Yesterday, I had the privilege of one of my many discussions on technology direction with Josh Mahowald. Our conversation turned towards why it is that so many interesting and enabling pieces of software have been built on top of Kubernetes. As Josh put it, there is an explosion of higher-level services and tooling. This will be the first in a series of posts examining what Kubernetes really is (ok, an API), where it fits in the history of technology, and why it has enabled this kind of “explosion”.

Why do I need both GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket and JIRA/PivotalTracker/etc.? Over the last several years, while working with companies that regularly deliver software, I have seen three basic patterns in use: Git-All-In: These companies, normally founded by engineers, run all-in on git platforms like GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket. The Issues tracker and Pull Requests/Merge Requests (I will stick with “PR”, but no offense to GitLab) are the primary tool they use to track activity. As they grow some, they use the various “project”, “kanban” and other organizational features added to these platforms, but the primary method for interacting with daily work and knowing their state is the Git-based platform.