A Rapidly Expanding Kubernetes Universe

Kubernetes has taken the industry by storm. The container orchestration technology has quickly progressed from internal use at Google, to open source incubation in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, to consensus as an infrastructure standard.

As a mature technology, Kubernetes is now in a phase of extremely rapid enterprise adoption.

But adoption trends only paint part of the Kubernetes picture. The question for CIOs choosing a digital transformation strategy more often isn't whether to deploy Kubernetes as the backbone of their organizations' cloud-native infrastructure, but how.

The needs of those enterprises and services providers vary greatly based on the characteristics of the IT environments they have implemented or would like to, their legacy systems, use cases, multi-cloud strategies and budgets.

Startups, open source foundations and industry giants are jointly contributing to a comprehensive ecosystem mushrooming around the core Kubernetes project that can support the diverse requirements and constraints of all those potential customers.

Below are some new Kubernetes tools and technologies that are poised to make an impact on that ecosystem.

Get more of CRN's 2019 tech year in review.