What if Google finds a more efficient way to drive paying customers to its cloud?
If the open source model is broken, as Apcera founder Derek Collison believes, then container orchestration wunderkind Kubernetes may be its first major casualty. Yes, that Kubernetes, the Google-spawned container king that 71 percent of enterprises surveyed by 451 Research say they’re using for container management.
It seem far-fetched that Kubernetes could be heading for a fall, even as it continues to rise. But the problem, Collison argues, is one of investment: The old open source model was all about commoditizing a richly funded market filled with proprietary software. Open source came along, democratized the market, and shifted investment dollars elsewhere.
Kubernetes (and a host of other new-school open source projects) turns this model on its head, however. It started life as open source and thereby rendered the initial price as $0.00. This is OK for now while Google funds Kubernetes to provide an API-laden path …