Long Live Containerization!
Kubernetes applications have quickly become the default cloud container for most businesses. In fact, of the 84% of companies using containers in production, an overwhelming 78% use Kubernetes, according to Cloud Native Computing Foundation data.
The overwhelming use of Kubernetes isn’t entirely surprising. As IT teams increasingly prioritize supporting agile development and rapid innovation, their use of containers is multiplying. Containers are essentially mobile and can run from anywhere, whether from a developer’s laptop, testing and production environments and in on-premises, private or public clouds. But the more containers they use, the more chaotic it becomes to manage them.
Kubernetes mitigates this problem by providing an open source API that orchestrates containers and controls how and where each container will run over a fleet of worker nodes based on what compute resources are required and what’s available. It’s undeniably the superior orchestration tool, solving many IT challenges that are unfortunately part and parcel of using containers, including the need for high availability, reliability, scalability, fault tolerance, and spiraling costs.
With their value clearly outlined, here are three ways Kubernetes can help organizations manage containerized applications and scale digital transformations.
As this incredibly fast-paced environment continues to shorten innovation cycles, Kubernetes abstracts many of the monotonous tasks hindering the productivity of developers and DevOps engineers.
Kubernetes allows complete encapsulation of the application and dependencies, allowing developers to pick whatever tooling they’re comfortable with (within reason!). The declarative and ops-friendly approach of Kubernetes fuels quicker deployment and feedback loops, enabling organizations to identify potential issues sooner and security concerns, and thus get to market quicker.
A team using a Kubernetes environment can give developers enough freedom while maintaining their peace of mind when it comes to safety. This is more important than it might seem, as operations teams historically fear giving developers too much space. They believe that with too much leeway, they’ll lose control and security issues will quickly become problematic.
According to Gartner, by 2026, 20% of all enterprise applications will run in containers—up from fewer than 10% in 2020. Dealing with large-scale complex applications can be incredibly costly. However, Kubernetes does help IT leaders keep these costs down and significantly reduce large-scale containerized ecosystems.
Truthfully, without Kubernetes, it’s easy to over-provision hardware or virtual infrastructure for unplanned spikes. This is something that organizations did purposefully in the past because administrators often tended to conservatively handle unanticipated spikes or just because they found it difficult to manually scale containerized applications.
But, orchestrators like Kubernetes have built-in features such as auto-scaling that enable you to automatically respond based on the needs of your application and the incoming traffic and load processed by your applications. Overall, this leads to greater efficiency in responding to changes in environmental demands and prevents you from paying for resources you do not need.
In the early days of orchestration, several different open source projects were in the mix. Still, Kubernetes quickly rose to become the industry standard for deploying containers into production. The rising popularity of Kubernetes has brought with it a broad community of end users, contributors and maintainers, on whom IT leaders can rely for support and advice when they’re faced with technical issues.
Moreover, there is now a rich ecosystem of add-ons and complementary software applications which extend the platform’s functionalities and range of capabilities. For instance, if you have a specific requirement that Kubernetes cannot meet adequately, there is a reasonably good chance that there exists an add-on to address your particular use case. As we implemented Kubernetes, we saw that these tools—most notably Helm charts—significantly reduced our deployment time.
Helm charts, or pre-configured Kubernetes packages, were a major help in reducing the complexity of deploying applications on Kubernetes. They make application updates and releases repeatable, and there isn’t further need for reconfigurations in deploying. Rather than worrying about deploying software, engineers can stay focused on writing software while Helm takes care of deployments.
It’s no surprise, then, that most developers love the platform. Suddenly, they don’t need to fight fires as frequently and they can work more efficiently to deploy and scale faster than ever before.
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