What is common between Booking, BlaBlaCar, Pinterest, Tinder and Pokemon Go? They all operate on the basis of Kubernetes.

In a last decade, the demand for containers has skyrocketed. As Gartner forecasted back in March 2022, large enterprises would use 90% of this technology till 2026. And in another survey at Stack Overflow, the developers have dubbed this technology as the most favorable and popular one.

In this article, we answer the question of what Kubernetes is in simple words, as well as show what tasks it accomplishes and what its benefits are.

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is an open-source platform for automatic container apps management. Often it can be named as k8s. The technology provides basic tools for deployment, scaling, and support of the containers.

k8s is irreplaceable in projects with several independent programs. It is also used when there is a need for app launch optimization in cases of fluctuating efficiency requirements and within the testing environments. Kubernetes is in the basis of the modern microservices’ architecture, cloud software and DevOps work processes. It has a constantly growing ecosystem.

In 2014, Google rolled out k8s. It became a successor to Borg, a system of cluster management, which is used by engineers inside the company. Its first name was Project Seven after the Star Trek heroine, alluding to seven handles on a boat steering wheel, which is the project’s logo. The modern name derives from the Greek for ‘helmsman’.

The app containerization is key in Kubernetes work. It has several ways of deployment:

  • Traditional. As soon as the computers emerged, the apps were installed on one server. In turn, they were competing for resources with each other, reducing efficiency. To solve this issue, one app was launched per one server. However, it was impractical to have many servers.
  • Virtual machine. The computing resource is using the software instead of a physical computer to launch apps. One or more virtual ‘guest’ machines are working on a physical ‘host’. The virtualization allowed for a more effective server’s resources allocation.
  • Container. It is a form of OS virtualization. Inside, it has all the necessary files, binary code, libraries, and configuration files. Contrary to VMs, containers do not have operating systems images, which makes them smaller.

The main reason for container technology to come up is the emergence of complex and high-load IT infrastructures.

Kubernetes capacities

Containers orchestration

Increasingly more enterprises opt for containers due to the simplicity in creating them, uniting and deploying services. This way, it is more efficient to use resources and isolate processes. However, during company scaling and rise in the amount of projects, the number of containers also increases. When formerly they were manually managed, in the future a special team will be required to update, connect, manage and deploy them.

The containers function at the lowest level of IT system organization. To get the most of them, orchestrating tools are required, which are stacked above them.

Microservices administration

The concept of microservices is far from being new. It took the software architects decades to break large-scale services into smaller ones and have the autonomy of their actions. But the development team should anyway coordinate the infrastructure, where all the little services are, and calculate the necessary amount of RAM, virtual disks etc. Kubernetes offers the main framework, which provides description to the IT environment architecture, enables verification and issue solving when it comes to the issue of sharing resources.

Managing cloud environment

Kubelets are designed to be used anywhere: in private, public or hybrid clouds. They also make it possible to work in a multicloud system — to perform tasks in a single cloud, as well as in numerous ones. It is the way to avoid issues with vendor lock-in and to increase safety.

Kubernetes advantages

  • Simplicity and flexibility of launch, unlike with a virtual machine.
  • Ability to quickly roll back changes.
  • Software creation in the release process and their separation from the hardware infrastructure.
  • Unified development environment, testing on the server and developer terminals (laptops, computers).
  • Ability to transfer applications to different clouds and OS.
  • Splitting apps into isolated, distributed, flexible microservices with dynamic deployment and management.

For the enterprises, the technology helps to reduce IT infrastructure costs, optimize funds invested in infrastructure and equipment. It also reduces the workload of the IT team, allowing them to engage in the development and creation of new projects.

Kubelets distributed architecture and scalability pair well with machine learning and artificial intelligence. These technologies will keep their growing popularity.