  Context: Kubernetes is an open source software that helps in automated
deployment of software and orchestration of containers. With Kubernetes, IT
organizations, such as IBM, Pinterest, and Spotify have experienced an increase
in release frequency. Objective: The goal of this paper is to inform
practitioners and researchers on benefits and challenges of Kubernetes usage by
conducting a multi-vocal literature review of Kubernetes. Methodology: We
conduct a multi-vocal literature review (MLR) where we use 321
Kubernetes-related Internet artifacts to identify benefits and challenges
perceived by practitioners. In our MLR, we also analyze 105 peer-reviewed
publications to identify the research topics addressed by the research
community. Findings: We find 8 benefits that include service level objective
(SLO)-based scalability and self-healing containers. Our identified 15
challenges related to Kubernetes include unavailability of diagnostics and
security tools and attack surface reduction. We observe researchers to address
14 research topics related to Kubernetes, which includes efficient resource
utilization. We also identify 9 challenges that are under-explored in research
publications, which include cultural change, hardware compatibility, learning
curve, maintenance, and testing.
