My true personal opinion based on what customers asks and what co-worker uses:
- docker , docker-compose is still the dev winner
- Podman is rising but it has no extra feature, because docker support the rootless mode too.
- Ignite – Use Firecracker VMs with Docker images (github.com/weaveworks)
Super-fast VM based on container are gaining traction. Driving force are cloud providers, but this idea can eventually be helpful for some service providers.
- K8s + Helm keep going
K8s is “the” abstraction layer for Cloud providers, to some extent.
K8s offers tons of extension points, for automation tools and for cloud providers.
The only downside is its heavy lifting: for very simple deploy (less than 3 physicals nodes) it is still an overkill in pricing and management overhead. Also it needs at least a speedy 2-Core CPU to work.
Cost rising due to inflation can have a negative impact on “Fat”-K8s solution. - Jenkins pipeline sucks
It is sad to say, but GitHub actions & similia (like GitLab pipelines, Bitbucket pipelines and Cloud provider similar services like AWS CodePipeline) are a winner.
Jenkins declarative pipeline are elegant, but its declarative language depends on Jenkins plugins, so you must keep track of them.
Also, it is frequent to build groovy library on top of it
And when you need to upgrade Jenkins from time to time, you face a lot of refactoring on pipeline syntax, and it is increasing difficult to estimate.