Brian Grant

Omega supported an extensible object model, and @davidopp had proposed putting an API in front of the persistent store, as we later did in Kubernetes, but it wasn't declarative. Separate work on a common configuration store was discontinued as Google Cloud became the focus

GCP was comprised of independent services, with some common standards, such as the org hierarchy and authz. They used REST APIs, as the rest of the industry, and gRPC didn't exist yet. But, GCP’s APIs were not natively declarative, and Terraform didn’t exist, either

@jbeda proposed layering an aggregated config store/service with consistent, declarative CRUD REST APIs over underlying GCP and third-party service APIs. This sort of later evolved into Deployment Manager.

For the most part, controllers know which fields to propagate from one resource instance to another and wait gracefully on declarative object (rather than field) references, without assuming referential integrity, which enables relaxed operation ordering.

In the next thread, I’ll cover more about configuration itself, such as the origin of kubectl apply