Kubernetes is booming, but consolidation is coming
Summary
What we often call cloud-native applications are designed to handle failure by just restarting and retrying rather than having enormous fault tolerance and resilience built in – replacing hardware with software but still keeping the rather brute-force nature of turning things off and on. Kubernetes has become so significant that large enterprise IT companies from Microsoft to VMware to IBM have hired key developers and made contributions to key projects, either to get the expertise to deliver their own Kubernetes products and services or to move the ecosystem forward in a way that meshes with their existing products and services. The CNCF certification program for Kubernetes distros has allowed the number to proliferate without succumbing to the OpenStack problem of incompatibility between distributions from different vendors. ) will get curated down to a more manageable set of choices and ideally, much of Kubernetes will disappear into the infrastructure that most people in technology dont have to think about any more than they think about the way an OS filing system, a database engine or a hypervisor works. There are lots of ways of delivering that – cloud Kubernetes services, virtual kubelets and ephemeral containers and a half dozen other ideas – so there will be multiple projects and vendors springing up like mushrooms in the forest to deliver that abstraction, and infrastructure admins will get to care and worry about all of those.