Unless your organization uses containers extensively and at-scale, Kubernetes is not a fait accompli for container orchestration.

Yes, Kubernetes outpaces generic container adoption, but it “only” grew 29% in the last year (35% in October 2018 to 45% in October 2019) among Datadog’s container-using customer base. According to the monitoring company’s updated report about the changing containers landscape, Amazon Web Services’ Fargate adoption rose about 170% to 19% of AWS customers that utilize containers.

Fargate’s compute engine allows users of Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to run containers without managing servers or clusters. This easy-to-use, low maintenance option can be appealing, especially to companies with small operations teams that are concerned about Kubernetes’ complexity.

Administrator/operator experience continues to be a Kubernetes pain point. Partly in response to this problem, managed Kubernetes services, of such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) have arisen. In fact, there are 125 certified Kubernetes platform related offerings listed in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s interactive landscape. The Datadog study finds that about 40% of Kubernetes-using AWS customers have opted for EKS. Based on The New Stack’s calculations, that means 17% of container-using AWS customers opt for its Kubernetes managed service as opposed to its own Fargate offering.

Although providers of IT infrastructure have primarily decided to build on top of Kubernetes, that does not mean the entire IT community is rushing to jump on the bandwagon. Rishidot Research’s recent “Decision Makers Guide — Nomad Vs Kubernetes” warns about making apples to oranges comparisons about container orchestrators, but reminds us that non-Kubernetes options may still be the best option for some companies.

Lawrence Hecht has been producing research reports about information technology markets for the last 16 years. He publishes weekly analysis and manages survey research projects for The New Stack.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a sponsor of The New Stack.

Feature image via Pixabay.