Happy 8th birthday Kubernetes!
June 2022 marks 8 years of Kubernetes! We celebrate the leader in container orchestration software and see what the future holds.
Jun 08, 2023 • 5 Minute Read
June 7, 2022, marks eight years since the initial release of Kubernetes. In that time, it has grown to become not only a widely used open-source tool, but the industry leader in container orchestration software. Let’s celebrate just how far Kubernetes has come!
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Where did Kubernetes come from?
Kubernetes was originally created at Google by engineers Joe Beda, Brendan Burns, and Craig McLuckie. In those early days, Google was already invested in containers and had developed a series of container cluster managers. This ultimately led to the Borg system and its successor, Omega. Work then began on the next iteration, a piece of software known as Project Seven. This was inspired by the knowledge gained from both Borg and Omega.
Project Seven eventually became Kubernetes. Taking the features and ideas behind Borg and Omega, and reimplementing them using the latest technologies, Kubernetes created a general-purpose container management cluster solution that could be used by anyone. It wasn’t designed solely for Google’s systems, and it was open-source.
The success of this new tool was immediate. Within three years, Kubernetes had established a large and thriving open-source community, with numerous code contributors, users, and in-person events.
Kubernetes in 2022
While it gained popularity very quickly, the present day could be described as the era in which Kubernetes has “made it.” On its eighth birthday, Kubernetes is experiencing an explosion in adoption and usage metrics year-over-year.
The 2021 Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s annual survey declared that Kubernetes had crossed the “adoption chasm,” with 96% of respondent companies either using or evaluating it. Within the last year 27% of developers had actually used Kubernetes, a 67% increase over 2020.
VMware’s State of Kubernetes 2022 survey found that adoption is ramping up even further, and that more companies are using Kubernetes clusters to achieve their goals. Today, Kubernetes has earned the right to be called a mainstream technology.
With more and more companies adopting Kubernetes, it’s now the leader in the world of managing and orchestrating containers. And its growth doesn’t seem to be slowing down. If Kubernetes has entered the mainstream, it’s likely it will stay there and grow.
What’s next for Kubernetes?
Current trends certainly seem to suggest that the adoption of Kubernetes will only increase. Development continues, and we’re seeing new features and improvements with every new release.
Kubernetes in the cloud
Increasingly, Kubernetes is becoming the infrastructural backbone of a variety of technologies. It’s built to be “cloud native,” and i certainly at home in the world of the cloud. Much of its adoption takes the form of managed cloud-based offerings like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (Azure AKS), and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
In the future, it seems likely that “Kubernetes in the cloud” will continue to grow. In some ways, Kubernetes is in the process of becoming the standard for containers in the cloud.
Multicloud deployment
Another trend that’s worth mentioning is multicloud deployment. Organizations using multicloud are often doing so via Kubernetes, utilizing the Kubernetes offerings of various cloud vendors. As above, Kubernetes is also becoming the standardized API for running workloads in the cloud.
Kubernetes will continue to mature
In addition to the widespread adoption of Kubernetes, companies seem to be growing in terms of the maturity of their Kubernetes usage. Adoption is growing for technologies that work with Kubernetes to meet more mature needs, like observability and monitoring. This is a sign that companies are investing in Kubernetes for the long haul and that their Kubernetes systems are growing more and more robust. The future looks very bright for Kubernetes, as its overall ecosystem matures and grows.
What does the future hold for Kubernetes?
What began as a small, albeit popular, open-source project has grown into a mainstream, industry-leading tool. People have been speculating for years that Kubernetes is here to stay, and it seems they’re right.
The future of Kubernetes looks bright indeed, and it will likely continue to hold a growing influence in the world of the cloud, helping many companies to innovate quickly and achieve their dreams. Here’s to eight more years, and beyond!
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