The path to achieving business agility is undeniably through adopting cloud-native applications, and Kubernetes plays a central role.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Kubernetes is the leading container orchestration system, and it has a vast ecosystem of open-source and commercial components built around it. Today, in the wake of the pandemic, even more enterprises are considering Kubernetes a central part of their IT transformation journey. Kubernetes is a great container management tool because it offers: However, using Kubernetes alone may not solve the purpose of becoming agile because it was never meant to be a deployment system. This blog will highlight some of the challenges of using Kubernetes and, based on our work with hundreds of organizations, how to avoid the challenges to unlock the full potential of cloud-native. Deploying an application into Kubernetes is not straightforward as it involves a lot of manual scripts. For instance, an engineer has to create a Kubernetes Deployment manifest in YAML or JSON format (shown below) file and write kubectl commands to deploy an application: While this may look easy for (some experts) in a single deployment, it becomes an arduous task when the aim is to perform multiple deployments into dev/QA/Prod per day. It also requires substantial familiarity with Kubernetes, which not all members of the team will have. More often than not, organizations end up using scripts and kubectl commands that slow deployment. A recent survey of 1500 respondents by CNCF reports that complexity and cultural change with respect to using and deploying containers remain top challenges for Kubernetes adoption. Lack of knowledge and expertise on Kubernetes makes developers and application teams heavily dependent on the DevOps team (also referred to as the release team) to continuously help them create K8S objects such as Deployments, Replicasets, StatefulSets, and DaemonSets. The process of follow-up, collaboration with various groups to get the changes deployed takes away a lot of time from all stakeholders. Furthermore, with shorter deadlines and immense pressure to meet business objectives, the team has to spend long hours to deploy their changes. As per a report by D2IQ almost all organizations (96%) face challenges and complexities during initial deployments of containerized applications ( called Day 2 Operations in DevOps language), and cite Kubernetes as a source of pain. The report also shares, “51% of developers and architects say building cloud-native applications makes them want to find a new job.” This is extremely stressful for senior IT leaders who are responsible for deploying containerized applications for their organizations. Kubernetes is not meant to enforce policies, for example finding vulnerabilities in the images.
