As-a-service hides technological complexity behind layers of abstractions, showing only the user-friendly face. But under the hood, the intricacy is growing with applications and data following edge computing as it spreads itself across the globe and into space.

“There’s a really rich opportunity within open source to observe what’s going on and to offer some supporting technologies that bridge clouds, bridge locations, lets you deal with compute at a little bit more of an abstract level and really double down on making services run well,” said Clayton Coleman (pictured), architect, Kubernetes and OpenShift, at Red Hat Inc.

Coleman spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Google Cloud Next OnAir event. They discussed the evolution of open source to meet the demands of developing within dispersed environments. (* Disclosure below.)

Consistency is key to app management across complex environments

Kubernetes is the grandfather project of the open-source community, with the technology now synonymous with container management. But resolving the challenges posed by edge with a consistent solution isn’t simple. Management may be on a single cluster on a single remote computer or multiple clusters in multiple locations; lifecycles vary; and hardware may or may not be accessible.

As organizations struggle to manage workloads across multiple locations, even Kubernetes needs to evolve to keep up. “A need that is becoming really clear is [that] there’s a lot of abstractions missing above Kubernetes,” Coleman said.

Missing are tools that can stitch together compute and applications across a lot of footprints, “whether it’s folks who need to be resilient across clouds or whether it’s folks who are looking to bring together disparate footprints to accelerate their boot to the cloud or to modernize on their on-premise stack,” Coleman said.

Solving this means a change of focus for open source, according to Coleman. “A real opportunity within the community is abstractions around a location — not really about clusters or machines, but something broader that,” he stated. “I think we’re ready to make the transition to say officially it’s not just about applications, but to flip it around and say we want to be service focused.”

As the open-source community moves toward incorporating Kubernetes as an invisible part of the background infrastructure, projects such as Istio and Knative are part of the drive, with Knative eventing a key technology, according to Coleman. “We’re starting to move to that phase where Kubernetes is just part of the platform that people are building,” he said.

With the community working around creating infrastructure-as-a-service, Coleman is confident it will continue to replicate the success of Kubernetes and produce solutions to smooth the development and deployment pipeline.

“Regardless of business or technology, it’s about making sure that we’re improving software for everyone,” he said. “There’s a lot more to do, and I think open source is the best way to do it.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Google Cloud Next OnAir event. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE