By Jason Bloomberg
Everybody loves new technology. Just like that shiny toy on Christmas morning, new tech is desirable simply because it’s new. Software marketers are keenly aware of this ‘shiny things’ principle and are only too happy to position the most recent addition to the product list as the must-have of the season.
Open source efforts, of course, can be just as shiny — regardless of whether the latest and greatest is really the solution to the business problems at hand.
Over the years, every new aspect of the technology story — software, hardware, methodologies, architectural approaches, etc. — has succumbed to this shiny things syndrome, for better or worse. Sad to say, it has usually been for the worse. Shininess bears little correlation to the best tool for the job, and given that new usually means immature, it can often lead decision-makers astray.
Today, there’s no question that Kubernetes is so shiny, you need to wear shades just to talk about it. This open source container orchestration platform has soundly outshined all the competition and is now the wunderkind of cloud-native computing — which, of course, is plenty shiny in its own right.
The question we must answer, therefore, is whether the excitement around the still-new Kubernetes (and cloud-native computing in general) has gone overboard, leading to the counterproductive shiny things scenario. Or perhaps – just possibly – we’ve learned our lesson this time, and we’ll be able to avoid overplaying Kubernetes’ hand.
