Docker was always about making it easy for developers to build isolated applications. Kubernetes was about making it easy for cloud providers to support deployi

Docker was always about making it easy for developers to build isolated applications. Kubernetes was about making it easy for cloud providers to support deploying these isolated applications in their systems. A lot of organizations tried to support docker swarm (or their own versions of an "ocean" of containers) but it was just too difficult, the products failed and/or were unreliable and docker didn't provide a toolkit to do this better. When they tried kubernetes, it worked (probably because kubernetes creators had experience from running an actual production system before viz. Borg). So then cloud providers coalesced around the platform. People who learned the concepts found it easy to use and loved it and it fueled the adoption. I still believe that despite all the hate that k8s gets on HN, its popular because it works and its users love it. There is very loud subset of users who makes their displeasure known very well but we have to look at concrete data on usage and the data points to k8s being a very popular platform for USERS.