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Kubernetes, often referred to as the “cloud operating system,” is an open-source platform for managing clusters of containerized applications and services. Kubernetes was developed by Google engineers Joe Beda, Brendan Burns, and Craig McLuckie in 2014 and released as open source shortly thereafter. Kubernetes itself quickly became a thriving cloud-native ecosystem.
Today, Kubernetes — which means “helmsman” or “pilot” in ancient Greek — is managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), an arm of the Linux Foundation. Although Google donated Kubernetes to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2014, it continues to actively contribute to the development of Kubernetes.
Who Should Use Kubernetes?
After thinking about why Kubernetes is used, the next interesting question is who is using Kubernetes. Given that Google developed Kubernetes, it’s no surprise that it uses the open source Kubernetes platform. Of the 25,290 companies using Kubernetes, Spotify, The New York Times, Pinterest, Booking.com, Adidas, and others are the most popular.
Kubernetes is an excellent development aid for projects that need to scale over time with seamless portability. For tech startups and growing businesses, it can set up multiple development environments and ensure faster application delivery. Although deploying Kubernetes requires money, effort, and time to get started, the features it offers make the platform worth your attention and use. And since it’s a future-proof and well-functioning modern orchestration solution, you won’t regret choosing it.
But despite all the talk about Kubernetes… do you really need Kubernetes to fit your environment? Or is it just another case of the next “new and shiny” thing where people get distracted by novelty and possibilities rather than facts? In this blog, I dive into why Kubernetes often gets more hype than utility.
While Kubernetes Can Do A Lot, It’s Not A Silver Bullet.
Just like Docker, Kubernetes is not a panacea. First, Kubernetes is very complex. As we’ve already noticed, it does a lot of things well. This is a double-edged sword. There are many different things that can be done, but it will take you a long time to learn to do them. You will learn many of these steps by trial and error. This can lead to frustration with your progress as you try to find the next steps to deploy your application the way you want.
Kubernetes is at the top of the Gartner hype cycle, everyone wants it, but few really understand it. Over the next few years, quite a few companies will have to realize that Kubernetes is not a panacea and figure out how to use it properly and effectively.
Kubernetes is powerful, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right choice for every team and application. Like any technology, it is used to solve a specific problem. If you don’t have a problem that Kubernetes is designed to solve, it’s a lot of trouble.
Truer Than You Might Think, Kubernetes Is More Than Just A Fancy Container Orchestration System.
Running containers in production is not a good thing or a fun thing to do. It requires a lot of effort and computing power; you need to solve problems like fault tolerance, elastic scaling, continuous delivery, and service discovery. This is where an orchestrator like Kubernetes comes into play. There are other orchestration platforms, but Kubernetes has gained huge traction and is supported by major cloud providers.
While Kubernetes is no longer a newcomer in town — it has quickly become a staple of container orchestration and planning — its features and components are frequently updated and released. IT teams need to understand how it works, especially when Kubernetes integrates with other platforms.
What Are the Benefits of Using Kubernetes?
That said, there are many benefits to using Kubernetes, many of which we have covered in this article. The included Kubernetes can be easily scaled up and down, it increases the productivity of the entire engineering team, and provides portability for the company. The net impact of all these improvements will only make end users and design departments more satisfied.
While Kubernetes offers amazing business benefits, it also comes with a steep learning curve. Several tools have been released to take advantage of Kubernetes while protecting your team from the hassle and details of usage. You don’t need to understand how Kubernetes works to get all the benefits of Kubernetes. Here are some options to simplify things:
- Fully managed Kubernetes services: You can use fully managed Kubernetes services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Azure Managed Service (AKS).
- Kubernetes-enabled PaaS: Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers offer cloud platforms that integrate with Kubernetes. However, they do not provide the full functionality of the tool. OpenShift, Rancher, and Densify are some examples of this section.
- Payara Cloud is an example, designed specifically for the Jakarta EE runtime: you just need to configure your application, upload it and that’s it. This is the type of Kubernetes usage that makes sense for most organizations.
Conclusion
In summary, Kubernetes is the “big data” of containers/infrastructure – it’s great if you know what you’re doing. However, it turns out that most users don’t really need it and can use something else for a fraction of the cost.
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