During the worldwide Covid-19 situation, almost every country went through several lockdowns. Everyone worked at home. At that time, cloud services were in the limelight of the work environment. However, the cloud infrastructure needs to be fast and scalable to achieve this.
Here comes the Kubernetes to help in this situation. It opens a new era to remote work with a relatively smooth transition. That is why Kubernetes is in high popularity among DevOps and SRE teams. Kubernetes experts earn between $ 10,000 and $ 25,000 per month. You must be wondering why it is in such high demand. Why use Kubernetes?
In this article, we will discuss why use Kubernetes and some other facts about it. So, let’s get into it!
Main Concept of Kubernetes
Kubernetes is a Greek word. It means to drive something. When we drive a car or a ship, we use a steer. Similarly, developers use Kubernetes to manage the container. In short, Kubernetes is a container management tool. According to the 1980s numeronyms system, It is also called K8s. It is also an open-source tool.
Nowadays, developers are using containers for their software. All the elements needed to run this software on any operating system are stored in these containers. To ensure scalability, developers require a steering tool that will steer and organize these diverse tiny packages. That’s why Google built the Kubernetes tool in Golang, a higher-level programming language.
Why are Developers using Kubernetes?
When developers started building applications using microservices, they realized they needed an orchestration tool. As the use of web apps increased, it became more and more important. At that time, Platform as a service (Paas) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provided the infrastructure to deploy, run and update these apps.
But it required developers’ contribution. But the developers wanted to focus more on updating the code rather than managing the old code. So they came up with a new lightweight container runtime approach called Docker containers. It was great for building and deploying app packages, but still not enough for large apps. Then they used Kubernetes. It can orchestrate across a fleet of machines for enormous numbers of containers.
What are the benefits of using Kubernetes?
First, you need to understand the uses of Kubernetes. It will help you to realize where and why you should use Kubernetes. The areas of use are
- For Scalability: Scalability is one of the key requirements of a web app. The Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaling Controller continuously adjusts scaling to meet the demands of computing resources.
- Load Balancing: When many users access your app at the same time, it causes traffic and slow server response. Kubernetes can distribute these loads to other DNS clouds to stabilize your server.
- Self-healing container: There are possibilities that app containers may fail or restart. Kubernetes can check the condition of the container and replace or restart the failed container.
- Rollbacks or Rollouts: Rollbacks and rollouts mean to change something back or out to the desired state. Kubernetes makes it easier for developers to roll out or roll back existing app containers to their desired state.
- Consistent Deployment: Developers find this benefit to be the most appealing of Kubernetes. Kubernetes is based on a declarative state through APIs of the CI/CD pipeline. With a DevOps CI/CD pipeline, developers can focus on other processes while Kubernetes automates the deployment process.
- Robust and Secure Infrastructure: Kubernetes can automate the addition, deletion, management, and updating of containers with high secrecy and encryption. Kubernetes also helps you run your app’s infrastructure in any cloud environment.
Future of Kubernetes
In modern web architecture, developers build containers to handle all functions of a server. If a server contains a lot of features, then it will need more containers. These containers also allow the software to interact with its server data and features.
As software drags out everything from its small containers, it will take time to find and extract those desired features. This will result in a slow app runtime. Developers need orchestration tools to support and manage these containers. As long as you need to orchestrate your container, you will need Kubernetes.
But, features and infrastructure change and update over time. The good news is Kubernetes is also improving. But there are other technologies such as Unikernels and MicroVM. You can’t replace Kubernetes, but you can run it in parallel in the mainstream.
Flaws of Kubernetes
The advantages of Kubernetes are many. But you also need to be concerned about the flaws of Kubernetes. If you think, the flaws are not much and you don’t have other alternatives, then you should use Kubernetes.
- Slow Productivity: Kubernetes requires good expertise on it. Because it is a complex tool to work with. Still, it will not provide a fast workflow environment.
- Overdoing for Small Apps: Kubernetes can handle larger apps perfectly. But, using Kubernetes for smaller apps costs more than you invest.
- Complex Update and Management: Kubernetes has so many tools, components, and options that make it difficult to install and update. Experts are required to process each step individually.
- Not Suitable for Manual Tasks: Kubernetes is always good at automating things. For manual work such as resource allocation and cluster monitoring, Kubernetes can not help you.
Final Verdict
Kubernetes is very popular with developers because it provides scalability for cloud-native applications. Kubernetes is even more efficient than traditional current and future tools. Not only that, Kubernetes has many more uses. In a nutshell, Kubernetes will tell you to relax while it takes care of all of your apps’ leftovers.
Nowadays, the use of Kubernetes has become a common term among cloud services. Some developers take it as a major concern while building a cloud-native application. Without it, the work is incomplete. Yet the Kubernetes has some flaws. But most users comment these flaws are not major ones. And Kubernetes is still doing everything it can to live up to its reputation.
