Curious about the buzz on containers and Kubernetes?

A survey showed that containers in production increased to 84%, which is a 15% jump from 2018. About 78% of respondents also reported that they’re using Kubernetes in production. This is a 20% increase from the 58% usage from last year.

Want to know more about it? Here’s a guide discussing what Kubernetes is and why it matters!

What is Kubernetes?

During the early stages of application deployment, applications run on physical hardware servers. This caused an issue with resource allocation. As there are no resource boundaries when using physical servers.

For instance, you’re running multiple applications on 1 physical server. One application may use a lot of the resources causing the others to underperform. While you may opt to run different applications on different physical servers, it’s costly.

As a solution, developers came up with virtual deployment. Virtualization made it possible for developers to run many Virtual Machines (VMs) on a physical server. This resulted in better scalability as developers can easily add or update applications.

Further development in the field led to the use of containers. While containers and VMs are similar, containers proved to be more viable.

Aside from being lightweight, it has more relaxed isolation properties. This allows it to create container images as compared to VMs efficiently.

The thing about containers is that you need to manage them to avoid downtime. If the container bugs down, another container should immediately start operating. This is where Kubernetes comes in.

Kubernetes is an open-source container organization platform. It allows developers to deploy, manage, and scale multiple containerized workloads automatically.

What Can Kubernetes Do?

The primary use of Kubernetes is in container orchestration. As mentioned above, containers provide an easy way to package and deploy services. However, in reality, they have to deal with running dozens to thousands of containers.

Manually deploying, managing, connecting, and updating containers take up a lot of resources. Aside from these, there’s the extra task of scaling the container as per demand. Developers have to do this while ensuring that the containers are fault-tolerant.

Further, there’s the integration and provision of communication across different clusters. These tasks take up a lot of time and resources, which means higher costs.

However, by using Kubernetes, not only will it complete the task, but it also saves you team time. Such time that they can use to focus on other matters.

Kubernetes Allows for Better Application Management

Kubernetes checks and monitors the containers and nodes’ health. This ensures that your application doesn’t encounter any failures.

Aside from this, Kubernetes have built-in self-healing capabilities. It has an auto-replace feature; thus, it can heal itself when a pod or container fails.

It also has an automated rollback that eliminates downtime during updates or deployment of new versions. In instances where the rollout falters, it immediately rolls back.

As a result, the application will hardly encounter problems. Instead, it’ll continue to perform at the desired state and great lengths.

Moreover, Kubernetes doesn’t operate on a deployment script. Rather, it permits declarative expressions of the anticipated state.

This means that it can resolve issues when the condition of the containers doesn’t match the desired state. All these features allow for faster solving of issues.

It Allows Multi-Cloud Adoption

Businesses are gearing toward micro-service architecture. This helped increase the popularity of containers. Thus, it’s no surprise that containers, Kubernetes, and the tools used to manage it, such as Turbonomic, are a trend.

So long as you hold a Kubernetes certification, there are no limits to what you can achieve with Kubernetes. One of which is that Kubernetes allows for great multi-cloud adoption.

Microservice architecture splits your application into smaller parts via containers. Such containers are versatile and can run on different clouds.

What’s even better is that with Kubernetes, your options broaden as it can perform on any cloud. May it be a public, private, or even a hybrid cloud. This allows you to reach a greater range of users, whichever cloud they’re at.

Speedy Application Deployment and Update at Scale

Kubernetes has a lot of features that hasten the deployment of applications on any scale. For one, its horizontal infrastructure scaling eases removing or adding new servers. It can also perform automatic scaling base on application metrics.

It even has a replication controller that ensures that the pods running in your cluster are equal. In cases where there are too many pods, it lays off the extra pods. When there aren’t enough pods, it enables more pods.

Meanwhile, the canary deployments enable you to test and compare new production deployment with the previous version simultaneously. You won’t have to worry about traffic as routers send signals to appropriate containers. On the other hand, the built-in load balancers allow you to respond to resource outages during high traffic by balancing your resources.

What is Not True About Kubernetes?

Before proceeding with the Kubernetes tutorial, you must understand its limits. Such knowledge will help you avoid misuse, which can lead to malfunctions.

First off, Kubernetes doesn’t run on an all-inclusive Platform as a Service system. It’s not used to build an application as it doesn’t provide configuration language.

It doesn’t offer services such as data-processing databases as built-in services. However, such components may run on Kubernetes. Moreover, applications running on Kubernetes can access such mechanisms via a portable mechanism.

Kubernetes vs Docker

A Docker is also an open platform used in developing, deploying, and running applications. It enables developers to separate the applications from the infrastructure for faster delivery.

While Docker Engine allows you to build containers, it can’t orchestrate them. This is because a Docker can only run 1 node. Thus, Kubernetes is more extensive as it can manage clusters of nodes.

Capitalize on Kubernetes Now!

Unable to meet customer demands due to slow application development time? Kubernetes might be what you’re looking for! From zero-downtime deployments to high fault tolerance, Kubernetes can help effectively manage containers for your application.

You’ll also stand to reap other benefits, such as efficient utilization of resources. This leads to lower costs and a high productivity rate.

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