Kubernetes : An Introduction

Technology  |     |  

Thanks to a massive digital transformation across industries, accessing different applications through different smart devices has never been so easy. Among numerous applications, platforms, processes, tools and technologies that have aided this transformation are DevOps and Cloud.

These services sometimes called the cloud computing stack play a pivotal role in the ongoing digital transformation that we witness every day.

We do know about different cloud computing providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure et al. Now, how about transferring your applications to these cloud platforms for your ease of business? There are many open-source and closed-source software systems that facilitate this process. One of these specially built open-source systems is Kubernetes.

What is Kubernetes?

The term Kubernetes has its origin in Greek vocabulary which means “Helmsman of the ship.” The meaning quite aptly describes the working principle of the open source system. Kubernetes, in simple terms, means a ” Orchestration of Containers.” Grouping containers and making up an application into small logical units for superior management and discovery has become possible with the use of Kubernetes. It is written in Go Language and is managed by “Cloud Native Computing Foundation,” a vendor-neutral entity focused on managing “cloud native” projects.

Kubernetes: A special Google spinoff

Features of Kubernetes at a glance

  • Service discovery and load-balancing
  • Manual process automation (automatic bin-packing)
  • Seamless interaction with several container groups
  • Management of containers
  • Other services: Offers security, networking, and storage services
  • Continuous health monitoring of nodes and containers
  • Orchestration of storage
  • Automated rollouts and rollbacks
  • Balancing of containers by calculating the ‘best location’ for them
  • Runs on any infrastructure- on-premises, hybrid, or cloud
  • Scaling-up and scaling-down of applications

Kubernetes is a special spinoff of Google. Hence, it features a lot of characteristics based on Google’s principle. The product saw the light of the digital world through the experiences gained from the development of Google’s Borg and Omega. Google (open) sourced Kubernetes in the year 2014 making it an extensively available platform for cluster management. The main contributors to the development of Kubernetes apart from Google are IBM, VMWare, CodeOS, Mesosphere, RedHat, IBM, Microsoft, HP, Pivotal, SlatStack, etc.

Kubernetes helps you to scale up or scale down your applications, as per your need and is a highly adaptive platform which runs thousands of containers every week.

Kubernetes — Extremely flexible and Highly scalable Architecture

All the components of Kubernetes are little aware of each other’s existence; they can function perfectly while being completely independent of each other. Basically, these loosely coupled collection of components are centered on the automatic deployment of applications to the cloud while making maintenance and scaling your containers very easy.

Also, being built up as a “Loosely coupled system,” the components can be easily replaced. This feature makes it extremely easy for Kubernetes to be integrated with a wide array of systems making your applications work like a charm, over the cloud.

As an enterprise, one must consider taking advantage of DevOps and Cloud in a growing ecosystem of successful deployment options. Kubernetes being an adaptive and progressive platform helps you exactly with the same. It has features such as automatic roll-out or roll-back on changes to your workloads running on containers.

What makes Kubernetes a perfect orchestration solution?

Kubernetes orchestrator provides the most sought after features of orchestration for the automated arrangement, coordination and management of containers in the clusters. Some of the additional features of the Kubernetes container orchestration platform are as follows:

  • Maintenance of the containers
  • Checking the containers’ health and safety
  • Monitoring the containers
  • Post-failure restoration of the containers to their actual or mostly desired statev
  • Access authorization to containers

Besides, Kubernetes can be run from anywhere as it has been built up as an open source platform. So now, you can deploy your application applications on any infrastructure- on-premises, private, hybrid or public cloud, where it matters the most. Scaling up or scaling down, without increasing your Ops team is possible with Kubernetes as it features auto-scaling of your applications. Even restarting and replacing failure containers can be done swiftly with the help of Kubernetes.

Kubernetes for managing containerized workloads

Use of Kubernetes platform is inevitable as containers do have an inherent problem. Keeping track of your containers is the most difficult and at the same time, an important task as cloud infrastructure companies do their billing based on CPU time and storage. Kubernetes makes sure that no container is spinning around in the cloud as an orphaned program. Also, when you need more memory, CPU or storage, Kubernetes automatically helps you achieve that by maximizing your cloud set-up and as soon as the load becomes lighter, it shuts down the containers. Thus, it helps in balancing the workload.

Why Kubernetes over any other similar platform?

Google has been using Kubernetes for almost a decade. Kubernetes has been the unique selling point of Google for being able to run massive virtual machines with utmost efficiency to date. Proper implementation and use of these exclusive technologies such as Kubernetes has made the digital transformation possible while DevOps and Cloud being two most dependable pillars for it.

Loves Cloud has gained expertise in designing, deploying and maintaining Kubernetes across multiple cloud providers. It has successfully managed services like AWS EKS, Azure AKS, GCP GKE, and delivered turnkey solutions like KOPS along with custom Highly Available Kubernetes deployments.

At Loves Cloud, we are constantly leveraging the power of major public cloud computing platforms along with multiple open source software solutions to secure, optimize, automate and scale workloads of our customers. To learn more about our services aimed at digital transformation of your business, please visit https://www.loves.cloud/ or write to us at biz@loves.cloud