KUBERNETES OVERVIEW

What Is Kubernetes (K8s)?

Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration tool. It simplifies the management of containers by removing many of the manual processes involved in the deployment and scalability of containerised applications.

What Does Kubernetes Mean?

The name Kubernetes comes from the Greek, meaning helmsman or pilot. K8s is simply an abbreviation of Kubernetes. K8s was invented by Google for an internal project called Borg. In 2014, Google open-sourced the project. Today, Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestration system by far.

What Are Containers?

Containers are small virtual machines. They are lightweight, standalone, executable units of software in which everything needed to run an application is packaged – including code, runtime, system tools, system libraries and settings.

What Are the Benefits of Using Containers?

24/7 Availability

Containers greatly simplify deploying applications. Today, users expect applications to be available 24/7, and developers need to deploy new versions quickly and easily. Containerisation serves these goals, allowing applications to be released and updated swiftly and simply, and without downtime.

Portable Workloads

Because containers are separate from their infrastructure, they are portable – which means they can be run anywhere, whether it be on desktop, traditional IT, or the cloud. This also means organisations are not tied into any one cloud platform, as containers can be lifted and shifted between platforms as required.

Edge Computing

Since containers are lightweight, portable, and high performing, they are ideal for running on edge computing devices, or edge compute mixed with cloud to achieve the best levels of performance, cost-effectiveness, and availability. This is because updating containers in-place is very simple – and simplified even further by orchestration solutions like K8s.

Container Orchestration with Kubernetes

An application may rely on huge quantities of containers, all of which must communicate with one another, handle failures, and scale independently based on ever-changing needs. Enter Kubernetes to orchestrate and automate the process – easing the burden of configuring, deploying, managing, and monitoring even the largest-scale containerised applications.

This also applies at the edge. With K8s, organisations can run containers at the edge in a way that maximises resources and enables DevOps teams to greatly simplify their practices.

What Can You Do with Kubernetes?

Container orchestration with Kubernetes does all the hard work of managing large volumes of containers throughout their lifecycle, including:

• Load Balancing – If traffic to a container is high, K8s will load balance so the deployment remains stable.
• Storage orchestration – K8s automatically mounts a storage system of your choice when the need arises, such as local storage or cloud storage.
• Automated rollouts and rollbacks – Kubernetes will automatically create new containers for your deployment, remove existing containers, and adopt all their resources to the new container.
• Automatic bin packing – You decide how much CPU and RAM each container needs, and K8s will automatically manage and optimise resources for those containers.
• Self-healing – K8s runs health checks on containers that fail, and then restarts, kills, and replaces them so there is no service interruption for end users.
• Secret and configuration management – K8s lets you store and manage passwords, OAuth tokens, SSH keys, etc. without exposing them in your stack configuration. You can also deploy and update secrets and application configuration without rebuilding container images.

Key Business Benefits of Kubernetes

• Save money through optimising resources and the more efficient use of hardware
• Control and automate deployments and updates
• Orchestrate containers on multiple hosts
• Scale resources and applications in real time
• Increase developer productivity by allowing teams to deploy multiple times a day
• Avoid vendor lock-in – K8s is cloud agnostic, meaning you can take advantage of being able to run on GRIDZ, AWS, Azure, and more
• K8s is tried, tested, trusted and fully supported by a thriving developer community