I am no expert, but I know what a container is and I use it in my daily job; same for Kube, but hearing the actual people going through it feels a bit like an history lesson.
(The documentary also touches various interesting point, such as open-source in the eyes of upper management, and so on... surely there is some better source/book/article, but I found the format pretty chill and easy to absorb)
I think this is high-level enough to appeal to non-technical people. I've shared this with some friends who have money invested in cloud companies they don't really understand, and with my family for whom even my simplified job description is too abstract to really comprehend.
I think this is good, but it makes me wish for an even broader-scoped documentary on the history of cloud technologies.
> I think this is good, but it makes me wish for an even broader-scoped documentary on the history of cloud technologies.
Honestly I would love for there to be more documentaries on the more “boring” computing related stuff too, like what are the origins of VMs.
There’s a lot of pop culture material on the founding of the big tech but very little on the boring stuff without which none of this would have been possible. And my assumptions about who invented what when are always changed by talking with people who have been around for long enough.
If there were a dedicated field of Academic History dedicated to computing that would be amazing. Just having a timeline that explains the lineage of computer technologies without it being a short paragraphs in the introduction chapter in books on more specific tools, that would be great.
Kubernetes: The Documentary is for history, to tell the story.
first there was docker. but we didn't know how to use it. a tiny team of google engineers spread out across various teams saw a way to mock up something more like their internal system, to allow larger scale control, but leveraging docker-ish containers. the small disassembled team fought & was semi-surprised to see it make it through the gauntlet of corporate, to get executive approval. it shares the context of why this was so important: AWS was the 900 lbs gorilla, and the world had nothing to compete with, couldn't make a dent going it alone. the tiny assemblage of folks were still basically shocked they got approval to go ahead with kubernetes, and just in time to show it off in front of DockerCon 2014, where they released what they had & started trying to build a bigger community.
from there there's a long lesson in coallition building. it becomes a classic tale in creating more value than you capture, in not trying to be winner take all. it's a lesson in creating community to fight the existential threat of winner takes all (AWS). it's a lesson in helping a team go from pioneer stage to town planner stage, in long term planning for success.
this is a wonderful historical analysis. it is packed with countless lessons & pieces of wisdom, about software, about organizations, about open source. these engineers have such great insight into where the market was, what was happening at the time, can talk eloquently about how we were in the midsts of a "rise of devops" movement but disunified & lacking in common platforms.
this isn't a practical hands on lesson. it doesn't go into what kubernetes is, it's architecture. this is a lesson to help understand the context of how Kubernetes came about. it's here to share context. it's rare insight into a rare project that happened at a just the right moment, & was released in just the right ways. we need these kind of landmark analysis to really understand software: not just what it is, but how it came about, the world in which it came to be, and to understand how & where success comes from.
