Container-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is being widely adopted in production by large to small companies across different industries. The main advantages are: (1) rapid application development of cloud-native applications; (2) ease of deployment and management of resulting applications; and (3) high-density usage of cloud resources needed to run applications in production.
However, since the workloads that different PaaS users want to manage vary widely, many alternative approaches to container-based PaaS have emerged. Some focused on end-user experience while others on developers and some on simply providing the primitives for all types of workloads. In the resulting soup of alternatives, there seem to emerge three open-source leaders: Cloud Foundry, Moby Project (née Docker), and Kubernetes.
While the diversity of approaches is great for open source and can encourage innovations, it also can result in duplication of efforts, reinvention of the wheel, and confusion for customers. This thus leads to one important question: how can these different communities continue exploring and innovate in the space while collaborating on common concerns?
Serverless Panel at DockerCon ’17. From camera right to left: Patrick Chanezon (Docker), Phil Estes (IBM), Chad Arimura (Oracle), Erica Windisch (IOpipe), and Alex Ellis (OpenFaaS)
Collaboration Station at Cloud Foundry Summit 2017 in Santa Clara. Picturing various members of the Cloud Foundry community from VMware and IBM.
In this panel, we plan to address what we can do as communities to solve the issues mentioned above, increase collaboration, while still encouraging innovation. To do so, I have invited the following engineering and community leaders from the different communities to join me as panelists:
- Patrick Chanezon of Docker
- Eric Malm of VMware
- Nima Kaviani of IBM
- Swarna Podila of the Cloud Foundry Foundation
Some seed questions I am planning to ask the panelists are: what are examples of collaborations across communities are seeing positive results? what about those not working so well? does close collaboration between communities reduce innovation? how can we increase collaboration while encouraging innovation? how to reduce the friction when collaborating with communities with different cultures? should we instead leave the communities alone and the “forces” of Open Source will resolve any overlap? I also plan to have time for audience questions and debate. So come prepared.
Question from audience at CF Day in New York City during CloudExpo 2017
All photos credit @maximilien
