Kubernetes

Although technically best described as a container orchestration engine, Kubernetes is rapidly becoming the infrastructure platform for cloud native computing, an approach to flexibly using public or private clouds.

What Is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is a portable open source platform — with a rapidly growing ecosystem — for managing containerized workloads and services. Kubernetes aids declarative configuration, automates deployment, and manages cloud native applications with on-premise systems or public cloud infrastructure.

What Is a Kubernetes Cluster?

A Kubernetes cluster is a set of nodes for running containerized applications. A node is a device or data point in a network. With a Kubernetes cluster, teams can run containers in multiple environments such as public clouds, on-premise, virtual, or physical environments.

Clusters often comprise a control plane — which manages the cluster’s desired state — and some worker nodes, which could be virtual machines or physical computers depending on the cluster. Each Kubernetes cluster’s desired state determines elements such as applications or running workloads, corresponding images, and configuration details.

Benefits of Kubernetes Architecture

The idea behind the cloud native computing approach is to put your applications within containers and then manage them against available resources using Kubernetes.

Beyond orchestration, Kubernetes as a platform solves many enterprises’ IT issues. Some of the benefits of Kubernetes architecture include:

Service discovery. Service discovery is the process of automatically locating devices on a network. Kubernetes has labels and annotations for additional metadata to identify and group objects with similar attributes. These labels and annotations make it easy to associate a service with a group of pods in service discovery.

Storage orchestration. Kubernetes allows teams to mount chosen storage systems into pods, such as public cloud providers and local storage.

Flexibility. A container runtime or engine is a program that runs containers. Kubernetes supports several types of container runtime and infrastructure as long as they have some version of Linux or Windows. K8s portability makes it easy for development teams to switch engines, servers, or environmental configurations.

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Multicloud operations. Many organizations believe that cloud computing is the best way to handle IT operations. Each cloud provider offers unique interfaces, posing a danger that a customer’s operations may be “locked” into that specific provider. This risk makes many companies adopt a multicloud strategy. Kubernetes supports multicloud infrastructure and quickly scales its environment from one cloud to another.

Developer productivity. Kubernetes has an operations-friendly approach that enables development and operations (DevOps) teams to innovate, scale, and deploy faster than they previously could.

Bin packing. Kubernetes fits containers into nodes based on defined resources such as CPU, RAM, and the cluster of nodes developers provide for containerized risks.

Using Kubernetes for Containers Eases Application Deployment

Containers allow organizations to streamline the development process to transition between the developer and the production deployment automatically. Containers free up developers to use whatever languages and frameworks they prefer, given the ability to package all the dependencies for these specific choices within the container itself.