The entire technology industry has aligned behind Kubernetes. Since then, application lifecycle management has become much easier. Before Kubernetes, only the CI half of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) was automated. CD was assembled by hand with scripts, pipelines, metadata and configurations. Kubernetes enables CD automation, and tools like Jenkins X make it simple to deploy on Kubernetes.

“CI/CD should become increasingly like an appliance that just does CI and CD for you. It's not this kind of ninja scripty thing that only experts can figure out,” said James Strachan, chief architect at CloudBees. “Where we're trying to go with Jenkins X is not so much hiding Kubernetes, not so much hiding CI and CD and pipelines, but just automating it.”