Why include Kubernetes in your DevOps toolchain in 2021

Since last few years, Kubernetes has taken the container world by storm and has become the de-facto standard for container orchestration.Today with the growing demand, every company is moving towards Kubernetes as the most preferred container orchestration tool.

It has introduced the concept of automation of extensive services into many small microservices to increase the system’s efficiency, performance, and agility. Adopting Kubernetes to your DevOps pipeline will help you optimize the resources and enhance your application’s uptime.

After the introduction of containers, the need arises for how we can manage these containers and how we can orchestrate them within the different infrastructures. Kubernetes comes as a solution for container orchestration that helps push the images to the docker repository and handle the deployment. You do not have to worry about the type of cloud provider you are using. You can easily use it on-premises, cloud, or hybrid cloud solutions.

With Kubernetes, you can easily migrate to the cloud from your traditional virtual machines. It helps in reducing the cost and increases service quality. In this article, we will discuss the reasons to choose Kubernetes over another orchestration tool.

Ten reasons to use Kubernetes

• Portability

With Kubernetes, you can leverage the benefit of hybrid cloud computing, which provides the benefit of both public and private cloud. It allows you to match the job’s workload and toggle between both of them as per your business requirement. It ensures the flexible growth of the capacity without investing much in time, energy, and infrastructure. But the main point is to migrate the workload from one cloud to another whenever required or when the business requirement changes.

Once you have an extensive infrastructure from deploying the CPU, storage, containerization, and other features will increase portability risk. As Kubernetes works on containers running on virtual machines and keeping the complete infrastructure on the cloud, creating an agnostic and portable environment. By implementing Kubernetes, you can manage many services along with enhanced agility and flexibility throughout your container lifecycle. You can choose any platform and cloud vendor to implement Kubernetes.

• Saves time and effort

The main concept of using containers is to save the IT teams time by creating an extensive code and allowing them to create a bundle for your application along with their dependencies to deploy them in the environment. This is the reason why containerization has gained more popularity than the traditional way of deploying applications. With Kubernetes, you do not have to worry about the underlying platform as it supports all platforms to deploy the code. A container will include files that are required for the software deployment to avoid the large overhead time. But handling a large number of containers within the enterprise may increase the complexity and needs time to manage.

Kubernetes allows you to handle these containers efficiently with the help of cloud providers that will handle the infrastructure and will save your time in deploying cycles. It will help the developers to focus more on development instead of deploying applications.

• Stability and security

The traditional way allows you to deploy many applications within the same operating system instance, which is considered to be a very common practice. But, whenever you update or upgrade your operating system for stability and security issues, the underlying software dependencies will also get updated. It may lead to stability and security issues to handle many software changes at once. Changing such settings may impact the working of many applications running on the server or create critical endpoints for your application to crash. This causes to increase the efforts of the IT team to monitor continuously for OS stability.

But with the containerized applications, you can easily handle the OS update or upgrade as the applications are bundled separately and do not depend on the underlying OS. You can easily patch or update your operating system without impacting the containerized applications, and you will get a stable OS. Also, you can update the application within the container to fix issues or to add new features.

Kubernetes allows you to orchestrate different container versions if you want the earlier version to be deployed in the production, enhancing security and stability across cloud environments.

• Architectural advantages

Kubernetes allows you to reduce the sysadmin cost and improves service quality. It ensures complete system transparency as each container has a particular task. Each component is interlinked and has its dependency mapped to a configuration file. You can store containers in different versions in the container repository that allows you to version the infrastructure.

• Vendor agnostic

Kubernetes not only supports the public cloud services but is efficient in handling on-premise application container orchestration. It comes with a great feature of being vendor-agnostic as it allows them to build, manage, and deploy multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud platforms quickly. It also ensures no risk of vendor lock-in by providing specific services bound to a particular cloud provider. Kubernetes also reduces the operational team’s effort to understand cloud platform strategies.

• Elasticity and scalability

Working on cloud platforms comes with the benefit of autoscaling that allows you to handle an intense workload within the cloud environment. Kubernetes allows you to automate and build the container platform that enhances the system’s reliability for their end-users. You can use various auto scaler tools of Kubernetes to increase or decrease the number of applications within your infrastructure. In such a way, you can handle the increasing traffic and maintain the application’s performance even in peak time. Kubernetes ensures that your system will work efficiently and consistently without any outage and shortage of resources.

• Resilience

Implementing Kubernetes enhances the system resiliency by providing better error-handling strategies. You can use various tools that allow you to deploy counter codes to get the system’s state back to normal even after any failure. It helps the developers save their time and effort by automating the process to keep some of the pods available and running.

• User-focused

Irrespective of the underlying infrastructure, Kubernetes is user-focused as it allows us to build applications that can run for any organization without worrying about the environment. Kubernetes provides several tools that help the users to get started with Kubernetes quickly by providing cross-platform support. You are allowed to choose any environment for your business and can change it later as per your changing business requirement.

• Provide a base for cloud-native applications

Among other orchestration tools, Kubernetes has gained popularity as it allows the teams to keep pace with modern software development requirements. Without Kubernetes, you have to write scripts for every task from deployment, scaling to update that will require large IT teams at your disposal. Kubernetes allows teams to leverage the maximum benefits of containers and cloud-native applications. You can efficiently run these applications on any platform without worrying about the cloud-specific requirements.

• Modularity

With containers, you can divide your large applications into small parts that can be set up and run separately and with their dependencies bundled in a package. This modular approach helps you develop applications efficiently in smaller parts and dedicate specific teams to each container. Kubernetes helps manage these containers within an environment with the help of pods, which are controlled as a single application.

Conclusion

So we have seen in this post that Kubernetes eases the burden of configuring, deploying, managing, and monitoring the large-scale containerized applications. Since Kubernetes does offer so many benefits, the organizations globally should consider leveraging Kubernetes to take advantage of these benefits.

Also it gives you complete control over container orchestration, enabling you to deploy, maintain and scale application containers across a cluster of hosts.

Even though learning and implementing Kubernetes within your organisation might not be a simple task, but it is definitely worth the time, money and manpower invested. With Kubernetes as the central technology and using DevOps approach to software delivery, the organisation can accelerate application development, manage its workflows more efficiently and get to the market faster.