The value proposition of managed Kubernetes now extends far beyond its original container-centric roots. While it continues to excel at traditional use cases like microservices and web applications, the platform has expanded to address broader computing needs, including virtualization and serverless functions. This evolution makes it an increasingly versatile solution for modern infrastructure management, appealing to organizations of all sizes and technical capabilities.

The market for managed Kubernetes is experiencing rapid growth, driven by increasing adoption rates and the growing complexity of cloud-native applications. As the technology matures, vendors are enhancing their offerings with advanced features such as hybrid cloud capabilities, automated monitoring, and improved security measures. Customer requirements are shifting toward comprehensive, integrated solutions that offer seamless multicloud support, DevOps tool integration, and self-service capabilities.

This year’s report expands in scope, offering a more comprehensive analysis of the managed Kubernetes market. We’ve concentrated our evaluation on vendors providing service-backed products, which combine bespoke Kubernetes solutions with managed service components. Our assessment covers a wide range of providers operating across diverse shared responsibility models, giving readers a broader perspective on the available options in the market.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) establishment of Kubernetes interoperability standards has played a crucial role in market development. These standards have prevented the fragmentation seen in earlier technologies, such as the virtualization stacks of the early private cloud era, ensuring core functionality remains consistent across vendors while allowing differentiation through value-added features. This standardization has created a robust ecosystem where vendors compete on innovation and service quality rather than proprietary implementations.

The CNCF-certified Kubernetes implementation—referered to widely as “pure play upstream Kubernetes”–-provides this assurance. Forked versions of the Kubernetes core code—known as opinionated Kubernetes—can offer augmented functionality at the expense of compatibility.

As the market continues to evolve, managed Kubernetes providers are focusing on enhancing their capabilities to meet diverse organizational needs across industries. The emphasis is on delivering comprehensive solutions that include advanced tooling, prepackaged workflow, and hybrid cloud support while maintaining the simplicity and efficiency that made managed Kubernetes attractive in the first place.

This is our fifth year evaluating the managed Kubernetes space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 19 of the top managed Kubernetes solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading managed Kubernetes offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

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At first, cloud providers focused on block and object storage, leaving file services out of their initial offerings. Block and object storage work well for many use cases, and newer applications can be designed to make file storage unnecessary. However, the reality is that in many circumstances, file storage is preferable for the following reasons:

• Simplicity: File storage is the most user-friendly storage, making it a go-to for developers who want to build more portable applications and simplify the sharing of machine- and human-generated data.
• Lift and shift: As more enterprises transition to the public cloud for their primary IT infrastructure, “lift-and-shift” migrations are now commonplace. In this scenario, users want to replicate the same services they had in their on-premises data center, including POSIX-compliant file systems, data services, and all the other enterprise features they are accustomed to.
• Performance: Though object storage performance has improved by leaps and bounds, file systems still provide the best combination of performance, usability, and scalability for many workloads. They’re still the primary interface for most big data, AI/ML, and high-performance computing (HPC) applications, and they usually offer data services such as snapshots to improve data management operations.
• Collaboration: With hybrid cloud infrastructures and distributed organizations spanning the world, the ability to seamlessly access data from everywhere facilitates teamwork while keeping data under control.

In recent years, file systems have evolved from being cloud-friendly to cloud-native, offering better integration with elastic infrastructure elements across public and private cloud providers. This feature brought several advantages to end users:

• Better scalability: File systems specifically designed to work with multiprotocol elastic storage elements provide a good balance between performance and cost.
• Cost tuning: Policy-driven tiering mechanisms allow cold data to be moved to low-cost storage, saving precious resources in the high-performance tier.
• Dynamic data placement: Many modern file systems can replicate data to remote file or object stores, in the cloud or on-premises. This makes it possible to synchronize and serve datasets across different infrastructures to optimize compute proximity, which lowers latency.
• Disaster recovery: Syncing data to a remote object store enables users to leverage a lower cost storage repository and repopulate a file system when necessary.

Business Imperative
These capabilities are particularly important as vendors optimize their file systems to take advantage of newer classes of flash memory, distributed computing, and networking technologies. This enables users to design, build, and scale highly optimized IO/$/GB ratios across disparate infrastructure providers and hardware paradigms. Furthermore, as more users embrace hybrid and multicloud strategies, his storage infrastructure fits very well in this context.

That trend highlights why cloud-native file systems are becoming increasingly successful, especially as they mature and bridge the gap between on-premises and public cloud storage service providers while delivering a globally consistent experience.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of deploying a cloud-native globally distributed file system, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of a cloud-native globally distributed file system, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) of 4.2 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that a cloud-native globally distributed file system is a compelling candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for cloud-native globally distributed file systems are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.