Is Kubernetes Betamax?
The other day I was reading through some old Reddit posts about the basic question ‘should I use Kubernetes at all?’ and found this post from Reddit user u/trg0819 where they posit that Kubernetes matters because it is the industry standard.
Betamax in theory did everything VHS did. But one made its way to be the industry standard, and people still using Betamax after that point were not well regarded.
His point is extremely valid: there’s value to using what everyone else is using, totally outside of its individual merits. In that way, Kubernetes is VHS all the way. Every major cloud platform supports Kubernetes, and 50–80% of containerized applications running in those platforms are using it (this article is old and the current rate is probably higher).
But I still have to ask, is Kubernetes Betamax?
I’ll admit that my analogy requires an understanding of an audio-visual format war from nearly 40 years ago, but bear with me: Sony’s Betamax was a superior video format at the time of its release. Betamax creates a denser image in pure analog, with more vertical lines in each frame. You can watch a comparison here.
So why is there a 0.0% chance that your grandparents’ basement is filled with Betamax tapes? There are a number of theories about price and availability, but one simple answer is that the most complex answer is not the best answer for everyone. The cost and complexity of Betamax players, combined with their relatively short play time, meant they lacked mass-market appeal.
How is this connected to Kubernetes? I don’t think anyone could argue that Kubernetes is a simple tool. Last year I saw people hailing a ‘simple troubleshooting guide’ that felt like… anything but. https://learnk8s.io/troubleshooting-deployments
And as we see a severe talent crunch, with teams unable to hire experienced Kubernetes experts, it seems reasonable to say that Kubernetes may just be too complex for mass-market adoption.
Even though most teams doing distributed workloads are using Kubernetes, it’s still true that most of the web requests that are handled are not handled by a distributed workload, so Kubernetes is the default tool for the job, the job is still not fully wide-spread.
Here’s one of the secrets of ‘failed’ formats like Betamax and DAT tape and others: They lived on for a very long time as tools for professionals.
The reason people aren’t using Kubernetes, why they’re sticking with tools that don’t involve distributed frameworks like serverless, is not because Kubernetes can’t do what they need, it’s because they’re intimidated by a tool that, as the original poster said, feels like overkill.
Okay, so in the real world at this point the analogy breaks down. I’ll mention here that tools and services like Mirantis are popular for a reason: a lot of teams are finding a huge expertise barrier to creating distributed workloads in production, and they need both tools and experts to them across that initial barrier.
