Introduction

About a decade ago, there was a lot of discussion over software development paradigms such as service-oriented architecture, agile development, and software design patterns. In hindsight, those were all great ideas, but only a few of them were practically adopted a decade ago.

One of the major reasons for the lack of adoption of these paradigms is that the underlying infrastructure couldn't offer the resources or capabilities for abstracting fine-grained software components and managing an optimal software development life cycle. Hence, a lot of duplicated efforts were still required for resolving some common issues of software development such as managing software dependencies and consistent environments, software testing, packaging, upgrading, and scaling.

In recent years, with Docker at the forefront, containerization technology has provided a new encapsulation mechanism that allows you to bundle your application, its runtime, and its dependencies, and also brings in a new angle to view the development of software. By using containerization technology, the underlying infrastructure gets abstracted away so that applications can be seamlessly moved among heterogeneous environments. However, along with the rising volume of containers, you may need orchestration tools to help you to manage their interactions with each other as well as to optimize the utilization of the underlying hardware.

That's where Kubernetes comes into play. Kubernetes provides a variety of options to automate deployment, scaling, and the management of containerized applications. It has seen explosive adoption in recent years and has become the de-facto standard in the container orchestration field.

As this is the first chapter of this book, we will start with a brief history of software development over the past few decades, and then illustrate the origins of containers and Kubernetes. We will focus on explaining what problems they can solve, and three key reasons why their adoption has seen a considerable rise in recent years.