Jacques Philipp, LSD Open

Whether you call it Kubernetes or K8, the open source system to deploy, scale and manage containerised applications has fundamentally reshaped the cloud computing landscape. Simply put, it’s an application management platform, a tool for managing large server clusters running containers. But for many, Kubernetes is more than a piece of technology, it’s a cultural and organisational movement, with its crazy adoption being driven by community and companies like Red Hat and VMware.

Jacques Philipp, an open source consultant and instructor at LSD Open, says that in South Africa, the rate at which enterprises are adopting containerisation has accelerated massively. “Kubernetes is still pretty much the new kid on the block, but it has matured quickly and its adoption has been crazy. I don’t know of an enterprise that is not using Kubernetes,” he says. The reason for this is twofold. Kubernetes simplifies the life of a developer. “If you think of the traditional way of development, there’s a team making a product. They should be concentrating on development – writing the code,” he says. “But what often happens is that the developers have to get involved with the infrastructure team because they need a place where they can test their code. All this back and forth takes time out of a developer’s life and it costs a company money.”