Kubernetes — The Fast and Furious?

This article outlines some of the features of Kubernetes and talks about how the development of cloud-native apps is beneficial in the long run.

Alexis Richardson recently spoke at the two-day event Container Stack in Zurich and described the role of the CNCF and what it means to be cloud-native. After a brief introduction on the CNCF and its role, Alexis then explained the type of projects and how they get accepted to the foundation before diving into how enterprises can benefit by adopting cloud-native technology.

CNCF — A Brief History

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) was created three years ago as the home of Kubernetes. Kubernetes builds upon 15 years of experience of running production workloads at Google combined with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.

The CNCF is a vendor-neutral foundation that has contributions from Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco as well as more than 300 other companies. The main mission of the CNCF is to build sustainable ecosystems and community around high-quality projects that help manage and scale containerized applications all orchestrated by Kubernetes.

Benefits for Enterprises Adopting Cloud-Native

At its core, cloud-native is a way to increase the velocity of your business. It is a method to structure your teams so that you can take advantage of the automation and scalability that cloud-native technologies offer.

The top benefits for enterprises adopting cloud-native are:

Agility

With GitOps and DevOps best practices, developers use fully automated CI/CD pipelines to rapidly test and push new code to production. Enterprises can bring forth new ideas to production within minutes or hours instead of weeks and months, resulting in a greater rate of innovation and competitiveness.

Scalability

On-demand elastic scaling or cloud bursting offers near limitless scaling of compute, storage and other resources. Enterprises can take advantage of built-in scalability to match any demand profile without the need for extra infrastructure planning or provisioning.

Reliability

GitOps and DevOps best practices provide developers with a low-risk method of reverting changes, clearing the way for innovation. With the ability to cleanly rollback, recovery from disaster in the case of a cluster meltdown is also faster. Higher uptime guarantees mean businesses are more competitive and can offer more stringent service level agreements and a better quality of service.

Lower Costs

Because cloud-native technology enables pay-per-use models, the economy of scale is passed through and shifts spending from CapEx to OpEx. This lower barrier to entry for upfront CapEx spending allows for more IT resources on development rather than on infrastructure. In addition, overall TCO/hosting costs will also be lower.

Attract and Retain Top Talent

Working with cloud-native and other cutting edge open source technology that lets you move faster and spend less time on infrastructure is appealing to developers. Hiring higher-quality developers results in better products, and also more innovation for your business. An added bonus is that open source contributions can help establish your reputation as a technology leader.

Reduced Vendor Lock-In

Cloud-nativity gives you a choice of tools without being stuck with legacy offerings. By taking advantage of multi-cloud compatible tooling wherever possible, your applications are more portable and beyond the reach of vendor predatory pricing. You can easily migrate to alternate public clouds with better product offerings or where compliance requires multi-cloud infrastructure.

Click here to see the complete talk.

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