Envisioning the Powerful Potential of Kubernetes

In the high-tech industry, every so often a game changer comes along—an innovation that has the potential to directly or indirectly transform the way we work and live. Kubernetes (or “K8s” as it’s often abbreviated by developers) holds the promise of becoming one such innovation.

Clearly, developers recognize the potential for K8s. One of the fastest-growing open-source projects ever, K8s has attracted more than 36,000 individual contributors.

Why is K8s so promising? Our world is increasingly dependent on software. From retail, banking, and insurance to healthcare, transportation, and manufacturing, organizations across industries rely on software to run their business and deliver engaging customer experiences.

K8s—a container orchestration platform—can help organizations accelerate development of the modern applications that drive businesses and industries forward. At the same time, K8s can help reduce development and operational costs, improve reliability of applications, and streamline application management.

Early K8s adopters are already seeing these and other benefits. For example, many large organizations that are using K8s to build and run applications have improved utilization of their technology resources, according to a Dimensional Research survey of 247 companies (see Figure 1). Better utilization can help organizations reduce hardware resources, driving down both CapEx and OpEx costs.

K8s adopters also report speeding up software development cycles. And organizations often can deploy those applications faster as well—in minutes instead of days. By delivering innovative, modern applications faster, organizations can boost revenue, improve customer satisfaction, and gain a powerful competitive edge.

Clearly, early adopters are deriving tangible and quantifiable value from K8s. Still, many of these successful—but early—implementations require a lot of time, experimentation, and on-the-fly learning. Addressing these and other challenges will be crucial for ensuring more organizations can fully capitalize on K8s.

Advancing Toward Wider Adoption

Research shows that K8s adoption is progressing from an early-adopter stage toward more mainstream implementation. According to the Dimensional Research report, 41 percent of organizations are running K8s within development environments, but 59 percent have most or all of their K8s implementations running in production environments (Figure 2). K8s is increasingly employed as a platform to access, utilize, and operate enterprise applications.

What will it take for even more organizations to adopt K8s for production environments? Industry leaders must also help organizations overcome several specific challenges with K8s implementations (Figure 3).

A top challenge is a lack of internal experience and expertise—a typical challenge for adoption of any emerging technology. Organizations can gain that expertise through experience over time, but in the near term, they need external sources that offer relevant training, services, and solutions. Technology vendors must provide the information and resources required to jumpstart K8s initiatives and reduce risks. Organizations need to understand the complexities, interdependencies, and the requirements for K8s adoption within the enterprise.

Successful adoption within an enterprise also depends on close alignment among developers and IT operations teams. Vendors must offer technologies that reduce the learning curve for developers and give operators the confidence for enterprise deployments.

In addition, technology vendors must build on this open-source technology and deliver mature solutions geared for enterprise deployments. In particular, vendors must deliver solutions that can help simplify the use of K8s and streamline its management while improving the scalability and reliability of K8s environments.

Finally, wide enterprise adoption will require a strong K8s ecosystem. A strong ecosystem creates a rising tide that stimulates innovation, promotes advancement, and establishes the legitimacy of the technology while reducing deployment risks in mission-critical environments.

VMware is meeting these requirements for enterprise adoption. VMware is shrinking the knowledge gap, sharing deep K8s expertise that draws from a fast-growing team of K8s experts led by Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie—two of the three original creators of K8s. In addition, VMware has become a top K8s contributor and driving force for K8s innovation, offering mature, production-grade solutions that help organizations capitalize on the power of K8s while controlling complexity. And because many developers and IT operators have familiarity with and confidence in VMware solutions, choosing K8s solutions from VMware can help align these groups on a K8s platform and remove barriers to adoption.

Importantly, VMware is also strengthening and expanding the K8s ecosystem. The company regularly collaborates with a broad array of software, hardware, service, and solution vendors. VMware can help organizations leverage this partner community for K8s while also fostering and developing new relationships.

In addition, VMware is committed to advancing knowledge about Kubernetes and enhancing skills among developers. KubeAcademy from VMware—a free, product-agnostic Kubernetes education program—provides an accessible learning path for those looking to advance their skillset. The expert instructors at KubeAcademy design and deliver practical Kubernetes training for a variety of roles and skill levels.

Moving Forward with K8s

K8s offers tremendous opportunities for organizations to speed modern app development, reduce costs, and more. But widespread enterprise adoption requires industry leaders to share expertise, help align internal teams, produce enterprise-grade solutions, and work to expand the K8s ecosystem. Fortunately, with VMware and other technology vendors demonstrating their strong commitment to K8s, organizations can tap into the resources they need to begin enterprise implementations and start realizing the benefits of K8s rapidly.