As more organizations opt for containerized deployments of their apps, Kubernetes has quickly emerged as the de facto container orchestrator.

Kubernetes benefits your development teams in a number of key ways, enabling you to increase efficiency while keeping infrastructural costs down through smarter scaling. With Kubernetes, you can also deploy applications that are self-healing across any type of infrastructure, from private and public clouds, to hybrid and multi clouds.

Here are 7 successful organizations running their applications on Kubernetes.

1. The New York Times

Even though this influential newspaper was founded in 1851, the New York Times has continued to find innovative ways to deliver important stories in a digital era. They were an early adopter of web technologies, first launching their website in 1996. And they have continued to leverage modern methods to deliver the news ever since.

A few years ago, the New York Times moved toward becoming cloud-native, deployed on Kubernetes.

Deep Kapadia, who serves as the Executive Director of Engineering at The New York Times admits that moving to Kubernetes was a challenge, but a challenge that was well worth the benefits. He says, “I think once you get over the initial hump, things get a lot easier and actually a lot faster.”

2. Adidas

Adidas is a multinational sportswear company that was founded and is headquartered in Herzogenaurach, Germany. When they began experiencing inefficiency with their previous VM deployments, Adidas decided to move to containerized deployments on Kubernetes. Within 6 months, Adidas was able to have its entire e-commerce site running on Kubernetes, which resulted in load times that were twice as fast.

Daniel Eichten, who serves as Adidas’ Senior Director of Platform Engineering, summarizes the benefits of Kubernetes this way: “For me, our Kubernetes platform is made by engineers for engineers. It’s relieving the development team from tasks that they don’t want to do, but at the same time giving the visibility of what is behind the curtain, so they can also control it.”

3. VSCO

VSCO is a mobile photo editing and social media app that was created in 2011 to build a community of creators through a mobile application.

After moving to containerized microservices, the team at VSCO began to realize that they were not utilizing their infrastructural resources well. But by deploying on Kubernetes, VSCO has seen the time for a deployment to happen in production decrease by 80 percent, and their number of deployments have more than doubled.

Melinda Lu is the Engineering Manager for VSCO’s machine learning team, and she says, “I've been really impressed seeing how our engineers have come up with creative solutions to things by just combining a lot of Kubernetes primitives. Exposing Kubernetes constructs as a service to our engineers as opposed to exposing higher order constructs has worked well for us. It lets you get familiar with the technology and do more interesting things with it.”

4. Spotify

Spotify is an audio streaming platform that launched in 2008, and they were an early adopter of microservices and Docker. They had even created their own container orchestration system called Helios. But as their needs continued to grow, they decided to join the Kubernetes community.

Dave Zolutusky, who is a software engineer at Spotify, cites the open source community as a key benefit of Kubernetes. “The community has been extremely helpful in getting us to work through all the technology much faster and much easier. And it’s helped us validate all the things we’re doing.”

Spotify also leverages micro frontends on their site.

5. Pokémon GO (Niantic)

Niantic’s mobile game Pokémon GO took the world by storm during the summer of 2016 when its augmented reality enabled gamers to catch pokémon in their neighborhoods, places of business, and local hangouts.

Niantic utilized Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to orchestrate their large scale containerized deployment in order to free up their team to focus on deploying live changes to the gameplay, continually improving the gamer’s experience. This was a major aspect of Pokémon GO’s popularity and success.

According to the Google Cloud blog, at the time of its release, “Pokémon GO was the largest Kubernetes deployment on Google Container Engine ever.”

6. Ancestry

Ancestry is an organization that helps its customers get connected with their family history and lineage. Serving millions of subscribers and leveraging big data to construct family histories from public records, Ancestry had been using a traditional deployment methodology. Paul MacKay, software engineer and architect at Ancestry, admits that while this worked in the past, it had become far too cumbersome and time-consuming as time went on.

MacKay says, “I believe in Kubernetes. I believe in containerization. I think if we can get there and establish ourselves in that world, we will be further along and far better off being agile and all the things we talk about, and it'll go forward.”

7. Capital One

Capital One is a bank that has developed a reputation for being forward thinking. And as they sought to deploy applications that service millions of daily transactions, credit decisioning, and fraud detection on AWS, they placed speed and resilience at the top of their priorities. Therefore, they felt that their decision to run on Kubernetes was very strategic.

Jamil Jadallah, who served as Agile Coach at Capital One remarks how Kubernetes-native deployments have saved the organization time. “With the scalability, the management, the coordination, Kubernetes really empowers us and gives us more time back than we had before.”

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