The State Of The Kubernetes Ecosystem

Container orchestration is a genuinely new concept in the history of computing. It is the modern manifestation of web services at the most granular of levels. In the late 1990s, when the concept of web services was created, software developers and network engineers toyed with the idea of building directories of common functions that could be called remotely through common interfaces.

For a time, the tech press concocted a war between Microsoft and Novell for the right to set the standard for such interfaces. When knowledge management applications first tested the limits of ordinary servers, a new type of load balancing scheme was created — one that listened to the type and context of the requests being received, and that responded by dispatching the call to a server based on its availability. When that server became virtual, the dispatch call became easier, and the network supporting that dispatch could become software-defined.