Lesson 2 of 5By Simplilearn
Last updated on Mar 4, 202115459When applications become larger and more complex, what is the most effective way to host and manage web applications and other dependencies? What if there is a need to scale out a service for business needs? How do we provide services across multiple machines without cumbersome network and storage settings?
These are some questions every developer or application building enterprise asks. While the advent of DevOps has certainly automated and shortened the development-to-deployment lifecycle, the Kubernetes DevOps tool facilitates the configuration and automation process to get the best version of your software out there.
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Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services—with a framework to run distributed systems resiliently. It takes care of your scaling requirements, failover, deployment patterns, scaling, load balancing, logging, and monitoring, much like PaaS offerings. However, it operates at the container level rather than at the hardware level.
It was initially built upon a decade and a half of the Google experience running production workloads. Open-sourced in 2014, Kubernetes is now a growing ecosystem that combines best practices for application deployment to run some of the largest software services by scale.
The name Kubernetes is derived from a Greek term meaning ‘helmsman’ or ‘pilot.’ True to this word, Kubernetes provides the guiding force for developer platforms to transition from virtual machines (VMs) to containers and the statically scheduled to the dynamically scheduled. This means no more manual integration and configuration when you move from a testing environment to an actual production environment or from on-premise to the cloud! The Kubernetes logical compute environment offers common services to all the applications in the cluster as part of the ecosystem for the software to run consistently.
Kubernetes allows you to manage hundreds of containers and clusters of hosts on which containers are executed. When you deploy your containerized applications to a group of computers, Kubernetes automates their distribution and scheduling, working as an orchestration platform to simplify the work of technical teams.
Particularly, in instances when you need to manage applications with hundreds of containers spread across multiple hosts, a container orchestration tool like Kubernetes manages the workloads in a compute cluster, connecting to the outside world for scheduling, load balancing, and distribution.
The container orchestration capability of Kubernetes closes the gap between IT operations and development, making a great collaborative DevOps environment for sharing software and their dependencies seamlessly between different environments.
It facilitates the software lifecycle and the enabler teams in the build-test-deploy timeline:
Kubernetes has emerged as a good actor in DevOps as it focuses on features and bugs rather than time-intensive tasks to enable better software to be shipped with a smooth DevOps workflow.
Although we have several tools in DevOps that are equally popular like the Docker, Kubernetes wins the votes. This is because of the many benefits that far outweigh other tools.
Among its many attributes, Kubernetes:
The benefits of Kubernetes extend beyond the development, testing, and production environment to perform mission-critical tasks in large-scale businesses.
Kubernetes offers the widest range of features required to deploy containerized applications.
As an open-source platform, Kubernetes can run containers on any number of public clouds, virtual machines, or infrastructures. Its compatibility with most platforms makes it highly flexible and usable.
Kubernetes supports most programming languages and frameworks.
The application is packaged, and the containers scheduled based on available resources, allowing optimal utilization of unused resources. As Kubernetes enables you to specify the CPU and RAM needs of each container, the containers can be slotted to increase compute efficiency and ultimately lowers costs.
Kubernetes allows complete control over the number of containers you want with deployment and keeps those containers ready with a rollout. Thus, you can automate Kubernetes to create new containers, remove existing containers, or adopt all of their resources to a new container.
Versions and updates are automated and running, so you don’t waste time or resources on downtime. Also, the health of the application is screened during rollout to automatically rollback in the case of any glitch or failure.
It checks the health of nodes and containers to ensure than an application doesn’t fail. In case of a pod crash or an error, Kubernetes automatically restarts containers that fail, replaces or kills containers that don’t match user-defined health checks, and doesn’t make them available to clients until they are client-ready.
You can store and manage user information such as passwords and SSH keys, deploy secrets and application configuration without rebuilding your container images, and do all of this without exposing secrets in your stack configuration.
Kubernetes can expose a container using the DNS or IP address. For high traffic to a container, it can automatically balance the loads into the pods and distribute the network traffic for the stable deployment of software.
This supports the distribution of load and auto-balancing of resources instantly during incidental traffic or batch processing.
You can automatically mount a storage system or orchestrate containers on multiple hosts.
Kubernetes offers several features for auto-scaling. You can deploy and control the number of containers based on computing resources, workload balance, and scale-out your software or create applications on more containers by grouping containers in pods. Horizontal autoscaling is another feature whereby Kubernetes auto-scalers automatically size a deployment’s number of pods based on the usage of specified resources and at the individual server level.
New servers can be added or removed easily. Kubernetes can thus automatically expose your containers to the internet or other containers in the cluster to automatically load balance traffic across matching containers.
Kubernetes allows you to build your cluster with a mix of virtual machines on the cloud, on-premise, or in your data center, to suit your requirements.
Kubernetes workflow includes support for Amazon Web Services EBS, Google Cloud Platform persistent disks, and other storage.
Kubernetes supports a variety of workloads: stateless, stateful, data-processing.
Kubernetes offers complete support for the application types, application frameworks, and language without differentiating between apps and services.
To get a brief understanding of the features, architecture, and working of Kubernetes, check out this Kubernetes Tutorial video -
Kubernetes has emerged as the cornerstone of DevOps. Its many benefits and flexibility make it the preferred choice of companies when they want to develop, test, and deploy their products and services. Thus, more and more companies are investing in the container management system and Kubernetes.
If you’re looking at enhancing your career prospects in DevOps or building in-depth knowledge about containerization and orchestration tools, then you must check out Simplilearn’s Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Certification Training. Learn how to build applications in containers and deploy and manage a Kubernetes cluster. Master the most trending DevOps tool, Kubernetes, to help facilitate the process of development-to-deployment.
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