If you are responsible for overseeing the IT and cloud infrastructure of a business, you already understand that your customer-facing applications are key touchpoints for your audience to interact with your brand. Any issues or downtime can lead to losing customers, losing revenue, and reputational damage. To deal with the risk, many businesses are looking to cloud native Kubernetes-based platforms for their applications.
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. For a more detailed look at Kubernetes, please see an earlier blog post.
Using a platform built with Kubernetes, you can run your customer-facing applications with greater speed, efficiency, resiliency and reliability. Here are some of the key benefits of using a Kubernetes platform for your applications:
Fluent Platform Scalability
With a platform built with Kubernetes, you can easily scale your applications up or down based on user demand. During peak traffic times, you can automatically increase your application’s resources, which ensures that your customers can continue to access your services without any issues. The same applies when user traffic dissipates – resources will scale down so you don’t end up paying for unused resources.
Improved Reliability
Kubernetes ensures that your applications are always available and reliable by automatically detecting and recovering from failures, a process referred to as self-healing. If one instance of your application goes down, Kubernetes can spin up a new instance to replace it, without any manual intervention from your team. No panic and scrambling for your team when something goes down.
Reduced Downtime
Kubernetes can perform rolling updates to your applications, ensuring that updates are applied seamlessly without any downtime. This means that your customers can continue to use your services while you upgrade your application to the latest version. This means that your team doesn’t have to deal with midnight weekend maintenance windows.
Automation = increase efficiency
With Kubernetes, you can automate many of the manual processes involved in deploying and managing applications, freeing up your team’s time to focus on more important tasks. The less time your team spends managing infrastructure, the more time they have to spend on doing work that matters to your business.
Save on cloud costs
You can optimize resource utilization and reduce the number of servers needed to run your applications by using Kubernetes. This is especially true for large cloud estates, where the costs saved can be hundreds of thousands.
Options for every kind of budget
Kubernetes is an open source software that has several distributions available. Many of them are vendor-supported subscription-enabled distributions to meet enterprise needs with features, security and support. If you don’t immediately have the budget, you can always use the free open source version of Kubernetes to orchestrate your platform. If and when you start requiring enterprise-grade features and support, you can easily migrate the containers over to a different distribution.
Using a Kubernetes-based platform for your applications isn’t just a technically sound decision, but one that’ll benefit your business too. This route ensures that your customer-facing applications are always available and performing at their best, leading to happier customers and a healthier bottom line.
