Every enterprise should use Kubernetes - here's why

Kubernetes is ground-breaking technology that will drive enterprise innovation now and in years to come

Kubernetes is less than five years old, yet it's already become the de facto container management system worldwide. Forrester's cloud predictions for 2018 even declared Kubernetes to be the victor in the "war for container orchestration dominance". And in the last year or so, its popularity has only continued to grow. CIOs across every sector now consider it to be the gold standard for container management - particularly when it comes to supporting DevOps within their business.

This popularity is no surprise given the benefits of the technology. Kubernetes groups application containers into logical "packages" for simple, fast management and discovery. It also automates the deployment and scaling of containerised applications. As it is not quite a true platform in itself, Kubernetes can be combined with additional elements to provide the ease of use of PaaS for developers, with the adaptability of IaaS to make it easier to move workloads across infrastructure providers.

Containers are an increasingly important aspect of modern enterprise IT. Yet those businesses implementing container technology but not Kubernetes are missing out on key benefits - and should consider the following three key reasons to embrace the industry standard.

Community collaboration

Originally developed by Google, Kubernetes was launched as an open source project back in 2014. Google's heritage of employing top talent and its two decades of experience providing software services at massive scale, lent initial credibility to the solution.

Once Kubernetes became open source, its quickly growing community and wealth of support enabled it to quickly surpass its competitors. Now it is one of the largest open source communities and has thousands of contributors on GitHub. Hosted and supported by both The Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Kubernetes benefits from best practices developed over time by both individual contributors and members such as SAP, AWS, Google, Microsoft, SUSE and many others. Additionally, Kubernetes' home at the large, neutral, open source CNCF also helps to ensure that it will continue to avoid vendor lock-in issues in future.

Kubernetes was quick to gain recognition and popularity in the industry, leading to enterprise vendor interest and development around the system. In fact, many technology providers have now made Kubernetes capabilities central to their roadmaps to the future. Those businesses using the technology are tapping directly into the innovation resulting from this ever-increasing, collaborative community.

Flexibility - any cloud deployment, any application

The majority of organisations today deploy a combination of cloud and on-premises data centres. To succeed in this hybrid environment, IT needs the ability to easily and securely run and move workloads as well as share data between the various environments.

Kubernetes is ideal for this hybrid environment as its flexibility means it can be implemented across cloud and on-premises, or even run as a service. The system does not rely on one particular infrastructure, allowing DevOps teams to build applications and then use Kubernetes to deploy them just as easily in the organisation's data centre as in the public cloud.

In fact, Kubernetes can handle practically any application, from the latest cloud-native microservices to a legacy application which has been migrated into containers. To summarise, if an application works in containers, it will work smoothly on Kubernetes. The technology is designed to support a wide range of workloads and also works well with the latest development technology, such as serverless architecture.

Boosting DevOps innovation

In today's fast-paced, digital-first world, responding quickly to internal and external changes without losing vision is absolutely key for all companies who want to survive, thrive and ultimately surpass the competition. Achieving business agility requires more than software and IT, yet applications are necessary to all companies' success. The DevOps method is now revolutionising application development and helping organisations to achieve business agility - in part because of the flexibility of containers.

Kubernetes simplifies DevOps innovation - supporting businesses as they look for ways to achieve new levels of agility. Developers can now package their applications into containers and feel confident that the apps will work just as well in production environments as they did on their development laptop. Kubernetes enhances application development and innovation by removing the need for developers to spend time scripting specific deployment, scaling and updating workflows. Instead, it handles those tasks automatically, especially when coupled with application platform technologies such as Cloud Foundry.

Kubernetes is key to agile scaling today. As an example, consider online multiplayer game Pokémon Go. Before its launch in 2016, developers expected moderate interest in the game and were taken by surprise when it drew in fifty times the expected traffic. Luckily, Kubernetes served as the infrastructure on top of Google Cloud, and it allowed for the game platform to be quickly scaled up to keep pace with the skyrocketing demand.

Kubernetes is a critical component of application development and delivery solutions today. This ground-breaking technology will drive enterprise innovation now and in years to come. Businesses interested in dramatically accelerating application delivery with containerised and cloud-native workloads should embrace Kubernetes now to start reaping the rewards sooner rather than later.

Thomas D. Giacomo is president of engineering, product and innovation at SUSE.