Kubernetes allows teams to keep pace with the requirements of modern software development. Without Kubernetes, large teams would have to manually script their own deployment workflows.

Containers, combined with an orchestration tool, provide management of machines and services for you — improving the reliability of your application while reducing the amount of time and resources spent on DevOps.

Kubernetes has some great features that allow you to deploy applications faster with scalability in mind:

Horizontal infrastructure scaling: New servers can be added or removed easily.

Auto-scaling: Automatically change the number of running containers, based on CPU utilization or other application-provided metrics.

Manual scaling: Manually scale the number of running containers through a command or the interface.

Replication controller: The replication controller makes sure your cluster has an equal amount of pods running. If there are too many pods, the replication controller terminates the extra pods. If there are too few, it starts more pods.

Health checks and self-healing: Kubernetes can check the health of nodes and containers ensuring your application doesn’t run into any failures. Kubernetes also offers self-healing and auto-replacement so you don’t need to worry about if a container or pod fails.

Traffic routing and load balancing: Traffic routing sends requests to the appropriate containers. Kubernetes also comes with built-in load balancers so you can balance resources in order to respond to outages or periods of high traffic.

Automated rollouts and rollbacks: Kubernetes handles rollouts for new versions or updates without downtime while monitoring the containers’ health. In case the rollout doesn’t go well, it automatically rolls back.

Canary Deployments: Canary deployments enable you to test the new deployment in production in parallel with the previous version.

“Before Kubernetes, our infrastructure was so antiquated it was taking us more than six months to deploy a new microservice. Today, a new microservice takes less than five days to deploy. And we’re working on getting it to an hour.”

— Box