First Mover Advantage is defined as gaining advantage by being the first player with a new product/ service in an existing/ new industry. With this strategic advantage the first player can influence the course of the industry and define the rules. Usually the first mover’s name symbolizes what the industry would now be called. For example, Xerox was the first most popular photocopier and “get me a xerox of this document” was used very commonly. Or “google it!” instead of search it on the internet.
Similar to that in the IT container space the name ‘Docker’ has become virtually synonymous with Container. Even though container technology has existed for a long time (example: FreeBSD) they have been used more commonly in the past decade. Through design simplification and an easier consumption model Docker has now become a leader, in Container Engine space, leaving behind other players (example: rkt).
Similarly, there was a war waging for the standard in the Container Orchestration layer. Players like Apache Mesos Marathon, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Openstack Magnum and VMware Photon were all fighting for a piece of the pie. For a little while it seemed like Mesos was going to come out on top, with some early wins, but then in mid-2017 the tides began to shift. As of today, I’m calling it. The container wars are over. Kubernetes has won.
The final blow in this hard fought war was Amazon’s announcement today of support for Amazon Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS). Now native Kubernetes is supported on all the major public clouds: Google Cloud Platform, AWS, Microsoft Azure, etc.
How have Kubernetes captured this market? Google has been using Kubernetes for more than a decade and they have nurtured its development. Forrester mentions ‘Service partners are key to K8S ecosystem expansion because they provide K8S professional services in a world where engineers and developers with K8S skills are hard to find. The market for K8S services is young, but it’s growing quickly.’1 This growing ecosystem is also supplemented by the popular container-as-a-service solutions based on CoreOS Tectonic, RedHat OpenShift, etc.
We are proud to announce that CloudHealth Technologies has also joined the Kubernetes ecosystem. Through our Container Governance Module we provide visibility, optimization, and governance into all Kubernetes-based orchestrators, including the Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes. This module provides granular and trended visibility into the CPU and memory consumption by individual service, groups of pods, labels, and namespaces. It can help track and trend resource consumption by teams and services or over time and allow you to find opportunities to optimize your cluster fabric. Thus, you can now consume Kubernetes on AWS with complete confidence, visibility and governance that you need.
