Kubernetes

Docker is great for packaging your applications as images and then for running them as containers. This is great if you have only a few containers; however, any software or product can have a dozen or more containers. When you get this level, you have to orchestrate those containers. Container orchestration is all about managing the lifecycle of containers. With the help of container orchestration tools now we can easily automate;

• Deployment of containers
• Scaling of containers
• Allocation of resources between containers
• Expose containers as services to the outside world
• Health monitoring of containers

There is a de-facto standard for container orchestration: Kubernetes. This success comes from Google’s hard work with Borg since 2003. Kubernetes was released in 2014 as an open-source project and then after so many years of work, Google donated Kubernetes to Linux Foundation to form the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

So, what makes Kubernetes the winner for container orchestration? First, Kubernetes is cloud-agnostic; that is, Kubernetes can run anywhere like, bare-metal physical computers, virtual machines in on-premise environments or cloud environments. When your teams want to change their cloud provider, they can migrate their container workloads to another cloud provider or even on-premise systems with ease.

Also, Kubernetes’s architecture allows us to extend its features. For example, you can deploy a Prometheus operator and then have a complete cluster monitoring with ease. You can even extend its network by installing Istio on your cluster and get better observability of your services.