What is Kubernetes?
- Date: 03 November, 2020
Kubernetes has outgrown the hype and is a known term in the IT-world. Strangely enough this technology is still unfamiliar to many amongst the IT-crowd. Which demands the question: what is Kubernetes, exactly? What can you do with Kubernetes? Who would profit from working with it – and which knowledge do you need to best use it?
Companies in Belgium have transferred to Kubernetes too. Take a look at ING for example. The bank realized after transforming into an agile organization that it needed a standardized platform to support the work of their developers.
Because their DevOps-teams are stimulated to be self-sufficient they enrolled all kinds of container systems: Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos..
ING was getting overwelmed by all these different containersystems the company had – so they decided to pick one: Kubernetes.
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is the Greek word for pilot or helmsman. Kubernetes hosts your containers with apps on her ‘ship’, so to say. Kubernetes is a platform on which your containers can preform on large scale in the cloud. Kubernetes also grants you the overview over all these different containers.
Want to know more? Watch the video!
Containers
When you decide to run an application on a server in the cloud, you will most likely put the application in a Virtual Machine (VM). But if you want to run multiple instances, VM’s aren’t the most efficient solution. Because when you use a VM, you’ll have to virtualize an entire environment.
Every instance demands more computing power than it actually uses and that’s a waste. A container can be a solution here – the container wouldn’t waste computing power.
Smarter than VM’s
Containers work smarter than VM’s. See, a container only gives the application what it really needs. Containers can be useful to run apps and workloads in a virtual environment. When working with containers efficiency and scalability are key.
The danger with a container system is that the whole thing can become chaotic and cost-inefficient. This could for example happen when you need thousands of instances of one application. Kubernetes makes it easy to roll out containers and manage them (orchestration) in the datacentre.
Prepare yourself
Kubernetes can become chaotic when you start working with it, if you immediately put large workloads in. Be careful: take baby steps and start with small workloads.
Make sure there is enough knowledge of Kubernetes present in your organization to implement this technology and enjoy it to it’s full potential. Take a Kubernetes Fundamentals training course at Global Knowledge! In this course we take two days to bring you up to speed with Kubernetes, so you can gain all there is from this technology.
