We have many applications that are running on top of Kubernetes.
Sr. DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Useful container orchestration, high availability, and good support
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable feature of Kubernetes is container orchestration."
- "Kubernetes can improve pod escalation."
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of Kubernetes is container orchestration.
What needs improvement?
Kubernetes can improve pod escalation.
In a future release, the dashboards could be more detailed. They are too simple.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Kubernetes for approximately five years.
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December 2025
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Kubernetes is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have approximately 100 people using Kubernetes.
How are customer service and support?
I have used the support from Kubernetes and it was good.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
There is a license to use Kubernetes.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
My company chose Kubernetes because it is the best tool for orchestration containers.
What other advice do I have?
My advice to others that want to use this solution they should first study container concepts and create a POC.
I rate Kubernetes a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Effective automation, highly reliable, but scripting knowledge needed
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable feature of Kubernetes is automation. It is the best tool for automation."
- "The initial setup of Kubernetes is difficult. However, if you are used to the flow then it is easier. The length of time it takes for the implementation depends on the project."
What is our primary use case?
I am using Kubernetes for particular projects.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of Kubernetes is automation. It is the best tool for automation.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Kubernetes for approximately two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability of Kubernetes is very good. It does not go down.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
All of our DevOps engineers are using Kubernetes in my company.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup of Kubernetes is difficult. However, if you are used to the flow then it is easier. The length of time it takes for the implementation depends on the project.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
My company chose Kubernetes because it has automatic deployment.
What other advice do I have?
If it is your first time using Kubernetes then you will have to study how to use it and learn how to do scripts.
I rate Kubernetes a seven out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Buyer's Guide
Kubernetes
December 2025
Learn what your peers think about Kubernetes. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2025.
879,768 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Senior network virtualization & storage specialist at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Integrates well with other solutions, highly scalable, and useful documentation available
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable features of Kubernetes are the integration with Docker and there is plenty of documentation available. We work with Docker as a container, and it is more integrated with Docker than VMware Tanzu."
- "Kubernetes could improve by having better integration with VMware solutions."
What is most valuable?
The most valuable features of Kubernetes are the integration with Docker and there is plenty of documentation available. We work with Docker as a container, and it is more integrated with Docker than VMware Tanzu.
What needs improvement?
Kubernetes could improve by having better integration with VMware solutions.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Kubernetes for approximately three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Kubernetes is stable. They are the leader in their category.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
If the platform for Kubernetes is VMware it is not scalable, but if the platform is Linux, it's scalable.
There are approximately 15 developers and five network administrators using the solution in my organization.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support from Kubernetes is good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have used VMware Tanzu previously and I would like to work with it more because it is better integrated with other VMware solutions, such as vCenter, vSphere, vSAN, and NSX.
How was the initial setup?
I have done the initial setup of Kubernetes many times, for me the setup is easy. If I am focused I can complete the full implementation in one or two days.
What was our ROI?
We have received a return on investment from using Kubernetes.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The price of Kubernetes could be lower. However, it is less expensive than VMware Tanzu. Additionally, technical support is expensive. The overall cost of the solution is approximately $1,000 annually.
What other advice do I have?
Kubernetes is the leader in this category, and are very good. However, if the platform they want to implement is VMware, I would advise using VMware 10.
I rate Kubernetes an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Production Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Helpful support, beneficial integration, and highly reliable
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable feature of Kubernetes is the integration with other solutions, such as Formative and Grafana."
- "Kubernetes could improve security. The security is really hard to deploy with proxies and other elements. Additionally, We have had some issues downloading repos and libraries."
What is our primary use case?
Kubernetes is used to Dockerize and containerized applications.
How has it helped my organization?
Kubernetes has helped our organization by making our time-to-market better and the continuous integration and development are good. We can develop DevOps and FinOps methods.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of Kubernetes is the integration with other solutions, such as Formative and Grafana.
What needs improvement?
Kubernetes could improve security. The security is really hard to deploy with proxies and other elements. Additionally, We have had some issues downloading repos and libraries.
In the next release, Kubernetes should develop a good interface for the administration and make the deployment of the solution easier.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Kubernetes for approximately six months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Kubernetes is highly stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability of Kubernetes is very good.
We have approximately 1,500 people using the solution in my organization. We have IT managers, administrators, and developers use it.
How are customer service and support?
The support we have received has been very helpful.
I rate the support from Kubernetes a five out of five.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We have used other solutions previously, such as One Automation, and Nokia for traffic management.
How was the initial setup?
The deployment of Kubernetes could be better. The initial setup took approximately a week to complete.
I rate the initial setup of Kubernetes a four out of five.
For our implementation strategy, we enabled a cluster in the production environment, dev environment, and pre-production environment and we made two masters and many nodes. However, it depends on the application and the traffic volume.
What about the implementation team?
We use integrators for some of our deployments and for others we use only our team.
We use four of five administrators for the maintenance of the solution.
What was our ROI?
We have seen an ROI because the time it takes to market has been very quick to make a deployment.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Kubernetes is an open-source solution that can be free. We have some distribution with licenses, such OpenShift and Tucows in Amazon. They are billing services.
What other advice do I have?
If you need to take care of proxies and configuration you may find the use of the GitHub repo Cube install helpful. It can help deploy and administrator the Kubernetes platform.
I rate Kubernetes an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Consultant at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Can scale up as per demand and has multiple instances of the application running
Pros and Cons
- "There are features that come out of the box with Kubernetes, with respect to scaling, reliability, etc. It's the leading container management platform. There are other competing ones, but this is the leading one. It has multiple instances of the application running. If one of them goes down, the other one automatically spins up."
- "It would be nice if they could make it easier for developers and infrastructure staff to automate some of the pieces that they have to do manually at the moment."
What is our primary use case?
Kubernetes is a container management platform, and all our microservices are deployed on this platform.
What is most valuable?
There are features that come out of the box with Kubernetes, with respect to scaling, reliability, etc. It's the leading container management platform. There are other competing ones, but this is the leading one.
It has multiple instances of the application running. If one of them goes down, the other one automatically spins up.
What needs improvement?
It would be nice if they could make it easier for developers and infrastructure staff to automate some of the pieces that they have to do manually at the moment.
For how long have I used the solution?
This is a solution I've been using for four or five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's stable. It's managed by the cloud provider.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Depending on the SLAs with respect to scalability, we can scale up and down as per our demand. We could increase the number of nodes instantaneously for our requirements. In our company, we have 5,000 people around the world using Kubernetes.
How was the initial setup?
As for initial setup, If it is on an on-premises environment then it's a little bit tricky, but if it's on public cloud, then they have an offering where you can spin up clusters within minutes. Those are managed by the cloud providers. On cloud platforms, the initial setup is easy, but if you want to spin up your own cluster and manage that, then it could be a lot of work. Spinning up might be easy, but maintaining that cluster could be a lot of work.
What other advice do I have?
Look at your use cases to make sure that Kubernetes is required. It is generally required when there are concerns with scalability or when there is a need for a solution that is highly available and highly scalable. If this is the case, then it makes sense to use Kubernetes.
It could be used as a global tool as well. Some of the nodes would be on-premises and on the cloud or multi-cloud.
However, if you have a simple application which is used by your own company and some internal applications, and is not used by many people, and scalability is not the concern, then you shouldn't go for Kubernetes.
I would rate this solution at eight on a scale from one to ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Solution Architect | Head of BizDev at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Cost-effective and it has great integration has helped unify our technology stack
Pros and Cons
- "This product has a rich toolset from the community including CNI plug-ins, Helm packages, operators, dashboards, various integrations, etc."
- "This product should have a more advanced built-in scheduler that uses real application metrics in the scheduling strategy."
What is our primary use case?
The following is a list of the cases when I prefer Kubernetes for application hosting:
- Micro-services infrastructure + possible use of some service meshes, like Istio or Linkerd.
- Cost efficiency; we are using Kubernetes in conjunction with AWS Spot Instances or Google Cloud preemptible VMs.
- Standards-compliant infrastructures like HIPAA, PCI SOC, DSS, and ISOxxxx.
- Highly-available or fault-tolerant infrastructures, due to some sort of self-recovery and self-healing.
- Infrastructures with automatically scalable applications.
How has it helped my organization?
It's unified our technology stack across on-premises infrastructures and public clouds, including Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Kubernetes provides great integrations with other open-source tools, like Prometheus, Grafana, Elastic Stack, Fluentd, OAuth providers, and others.
Kubernetes distributions are also great because we adopt the platforms for different requirements. These include the AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service, Google Kubernetes Engine, Azure Kubernetes Engine, Rancher, etc.
It allows us to build custom-tailored infrastructures from small to big companies and satisfy various requirements, such as providing a proper level of RPO, RTO, scalability, cost-efficiency, and support high availability/fault tolerance.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable features of Kubernetes are:
- Containers self-healing and self-recovery.
- Unifications allow for internal Kubernetes components to be migrated between Kubernetes providers in an easier manner.
- Kubernetes as a service from the major cloud providers including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Digital Ocean, IBM, etc. Kubernetes as a service helps in infrastructure migration from on-premises to cloud, or from cloud to cloud.
- This product has a rich toolset from the community including CNI plug-ins, Helm packages, operators, dashboards, various integrations, etc.
- Built-in scaling features, it's really great!
What needs improvement?
Some improvements that we would like to see are:
- Have reacher built-in features and probably incorporate some features from the community toolset, like KEDA for pod scaling.
- There are even more tools from the community for monitoring, log collectors, authorization, and authentication.
- Have some sort of simplifications for wider adoption.
- This product should have a more advanced built-in scheduler that uses real application metrics in the scheduling strategy.
- Wider integration with cloud providers in terms of volumes and key management services.
- Add support of traffic encryption option from container to container, and Ingress to the container.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using Kubernetes as a self-hosted service, managed by external solutions, like Rancher, or a cloud-provider managed service (Azure AKS, Google GKE, Amazon EKS) for between three and four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
This product is pretty stable, especially in the managed service option, but as with all platforms, it has some issues. As an example, during an update Kubernetes version on Amazon EKS from 1.17 to 1.18 Amazon duplicates workers count from 4 to 12 (should be from 4 to 8), upgrades takes more than 1 hour (should be about 10-20 minutes) and suddenly this leads to the short-time interruption of some applications during re-scheduling. In the end, we were forced to write our own rolling update scripts for updating the Kubernetes version on the nodes instances, which completes the upgrade in 10 minutes without application downtime. But again, this is an issue related to managed Kubernetes (in particular, Amazon EKS platform).
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Great scalability, especially for the small and mid-size setup with fewer than 100 nodes.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We have used various platforms for managing Docker containers, such as Rancher, Azure App Service, and Portainer.
How was the initial setup?
The first adoption was hard because the Kubernete's learning curve is pretty high.
What about the implementation team?
The in-house team only.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It's open-source and free, so pricing should not be applied here.
Google Kubernetes Engine is free in the simplest setup, AWS Kubernetes Engine costs about $50 (depending on the region), in a three master setup, so it's almost the same as the cost of the EC2 instances and it's totally fine from my point of view.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We prefer Kubernetes due to the unification and the next level of the platform itself.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Senior Manager -Datacenter Planning and Operations at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Scalable and stable solution
Pros and Cons
- "If you don't have resources, you can certainly add another worker node and expand the cluster."
- "Setup was not straightforward."
What is our primary use case?
My primary use case of this solution is for infrastructure implementations - we allocate an EC2 instance and then define how many worker nodes are needed to run the application and the managed nodes.
What needs improvement?
More automation could improve the product - specifically, it would be useful to be able to shut down any IT machines that are currently not in use.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Kubernetes for around a year and a half.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I think this solution is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I think Kubernetes is scalable in a vertical manner, depending on the type of instances in the worker mode. If you don't have resources, you can certainly add another worker node and expand the cluster.
How are customer service and support?
With the latest edition of Kubernetes, there is a concern in terms of infrastructure regarding AWS support. There is no specific contact point for issues with Kubernetes, so we have to rely on the internet and blogs in order to work out what has gone wrong.
How was the initial setup?
The setup was not straightforward. There were certain challenges in setting up the product requiring a lot of time on proper configuration and compiling. The first time we deployed took a lot of time but now we can do it in around a week.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
You don't need a license for Kubernetes, but you do have to pay for usage.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Kubernetes as ten out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Cloud Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Runs in multiple availability zones, reliable, and scalable
Pros and Cons
- "The performance is good."
- "The configuration is a bit complicated."
What is our primary use case?
Kubernetes is a container-based platform that is used for microservices-based applications.
You can containerize and deploy your ports, as well as expose them over the internet, to get your applications running.
What is most valuable?
The performance is good.
The services it provides you are good.
It runs in multiple availability zones.
What needs improvement?
The configuration is a bit complicated.
Because the platform provided is so simple, additional configuration is required to get your apps up and running.
There are some issues with the upgrades. When updates are released, the older versions are decommissioned.
The updates are quite frequent and are lengthy. It takes about an hour each time.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Kubernetes for approximately two years.
It's cloud-agnostic Kubernetes, we have it available in Azure, AWS, and GCP.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
In the two years that I have been using Kubernetes, I have not experienced any issues with the stability of this solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Our main e-commerce application is running in Kubernetes. Currently, we have three applications running, and we are trying to onboard different applications.
How was the initial setup?
You need to have knowledge of Kubernetes to manage the cluster and to complete the deployment.
It can take 20 to 30 minutes to configure the Kubernetes cluster.
Once the setup is complete you can have your dependencies running in Kubernetes.
You need a core technical person, who is a DevOps engineer who has experience working on Kubernetes to deploy and maintain this solution.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated ECS, which is a service offered by Amazon.
It's an orchestration tool, but it has certain limitations.
What other advice do I have?
I would highly recommend this solution to anyone who is considering using it.
I would rate Kubernetes a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
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