When my cousin finds airline tickets or an apartment for rent, she uses services like Amadeus. They’re great examples of Kubernetes container open-source orchestration platforms. But how does it work? Make yourself a cup of coffee and read.
What is a software container?
The software container is similar to that sea containers riding on trucks, trains, and ships, despite their virtual nature. Instead of the cargo, that container has the piece of universal code used to run in any environment. They simplify allocating resources between the components on the personal workstation or server.
Their alternative is the virtual machine. It’s a guest operating system or virtual hard disk running on the station. That’s important when the company deploys productive equipment or software requiring older versions. Comparing package containers with virtual machines, the specialist understands their advantages:
- A container package is lighter than a virtual machine:
- They virtualize the environment on the operating system level, while their opponents prefer the hardware:
- This article’s topic shares the OS kernel while the machine eats the physical memory.
Container orchestration
Current challenges constantly widen the field for containerization. That requires building more dependencies that are impossible to handle in manual mode. That’s why the developers use different systems like Kubernetes, aiming to orchestrate the containers. It manages its lifestyle, including provisioning, scaling, deployment, and more.
The orchestration boosts the opportunities of the commercial possibilities paired with microservices in their own containers. Those measures form the hive of thousands of containers. Thus, it generates the space for developers’ operations. Its benefits are:
- Simplified operations. It avoids the problems with container exploitation or management.
- Resilience. The orchestration increases this parameter improving its scaling or restarting if required.
- Security. The orchestration is the automated process helping to keep the containers secure. It minimizes the risk of human error except if the operator (orchestrator) caused a mistake at the programming stage.
The correct automation is the key to the full benefits of these instruments. Portability is number 1 in this list. It means you can load code cargo in one place and deliver it to any environment without problems. That’s the same as you load the export cargo into the container, put it on the ship, and departure it to the customer. The developers boost their capabilities in application development. Orchestration splits the massive software architecture into intellectually understandable smaller parts. Containers are lightweight, so they need fewer resources.
Now we’re ready to learn what Kubernetes is. It was the first union in this sphere. That hosting and building platform has competitors, but their level is minor.
Acquainting with Kubernetes
So, Kubernetes is an open-source platform for replacing manual processes. The first system version was released back in 2014. It manages the development of cloud-native applications or on-premise solutions. The system principle distributes the application workload across the cluster. These clusters are active on all types of server clouds. An operator can group its containers into groups to manage them efficiently.
Google engineers from the Borg department launch most container deployments in the network. This company was the Kubernetes predecessor as a service. An open-source type is a field for experiments of orchestration enthusiasts. The weekly volume of the Kubernetes operation is 2 billion or even more.
What features does the platform offer?
- Auto-scaling. That’s a step in the management of resource allocation. They usually are spread evenly throughout the cluster, but sometimes the container from the list needs more resources or less. Auto-scaling fixes it.
- Lifecycle management. That relates to errors or operating issues. It gives two options: Rollback to older versions, pausing, and switching on/off are the main options in the category.
- Declarative model. K8s will maintain the state declared by the administrator. It will recover the container from the sleep or critical features.
- Resilience and self-healing. The feature is responsible for scheduled operations like auto-restart or conditional. An example is auto-scaling at the load peak.
- Persistent storage performs the flexibility to storage management.
- The platform supports multiple internal options to balance the diversified load. It welcomes the external sources of the additions to these solutions.
- DevSecOps. It’s a Klondike for those programmers who make Kubernetes secure as the affected environments. The resources open a new approach to developing security operations throughout the unit lifecycle.
How does the solution work?
The developer encapsulates their application into the container. Kubernetes hosting runs it in any environment according to the customer’s preferences. A cluster has containerized software plus auxiliary modules – the control plane and one worker. The latter is usually the server. The Control plane integrates the platform API to the server infrastructure to simplify project management. It monitors the cluster events and reacts to them correspondingly. A Kubernetes Pod is the smaller unit supposed to work on the worker nodes. It contains at least one container.
Conclusion
Although society criticizes Google for excessive monetization, the company launches competitive products in all markets. Kubernetes is one of these winning challenges. It brought modern, energy-efficient, and resource-friendly servers and workstations. Follow this perspective topic to try your efforts there.