Organizations today face challenges from rapidly changing markets, new technologies, and the need to build new modern apps running in a multicloud environment. For this reason, business leaders are demanding faster delivery of new applications, services, and insight, requiring greater agility and efficiency from IT. Enterprises, rightly so, are investing in modernizing their on-premises infrastructure with increased use of the cloud.

Kubernetes has experienced rapid growth over the years, with a recent post from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation reporting a userbase increase of about 67% in just the past year. Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that automates how containers are deployed, how they communicate, and how traffic is routed between them; it also scales configurations for both the containerized workloads and the underlying infrastructure that comprises the cluster.

In this blog post series, we have discussed how Kubernetes enhances a container-based microservices architecture. We examine the rise of containers and Kubernetes to understand the organizational and technical advantages of each, including a deep dive into the ways Kubernetes can improve processes for deploying, scaling and managing containerized applications. The first in the series covered Next-Generation Application Development. The second covered the Next Frontier: Container Orchestration.

Kubernetes is hard. Last year, we started the developer experience product at American Airlines. As we transitioned into the later half of 2020 and into 2021, we wanted to tackle Kubernetes app deployments. We aimed to make it easy for the users to do the right things, no matter how difficult those tasks were. Through our Kubernetes journey, we created reproducible patterns for application teams to use to make things even easier.