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Comment by twakefield | Hacker News Reader

The brilliance of open sourcing Borg (aka Kubernetes) is evident in times like these. We[0] are seeing more and more SaaS companies abstract away their dependencies on AWS or any particular cloud provider with Kubernetes.

Managing stateful services is still difficult but we are starting to see paths forward [1] and the community's velocity is remarkable.

K8s seems to be the wolf in sheep's clothing that will break AWS' virtual monopoly on IaaS.

[0] We (gravitational.com) help companies go "multi-region" or on-prem using Kubernetes as a portable run-time.

[1] Some interesting projects from this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13738916)

* Postgres automation for Kubernetes deployments https://github.com/sorintlab/stolon

* Automation for operating the Etcd cluster:https://github.com/coreos/etcd-operator

* Kubernetes-native deployment of Ceph: https://rook.io/

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Note that Kubernetes "builds upon 15 years of experience of running production workloads [on Borg] at Google" [0], but is different code than Borg.

In addition to Rook, Minio [1] is also working to build an S3 alternative on top of Kubernetes, and the CNCF Landscape is a good way of tracking projects in the space [2].

[0] https://kubernetes.io/ [1] https://www.minio.io/ [2] https://github.com/cncf/landscape

Disclosure: I'm the executive director of CNCF, which hosts Kubernetes, and co-author of the landscape.

Yes, I was admittedly over generalizing with my statement regarding open sourcing Borg.

Well, you're in the ballpark. I might be wrong, but I've heard they're not averse to the idea of open sourcing Borg and Omega (it wasn't that long ago that the Borg paper would have been nigh unthinkable, interestingly), but the litany of Google specific stuff that is baked in makes refactoring for public release a nonstarter. It's a huge codebase with lots of little tendrils to other internal infrastructure.

Anyway, one needs an on-ramp to containers on Google Cloud. And one can't open source the one that one has, which despite being nearly mature enough to own a driver's license, wouldn't really fulfill the precise need that Kubernetes fills without some frontend work. So one writes Kubernetes. An almost entirely different fundamental architecture, by the way, so it's interesting for those who've seen both to compare.

In other words, you're not entirely off the mark even with the generalization.

K8s is a better borg! It leaps forward and build upon many years experience of operating the system.

Is there any way built in to Kubernetes to go multi-AZ, multi-region, or even multi-cloud? Is federation the answer to this?

I remember reading somewhere in the K8s documentation that it is designed such that nodes in a single cluster should be as close as possible, like in the same AZ.

Yes, see the blog http://blog.kubernetes.io/2016/07/cross-cluster-services.htm...

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