Simplicity (with flexibility) really is the Ultimate Sophistication

According to Leonardo da Vinci: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” That’s quite a statement from such a polymath man respected as a great artist, designer, scientist, inventor and many more.

It seems that simplicity, together with its close friend flexibility, is in short supply these days.   As the digital economy continues to drive IT transformation, it is exciting to think of the new tech opportunities that we already see now and that we’ll keep seeing even more visible in the next few years. But it’s also complicated. For many business decision makers, it can be chaotic trying to keep control of everything going on around us.  And right at the centre of all of this technology change is cloud computing.

CloudNativeCon and KubeCon Europe 2017 opens this week in Berlin.  It will involve all of the leading open source cloud computing projects and communities affiliated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) at a single event. The aim of CNCF is to make it simpler to assemble all the moving parts needed for fast and easy cloud-native development. It’s all about interoperability, driving alignment and getting all the elements and disparate parts working together, including parts coming from other relevant open source projects of course.

As you would expect, this is a great time for open source veterans like SUSE to step up to make a difference together with other members. We have now joined the CNCF community as a Gold Member and are focused on making the orchestration and management of containerized and cloud-native applications simpler and more flexible for customers to adopt.  To that end, we’ve already released Kubernetes-as-a-Service capabilities as part of SUSE OpenStack Cloud 7. This summer, a Kubernetes-integrated container OS will be delivered with SUSE Container as a Service (CaaS) Platform, an exciting new application development and hosting platform for container applications and services (We invite you to join the public beta starting March 30th). We’ll follow that up with a PaaS solution later this year built on our CaaS solution and Cloud Foundry, with Kubernetes as a key component.

The ultimate goal is remove some of the complexity by contributing, interfacing, then packaging all those technologies together for real life use.  Why is that so important?

Let me leave you with the words of Steve Jobs: “Simple can be harder than complex.”  “But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” We have to get there as an industry while coping with heterogeneous environments, use case, and future technologies that are yet to come.