Everything you should know about Kubernetes

8 min readDec 26, 2020

I hear everyone has been talking about Kubernetes, and you’ve probably heard of it, too. It’s become pretty popular and I think it’s time to learn what it is?. So Kubernetes is a container-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment scaling and management it’s very easily extensible, open-source, portable for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration management and automation, letting you deploy distributed systems resiliently, with scaling and failover for your application. So in simple terms, it’s a container orchestrator that helps confirm that every container is where it’s supposed to be and that the containers can work together. In layman's terms, it is just like a conductor that manages everything in an orchestra.

History:

Kubernetes (κυβερνήτης, Greek for “helmsman” or “pilot” or “governor”, and for that reason the etymological root of cybernetics) was established by Joe Beda, Brendan Burns, and Craig McLuckie, who was quickly connected by other Google engineers including Brian Grant and Tim Hockin and was first declared by Google in mid-2014. Its development and design are heavily exert influenced by Google’s Borg system, and lots of the very best contributors to the project previously worked on Borg. The first codename for Kubernetes within Google was Project 7, a regard to the Star Trek ex-Borg character Seven of Nine. The seven spokes on the wheel of the Kubernetes logo are regarded as that codename. The first Borg project was written entirely in C++, but the rewritten Kubernetes system is implemented in Go.

Kubernetes v1.0 was released on July 21, 2015. Along with the Kubernetes v1.0 release, Google partnered with the Linux Foundation to form the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and offered Kubernetes as a seed technology. In February 2016 Helm package manager for Kubernetes was released. On March 6, 2018, Kubernetes Project reached ninth place in commits at GitHub, and second place in authors and issues, after the Linux kernel.

Why was it created?

There are a lot of applications that put all the functionality, like transaction and third-party integration, into a single deployable, and artifact and monoliths are a common way to build application even today but they still have their downfalls, for example, deployments can take a long time, since everything has to roll out altogether. And if different parts of the monolith are managed by different terms, there could be a lot of additional complexity when prepping for a rollout And scaling has the same problem Teams have to throw resources at the whole application, even if the bottleneck is only on a single area. So people came up with microservices each piece of functionality is split apart into smaller individual artifacts if there’s an update only that exact service has to be replaced and the microservice model has scaling benefits, too. Now individual services can be scaled to match their traffic, so it’s easier to avoid bottlenecks without over-provisioning. This is all great, but having one machine for each service would require a lot of resources and a whole bunch of machines. That’s why containers are a perfect choice. with the containers, teams can package up their services All the applications, their dependencies, and any necessary configuration get delivered together. This also means that they can be sure their services will run the same way, no matter where they’re run. But there are still more problems that remain unsolved.

Updating a container is easy since you can create a new version of the container and deploy it in place of the old one But the question is that how can upgrades be done without downtime? How do these containers know how to talk to the other ones? And how can the app developer debug issues and observe what’s happening? And now we’ve come back to the conductor of our container orchestra. Kubernetes is all about managing these containers on virtual machines or nodes. The nodes in the containers they run are grouped together as a cluster, and each container has its own endpoints, Domain Name System, storage, and scalability. Everything that modern applications need, without the manual effort of doing it yourself. Kubernetes automates most of the repetition and inefficiencies of doing everything by hand. The app developer tells Kubernetes what it wants the cluster to look like, and Kubernetes makes it happen. See, this all sounds amazing.

Want a plain English way to explain what this looks like?

This one’s pretty great: You can use a lunchbox analogy, notes Mike Kail, CTO and co-founder at CYBRIC: “Let’s say an application environment is your old-school lunchbox. The contents of the lunchbox were all assembled well before putting them into the lunchbox [but] there was no separation between any of those contents. The Kubernetes system provides a lunchbox that permits for just-in-time expansion of the contents (scaling) and full isolation between every unique item within the lunchbox and therefore the ability to remove any item without influence any of the other contents (immutability).”

Key features of Kubernetes:

After knowing this now you are very much interested in key features of Kubernetes. It provides different features like Scalability, Flexibility, Run Anywhere, Automation, Self-Healing, Self-Discovery & Load Balancing, Automated rollouts & rollbacks, Batch Execution.

Scalability:

Customers using Kubernetes answer end-user requests quickly and ship software quicker than ever before. But what happens when you build a service that is even more popular than you planned for and run out of computers? Kubernetes say we have a solution: autoscaling. On Google Compute Engine (GCE) and Google Container Engine (GKE), Amazon(EKS) Kubernetes will automatically scale up your cluster as soon as you need it, and scale it back down to save you money when you don’t.

Flexibility:

Kubernetes’ flexibility grows with you to bring your different types of applications consistently and very effortlessly no matter how complex your need is.

Run Anywhere:

Run Anywhere: Kubernetes is open source(means code is openly available), giving you the freedom to take advantage of on-premises, hybrid, or public cloud infrastructure, and letting you effortlessly move workloads to where they’re most needed.

Automation:

Automatically place containers hold up their resource requirements and other constraints without giving up availability. Mix evaluative and best-effort workloads to drive utilization and save resources.

Self-Healing:

Restart containers that stop working, replace, and reschedule containers when nodes die. Kill containers that don’t answer your user-defined health checkup.

Self-Discovery & Load Balancing:

Kubernetes gives containers their own IP addresses and one DNS (domain name server) name for a group of containers, and it can load-balance.

Automated rollouts & rollbacks:

Kubernetes growingly rolls out changes to your application or its configuration management, while observing application health to make sure it doesn’t kill all of your instances at a similar time. If something goes amiss, Kubernetes will roll-back the change for you.

Batch Execution:

Kubernetes can manage your batch and continuous integration (CI) loads, replacing containers that fail, if desired.

Recent trends of Kubernetes:

Amazon EKS service (Kubernetes + AWS):

Amazon elastic container service for Kubernetes is a managed service that allows users to run Kubernetes on a w s cloud without having to manage the underlying control plane so by this we don’t have to manage any control plane when you are using Amazon EKS service. Amazon EKS runs the Kubernetes management infrastructure across multiple AWS availability zone so you simply provision worker nodes you create them and then connect them to your EKS cluster endpoint Infrastructure running on Amazon. It is secure by default this is mainly because Amazon EKS sets up the secure and encrypted communication channel between your worker nodes and your Kubernetes cluster endpoints. then the application that is managed by Amazon EKS is fully compatible with those in the standard Kubernetes environment what exactly means is you can easily migrate any standard Kubernetes application to Amazon EKS without modifying any code just like that you can transfer from the Standard Kubernetes environment. finally, AWS actively works with the Kubernetes community it also makes contributions to the Kubernetes codebase that has a w s EKS users to use other AWS services as well.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) gives you the pliability to start out, run, and scale Kubernetes applications within the AWS public cloud or on-premises. Amazon EKS(Amazon Elastic Kubernetes) helps you provide highly-available and secure clusters and automates key tasks such as patching, node provisioning, and updates. Customers like Intuit, Autodesk, GoDaddy, Intel, and Snap trust EKS to run their most delicate and mission-critical applications.

How it works

Deploy applications with Amazon EKS in the cloud:

Deploy applications with Amazon EKS Anywhere:

Deploy applications with your own tools:

Benefits:

Improve availability and observability

EKS runs the Kubernetes control plane over multiple AWS Availability Zones, spontaneously detects and replaces unhealthy control plane nodes, and provides on-demand, zero downtime upgrades, and patching. EKS offers a 99.95% uptime SLA. At an equivalent time, the EKS console provides observability of your Kubernetes clusters so you can identify and resolve issues faster.

Provision and scale your resources efficiently

With EKS managed node groups, you don’t get to separately provision compute power to scale your Kubernetes applications. Additionally, AWS Fargate automatically provisions on-demand serverless compute for your applications. For even other cost savings, EKS nodes on Amazon EC2 Spot instances reduce your cost for more efficiency.

Get a more secure Kubernetes environment

EKS spontaneously applies the latest security patches to your cluster’s control plane. AWS works closely with the community to deal with critical security issues and help make sure that every EKS cluster is secure.

Companies adopting Amazon EKS:

Conclusion:

If you need a great tool for your organization that does orchestration just go for Kubernetes. Because Kubernetes is a great tool for orchestrating containerized applications. It automates the very complex task of dynamically scaling an application in real-time.