Do you use Kubernetes?
History of containers
Terms like Kubernetes (K8s) and containers are coming at us from all sides. We hear about them every day in the world of technology and online business, which is no coincidence. Cloud-native approach is considered the gold standard of modern application development.
The origins of containerisation go back to the late 1970s. of the last century. It was then that process isolation structures began to emerge within the UNIX operating system, enabling further development in this direction.
Containers gained huge popularity in 2013 with the rise of Docker. A large community is forming around the entire ecosystem. As a consequence, security is also becoming much more of an issue. Over the course of a few years, this has matured to the point where containers can be used for critical production systems. But with that came the need to keep everything under control and preferably centralized.
Google has answered this challenge by creating an open-source orchestration tool called Kubernetes (Greek for pilot, helmsman). The name is abbreviated as K8s. Why? For there are 8 letters between K and s. Within a few years, Kubernetes became the orchestration standard.
Interesting fact: after LINUX, K8s is the second most successful open-source project
How does Kubernetes work?
First, let’s go over some basic terms used in Kubernetes. The smallest unit is the container itself. Kubernetes adds on top of this its concept of a pod, which we can think of as a folder where one or more containers can be placed. Pods then run on nodes, which are e.g. virtual machines or physical servers connected in a cluster.
The fact that it is a clustered solution ensures high availability and resilience to outages. This also allows horizontal scaling, i.e. adding more nodes to the cluster to increase the available computing resources. Everything can be done without downtime and without impacting existing applications, unlike vertical scaling of virtual machines where downtime is usually required to add CPU or RAM. Applications can be divided into a namespace based on their use and security.
Why use Kubernetes?
- Automation and orchestration: you can define the state of your applications in Kubernetes, which then allows Kubernetes to automatically perform the necessary actions to maintain the state you define, such as restarting containers in case of failure or scaling applications depending on the load.
- Scalability: Kubernetes makes it easy to scale your applications horizontally and vertically. This means that you can easily add or subtract containers according to the current load, which contributes to efficient use of resources.
- High Availability: Kubernetes offers mechanisms to ensure high availability of your applications. This includes, for example, container replication and the ability to automatically recover containers in the event of a container failure.
- Portability: thanks to a standardized container management interface, applications can be easily transferred between different cloud providers or even between on-premises and cloud environments. There is therefore no risk of vendor lock-in.
- Extensibility: Kubernetes is easy to extend, with a huge supporting ecosystem of plugins and extensions that allow you to customize the platform.
- Monitoring and management: Kubernetes provides tools to monitor the health of your applications and infrastructure, allowing you to identify and respond to problems.
Who can this help? App developers who want to stay ahead of the competition, earn more and work easier. At Geetoo, we offer managed Kubernetes so you can put your operational and management concerns behind you and focus purely on your business and clients.
