Why Kubernetes is a game-changer for software startups
If Kubernetes has one superpower, I might argue it’s providing a standard abstraction on which software vendors can design their products to run. Yeah, there are all the benefits of container orchestration and reliability and DevOps and what have you, but there will always tools to facilitate those things. However, having a standard platform on which to deploy software? Well, that could open the world for enterprise startups in the same way that infrastructure as a service did a decade ago.
I should note that the idea of Kubernetes as a standard application platform is not novel: I had Replicated CEO Grant Miller on the Architecht Show podcast talking about KOTS (Kubernetes Off The Shelf) applications, and in my day job at VMware I’ve written about a customer trying to standardize on Helm files as the preferred package from ISVs. Bitnami (also part of VMware) offers easy access to pre-packaged Kubernetes applications.
What’s underappreciated, I think, is just how powerful this trend could become — especially for startups. In fact, I’ve had several startup founders on the podcast over the past year and a half or so who’ve designed their software to run on Kubernetes (including a yet-to-be-published episode with Starburst Data founder and CEO Justin Borgman). There are several reasons for this decision, but a big one is that it lets them focus their engineering on a single platform that happens to run anywhere — on premises, in the cloud, or on the edge.
Contrast this to years past, where vendors first needed to support whatever stack their prospective customers happened to be running. After that, it was determining which cloud platform to support first (almost always AWS), while leaving money on the table if GCP or Azure users wanted get on board. Or it was offering the product as SaaS, which certainly has its benefits but comes with the limitation of being cloud-only and the burden of managing a multi-tenant service.
If customers are already running Kubernetes, they can now install and manage COTS Application A the same as COTS Applications B, C, and D, and largely the same as they manage their custom software hosted on Kubernetes. And of course there’s a flywheel effect, because once an organization installs Kubernetes for any reason, it’s now that much easier to start hosting more things on it. At some point, if ISVs aren’t packaging their wares to run natively on Kubernetes, perhaps they’re not worth the time. And for startups, if prospective customers aren’t running Kubernetes, perhaps they’re not worth the time.
I make the comparison to IaaS because IaaS changed the economics of software startups by eliminating the cost of buying servers. For entrepreneurs who came of age after the advent of the cloud, prototyping and hosting software products really did require only a credit card. They could go to investors with actual users and never have to worry about managing a data center. Think about every web and mobile app you’ve used since about 2010 — starting with Netflix — and how many of them run, or ran, in the cloud.
With Kubernetes, software startups can build their products to run on it, thus saving the time and mental energy of debating which server environments to support or which cloud marketplaces to target. They can push updates in the continuous manner that’s natural to developers today. Basically, they can focus on building enterprise software without focusing on many of the parts that make it so difficult to sell enterprise software.
Kubernetes is lots of things to lots of people, and I will be very surprised if it doesn’t also become a default deployment environment for enterprise software startups.
