Google Cloud’s director of engineering apologised for Kubernetes’ less than optimal developer experience this week, over a decade after the container orchestrator began making devs’ lives simultaneously easier, and more complicated.
Jago McLeod was speaking on a panel on the future of cloud native at Kubecon in London. That future is looking very highly AI driven, as calls to LLMs increasingly become part of applications and workflows.
The conference saw a flurry of initiatives around gateways to LLMs. Solo.io, champion of the Istio service mesh, for example, has released its MCP (model context protocol) Gateway, a few months after donating its Kgateway (formerly Gloo) project which “supports and secures LLM usage” to the CNCF.
The apparent direction of travel is that Kubernetes will play a significant role in our upcoming AI future, although the boundaries of AI development and AI infrastructure are currently being skirmished over.
But the infrastructure/developer interface is not a new battleground.
Kendall Roden, technical product lead at Diagrid, raised the fact that “This was the first Kubecon that had an application development track as part of the actual conference.”
It was, she added, “Amazing to see more developers coming up to Kubernetes, because traditionally, it's been so platform oriented. So I want to continue to see evolution and enablement for developers within the CNCF space.” But the question was how to “enable developers to be productive, delivering business value, when Kubernetes is the host.”
Randy Bias, VP or open source strategy and technology at Mirantis, added that “The best that we've gotten to is that Kubernetes is kind of a meet in the middle between operators and developers, but it's not a place where we have a developer experience that we really want.”
McCleod, possibly with at least part of his tongue in his cheek, said. “I also just wanted to kind of apologize for the developer experience in Kubernetes. I think when we open source all this wonderful technology, we also open source some of Google's internal culture about the developer experience.”
It’s not like Google was beating up on outside developers, he continued. Rather it reflected Google itself.
“We're not very nice to ourselves at Google. That's an afterthought. I made this amazing like, engineering marvel, like, figure out how to use it.
He insisted, “We're getting better at that.” It’s just it’s been “traditionally pretty terrible.”
“So, you know, it wasn't the build it and they will come," said McLeod. "We're moving beyond ‘it's possible to do the right thing’ to ‘it's hard to do the wrong thing’, and that's taken us a little time. So thanks to the community for helping us along with that. We're not very good at that.”
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