The End of Kubernetes as We Know It: A New Era of Multi‑Tenant Control Planes
Kubernetes is evolving. For nearly a decade, it has been the default choice to deploy and manage containers at scale – the go-to platform for container orchestration. However, Kubernetes today is no longer just a container orchestrator; it has grown into a foundational technology for modern infrastructure. While some people still try to create unified cloud standards or agree on some shared communication protocols[^10], they ignore the fact we already have this standard. Not by explicit choice, but by its success and adoption. Industry experts foresee Kubernetes becoming the common control plane spanning clouds, datacenters, and the edge[^1]. This means Kubernetes provides a consistent way to manage containers and all kinds of workloads and resources across diverse environments, becoming de-facto the most widely adopted standard to manage services and resources.
This transformation didn't happen overnight. The Kubernetes API and its resource model - often called the Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM) - have become an industry standard for declarative infrastructure management. Many open-source projects now extend Kubernetes well beyond running containers. For example, Crossplane, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project, builds on Kubernetes to orchestrate "anything… not just containers"[^2], leveraging Kubernetes' reliability and integration capabilities with other tools. Likewise, projects for certificates (cert-manager), secrets management, databases, and more are leveraging Kubernetes as a universal automation engine. The message is clear: Kubernetes has grown into a powerful general-purpose platform API for infrastructure.
So what's the catch? As organizations embrace Kubernetes for more use cases, new challenges have surfaced with how we traditionally run Kubernetes.