Case Study: Zendesk achieves faster deployments and self-healing infrastructure with Kubernetes from CNCF

Zendesk and the art of microservice maintenance

Zendesk, a customer service software company, faced significant challenges with scalability and deployment velocity due to its monolithic Ruby on Rails application architecture. Their centralized system in a co-located data center caused slow, risky deployments and made it difficult for dispersed engineering teams to work efficiently. To overcome these constraints, they sought a solution that would enable a microservices approach.

The solution was adopting Kubernetes, a product from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). This provided the orchestration needed to manage their containerized microservices. The impact was substantial: resource profile changes that previously took days were reduced to one or two minutes, and the platform's self-healing capabilities resolved outages automatically in minutes instead of hours. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation's technology enabled Zendesk to achieve greater flexibility, faster deployment velocity, and now runs 70% of its applications on Kubernetes.

Zendesk

Jon Moter

Senior Principal Engineer