KubeAcademy by VMware
Kubernetes for Business Users
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This lesson addresses why Application and Business Owners need to consider Kubernetes as a part of their future IT plans. It emphasizes the importance of Kubernetes in their digital transformation.

Patricia Bogoevici

Director for Kubernetes Services in the Modern Application Platform Business Unit at VMware

Patricia Bogoevici is a Director for Kubernetes Services in the Modern Application Platform Business Unit at VMware. Patricia has a strong background in consulting services, helping companies implement digital transformation solutions.

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Hello, this is Patricia Bogoevici. I'm director for field engineering at VMware. I want to thank you for joining me today for Kubernetes for Business Users lesson and why it is important to business users. I find this Dilbert cartoon very funny, but also it is very illustrative of the fact that technology is often viewed as a silver bullet that fixes all problems. And, consequently, one can only point to the popular technology of the day as answer to anything. In this lesson, I'm going to explain what Kubernetes does and how it helps businesses. So if the answer is Kubernetes, what is the real question? What are the problems our customers are trying to use Kubernetes for? In order to have a meaningful conversation about why Kubernetes is important, we need to talk about the business value of Kubernetes and identify the real problems it solves.

Digital transformation is a strategic imperative, and it changed the way our industry works, and it changed how businesses deliver value to their customers. Basically, digital transformation meant that companies started to incorporate technology in every aspect of their business, and the way companies deliver new value to their customers is through modern applications that allow businesses to innovate and create new products. Whether companies are unicorns or well-established enterprises, their competitive advantage is their efficiency and speed at developing and deploying new applications.

In response to digital transformation, one of the most dramatic shifts was in the application architecture. Traditionally, applications have been monolithic units that pull together all the functionality into one single deployment unit and would sit on its own dedicated hardware or virtual machine. Recognizing the need for more agility, applications have become more and more granular, splitting into microservices. For these smaller and smaller deployment units, the overhead of an entire machine, including the operating system, has become too big. So containers solve that problem by allowing multiple applications to run as isolated processes inside a single operating system.

So since the introduction of microservices, now businesses have a lot of applications running in production, and this created an additional complexity for how to deploy applications and how to run them. Containers fix that complexity and provide a way to run multiple applications in isolation on the same operating system, using immutable images that packages an application and all its dependencies, so an application can run faster, be deployable on any environment and be easy to update. While containers solved the problem of application deployment, it did create another complexity on how to manage so many applications at scale.

This is where Kubernetes comes in to help because it provides the container orchestration piece that allows these applications to run on a platform that abstract out the capabilities of a data center into an API driven fashion. To summarize, Kubernetes is the modern application platform where businesses can seamlessly deploy legacy applications, or cloud native applications, or they can experiment with artificial intelligence, machine learning applications, and it can be deployed on bare metal data centers or private and public clouds.

As we discussed in the previous slide, Kubernetes is the modern application platform where applications can be deployed faster, more efficiently. It allows the development team to iterate new functionality at an increased pace. So for business owners, this means shorter time from inception, where new ideas and proposals are formulated, to the time when these ideas are put in front of the customers. Different studies show that the adoption of Kubernetes has shortened the time from idea to production from months and years to days and even weeks.

This is very important for business users. As they can run experiments, they can try out new ideas, they can figure out what works and what doesn't, create new products that are truly responsive to the needs of users. And that's why Kubernetes is important to business users, because it enables them to deliver new business value to the end user faster. I hope that this lesson helped you understand why Kubernetes is important for business users. Thank you and see you in the next lesson.

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