It is now becoming obvious that the accelerating pace of technological change is the most creative force as well as the most destructive for traditional enterprise. The future of companies will depend on their ability to transform and leverage modern IT.

Containerization has been a huge trend over the past couple of years within developer circles because it has allowed developers to produce portable artefacts of code. With containerization comes the ability to deploy code anywhere. This makes it an attractive tool, a vehicle for developers to interact with operations and create predictable outcomes from their work. Containerization has helped increase overall deployment agility by over 60%, reducing the time to deploy code to less than 2 seconds.

Kubernetes is gaining in popularity and now has an increasing number of takers. It allows ways to orchestrate the containers. Many organizations are interested in Kubernetes, and it is becoming one of the most crucial tools in workflow production and a core element of a multi-cloud strategy.

Key areas where Kubernetes influences enterprise transformation:

• Business agility
• Technology adoption
• Customer experience
• Real-time insights
• Collaboration across enterprise
• Organizational culture

Business agility

It is the ability to deliver on-demand features seamlessly and rapidly to the customer. It requires deft orchestration of various business and technical systems to realize the change at optimal cost. This requires the design of systems to be nimble and decoupled with minimum dependencies. Containerization introduces the ability to manage those dependencies in the best possible way. Kubernetes manages the complexities of managing these containers and accelerates the ability to deploy new features seamlessly. Continuous delivery is made easy through the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Technology adoption

This is another critical factor which influences the success of enterprise transformation. In order to manage business agility, enterprises need to integrate various systems and functions to realize business value. They also need the ability to manage changes rapidly and hence the need for automation. Automation increases the velocity of feature delivery. The Kubernetes ecosystem provides all the necessary tools (such as Helm, GitOps, Operators) which can orchestrate the deployment pipeline in the most seamless manner to achieve continuous delivery. The Kubernetes ecosystem is evolving rapidly in terms of abstracting technology complexities as well as integration complexities by introducing rapid application development accelerators like Kyma, which can generate code for cloud-native services.

Customer Experience

Customer experience is achieved through a combination of multiple factors like interesting insights into the system functionality, coherence between business functionalities, and the ability to provide uninterrupted business continuity at all times. The Kubernetes ecosystem provides a variety of techniques to provide observability across systems, support feature enhancements with almost zero downtime by following a variety of deployment patterns such as canary/blue-green/dark-launch deployments. Coupled with a service mesh layer, these deployment patterns are seamlessly achieved.

Real-time Insights

By following open tracing and distributed-tracing mechanisms like Jaeger/Zipkin, applications are enabled with instrumentation capabilities. With Kubernetes native monitoring tools like Prometheus coupled with log analytics using Elastic stack and time series databases like Influx, it is possible to define the personas of various systems and measure their performance in real time.

Collaboration across enterprises

Enterprise transformation also requires continuous collaboration across departments and business units to achieve a coherent view of various systems. Kubernetes adoption introduces the much-needed flexibility and standardization while still providing the required control of individual business units. With service-mesh frameworks like Istio, these clusters/business units and their resources can be centrally controlled while respecting the isolation levels across units. It is expected that the IT Managers are required to draw a plan to define Kubernetes adoption strategy along with DevOps teams to successfully achieve the collaboration.

Organizational culture

Enterprise transformation requires cultural changes and processes in order to achieve success. Adopting digital tools and cutting-edge technologies will introduce the need to understand the complexities of managing these tools and systems. With a rapidly evolving Kubernetes ecosystem, the management of various tools is being simplified and complexities are being abstracted. As a result, managing Kubernetes is becoming more of a mainstream business, thereby accelerating organizational culture changes, which in turn expedites enterprise transformation.

Conclusion

Enterprise transformation requires critical changes within the enterprise such as introduction of digital technologies, the need for extensive automation, business agility, and cultural changes within the enterprise. The Kubernetes ecosystem provides many salient features (isolation, resiliency, scalability, availability and features designed for business continuity and enterprise adoption) which can address most of the critical challenges encountered during the enterprise transformation journey. The thriving and rapidly growing Kubernetes ecosystem enables seamless  enterprise transformation across business domains.