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Discussion on: The Wrong Question About Docker and Kubernetes

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charlesdlandau profile image
Charles Landau

Kelsey Hightower agrees with you:

"Managed k8s" today isn't where Kelsey predicts here, but I think his intuition on this holds. Remember that most of our competitive advantage in this business is from distinguishing "core" versus "context". Managed database services like RDS are successful because everything below the DB app level is "context." In the future Kelsey is predicting here, writing the podspec or deployment spec can be "core", but much of the control plane config in k8s will be "context" for many shops. Offloading it to EKS/GKE/AKS makes as much sense as offloading DBA tasks to RDS.

Having said that, RDS didn't wipe out the "roll your own"/"on-prem" set, so my guess is that both with remain for k8s as well.

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edmistond profile image
edmistond

That's interesting, I hadn't seen that tweet from Kelsey, thanks :)

I agree with your take here, and I like the core vs context framing here; I know the idea has been around for a while, but I first saw it articulated by Gene Kim in The Unicorn Project last year and it resonated with me - probably because I spent a lot of time working on context because of broken cluster init scripts. ;)

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charlesdlandau profile image
Charles Landau

but I first saw it articulated by Gene Kim in The Unicorn Project last year and it resonated with me

Exactly where I first saw it too. To be honest, I've been working my way through everything he's ever written. Books you may like and have probably already read:

  • Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters, by Ryan Singer
  • An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson
  • Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim
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edmistond profile image
edmistond

I've heard of all of them, but haven't read them yet. An Elegant Puzzle, in particular, is on my list to check out. I'm not sure engineering management is where I want to go, but having some grounding in it should be helpful and I've found other books on the topic to be relevant even from a senior/lead developer perspective.

Have you by any chance read Camille Fournier's The Manager's Path? Well written and relevant even at the individual contributor level; I should read through it again soon.