In just a few short months, Google’s deft move to build an open consortium around its Kubernetes orchestrator has shifted the platform focus away from containers, and onto container orchestrators.
Perhaps the biggest indicator of that shift came last week at KubeCon in San Francisco, where Deis — now the brightly polished new division of Engine Yard — unveiled a package manager for workloads called Helm.
Helm will take a wholly new approach to deploying workloads in a PaaS-like manner, with Kubernetes — not Docker — as the objects of these deployments, according to principal architects Jason Hansen and Matt Butcher. The Deis team saw that no two data centers or cloud environments work alike, so no technique for deploying one type or even one identity of workload will translate perfectly between platforms, like a standardized template.
