Why the User Community Needs Kubernetes
Understand how Kubernetes helps the user community by enabling cloud flexibility.
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The user community needs vendor-neutral platforms that provide flexibility and have a strong future. As things stand, Kubernetes fits the bill.
Overview of Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open-source project hosted and maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The CNCF is a Linux Foundation project with a goal of creating a vendor-neutral cloud. Of course, some vendors have more influence than others, but Kubernetes has remained vendor-neutral so far.
As the OS of the cloud, Kubernetes gives users great flexibility and helps avoid cloud lock-in.
It has already been stated that Kubernetes can abstract lower-level on-prem and cloud infrastructure, allowing you to write your applications to run on Kubernetes without even knowing which cloud is behind it. Well, this has a few side benefits, including:
You can deploy to one cloud today and switch to another tomorrow.
You can run multi-cloud
You can ramp onto a cloud and then ramp off back to on-prem more easily.
Basically, applications written for Kubernetes will run anywhere that you have Kubernetes. It is a lot like writing applications for Linux. If you write your applications to work on Linux, it does not matter if Linux is running on Supermicro servers in your garage or AWS cloud instances on the other side of the planet.
Most of the major cloud vendors contribute to the upstream Kubernetes project and use it as the basis of their own hosted Kubernetes services, creating a strong future for Kubernetes.
The following figure shows the upstream open-source Kubernetes project and how it relates to vendor implementations. The upstream project is where the new features and new development happen. Cloud vendors take this and use it to build their own cloud platforms and services. The diagram is very high-level and only for illustration purposes.