Kubernetes & DevOps: A Perfect Pair?

The Benefits of Kubernetes DevOps in Software Development Cycle

Kubernetes is an open-source platform built by Google that manages containerized applications across multiple hosts. Since its launch, it has continued to be adopted by more companies across various industries, including telecommunications, retail, media, healthcare, etc.

This is because containerization is gaining popularity due to its ability to help with the portability, maintainability, and scalability of applications. On top of that, Kubernetes is an excellent choice for managing containerized apps because it offers many benefits in the DevOps best practice.

Kubernetes provides the ability to effectively manage application containers

One of the notable benefits of Kubernetes is its ability to manage the application containers required by multiple applications. Kubernetes does this through features like deployments, which are used to manage one or more containerized apps on the same host. The replication controller allows you to set up a specified number of pods and deploy them across different hosts. Services ensure that these replicated pods remain available even when a node goes down.

Kubernetes also ensures the high availability of containerized apps to scale containers up and down while ensuring their availability through features like restarts, auto-repairing, and auto-scaling. In addition, it offers a unique feature called Jobs, which is used to facilitate long-running batch tasks.

Kubernetes helps you streamline your application development process

Another notable benefit of Kubernetes is its ability to simplify the application development process by providing an environment where developers can quickly develop, test, and deploy their containerized apps.

It allows users to share application containers through tools like Docker, which they can use to build and share containers across different development teams.

In addition, Kubernetes provides a self-service platform where developers can easily manage their containerized apps without requiring any assistance from administrators or DevOps engineers.

Kubernetes helps you improve infrastructure utilization by leveraging the full power of the cloud infrastructure

Companies frequently struggle with a lack of infrastructure utilization, increasing costs and negatively impacting business operations. Luckily, Kubernetes helps solve this problem by providing your containerized apps on-demand, right from the self-service platform mentioned above. This improves resource utilization and reduces costs for businesses.

Kubernetes provides a common development and continuous deployment environment

Kubernetes provides a common infrastructure to all development teams within an organization to easily collaborate during the DevOps processes of developing, testing and deploying containerized apps.

This enables developers to reuse resources across different projects, eliminating the need to create their own individual environments for each new project or app they are working on.

Kubernetes also simplifies the software’s continuous delivery by allowing you to bring apps from development into the production environment with minimal downtime and without affecting existing app availability.

Kubernetes Features

Kubernetes is an open-source implementation of container cluster management that has become very popular lately, especially since Google launched it. Initially designed for the Google compute engine environment, Kubernetes is now used by many software companies to manage containers across large container clusters of computing power. The most critical features of Kubernetes are the following:

• Portability

  Kubernetes can manage stateless and stateful applications across many different platforms, such as bare metal, virtual machines, OpenStack, and public [cloud services](/services/cloud-computing/) like AWS and Azure.

• Scalability

  Users can easily add computing power to Kubernetes clusters by running more containers on more machines.

• High availability

  Kubernetes has mechanisms to recover from node failures and ensure that containers keep running despite such events, providing the high availability of applications.

• Dynamic configuration

  Users can easily update container resource requests and limits through an online RESTful API and use the same configuration file across many data centers.

• Extensibility

  Kubernetes has an extensive API that can be used to interact with any part of the operating system, including storage and networking components.

Why Should You Use Kubernetes In DevOps?

Kubernetes has become a widely adopted platform for deploying containerized applications, and more and more software companies are considering Kubernetes due to its benefits, as we mentioned above. However, if you are still wondering, then let’s remind you of some of the notable reasons below:

• Kubernetes helps scale containers dynamically, update existing apps without downtime, and run multiple apps on a single machine. It also makes the continuous deployment process simpler and faster by abstracting away all the underlying complexities of containerization from developers. In addition to that, it allows easy management of various containerized apps running on a single machine.
• Kubernetes also enables the usage of a shared pool of workers, which means users from different teams can share resources and distribute workloads.
• Kubernetes is a system allowing you to automate deploying, scaling, and operating containerized apps. It provides declarative configuration so you can easily manage your containerized services. It’s also extensible, so you can add plug-ins to suit whatever level of automation you need. You can install Kubernetes on-premises, private clouds, or public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS Resources), Microsoft Azure, and other platforms.
• Kubernetes is also open-source software that’s free to use and download.