Author | China Software Network Chen Yang
Proofreading | China Software Net Haice
Whether it is under the wave of digital transformation, the rapid iteration and delivery requirements of applications and services by enterprises, or the mature development of technologies such as containers, microservices, DevOps, and distributed application architecture, it is inevitable to move towards cloud native. Enterprise's high acceptance of hybrid cloud has made containerized applications a sought-after object.
A report released by Gartner in 2019 predicts that in 2020, 50% of traditional and old applications will be transformed in a cloud-native way. By 2022, 75% of global enterprises will use cloud-native containerized applications in production.
Even though Kubernetes has long become the accepted standard for container orchestration, its high threshold still prevents many enterprises from embarking on the path of cloud native. I have to admit that the emergence of container platforms such as OpenShift and Rancher have helped companies lower this threshold. This view was also endorsed by Zhou Xiaosi, the R&D director of QingCloud's application and container platform.
However, Zhou Xiaosi also put forward his own view: OpenShift and Rancher do well in container management, but they are not perfect.
This is also the driving force for Zhou Xiaosi to continuously iterate and improve KubeSphere: to provide enterprises and users with a simpler and more complete container platform, and to complete the step of cloud native applications.
Zhou Xiaosi, R&D Director of QingCloud Application and Container Platform
01
From chasing to surpassing, KubeSphere sharpens its sword in three years
"I think KubeSphere does not have too many competitors in China, and it has established a firm foothold in China." When it comes to KubeSphere's performance, Zhou Xiaosi is full of confidence. "In foreign countries, our biggest competitors are OpenShift and Rancher. From a product point of view, I have compared each version of KubeSphere with OpenShift and Rancher horizontally. In version 3.0, KubeSphere has already surpassed."
Zhou Xiaosi's confidence stems from the official release of version 1.0 in 2018 to today. In just three years, KubeSphere has become an international container open source project step by step.
In December 2018, KubeSphere 1.0 version was released, providing multi-tenant management, DevOps, multi-dimensional monitoring, application store and quota management;
In May 2019, KubeSphere 2.0 version was released, adding microservice governance, mirror warehouse, multi-tenant log, alarm notification, static code analysis and enhanced security;
In August 2020, KubeSphere ushered in a major upgrade to version 3.0, providing multi-cloud and multi-cluster management, application custom monitoring functions, and supporting audit log query, network policy management, etc., further enhancing platform security.
The result of this steady and steady performance is: KubeSphere has become the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) officially certified open source container cloud platform, the only Kubernetes release in China, and the number of domestic users has exceeded 10,000. "I made a three-step plan for myself a year and a half ago, reaching 10,000, 100,000, and 1 million users. At present, the domestic market has gone out of the 0 to 1 stage, and the number of users has already exceeded 10,000." Zhou Xiaosi said.
What made Zhou Xiaosi even more pleased was the performance of KubeSphere abroad: "KubeSphere has partners in Turkey, South Africa, Spain, and Iraq, and they all found us on their own initiative. KubeSphere even entered the Turkish national system department."
At the same time, in November, KubeSphere and AWS reached a cooperation and launched Quick Start, creating an important way to further develop the global market.
User portraits reflect the popularity of KubeSphere from another dimension. "A survey we did not long ago showed that nearly half of KubeSphere users come from companies with more than 500 employees."
02
Grasp user pain points and stay close to the community
It has to be said that under the "suppression" of the two container platforms OpenShift and Rancher, it is not easy for KubeSphere to surpass in just three years. KubeSphere also used practical actions to break the conclusion that "container platforms are severely homogenized".
In Zhou Xiaosi's view, KubeSphere's success is no accident. "Under such a fiercely competitive environment, KubeSphere's conversion rate is still so high, there must be a reason." The first is the first-mover advantage. "In China, when we made KubeSphere two or three years ago, the giants had not paid attention to the container platform."
The second is to grasp the pain points of users. On this point, Zhou Xiaosi is very grateful to OpenShift and Rancher. "At that time, we spent a long time doing investigations and research to find out the problems of OpenShift and Rancher. These problems are the pain points of users. Users must be looking for better products, so we appeared."
For example, KubeSphere focused on improving the observability and monitoring and warning capabilities, which is a major deficiency of K8s. It is the improvement in this area that makes KubeSphere quickly capture the hearts of operation and maintenance engineers.
The third is to fit the user's interaction and usage habits. This is the essential difference between KubeSphere, OpenShift and Rancher in Zhou Xiaosi's mind. "The interaction provided by KubeSphere is by no means as simple as beautiful pages, but completely from the user's perspective, providing what they need, such as network, storage, and security. Microservices will never expose Istio to users."
Finally, stay close to community users. "We and the community users are in a relationship of'fish and water', blending together. Community users are promoting us, and we are serving community users. KubeSphere will also ensure the integrity of the open source community."
03
Build a platform to build the KubeSphere Native ecosystem
An open source project must have its own unique features in terms of technology, functions, etc., before it can be completed from 0 to 1. The transformation from 1 to 10 is inseparable from operations. When KubeSphere has surpassed OpenShift and Rancher at the product level, Zhou Xiaosi also set his sights on operations.
"OpenShift and Rancher are done early, and they also have a brand effect. The user base is large enough. This is what KubeSphere needs to strengthen. We hope to achieve a breakthrough from 1 to 10 in China in 2021."
At the same time, when an open source project develops to a certain stage, it is inseparable from the creation of ecology. In this regard , Zhou Xiaosi has a clear boundary division: "KubeSphere's core competition is platform architecture, not the above applications."
Therefore, Zhou Xiaosi and his team are responsible for platform functions such as resource management, monitoring, alarms, and logs. The partners are responsible for additional functions such as DevOps and artificial intelligence on the platform.
Based on this ecological concept, KubeSphere 4.0 version will be designed in a completely decoupled and pluggable form, that is, users can maintain the original development form unchanged when developing applications.
According to Zhou Xiaosi: "For users, this is not a discrete and fragmented service. They can't see whether it is a service provided by KubeSphere or a service provided by a partner, collectively referred to as KubeSphere Native service."
KubeSphere functional architecture
On the other hand, when an open source project develops to a certain stage, commercialization is a problem that must be considered. Xiaosi Zhou did not avoid it in the slightest: "We will provide KubeSphere.Cloud commercial website, which is one of our business models. "
In his opinion, the community version and the commercial version are not contradictory, this is a complementary result. "Commercial users can recruit more employees by paying. For community users, the original promise to solve problems within 24 hours can now be shortened to 12 hours. This is a virtuous circle. I have been balancing the two, how to take care of community users, and Take care of business users with business aspirations."
Although KubeSphere does not currently have a commercial version, Qingyun QingCloud has launched the QingCloud KubeSphere Engine (QKE) container cloud service based on KubeSphere.
QKE realizes the full capability of delivering the KubeSphere container platform on the QingCloud public cloud, and can uniformly manage cross-cloud and cross-infrastructure Kubernetes clusters, and realize CI/CD, microservices, and cluster operation and maintenance management through minimal human-computer interaction. Help users more agilely build cloud-native applications and unified management of the entire life cycle of applications.