Editor’s Note: The following is an article written for and published in DZone’s 2025 Trend Report, Kubernetes in the Enterprise: Optimizing the Scale, Speed, and Intelligence of Cloud Operations.

Kubernetes has become the backbone of application deployment. Its flexibility and scalability are long-time proven, but its adoption by developers can still be a challenge. The misuse of Kubernetes configuration, through the thousands of options, can make applications less performant or less resilient in that they would be a single old-school server. To fully take advantage of Kubernetes, organizations must prioritize the developer experience by embracing platform engineering practices that abstract complexity and provide self-service capabilities, enabling teams to deploy applications with confidence.