This article is based on analysis originally published at ITPro Today. Original publication date: October 2020.
Overview
Kubernetes launched as an open source project in 2014, and while the core architecture is well understood, the ecosystem surrounding it has shifted dramatically. Over a relatively short period, the market has consolidated around large software vendors, new tools have extended Kubernetes to virtual machines and multi-cloud environments, and management of multiple clusters has become the norm rather than the exception. This article examines each of those shifts in detail.
1. The Kubernetes Market Is Consolidating
The most visible trend in the Kubernetes space is consolidation around large, established software vendors. A few significant acquisitions illustrate the pattern clearly.
SUSE Acquires Rancher
In July 2020, SUSE acquired Rancher Labs, a company focused on Kubernetes management software. The deal gave SUSE — a well-established open source vendor with historically limited exposure to the container ecosystem — a competitive position alongside companies like Canonical and Red Hat, both of which had already invested heavily in Kubernetes tooling and platforms.
IBM, Red Hat, and OpenShift
IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat placed OpenShift — one of the most widely deployed Kubernetes-based application platforms — under the ownership of one of the world’s largest enterprise technology companies. Prior to the IBM deal, Red Hat had also acquired CoreOS in 2018, absorbing another early and influential player in the Kubernetes space.
Managed Kubernetes on Public Cloud
Managed Kubernetes services from major cloud providers — including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) from Microsoft and Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) from Amazon — have matured considerably. These services abstract away much of the operational overhead of running a Kubernetes control plane, making Kubernetes more accessible to teams without deep infrastructure expertise.
The net result is that deploying Kubernetes today most commonly means using a platform owned and operated by a large technology company. Independent vendors such as Platform9 still serve organizations that need more flexibility across heterogeneous infrastructure, but the general trend points toward corporatization of the Kubernetes stack.
2. VMware Enters the Kubernetes Architecture Space
For most of Kubernetes’ history, VMware and Kubernetes occupied separate corners of the IT landscape — virtualization on one side, container orchestration on the other. That separation has narrowed significantly.
Project Pacific and VMware Tanzu
VMware launched Project Pacific and the Tanzu portfolio to address both container and virtual machine workloads through a unified management framework. The strategic logic is sound: not every workload can be containerized, and organizations running mixed environments benefit from a single operational model for both VMs and containers.
The open source project KubeVirt pursues a similar goal in a vendor-agnostic way, allowing virtual machine workloads to run inside Kubernetes clusters alongside container workloads.
VMware’s Kubernetes strategy is most likely to succeed within its existing customer base — organizations already deeply invested in VMware’s virtualization stack. Whether VMware can attract net-new Kubernetes adopters who have no prior VMware investment is a more open question.
3. Kubernetes Goes Multi-Cluster and Multi-Cloud
Early Kubernetes deployments assumed a single cluster per environment. Kubernetes namespaces provided a way to segment workloads within that cluster — useful for resource isolation, access control, and organizational separation, but not providing the full isolation that distinct clusters offer.
Multi-Cluster Management
Tools like Rancher and VMware Tanzu Mission Control have made managing fleets of Kubernetes clusters a central capability. Teams can now run each application or tenant in its own dedicated cluster, providing strong isolation guarantees without relying solely on namespace-level separation. This is particularly valuable for security-sensitive workloads or environments with strict compliance requirements.
Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud with Anthos
Google introduced Anthos in 2019 as a platform that uses Kubernetes as an abstraction layer across multiple underlying environments — public clouds, on-premises data centers, or both. Anthos allows teams to define, deploy, and manage applications consistently regardless of where the underlying infrastructure lives. This positions Kubernetes not just as a container orchestrator, but as a control plane for hybrid and multi-cloud strategy.
The practical implication: modern Kubernetes architecture is designed around the assumption that you will run many clusters, across many environments, and need unified tooling to manage them all.
4. Google Continues to Dominate Kubernetes Development
Kubernetes originated from an internal Google project called Borg. Even six-plus years after Google open-sourced Kubernetes and donated it to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Google remains by far the largest contributor to the core project.
This is notable given the breadth of the Kubernetes ecosystem. Red Hat and IBM together represent a distant second in terms of core contribution volume. Major cloud providers such as Amazon, despite running large commercial Kubernetes services, have historically ranked outside the top contributors to the upstream project. This asymmetry reflects a broader pattern: companies that have built managed services on top of Kubernetes often invest more in their own control-plane abstractions than in the upstream codebase itself.
What This Means for DevOps Teams
For engineers evaluating or operating Kubernetes environments, several practical points emerge from these trends:
- Vendor lock-in risk is real but manageable. Managed Kubernetes services reduce operational overhead but may introduce dependency on provider-specific APIs and tooling. Evaluate the exit cost before committing.
- Multi-cluster is now the default assumption. Design your CI/CD pipelines, RBAC policies, and networking with multi-cluster topologies in mind, even if you start with a single cluster.
- Hybrid cloud use cases are expanding. If your organization operates on-premises infrastructure alongside public cloud, tools like Anthos, Rancher, and similar platforms offer a route to a consistent operational model.
- VM-to-container migration has vendor-supported paths. If you have a significant VMware estate, Tanzu and KubeVirt provide gradual migration options rather than requiring a full rewrite to containerize every workload.
- Upstream contributions signal long-term influence. Google’s continued dominance in Kubernetes development means the project’s direction is heavily influenced by Google’s own product roadmap priorities.
Looking Ahead
Further consolidation in the Kubernetes vendor landscape seems likely. The remaining independent Kubernetes management vendors face pressure from well-resourced platform companies offering bundled solutions. Meanwhile, Kubernetes itself is expected to play an increasingly central role in hybrid cloud strategies, with more vendors likely to invest in Anthos-style abstraction platforms over time.
As Kubernetes matures, it is becoming less a disruptive technology and more a foundational layer of modern infrastructure — present in solutions stacks almost by default. For DevOps engineers, that means deeper familiarity with Kubernetes is increasingly a baseline skill rather than a specialization.