Welcome to the Kubernetes for Developers lesson.

In this lesson, you'll learn why Kubernetes is important to you, the developer. Everything is software. Software is written by developers, and software runs on infrastructure in platforms. Due to digital transformation, every company creates software that delivers value to their customers through new applications. Therefore, the people who develop the software have an increasingly important voice in how the software gets developed, and they increasingly influence the process of how their tools and target platforms are bought.

When developers are considering tools and target platforms, they're considering a different criteria than central IT. IT, usually, buys for stability, scaling and security, which are perfectly good reasons. But developers also want, on top of that, the following: they want a seamless experience of developing and deploying applications with little to no friction with infrastructure. And, ideally, they want to self-service as much as possible. This enables them to develop business functionality as quickly and as easily as possible, which is their main success metric. They also want a seamless integration with existing application architecture. And the ability to easily migrate their existing applications to a new platform with little disruption, which reduces the cost and the risk, and keeps them focused on writing new code rather than updating the existing ones.

Lastly, developers have a strong community focus, both inside and outside their company. They want to take advantage of innovation, knowledge, stability, responsiveness, and recognition that strong open source communities offers them. And will favor the software developed by such communities. Of course, one of the effects of having a vibrant and active community is that developers are faced with an explosion of tools, frameworks, and innovation, which gives them more options. Software engineering, as a discipline, has become more sophisticated with the emergence of CI and CD platforms and dev ops methodologies, developers often have multiple choices. So, there is a need to conquer all of this complexity.

As you can see in the previous slide, considering this complex landscape of frameworks, languages, and continuous innovation in the space, developers are looking for things that are easy to use, have good documentation, and allow them to build their products, and apps with the least amount of friction.

So, how does Kubernetes make it easy for developers? Containers provide a way to run multiple applications in isolation on the same operating system, or virtual machine. Kubernetes provides the container orchestration that allows these applications to run on a single platform regardless of the infrastructure which then, allows it to be API driven and securely provide scalability and reliability.

Kubernetes platform is the key ingredient that modern application platform should be based on. It allows customers to transform their traditional applications, build cloud native applications, and experiment with analytics, machine learning and serverless services. Kubernetes platform provides the easy button for developers.

Let's bring it all together. Developers are mostly concerned about productivity and innovation. For them, running applications in containers means that all deployments are consistent with each other, regardless of what tools or languages they use to deploy them. They can create microservice architectures, and use different languages or frameworks and run them consistently on Kubernetes. This reduces friction with IT operations, who do not have to deal with the different types of artifacts. Everything is in containerized workload, regardless of the business purpose that it serves. For developers, this is critically important, as they choose the best tool that fits their needs and the best frameworks that are suited to solve the business problems that they need to address.

I hope this lesson helps you understand why Kubernetes is important to the developer, to keep these principles in mind as we go through the course. Thank you, and see you in the next lesson.