Kubernetes And Its Uses Cases..

Kubernetes (also known as k8s or “kube”) is an open source container orchestration platform that automates many of the manual processes involved in deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications.

In other words, you can cluster together groups of hosts running Linux® containers, and Kubernetes helps you easily and efficiently manage those clusters.

Kubernetes clusters can span hosts across on-premise, public, private, or hybrid clouds. For this reason, Kubernetes is an ideal platform for hosting cloud-native applications that require rapid scaling, like real-time data streaming through Apache Kafka.

Kubernetes was originally developed and designed by engineers at Google. Google was one of the early contributors to Linux container technology and has talked publicly about how everything at Google runs in containers. (This is the technology behind Google’s cloud services.)

Google generates more than 2 billion container deployments a week, all powered by its internal platform, Borg. Borg was the predecessor to Kubernetes, and the lessons learned from developing Borg over the years became the primary influence behind much of Kubernetes technology.

Fun fact: The 7 spokes in the Kubernetes logo refer to the project’s original name, “Project Seven of Nine.”

Red Hat was one of the first companies to work with Google on Kubernetes, even prior to launch, and has become the 2nd leading contributor to the Kubernetes upstream project. Google donated the Kubernetes project to the newly formed Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2015.

With Kubernetes you can:

• Orchestrate containers across multiple hosts.
• Make better use of hardware to maximize resources needed to run your enterprise apps.
• Control and automate application deployments and updates.
• Mount and add storage to run stateful apps.
• Scale containerized applications and their resources on the fly.
• Declaratively manage services, which guarantees the deployed applications are always running the way you intended them to run.
• Health-check and self-heal your apps with autoplacement, autorestart, autoreplication, and autoscaling.

How does Kubernetes work?

A working Kubernetes deployment is called a cluster. You can visualize a Kubernetes cluster as two parts: the control plane and the compute machines, or nodes.

Each node is its own Linux environment, and could be either a physical or virtual machine. Each node runs pods, which are made up of containers.

The control plane is responsible for maintaining the desired state of the cluster, such as which applications are running and which container images they use. Compute machines actually run the applications and workloads.

Kubernetes runs on top of an operating system and interacts with pods of containers running on the nodes.

The Kubernetes control plane takes the commands from an administrator (or DevOps team) and relays those instructions to the compute machines.

This handoff works with a multitude of services to automatically decide which node is best suited for the task. It then allocates resources and assigns the pods in that node to fulfill the requested work.

The desired state of a Kubernetes cluster defines which applications or other workloads should be running, along with which images they use, which resources should be made available to them, and other such configuration details.

From an infrastructure point of view, there is little change to how you manage containers. Your control over containers just happens at a higher level, giving you better control without the need to micromanage each separate container or node.

Your work involves configuring Kubernetes and defining nodes, pods, and the containers within them. Kubernetes handles orchestrating the containers.

Where you run Kubernetes is up to you. This can be on bare metal servers, virtual machines, public cloud providers, private clouds, and hybrid cloud environments. One of Kubernetes’ key advantages is it works on many different kinds of infrastructure.

Kubernetes provides security

Kubernetes provides innate security advantages. For example, application containers are typically not patched or updated — instead, container images are replaced entirely with new versions. This enables strict version control and permits rapid rollbacks if a vulnerability is uncovered in new code.

-Case Studies for Some Companies

ADIDAS

Challenge

In recent years, the adidas team was happy with its software choices from a technology perspective — but accessing all of the tools was a problem. For instance, “just to get a developer VM, you had to send a request form, give the purpose, give the title of the project, who’s responsible, give the internal cost center a call so that they can do recharges,” says Daniel Eichten, Senior Director of Platform Engineering. “The best case is you got your machine in half an hour. Worst case is half a week or sometimes even a week.”

Solution

To improve the process, “we started from the developer point of view,” and looked for ways to shorten the time it took to get a project up and running and into the adidas infrastructure, says Senior Director of Platform Engineering Fernando Cornago. They found the solution with containerization, agile development, continuous delivery, and a cloud native platform that includes Kubernetes and Prometheus.

Impact

Just six months after the project began, 100% of the adidas e-commerce site was running on Kubernetes. Load time for the e-commerce site was reduced by half. Releases went from every 4–6 weeks to 3–4 times a day. With 4,000 pods, 200 nodes, and 80,000 builds per month, adidas is now running 40% of its most critical, impactful systems on its cloud native platform.

WIKIMEDIA

Challenges

• Simplify a complex, difficult-to-manage infrastructure
• Allow developers to continue writing tools and bots using existing techniques

Why Kubernetes

• Wikimedia Tool Labs chose Kubernetes because it can mimic existing workflows, while reducing complexity

Approach

• Migrate old systems and a complex infrastructure to Kubernetes

Results

• 20 percent of web tools that account for more than 40 percent of web traffic now run on Kubernetes
• A 25-node cluster that keeps up with each new Kubernetes release
• Thousands of lines of old code have been deleted, thanks to Kubernetes

NOKIA

“When people are picking up their phones and making a call on Nokia networks, they are creating containers in the background with Kubernetes.” — GERGELY CSATARI, SENIOR OPEN SOURCE ENGINEER, NOKIA

BOSE

“At Bose we’re building an IoT platform that has enabled our physical products. If it weren’t for Kubernetes and the rest of the CNCF projects being free open source software with such a strong community, we would never have achieved scale, or even gotten to launch on schedule.” — JOSH WEST, LEAD CLOUD ENGINEER, BOSE

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