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Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system that has become the de facto standard to deploy and operate containerized applications. It is designed for automating software deployment, scaling, and management, and it improves business reliability and reduces time and resources by providing automated container orchestration.
Kubernetes was originally designed by Joe Bred, Brendan Burns, and Craig McLuckie at Google in 2014, and the first version, Kubernetes 1.0, was released on July 21, 2015. By now, it is maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
See below to learn all about Kubernetes and where it stands in the containizeration sector:
Kubernetes and Container Orchestration Market
The global container orchestration market value was estimated at $454 million in 2021, and it is expected to reach $1.78 billion by 2027, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.62% from 2022 to 2027.
Kubernetes is the market leader and widely accepted service provider for container orchestration platforms. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) plays an important role in the global container orchestration market, with a 12.82% market share.
Kubernetes Key Features
Kubernetes is a feature-rich container-centric management software. Some of the key features of Kubernetes are below:
Automated Rolling and Operations
Automated operations of Kubernetes can make sure applications are always running the way the user intended them to run. It progressively rolls out changes to the user application or its configuration while monitoring application health, and if something goes wrong, Kubernetes will roll back the change for the user. Kubernetes has built-in commands to handle much of the heavy lifting that goes into application management.
Infrastructure and Storage Orchestration
Kubernetes allows developers to focus on applications by handling computing, networking, and storage. It allows automatically mounting the storage system of users’ choice, whether from local storage, a public cloud provider, such as GCP or AWS, or a network storage system, such as NFS, iSCSI, Gluster, Ceph, Cinder, or Flocker. The persistent volumes in Kubernetes provide an API for users and administrators that abstracts details of how storage is provided based on how it is consumed and that helps manage storage.
Resource Management
Resource management for pods and containers is an important task that involves managing several key resources, including CPU and memory. During the process, users specify a Pod as well as the amount of resources the container needs. From there, the Kube-scheduler uses this information to decide which node to place the Pod on and enforces those limits, so the running container is allowed to use the resource within the limit.
Kubernetes Use Cases
Kubernetes is a widely used software platform that delivers container orchestration for different types of users across organizations of all sizes:
“Kubernetes is a great platform for machine learning, because it comes with all the scheduling and scalability that you need. We tried to create a Kubernetes core server, we deployed Kubeflow, and we orchestrated the whole experiment, which ended up being a really good success.” -Jérémie Vallée, AI infrastructure lead, Babylon
“It is being used across many departments, with more being added every day. My team was one of the first teams to use Kubernetes 8 for our microservice deployments. It addresses the problem of HDHA applications, agile development, rolling deployments with no downtime. We are also utilizing its service discovery with spring boot admin to provide node-level details for all nodes in the cluster.” -Jake Luby, lead engineer, Target
“Over the next couple of years, people won’t even think that much about it when they want to run containers. Kubernetes is going to be the go-to solution. The really big companies, like Ticketmaster and Google, get it right, and the startups get it right, because they’re faster.” -Martin Danielsson, solution architect, Haufe Group
Kubernetes Differentiators
The core capabilities of Kubernetes enable organizations to automate deployment, manage a container’s life cycle, and allow developers to create and monitor containers across clusters. Some of the key areas of differentiation for Kubernetes are below:
Horizontal Scaling and Self-Healing
HorizontalPodAutoscaler automatically updates a workload resource, and horizontal scaling is the response to increased load to deploy more Pods. Kubernetes helps scale the application up and down with a simple command. The self-healing capability of Kubernetes restarts containers that fail, replaces and reschedules containers when nodes die, kills containers that don’t respond to user-defined health checks, and abstains from advertising the failed containers to clients until they are ready.
Service Discovery and Load Balancing
Kubernetes reduces additional work by service discovery and load balancing. Users don’t need to modify their applications to use an unfamiliar service discovery mechanism. Kubernetes gives Pods their IP addresses and a single DNS name for a set of Pods and can load-balance across them. Moreover, Pods are non-permanent resources; they can be created and destroyed to match the desired state of the users’ cluster.
Kubernetes Secret
Kubernetes Secrets are similar to ConfigMaps but are specifically intended to hold confidential data. Secrets contain a small amount of sensitive data, such as a password, a token, or a key. Users can deploy and update secrets and application configuration without rebuilding images and without exposing secrets in a stack configuration. In addition, secrets can be created independently, and applications that run in a cluster can also take additional precautions with secrets.
User Reviews of Kubernetes
Kubernetes receives mostly positive reviews and recommendations from several user review sites. According to G2, users rate Kubernetes at 4.5 out of 5, and users at TrustRadius rate Kubernetes at 8.9 out of 10. In addition, PeerSpot users rate Kubernetes at 4.2 out of 5.
And according to Gartner Peer Insights, users rate:
- Platform9 Managed Kubernetes at 4.5 out of 5, with 91% willing to recommend it
- VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid at 4.5 out of 5, with 75% willing to recommend it
- IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service at 3.5 out of 5, with 50% willing to recommend it
Kubernetes Providers
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system. Several companies are offering a Kubernetes-based platform or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) that deploys Kubernetes, such as:
- Google Cloud
- AWS
- IBM
- Microsoft
- Oracle
- Red Hat
- Platform9
- SUSE
- VMware
Conclusions
The right container orchestration services help organizations achieve their business goals by enhancing application functionalities. Users should understand what type of containerization features they need for their organization and how much they want to pay for them.
Kubernetes helps manage and deploy applications in a scalable way and allows for moving workloads to the cloud easily and quickly. The deployment configuration is defined as code that is easy to write and understand. It offers higher security with low operational costs, and its useful tools deliver better performance for small to large development teams. Kubernetes can be a good option for any enterprise.
