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WORA — Write Once, Run Anywhere was the term coined by Sun Microsystems in the mid-1990’s to signify that Java apps were portable. Byte code generated by the Java compiler could run on any standards-compliant Java Virtual Machine on any device, independent of the operating system. The byte-code idea wasn’t new, however the strategy was to make the OS (specifically, Microsoft Windows) and the hardware it ran on irrelevant. (Sun made all its profits from hardware, so this was a little strange).
The Java WORA strategy yielded a great deal of drama, including lawsuits and counter-suits and was part of the DOJ’s investigations into Microsoft’s anti-trust activities. In other words, it was a big deal. It was also successful in the sense that it prevented Microsoft from dominating the software stack for enterprise applications.
When Kubernetes was open-sourced by Google, it was clear to me that this was a similar strategy — aimed against the dominant cloud player Amazon Web Services. The business of a business is to make money, so it is unlikely that Google gave away a great piece of software out of the goodness of its heart. I tweeted as much:
The Kubernetes API (tries to) makes the underlying (proprietary) IaaS APIs irrelevant. Write to the Kubernetes API and get automatic portability. Technically, this is different from past efforts to abstract away the cloud APIs (e.g., Jclouds, or RightScale) with another API. Kubernetes brings a level of automation and cloud-nativity that makes even on-premises datacenters cloud-native.
Google, in its just-concluded Cloud Next ’19 conference made this explicit — the phrase “write once, run anywhere” was used in the keynotes and other sessions. The Anthos platform makes this even easier by taking the toil out of running Kubernetes on-premises.
Microsoft’s counter-strategy towards Java was “Embrace, extend, and extinguish”. Embrace Java, extend it with proprietary capabilities and then kill it by killing its portability. Sun sued Microsoft over this strategy, and following the anti-trust settlements with the DoJ, the Java standard prevailed. So far, the competition (Pivotal, RedHat, AWS, Microsoft Azure) have embraced Kubernetes. By donating the software to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation which certifies Kubernetes distributions, Google is betting that competitors such as AWS will not be able to kill the portability of Kubernetes with proprietary extensions.
At the same time, Google wants to make money with its Cloud business — unlike Sun Microsystems, which disappeared into obscurity despite the popularity of Java. There is an official way to extend Kubernetes — by extending its API using Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs). The Istio and Knative projects from Google leverage CRDs to offer value on top of standard Kubernetes. While these are open source, they are not (yet, maybe never?) under control of the CNCF. Istio and Knative are the differentiation that Google can use to provide a superior Kubernetes solution. This is what Anthos is — a platform that simplifies Kubernetes while adding value with Traffic Director (Istio) and CloudRun (Knative).
Despite its propensity to kill popular products, Google is also capable of playing the long game. Consider the Chrome Browser — it started with a miniscule marketshare 11 years ago, and is now the dominant browser. GSuite is another successful monetisation of a freemium product. Whether Anthos will survive as long and be as successful as Chrome is to be seen.
Japanese Admiral Hara Tadaichi summed up the Pearl Harbor attack by saying, “We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor and thereby lost the war.” We don’t know how the current battle between the cloud giants will pan out, but it is sure to be entertaining without the destruction¹ and bloodshed of the Pacific Theatre.
[1] Kubernetes has left a swath of destruction among startups that had offerings similar to Kubernetes.