What is Kubernetes?

What is Kubernetes and its purpose?

Containers—largely popularized by Docker—have profoundly changed the way development and operations teams test and deploy modern software. Containers help companies modernize by making it easier to scale and deploy applications, but containers have also introduced new challenges and more complexity by creating an entirely new infrastructure ecosystem.

Early adopters are now deploying thousands of container instances daily, and that’s a complexity of scale they have to manage. So how do they do it?

Enter the age of Kubernetes.

Originally developed by Google as an offshoot of its Borg project, Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform designed to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. In fact, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard for container orchestration and is the flagship project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, backed by key players like Google, AWS, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Cisco, and Red Hat.

Sometimes referred to as “k8s,” Kubernetes makes it easy to deploy and operate applications based on a microservice architecture. It does so by creating an abstraction layer on top of a group of hosts so that development teams can deploy their applications and let Kubernetes manage:

• Controlling resource consumption by application or team

• Evenly spreading application load across a hosting infrastructure

• Automatically load balancing requests across the different instances of an application

•Monitoring resource consumption and resource limits to automatically stop applications from consuming too many resources and restarting the applications again.

• Moving an application instance from one host to another if there is a shortage of resources in a host, or if the host dies

• Automatically leveraging additional resources made available  when a new host is added to the cluster

• Easily performing canary deployments and rollbacks.

As more and more organizations move to microservice and container architectures, they’re looking for strong, proven platforms. DevOps practitioners are moving to Kubernetes for four main reasons:

Kubernetes helps you move faster

Indeed, Kubernetes allows you to deliver a self-service Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that creates a hardware layer abstraction for development teams. Your development teams can quickly and efficiently request the resources they need. If they need more resources to handle the additional load, they can get those just as quickly, since resources all come from an infrastructure shared across all your team No more filling out forms to request new machines to run your application. Just provision and go, and take advantage of the tooling developed around Kubernetes for automating packaging, deployment, and testing, such as Codefresh or Helm.

Kubernetes is cost-efficient.

Kubernetes and containers allow for much better resource utilization than hypervisors and VMs do. Because containers are so lightweight, they require less CPU and memory resources to run.

Kubernetes is portable

Kubernetes runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and you can also run it on-premise. You can move workloads without having to redesign your applications or completely rethink your infrastructure, which lets you standardize on a platform and avoid vendor lock-in.

Cloud providers will even manage Kubernetes

As noted earlier, Kubernetes is currently the clear standard for container orchestration tools. It should come as no surprise, then, that major cloud providers now offer Kubernetes-as-a-Service platforms. Amazon EKS, Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Red Hat Openshift, and IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service all provide a full Kubernetes platform management, so you can focus on what matters most to you shipping applications that delight your users.

Relevant Blogs:

Kubernetes Autoscaling

Kubernetes integration using AWS cloud provider

Salt stack cloud infra

Docker compose installation