Lionel Sujay Vailshery
Research expert covering cloud computing and emerging tech industries
Kubernetes - statistics & facts
Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source orchestration platform used to manage container technology across cloud environments. Initially released in 2014, the platform evolved from Google’s code used to manage its data centers and was later donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Since then, the open-source project has been supported by a community of professional programmers and coders from around the world. As a result, Kubernetes emerged as the leading container orchestration platform.
Kubernetes features
Kubernetes enables organizations to automate deployment on the cloud and manage a container’s lifecycle. In other words, Kubernetes' core capabilities allow developers to create and monitor containers across clusters, making sure that each container is where it is supposed to be and working together with other containers. In this way, Kubernetes is automating many of the inefficiencies and repetitions inherent in app development.
On a broader level, Kubernetes is used for cloud web hosting, high-performance computing (HPC), data center outsourcing, or software as a service (SaaS) support. This points to the reasons for using Kubernetes in the first place, among which are faster software shipment and an increase in revenue. Given its capability to manage microservice architecture, it is not surprising that respondents also indicate Kubernetes' importance for their cloud native application strategy.
Kubernetes outlook
With investments being directed towards Kubernetes, organizations seek to increase technical positions to take advantage of its benefits. Notably, the major cloud providers already offer fully managed Kubernetes services do drive adoption and help businesses overcome some of the remaining challenges. Unsurprisingly, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and VMware take up a sizeable share of environments on which Kubernetes clusters are run worldwide, leaving other contenders in the market behind.
