The need for container orchestration
Containers are being embraced by enterprises across the industry. The lightweight technology allows service providers to package applications, along with their dependencies, libraries and other binaries, into isolated environments on an individual server. Accompanying the rise of containers is the need for effective container orchestration. Among all the container orchestration tools available today, Kubernetes is arguably the most widely used platform, but why? No single reason suffices. This article explores the forces that have driven Kubernetes to the forefronts of container orchestration.
History
Kubernetes owes its success to the Google engineers who helped design the open source orchestration technology. Google is home to some of the best software developers, running some of the biggest software services by scale. This sort of fertile ground enabled Kubernetes to become a platform capable of fulfilling the scaling needs of businesses with the push toward virtualization.
Multi-cloud support
One benefit of Kubernetes is it allows containers to be managed over multiple-cloud architectures. Users can deploy the same software server stack across public clouds like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform. With Kubernetes, developers are able to launch container clusters using advanced cloud native features. By the same token, IT administrators are able to handle an organization’s cloud providers and data centers with a single interface.
Hybridization
Another reason Kubernetes has become popular is it provides both both public and private cloud support, which is ideal for businesses with the general shift toward hybrid-clouds. Companies use a hybrid cloud to run applications on a physical and virtual infrastructure. Several businesses have adopted hybrid architectures to scale applications to fulfill customer demand, allowing them to spend less time managing infrastructure and more time crafting code. Moreover, with hybrid cloud capabilities, users can seamlessly transfer workloads from one environment to the next. However, since hybrid architecture brings multiple networking technologies into a single environment, it can be difficult to troubleshoot.
Made for DevOps
Kubernetes has become popular among software developers and operations teams, or DevOps for short. DevOps is a term used to describe blending these two departments together to deploy various technological solutions. Developers are responsible for writing applications capable of running on private and public clouds, including AWS and Azure; and operations teams are responsible for ensuring those applications run smoothly.
Originally, applications and their supporting tools were tightly attached to an underlying infrastructure, making it financially difficult to use alternative deployment models. As a result, applications became dependent on a particular environment, giving rise to the “dependency hell” that plagues software developers today. Kubernetes sidesteps the issue by equipping containers with core capabilities and not forcing restrictions on programming languages and application frameworks. This is achieved with a mix Kubernetes components, including Pods and Services. Moreover, since the platform runs in the cloud, developers and operations teams are equipped with the tools they need to manage large projects swiftly, whether it be load testing a website or transferring online applications to production.
