If you feel underwhelmed by your Kubernetes implementation, it might be because you're not finished yet. Organizational limitations can stifle your K8s deployment.

I want to talk about Kubernetes for a little bit. But before we get into Kubernetes, I want to talk about containers. And not the containers that run inside of pods on Kubernetes. I want to talk about the old boring intermodal shipping containers that have become a staple of the shipping industry.

These dull, 20 feet long, 8 feet 6 inch tall titans of industry don't look like the type of invention that would help revolutionize commerce, yet that's exactly what it did. Back in the early 1900s, the shipping industry looked very different. The norm for shipping back then was called "Breakbulk Cargo". (It's still in use today, but for specific cases) Breakbulk cargo or "general cargo" was cargo that was shipped in individually counted units. That might sound innocuous enough, but when you're dealing with a ship that has 20,000 goods on it, you can imagine how inconvenient it must be to keep track of an individual PS5, for example. But in the early 1900s, dealing with cargo in this fashion was pretty commonplace.

There are a few issues with breakbulk cargo. One of the biggest issues was the speed at which you could load and unload the cargo. Dealing with breakbulk cargo is a labor-intensive process. Then along came a guy named Malcom Mclean.

Malcom Mclean was an American businessman and a former truck driver who was compelled to find a better solution for the shipping industry. Mclean is credited with inventing the intermodal shipping container which changed the shipping industry forever. The interesting thing about Mclean's story was that he wasn't the first person to try using shipping containers. Shipping containers were in use as early as 1926, almost 9 years before Mclean even finished high school. So why did Mclean's idea for containers take off while other implementations surfed in mediocrity?

Mclean's biggest insight into the process wasn't just the container. It was the need for the entire industry to change in order to align practices and standards around the container. Having a container show up at a port, only to be manually unloaded a single item at a time would limit the impact that the container would have. But if ports were all standardized to expect these 20'x8'x8'6" containers, the loading, offloading and storage process could bring an advantage that just wouldn't be possible if ports used the same breakbulk infrastructure as they did with containers. Everything needed to change to maximize the...