'Vanilla Kubernetes' What Are the Features? How do you choose the vendor and who are these vendors in the first place? Let’s see how some of K8s distros available on the market compare to each other and to the “vanilla” Kubernetes distribution.

Now let’s imagine that your company is planning to adopt Kubernetes and is not eager to setup and maintain the cluster itself. And, naturally, they want to support the product that they are confident in, so even if they make no changes to the code, they test their distro to know their product inside out and see how it works in real conditions. However, they provide support and maintenance of K8s clusters (the so-called 'managed Kubernetes'). Since Kubernetes is open source, companies offering their own Kubernetes distributions cannot sell it. Why do we at all have all these distributions? The answer is obvious: every vendor wants to guarantee performance.

No wonder that just as for any successful open source project, several distributions can be found in the market (think Linux here), offering various extra features and targeting a specific category of users. One of the reasons why Kubernetes gained popularity so fast is its open source architecture and an incredible number of manuals, articles and support provided by its loyal community.

2017 saw an increase in Kubernetes adoption by enterprise and by 2018, it has become widely adopted across diverse businesses, from software developers to airline companies. Kubernetes was introduced in 2014 as an open source version of the internal Google orchestrator Borg. Kubernetes is currently one of the most successful and fastest growing IT infrastructure projects.

Rancher k8