“Historically, software application development has been a challenging process, often constrained by hardware and platform limitations,” says Binqi Zhang, a director with PwC Australia’s digital engineering practice. “This led to the development of containerization as a way to decouple applications from underlying infrastructure—basically providing applications with everything they need to be deployed on any infrastructure or digital platform.”
Over time, however, containerization led to a proliferation of self-contained applications, creating its own challenges for technology teams, especially in a world of frequent software updates. Kubernetes is an automated system for managing containerized complexity, greatly reducing operational challenges by enabling organizations to run multiple containers and scale them up without the need for manual coding. It enables policies to be set centrally and code changes to be rolled out more quickly.
At the same time, Kubernetes can constantly monitor the “health” of containers and balance load to distribute traffic and deploy compute/storage resources as needed. It also supports security by identifying traffic patterns that could compromise containers and signal a cyberattack.
