Is Kubernetes really that popular out there in the wider software world? Or is this author just in a bubble?
I guess it could be a regional thing, but for the most part i'd be inclined to say yes.
Most of the larger cloud vendors offer managed Kubernetes in one way or another (Azure, GCP, AWS, Scaleway etc.), which you cannot say about any other orchestrator out there.
Most of the large enteprises that i've worked with also are moving towards introducing Kubernetes internally, sometimes with pretty large clusters for multiple projects at once!
Similarly, most of the tooling out there is focused on Kubernetes nowadays (networking, storage, deployment solutions), which isn't the case for other orchestrators.
Of course, many out there don't even need an orchestrator - Docker or even Docker Compose (or the podman equivalents, or other solutions like that) are oftentimes enough for smaller scale projects, it can be a while before you would enjoy the benefits from the likes of Docker Swarm, Hashicorp Nomad or even one of the many Kubernetes distros out there. Once you need to scale past one (or a few servers) and need to orchestrate deployments across all of them, it might just be worth to look into them, though.
I guess that's because Google largely won the "container wars", being the first to market with a reasonably complete feature set, brand reputation and resources for continued development, offerings by most cloud vendors and also a large dose of hype in the form of developer talks, demos, press releases/newsletters, tutorials, learning resources and i guess even certifications. Of course, that wasn't all just Google - once the hype around it started, numerous parties joined in, wanting recognition, relevant skills, or even to market their products that are built around supporting the complexity of Kubernetes.
Compare that to something like Apache Mesos, which, while initially promising, largely fell by the wayside and never really caught on: https://mesos.apache.org/
Larger surface area that can be controlled programmatically without needing to involve the people managing the hardware or network. This makes certain engineering choices (like microservices) more tenable.
If so: Kubernetes is kind of like a fancier version of that which can scale to a large cluster, along with tools for handling common tasks associated with these deployments like name resolution, HTTP/S ingress, automatic scaling, and periodic tasks. It scratches a lot of itches for large-scale production environments.
Amazon ECS launched April 2015 and EKS June 2018.
I remember the docker deployment story being a mess. You still needed to manage a fleet of containers the same way you did VM instances.
I work on the Kubernetes offering for one of the major cloud providers... yes, yes it is.
If you’re big enough to have a Unix team and SRE’s then today I’d wager kube can save you time and money vs. manually managing cpu, memory & disk allocations, software deployments/rollbacks and disaster recovery steps.
If you’re smaller than that, it really depends on the skillset of the team as to whether kube is a good idea or not.
https://ramansharma.substack.com/p/the-case-for-cloud-server...