Kubernetes & it's use cases

Now a day in the technical world everyone is aware of this term Kubernetes. So, today in this article we are going to talk more about it, and how different industries uses it.

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is a container management platform designed to run enterprise-class, cloud-enabled and web-scalable IT workloads. It is built upon the foundation in running containerized application. So let's first talk about the containers.

The concept of containers has existed for over a decade, but it was docker that truly democratized containers by making them manageable and accessible to both the development and IT operations teams. Docker has demonstrated that, containerization can drive the scalability and portability of the applications.

The above fig. is a High-level architecture of a container orchestration engine.

Kubernetes Architecture

Like most distributed computing platforms, a Kubernetes cluster consists of at least one master and multiple compute nodes. Kubernetes breaks down into multiple architectural components as shown in this fig.

The master is responsible for exposing the application program interface (API), scheduling the deployments and managing the overall cluster.

As master controls and scheduled the all the nodes in a systematic way.

Each node runs a container runtime, such as Docker, along with an agent that communicates with the master. The node also runs additional components for logging, monitoring, service discovery and optional add-ons. Nodes are the workhorses of a Kubernetes cluster. They expose compute, networking and storage resources to applications.

Nodes can be virtual machines (VMs) in a cloud or bare metal servers in a datacenter. This architecture of Kubernetes makes it modular and scalable by creating an abstraction between the applications and the underlying infrastructure.

Key Design Principles of Kubernetes

• Workload Scalability
• High Availability
• Security
• Portability

DEPLOYMENT TARGETS IN THE ENTERPRISE

Kubernetes are using, it’s important to identify the implementations that they are most likely to adopt. There are several deployment models for running production workloads that vendors have already targeted with a suite of products and services. This section highlights these models, including:

• Managed Kubernetes and Containers as a Service(CaaS).
• Public Cloud and Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS).
• On-premises and data centers.
• Hybrid deployments. 

The components that make up the architecture of a CaaS solution.

Kubernetes as a Private PaaS(platform as a service) 

Customers deploy PaaS primarily to standardize their development and deployment environments. By using a Kubernetes-based PaaS, they will be able to bring traditional line-of-business applications and contemporary containerized applications onto the same platform. Kubernetes has been adopted by traditional PaaS vendors to deliver end-to-end platform to enterprise customers.

In the Kubernetes-based PaaS market on of the prominent player is RedHat OpenShift.

OpenShift aims to offer a developer-centric experience while abstracting the Kubernetes infrastructure. It comes with a set of user interfaces that connect Git, proprietary Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) tools, Docker and Kubernetes.

Red Hat built on top of Kubernetes to add enterprise-centric features : such as projects, users, and groups - that enable multi-tenant capabilities.

Kubernetes as an Infrastructure for Cloud-Native Apps

Kubernetes as an infrastructure for cloud-native applications is a model at work in implementations such as the Stackanetes project from Intel and CoreOS. Stackanetes is OpenStack on top of Kubernetes; it provides high availability with scaling, self-healing, and the full complement of OpenStack IaaS features – all while being deployed and managed with Kubernetes automation.

Pinterest’s Kubernetes story

With over 250 million monthly active users and serving over 10 billion recommendations every single day, that is huge. (The numbers might have changed now) As they knew these numbers are going to grow day by day, they began to realize the pain of scalability and performance issues.

Their initial strategy was to move their workload from EC2 instances to Docker containers; hence they first moved their services to Docker to free up engineering time spent on Puppet and to have an immutable infrastructure.

And then the next strategy was to move to Kubernetes:) Now they can take ideas from ideation to production in a matter of minutes whereas earlier they used to take hours or even days. They have cut down so much of overhead cost by utilizing Kubernetes and have removed a lot of manual work without making engineers worry about the underlying infrastructure.

Now a days Kubernetes is getting much more popular due to its fetures and in future it will grow more and more by Another form of Kubernetes extensibility .

Thank you.