As we considered our 2023 development plans, we wanted to formalize our gut instincts on the state of Kubernetes deployments into numbers backed by research. There are a lot of questions in our head, and the biggest of them all is, ‘How many Kubernetes clusters exist today, and how many are in public clouds versus on-premises?’

One challenge of open source is that you will never know the exact numbers, and estimations are, unfortunately, more an art than a science. Even the Docker Hub pull counts for some open source technology and containers are unreliable indicators because of the ephemeral nature of the Kubernetes ecosystem; clusters and applications are cremated and redeployed all the time. For example, the most popular Kubernetes backup solution, Velero, has over 50M+ Docker pulls. Between various versions and deployments, it is incredibly hard to estimate how many clusters constitute all that activity. Despite that, we strongly believe Docker Hub could become the source of the best free market research and buying intent data in the open source community today.