“Future-proofing” anything against the dynamic change of the web is almost impossible, but Kubernetes may be the closest we’ve come since the arrival of the cloud. 

Container technology isn’t new — it’s been widely available for more than six years. But after the public release of Kubernetes in 2015, Kubernetes has become the de-facto standard for building and operating applications in the cloud. Kubernetes essentially represents the entirety of Google’s knowledge around successfully running and scaling modern cloud apps.

If it wasn’t for its rapid adoption, many of the promises of Kubernetes — self-healing, system agnostic, automatically scalable — would seem almost too good to be true. Luckily, they’re all true. But the most important thing to know about Kubernetes is that it’s flexible. And when it comes to anticipating and outlasting the changing trends of the web, flexibility is key.

If you’ve been dragging your feet on diving into Kubernetes, or are an evangelist looking to sell others in your organization on the benefits of using this orchestration system, here are four compelling reasons to go all in on Kubernetes.

Kubernetes is layered on top of the current systems that host your application, whether on-premises, bare metal, VM, or in a cloud. Once Kubernetes is implemented, your application workflow can exist anywhere that Kubernetes does.

This means that if you’re using a cloud service that isn’t working as you expected, or one that is just clunky, outdated or hamstringing your development process, you aren’t stuck for good. Kubernetes helps you avoid lock-in by flexibly and easily migrating to a new service.

Kubernetes automatically communicates with your server, and will scale up and down according to demand. On days of high-traffic, this means that none of your users will experience slow load times or downtime. 

If you’re dependent on a cloud service that charges based on your consumption, Kubernetes can ensure that you’re only ever paying for what you expressly need.

One of the chief appeals of Kubernetes is that it makes updating your application much easier. Kubernetes makes zero-downtime rolling updates, version rollbacks or canary deployments possible, largely because of how responsive it is to the health of your nodes and containers. 

Additionally, Kubernetes is self-healing. If the infrastructure breaks or the application crashes, Kubernetes will automatically move to correct the issue and maintain uptime.

A good indicator of the longevity and security of an open-source project is the size of the development community behind it, and Kubernetes has a massive one. In addition to individual developers who freely contribute, businesses that are invested in Kubernetes themselves encourage their own developers to contribute to the community.

Just as the introduction of VM initially disrupted the market, Kubernetes has the power to do the same. By introducing Kubernetes to your stack now, you’ll get ahead of the shifting behaviors of users, technology and the changing trends of the web.

Want to know more about all things Kubernetes? Watch Nigel Poulton’s webinar “Why Kubernetes,” on-demand now for free.