This article is based on reporting by TechRepublic and a survey conducted by Platform9 at KubeCon North America 2019, San Diego. The original survey was authored by Kamesh Pemmaraju, Head of Product Marketing at Platform9.
KubeCon 2019 by the Numbers
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019, held in San Diego just before Thanksgiving, underscored how far Kubernetes has come as an enterprise-grade platform. The event attracted more than 12,000 attendees—a figure that itself signals the growing weight of the cloud-native ecosystem in mainstream IT.
Platform9 used the conference as an opportunity to survey nearly 1,500 attendees on how their organizations are deploying and managing Kubernetes. The results, summarized by Kamesh Pemmaraju in a Platform9 blog post, reveal both the impressive scale of adoption and the operational challenges that come with it.
Production Deployments Are Scaling Up Fast
One of the clearest signals from the survey was the sheer scale at which organizations plan to run Kubernetes. More than 400 respondents reported that their company planned to operate at least 50 clusters in production within the next six months. Some organizations reported running hundreds of nodes across just one or two clusters—a sign that workloads are growing denser as teams gain operational confidence.
The survey also highlighted the hybrid nature of modern Kubernetes deployments. Many organizations are running clusters across both on-premises infrastructure and public cloud providers simultaneously, rather than committing exclusively to one model.
Kubernetes Talent Demand Is Surging
As adoption scales, so does the demand for Kubernetes expertise. The Platform9 report cited approximately 12,500 Kubernetes-related job listings on Indeed.com at the time of the conference, with more than 3,000 of those positions added in the preceding six months alone.
Major enterprises including Capital One and Walmart were among the companies that used KubeCon 2019 to advertise open roles and recruit from the concentrated pool of Kubernetes talent in attendance. The conference has become as much a recruiting event as a technical one.
“It’s astonishing to see the massive scale of Kubernetes’ deployments. The companies at KubeCon that are spearheading these large-scale Kubernetes deployments are positioning themselves to rapidly deliver superior customer experiences giving them a distinct competitive edge in a fast-moving digital economy.”
— Kamesh Pemmaraju, Platform9
Edge Computing: A Fast-Growing Kubernetes Use Case
One of the more striking findings from the survey was the breadth of edge computing use cases now running on Kubernetes. Among the respondents:
- 145 respondents reported an active edge deployment using Kubernetes.
- 38% said they were running Kubernetes across more than 100 locations.
- Nearly half of those using Kubernetes at the edge reported running at least 11 servers per location.
The most common edge workloads identified in the survey included:
- Edge gateways and access control
- Surveillance and video analytics
- 5G infrastructure
- Retail point-of-sale and in-store tooling
These use cases span verticals from retail and manufacturing to automotive and telecommunications. The challenge is that edge locations are often unstaffed and have limited connectivity, making remote management and automation critical.
“It’s quite a challenge to scale dozens or hundreds of pseudo-data centers that need to be managed with low or no touch, usually with no staff and little access. Given the large scale, traditional data center management processes won’t apply.”
— Kamesh Pemmaraju, Platform9
Operational Challenges at Scale
Scaling Kubernetes from a handful of proof-of-concept clusters to dozens of production clusters introduces significant operational complexity. Survey respondents were candid about where they struggle most. The top three challenges reported were:
- Monitoring at scale — cited by 48.86% of respondents as their biggest challenge.
- Cluster upgrades — flagged by 44.3% of respondents.
- Security patching — a concern for 34.09% of respondents.
“Kubernetes’ complexity and abstraction is necessary and it is there for good reasons, but it also makes it hard to troubleshoot when things don’t work as expected.”
— Kamesh Pemmaraju, Platform9
These challenges are not surprising. Deploying one or two clusters for development or testing is relatively straightforward. Maintaining reliable, secure, and upgradeable clusters across hundreds of nodes and dozens of environments demands a level of automation and tooling maturity that many organizations are still building toward.
Recommended Tooling for Observability and Operations
To address the most common operational pain points, the Platform9 report pointed DevOps, PlatformOps, and ITOps teams toward a core set of cloud-native tools:
- Prometheus — for metrics collection and alerting at scale.
- Fluentd — for centralized log aggregation across clusters and nodes.
- Istio — for service mesh capabilities including traffic management, observability, and mutual TLS.
The cloud-native tooling landscape evolves quickly. Teams operating Kubernetes at scale should treat staying current with CNCF project updates as an ongoing operational responsibility, not a one-time evaluation exercise.
What This Means for DevOps Teams
The KubeCon 2019 survey data paints a clear picture: Kubernetes is no longer an emerging technology being piloted by early adopters. It is a production platform running at enormous scale across industries, deployment models, and geographies—including challenging edge environments.
For DevOps and platform engineering teams, the implications are practical:
- Invest in automation for cluster lifecycle management, including upgrades and security patching, before scale makes manual processes untenable.
- Build observability into your platform from the start—monitoring is the top reported challenge for a reason.
- Treat edge deployments as a distinct operational discipline requiring low-touch automation and robust remote management tooling.
- Plan for talent development: the demand for Kubernetes expertise is outpacing the available talent pool, making internal upskilling a strategic priority.