Five years after its creation, Kubernetes has become all the rage in open-source computing.

The free platform for managing container orchestration is helping along digital transformation initiatives across the enterprise landscape, automating away the tough work of deploying and monitoring software applications in multicloud and hybrid cloud environments. So will the Kubernetes ecosystem continue to boom, or will its meteoric rise become its own downfall, becoming victim to the complexities of popular computing platforms?

“It feels like right now we’re at peak hype as far as Kubernetes goes,” said Corey Quinn, a cloud economist with the Duckbill Group. “Whenever you see a technology that has gotten this level of adoption, as we saw with OpenStack, we’ve seen it with cloud … we’re starting to see it with serverless as well — [the issue is] what problem are you trying to solve? Today, that answer is Kubernetes.”

But there needs to be a value proposition shown for Kubernetes, he added. “There has to be a story,” he said. “I’m not suggesting that there isn’t, but I think it’s being used as an upscale snake oil in some cases.”

Quinn sat down with Stu Miniman at this week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU show in Barcelona to discuss the impact of Kubernetes within the open-source community gathered at the conference. As co-hosts for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming news desk, the duo shared their first impressions of the conference at the kickoff (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Kubernetes is the lever to help modernize apps

While the industry has witnessed the boom and bust cycles for other container management platforms, Kubernetes has emerged the de facto project from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, according to Miniman. As information technology administrators seek agile solutions compatible across public and private clouds, Kubernetes has proven useful in modernizing computing environments.

“What IT needs to do is respond to the speed of what the business needs, and with a cloud-native environment … it has to be that lever to be able to help me deliver on the next thing, or change the thing, or update my thing to get that working,” Miniman said.

At KubeCon and other trade shows, Miniman has spoken with end users of these most prominent open-source projects aimed at container management, including OpenShift customers.

“They didn’t talk about OpenShift,” Miniman said. “They talk about their digital transformation. They talk about their data. They talk about the cool new things they’re able to do. It was that platform that happened to be built on Kubernetes that helped them do that.”

Now, he said, it’s apparent that whether an application lives on the Google Cloud Platform or in an on-premises data center, it can be done with containers. “It was Kubernetes that was that lever to help me modernize new apps, and do it faster than I would’ve done it in the past,” he said. “It’s that kind of progression that’s interesting to me.”

 Photo: Stu Miniman