Hi, I'm Rachel Leekin and I'm a Kubernetes field engineer at VMware. In this lesson, we will be discussing why Kubernetes matters to your business and how to move forward. These topics will include: What is Kubernetes? Why is Kubernetes important to your IT teams? How does Kubernetes help your business? How does Kubernetes help your customers? Finally, what do you do next to get involved in Kubernetes?

Let's discuss what is Kubernetes. It is a container orchestration solution that acts as a layer between your application and your hardware. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Already over 55% of fortune 500 companies have adopted Kubernetes into their IT solutions. As you can see, the use of Kubernetes is growing rapidly in the IT space. Let's review the principles.

The core principles of Kubernetes are: Portability. It gives you the ability to move your solutions quickly and easily to different platforms. Scalability. Increase and decrease your resources as needed to suit your changing solutions. High availability. It's API based integration and extendability, allowing you to integrate with other upstream projects.

Keep these principles in mind as we continue through the lesson. Your IT and development teams are up to their elbows in digital transformation and working hard in the face of what seems like mind-boggling pace of technology innovation. It's hard to keep up. The cloud native computing foundation builds sustainable ecosystems and fosters communities to support the growth and health of cloud native open source software.

Currently the foundation and the user community is consistently growing and the community grew 89% in 2019. Over 23,000 people attended QCOMP conferences in 2019 and there are now over 500 cloud native computing foundation members demonstrating the massive growth in the Kubernetes community.

Kubernetes is increasing in importance to your stakeholders. They want to embrace the world of automation and site reliability engineering. Kubernetes is essential in enabling your stakeholders from executives, to developers, to operators because of the core principles we mentioned earlier. You want to keep your stakeholders happy by giving them access to the latest technology available to them to help improve their workload.

If you don't, you will lose out to one of the many IT partners or cloud providers out there that are willing to provide the services to your stakeholders. Overall, Kubernetes offers significant advantages to your IT and development efforts, contributing directly to the success of your business. It helps deliver software quickly, provides you a greater resilience and agility across multiple cloud solutions, removes impediments, or helps removes repetitive deployment tasks, overall removing human toil.

Here are some statistics on how Kubernetes has positively affected businesses. When using Kubernetes, we find that from commits to production is 86% faster. Time to provisioning resources is 450 times faster. Code deployment frequency becomes five times faster. Kubernetes advantages for your IT and development teams contribute directly to the success of your business. It helps avoid vendor lock-in, which might increase your return on investment. Faster deployment cycles helps your teams focus on lowering your IT costs, which can be transferred to your customers. Improves customer experience, quicker development of features that help meet customer's needs and requests.

What's next for your business? And where do you get started? Since Kubernetes is increasingly being used by Fortune 500 companies, start to review how these companies are implementing it. There are a lot of case studies available such as Spotify and even Netflix that are using it rapidly to deploy their solutions. Start assessing your IT challenges. Understanding those challenges will help you understand what parts of Kubernetes and its ecosystem that you need to help meet your challenges and requirements.

Work with your IT teams to create a plan to address those challenges. Often your IT teams already have an initial solution to solve the issue. They just need guidance and support from management to get the process started.

Here's some questions that you can ask your IT teams or partners: Where should we put Kubernetes clusters? Do you already have infrastructure? Maybe you put it there or you put it straight to a cloud provider or have a combination of both. How should we build our clusters? Do you have HA requirements or do you need to process high intensive competing transactions? How do you leverage and extend Kubernetes to address those operational needs? Kubernetes has a very large ecosystem and through that ecosystem, you can extend your Kubernetes cluster to meet those requirements, from policy management to access control.

Kubernetes will change how your business operates. It can be used to fill the gap between infrastructure and platform solutions. Your team will focus their time on managing groups of configurations rather than individual systems. Additionally, Kubernetes provides your team with the ability for self service. They can now get the accurate resources they need quickly without having to go through multiple processes. I hope this lesson helps you and your teams take full advantage of all that Kubernetes has to offer. See you in the next lesson. Thank you.