Originally designed and developed by Google, Kubernetes has helped shape the tech giant’s reliance on containers, particularly for its cloud services. The Kubernetes platform is the successor of Borg, a cluster management system used internally by Google engineers. The Kubernetes project was open-sourced by Google in 2014 when it was transferred to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation–a sub-foundation of the Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization–as a seed technology.

Containers and Kubernetes

The demand for containerized applications has seen an explosive increase in the last decade. A March 2022 projection by Gartner pegs container adoption by global organizations at 90 percent by 2026. A container is a comprehensive software package containing all the components required for independent operation. This includes system tools, preset configurations, libraries, and an executable program.

Containers can be viewed as lightweight, specialized adaptations of virtual machines with less stringent isolation properties. Just like a virtual machine, a container also has access to the CPU’s processing power and its own filesystem, process space, and memory. Containers are decoupled from the fundamental infrastructure of the platform, making them portable across operating systems and cloud platforms.

More and more software-first enterprises are leveraging containers to create bundles and design and execute their applications more effectively. However, as the container architecture of an organization scales up, measures need to be taken to minimize container downtime and mitigate its effects. Kubernetes addresses this by providing users with a robust framework for running distributed container systems. Engineers rely on the platform for automated scaling and failover, provisioning of deployment patterns, and more.

What Is Kubernetes Used For?

Kubernetes is an automated orchestration tool for containers. It allows for the seamless execution of operational tasks related to container management. This platform has built-in commands for application deployment, update rollouts, scaling up or down, application monitoring, and many more functions. Simply put, users only need to tell Kubernetes where the application needs to be executed, and it will handle almost everything else.

How Does Kubernetes Work?

Kubernetes is vendor agnostic and compatible with most leading server and cloud solutions, including Azure Container Service, Amazon EC2, and IBM Software. It also works with bare-metal configurations using CoreOS and similar solutions, as well as vSphere, Docker, libvirt and Linux kernel-based virtual machines. But what exactly does Kubernetes do? Well, massive container-powered enterprises typically need multiple Linux container instances to sustain all their application needs. This becomes especially necessary as applications increase in complexity, for instance, by adopting microservices for their communication needs.

Managing individual containers becomes an uphill task as an organization’s container infrastructure scales up. Developers must schedule container deployment for particular machines, manage networking, scale-up resource allocation according to workload, and more. That’s where Kubernetes comes in! This container orchestration system allows engineers to manage the containerized application lifecycle throughout the fleet. This ‘meta-process’ allows users to simultaneously automate scaling and deployment for numerous containers. Kubernetes gives containers visibility using either DNS or IP addresses. Additionally, Kubernetes groups together the containers that run the same application.

The containers replicate each other’s functionality and balance the load of incoming requests among themselves. The load in high-traffic containers is balanced, and network traffic is distributed to ensure a stable deployment. Container groups are managed by Kubernetes, which works to ensure seamless operations. This automated process serves as an administrator that supervises the operations of containerized application groups. Orchestrators such as Kubernetes take care of numerous processes, such as restarting a container or scaling up its throughput. Kubernetes operates as a cluster in several nodes, making applications more robust. This framework also supports automated static and dynamic scaling. Automatic resizing of the number of replications based on memory and CPU utilization is also supported. Once a specific threshold percentage is crossed, Kubernetes creates a new pod to ensure optimized load balancing. Storage orchestration is another function of Kubernetes. This enables users to automate the mounting of their preferred storage system, including local and public clouds.

With Kubernetes, users can define the preferred state for deployed containers. The framework then takes a controlled approach to modifying the actual state to the desired state. Simply put, Kubernetes can automate rollouts and rollbacks. For instance, it can be automated to form new containers, remove existing ones, and adopt resources to a newly created container. Kubernetes is also used to manage secrets and configurations by allowing for the storage and management of sensitive data. This includes passwords, SSH keys, and OAuth tokens. With Kubernetes, it is possible to deploy and update application configurations and secrets without the need to rebuild container images. This arrangement also prevents secrets from being exposed in the stack configuration.

Finally, automatic bin packing and self-healing are two other salient features of Kubernetes.In the case of the former, the user needs to provide a cluster of nodes that the platform can leverage for running containerized tasks. Once the CPU and memory specifications of each container are added to Kubernetes, it crafts the containers onto the provided nodes to ensure optimized resource consumption. In the latter, the framework can restart failed containers, terminate containers that fail to respond favorably to a user-defined health check, replace containers as required, and keep containers hidden from clients before they are ready.