How industries are using Kubernetes and what all use cases are solved by Kubernetes?
By: Subhashis Paul
Tags: Kubernetes, Redhat Linux, Containers, Vimal Daga

What is Kubernetes?

Before knowing about the Kubernetes, we also have to know about the containerization. What is containerization? Containerization is OS-based virtualization which creates multiple virtual units in the user space, known as Containers. Nowadays Docker is a famous platform for this containerization. It is used to package your application and all its dependencies together in the form of containers so to make sure that your application works seamlessly in any environment which can be development or test or production. Simply we can say that Docker is a tool designed to make it easier to create, deploy, and run applications by using containers. Containers allow a developer to package up an application with all of the parts it needs, such as libraries and other dependencies, and deploy it as one package. But this docker has lots of drawbacks. Actually it is not drawback, it is lack of some features.

While Docker provided an open standard for packaging and distributing containerized applications, there arose a new problem. How would all of these containers be coordinated and scheduled? How do you seamlessly upgrade an application without any interruption of service? How do you monitor the health of an application, know when something goes wrong and seamlessly restart it?

Here Kubernetes come to solve those kind of problems. Kubernetes is an orchestration tool for containerized applications. Starting with a collection of Docker containers, Kubernetes can control resource allocation and traffic management for cloud applications and microservices.

Kubernetes was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

What does Kubernetes do?

✒️Deploying images and containers

✒️Managing the scaling of containers and clusters

✒️Resource balancing containers and clusters

✒️Traffic management for services

What types of the challenges were faced by the industries?

Adform’s mission is to provide a secure and transparent full stack of advertising technology to enable digital ads across devices. The company has a large infrastructure: OpenStack-based private clouds running on 1,100 physical servers in 7 data centers around the world. Their private cloud was not really flexible enough. The biggest pain point is that their developers need to maintain their virtual machines, so rolling out technology and new software takes time.

mission is to provide a secure and transparent full stack of advertising technology to enable digital ads across devices. The company has a large infrastructure: OpenStack-based private clouds running on 1,100 physical servers in 7 data centers around the world. Their private cloud was not really flexible enough. The biggest pain point is that their developers need to maintain their virtual machines, so rolling out technology and new software takes time. Adidas is a big company. They was happy with technological perspective. But they were facing problem to access all the tools at a time.

is a big company. They was happy with technological perspective. But they were facing problem to access all the tools at a time. Tinder was facing challenges of scale and stability. When scaling became critical, they often suffered through several minutes of waiting for new EC2 instances to come online.

was facing challenges of scale and stability. When scaling became critical, they often suffered through several minutes of waiting for new EC2 instances to come online. Even Google was facing some problems on scalability and automatic deployment before using Kubernetes.

was facing some problems on scalability and automatic deployment before using Kubernetes. We all know the Spotify . It is a fabulous audio-streaming platform has grown to over 200 million monthly active users across the world. They have a small team working on the features and that was just not as efficient as adopting something that was supported by a much bigger community.

. It is a fabulous audio-streaming platform has grown to over 200 million monthly active users across the world. They have a small team working on the features and that was just not as efficient as adopting something that was supported by a much bigger community. WooRank is a super fast, super easy-to-use SEO audit and digital marketing tool. For two years, the infrastructure ran smoothly on Mesos, but there were still lots of their own libraries that they had to roll and applications that they had to bring in, so it was very cumbersome for them as a small team to keep those things alive and to update them.

is a super fast, super easy-to-use SEO audit and digital marketing tool. For two years, the infrastructure ran smoothly on Mesos, but there were still lots of their own libraries that they had to roll and applications that they had to bring in, so it was very cumbersome for them as a small team to keep those things alive and to update them. Ocado is the world’s largest online-only grocery retailer, developed the Ocado Smart Platform to manage its own operations, from websites to warehouses. To set up the first warehouses for the platform, Ocado shifted from virtual machines and Puppet infrastructure to Docker containers. They were looking for to bring all these disparate infrastructure services together in one unified API.

is the world’s largest online-only grocery retailer, developed the Ocado Smart Platform to manage its own operations, from websites to warehouses. To set up the first warehouses for the platform, Ocado shifted from virtual machines and Puppet infrastructure to Docker containers. They were looking for to bring all these disparate infrastructure services together in one unified API. IBM cloud offers public, private, and hybrid cloud functionality across a diverse set of runtimes from its Open Whisk-based function as a service (FaaS) offering, managed Kubernetes and containers, to Cloud Foundry platform as a service (PaaS). In 2017, the IBM Cloud Container Registry team wanted to build out an image trust service.

cloud offers public, private, and hybrid cloud functionality across a diverse set of runtimes from its Open Whisk-based function as a service (FaaS) offering, managed Kubernetes and containers, to Cloud Foundry platform as a service (PaaS). In 2017, the IBM Cloud Container Registry team wanted to build out an image trust service. An artificial intelligence research lab, OpenAI needed infrastructure for deep learning that would allow experiments to be run either in the cloud or in its own data center, and to easily scale. Portability, speed, and cost were the main drivers.

Why you need Kubernetes and what it can do

Containers are a good way to bundle and run your applications. In a production environment, you need to manage the containers that run the applications and ensure that there is no downtime. For example, if a container goes down, another container needs to start. Wouldn’t it be easier if this behavior was handled by a system?

That’s how Kubernetes comes to the rescue! Kubernetes provides you with a framework to run distributed systems resiliently. It takes care of scaling and failover for your application, provides deployment patterns, and more. For example, Kubernetes can easily manage a canary deployment for your system.

Kubernetes provides you with:

Service discovery and load balancing Kubernetes can expose a container using the DNS name or using their own IP address. If traffic to a container is high, Kubernetes is able to load balance and distribute the network traffic so that the deployment is stable.

Kubernetes can expose a container using the DNS name or using their own IP address. If traffic to a container is high, Kubernetes is able to load balance and distribute the network traffic so that the deployment is stable. Storage orchestration Kubernetes allows you to automatically mount a storage system of your choice, such as local storages, public cloud providers, and more.

Kubernetes allows you to automatically mount a storage system of your choice, such as local storages, public cloud providers, and more. Automated rollouts and rollbacks You can describe the desired state for your deployed containers using Kubernetes, and it can change the actual state to the desired state at a controlled rate. For example, you can automate Kubernetes to create new containers for your deployment, remove existing containers and adopt all their resources to the new container.

You can describe the desired state for your deployed containers using Kubernetes, and it can change the actual state to the desired state at a controlled rate. For example, you can automate Kubernetes to create new containers for your deployment, remove existing containers and adopt all their resources to the new container. Automatic bin packing You provide Kubernetes with a cluster of nodes that it can use to run containerized tasks. You tell Kubernetes how much CPU and memory (RAM) each container needs. Kubernetes can fit containers onto your nodes to make the best use of your resources.

You provide Kubernetes with a cluster of nodes that it can use to run containerized tasks. You tell Kubernetes how much CPU and memory (RAM) each container needs. Kubernetes can fit containers onto your nodes to make the best use of your resources. Self-healing Kubernetes restarts containers that fail, replaces containers, kills containers that don’t respond to your user-defined health check, and doesn’t advertise them to clients until they are ready to serve.

Kubernetes restarts containers that fail, replaces containers, kills containers that don’t respond to your user-defined health check, and doesn’t advertise them to clients until they are ready to serve. Secret and configuration management Kubernetes lets you store and manage sensitive information, such as passwords, OAuth tokens, and SSH keys. You can deploy and update secrets and application configuration without rebuilding your container images, and without exposing secrets in your stack configuration.

Kubernetes was created to automate most of the tasks associated with deploying many clustered services across many infrastructure components. Kubernetes provides the following capabilities:

Kubernetes is certainly a great automation tool for deploying and managing distributed containerized application services. It would be very labor intensive and time consuming to try to achieve the same results manually, if possible at all. Kubernetes has solved many use cases faced by many industries.