‘Don’t use Kubernetes with application portability as the main goal’

Organizations should not choose Kubernetes if their primary concern is application portability. That is what Gartner analysts say. The choice of Kubernetes would still lead to a lock-in, but at the level of the abstraction layer.

It’s not a good idea to choose Kubernetes if the primary reason is to avoid lock-in, say Gartner analysts. The choice for universal portability is associated with costs, the so-called portability tax, such as management overhead and having to adapt applications. In addition, costs must be incurred in order not to become dependent on the services of a single cloud provider and to work with alternative parties.

Preventing a lock-in with a cloud provider is an attractive idea, but the choice of Kubernetes ensures a lock-in at the level of the abstraction layer, the analysts clarify according to The Register. According to them, the use of abstraction layers in cloud platforms does not offer the same functionality as the underlying services of those platforms.

In addition, most applications would never have to be transferred from one cloud provider to another at all. Preparing for portability and the costs of transferring data would rarely outweigh the savings that can be achieved by switching to the cheapest infrastructure, the conclusion goes on. The analysts argue that organizations should primarily choose Kubernetes because of the scalability and modernization of their application infrastructure.

Kubernetes, or K8s, is a platform to automate the deployment and management of application containers. The platform was originally designed by Google, but the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is now responsible for Kubernetes.