3. Increased developer productivity

While Kubernetes is commonly associated with helping relatively small operations or SRE teams manage large-scale containers and infrastructure, another key constituency – your developers – will also see gains.

“IT organizations will see the most return on their Kubernetes investment via increased developer productivity, driven by a common declarative approach to configuration management for application provisioning and deployment,” says Kevin Crawley, developer advocate at Containous.

[ Related read: Kubernetes deployments: 6 security best practices. ]

“Increased developer productivity” is usually sweet music to executive management’s ears, but Crawley notes it’s not automatic. You need the right conditions in place. In particular, Crawley says that teams that have already adopted DevOps (or DevSecOps), as well as practices such as the 12-factor methodology for building microservices, will be the ones that really reap the productivity benefits. (“Productivity benefits” stands in here as a reasonable proxy for “budget savings.”)

“Development teams who are still contending with legacy processes – such as bureaucratic change management policies, applications that are implicitly tied to the configuration of their infrastructure, and large silos that have not practiced ‘move fast and break things’ – will have to trudge through the J-curve of transformation before seeing any benefit from the cloud-native ecosystem,” Crawley says, adding that this can be an expensive proposition.

DevOps teams, on the other hand, are well-positioned to find immediate savings – whether in real financial costs or in other forms – with Kubernetes.

“Development teams who’ve embraced DevOps practices should expect to see productivity gains [with Kubernetes] almost immediately,” Crawley says.

[ Read also: 5 open source projects that make Kubernetes even better. ]

4. Increased operations team productivity

Kubernetes’ aforementioned reputation as a powerful lever for operations and/or SRE teams is well-earned and is another source of potential savings over time. The tool (in concert with other cloud-native or cloud-centric technologies) essentially allows Ops pros to achieve extraordinary feats of operational strength (without the anticipated muscle pulls or other “injuries”) through automation, repeatability, and the like.

“Apart from infrastructure cost benefits, the adoption of Kubernetes helps scale operations teams,” says Tolia, the Kasten CEO. “The adoption of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Kubernetes will result in fewer ‘snowflake’ deployments and more reliable deployment patterns. This will make it easier for a smaller number of people to manage a larger number of servers, applications, and clusters spread across multiple data centers and clouds.”

[ Get the free eBook: O'Reilly: Kubernetes Operators: Automating the Container Orchestration Platform. ]

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