Aside from surveys that show that Kubernetes adoption now stands at 86%, a true measure of the container orchestration tool’s popularity can be found in another metric: jobs.

The online employment marketplace Indeed recently revealed that Kubernetes expertise is one of the top 10 fastest-rising tech skills on its site, and demand has grown 2,141% since October 2015.

Kubernetes adoption has skyrocketed because of its strength in managing containerized applications, which are on a steep growth curve as well, in the data center and public cloud. A recent Gartner Inc. report has projected that by 2023, over 70% of global enterprises will be running two or more containerized applications, up from 20% last year.

OK, so Kubernetes is popular. But what will this mean for its future direction?

Startups are prospering

To gain some insight into where Kubernetes may be headed, it’s worth taking a brief look back to last year. At the start of 2019, SiliconANGLE identified five startup companies in the Kubernetes space worth watching. How did they do?

For starters, all five are still very much in business, which is not always the case with tech startups where the failure rate tops out around 90%. Twistlock Inc., a container security firm, was acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $410 million in May.

Mesosphere, previously founded on open-source technology for managing server clusters, changed its name to D2iQ in August and pivoted into expanded support tools for Kubernetes. Rockset Inc., a serverless search and analytics firm, relies on Kubernetes for cluster orchestration and leverages internal tools for visibility into container managed events. The company issued a release at the end of January indicating it had experienced “massive new user growth.”

LightStep Inc., provider of observability software for developers who build serverless apps, remains viable in a space that saw a number of eye-catching acquisitions in 2019. For reference, two other Kubernetes monitoring companies — SignalFx and IOpipe — were acquired for well north of $1 billion last year.

Finally, there is TriggerMesh Inc., which builds on top of Kubernetes to enable serverless architecture across apps. In January, the startup announced it had raised $3 million in seed capital from Index Ventures, which provided early funding for Dropbox Inc. and Slack Inc.

Value on top

The relatively healthy position of these five startups reveals a key indicator of what Kubernetes has spawned: There is a market for adding value on top of the container orchestration tool.

This was a clear motivator for the Mesosphere rebranding under D2iQ. It was “day two,” post-Kubernetes, and the company wasted no time rolling out new tools. These included ways to build production-grade Kubernetes Operators for an app lifecycle and multi-cluster governance for any cloud or on-premises Kubernetes distribution.

“Kubernetes itself is great, but it needs a lot of pieces to actually get it ready for prime time,” said Chandler Hoisington, senior vice president of engineering and product at D2iQ, during an interview with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, in November. “Here is your enterprise ready-to-go Kubernetes distribution right out of the box.”

Here is the interview with Chandler Hoisington:

Need for simplification

Despite the rapidly expanding integration of Kubernetes into enterprise platforms around the world, the technology has a couple of issues that need to be addressed. For starters, it’s not simple to use. As its own co-inventor, former Google employee Joe Beda, has freely admitted that “Kubernetes is a complex system.”

There are signs that the Kubernetes community is getting the message, and companies are rolling out tools designed to simplify the implementation process. A year ago, Rancher Labs Inc. launched a “lightweight” Kubernetes distribution to make it easier to run the tool in edge computing environments. Rancher just reported a doubling of its enterprise customer base and commercial revenue for 2019.

Automation is being viewed as a potential solution as well. The startup Carbon Relay has raised $63 million over the past year to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to boost Kubernetes performance. And software intelligence firm Dynatrace LLC recently announced automated solutions to discover and map Kubernetes events and metrics.

“Simplification is going to be an issue; it has to happen,” said John Troyer, co-host of theCUBE, during a KubeCon conference discussion in November. “People are still building engines, and I want them to build cars because not everybody can build the engine.”

Here’s the KubeCon analyst discussion:

Security remains an issue

A potentially more difficult issue confronting the Kubernetes community involves security. Earlier this month, security vendor StackRox Inc. released its “State of Container and Kubernetes” report that indicated 94% of respondents dealt with a security incident in a Kubernetes environment over the past year.

The report also found that a majority of the incidents were misconfiguration exposures, an indication of how the technology’s complexity may be contributing to the vulnerabilities. Twenty-seven percent of respondents also reported security incidents during runtime.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has recently taken steps to address security for Kubernetes. The group announced earlier this month that it would fund a new bug bounty program designed to reward security researchers identifying vulnerabilities in the Kubernetes codebase.

One troublesome problem that exists with Kubernetes security today is that the technology itself can be used to generate attacks. At a presentation for the recent ShmooCon cybersecurity conference in Washington, D.C., an NCC Group researcher documented how “attack pods” can be set up using standard Kubernetes tools.

“When you’re launching applications every six hours, you can’t spend six days addressing security,” said Kamal Shah, president and chief executive officer of StackRox, during an interview with theCUBE. “It has to be built in.”

Here’s the interview with Kamal Shah:

Kubernetes to become part of the ‘IT furniture’

Against this backdrop of growing adoption, complexity and concerns around security, there remains an inevitable conclusion about Kubernetes: It is here to stay.

Wikibon Inc., SiliconANGLE’s sister market research firm, recently analyzed data from Enterprise Technology Research that confirmed Kubernetes’ extremely strong market position and predicted that as the technology becomes embedded into every platform it will no longer be viewed as a separate solution. Like flash storage before it, Kubernetes will simply become part of the IT furniture.

There is certainly enough evidence for this among the actions of major enterprise computing players. Google Anthos, an open hybrid and multicloud application platform, offers container management based on Kubernetes that can be run anywhere. VMware Inc.’s Tanzu and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Arc are examples of platforms that can manage customers’ Kubernetes needs.

Kubernetes’ co-founders have been integrated into large enterprises themselves. Brendan Burns is now a distinguished engineer at Microsoft. Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie left Google LLC to start Heptio Inc. and are now at VMware Inc. after their company was acquired by the firm in 2018.

In a joint appearance last year, the three co-founders reminisced about what they thought their container technology was going to be named. The top choice was Locutus, according to the inventors, named after a translator for Borg in the “Star Trek” television series.

In an episode, “The Best of Both Worlds,” Locutus delivered the following line: “I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile.”

Come to think of it, maybe the Kubernetes co-founders should have named it Locutus after all.

Photo: Cloud Native Computing Foundation