Kubernetes - What is Kubernetes?
In this post we are going to explore Kubernetes in detail and learn the importance of highly growing technology. You will understand ?What is Kubernetes and why it?s growing so fast.? Kubernetes is a very complex system which is being used in the enterprise environment for running large numbers of containerized applications.
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is also known as K8s, which is an open-source container deployment platform for running containers like docker. Kubernetes features auto-deployment, auto-scaling and management of containerized applications. Kubernetes was developed by Google which combines its experience of running 15 years of production workload. Google released Kubernetes as an open-source tool in 2015, but now this software is maintained by Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Official Definition of Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration tool developed by Google. This tool is used to deploy, run and manage containerized applications on the Kubernetes cluster. Kubernetes cluster manages the containers such as Docker containers and runs these containers on the Kubernetes cluster. Kubernetes is powerful enough to run 100s to thousands or more containers on the Kubernetes cluster.
Kubernetes is powerful container management software that helps in managing and running thousands of containerized applications. For example you can run your web server, application server or database servers in Kubernetes cluster. You can also run your microservices in the Kubernetes cluster.
Kubernetes cluster can be installed on the physical machine, virtual machine or in a cloud environment. So, it helps in running your containerized application in these environments without any performance degradation. Kubernetes makes your application highly scalable and maintainable. You can run your applications and also upgrade it to a new build without any downtime.
Kubernetes also supports hybrid deployment environments. A hybrid solution where on-premises and cloud resources are combined. In such a scenario Kubenetes are installed on-premise and in a cloud environment together. This helps in combining these two powerful systems together.
These are the reasons of such combined solution:
Cloud migration: Such a solution can be used while migrating to the cloud environment.
Throughput: Such a solution will help in increasing the throughput of the combined system. For example cloud computing can be used when servers in the data center are full.
Replication: This can be used to replicate the data center backup to the cloud environment.
Geographical replication: Hybrid Kubernetes installation can also be used for geographic replication of data.
What problem does Kubernetes solve?
Running application 24x7: Kubernetes is designed to run containerized applications 24x7 without downtime. Kubernetes helps in auto eviction of the failed application and run new instances making these applications available 24x7.
Deployment applications multiple times: If your application is under heavy development or in bug fixing then you can easily deploy your applications multiple times in a day without any issues. New builds can be deployed without affecting the production instances of the applications.
Deploying a large number of webservices containers: These days web-services are being used very extensively instead of monolithic applications. There are many benefits of using web-services in self-contained container applications. But deploying and managing web-services are very difficult or even impossible using the custom scripts. Kubernetes helps in managing such a large number of web-services containers with ease and with efficiency.
Running highly available applications: Kubernetes can be used to deploy and run containerized applications with the guarantee of high availability. Kubernetes guarantees high availability and auto-failover recovery. Kubernetes can be configured to evict failed applications and start new pods.
Highly scalable applications: Kubernetes can be configured to create new instances of the applications to meet the load requirements. Thus Kubernetes can be used to deploy applications with high scalability. In the cloud environment Kubernetes can also be configured to autoscale the cluster as and when requirement of more processing power is needed.
Disaster recovery: Kubernetes also helps in the backup and restore, it can start from the last run state to help in faster disaster recovery. There are many ways architects design Kubernetes clusters for disaster recovery.
Fault tolerant and self healing application: Kubernetes is an enterprise class cluster that can run containerized applications in fault tolerant way. Kubernetes can bring applications from a single instance or from the configuration. Kubernetes also detects issues with the running pods and helps in recovering the application instance.
Basic architecture of Kuberntes cluster
Architectural components of the Kubernetes are master node, slave nodes, K8S process . It also includes containers, pods and services. Master node is responsible for starting and managing the worker nodes to meet work load requirements.
Why do Kubernetes rise so fast?
Kubernates is a container orchestration tool developed by Google and due to its features its popularity is growing very fast. Kubernetes is powerful enough to run a large number of containers on the Kubernetes cluster with efficiency. Kubernetes helps in running different versions of the containerized application on the same Kubernetes cluster without any issue. Deployment of the application is also easy and it's mostly automated.