[bkanber]

How many people actually need it? Nobody! We managed to run servers for years without containers or orchestration tools. Docker is a new technology.

Does it make things better, though? Yes. Yes it does.

Kubernetes was designed at Google where they reaaaaally feel their scale problems day to day.

I see Docker/Kube/CoreOS/ etc as the natural evolution of where we were already going. Bash -> puppet -> vagrant -> docker -> kubernetes. Less abstract to more abstract.

So it's actually "only" an incremental evolution in terms of managing the server ecosystem. But it's a revolutionary improvement in how we think about server ecosystems, which is why many people struggle with Docker et al at first; it's a brand new mental model.

[ecnahc515]

I'd like to add that this isn't necessarily even about huge scale. It's about scaling deployment patterns too, which is different than scaling services.

Sometimes you need to have the ability to run more services when your "web-scale", but even if you're not at that point, scaling how you deploy new versions, and new services is still important.

Tools like docker, and Kubernetes really help with the application delivery aspect, and really enable you to rapidly iterate on your project.

You might have a site with 100-1000 users, not huge by any means, and 1 server could probably handle all of your needs. But once you start adding other components, perhaps redis, or a runtime like nodejs, those can all be managed, but if you need to rapidly iterate, something like Kubernetes/docker can make updating or deploying these easier in the long run.