[rc_hackernews]

Why do you think that is? In regards to Cloud Foundry being steamrolled by Kubernetes.

There's not a day that goes by where I'm using the "current stack", i.e. K8S, Terraform, etc., and not wish I was using Heroku or something Heroku-like instead.

[parasubvert]

Kubernetes isn’t focused on solving specific end-user problems, it focuses on a community and a set of lower level computer science problems. The community and openness to extend itself to nearly every use case in distributed or networked computing is its strength. The CNCF’s ecosystem map shows this: there is a strong supply of options. This then drives a deep FOMO in tech consumers.

In the community, from my POV anyway, the fact that Kube lacks the end-user experience of Heroku is irrelevant: what matters is how problems are solved: in the Kubernetes Way, or not at all. Some day developers may get their “cf push” or Heroku “git push”, built in Kubernetes, but it must be done “the right way” (no one knows what that is until they see it) to be accepted by the community and thus standardized. There are attempts at this today such as CNCF’s pack/buildpacks, Knative, or Openshift’s S2I… but none of that really has critical mass. The Heroku experience may never happen, but there’s a lot of money being spent to give it a shot.

Kubernetes is more than software, it is a movement. It is trying to drive a standard architecture of how to build and run distributed software with a set of (mostly) elegant design patterns and principals. The YAML overload is a temporary side effect of limited scope: the endgame is that every piece of server software is manageable as a CRD with an operator, and the greater Kubernetes API ecosystem subsumes all categories of cloud and server software.

It reminds me of past major tech waves like Java or Windows 95 or the Web itself: it sucks a lot of oxygen out of the conversation for a decade or so, and solves some problems while creating new ones.