Industry use cases of Kubernetes — a formal look upon.
Before starting our discussion on Kubernetes and its industry use cases, let’s first start from the very starting of these things. You might have guessed it till now, yes, I am going to talk about containerisation and docker first.
So, virtualisation technology existed for a long time but the containerisation technology came into focus when Solomon Hykes announced the first release (or debut) of Docker in 2013. Suddenly after its release, it gained everyone’s attention and even including top IT organisation like Google, Microsoft.
But what Docker actually do and how it’s useful?
Docker can package an application and its dependencies in a virtual container that can run on any Linux, Windows, or macOS computer. That means, it can also be used to create a separate environment (and launch within a second) for your application to run on.
From the graph above, you can see how fast Docker was growing after its initial release. Many companies started collaborating on Docker projects. Though the initial environment creation and deployment at a small scale can work fine with the Docker. But when it comes to large scale deployment or deployment in the production environment, then, Docker was not a great choice. Why? The simple reason for this was management and monitoring. When an application is deployed, then, there is a number of things that need to be thought upon beforehand. Like the company needs to think about how it can monitor all the resources and clients data, or how it can manage all the containers running or when any container goes down (or crashes) then how much time would it take to make it running again. Ah… a number of things. But apart from these, do you know what is more frightening, “all these things are to be done manually”. And this was the time when Kubernetes came into the picture as a container orchestration tool, which can manage all the containers running anywhere (either production or testing environment).
What is Kubernetes (k8s)
Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration tool for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Now, let’s come to our main topic of discussion, i.e., the industry use cases of Kubernetes.
Kubernetes is commonly used as a way to host a microservice-based implementation because it and its associated ecosystem of tools provide all the capabilities needed to address key concerns of any microservice architecture. In today's world, there is really a large number of companies who are using Kubernetes.
Some features provided by K8s are:
- Load Balancer
- Storage Orchestration
- Rollout and Rollback
- Provides a higher density of resource utilization
- Application-centric management
- Self-healing capability
What made companies switch to K8s?
Companies switching from the traditional system to Kubernetes take efforts at starting but the results are rewarding.
Let’s take a situation that can arise in any organisation or company which is related to tech in any way. Say, the company is running on 20 servers (on-premises) right now to deliver its services. The company sees exponential growth in its customer base and want to scale up the servers. But in traditional systems, scaling the servers isn’t that easy and simple task. And at the same time, the company don’t want to switch to the cloud from on-premises because for that they need to do lots of changes.
The above was the same scenario that happened with BlaBlaCar and they wanted a robust solution for this. They also wanted to keep the great performance they got on bare metal, so they didn’t want to go to virtualization on-premise. The solution was to move to containers.
The company decided that moving to cloud-native technologies would allow teams to have infrastructure-agnostic behaviour in their products. With all the tooling that we made around the containers, copying a new service is a matter of minutes. It’s a huge gain. For the developers, it means they can focus only on the features that they’re developing and not on the infrastructure or the hour they would test their code, or the hour that it would get deployed.
“If we lose a server because there’s a hardware problem on it, we just move the containers onto another server. It’s much more efficient. We do that by just changing a line in the configuration file. With Kubernetes, it should be automatic, so we would have nothing to do.” — They said.
Conclusion
The conclusion of this article is that Kubernetes can solve lots of industry use cases and switching to Kubernetes is all time beneficial for companies. Kubernetes can provide features like Load Balancers, scalability, storage orchestration etc.
Discussing all the use cases of Kubernetes in one article is not possible.
So, this was all for now, we’ll meet you in my next article.
Happy Reading!!
