Run on Kubernetes

Do you want to truly leverage the cloud as a platform for deploying modern applications? Run on Kubernetes

Many are still unsure of how to balance flexibility, cost, security, and scalability in their cloud infrastructure. For me, Kubernetes offers one of the best options for running cloud-native applications. And this goes for established enterprises as well as startups.

Particularly for the latter, the advantages bring a lot of value - unmatched flexibility, no vendor lock-in, reduced costs, rapid scaling, and a rich ecosystem of open-source tools. And its setup complexity has seen a fast decrease in comparison to other options in recent years.

Flexibility

Kubernetes is all about flexibility. Whether you’re deploying a small application or running large-scale systems, Kubernetes uses the same concepts and abstractions. It has proven to be a great core architecture, which decouples your applications from the underlying hardware reliably.

Making big changes, introducing new services, updating underlying hosts - it’s all pretty straightforward.

No Vendor Lock-In??

One of the biggest concerns in choosing a cloud platform is getting tied to a single provider. Kubernetes mitigates this risk. Since it is an open-source project supported by a large community and all providers, you aren’t bound to a specific cloud vendor.?

You can easily move your workloads from AWS to Google Cloud or Azure, or even run it on your own infrastructure, all without modifying your application. This gives you maximum control and ensures that you’re never locked into a costly or limiting contract.

In fact, you can and should use some vendor-specific services (like AWS RDS) so you can leverage most of their capabilities while keeping a short and clean list of dependencies that you can switch over if needed. I go as far as to encourage people to use their cloud provider’s Kubernetes service (like AWS EKS) as it’s usually crazy cheap and reliable.

Cost Efficiency??

Running Kubernetes can be significantly cost-effective. It allows you to efficiently allocate resources and avoid over-provisioning, which can drive up cloud costs. It is great to quickly deploy other necessary applications that a business might rely on, without the need for other providers or hosts. And that is where some hidden costs creep up on infrastructure.?

Also, through autoscaling, Kubernetes can adjust resources based on actual usage, ensuring you only pay for what you need. Additionally, the open-source nature of Kubernetes means you can deploy it without paying licensing fees, reducing the initial investment compared to proprietary solutions.

Seamless Scalability??

In modern cloud architectures, the ability to scale quickly and efficiently is key. Kubernetes enables you to do horizontal scaling easily, which means you can add or remove instances of your services and servers to support those in real time.?

This is particularly useful in scenarios of unpredictable traffic or some kinds of performance degradation, where systems need to scale up during peak loads. It is usually just three commands or clicks away in most cases.

Resilience and High Availability

Kubernetes is designed for resilience. It automatically monitors the health of containers in a couple of ways you can define - ensuring that if one fails, it can be restarted or replaced immediately, minimizing downtime.?

While the side effects of this (and the self-healing capabilities) might be nauseating at first, it brings a lot of coherence and you can leverage a single monitoring solution to understand what’s happening. So that’s nice.?

Cloud-Native??

Kubernetes natively supports cloud-native applications, which are designed to thrive in dynamic, distributed environments. Routing requests, working with services, understanding and mapping port bindings, and creating redirects. All things that are easy and fast to solve.

It is super friendly, specifically, if you are building a product based on The 12 Factor App. It brings all the “must haves” directly and is very easy to manage.

CI/CD Integration

Kubernetes integrates seamlessly with modern Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Tools like Github Actions, GitLab CI, and ArgoCD can easily automate the process of building, testing, and deploying applications on Kubernetes.?

This ensures rapid deployment cycles, frequent updates, and a faster go-to-market time for new features. By embracing Kubernetes, you streamline and automate big chunks of (if not all) the deployment workflow, allowing teams to focus on writing code.

Providers and a robust ecosystem

At this point, Kubernetes has become a top pick for many engineering teams in leading firms. This has the positive effect of setting a de-facto standard that many cloud providers want to capitalize on.?

This is why it has become increasingly easy and cheap to set up and run a cluster - there is a race between cloud providers to have most people setting up shop, and having an easy onboarding is part of that. That is also why the Kubernetes ecosystem is vast, with hundreds of open-source projects and third-party tools that can be plugged into your Kubernetes environment.

It is therefore a very vibrant open-source initiative, with a lot of interested parties in having a secure platform. This, combined with out-of-the-box things like role-based access control, network policies, and secret management make it a sound choice.

The most important bit

Finally, the most important part of Kubernetes for me is that it empowers developers and abstracts away a lot of IT-specific, provider-aware services and products. While it’s great that they can understand it, it is by itself another (big) domain, and having some form of clean interface is a solid way to isolate those two.

And that is what even plain Kubernetes brings in a declarative format, which is great.

You can find this article and others on my website.