Bet on a Cloud Native Ecosystem, not a Platform

This is a small extract from a longer post I published at The New Stack. Check the original post here.
 
Recently I wrote about “The New Distributed Primitives for Developers” provided by cloud-native platforms such as Kubernetes and how these primitives blend with the programming primitives used for application development. For example, have a look below to see how many Kubernetes concepts a developer has to understand and use in order to run a single containerized application effectively:

Kubernetes concepts for Developers

The chances are, the developers will have to write the same amount of YAML code as the application code in the container. More importantly, the application itself will rely on more the platform than it ever used to do before. The cloud native application expects the platform to perform a health check, deployment, placement, service discovery, running a periodic task (cron job), or scheduling an atomic unit of work (job), autoscaling, configuration management, etc. As a result, your application has abdicated and delegated all these responsibilities to the platform and expects them to be handled in a reliable way. And the fact is, now your application and the involved teams are dependent on the platform on so many different levels: code, design, architecture, development practices, deployment and delivery pipelines, support procedures, recovery scenarios, you name it.

Bet on an Ecosystem, not a Platform

The platform is just the tip of the iceberg, and to be successful in the cloud-native world, you will need to become part of a fully integrated ecosystem of tools and companies. So the bet is never about a single platform, or a project or a cool library, or one company. It is about the whole ecosystem of projects that work together in sync, and the whole ecosystem of companies (vendors and customers) that collaborate and are committed to the cause for the next decade or so.  

You can read the full article published on The New Stack here. Follow me @bibryam for future blog posts on related topics.

Posted in: Cloud Native,Kubernetes