What is Kubernetes and Why Do You Need to Hear About It?

Every IT enthusiast is well aware of the fact that Kubernetes is an awesome container orchestration tool.

Kubernetes can help with simplifying the management of containers. At the same time, this tool makes the management process more efficient.

However, most experts agree that Kubernetes is especially good due to the following reasons:

• Easy optimization of infrastructural resources due to the more efficient use of hardware.
• Awesome control and automated updates and deployments.
• You can orchestrate containers on multiple hosts.
• Kubernetes enables both vertical and horizontal scaling (real-time scalability of resources and apps).
• Autocorrection and testing of apps.

This is just one part of why Kubernetes is great. Many developers use it for all sorts of things, starting at containerization all the way to the development of apps (team chat apps, collaboration apps, communication apps, and so on).

If you are interested in learning more about this tool, get an in-depth understanding with the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Certification”

What exactly is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is a container management system which was originally created at Google headquarters.

In 2015, Google released this tool as an open-source project. A few months later, Kubernetes was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The CNCF, which was started by Google in cooperation with the Linux Foundation aims to promote container technology.

How does it work?

To put it simply, Kubernetes allows users to use the potential of container technology and operational reality by automating and simplifying the daily container workflow.

This tool automates deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications on a cluster of servers (bare metal or virtual).

Kubernetes also allows users to automatically handle networking, storage, logs, alerting, and so on, for containers.

Should you deploy Kubernetes?

Businesses of almost all sizes are utilizing container technology and Kubernetes.

However, just because everyone is using this technology, it doesn’t mean that you should adopt it too at all costs.

Adopting containerization and Kubernetes (or any other container management tool) as a stand-alone goal is the wrong way to look at it. Instead, the implementation should support your business, operational and strategic goals.

Keep reading and learn more about the idea behind container technology and the main features of Kubernetes for a business.

Benefits of containerization

Since Docker is an absolute prerequisite whenever Kubernetes is mentioned, it is necessary to cover Docker’s main benefits.

Easy to use

The isolation containers allow you to run your software consistently across environments, оn your laptop, on any public cloud, private cloud, or even bare metal.

Containers can also be copied to development, test, integration and live environments quickly and reliably. In turn, this considerably simplifies and speeds up the software development and release process, resulting in a faster time-to-market.

This advantage offers more opportunities that are not so obvious in the first place.

Lower resource costs

Containers are isolated ‘packages’, that include everything the application needs in order to work properly.

Multiple containers can share the same OS and internet connection.

This is a more efficient resource regarding utilization. Especially when compared to making a virtual machine with its own OS for each application.

Containers are lightweight by design and take up fewer resources, enabling you to save on hardware and data center costs.

Modularity and scalability

Containers are light by design and they can be built in a matter of seconds.

This allows users to scale instantly, helping them react to unexpected website traffic load seamlessly.

Containers also make it really easy to break down an application into individual components with their own function.

You might want to have your application in one container and your database running in another container.

Docker lets you link these containers together to create your application, making it easy to update or scale the components independently.

Kubernetes benefits (compared to other systems)

Let’s take a look and see why Kubernetes is one of the most widely used solutions when it comes to container management.

Great heritage

There is no denying that Kubernetes has a very mature and proven architecture.
Its design is built on over 10 years of operational experience of the Google engineers who helped build and maintain the largest container platform in the world.

Performance Management

The Kubernetes GUI makes it hassle-free to monitor the performance of your applications, manage the cluster resources, as well as modifying the Kubernetes individual resources.

Good support and ample feature set

This system has a very rich feature set when compared to other container management systems.

Kubernetes supports a wide spectrum of workloads, programming languages, and frameworks, enabling stateless, stateful, and data-processing workloads.

Kubernetes is also flexible enough to meet the needs of a wide range of users and use cases.

Awesome industry support and community

This system has been broadly adopted. It also grew, and with it grew its support and popularity.

The project also gained a huge active user and open-source community, as well as the support of global enterprises, IT market leaders, and big cloud providers.

Constant development

There are so many contributors, so new features are released regularly. Thanks to this large and diverse user community, development is stable and constant. Whenever there is a question regarding Kubernetes, someone is there to answer it.

Kubernetes’ greatest functionalities and benefits

Now let’s discuss the most prominent features of Kubernetes and how one can benefit from them.

It is portable and completely open-source

Kubernetes can virtually be deployed on any infrastructure.

One can run their containers in one or more public cloud environments, on their dedicated virtual machines or on bare metal.

One can use the same orchestration tool for all different environments. Kubernetes’ compatibility across several platforms avoids infrastructure and cloud provider lock-in.

It also makes a multi-cloud strategy and set-up not only possible but highly usable and flexible too. It is 100% open-source and that provides users with even more flexibility.

Workload scalability

Kubernetes is efficient in its use of infrastructure resources and offers a few useful features used for scaling.

• Horizontal infrastructure scaling

Kubernetes operates at the individual server level to use horizontal scaling. New servers can be easily added or removed.

• Auto-scaling

When there is auto-scaling involved, you can automatically change the number of running containers, based on CPU utilization or other application-related metrics.

• Manual-scaling

A user can manually scale the number of running containers through a command.

• Replication controller

This controller ensures a user’s cluster has a specific number of equivalent pods running. When there are too many pods, the Replication Controller terminates the extra pods. When there are too few, it starts more pods.

High availability

Kubernetes is designed to combat the availability of both applications and infrastructure, making it indispensable when it comes to deploying containers in production.

• Health checks and self-healing

Kubernetes protects your containerized application against failures by constantly checking the health of nodes and containers. Kubernetes also offers self-healing and auto-replacement. 

• Traffic routing and load balancing

Traffic routing sends requests to the appropriate containers. Kubernetes also comes with built-in load balancers to distribute your load across multiple pods.

It is designed for deployment

Many think that the main benefit of containerization is the capability to speed up the testing, building, and releasing processes.

Kubernetes was designed for deployment and it even offers various features that are quite useful.

These include:

1. Auto-rollouts and rollbacks
2. Canary deployments
3. Programming languages and frameworks support

Final thoughts

Hopefully, now you see that the benefits of Kubernetes or a good Kubernetes alternative can go a long way if you are a developer. Think about your business needs and requirements, evaluate all the aspects, and then decide if this is a good option.

And if you opt for this technology, know that you will enjoy great benefits.

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