What is Kubernetes and why you need it

Posted by Will Smith on February 10th, 2023

Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available.

Why you need Kubernetes and what it can do

Containers are an effective way to bundle and run your applications. In a creation environment, you'll need to control the containers that run the applications and ensure that there's no downtime. Like, if a pot decreases, another container needs to start. Wouldn't it be easier if this behavior was handled by way of a system That's how Kubernetes involves the rescue! Kubernetes offers you a platform to run distributed systems resiliently. It manages scaling and failover for the application, provides deployment patterns, and more. Like, Kubernetes can
quickly manage a canary deployment for the system.

Kubernetes offers you: Service discovery and load balancing

Kubernetes can expose a pot using the DNS name or using their own IP address. If traffic to a pot is high, Kubernetes can load balance and distribute the network traffic so that the deployment is stable.

Storage orchestration

Kubernetes lets you mount a storage system of your decision automatically such as local storages, public cloud providers, and more.

Automated rollouts and rollbacks

You can describe the specified state for the deployed containers using Kubernetes, and it can transform the actual state to the specified state at a controlled rate. Like, you can automate Kubernetes to produce new containers for the deployment, remove existing containers and adopt almost all their resources to the brand-new container.

Automatic bin packing

You provide Kubernetes with group of nodes that it may use to run containerized tasks, you command Kubernetes how much CPU and memory (RAM) each container needs. Kubernetes can fit containers on your nodes to help make the best utilization of your resources.

Self-healing

Kubernetes restarts containers that fail and replaces containers, Kubernetes kills containers that don't react to your user-defined health check, and doesn't advertise them to clients until they're prepared to serve.

What Kubernetes isn't

Kubernetes isn’t a traditional, all-inclusive PaaS (Platform as a Service) system. Since Kubernetes operates at the container level relatively than at the hardware level, offers some usually related features common to PaaS offerings, such as scaling, load balancing, deployment, logging, and monitoring. It provides the blocks for building developer platforms, but it preserves user choice and flexibility because it's important.

Kubernetes:

Does not limit the types of applications supported. Kubernetes aims to help an extremely diverse selection of workloads, including stateless, stateful, and data-processing workloads. If a software can run in a pot, it should run great on Kubernetes.

Doesn’t deploy source code and not build your application. Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment (CI/CD) workflows are determined by organization cultures and preferences along with technical requirements.

Does not provide application-level services, such as middleware (for example, message buses), data-processing frameworks (for example, Spark), databases (for example, MySQL), caches, nor cluster storage systems (for example, Ceph) as built-in services. Such components can operate on Kubernetes, and/or may be accessed by applications running on Kubernetes through portable
mechanisms, including the Open Service Broker.

Does not dictate logging, monitoring, or alerting solutions. It gives some integrations as evidence of concept, and mechanisms to get and export metrics.

Does not supply nor mandate a configuration language/system. It gives a declarative API that could be targeted by subjective forms of declarative features.

Additionally, Kubernetes isn't only orchestration system. In fact, it eliminates the requirement for orchestration. The technical definition of orchestration is execution of a precise workflow: first do A, then B, then C. It shouldn't matter how you receive from A to C. Centralized control is also not required. This results in a method that is easier to utilize and better, robust, resilient, and extensible.

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Will Smith

About the Author

Will Smith
Joined: May 16th, 2019
Articles Posted: 32

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