Today marks the anniversary of a milestone I hit back in 2018. October 22nd is when my company fully committed to moving our monolithic legacy app into a Kubernetes cluster. It wasn’t easy, but it was necessary.

You know those moments where you’ve been working hard and finally see that light at the end of the tunnel? That’s what this day felt like for me. We had wrestled with containerization for months, fought through dependency hell, and faced some ugly infrastructure challenges. But now, we were deploying our application in Kubernetes.

The tech world was buzzing about Kubernetes back then. Helm had just hit v2, bringing versioning to deployments. Istio was still in its infancy but promising. And serverless—AWS Lambda—was all the rage. Meanwhile, GitOps as a term hadn’t quite caught on yet, and Terraform was still in 0.x land.

I vividly remember the day we launched our first app into Kubernetes. We had set up a basic deployment pipeline using Jenkins, but it was clunky compared to what we were eventually able to achieve with GitHub Actions. And our monitoring setup? Oh boy, we were using Prometheus and Grafana, which felt like a step up from Nagios, but the learning curve was steep.

One of the big challenges we faced was managing stateful applications in Kubernetes. Our monolith had lots of database connections and persistent storage requirements. We didn’t have great answers on how to handle that initially. But then we stumbled upon StatefulSets, and it was like finding a gold mine. It solved our problems elegantly and made us feel like the smartest people in the room.

Another interesting development during this time was the rise of platform engineering conversations. At my company, we were trying to figure out how to build a platform that could support multiple teams without over-engineering it. We had debates about whether to build everything from scratch or leverage existing tools and practices. Ultimately, we decided to use managed services where possible but still build some custom integrations.

The month leading up to this moment was filled with late nights and intense discussions. I remember arguing with my team about how to handle horizontal scaling in Kubernetes. Someone suggested using HPA (Horizontal Pod Autoscaler), which at the time felt like a savior for autoscaling deployments. But then we hit some issues where our application didn’t scale as expected due to resource limits. After some debugging and tweaks, we finally got it working, but not without a few sleepless nights.

Looking back, that day was more than just an end to a deployment; it was the beginning of a new era for us. Kubernetes allowed us to break down our monolith into smaller, manageable pieces, which in turn made our codebase easier to understand and maintain. We were still learning as we went along, but having the right tools helped immensely.

The tech landscape has certainly evolved since then. The big hack stories from that month—the Red Hat acquisition by IBM, Paul Allen’s passing—seem almost quaint now compared to today’s headlines. But they remind me of a time when containers and Kubernetes were still the hot new thing. And while those technologies have matured significantly, I’m grateful for that early experience because it taught us so much about DevOps practices and platform engineering.

So here’s to Kubernetes—the love-in that changed our company culture and paved the way for future innovations. Here’s to the late nights, the debugging sessions, and the learning curve—because sometimes, those are the moments that truly matter.