Using Kubernetes to enhance CD best practices

Kubernetes has significantly transformed the deployment landscape over the past decade by enhancing continuous delivery (CD) best practices, which aim to deploy quickly in response to business needs while minimizing deployment friction. These practices, though predating Kubernetes, are amplified by its ability to provide easily isolated test environments and manage containers, ensuring consistency and reliability across deployment processes. Key CD principles include always being ready to deploy to production, building once and deploying everywhere, including all components in automated testing, and using the same deployment processes in testing and production environments. Kubernetes supports these principles by offering a declarative system that abstracts underlying infrastructure, uses container versioning, and provides tools for consistent deployment across environments. Additionally, the integration of tools like Helm, Kustomize, and ArgoCD enables seamless and dynamic deployments, ensuring robust and efficient software release management in modern ecosystems.