This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria.

Kubernetes is the de facto standard for container orchestration, and it’s being used by born-in-the-cloud startups and cloud-native enterprises alike. In 2021, Kubernetes was in production on-premises, in the cloud, and even at the edge for many different types of applications, including those that Kubernetes wasn’t initially built for.

Kubernetes was never really built for stateful applications, and by default, it lacks features for data protection. However, we see many organizations building and running their stateful applications on top of Kubernetes, indicating there’s a gap in functionality between what Kubernetes offers and what the (enterprise) market wants.

Unfortunately, existing data protection tools, mostly built for legacy technologies such as virtual machines, do not fit well into the container paradigm. Vendors are adapting existing solutions or creating new products from scratch that are often better aligned with the cloud-native and container paradigms.