What is Kubernetes? How is it being used by Industries over the years?
By: Rahul Bhardwaj
Tags: Redhat Linux, Automation, Containers, Kubernetes

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes (also known as k8s or “kube”) is an open source container orchestration platform that automates many of the manual processes involved in deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications. You can cluster together groups of hosts running Linux containers, and Kubernetes helps you easily and efficiently manage those clusters.

An Overview on the background:

Kubernetes was originally developed and designed by engineers at Google. Google was one of the early contributors to Linux container technology and has talked publicly about how everything at Google runs in containers. (This is the technology behind Google’s cloud services.)

Google generates more than 2 billion container deployments a week, all powered by its internal platform, Borg. Borg was the predecessor to Kubernetes, and the lessons learned from developing Borg over the years became the primary influence behind much of Kubernetes technology.

What can Kubernetes do?

With Kubernetes you can:

Orchestrate containers across multiple hosts.

Make better use of hardware to maximize resources needed to run your enterprise apps.

Control and automate application deployments and updates.

Mount and add storage to run stateful apps.

Scale containerized applications and their resources on the fly.

Declaratively manage services, which guarantees the deployed applications are always running the way you intended them to run.

Health-check and self-heal your apps with auto-placement, auto-restart, auto-replication, and auto-scaling.

Real World Cases

One of the best examples of accelerating time to market comes from Tinder. Due to high traffic volume, Tinder’s engineering team faced challenges of scale and stability. And they realized that the answer to their struggle is Kubernetes. Tinder’s engineering team migrated 200 services and ran a Kubernetes cluster of 1,000 nodes, 15,000 pods, and 48,000 running containers. While the migration process wasn’t easy, the Kubernetes solution was critical to ensure smooth business operations going further.

Spotify is an early K8s adopter and has significant cost saving values by adopting K8s. Leveraging K8s, Spotify has seen 2–3x CPU utilization using the orchestration capabilities of K8s, resulting in better IT spend optimization.

Airbnb’s needed to scale continuous delivery horizontally, and the goal was to make continuous delivery available to the company’s 1,000 or so engineers so they could add new services. Airbnb adopted Kubernetes to support over 1,000 engineers concurrently configuring and deploying over 250 critical services to Kubernetes. The net result is that AirBnb can now do over 500 deploys per day on average.

Use and Significant role Kubernetes is playing in Industries

Since its inception, Kubernetes has been a project that has enjoyed great recognition and has always had a lot of impact, but in recent months its influence has been consolidated based on different factors.

The community has grown considerably. Google and Red Hat are the biggest contributors, but there is also Meteor, CoreOS, Huawei, Mesosphere and many more.

In addition, Kubernetes is no longer perceived as something new to experiment with, it is gaining enough credit to be used more and more in production. In fact, by 2019, this platform was in production in 78% of the companies. One year earlier, in 2018, it was in 58%. Companies such as Tinder, Reddit, New York Times, Airbnb or Pinterest have integrated this technology into their services. The following sections shows some past data of Kubernetes and its influence in the industries.

Stastical Data:

The following data shows the increasing interest in the projects:

This data was taken and compiled from questions asked on StackExchange as well as GitHub stars and forks across three leading orchestrators.

There is no doubt Kubernetes has been gaining popularity in industries exponentially.

According to the CNCF, Kubernetes is now the second largest open source project in the world just behind linux

Source: CNCF survey

Kubernetes enables organizations to be cost effective while offering a versatile container orchestration solution. The following graph shows Kubernetes share among container organizations:

Future of Kubernetes:

Since the introduction of Kubernetes, you can safely say that almost all of the other orchestrators are either irrelevant or have taken a back seat to Kubernetes. And now just over four years later, every major public cloud provider has a managed Kubernetes service or is in the process of developing one.