Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform, which enables multiple containers to work collectively, and automates manual processes, like deploying, managing, and scaling, containerized applications.  

Kubernetes evolution 

Kubernetes gets its name from Greek, which means helmsman or governor or pilot. Kubernetes is also known as k8s (the eight alphabets between K and s) or kube

Kubernetes has a large and rapidly growing ecosystem and manages application containers across multiple hosts.  Kubernetes clusters can host across public, private, or hybrid clouds. Thus, Kubernetes can be used for hosting cloud-native applications that need rapid scaling. 

Earlier, companies ran applications on physical servers before the existence of Kubernetes. It was difficult for users to allocate the resource boundaries for software applications in a physical server, which led to resource allocation issues. For example, when you run multiple applications on a physical server, there can be occurrences where one application would take up most of the resources, and thus the other applications would not get the resources.  

To avoid the resource allocation issue, you can run each application on a different physical server. However, this solution did not scale as resources were not utilized, and it was not cost-effective for companies to manage multiple physical servers.  

Therefore, virtualization was introduced, in which you run multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical server. The VM is a system, which runs all the components, and its Operating System (OS), in the virtualized hardware.  

Image source: ResearchGate 

The virtualization enables applications to be inaccessible between VMs and provides security such that the information of one application cannot be accessed by another application. The virtualization helps proper use of resources in a physical server, provides better scalability, and reduces hardware costs. In virtualization, you can use a set of physical resources as a cluster of disposable virtual machines. 

Image source: MakeITSolutions 

Then, came the use of containers similar to VMs with better isolation properties to share the OS among the applications. In a production environment, the containers should be managed that run the applications, and confirm that there is no downtime, that is, if a container stops, another container should start immediately. Kubernetes was then used to overcome these issues.  Kubernetes provides a framework to run distributed systems collectively. Kubernetes helps to scale and identifies failover for applications, and provides deployment patterns. In 2014, Google made Kubernetes available for other users. 

Image credits: RedHat 

The cluster is a working Kubernetes deployment. The two parts of the Kubernetes cluster are: 

Kubernetes runs on an operating system and interacts with pods of containers, which run on the compute machines. The Kubernetes control plane receives the commands from an administrator or DevOps team, and sends the commands to the compute machines. Kubernetes identifies the compute machines suitable for each of the tasks and assigns the resources and pods in the compute machines to complete the requested task. 

The desired state of a Kubernetes cluster defines the configuration details, such as: 

For infrastructures, the control over containers is at a higher level, which provides better control to avoid micromanaging each separate container or compute machine. You can configure Kubernetes and define compute machines, pods, and containers, and Kubernetes will arrange the containers. You can run Kubernetes on VMs, public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud environments.  

Advantages of using Kubernetes 

 

Disadvantages of using Kubernetes 

Kubernetes as a part of your Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) 

Kubernetes helps in application development, and its operations throughout all the stages of the SDLC, such as from planning, defining, coding, building, testing, deploying, and operating and monitoring. 

Kubernetes provides portability and flexibility for all the users involved in the different stages of SDLC, such as:  


Image source: Platform9 

In SDLC, Kubernetes helps developers and system administrators to reduce config variables, and time-consuming setup and maintenance, and testers to reduce risk and improve efficiency. Kubernetes technology increases the competence and eradicates the risk by ensuring that the system configuration of the test environment is the same as the production environment. 

Kubernetes is very important for SDLC as the shift of the digital wave has made software architecture complex, use of various technologies, and run-on multiple environments with multiple iterations. Kubernetes helps you manage consistency, as the infinite loop of technologies and environments. 

In SDLC, Kubernetes improves for Continuous Integration (CI)/Continuous Delivery (CD), that is, you can use the code between different virtual machines in different environments, the same code can be moved across container clusters with Kubernetes. Thus, it helps to improve elasticity, high availability, and usage of resources. 

Kubernetes cluster management: 

Kubernetes environments are widely spread and they can be deployed across multiple data centers, like in the public cloud,private cloud, hybrid clouds, on-premise, and so on. Kubernetes has multiple clusters, like for development, testing, and production, distributed across environments, and are managed effectively. The multi-cluster Kubernetes deployment improves application availability and disaster recovery, reduces latency, and deploys legacy and cloud-native applications across environments. 


Image source: Kubernetes 

A Kubernetes cluster is defined as a collection of node machines to run containerized applications. You can use the Kubernetes cluster to plan and run containers across a group of machines in physical, virtual, cloud, or on-premise environments. A Kubernetes cluster has a desired state, and Kubernetes automatically manages the cluster to match the desired state. 

The Kubernetes environments are managed at an individual cluster level, thus the cost of managing the cluster can increase based on the number of clusters. You deploy, upgrade, and configure each cluster individually for security purposes. 

Below are the tasks involved in Kubernetes cluster management: 

Software developers require easy access to new clusters as they need them very often. For Operations teams (Ops) and Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), new clusters should be configured correctly for applications are made available in production, and to monitor the health of clusters. 

Kubernetes cluster management helps to overcome the challenges faced by administrators and site reliability engineers as they work across a range of environments that run Kubernetes clusters. 

Kubernetes container management

 

Image source: Docker 

A container is a software, which generates, maintains, and secures containerized applications. Kubernetes container management helps for easier and faster networking, and container orchestration. The containers maintain multiple containerized application processes, such as: 

Kubernetes container management is required when there are a greater number of containers for a single IT team to handle.  

Kubernetes container management helps: 

Kubernetes container management: 

Well, Kubernetes has been around for a while and has grown rigorously all over the world. Kubernetes has become the de facto container orchestration tool in the industry today. Every company embracing a cloud-native approach has Kubernetes in their tech stack, which is considered a must. Kubernetes makes complex things very simple with its many unique features. Deploying apps on Kubernetes makes them easy to scale up and scale down accordingly. Many big companies are already using Kubernetes in production and are highly successful.  

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