Kubernetes

The operating system of the cloud — the platform that orchestrates the containers running your most critical applications.

Kubernetes, often abbreviated as K8s, manages over 90% of containerised workloads in production and has become the de facto standard for deploying modern applications. With the container orchestration market projected to exceed $7 billion by 2027, Kubernetes is no longer a developer curiosity but a core enterprise infrastructure capability. For C-suite leaders, understanding Kubernetes is essential because it underpins your organisation's ability to deliver software quickly, reliably, and cost-effectively at scale.

What It Is

Kubernetes is an open-source platform that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications. Containers are lightweight, standalone packages that include everything an application needs to run — code, runtime, system tools, libraries, and settings. Kubernetes manages fleets of these containers across clusters of machines, ensuring the right number of containers are running, replacing failed ones automatically, and scaling up or down based on demand. Think of Kubernetes as the conductor of an orchestra — it does not play any instrument itself, but it ensures every musician (container) enters at the right time, plays at the correct volume, and recovers if they miss a beat.

Originally developed by Google based on 15 years of internal experience running containerised workloads at massive scale (Google's Borg system), Kubernetes was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2015 and has since become one of the largest open-source projects in history, with contributions from over 8,000 developers across hundreds of companies. Google reportedly runs over 10 billion containers per week using Kubernetes-derived technology, a scale that validates its design for enterprise reliability.

The core value proposition is operational resilience and efficiency. Kubernetes automatically monitors the health of every container and replaces failed ones within seconds — compared to minutes or hours for manual intervention. It optimises resource utilisation by packing containers efficiently onto available machines, typically improving infrastructure utilisation from 15-25% (traditional virtual machines) to 60-80%. For a company spending $10 million annually on cloud infrastructure, this efficiency improvement alone can deliver $3-5 million in savings.

Why It Matters for Business

Kubernetes directly impacts three critical business metrics: speed to market, operational reliability, and infrastructure cost. Spotify migrated its entire infrastructure — over 1,500 microservices serving 600 million users — to Kubernetes between 2018 and 2023. The result was a 40% reduction in infrastructure costs through better resource utilisation and a 70% reduction in deployment time, enabling the company to release new features to production in minutes rather than days. Similarly, Adidas migrated its e-commerce platform to Kubernetes and reduced infrastructure costs by 30% whilst improving system availability to 99.99% during peak sales events.

The platform also enables multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud strategies. Because Kubernetes provides a consistent abstraction layer across different infrastructure providers, applications can be deployed on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or on-premises data centres with minimal modification. This reduces vendor lock-in, enables disaster recovery across providers, and allows organisations to leverage the best pricing and capabilities from multiple vendors. ING Bank adopted Kubernetes specifically to enable a multi-cloud strategy, running workloads across AWS and Azure to meet regulatory requirements for geographic redundancy.

However, Kubernetes complexity is real and often underestimated. The platform has a steep learning curve, and misconfigured Kubernetes clusters are a leading cause of cloud security incidents. Gartner estimated that through 2025, over 50% of Kubernetes deployments experienced at least one significant operational incident due to misconfiguration. Organisations must invest in training, tooling, and platform engineering talent to realise Kubernetes' benefits without falling victim to its complexity.

Enterprise Use Cases

Apple runs one of the largest Kubernetes deployments in the world, managing tens of thousands of containers across its global data centres to power services including iCloud, Apple Music, and the App Store. The scale of Apple's Kubernetes usage demonstrates the platform's ability to handle mission-critical, consumer-facing workloads at the highest tier of global technology operations. In financial services, Goldman Sachs built its internal developer platform, Aether, on Kubernetes, enabling over 10,000 developers to deploy applications to production without manual infrastructure management. The platform reduced application deployment times from weeks to hours and cut infrastructure provisioning costs by 40%.

Shopify processes over $700 billion in merchandise through a Kubernetes-based platform during peak periods like Black Friday. The architecture automatically scales to handle traffic surges of 10-20x normal volume, spinning up additional containers in seconds and decommissioning them when the rush subsides. Before Kubernetes, Shopify engineers spent significant time manually provisioning servers for predicted traffic spikes — now the platform handles this automatically. In the public sector, the United States Department of Defence adopted Kubernetes through its Platform One initiative, standardising application deployment across all military branches and dramatically improving the speed at which software updates reach operational units.

AI and machine learning workloads have become a major Kubernetes use case. Companies run distributed training jobs, inference serving, and data processing pipelines on Kubernetes, leveraging its ability to schedule expensive GPU resources efficiently across teams. NVIDIA's GPU Operator for Kubernetes has become the standard for managing GPU-equipped clusters in enterprise environments.

Vendor Landscape

All major cloud providers offer managed Kubernetes services: Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). GKE is widely regarded as the most mature and feature-rich, whilst EKS benefits from AWS's dominant market position. Managed Kubernetes pricing typically involves a control plane fee of $70-150 per cluster per month plus compute costs for worker nodes. For organisations wanting Kubernetes without managing it at all, platforms like Red Hat OpenShift ($1,000-3,000 per node per year), Rancher (acquired by SUSE), and VMware Tanzu provide enterprise-grade management layers. The broader ecosystem includes hundreds of CNCF-certified tools for monitoring (Datadog, Grafana), service mesh (Istio, Linkerd), security (Aqua Security, Sysdig), and CI/CD integration (ArgoCD, Flux).

Strategic Considerations

Do not adopt Kubernetes simply because it is trendy. If your organisation runs a small number of monolithic applications with stable traffic patterns, Kubernetes adds complexity without proportional benefit. Kubernetes is most valuable when you have many services that need to scale independently, require high availability, or are deployed across multiple environments. Before committing to self-managed Kubernetes, evaluate managed offerings from cloud providers or platforms like OpenShift — the operational burden of managing Kubernetes clusters (security patching, upgrades, monitoring) is substantial and often underestimated. Invest in a platform engineering team that builds developer-friendly abstractions on top of Kubernetes, hiding its complexity from application teams. Finally, establish strong governance policies for resource allocation, security, and cost management from day one; without them, Kubernetes' flexibility becomes a vector for cost overruns and security vulnerabilities.