- Kubernetes is a fast-growing cloud project started at Google and becoming an increasingly big focus for many tech giants.
- According to a report from the job search site Indeed, Kubernetes jobs have exploded in the past five years.
- These are the top five companies that are hiring the most for Kubernetes roles, including IBM and Microsoft.
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A popular cloud project started at Google is continuing to shake up the IT market, and now more companies are looking for developers who know how to work with it.
This project, called Kubernetes, uses a type of technology called containers, which makes it easy to move around applications and run them anywhere they want, whether on a laptop, on the cloud, or in a private data center.
It was first released in 2014, and since then, it's become especially widespread because it's open source, meaning it's free for anyone to use, download, or modify. And from Google itself to other companies of all sizes like Spotify, Lyft, and "Pokémon Go" developer Niantic, it's become crucial for many companies to run their large-scale applications. It was also a driving force behind IBM's $34 billion purchase of Red Hat last year.
Because so many companies are now using Kubernetes, expertise in the technology has quickly become one of the fastest growing tech skills. According to a report from the job search site Indeed, Kubernetes jobs per million grew by 2,141% between October 2015 and October 2019. From October 2018 to October 2019 alone, Kubernetes jobs per million rose 53.33%.
"The increasing demand for these skills is a reflection that employers are finding that containerization and related abilities are really helpful for maintaining development of these products," Indeed's North America head of research Nick Bunker told Business Insider.
The top five Kubernetes-related roles companies are looking for are DevOps engineers, software engineers, software architects, cloud engineers, and full stack developers. Kubernetes has especially become crucial to DevOps, a software engineering philosophy that combines development and operations, because it can help programmers with rolling out new features and keeping applications running smoothly without downtime.
"Kubernetes is interesting and it's a sign of bigger broader skills that are increasingly in demand," Bunker said.
Below are the top five companies that are hiring the most for Kubernetes roles.