Why Kubernetes

The popularity of container orchestration tools

Kubernetes has become the de facto choice for container orchestration. Here’s why:

Massive feature set

Kubernetes offers a huge range of functionality for managing containers, including auto scaling, auto healing, rolling deployments, service discovery, secrets management, configuration management, bin packing, storage orchestration, batch execution, access controls, log aggregation, SSH access, batch processing, and much more.

Massive community

Kubernetes has the biggest community of any orchestration tool, with more than 50,000 stars and 2,500 contributors on GitHub, thousands of blog posts, numerous books, hundreds of meetup groups, several dedicated conferences, and a huge ecosystem of frameworks, tools, plugins, integrations, and service providers.

Run anywhere

You can run Kubernetes on-premise, in the cloud (with 1st class support from the cloud provider, e.g.,: AWS offers EKS, Google Cloud offers GKE, Azure offers AKS), and on your own computer (it’s built directly into the Docker desktop app). This reduces lock-in and makes multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud more manageable, as both the containers themselves and the way you manage them are portable.

Proven technology

Kubernetes was originally designed by Google, based on years of experience with their internal container management systems (Borg and Omega), and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It’s designed for massive scale and resiliency (Google runs billions of containers per week) and with a huge community behind it, it’s continuously getting better.