I share my thoughts about what makes it so complex to build an IDP with Kubernetes? Spoiler alert: it’s all about Developer Experience and their adoption! Kubernetes is a container orchestrator; it’s not an IDP by itself. But it’s a great building block 🙂 What do you think? Happy to open the conversation on this 🧵

I wonder if Kubernetes is too low level and we should start thinking of going up in the abstraction level? just a thought

I like the idea - but which abstraction layer could be used then?

The abstraction is entirely wrong for developers no question. The question is about pragamtism right now - aka take some Advil/Tylenol to make it tolerable for SMBs. At larger organizations you HAVE TO tease apart the k8s problem in various pieces that can, should and must be solved independently. The use cases vary and you need deeper expertise in each area. Additionally the use cases will be to be organizationally specific. For example, CI optimizations, CD optimizations, Debugging, etc each might need more specific tools than a simple flow on k8s that works for SMB segment. (There’s a reason why Backstage has traction). On a timescale of 10y you’ll probably see an influx of products that look more like convex.dev or firebase that completely eliminate the need for managing persistence layers and services.

Kubernetes is a container orchestrator

Kubernetes is much more than container orchestrator. It gives you mechanisms to orchestrate pretty much anything. In my team, we're building a platform on top of Kubernetes using these mechanisms. Of course a lot of it has to be abstracted away from users.

Tightly coupling an IDP to a single platform almost ensures failure. Huge part of the value is that it unifies the view of the estate, which in most cases spans multiple platforms/providers