[yllus]

To draw anecdotally from my own experiences, its for two reasons:

1. It's simple to get started with, but complex enough to tweak to your needs in respect to simplicity of deployment, scaling and resource definition.

2. It's appealingly cloud-agnostic just at the time where multiple cloud providers are all becoming viable and competitive.

I think it's more #2 and #1; as always, timing is everything.

[zmmmmm]

Yeah, I think people are overthinking it. The real reason is that if you do a superficial investigation you will quickly come back with the impression that k8s is near universally supported across cloud vendors and gives an appearance of providing a portable solution where otherwise the only alternative would be vendor lock-in. It makes it a no-brainer for anybody starting out with a new cloud deployment.