8 Reasons Why Kubernetes is So Powerful

Kubernetes became a de-facto tool for container orchestration. It was in the top too long for someone to consider it hype. In case you are still suspicious of it this article is for you. First, let’s start with What is Kubernetes?

Why Kubernetes is So Powerful?

Kubernetes manages the management and distribution of the containerized applications. Before containers, system admins used physical or virtual machines to run their applications. After the invention of the containers, lots of pre-existing systems transferred their workloads to containers. This transition enabled developers to have faster and more lightweight deployments. When it comes to orchestration of the workloads, Kubernetes is one of the most sophisticated software there is. So what are the reasons that Kubernetes(also known as K8s) is So Powerful?

1-  Community

One of the biggest advantages of being popular is having a big community. Kubernetes has more than3000 contributes on GitHub. Kubernetes is the first graduate of the CNCF organization. CNCF technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. CNCF has more than125K contributors. CNCF is supported by many large organizations such asGoogle(who build the first version), Microsoft, Amazon, and many more.

2- Scalability

Scalability is a major concern of modern software. While choosing a platform, lots of developers ask “Does it scale“. In Kubernetes, there are two things you would like tos cale: Workload and Cluster size. Workloads can be scaled by their CPU and ram usage(however there are many tools for scaling workloads based on different parameters, like request number). This behavior provides a system that can automatically adapt to the circumstances of the situation.
When it comes to cluster size, Kubernetes provides an easy way to scale up and down via its command-line interface. However, in many cloud environments, youcan automate even Node replication.

3- Easy to Manage

Every interaction with Kubernetes has to be done via APIs and to interact with API Kubernetes offers kubectl. Kubectl is a highly capable tool for managing Kubernetes objects via imperative or declarative approach. The imperative approach is using plain commands to create, update, and delete. This approach is useful for fast changes. The declarative approach is using files to manage Kubernetes objects.This approach is useful for storing and managing configuration objects like code. Also is this approach you can store your configuration files in git.

4- Easy to Observe

Kubernetes has a web-based dashboard for monitoring its own state. You can view, create and update the Kubernetes objects using this dashboard. The dashboard is nice and all but when you need a detailed report of the state of the cluster, the dashboard might be a little insufficient.

A more appropriate approach would be, using the specialized tools for the job. For example:

• Prometheus Stack
• ELK Stack
• Kiali/Jaeger
• KubeWatch

5- Extensibility

Kubernetes is highly configurable and extensible. This means when you want something from Kubernetes that is not provided by default you can add that capability or better you can use somebody else's solution. By using Custom ResourceDefinitions, which itself is a Kubernetes object, you can create your own resource types. Also by writing Operators you can create extensions to your applications.

6- Zero downtime on rolling updates

It is old problem of software deployment. How to ensure that you have no downtime? Kubernetes provides rolling updates. When you have a new release of your software, Kubernetes ensures that users will not experience any downtimes. Rolling updates keep track of the state of the deployment provides a smooth transition from the old deployment. This is done by incrementally updating pods.

7-  Self-healing capabilities

Kube-controller-managerensures that workloads are always in the preferred state. When your applications crash for some reason, the controller restarts the application.Also by using liveness and readiness probes Kubernetes ensures the workloads are always working correctly. If a container probe fails Kubernetes will terminate and restart.

8- Storage management

Containers by default stateless but most of the applications need some sort of storage. Kubernetes isolates storage from applications by using Persistent Volumes and Storage Classes. Persistent volumes define space that can be requested from workloads. Storage classes, by managing persistent volumes, provide dynamic storage provisioning. for other storage solutions, you can check the official page for Storage

Conclusion

Kubernetes grows and gets updated very regularly. This is an indication of how much it is used and desired in many environments. Statistics say currently 33% of every deployment is containerized and in the future, it is predicted to reach above 90%. Managing this infrastructure is work in itself. Kubernetes grows and improves itself on this topic. So it safe to say Kubernetes will spread even wider.

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