Contents
- Kubernetes Container Technology
- What Are Major Objects in Kubernetes?
- What Critical Tasks does Kubernetes support?
- What are the top benefits with Kubernetes?
- How Does Kubernetes Strengthen DevOps?
- What factors should be considered before planning for Kubernetes?
- Conclusion
Kubernetes Container Technology
Enterprises continue to explore and embrace Kubernetes and it is now the fastest-growing open-source container-management technology. A container at a high-level looks like a virtual machine, but it shares the host system’s kernel along with other containers.
Kubernetes enables the automated deployment, scaling, and management of multiple containers to work together in harmony and helps in reducing operational challenges. It has the advantage of being used in a variety of environments as it allows orchestrating containers across deployments to public clouds, private clouds, and even hybrid environments.
What Are Major Objects in Kubernetes?
– Containers are light-weight and look like virtual machines.
– Pods are the basic building blocks that can run a set of containers.
– The replication controller allows Kubernetes clusters to self-heal.
– A service that exposes a logical set of Pods for communication. The service can be a LoadBalancer, ClusterIP or NodePort type.
Kubernetes particularly schedules and runs application containers on clusters of physical or virtual machines. Containers make it easier to host and manage the lifecycle of web applications inside a portable environment more efficiently and quickly. These containers act as replicas and serve to load balance incoming requests, and docker is the generally used tool used to deploy containers inside clusters (while rkt is another option to containerize the application). Docker containers are efficient in managing packaged applications. Containerization allows development teams to move quickly, deploy software more efficiently and consistently
With agile and DevOps processes are already widely adopted by enterprises, the enterprises continue to deploy more and more containerized applications in recent years. A leading global analyst report states that more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production by 2022 due to the advantage of containerization.
What are the top benefits with Kubernetes?
The best advantages that can be achieved to enterprisers with Kubernetes are:
Portable and Open-source: Kubernetes is 100% open source, and highly flexible. Hence, it is compatible across different environments and platforms
Workload Scalability: Kubernetes proves as efficient in the usage of infrastructure resources. Also, it provides the best scaling features, that can be used based on the purpose such as Horizontal infrastructure scaling, Auto-scaling, Manual scaling, and Replication Controller
Availability for Application and Infrastructure: Kubernetes is exclusively designed to handle applications and infrastructure when they are effectively needed during deployment
Ability to speed up delivery: Containerisation effectively helps in speeding up the process of deployment, i.e. installing, configuring, running, testing, and doing necessary changes to the software. It enhances the deployment process by providing various features such as Automated rollouts and rollbacks, Canary Deployment, and Programming languages and automation testing frameworks support
How Does Kubernetes Strengthen DevOps?
1. Enables the Shift from Host-Centric to Container-Centric Deployment:
An important advantage of using Kubernetes is to help engineering teams move from being physical and virtual machine-centric to being container-centric. These containers allow standardizing the environment and are independent of the underlying operating systems and hardware infrastructure.
2. Ensures More Flexibility for DevOps Workflow:
Kubernetes and Docker make for a highly flexible and portable technology that enables DevOps teams to have an easier, more hassle-free and consistent deployment for the use in development, testing and production environments. Such an environment eases developers to build one time and then provide the ability to run everywhere. Quality Assurance becomes easier due to the reliable and consistent development, test and production environments The DevOps team can create appropriate configurations to run in various environments while it helps the development teams to focus on coding features or thrashing out bugs and thus ensuring releasing of quality software.
3. Brings-in Cross-Functional Team Coordination within DevOps:
The usage of containers reduces the conflicts across teams with the same containers being used across developer, QA and deployment teams. It becomes easier for teams to collaborate, as it eliminates manual tasks related to deployment and scaling containerized applications.
4. Pets vs Cattle Model:
While the earlier deployment models correspond to ‘pet services model’ wherein each server is individually cared for and carefully maintained (just like pets). The Kubernetes model corresponds to ‘cattle service model’ wherein the servers just have identification numbers (just like cattle) and individual pods are almost identical to each other and are considered dispensable and replaceable by alternate pods.
5. Immutable Infrastructure & Reliability:
In Kubernetes, new containers are immutable and they are created when there is a problem encountered with the original state. The strength of Kubernetes platform lies in its reliability; has a series of health-check features that eliminate any issues that are associated with deploying a new iteration. This platform has an auto-healing feature that ensures the entire system is up and running.
6. Zero Downtime Deployments:
Kubernetes helps with blue and green deployments wherein new environments can be set up while the earlier environment has not been taken down yet and thus allows for easy switching to the new environment without any downtime. The blue-green deployment approach ensures there are two production environments wherein once the software is working in the green environment, you can switch the router so that all incoming requests are sent to it while the blue one is idle. Therefore, when once the green environment is live and stable, then the blue environment can be destroyed.
7. Support across various platforms:
Kubernetes always helps in supporting DevOps across multiple platforms. The open-source container-orchestration system enables in building and deploying any type of application into the container. These containers can be further shifted with the means of different host systems. However, if any misshapen during the process of shifting, Kubernetes effectively automates the patches, solve and updates the issue immediately.
8. Efficient to increase server usage:
There are scenarios where the apps that are not effectively packed onto servers can result in heavy load irrespective of the place where the app is tested, i.e. in the cloud or on-premise. In such scenarios, Kubernetes is efficient to increase the server usage and effectively manages the increase or decrease of the load.
What factors should be considered before planning for Kubernetes?
– Choose a platform that is ready for production and is capable to perform complete automation testing for the configuration without hassles
– Essential to select a platform that can improve flexibility, and transparency between modules
– Select a platform that is effective in supporting multi-cloud strategy
– Choose a platform that can incorporate automated intelligence to monitor and provide alerts
– Select or consider a platform that helps the applications to run without the need for any new environment
Conclusion
Kubernetes manages the life cycle of your containerized application deployed on (private or public) cloud or hybrid environments. Kubernetes is one of the most sought after container orchestration tool to keep the development agile and ensures an effective CI/CD process with automated deployments. It is significantly changing the way software is shipped and deployed in today’s world. TestingXperts can help you with easing your deployments using Kubernetes and containerization. Contact us to know about our services in helping you with automated deployments, containerization, and infrastructure setup.
