Why You Need Kubernetes for a Thriving DevOps Culture
Thanks to DevOps, high-performing IT companies are more reliable and agile than ever before. As these businesses cater to the ever-expanding needs of their customers, they trust DevOps to deliver essential technology solutions—from around-the-clock version control and continuous deployment and integration to proactive monitoring of production environments.
Kubernetes enables teams to achieve a degree of automation in the deployment, creation, configuration and scaling of apps, minimizing the management overhead and risk of mistakes that might occur. This container storage solution appeals to DevOps teams looking to manage, operate and configure containerized microservices at scale. Let’s explore how you can use Kubernetes to cultivate a collaborative DevOps culture at your organization.
What is DevOps?
DevOps typically brings siloed teams like IT and development operations together so they can work collaboratively and collectively to achieve business results. Security is also a fundamental part of the collaboration that helps you build a progressive work culture. With DevSecOps, three silos (development, operations and security) come together as “first-class citizens” to achieve a similar outcome.
From a technological standpoint, DevOps usually focuses on CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous deployment or delivery):
- Continuous Integration: Programmers make constant source code updates within a shared repository, checked and scanned by an automated build, enabling teams to identify problems early
- Continuous Deployment: Once accepted, you can release the code into production, following on with various production deployments daily
- Continuous Delivery: You can build software and release it at any time–but with the help of a manual process
A Quick Guide to Kubernetes
Kubernetes use has risen in the past few years as companies leverage containers for complex applications, cloud-native applications and microservices. And with the increase in Kubernetes use, DevOps has also gained more traction. Although they are quite different—one is a tool and the other is an approach—they work together to help companies deliver results.
Google designed Kubernetes and released it free-of-charge to streamline DevOps processes. The aim was to provide deployment, automation and agile approaches for software deployment and integration. With Kubernetes, developers can quickly move from development to production, making apps more portable.
But according to one survey, 57% of developers have less than five years of experience working in the industry. This relative lack of experience can be best remedied with the aid of quality tools that are also user-friendly. Therefore, developers must take advantage of the best tools on the market to help them with quick software release and portability without skimping on security and quality.
Kubernetes also enables organizations to run and manage apps within containers in a disseminated manner. In doing so, they can maintain resiliency, availability, and scaling.
Additionally, Kubernetes provides:
- Storage (non-persistent and persistent)
- Load balancing
- Service discovery
- Automated upgrades, rollbacks and rollouts
- Extensibility to use a growing ecosystem to facilitate DevOps
- Security controls to run apps within the platform
The Kubernetes DevOps Connection
Kubernetes helps DevOps teams respond to customer demands without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. Within Kubernetes, the orchestration engine handles the manual tasks of scaling, building and deploying more resiliency into the apps rather than the controls to manage while in motion. This makes it a strong tool for DevOps teams that aim to scale, automate and build resiliency into applications while reducing the infrastructure burden.
Additionally, it manages applications with precision based on metrics. For instance, it enables developers to concentrate on new services rather than worrying about whether the app can handle different requests in peak times.
For businesses looking to implement container storage solutions for DevOps, Kubernetes is probably the way to go. You can expect to pay around $60 an hour for an experienced self-employed developer in the U.S., so make sure the developers you hire are experienced with containerization to maximize their DevOps collaboration abilities.
Here are some other reasons why Kubernetes is vital for a successful DevOps team:
- Deploy everywhere. Kubernetes manages the application deployment from anywhere without worrying about the primary infrastructure. This layer of abstraction is a significant advantage to running containers.
- Hybrid. You can easily deploy Kubernetes anywhere—whether in the cloud, on-premises or at the edge. You aren’t locked into either cloud-enabled deployment or on-premises deployment—you can opt for both methods as needed.
- Configuration and infrastructure-as-code. With Kubernetes, everything is “as-code,” ensuring that the application and infrastructure layers are all portable, stored and declarative in a source repository. When you run “as-code,” the environment is controlled and maintained automatically
- Open standards. Following open source standards, Kubernetes augments your flexibility to use an ever-evolving and growing ecosystem of advanced tools, products and services.
- Immutability. Containers can and should have the ability to be stopped and restarted while in progress with minimal effects (logically, the service will be impacted in which the container is operating).
- No lost time. Since services and applications are constantly deployed, Kubernetes leverages various deployment tactics. This minimizes the impact on current users while providing programmers the ability to test in production effectively. Relatedly, Kubernetes has a rollback ability.
How Kubernetes Fosters DevOps Culture
There is no denying that Kubernetes is a win-win situation for programmers because the technology fosters DevOps culture—and vice versa. A DevOps culture promotes shared responsibilities, cross-functional collaboration and eradication of silos between Ops, quality assurance, product management and security team members. The transparency and flexibility that Kubernetes allows make it easier for teams to collaborate more closely and be more responsive to business requirements.
The mix of automation capabilities, reliable, detailed information and speed of operation supported by Kubernetes let teams quickly learn from failures and simplifies coordination between departments with improvement and experimentation. Operations teams will appreciate how Kubernetes augments resource utilization and allows them to overcome ticket-based management limitations.
Kubernetes also enables a continuous learning culture for DevOps because deployment communication information flows smoothly through cross-functional teams. The inherent repeatability, resilience, visibility and flexibility empowered by Kubernetes suits many DevOps apps.
The change management process, often a source of conflict, is more dynamic with Kubernetes as deployment configurations are managed based on versions. This streamlines the DevSecOps team’s ability to plan end-to-end workflows collaboratively. Kubernetes allows for centralized and standardized company workflows because it minimizes the frustrations of decentralized, scattered information and disparate methods of storing and formatting technical data
Kubernetes also facilitates cohesive DevSecOps security practices to manage environment variables and container code updates, improve access, restrict resource usage and limit network access in containers. This minimizes the security risks, giving operators, security teams and developers more confidence to handle application security more efficiently.
DevOps culture monitors key performance indicators to authenticate the end-to-end performance of the DevOps system. With Kubernetes, you can readily view and comprehend the resources’ state. Kubernetes breaks down conventional siloed visibility obstacles between teams. This augments transparency and promotes explicit communication among team members.
In this way, Kubernetes strengthens incident response best practices for DevOps culture because it is more productive, less costly and more collaborative. It provides team members with fewer impediments, enhanced communication flow, radically faster deployment time and quicker feedback when restoring service.
DevOps streamlines operations and development processes, leading to more agile app development. It’s more than just a tool—DevOps is a process and a culture change that takes effort and time. It demands tech teams collaborate and communicate, better aligning with open source principles. Strategies like self-service and automation amplify this approach, helping you ensure quality, reliability and security in your application deployment.