Why Kubernetes is Essential to a ZeroOps Strategy 

If you’re embarking on a ZeroOps journey, then two things are certain: 

Number one, there’s a big reason to make a change on your team. And number two, your developers may be struggling with burnout or too much daily pressure. 

The good news is that taking steps toward a ZeroOps approach is only going to help: ZeroOps helps alleviate immense strain from overtaxed teams, so they can actually get work done. 

ZeroOps is a set of practices that result in developers focusing solely on coding and creating, with 0% of their time spent on operations or infrastructure. 

ZeroOps doesn’t mean that there are literally no ops on your team, it just means that your developers don’t have to worry about them—and you’re not waiting around for someone else to take care of it, either. There’s nothing worse than being bottlenecked. 

No, instead, ZeroOps platforms automate these processes so they’re done quickly and automatically and are no longer the responsibility of busy, stressed-out teams. 

The time gained back from ZeroOps is noteworthy: Many teams feel like they’re adding new employees when they’re really just taking advantage of the talent they already have. Time is such an important factor when considering your team’s goals, not to mention your organization’s. Many teams want to be productive, but they simply don’t have time to do it all in one workday – or the next, or the next. When things pile up, it can seem like there’s no end in sight. 

A ZeroOps platform worth your time will offer teams and developers an experience that includes truly no operations tasks. 

So where does Kubernetes come into the picture? With automation. And ZeroOps and automation go hand-in-hand. 

Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration platform that helps automate processes related to hosting, building and running applications and sites. Containerization is at the forefront of the hosting and application delivery space, and for a very good reason: Containers are an easier, better way to run apps. Each individual container needs management, though, otherwise you’d have to do it by hand. And this is the beauty of Kubernetes: You don’t. It’s all automated. 

Kubernetes provides the framework to automate your containers and manage their life cycles and, in this way, Kubernetes is helping teams save so much time and energy. Doing that work manually would be a constant, unmanageable nightmare. But Kubernetes helps all your apps in cloud environments run consistently by automating tasks like: 

  • Deploying 
  • Scaling 
  • Load balancing 
  • Managing life cycles 

Kubernetes is the most modern approach to hosting, managing and running containerized applications and, as a result, it’s an integral part of ZeroOps strategy. Without Kubernetes, you simply will not be as automated and agile as the competition. To truly provide a zero-operations experience for your developers, Kubernetes is a necessary part of your stack. 

Another compelling reason to use Kubernetes is to prevent outages or downtime. With Kubernetes on your side, your sites and apps are managed in a way that ensures everything stays up and running with much less chance of avoidable downtime. 

Why hasn’t everyone just embraced Kubernetes, then? 

By now we’ve established that the benefits of Kubernetes are nearly endless, so it begs the question: Why isn’t everyone already using it? 

It boils down to one reason: Expertise. Kubernetes has a very steep learning curve, and it’s challenging to fully master. It takes specific expertise to configure the specific installation to meet your company’s unique needs. All this learning and training takes a lot of time and money, and the learning never really stops; there are constant updates and new releases to Kubernetes. This places a large burden on teams to learn all this, especially if Kubernetes isn’t in their primary job role. There just isn’t time. 

Troubleshooting is also a huge time-sink when it comes to Kubernetes. There are no easy quick fixes or solutions. You have to fix everything yourself and learn it as you go, and many developers report that this roadblock keeps them from achieving everything they want with Kubernetes. 

The bottom line is that most teams do want to be using Kubernetes since they know it could help their teams tremendously, but they just don’t have the time to devote to learning it, applying it and working out all the kinks. 

But if you truly want to invest in a ZeroOps strategy for the good of your team, then Kubernetes will be a very important piece of that. It’s something you can’t really leave out, not if you want your results to be as dramatic as they should be. 

Keep in mind that Kubernetes alone isn’t going to be a full ZeroOps strategy—there’s only so much that Kubernetes can do without being managed. Ideally, in a perfect ZeroOps world, someone else will be managing operations and infrastructure so your team can focus solely on building applications and delivering value. ZeroOps can’t be considered truly strategic until your developers and engineering teams are fully freed from the tedious tasks of infrastructure maintenance—which will very likely mean that your Kubernetes needs to be managed. Otherwise, your team is stuck doing it, which adds loads of time and hassle to your team’s daily activities. 

Is there a way to start using Kubernetes now, without learning it? Yes! As a solution, consider a managed Kubernetes platform for a true ZeroOps experience for your developers. 

For those who can’t build their own clusters or simply don’t have the time, managed Kubernetes services are a great way to explore the benefits of Kubernetes without doing it all yourself. For example, managed solutions from JFrog, SUSE Rancher, Kubermatic and Lagoon are open source application delivery platforms that bridge the gap for teams who want to use Kubernetes but don’t want to learn it from the ground up. 

A ZeroOps application delivery platform manages the entirety of operations and infrastructure for your team so they can do what they do best. 

Franz Karlsberger

Franz Karlsberger has been working in information technology, business consulting and strategic partnerships for over 15 years, establishing a reputation for scaling teams in competitive markets. He joined amazee.io as Chief Executive Officer in April 2020. Prior to amazee.io, he worked at Dynatrace and Accenture. Outside of work, Franz enjoys spending time with his wife, two sons and likes to run, to ski, and doing a variety of outdoor activities. Franz holds a Master in Business Informatics from Vienna University of Technology .

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