Why Use Kubernetes?

These days, it’s pretty clear that Kubernetes has won the battle of the orchestrators. 93% of enterprises are using Kubernetes in production, are piloting it, or are actively evaluating it, and 91% of organisations use containers for production workloads.

The main reasons that we see customers choosing Kubernetes over alternatives are:

  1. Portability - Kubernetes is cross platform and largely infrastructure agnostic, so you can run your workloads almost anywhere - public cloud, private cloud, on-premises datacenters, or using a hybrid architecture of two or more of these. These provides customers flexibility in choosing the hosting platform that suits their applications’ needs best, and also helps assuage cloud vendor lock-in concerns.

  2. Extensibility - the Kubernetes project is supported by a huge active community and many hundreds of projects that can extend the build-in capabilities of Kubernetes.

  3. Reliability - out of the box, Kubernetes will take care of healing your application if components fail, such as replacing a container that has run out of memory, or replacing a node running your containers that has crashed or needs updating. This provides a great starting point for customers that want their applications to be highly available and highly reliable, and Kubernetes has many more features (such as affinity and anti-affinity rules) which allow customers to tune how pods are placed in the cluster to improve this further.

The Alternatives To Kubernetes

While Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration, it’s not the only option — especially for teams looking for simpler operational models, tighter integration with platform services, or different levels of abstraction. Azure offers several alternatives that cater to varying levels of complexity, control and developer experience.

  1. Azure Container Apps (ACA) is a fully managed serverless container platform designed for microservices and event-driven architectures. It abstracts away the underlying Kubernetes infrastructure, allowing developers to focus on deploying containers without managing nodes, scaling rules or ingress controllers. ACA supports features like Dapr for building distributed applications, KEDA for event-driven autoscaling, and built-in revisions for blue-green deployments. It’s ideal for teams that want the flexibility of containers without the operational overhead of Kubernetes.

  2. App Service for Containers supports deploying containerised applications using Docker images. It’s a PaaS offering that simplifies deployment, scaling and monitoring, and is particularly well-suited for web apps and APIs. While it doesn’t offer orchestration features like Kubernetes, it provides a fast path to production for container workloads that don’t require complex service meshes or custom networking.

  3. Azure Functions with Custom Containers allows you to run event-driven code in a serverless model. For teams that want more control over the runtime environment, Functions supports deploying custom containers. This is a good fit for lightweight workloads that respond to events from services like Azure Event Grid, Service Bus or HTTP triggers, and where orchestration is not required.

  4. Azure Batch is designed for large-scale parallel and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. It supports containerised tasks and can be a strong alternative to Kubernetes for compute-intensive batch jobs that don’t require long-running services or complex orchestration.

  5. Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) is a fully managed OpenShift service jointly engineered, operated and supported by Microsoft and Red Hat. It provides a Kubernetes-based platform with additional enterprise-grade features, including integrated CI/CD tooling, developer self-service, and enhanced security policies. Unlike Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), which offers a more flexible and modular Kubernetes experience, ARO delivers a more prescriptive platform that includes the OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS. This makes it particularly attractive to organisations that already use Red Hat technologies or want a more curated developer experience.

When to Choose an Alternative

Choosing an alternative to Kubernetes depends on your workload characteristics, team expertise and operational preferences. If your team wants to avoid managing infrastructure and focus on application logic, Azure Container Apps or App Service may be more appropriate. For event-driven or short-lived workloads, Azure Functions with containers offers a lightweight and cost-effective model. And for batch processing, Azure Batch provides a scalable and efficient alternative.