What is Kubernetes? Guide to Containers and Deployment

Virtual machines are servers abstracted from the actual computer hardware, enabling you to run multiple VMs on one physical server or a single VM that spans more than one physical server. Each VM runs its own OS instance, and you can isolate each application in its own VM, reducing the chance that applications running on the same underlying physical hardware will impact each other.

• And, they’re disposable — when you no longer need to run the application, you take down the VM.
• Containers are similar to VMs, but are far more lightweight, as they share standard components such as the operating system they are running on between them.
• When Docker emerged in 2013, containers were familiar, but thanks to clever packaging and marketing, the project pushed containers rapidly into the mainstream.
• It provides all these functionalities and more, replacing a myriad of alternative tools.

Each VM is a full machine running all the components, including its own operating system, on top of the virtualized hardware. Restarts containers that fail, replaces and reschedules containers when nodes die, kills containers that don’t respond to your user-defined health check, and doesn’t advertise them to clients until they are ready to serve.

Key Kubernetes concepts

A Kubernetes Volume provides persistent storage that exists for the lifetime of the pod itself. This storage can also be used as shared disk space for containers within the pod. Volumes are mounted at specific mount points within the container, which are defined by the pod configuration, and cannot mount onto other volumes or link to other volumes. The same volume can be mounted at different points in the file system tree by different containers. Kubernetes provides a partitioning of the resources it manages into non-overlapping sets called namespaces. They are intended for use in environments with many users spread across multiple teams, or projects, or even separating environments like development, test, and production. Kubernetes orchestration allows you to build application services that span multiple containers, schedule those containers across a cluster, scale those containers, and manage the health of those containers over time.

Each worker node hosts one or more pods – a collection of containers under Kubernetes’ control. The various workloads and services that make up your cloud application run in these containers. Kubernetes can move them around the cluster if necessary to maximize stability and efficiency. To solve this problem came virtualisation, that allowed developers to run “virtual machines” on one physical machine. Virtualisation allows for isolation and security between each machine, and the applications running in it, and presents itself as a cluster of machines that you can create and recreate relatively easily.

DevOps Benchmarks

Deployments are a higher level management mechanism for ReplicaSets. While the Replication Controller manages the scale of the ReplicaSet, Deployments will manage what happens to the ReplicaSet – whether an update has to be rolled out, or rolled back, etc. When deployments are scaled up or down, this results in the declaration of the ReplicaSet changing – and this change in declared state is managed by the Replication Controller.

Containers offer the same isolation, scalability, and disposability of VMs, but because they don’t carry the payload of their own OS instance, they’re lighter weight than VMs. They’re more resource-efficient — they let you run more applications on fewer machines , with fewer OS instances.

Going back in time

Containers are similar to VMs, but are far more lightweight, as they share standard components such as the operating system they are running on between them. Containers allow you to package applications into self-contained units with just everything needed to run. You can then distribute, recreate and scale the container more easily. Containers can still have their own virtualised hardware resources if needed, but their decoupled nature makes them portable, and great for development workflows. Kubernetes — also known as “k8s” or “kube” — is a container orchestration platform for scheduling and automating the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications. Kubernetes is an open-source system which allows you to run containers, manage them, automate deploys, scale deployments, create and configure ingresses, deploy stateless or stateful applications, and many other things.

• Since the first KubeCon in 2015 with 500 attendees, KubeCon has grown to become an important event for the cloud native community.
• API resources that correspond to objects will be represented in the cluster with unique identifiers for the objects.
• The combination of Custom Resources and Custom Controllers are often referred to as an Operator.
• Red Hat OpenShift offers full stack automation capabilities with Kubernetes Operators, which automate installation and lifecycle management of non-Kubernetes-native infrastructure.

Mirantis provides a complete, managed solution that puts the power of cloud native in your hands. These API resources represent objects that are not part of the standard Kubernetes product. These resources can appear and disappear in a running cluster through dynamic registration. Cluster administrators can update Custom Resources independently of the cluster.

Kubernetes

It takes care of scaling and failover for your application, provides deployment patterns, and more. For example, Kubernetes can easily manage a canary deployment for your system. Automatically places containers based on their resource requirements and other constraints, while not sacrificing availability. Mix critical and best-effort workloads in order to drive up utilization and save even more resources. Cluster management is the process of managing a Kubernetes cluster from the moment of deployment onwards. Key to the success of Kubernetes has been its ability to automate much of this work – and central to that ability is the principle of a ‘desired state’.

This pattern can be thought of as one that uses Kubernetes itself as a component of the storage system or service. A ReplicaSet’s purpose is to maintain a stable set of replica pods running at any given time. As such, it is often used to guarantee the availability of a specified number of identical Pods. It includes all the extra pieces of technology that make Kubernetes powerful and viable for the enterprise, including registry, networking, telemetry, security, automation, and services.

Kubernetes helps your team and business make changes to large scale applications with little or no downtime. You can try new ideas, optimisations, and experiments and move quickly, staying ahead of your competition. With Istio, you set a single policy that configures connections between containers so that you don’t have to configure each connection individually. Docker is the most popular tool for creating and running Linux® containers. While early forms of containers were introduced decades ago , containers were democratized in 2013 when Docker brought them to the masses with a new developer-friendly and cloud-friendly implementation. Services are an abstraction on top of a number of pods, typically requiring a proxy on top for other services to communicate with it via a virtual IP address.