Building out your environment to create a full lifecycle delivery platform
This paper was conceived in response to a lot of chatter we were picking up among enterprise application delivery teams around an emerging set of Kubernetes-related challenges.
By way of background, we noted a year or two ago that conversations taking place at specialist industry conferences and within expert communities were often not representative of the broader developer and IT pro universe. Outside of the advanced practitioner circles that tend to drive the overall narrative in this space, Kubernetes adoption is much less further along. This means the issues are different, with less focus on the absolute latest ideas and best practices, and more on the fundamentals of how to manage and scale Kubernetes beyond your first one or two clusters.
That said, mainstream adoption is now happening at pace. A common story we hear, for example, is that early initiatives have proven the value of Kubernetes, so more projects are now being fired up to exploit it. At the same time, activity is edging ever more into micro-service architecture territory, further underlining the role of advanced container orchestration.
While all this is very positive, the biggest challenge we are hearing about now is how to keep control as the size and number of Kubernetes clusters continues to grow. A contributing factor here is the typical adoption pattern of individual teams recognizing the value of Kubernetes, then going through their own separate learning curves as they each progress in their own way. Before long, you discover that each Kubernetes cluster is configured and managed differently, often using home-grown tools and integrations developed by each team based on their local needs, skills and experience.
The resulting diversity is fine to begin with, and individual project teams may be happy with what they are doing. At an overall organization level, however, this ‘unique silo’ approach translates to significant duplication of effort, limited reuse and portability of assets and expertise, and an inability to exploit cross-team synergies. Put simply, many mainstream organizations will see costs and risks escalate while frustrations increase and ROI falls if they don’t take steps to standardize and harmonize sooner rather than later.
If any of this sounds familiar, then this paper is for you, but we aren’t going to focus purely on Kubernetes. This is because there’s a broader discussion going on about multi-cloud which provides important context. In practical terms, our firm view is that it makes sense to define requirements and invest at that level, embracing the Kubernetes-related issues mentioned above along the way.
Download the Paper to read more…
Dale is a co-founder of Freeform Dynamics, and today runs the company. As part of this, he oversees the organisation’s industry coverage and research agenda, which tracks technology trends and developments, along with IT-related buying behaviour among mainstream enterprises, SMBs and public sector organisations.
Bryan Betts is sadly no longer with us. He worked as an analyst at Freeform Dynamics between July 2016 and February 2024, when he tragically passed away following an unexpected illness. We are proud to continue to host Bryan’s work as a tribute to his great contribution to the IT industry.
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