Kubernetes : an Orchestration and Management Infrastructure for Containers

Kubernetes : an Orchestration and Management Infrastructure for Containers

Introduction to Kubernetes

Docker was responsible for introducing developers to the concept of container-based applications. Docker provided very consumable tooling for container development and storage of containers in registries. However, Docker was not the only company with experience using container-based applications in cloud environments. For more than a decade, Google had embraced the use of Linux containers as the foundation for applications deployed in its cloud.

Google had extensive experience orchestrating and managing containers at scale and had developed three generations of container management systems: Borg, Omega, and Kubernetes. Kubernetes was the latest generation of container management developed by Google. It was a redesign based upon lessons learned from Borg and Omega, and was made available as an open source project. Kubernetes delivered several key features that dramatically improved the experience of developing and deploying a scalable container-based cloud application:

Declarative deployment model

Most cloud infrastructures that existed before Kubernetes was released provided a procedural approach based on a scripting language such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and so on for automating deployment activities. In contrast, Kubernetes used a declarative approach of describing what the desired state of the system should be. Kubernetes infrastructure was then responsible for starting new containers when necessary (e.g., when a container failed) to achieve the desired declared state. The declarative model was much clearer at communicating what deployment actions were desired, and this approach was a huge step forward compared to trying to read and interpret a script to determine what the desired deployment state should be.

Built-in replica and autoscaling support

In some cloud infrastructures that existed before Kubernetes, support for replicas of an application and providing autoscaling capabilities were not part of the core infrastructure and, in some cases, never successfully materialized. These capabilities were provided as core features in Kubernetes, which dramatically improved the robustness and consumability of its orchestration capabilities.

Improved networking model

Kubernetes mapped a single IP address to a Pod, which is Kubernetes’ smallest unit of container aggregation and management. This approach aligned the network identity with the application identity and simplified running software on Kubernetes Built-in healthchecking support Kubernetes provided container health checking and monitoring
capabilities that reduced the complexity of identifying when failures occur.

Even with all the innovative capabilities available in Kubernetes, enterprise companies were still reticent to adopt a technology that is an open source project supported by a single vendor, especially when other alternatives for container orchestration such as Docker Swarm were available. Enterprise companies would have been much more willing to adopt Kubernetes if it were instead a multiple vendor and meritocracy-based open source project backed by a solid governance policy and a level playing field for contributing. In 2015, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation was formed to address these issues.

For more info visit official Kubernetes

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