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Comment by Avshalom | Hacker News Reader

The thing is some people want super stable, improvements are great but the ability to plan is also great. That breaking change that prevents Redhat from integrating Kubernetes into Openshift is just as likely to be a breaking change for Company X using Kubernetes

That's why they pay Redhat, so they can plan.

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You're sort of twisting GP's point by saying that because K8s is not super stable, Red Hat will provide stability via OpenShift. I mean yes, Red Hat will certainly provide a more stable version, but it's a double-edged sword, because K8s might leave OpenShift in the dust with some incompatible change, and then a few years down the line you could end up with serious buyer's remorse when K8s is an order of magnitude better and OpenShift is left in some well-maintained purgatory.

Yup, when I talk about stability I'm not talking about stability of function, which I presume is what people buying OpenShift want. I'm talking about stability as in few changes. Anyone doing things in the Container space shouldn't be expecting lack of changes, even if you're using OpenShift.

You could equally end up a few years down the line with Kubernetes being an order of magnitude better but also having required two orders of magnitude of work (over those years) porting your companies infrastructure to it.

or a few years down the line the zeitgeist has moved to Locutus and no one but Red Hat is driving anymore.

I can assure you that openshift will always be Kube++. It's just a Kube distro. The fact that today you need to compile in those extensions is a detail that we and others spend most of the time addressing.

Odds are, most of the things you use in Kubernetes were because someone working on OpenShift wrote, tested, performance tested, and stress tested in production.

When LTS OpenShift is a thing, there will still be an OpenShift trucking along right behind the latest Kube. We always try to strike the balance between being on the bleeding edge and making sure end user clusters continue to work. In fact, a lot of the bugs in patch releases are found by the teams working on openshift and opened upstream right away. But an OpenShift user never sees that, because we only ship once it's stable.

You've got a mighty big crystal ball there then.

Sarcasm aside. A major part of the allure of Kubernetes is that it's not a single vendor project. It's unlikely to die if something happens to RedHat. Say someone like Oracle comes along and buys you guys. But that's not the case with OpenShift.

Maybe you're right that things will continue as is and OpenShift will always be better and that RedHat will always maintain it.

But not particularly a risk that I think is worth taking.

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