Kubernetes

What is Kubernetes?

In 2014, Google turned the Kubernetes project into an open-source one. It is a compilation of 15+ years of Google’s experience in running production workloads at scale. It is also filled with fascinating ideas and best practices from the community.

It’s essentially an extensible platform that empowers you to manage containerized workloads and services more effectively while facilitating declarative configuration and automation.

It supports data center outsourcing to public cloud service providers but is also used for web hosting at scale. It allows you to automate web server provisioning depending on the level of web traffic in production.

Depending on the demand for a software application, Kubernetes can scale up web servers during high traffic times and scales it down when the traffic is low. It even features load balancing capabilities to route traffic to web servers in operations.

Kubernetes is immensely popular and is used by everyone - from The New York Times to Airbnb.

‍

How does Kubernetes work?

Kubernetes is a container orchestration system. It helps automate deploying and scaling multiple containers simultaneously.

It groups together containers that are all running the same application. They then act as replicas and are used to load balance requests that come in. Kubernetes now proceeds to supervise all these groups and make sure that they operate properly. Even if containers need to acquire more resources or get restarted, Kubernetes handles it.

What are Kubernetes components?

The Kubernetes control plane has five components of its own and worker nodes while the individual worker nodes have three components of their own.

Components of the control plane

The scheduler looks at resource capacity and makes sure that all the worker nodes are performing at optimal capacity.

The API server exposes the Kubernetes API and is the front-end for the control plane.

The controller manager looks after a range of controllers which respond to various events.

etcd is Kubernetes' backing store for all cluster data.

The cloud controller manager allows you to connect your cluster to your cloud provider's API, and proceeds to separate the components that interact with that cloud platform from the components that interact solely with your cluster.

Components of individual nodes

A kubelet runs on every node in a cluster. It ensures that your containers are running in a pod.

The container runtime has the responsibility of actually running containers.

The kube-proxy runs on all the nodes in your cluster. They implement a part of the Kubernetes Service concept and maintain network rules on your nodes which permit network communication to your Pods from network sessions that could be inside or outside your cluster.

What deployment options does Kubernetes offer?

Kubernetes allows four different deployment options, based on your objectives and needs. These include:

• On-premise: Turn your data center into a Kubernetes cluster.
• Cloud: Deploy Kubernetes on the cloud and make an infinite amount of virtual machines
• Hybrid: Use virtual machines on a cloud in situations where your in-house servers are at full capacity, distributing computing resources in a more effective manner.
• Multi-cloud: Reduce risk and avoid vendor lock-in.

What is the advantage of Kubernetes?

• Kubernetes is easily portable across multiple kinds of environments
• It has built-in safety features like vulnerability scanning and data encryption.
• Kubernetes allows you to create and maintain replica sets instead of making you have to replicate the entire application.
• It helps make your projects more reliable and scalable by providing high fault tolerance clustering.
• It simplifies container scaling across multiple servers in a cluster. It has an autoscaler that replicates Kubernetes instances/pods to different nodes.