They are programs (barring some semantic nitpickery about "programs run in containers"), and like programs, we can't make blanket statements about whether or not they implement the Unix philosophy. Some do and others don't.
> I've heard this enough times and seen enough K8s systems in production that I'm labeling this "fluff". K8s is an operating system in the same way that "everything is everything". K8s is software that manages containers and their resources.
Yep, like I said, an analogy: "An operating system is software that manages processes and their resources". By definition, the operands of an analogy are different, so if your thing is taking any analogy and calling "gotcha!" because you found some differences, then I'm afraid you're missing the point.
> From Wikipedia: >> An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. > You can generalize "software resources" as container resource limits. You can generalize "common services" as the network and filesystem layers. And you can generalize "computer hardware" as kernel configuration on the control plane. > All of these are purpose built abstractions built on top of the real operating systems. By that logic you could call any virtual environment or virtual machine an operating system. And if that's the true then the comparison isn't useful at all.
That's quite the straw man.