this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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"the next generation cloud-native"
that's as far as I got. Cloud native is an immediate, non-negotiable red flag for me
They need to work on their branding. "Cloud Native" triggers images of subscription services and data mining. But the idea here is that the whole OS and its components are all sort of containerized, so you can just pull pre-configured "cloud" images that are guaranteed to work out of the box to your machine.
That is one of the dumbest ways I've ever seen someone try to connect their product to the cloud buzzword. By that logic all stable linux distros are cloud since you pull the packages with preconfigured sane defaults from the repos.
It's hard to explain until you've used it, but in my experience I think this is much different than a traditional Linux distro. Every other distro I've tried has (to some extent) dependencies that can get out of whack, configuration drift that makes it hard to get things to work sometimes, random codecs or drivers or other things you need to install to get a system working as it should, etc. In the "cloud native" model, all the packages, drivers, etc. are built and tested in the cloud. So when they arrive on your machine, they "just work" and updates are handled automatically - it's great. Maybe not great for tinkerers, but great for regular users who just want to use their computer.
the cloud is just someone else's pc. if it can work in my machine, it can work there. The hard part of cloud stuff is the stuff outside your image. setting mount points, port redirections etc. When stuff doesn't work, you usually don't fix it in the image, but probably some configuration of the container.
Why?
The CNCF has a number of awesome projects that live up to FOSS values.
CNCF projects themselves are indeed FOSS, but "the cloud" as it is most commonly interacted with, by tech workers, are enormous collections of closed-source systems run by Amazon, Google or Microsoft (all under antitrust investigation either now or in the past).
Okay right but why would "cloud native" as the community's marketing for it be considered a red flag. Someone who doesn't know better would think oh "cloud native" Kubernetes is evil. When really the moniker mostly means it was designed to be highly scalable, to interface with public cloud API's, among many other decisions that differentiate traditional enterprise I.T. software (which like Cisco products) could have its own fair share of "evilness" to be avoided.
My point was that O.P. should clarify why that's such an immediate red flag for them.
To future readers I consistently use "cloud native" software on my bare metal computers at home. It's mostly a marketing term to reflect "modern ness" in software features to be run on a public cloud.
In my experience cloud native doesn't mean it's on Google, or Microsoft's privacy stealing software because they're marketing to you that you can host it yourself on the public cloud.
I won't speak for the OP, but yes it is a fair question about the automatic red-flag. There are characteristics of software described as cloud-native that are considered undesirable by some.
These could range from things as high level as an objection to how projects are funded, down to things like distaste for code complexity required to support opaque HTTP APIs over standardised protocols.