Kubernetes explained
In this article, you’ll understand everything you need to know about Kubernetes.
🔍 Problem: Automation and Speed
Engineers & DevOps need to scale and automate their infrastructures.
💡 Solution: Kubernetes
Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
Kubernetes & Brainboard
Brainboard is an ecosystem of tools for engineers like Chafik & Jeremy made to make their lives better. Naturally, we decided to integrate Kubernetes into our ecosystem of devices. With Kubernetes & the power of Brainboard, it is a way to accelerate deployment and automate tasks like never before.
🏁 Kubernetes services
- Ambassador Labs — provides advanced edge capabilities for supporting DevOps for Kubernetes
- Civo — bringing Kubernetes as a service to customers
- Talos Systems — providing operational stability and security for running production Kubernetes cluster for SaaS companies
- Replicated — a developer of cloud-native tools to use Kubernetes to help deliver software to on-premises or self-hosted environments
- Okteto — free access to secure Kubernetes namespaces that are fully integrated with remote development capabilities
- Kent — EaaS, or Environment as a Service
- Nirmata — unified management plane for the management and deployment of Kubernetes cluster for cloud-based application containerization
- Platform9 — provides a managed Kubernetes service
- Robin.io — provides cloud-native capabilities that help with automating deployment, scaling, and Kubernetes pod complete lifecycle hooks management of enterprise and 5G applications on Kubernetes
- StackWatch — open-source tool to give developers visibility into their Kubernetes spend
👍 Why Terraform Kubernetes
- Enables a significant increase in the operability and portability of modern software systems
- Allows developers to quickly adopt GitOps workflows into their development pipelines
- Increases the velocity and reliability of feature deployments
🔮 Opportunities
1: Containers are the go-to way of building modern apps
2: The Kubernetes ecosystem is rapidly maturing
3: Security is the canary in the coal mine
4: Digital Transformation of financial services
5: Open source is past the hype curve
🔑 Kubernetes Architecture 101
The way Kubernetes is architected is what makes it powerful. Kubernetes has a primary client and server architecture, but it goes way beyond that. Kubernetes can do rolling updates, it also adapts to additional workloads by auto-scaling nodes if it needs to, and it can also self-heal in the case of a pod meltdown. These innate abilities provide developers and operations teams with a massive advantage in that your applications will have little to no downtime. This section gives a brief overview of the master and its worker nodes, with a high-level overview of how Kubernetes manages workloads.
😠 Kubernetes Haters
It turns out that Kubernetes is complicated. There are many moving parts under the hood. Simplifying Container orchestration isn’t easy. Anyone who’s ever tried to follow Kelsey Hightower’s “Kubernetes the Hard Way” can attest to the intricacies associated with it. Standing up a Kubernetes stack by hand includes setup and maintenance of several supporting technologies. But where there are problems, there are opportunities. Many vendors such as Red Hat, Amazon, and Microsoft have built products that mask some challenges with Kubernetes. Some go so far that you barely realize Kubernetes is under the hood.
Other reasons not to use Kubernetes may include:
- Kubernetes is designed for web-scale companies.
- The Kubernetes marketplace is fractured
- Kubernetes has too many pieces.
- Kubernetes doesn’t automatically guarantee high availability.
- It’s hard to control Kubernetes manually.
- There are challenges with Kubernetes monitoring and performance optimization.
- Kubernetes reduces everything to code.
- Kubernetes wants to be all-controlling.
Kubernetes' alternatives: Docker vs Kubernetes vs Jenkins
Kubernetes is highly resilient and supports zero downtime, rollback, scaling, and container self-healing, but presents.
- Container as a Service (CaaS) — services like AWS Fargate and Azure Container Instances, Google Cloud Run, which allow you to manage containers at scale without the complex orchestration capabilities provided by Kubernetes.
- Managed Kubernetes services — including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), which let you run managed, hosted Kubernetes cluster. These services remove much of the complexity of deploying, upgrading, and maintaining Kubernetes but still require expertise to manage.
- PaaS using Kubernetes — several providers, such as OpenShift Container Platform and Rancher, offer complete cloud computing platforms, which have Kubernetes at their core but offer more straightforward operation built-in capabilities like security and networking.
- Lightweight container orchestrators — Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestrator but is not the only one. Docker Swarm and Nomad are two examples of capable, mature orchestrators, which are much less complex to use and maintain than Kubernetes
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