Kubernetes and its use cases
Kubernetes (K8s) is an open source platform for managing clusters of containers. It provides tools for deploying applications, scaling them as needed, managing changes to containers, and optimize the use of the underlying hardware beneath your containers. Kubernetes is designed to be extensible and fault-tolerant by allowing application components to restart and move across systems as needed.
Kubernetes is itself not a Platform as a Service (PaaS) tool, but it serves as more of a basic framework, allowing users to choose the types of application frameworks, languages, monitoring and logging tools, and other tools of their choice. In this way, Kubernetes can be used as the basis for a complete PaaS to run on top of; this is the architecture chosen by the OpenShift Origin open source project in its latest release.
The Kubernetes project is written in the Go programming language, and you can browse its source code on GitHub.
The platform was first developed by a team at Google, and later donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It’s not the only option for container management, but it has rapidly become one of the most popular. As Opensource.com notes, “Today, Kubernetes is a true open source community, with engineers’ works from Google, Red Hat, and many other companies actively contributing to the project.”
This is how many experts defined Kubernetes in simple words
source: The Enterprisers Project
Mike Kail, CTO and cofounder at CYBRIC: “Let’s say an application environment is your old-school lunchbox. The contents of the lunchbox were all assembled well before putting them into the lunchbox [but] there was no isolation between any of those contents. The Kubernetes system provides a lunchbox that allows for just-in-time expansion of the contents (scaling) and full isolation between every unique item in the lunchbox and the ability to remove any item without affecting any of the other contents (immutability).”
Gordon Haff, technology evangelist, Red Hat: “Whether we’re talking about a single computer or a datacenter full of them, if every software component just selfishly did its own thing there would be chaos. Linux and other operating systems provide the foundation for corralling all this activity. Container orchestration builds on Linux to provide an additional level of coordination that combines individual containers into a cohesive whole.”
Nick Young, principal engineer at Atlassian: “Kubernetes is an orchestration layer that allows users to more effectively run workloads using containers — from keeping long-running services ‘always on’ to more efficiently managing intensive shorter-term tasks like builds.”
Kimoon Kim, senior architect at Pepperdata: “Kubernetes is software that manages many server computers and runs a large number of programs across those computers. On Kubernetes, all programs run in containers so that they can be isolated from each other, and be easy to develop and deploy.”
Dan Kohn, executive director of the CNCF, in a podcast with Gordon Haff: “Containerization is this trend that’s taking over the world to allow people to run all kinds of different applications in a variety of different environments. When they do that, they need an orchestration solution in order to keep track of all of those containers and schedule them and orchestrate them. Kubernetes is an increasingly popular way to do that.”
Nic Grange, CTO at Retriever Communications: “Kubernetes is the new operating system for the cloud. It helps you run software in a modern cloud environment by leveraging Google’s extensive experience of running software at scale.” The decision to give Kubernetes to CNCF “has allowed it to be widely adopted by many companies. As a result, it has grown to become a powerful and flexible tool that can be run on a variety of cloud platforms and on-premises,” he says.
Some common use cases
source: thenewstack
Self-Healing and Scaling Services
For simplicity, K8s process units can be detailed as pods and services. A pod is the smaller deployment unit available on Kubernetes. A pod can contain several containers that will have some related communication — such as network and storage. Services are the interface that provides accessibility to a set of containers. These services can be for internal or public access and can load balance several container instances.
Pods are mortal: once finished, they vanish from the cluster. Pod termination can be natural or through an error. A deployment is the most modern Kubernetes module to create and maintain pods. Using a single description file, a developer can specify everything necessary to deploy, keep running, scale, and upgrade the pod.
Serverless, with Server
Serverless architecture has taken the world by a storm since AWS launched Lambda. The principle is simple: just develop the code, and don’t worry about anything else. Server and scalability are handled by the cloud provider and code just has to be developed as functions that handle specific events: from HTTP requests to queue messages.
Vendor lock-in is the major disadvantage of this solution. It almost impossible to change cloud providers without refactoring most of the code. There are some solutions like Serverless that seek to standardize function code across clouds. Another solution is to use a Kubernetes cluster to create a vendor-free serverless platform. As mentioned above, K8S abstracts away the difference between cloud servers. Currently, two popular frameworks virtualize the cluster as a serverless platform: Kubeless and Fission.
Optimized Resource Usage with Namespaces
A K8s namespace is also known as a virtual cluster. Namespaces create a virtually separated cluster inside the real cluster. Clusters without namespaces probably have test, staging and production clusters. Virtual clusters usually waste some resources because they do not undergo continuous testing, and because staging is used from time to time to validate the work of a new feature. By using a virtual cluster, or a namespace, an operations team can use the same set of physical machines for different sets depending on a given workload.
Namespaces are closely related to DNS because services located within the same namespace are accessible through their names. Namespaces offer a good solution for creating similar environments that locate services through network names: instances from different namespaces will find their dependencies without having to take into account which namespace they are located in.
In addition, namespaces can have resource quotas: each virtual cluster can receive a defined allocation in order to avoid a resource competition between namespaces. This is particularly useful to avoid a production environment sharing computing resources with just a few priority environments. Finally, different permissions can be created with roles for each namespace in order to limit the number of individuals with access to production environments.
Hybrid and Multiclouds
A hybrid cloud utilizes computing resources from a local, conventional data center, and from a cloud provider. A hybrid cloud is normally used when a company has some servers in an on-premise data center and wants to use the cloud’s unlimited computing resources to expand or substitute company resources. A multicloud, on the other hand, refers to a cloud that uses multiple cloud providers to handle computing resources. Multiclouds are generally used to avoid vendor lock-in, and to reduce the risk from a cloud provider going down while performing mission-critical operations.
Both solutions are addressed by Kubernetes Federation. Multiple clusters — one for each cloud or on-premise data center — are created that are managed by the Federation. The Federation synchronizes computing resources, and even allows cross-cluster discovery: virtually any pod can communicate with a pod in another cluster without knowing the infrastructure.
CASE STUDY: adidas
source: kubernetes.io
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.
“For me, Kubernetes is a platform made by engineers for engineers. It’s relieving the development team from tasks that they don’t want to do, but at the same time giving the visibility of what is behind the curtain, so they can also control it.” FERNANDO CORNAGO, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF PLATFORM ENGINEERING AT ADIDAS
And adoption has spread quickly among adidas’s 300-strong engineering corps. “I call our cloud native platform the field of dreams,” says Eichten. “We built it, and we never anticipated that people would come and just love it.”
For one thing, “everybody who can touch a line of code” has spent one full week onboarding and learning the platform with members of the 35-person platform engineering team, says Cornago. “We try to spend 50% of our time sitting with the teams, because this is the only way to understand how our platform is being used. And this is how the teams will feel safe that there is someone on the other side of the wall, also feeling the pain.”
Additionally, Cornago and Eichten took advantage of the fact that as a fashion athletic wear brand, adidas has sports and competition in its DNA. “Top-down mandates don’t work at adidas, but gamification works,” says Cornago. “So this year we had a DevOps Cup competition. Every team created new technical capabilities and had a hypothesis of how this affected business value. We announced the winner at a big internal tech summit with more than 600 people. It’s been really, really useful for the teams.”
So if they had any advice for other companies looking to start a cloud native journey, it would be this: “There is no one-size-fits-all for all companies,” says Cornago. “Apply your company’s culture to everything that you do.”
