How Kubernetes was the Secret Sauce in Our Globally Distributed Teams Transition to Microservices

It can be hard to fundamentally change how applications are built at a fast moving SaaS startup. Getting buy in, training and changing engineers daily workflows are some of the many challenges. Worki …

It can be hard to fundamentally change how applications are built at a fast moving SaaS startup. Getting buy in, training and changing engineer’s daily workflows are some of the many challenges. Working as a fully remote team, often these challenges can be magnified. It’s often hard to know where to start when your team is trying to move fast, but you know how much your team will benefit from everything that Kubernetes has to offer. Our remote team had been struggling to scale our development process as we’ve grown. A couple of years ago, our team rallied around the idea that we would ship code the minute it is better than what is in production. With a single monolithic application and a growing engineering team, this became a bottle neck and deploying our tightly coupled app started to create new challenges and problems. We needed a new way for each part of our application to deployed independently and quickly. Kubernetes was the missing piece that has allowed us to stay true to our engineering culture, empowering out team of engineers to move fast while also having a resilient and stable application infrastructure. If you’re trying to figure out how to get your company to start using Kubernetes or want to encourage wider adoption on a fast moving team, you’ll need to have a plan. In this presentation, you’ll learn about one plan that worked and is continuing to work at a 6 year old company whose team has grown from 10 to 80 since they last updated their infrastructure. This presentation hopes to illustrate how Kubernetes has enabled our infrastructure to reflect our organization itself; a distributed group of autonomous people aiming to work together while not getting in each other’s way.