Unfortunately people are looking for simplicity and this is going in the opposite direction. A kubernetes cluster is just offloading a large part to yet another component you have to run. Spinnaker is another completely separate system.
This is the opposite of what teams want. Drone, Gitlab, Teamcity as mentioned in these comments is a far better approach for 99% of companies who want a solid working solution.
Soon, "running on Kubernetes" will be like "running on Linux", i.e., it won't add any operational complexity because you anyway have a Kubernetes cluster running.
So maybe you are not there yet, but for a future-oriented CI/CD platform with self-hosting option, using Kubernetes as basis is a good approach.
On kubernetes - imagine if that was already managed for you, all the powerful things that can be done on top vs your self (preview apps, owasp vulnerability testing, progressive delivery - all without writing a pipeline - this is stuff that can be done.
I note gitlab is mentioned a lot here: they noted this power as well (see auto devops) and have started building things on top of kubernetes too.
Agree Kube is not for everyone, no question, I was just trying to clarify what was in the article. (if you are offloading complexity - I would hope it is to a GKE or EKS or AKS or similar, in which case it is very much offloaded...)
I didn't mean to imply that you mix all those things together from the CDF - was just mentioning some interesting projects (some are unrelated) in the mix.
Agree also on simplicity - myself I don't like to run anything, so CodeShip is what we have for that (but it sounds like you are referring to self hosting only solutions?)
This is the opposite of what teams want. Drone, Gitlab, Teamcity as mentioned in these comments is a far better approach for 99% of companies who want a solid working solution.