You missed my point; I didn't say it's new, I said it was simpler than it might seem, and that thinking of it as a state machine makes it easier to understand what the core of Kubernetes really is.
And of course "nothing but a pattern" is nonsense. Pre-container systems like Puppet and Chef -- which are also, vaguely, based on converging real state towards desired state -- are firmly rooted in the traditional Unix model of mutable boxes. You can't implement a consistent reconciliation loop if your state can't be cleanly encapsulated (as with containers).
And of course "nothing but a pattern" is nonsense. Pre-container systems like Puppet and Chef -- which are also, vaguely, based on converging real state towards desired state -- are firmly rooted in the traditional Unix model of mutable boxes. You can't implement a consistent reconciliation loop if your state can't be cleanly encapsulated (as with containers).