Why Kubernetes is so popular and how an industry uses Kubernetes.

Hello Readers👋

In this blog, I am going to discuss “How Industries are using Kubernetes” and will discuss some use cases that are solved by using Kubernetes. So after reading this blog you will get the whole insights about “Kubernetes”!!!!

Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Originally developed by Google, Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform designed to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. In fact, Kubernetes has established itself as the defacto standard for container orchestration and is the flagship project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), backed by key players like Google, AWS, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Cisco, and Red Hat.

Kubernetes makes it easy to deploy and operate applications in a microservice architecture. It does so by creating an abstraction layer on top of a group of hosts so that development teams can deploy their applications and let Kubernetes manage:

• Controlling resource consumption by application or team
• Evenly spreading application load across a hosting infrastructure
• Automatically load balancing requests across the different instances of an application
• Monitoring resource consumption and resource limits to automatically stop applications from consuming too many resources and restarting the applications again
• Moving an application instance from one host to another if there is a shortage of resources in a host, or if the host dies
• Automatically leveraging additional resources made available when a new host is added to the cluster
• Easily performing canary deployments and rollbacks.

Why is Kubernetes so popular?

1. Kubernetes helps you move faster: Indeed, Kubernetes allows you to deliver a self-service Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that creates a hardware layer abstraction for development teams.
2. Kubernetes is cost-efficient. Kubernetes and containers allow for much better resource utilization than hypervisors and VMs do; because containers are so lightweight, they require less CPU and memory resources to run.
3. Kubernetes is cloud-agnostic. Kubernetes runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and you can also run it on-premise. You can move workloads without having to redesign your applications or completely rethink your infrastructure which lets you standardize on a platform and avoid vendor lock-in.

Role of Kubernetes in Enterprises

Despite the core business, every company is embracing digitalization. Their ability to adapt to rapid growth and competitiveness is mostly appreciated. Cloud-native technologies are aroused to meet the needs in providing observability and automation that are necessary to manage applications. Also, they are planned to scale up with high velocity. Businesses were previously restricted to quarterly deployments for critical applications.

The Kubernetes declarative API-driven infrastructure enables teams to work independently. Moreover, it helps operators to concentrate on their business goals. These inevitable shifts in the culture of working have been proven to contribute towards higher productivity and autonomy, along with decreasing the labor of development teams. In addition, Kubernetes is no longer perceived as something new to experiment with, it is gaining enough credit to be used more and more in production. In fact, by 2019, this platform was in production in 78% of the companies. One year earlier, in 2018, it was 58%. Companies such as Tinder, Reddit, New York Times, Airbnb, or Pinterest have integrated this technology into their services.

Companies are looking to develop applications, and containers and open source are becoming very important, as they realize that Kubernetes is the first step to create modern scalable applications.

Kubernetes is a system that can be used to efficiently implement applications. As a result, it can help companies save money by using less labor to manage their IT infrastructure.

Kubernetes effectively automates container management. Because containers allow for the assembly of code into smaller, easier to transport parts, and larger applications involve a package of multiple containers, Kubernetes can organize multiple containers into units. Therefore, containerized applications can be scaled automatically, making it more feasible with only fewer resources needed to manage multiple containers.

Kubernetes offers these capabilities to a business:

• Multi-cloud flexibility: As more enterprises run on multi-cloud platforms, they benefit from Kubernetes, as it easily runs any application on any public cloud service or a combination of public and private clouds.
• Faster time to market: Because Kubernetes can help the development team break down into smaller units to focus on single, targeted, smaller micro-services, these smaller teams tend to be more agile.
• IT cost optimization: Kubernetes can help a company reduce infrastructure costs quite dramatically if it is operating on a large scale.
• Improved scalability and availability: Kubernetes serves as a critical management system that can scale an application and its infrastructure whenever the workload increases, and reduce it as the load decreases.
• Effective migration to the cloud: Kubernetes can handle rehosting, re-platforming, and refactoring. It offers a seamless route to effectively move an application from the facility to the cloud.

How Kubernetes solve problems?

CASE STUDY:

The New York Times:

From Print to the Web to Cloud Native

Challenge

When the company decided a few years ago to move out of its data centers, its first deployments on the public cloud were smaller, less critical applications managed on virtual machines. “We started building more and more tools, and at some point, we realized that we were doing a disservice by treating Amazon as another data center,” says Deep Kapadia, Executive Director, Engineering at The New York Times. Kapadia was tapped to lead a Delivery Engineering Team that would “design for the abstractions that cloud providers offer us.”

Solution

The team decided to use Google Cloud Platform and its Kubernetes-as-a-service offering, GKE.

Impact

Speed of delivery increased. Some of the legacy VM-based deployments took 45 minutes; with Kubernetes, that time was “just a few seconds to a couple of minutes,” says Engineering Manager Brian Balser. Adds Li: “Teams that used to deploy on weekly schedules or had to coordinate schedules with the infrastructure team now deploy their updates independently, and can do it daily when necessary.” Adopting Cloud Native Computing Foundation technologies allows for a more unified approach to deployment across the engineering staff, and portability for the company.

“I think once you get over the initial hump, things get a lot easier and actually a lot faster.” — DEEP KAPADIA, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ENGINEERING AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

IBM:

Building an Image Trust Service on Kubernetes with Notary and TUF

Challenge

IBM Cloud offers public, private, and hybrid cloud functionality across a diverse set of runtimes from its OpenWhisk-based function as a service (FaaS) offering, managed Kubernetes and containers, to Cloud Foundry platform as a service (PaaS). These runtimes are combined with the power of the company’s enterprise technologies, such as MQ and DB2, its modern artificial intelligence (AI) Watson, and data analytics services. Users of IBM Cloud can exploit capabilities from more than 170 different cloud-native services in its catalog, including capabilities such as IBM’s Weather Company API and data services. In the later part of 2017, the IBM Cloud Container Registry team wanted to build out an image trust service.

Solution

The work on this new service culminated with its public availability in the IBM Cloud in February 2018. The image trust service, called Portieris, is fully based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) open source project Notary, according to Michael Hough, a software developer with the IBM Cloud Container Registry team. Portieris is a Kubernetes admission controller for enforcing content trust. Users can create image security policies for each Kubernetes namespace, or at the cluster level, and enforce different levels of trust for different images. Portieris is a key part of IBM’s trust story since it makes it possible for users to consume the company’s Notary offering from within their IKS clusters. The offering is that the Notary server runs in IBM’s cloud, and then Portieris runs inside the IKS cluster. This enables users to be able to have their IKS cluster verify that the image they’re loading containers from contains exactly what they expect it to, and Portieris is what allows an IKS cluster to apply that verification.

Impact

IBM’s intention in offering a managed Kubernetes container service and image registry is to provide a fully secure end-to-end platform for its enterprise customers. “Image signing is one key part of that offering, and our container registry team saw Notary as the de facto way to implement that capability in the current Docker and container ecosystem,” Hough says. The company had not been offering image signing before, and Notary is the tool it used to implement that capability. “We had a multi-tenant Docker Registry with private image hosting,” Hough says. “The Docker Registry uses hashes to ensure that image content is correct, and data is encrypted both in-flight and at rest. But it does not provide any guarantees of who pushed an image. We used Notary to enable users to sign images in their private registry namespaces if they so choose.”

Top Industries that use Kubernetes

Kubernetes by the numbers, in 2020: 12 stats to see

Kubernetes’ increased adoption is showcased by a number of influential companies that have integrated the technology into their services. Let us take a look at how some of the biggest companies of our time are successfully using Kubernetes.

The Docker adoption is still growing exponentially, more and more companies have started using it in Production. It is important to use an orchestration platform to scale & manage your containers.

Imagine a situation where you have been using Docker for a little while, and have deployed on a few different servers. Your application starts getting massive traffic, and you need to scale up fast, how will you go from 3 servers to 40 servers that you may require? And how will you decide which container should go where? How would you monitor all these containers and make sure they are restarted if they exit?

This is where Kubernetes is increased adoption is showcased by a number of influential companies that have integrated the technology into their services.

Let us take a look at how some of the most successful companies of our time are successfully using Kubernetes.

Airbnb’s Kubernetes story

Airbnb’s transition from a monolithic to a microservices architecture is pretty amazing. They needed to scale continuous delivery horizontally, and the goal was to make continuous delivery available to the company’s 1000 or so engineers so they could add new services. Airbnb adopted to support over 1000 engineers concurrently configuring and deploying over 250 critical services to Kubernetes (at a frequency of about 500 deploys per day on average). I want you to see this excellent presentation from Melanie Cebula, the infrastructure engineer at Airbnb.

Conclusion

In a short span of time, Kubernetes has grown and developed into an economic powerhouse. As it offers varied benefits, most companies of all sizes look to develop products and services to meet an ever-increasing need. Kubernetes has the ability to work on both public and private clouds and has made it one of the favorite tools for the businesses that work with hybrid clouds. If this continues, we can even see more companies investing in Kubernetes and container management system. Containers are becoming more and more popular in the software world and Kubernetes has become the industry standard for deploying containers in production. We will expect a high growth rate of Kubernetes this year too

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