When containerization technology first burst onto the IT scene, most of the discussion centered about Docker. While Docker's open source technology is still a very important part of the container ecosystem, these days Kubernetes is getting a lot more attention.

Organizations use Kubernetes, an open source container orchestration, platform, to automate the management of containerized applications. It's particularly popular with organizations that are utilizing DevOps approaches. A 451 Research survey of enterprises using containers found that 71% of respondents were using Kubernetes.

In its 2018 cloud predictions, Forrester Research proclaimed that Kubernetes "has won the war for container orchestration dominance." Andrey Clay Shafer, senior director of technology at Pivotal, said Kubernetes is "on track to be the ubiquitous invisible standard."

To learn more about Kubernetes' popularity and why infrastructure professionals should care about this new technology, Network Computing interviewed Brian Gracely, Red Hat's director of product strategy for the company's  OpenShift container management platform. Gracely is a well-known cloud expert and co-host of the award-winning podcast, The Cloudcast. At Interop ITX 2018, Gracely will present, "Understanding Kubernetes."

Gracely offered four reasons why infrastructure pros should learn more about Kubernetes.

1. It's become the industry standard for deploying containers in production

Gracely pointed out that containerization technology has been around for about four years, and at first, several different open source projects were competing to become standards. "We've now reach the point that the industry has generally standardized on Kubernetes," he said. "What that usually means when we reach consensus among all the different vendors and projects and so forth is that the technology is stable, that it can be used in a lot of different ways, and that people can feel comfortable when they are making technology investments and architectural decisions."

[Read more of Brian Gracely's thoughts about Kubernetes on Network Computing.]