UX Is Kubernetes’ Biggest Short-Term Challenge

User experience (UX) is where the Kubernetes community needs to focus according to over 100 people polled by The New Stack ahead of its coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Overall, 19% said that administrator and operator experience is the top area that the core Kubernetes project needs to address in the next year, with another 17% citing developer experience. No wonder Kubernetes-related marketing is so often about making the DevOps role easier.
Kubernetes has gained wide adoption despite complaints about the complexity of setting up and then running it. Despite a huge influx of companies providing Kubernetes services and products, Chef co-founder Adam Jacob believes it is “hot garbage, from a user experience perspective.” He posits that after the Mirantis acquisition of Docker Enterprise, the remnants of the Docker company should “regroup and return to delivering the best developer UX on top of containers.”
Other challenges are of a more technical nature. Thirteen percent feel multitenancy issues need to be resolved. Another 10% feel that storage needs to be improved, although this finding may be influenced by the fact that we recently published an ebook about storage titled “New Approaches to Cloud Native Storage for Developers.”
Kubernetes veterans continue to be concerned with making cluster management easier. At the same time, more developers are utilizing these clusters in Kubernetes to orchestrate workloads. In the long-run, developer workflow improvements may be needed to get a new wave of container adoption.
Feature image via Pixabay.