Advances in containerization have left
enterprises with an interesting decision:
Choose from a set of off-the-shelf Container
as a Service platforms, or use the managed
container services now provided by AWS,
Google and Microsoft.
2018 has been the year of mass adoption of container platforms, and the
momentum will very much continue into 2019. With Kubernetes (K8s) being the
clear winner of the “container orchestration war,” organizations (both provid-
ers and adopters) focused their efforts on productionizing and maturing their
Kubernetes deployments. In this regard, 2018 has seen some significant prog-
ress made to ease the adoption of Kubernetes, the two key contributors being
the release of managed Kubernetes services and hybrid container stacks.
When it comes to managed container services, Google Kubernetes Engine
(GKE) pioneered the concept and continues to maintain a healthy lead over
both AWS and Azure, who each announced the general availability of managed
Kubernetes services midway through the year: Amazon Elastic Container Ser-
vice for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
The second announcement, around hybrid container stacks, is one that shakes
up the entire container landscape once again. With on-premises container
deployments being a huge business for the likes of Red Hat OpenShift, Docker
EE and Rancher among many others, cloud providers now offer companies yet
another option: the ability to extend their public cloud container stacks
on-premises.
This leaves large enterprises and those looking to make inroads into contain-
ers, with an interesting decision. They can either choose from a set of off-the-
shelf Container as a Service (CaaS) platforms, and deploy them on their infra-
structure platform of choice (public cloud or on-premises); or they can use the
managed container services provided by the three widely adopted public cloud
providers.
The good news is, using one option or the other might not completely lock in
an enterprise. The Kubernetes Certification program launched last year by the
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