What kubernetes and cloud9 tell us about the new industry – anyone but Amazon – James Governor's Monkchips

What kubernetes and cloud9 tell us about the new industry – anyone but amazon – James Governor's Monkchips: "We used to talk about the Anyone but Microsoft club. Arguably the triumph of open source in the enterprise was a result of the same driver. Linux was a means to avoid Microsoft operating system domination. Vendors would push an alternative, and customers would support it partly as means to hedge their bets against too much domination by a single provider.

Today the dominant vendor scaring tech providers is clearly Amazon Web Services.

One facet of today’s Anyone but Amazon coalition is OpenStack. AWS dominance led pretty much every other major tech vendor, no matter how competitive to converge on OpenStack, as an open hedge.

When pondering the implications of Microsoft’s hiring of Brendan Burns the other day, it struck me another coalition is forming, changing the fault lines of the industry. Burns is one of the founders of the Kubernetes container cluster manager project. He was at Google but just took a job as product lead for the Azure Resource Manager. He has already publicly declared he will continue to work on Kubernetes. Kubernetes has also been enthusiastically adopted by Red Hat, through it’s OpenShift platform.

So now Microsoft, Red Hat, and Google Cloud Platform are all now aligned around Kubernetes. While at first glance this new alliance of strange bedfellows might seem to be a response to the rise of Docker and the Docker Pattern – and indeed there is no doubt the enthusiastic growth in Kubernetes is partly driven by concern that Docker will own too much real estate of the new infrastructure world I believe the overarching threat is Amazon.

As Stephen has explained – the biggest competitor to open source is Amazon. There is no doubt that Amazon EC2 Container Services is going to gain wide traction. Amazon can afford to be magnanimous about Docker’s rise in a way other vendors can’t. Docker is an implementation detail rather than a potential existential threat to AWS.

This week another shoe dropped, when Amazon announced it is acquiring Cloud9, the online IDE startup. Cloud9 created Ace, which also powers the GitHub editor."



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