Kubernetes: Keep Companies Coming Back for More

If you are like most companies today, you are using a combination of public and private clouds. Think of all the cloud platforms out there: AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and others. However, running a business in a multi-cloud environment creates a lot of challenges; for example, the struggle to track various applications written in different programming languages, configurations and their dependencies to the underlying cloud infrastructures and the effort involved in deploying and scaling the applications to meet business needs.

Enter Kubernetes. A container orchestration platform that empowers enterprises and developers with more business-focused tools to succeed in the digital economy. By containerizing applications, companies could bundle applications and dependencies so that they can be easily deployed and scaled on a Kubernetes clusters running on any public or private cloud infrastructure providers.

Kubernetes has been around for quite some time now. We watched early adopters try to make sense of Kubernetes in 2014. In 2015, Google and CNCF launched its management, providing a reference model for the technology. In 2017, more and more services became available. Fast forward to today, and we’re looking at several more managed Kubernetes services that all have found a way to orchestrate containers more effectively.

Kubernetes 101

Commitment to Kubernetes has grown to 77 percent in 2017 from 48 percent in 2016, as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation reports, demonstrating rapid growth as businesses quickly realize the benefits. Kubernetes is especially helping businesses with:

  • Deploying containers onto servers (known as nodes) with appropriate resources (such as CPU and memory).
  • Monitoring them to ensure they are available and, in the case of a failure, restart a container.
  • Updating containers following changes in the container image (security patches, application updates).
  • Autoscaling sets of pods (and nodes) with the help of monitored metric triggers.

How It Works

In Kubernetes, all the entities or objects under its command are managed via a uniform and extensible API and are observed and controlled using active controllers. It is this pattern that allows for the shift from imperative to declarative logic and why the technology is on the path to become the dialect for cloud native software.

Managing Kubernetes clusters on a large scale is a tough and complex job. It involves setting up multiple clusters, monitoring them and updating them with latest versions and security patches.

Imagine using vendor-flavored Kubernetes versions on various infrastructure platforms and thus being trapped with old and platform-specific distributions. Or, imagine having to adapt your apps and maintain different code lines for each of the infrastructure platforms. Aside from being challenging, it also would also create unnecessary overhead. What you really need in this case is a Kubernetes environment that provides uniform versions, has common monitoring and logging mechanisms and allows you to securely manage various infrastructure and cluster credentials.

‘Uh’ to ‘Duh’: Kubernetes Transforms Businesses

Kubernetes has and continues to help businesses enable customers to better serve and innovate in their markets. When businesses invest in open source, business services and other technologies will help developers deploy innovative business applications and other game-changing applications to make their companies intelligent enterprises.

In fact, one Kubernetes founder, Craig McLuckie, says it himself: “Seeing Kubernetes hit these various milestones since its initial release has been amazing, it’s just been a series of these wonderful kind of moments as Kubernetes has gained a head of steam, and it’s been so much fun to see the community really rally around it.’”

While Kubernetes is here to stay, business will still want to see their team’s existing skills leveraged, so the availability of programming languages that developers are comfortable and experienced with is a key advantage.

Dan Lahl

Dan Lahl, Vice President of Product Marketing at SAP, has been in high tech for over 30 years, with extensive experience in data management, data warehousing, analytics and cloud.

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