Kubernetes is an open-source orchestration engine for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications at scale. When your requires a large number of containers, you need a tool to group containers into logical units, and to track, manage and monitor them all. Kubernetes helps you do that and is considered the de facto tool for container management.

The Kubernetes project is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and has over 1500 contributors. It was started at Google, which still leads development efforts.

Docker adoption is still growing exponentially and more and more companies have started using it in Production. It is important to use an orchestration platform to scale and manage your containers. Imagine a situation where you have been using Docker for a little while, and have deployed on a few different servers. Your application starts getting massive traffic, and you need to scale up fast, how will you go from 3 servers to 40 servers that you may require? And how will you decide which container should go where? How would you monitor all these containers and make sure they are restarted if they exit? This is where Kubernetes comes in.

Let us look at a few more reasons why we predict that Kubernetes adoption will explode in 2018.

#1: Open source, backed by giants

Kubernetes is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is quickly gathering momentum, attracting some of the biggest names in tech like Google, AWS, Oracle, Microsoft, VMware, Pivotal and many more. Since Kubernetes started at Google, it is still the face of the project, leading to a lot of trust in this platform. This gave it the required initial traction and generated enough curiosity for people to explore it.

#2: Vibrant and fast growing community

The Kubernetes project on GitHub has over 1500 contributors and they actively release tons of tooling, extensions, etc. All this makes the platform easier to use and helps with adoption. Kubernetes is one of the most significant open source communities (more than 27,000+ stars on GitHub) and was the “#2 project with the most reviews” and “#1 most discussed project” as per ‘The state of the octoverse in 2017.’

The State of the Octoverse 2017

Openness and ecosystem plays a major role in making the platform popular. The Kubernetes team maintains a Slack channel where the community can exchange information and help each other.

#3: Supported on all clouds

There are several other options for container orchestration, including Amazon ECS and Docker Swarm. However, recent announcements from Amazon, Microsoft and Docker are enough to show that Kubernetes is winning the container orchestration battle. It is now supported on all mainstream clouds, which will definitely make it the first choice for teams looking for a container orchestration platform without lock-in.

#4: Great partnerships

The Kubernetes team has done a great job partnering with third party system integration service providers to help enterprises smoothly adopt Kubernetes. A complete list of partners is available here: Kubernetes partners.

Companies like CoreOS offer a managed version of Kubernetes, and Google, Microsoft, etc offer cloud based container services natively running Kubernetes. No other orchestration platform has the reach that Kubernetes has today,

Trending up in 2018

If you go to Google trends and search for ‘Kubernetes’, you will see exactly what we are talking about. The adoption of Kubernetes is expected to grow exponentially in 2018, as shown by the Google trends graph below:,

Kubernetes Google Trend

Kubernetes is already beating the Swarm for container management on open stack clouds.

Open Stack Survey

The source is taken from Open Stack survey report April 2016.

We’re looking forward to seeing more Kubernetes adoption in 2018. The Shippable platform has always been a big believer in Kubernetes, and we were launch partners for Kubernetes 1.0. Our platform supports Kubernetes deployments natively and can help you get started with setting up end to end workflows in just a few minutes:

If you’re still unfamiliar with Kubernetes, this video is a great overview that will give you a 5 min recap:

Originally published at blog.shippable.com.