Gabe from the Azure team here. The goal of OAM is to promote better layering of the development and operations functions inside any org. This is modeled from what we’ve learned about high-functioning teams operating Kubernetes at scale, plus what we’ve learned running services inside Microsoft.
The desire to have software engineers focus only on business logic is strong. This tends to result in the creation of an internal “platform team” that provides services to dev teams. Effectively an internal PaaS.
Pivotal Labs in fact has an entire practice focusing on teaching and evolving the practice of "Platform as a Product". Operations is more than "just" operations, it's an engineering practice. You're delivering capabilities to a customer, looking for ways to make everyone's lives easier and better and faster.
I think that like folks at Azure, we evolved the approach based on experiences dogfooding various platforms, applying our existing thinking about product development and lots of learning from industry peers.
Yes precisely! OAM is meant to provide some consistency and standardization to this practice, while fully expecting each platform to have unique capabilities and requirements that can be surfaced through the model. It's really illuminating how often we hear "oh hey we're trying to do something very similar to OAM!"
I think the tricky part of the sale will be in abstracting away Kubernetes; or at least, not adopting its conventions for registration and discovery of resources/endpoints. You can keep those and not use Kubernetes, which is more or less how Knative went about it (insofar as it's possible to create an implementation that's Knative without using Kubernetes).
I am however overall very sympathetic to the idea that Kubernetes never drew a crisp line between roles.
The desire to have software engineers focus only on business logic is strong. This tends to result in the creation of an internal “platform team” that provides services to dev teams. Effectively an internal PaaS.
OAM helps enable this pattern.