Today I had the pleasure of co-hosting the GroupBy Conference. Part of that involved co-hosting as Anthony Nocentino present on Kubernetes. His talk was based on his Pluralsight video on the same topic. After watching his presentation, Kubernetes finally clicked for me. I think I get it.

Before you can get what Kubernetes is about, you need to understand one layer lower and get what containers are about. Aaron Nelson has written a great article on setting up SQL in containers in 5 lines of code. This helped me see how quick and easy it is to spin up a container. Additionally, I see how useful it is to be able to set up a container, kill it and spin up a new one, all in a matter of seconds.

Once you start playing around with containers, you realize you need some way to control and organize them. If you are going to treat them like cattle, not pets, then you need to higher a cattle wrangler. Kubernetes is that cattle wrangler. Or should I call it a kattle wrangler?

I wrote last week about how The Phoenix Project totally altered the way I think about work. It also altered the way I think about deployments and devops. To go fast, to make 10 deploys per day, you need to remove humans as much as possible. You need infrastructure as code. Kubernetes turns your datacenter into code.

I still have some reservations about SQL Server Big Data edition, and I have to wonder when Kubernetes is overkill. But when you need to do dozens of deployments, or blue-green deployments, or implement stateless microservices, it’s a total no-brainer.