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Box was one of the first companies to build on Kubernetes. Initially building its platform on PHP, Box’s architecture still uses some parts of the PHP architecture. Today, Box serves as a case study of a software platform’s cloud native journey that began a few years ago. The company also continues to rely on its legacy infrastructure dating back to the days when PHP ran on Box’s bare metal servers in its data centers.

In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, Kunal Parmar, director of engineering, Box, discusses the evolution of the cloud content management provider’s cloud native journey with hosts Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Ken Owens, vice president, cloud native engineering, Mastercard.

Prior to Box’s adoption of Kubernetes, the company sought ways to “create more services outside of the monolith in order to scale efficiently,” Parmar said. One way to do that, he explained, was to shift its legacy monolith applications into microservices.

“For anybody who has [made the shift to Kubernetes], they would know this is a really long and hard journey. And so, in parallel, we have been focusing on adopting Kubernetes for all of the new microservices that we have been building outside of the monolith,” said Parmar. “And today we are at a point where we're actually now looking at also starting to migrate the monolith to run on top of Kubernetes so that we can take advantage of the benefits that Kubernetes brings.”