, PHP, Clojure and the whole gang at various points in time. I am yet to see a single project (Mesos, Kubernetes, Docker, whatever) that would DRAMATICALLY make my life so much better. Not trying to be overly negative here, just looking for answers and better solutions.<p>EDIT I also continuously wonder how do things like Ansible fit into the picture. Are they competitors? Are they supplemental to the likes of Mesos&#x2F;Kubernetes? Are they orthogonal?

&gt; we set out to build and deliver Google’s infrastructure to everyone else<p>This statement rings pretty true as Kubernetes (also known as k8s) has some Google biases. Not all cloud providers will have such an easy time providing all the infrastructure necessary to run CoreOS + k8s smoothly.<p>For example, Kubernetes assigns each Pod (k8s unit of computation) an IP address, which is only simple to do if your cloud provider supplies something like a &#x2F;24 private block to your nodes. CoreOS came up with the VXLAN-based Flannel project to make this model more portable[0], but Layer 2 over Layer 3 isn&#x27;t something I&#x27;d like to throw haphazardly into my production environments. Google Compute Engine conveniently provides this setup as an option.<p>Another example of Google-favoritism is the strong preference of centralized storage--particularly GCEPersistentDisk. At first I was concerned about centralized storage by default as we know disk locality is a Good Thing (TM), but after reading a paper that claimed networking is improving faster than disks are[2], I felt somewhat better about this. However, it&#x27;s still pretty obvious that a Google Persistent Disk is the way to go with k8s[3].<p>That said, I&#x27;m really happy that Google has open-sourced this project because it is indeed a functioning, tested, and easy-to-use distributed system. I&#x27;m sure that the devs aren&#x27;t aggressively shutting out other cloud providers and that these biases are probably just a side-effect of their resource allocation process and the problems that they intend to solve (e.g. GCEPersistentDisk used to be a core type instead of a module--it has since gotten better). It&#x27;s still important to evaluate a technology&#x27;s biases and potential evolution before throwing your product on it.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;coreos&#x2F;flannel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;coreos&#x2F;flannel</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;GoogleCloudPlatform&#x2F;kubernetes&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;docs&#x2F;volumes.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;GoogleCloudPlatform&#x2F;kubernetes&#x2F;blob&#x2F;maste...</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eecs.berkeley.edu&#x2F;~ganesha&#x2F;disk-irrelevant_hotos2011.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eecs.berkeley.edu&#x2F;~ganesha&#x2F;disk-irrelevant_hotos2...</a><p>[3] Do you see any other providers here? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;GoogleCloudPlatform&#x2F;kubernetes&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;pkg&#x2F;volume" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;GoogleCloudPlatform&#x2F;kubernetes&#x2F;tree&#x2F;maste...</a>

Congrats to the team! Interesting to see a big focus on Kubernetes going forward--doesn&#x27;t CoreOS kind of compete with Kubernetes? (even though Kubernetes builds on CoreOS tools like etcd)

Aren&#x27;t they doing the same thing people have been complaining about Docker doing? Running with features but not stablizing? Is CoreOS not as unstable as the impression I&#x27;ve gotten of it from comments led me to believe?

Kubernetes will become a dominant container orchestration platform and API. It&#x27;s what Mesos should be, but with the backing of Google, kubernetes is more likely to push into that space a lot quicker and with a lot more momentum. Notice, there are a lot more startups forming around kubernetes than mesos. Even still, competition is healthy, having multiple forms of large scale orchestration and resource management systems are important for the tech ecosystem. I imagine we&#x27;ll see a couple more over the next few years. Docker with their own. I&#x27;m sure we&#x27;ll see one to solve these problems at a smaller scale that is easier to manage. And perhaps another focused on a niche area like AWS lambda functions but as an open source project.

There seems to be some feature overlap between fleet and kubernetes. Anyone knows are they planning to reconcile those two?

How does this compare to Redhat&#x27;s Atomic Host?