The battle for container orchestration began in the early 2010s with the rise of containerization technology. Containerization allows developers to package their applications into small, portable, self-contained units that can run on any infrastructure, from a laptop to a data center. However, managing these containers at scale can be challenging, which led to the development of container orchestration tools. The battle for dominance in container orchestration has been primarily between Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and Mesos. Kubernetes, which was originally developed by Google, has emerged as the clear winner due to its robust feature set, large community, and strong ecosystem. Today, Kubernetes is the de facto standard for container orchestration, used by companies of all sizes and industries.
As enterprises seek to modernize their application platforms, they, in turn, are adopting the use of containers and following the Kubernetes framework.