Throughout this course we are going to follow the journey of Tommy, who is looking for a better way of scaling food delivery to his customers.
Tommy sells food in his food truck, and he has made a variety of food at a consistent pace for the last few years.
His food is very popular, but food trucks have a set capacity, so he can only serve a set number of customers at any time.
Tommy often gets lots of requests to open a restaurant or cater at events, so he would be able to serve more customers.
But he only wants to expand his business if he can ensure that the high quality of his food will be maintained.
Tommy designed the food truck himself. It is a custom environment specifically made to cook his food in.
It's tempting to open another food truck so he can sell to more customers, but he recognises that the effort versus return won’t scale.
He would have to hire new staff for each new truck and train each of them to provide the meals at the same quality too.
The lead times of building a new truck means he also can’t meet short-term demands in his usual business model.
Tommy's daughter, Poppy, has some ideas to help expand the business in a better way.
Organisations struggle just like Tommy to take the quality of their product (application) at small scale and move it to work at large scale whilst also maintaining the consistency (uptime) and quality (responsiveness). We often see businesses try to manually recreate individual, custom environments to fix the immediate problem, but these are often short term fixes that add additional cost and complexity instead of fixing the fundamentals that allow efficient and proper scaling.
That's where Kubernetes comes in. We'll talk more about Kubernetes as we explore this issue.
Next Section
Let’s explore how businesses can scale efficiently using Kubernetes.