Ask HN: What is the next infrastructure technologey after Kubernetes?
In 2014 we have all started using docker and containerizing our applications, somewhere around 2018 we all started moving our apps to k8s, 4 years later what technology do we see emerging today that will be mainstream in 1-3 years? We didn’t all do that. What’s next for every one of my customers is running actual servers, like before 2014. No containers, no k8s. Who knows what will come next. The industry’s ability to constantly reinvent the flat tire seems boundless. Something shiny and complicated that will spawn an industry of conferences, training, consultants, and grief, no doubt. That is genuinely great, however it's very not common.
I think the main challenge of not using those technologies might affect talents not joining companies like yours. It is very common. The number of virtual server instances running far outnumbers the number of k8s deployments. I don’t have a company, I freelance, doing lots of system admin. I have yet to see k8s in a production environment. I do see Docker now and then, mainly for development. As far as I can tell bare virtual servers continue to dominate, with k8s mainly used by startups. Could be serverless applications using FaaS but noone really knows.
My guess would be that things move to data driven environments thus we will not have a platform revolution like we did with k8s but more a tooling revolution that get's rid of the anoying data transformation / engineering process. (Oh damn this would be a thing.) Another revolution could be edge deployment which is not yet a cloud native thing. But I dont see why K8s could not handle this with some changes. Generally, K8s bascically orchestrates processes on different nodes. So this is pretty much where platforms hand over responsibility to OS. An analogy would be - what is next after Linux? Well, developers do not run infrastructure. They want to deploy and scale their apps fast and focus on their business. If something comes up as a compatible (eg. helm charts) option to kubernetes, yet simple for developers to enable planet-scale rollouts...why not. Most likely it will be built on kubernetes in the foreseeable future.