The popularity is great, but Kubernetes also happens to have an awesome technology too. Where it intersects with the community is that the technical direction actually listens to real-world use-cases that members of the community brings up. Combined with the amount of activity, Kubernetes is evolving fast.

For example, the PetSet feature of Kubernetes 1.3 involved a really long discussion with people trying to work out how and why to use it.

I remember back in the Kubernetes 1.1 days when I was trying to get AWS ELBs to talk with Kubernetes and possibly finding drivers to automatically set up proxy points. In my search, I found the Github issues where people were discussing that very thing. The person who wanted AWS integration was there talking about the specific needs and quirks of the AWS ecosystem. There were a series of patches made to beef it up, and the discussion on Github documented how the feature was conceptualized (so as to be part of a more general solution on port management).

In contrast, I don't see that with Docker. I can't say anything about Mesos, as I've never tried using it.

I agree, that's exactly the proof of a strong community.

Community goes a long way but has to co-exist with strong technology and being open to change.

To me it started with a POC with the feeling "Hey, this thing is interesting lets try it out". The ease of use and the stability of it impressed me so much that I moved everything on top of kube. I know of at least one more company that did the exact same thing and now all their production infra is running on top of Kube.

> I moved everything on top of kube

Could you define the "everything" please.

What applications are you running? How many of them? How much resources do they use?

I don't think popularity was the #1 criteria, but can be a tie-breaker when you have 2 quality solutions to choose from a technical perspective.