Kubernetes is popular. If you’re in my business, you know that it’s widely considered to be how enterprises run and will their applications. So, it must be a huge market right? Lots of money flowing around.

Well…not really! Let’s look at some numbers:

1. "The container management market has seen accelerated growth of 28.6% over the past year with a market value of $1.6 billion in 2022. The market is forecast to exceed $3.6 billion in constant currency by 2027, with an 18% CAGR." // Includes both private and public cloud. (2023 Gartner Container Management MQ)

2. $1.46bn in 2023, growing to $2.85bn in 2028. (451 Research)

3. $5.56bn in 2027. (IDC)

What this means is that there “isn’t any money” in the Kubernetes market. Imagine having to share that pie with the three public cloud vendors, IBM/RedHat, VMware (hi!), SUSE/Rancher, and all the others. Those are small pie-slices.

Or, those forecasts could be weird! With TAMs, knowing the market-definition is incredibly important. The Gartner one has a pretty good overview of the market definition.

But, the size of the market just tells you that there’s not a business in it. Which, I think, is the point. Google didn’t want there to be a business, they wanted AWS to have less of a business and less of a hold on public cloud: shake the snow globe. It worked! And, people are really into Kubernetes, so it’s like win/win for vendors and users. Kubernetes is probably the current, best example of using open source to commoditize complements - as a strategy to mess with your competitors’(s) competitive advantages and change the market to your favor.

There is probably tons of money in all of the stuff built around Kubernetes. After all, the core is pretty small and designed (I think?) to need all that extra stuff. When people talk about Kubernetes, they’re usually talking about building a platform - a “cloud” even! - around a core, but small engine for running apps in containers.

Which is to say, assessing Kubernetes based on its market size (how much people are buying) is the wrong question. First, it’s better to track how much it’s used, how many apps/workloads are running in Kubernetes. Second, the money number you want to track is the spend on that bigger platform.

What’s different about that number than, say, in the 2000s or even 2010’s is that public cloud vendors are part of that TAM. This makes things weird to track. In the old days, you would track license sales for platforms. But now, what you pay for a platform includes actually running that platform: servers, networking, storage. You can slice out just what you pay for any layer…but that feels weird to me.

(And, to apply some Adam-kindness Wisdom: don’t get distracted by money talk, look at all they’ve done to change and improve things, that community is doing a great job.)

Platforms

Speaking of platforms, here’s a sort of virtual EBC about my work. If you care about the above, here’s our take at Tanzu:

Relative to your interests

• IBM Is Buying HashiCorp. What Comes Next? - Good analysis of the possible business strategy, the synergies to activate. // “Customers in specific industries, often highly regulated and conservative in outlook, have often chosen IBM and continue to do so. For them, the value of cloud is complementary at the margins, not a wholesale change to the core. They are pragmatic, serious guardians of the established order, not revolutionaries hell-bent on destroying and replacing the Ancien Régime.”

• OK Cloud, On-Prem is Alright - A case for private cloud, or, if you prefer the “a nicely automated VM or container environment” view: on-premises. I’d summarize it to: there isn’t enough ROI to motivate everyone to change, even spend the time to decide to change.

Wastebook

• “He is surely the friendliest little goblin you have ever met.” Caught In A Wizard’s Web.

• “exploring the latent space of visual styles” Midjourney release notes.

• “I used to get frustrated by people who I saw as uncurious.” Lauren Pope

• “Well, I had all kinds of plans for this morning, and then one of the chickens died in their sleep” 26apr24

• “Sorry, I was ranting and I forgot what the original question was.” A. Savage.

Have you had a chance to check out my series of videos full of my advice for working in a large company? WHAT?! If you have access to O’Reilly’s stuff, you can watch these. If you work at a large company, there’s a good chance you have access. Anyhow, check them out. There’s four four star reviews, including these accolades:

That’s right. Watch em!

🪵 Logoff

I’m supposed to be on vacation, so I hot-wired this one to send out automatically in the future. Well, what is now my future, but is - I mean - to you, in your now…ahem…what is now your now! And, then, actually, I unscheduled it so I could write more on Monday. Which future am I in now?