What exactly does it mean when we talk about how Kubernetes is portable? As with other aspects of Kubernetes, there’s a mix of what end-users think they want, what they actually end up using and the buzzwords that are thrown around in the industry but don’t necessarily reflect the actual way most organizations use technology.

“What I see from customers, one thing that is extremely scary for them is getting locked into a specific provider,” explained Idit Levine, CEO of Solo.io. These customers, she said, want to know that they could potentially take their containers and run them in Kubernetes on a different provider. They want to know that there is consistency, that the APIs are the same. But does that mean they will actually move? “I would argue that with all our customers, I’m talking about big, huge organizations, I never see it actually happening,” Levine said.

Interestingly, Solo.io did move its entire operation from AWS to Google Cloud because of financial incentives for startups — but Levine’s point is that a technically sophisticated, small, young startup might move between clouds and actually make use of Kubernetes’ promised portability. But it’s a very different story for most end users.

Nothing New

Lock-in has been the bogeyman of programming for decades. “That was the main selling point for C and C++ — oh, this is a portable language,” explained Erik Peterson, chief technology officer and founder at cloud accounting services provider Cloudzero. “It didn’t entirely live up to that, because it needed to be optimized for certain platforms and certain services are only available on one platform. But you’ll see portability talked about in the early days of C, and later with Java.”

Nonetheless, Peterson said, if you look at the enterprises that standardized on Java, they also standardized on specific server platforms and specific operating systems and other specific technology. They never actually followed a strategy that involved moving Java applications around.

It’s hard not to see the talk about Kubernetes’ portability as an extension of this trend: A technology that can theoretically move between environments yet is almost never used in that way.

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