Kubernetes is big. Really big. It was released as an open source project on GitHub in 2014, and now it averages 200 changes every week from a worldwide community of 2,500 contributors. The annual KubeCon conference has grown from 1,000 attendees in 2016 to more than 12,000 at the most recent event, and it’s now a global series with events in America, Europe, and Asia. All the major cloud services offer a managed Kubernetes service, and you can run Kubernetes in a data center or on your laptop—and they’re all the same Kubernetes.
Independence and standardization are the main reasons Kubernetes is so popular. Once you have your apps running nicely in Kubernetes, you can deploy them anywhere, which is attractive for organizations moving to the cloud, because it enables them to move between data centers and other clouds without a rewrite. It’s also very attractive for practitioners—once you’ve mastered Kubernetes, you can move between projects and organizations and be productive quickly.