It’s been four years since I wrote about the state of containers in the IT world, and a lot has changed since then. At the time, containerization was gaining momentum, and it felt like a freight train that couldn’t be stopped. Fast forward to today, and the narrative around containers has shifted significantly. The new cargo on that freight train is Kubernetes!

In my previous role at a cloud provider, I started looking into ways to offer containers as a service shortly after writing that 2015 post. At the time, there wasn’t much to work with, but I dabbled in Docker and played around with VMware’s AppCatalyst, which allowed me to deploy basic Docker images on my MacBook Pro (it’s still installed, actually). The highlight of that experience was being able to play Docker Doom!

However, as I got more involved in the early alphas of vSphere Integrated Containers (Docker containers as VMs on vCenter), I realized that containerization was not just a fad but a fundamental shift in how IT is done. And now, four or five years later, Kubernetes has become the standard bearer for container orchestration.

I remember sitting in my last VMware vChampion session with Kit Colbert, where he talked about Kuuuuuuurbines (the American pronunciation stuck in my mind) and how we all should be ready to understand how it works because it was about to take over the tech world. I didn’t listen… and now, I have a realization that I should have started looking into Kubernetes and container management more seriously sooner.

Not because it’s fundamental to my career path… not because I feel like I was lagging technically… and not because there have been those saying for years that Kubernetes will win the race. But because there’s an opportunity to take off the blinkers and learn something that is being adopted by understanding the fundamentals about what makes it tick.

In terms of discovery and learning, I see this much like what I have done over the past eighteen months with automation and orchestration. From a backup and recovery point of view, we’ve been seeing an increase in the field of customers and partners asking how they can back up containers and Kubernetes. For a long time, the standard response was “why.” But it’s becoming more obvious that the initial stateless nature of containers is making way for more stateful persistent workloads. So now, it’s not only about backing up the management plane but also understanding that we need to protect the data that sits within the persistent volumes.

My intention is to create a series of blog posts that describe my experiences with different Kubernetes platforms and ultimately deploy a simple web application with persistent storage. These posts will not be how-tos on setting up a Kubernetes cluster, etc. Instead, I’ll look at general config, application deployment, usability, cost, and whatever else becomes relevant as I go through the process of getting the web application online.

I’ll be working with different platforms, including the usual suspects in terms of major public cloud providers. From a Cloud and Service Provider point of view, the ability to offer Kubernetes via vCloud Director is very exciting. For a different approach, I have always liked what Platform 9 has done, and I was also an early tester of their initial managed vSphere support, which has now evolved into managed OpenStack and Kubernetes. They recently announced Managed Applications through the platform, which I’ve been playing with today.

In conclusion, this follow-up post isn’t about the state of containers today or what I think about how and where they are being used in IT today. The reality is that we live in a hybrid world, and workloads are being deployed in various fashions. Kubernetes seems to have come to the fore and reached some level of maturity that makes it a viable option… that could not be said four years ago! It’s time for me (and maybe you) to dig underneath the surface.