The CNCF was formed under the looming shadow of AWS. The CNCF was seeded with the donation of Kubernetes by Google. Much like the Linux community was positioned as a rebellious movement in reaction to Microsoft’s dominance, the Kubernetes community represents a fervent desire to open up the market to cloud providers beyond the tight-lipped, proprietary dominion of Amazon.
With such a deep spirit of insubordination, it is no surprise that the community has rejected Istio like a set of loosely coupled organs rejecting a foreign skin attempting to layer itself across them. Even though the CNCF was founded by Google, the community was formed in spite of big centralized clouds, not as a marketing vessel for their products which may or may not be open source.
Microsoft seems to understand this fact better than Google, at least in the domain of service mesh.
The day after this interview with William, Microsoft announced the Service Mesh Interface (SMI), a project it partnered with Buoyant and other companies on to create a minimal spec for what a service mesh should offer to a Kubernetes deployment. The SMI presents a safe buy-in point for enterprises who want a service mesh, but do not want to get caught in the evangelistic crossfire of Istio and Linkerd.
It is in this environment that we begin our next series of shows on the current cloud native ecosystem.
Thanks to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation for putting together an amazing podcasting zone at KubeCon, and allowing me to conduct these interviews.
