Kubernetes 

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is an open-source system for orchestrating the scale, deployment, and management of containerized workloads and services. Kubernetes, which is both portable and extensible, automates many manual processes required for the scalable deployment and management of containerized applications. 

 The Kubernetes open-source distributed system (also known as k8s or “kube”) was initially developed by a team at Google in 2014 to help manage containerized applications at scale. It was later accepted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a donation from Google on March 16, 2016. (1) 

How does Kubernetes work?

Kubernetes functions like a distributed operating system, decoupling and abstracting the underlying physical infrastructure resources—such as the compute (CPU, memory), storage, and network primitives—from the container applications. Kubernetes tracks, monitors, and manages the collection of physical machines as a single pool of resources, allocating these infrastructure resources to the cloud-enabled applications as they require. Kubernetes also maintains the desired state of the infrastructure and applications by monitoring and automatically handling issues related to workload scale and performance. 

A properly implemented Kubernetes system can run multiple modernized applications across a collection of cloud-enabled infrastructures and private on-premises data center environments. 

Why is Kubernetes important?

Digitally-transformed businesses running modern applications require the quick, reliable deployment of services, applications, and systems—oftentimes at a moment’s notice. When time and stability are of the essence, engineering and IT operations teams have little time to coordinate to ensure the infrastructure has the resources required to launch, tune, scale, and maintain the new or updated application. Rather, the infrastructure should be dynamic and robust enough to deal with whatever demands the modern application throws at it from the onset and over time. 

This is where Kubernetes comes in; confidently deploy and manage the application—this one and the many more that will follow—automating the process and taking the stress out of orchestrating the whole thing. Each containerized application should be able to access the exposed resources: CPU, storage, and networks. 

With the Kubernetes managed infrastructure in place, engineering and IT operations can work together to seamlessly provide and utilize core primitives for scheduling, monitoring, upgrading, and relocating containerized applications. And, when the team steps away from the keyboard, Kubernetes keeps an eye on things with self-healing services such as auto-placement, auto-restart, auto-replication, and auto-scaling. 

Benefits of Kubernetes 

Aside from the value of embracing a strategy that is widespread across the software engineering community, your business will benefit from the container management capabilities found in Kubernetes as described in the following examples: 

• • Kubernetes handles the organization and allocation of the underlying resource pool so DevOps and DevSecOps teams can focus on managing the deployed applications instead of struggling with infrastructure management 
  • Kubernetes abstracts the application from the underlying and supporting infrastructure, providing resource isolation ensuring the application operates predictably while automatically scaling on-demand without requiring engineering or DevOps to be involved in the process 
  • Gain visibility through metrics and observability through signals, giving you greater control over the application environment 

Common tips for a successful Kubernetes program 

With Kubernetes, organizations can: 

• • Make better use of hardware 
  • Orchestrate containers across multiple hosts 
  • Maximize resources required to run modern apps 
  • Control and automate application deployments and updates 
  • Scale resources for containerized applications on demand 
  • Ensure deployed applications always run as intended
  • Health-check and self-heal applications 

Does Taos help with Kubernetes implementations? 

Yes! Taos has worked extensively with customers across many industry sectors, helping to modernize their application workflow process in the Kubernetes space while deploying a microservices environment across their containerized environments. 

Recommended for You