Container Master: What is Kubernetes and what advantages does it offer?

The name Kubernetes itself reflects the essence of the solution to a certain extent. It comes from the Greek word κοβερνω (“kiverno”), which referred to a territorial or military-administrative unit under the control of a commander — a “kivernet” (hence, in particular, ‘gubernia’ and “gubernator”). Later, “kybernetes” came to refer to the helmsman on a ship, and in 1834, Henri Ampère (yes, that one) began to use ‘cybernetics’ to refer to the science of controlling complex systems. But the modern meaning of the term “cybernetics” is attributed to American scientist Robert Wiener.

One of the main advantages of Kubernetes is that it not only makes it easy to launch containers, monitor their health, and ensure uninterrupted operation, but also allows you to manage entire container clusters as a single interconnected system. In addition, K8s can be easily scaled to support applications of any size. Kubernetes also ensures high application availability by automatically restarting containers and recovering from failures, optimizes server resource utilization, and supports a wide range of container technologies (allowing the use of various programming languages and execution environments). The fact that K8s is an open-source project means that it is transparent, free, and can be adapted to almost any need.

By the way, we discussed what containers are and what the features of container infrastructures are in a previous article.

Key components of Kubernetes

The key components of the K8s architecture are objects such as Cluster, Node, Pod, Label, Volume, Service, Secret, and a number of others. Let's take a closer look at these terms.

• Cluster: a group of servers that are combined to run containers.
• Node: a server in a cluster. Nodes are divided into two types: Master Node (responsible for managing the cluster, storing the configuration, and distributing tasks among the worker nodes; there can be several such nodes) and Worker Node (running containers, storing their images, executing master node commands; the number of such worker nodes is virtually unlimited).
• Pod: One or more logically related software containers combined into a single unit. Pods are divided into two types: Stateless (can be easily recreated from container images) and Stateful (require special mechanisms to ensure data consistency).
• Volume: A way to store data accessible to containers. They can be represented by various types of storage, including NFS, GlusterFS, AWS EBS, and others.
• Service: An abstraction that provides access to a group of pods. A service allows other cluster components or external applications to find pods and interact with them.
• Label: Labels used to organize and manage cluster resources. Labels can be assigned to Kubernetes objects such as Pod, Service, Namespace, etc.
• Deployment: Description of the desired state of a group of Pods. K8s will automatically create, update, and delete Pods to match the specified state.
• Namespace: A logical grouping of resources that allows applications to be isolated from each other. Such objects are especially useful for distributing resources between different teams, projects, or environments (development, testing).

Why do you need Kubernetes and what problems does it solve?

Kubernetes solves many problems that IT developers and administrators face when working with containerized applications. Let's list just five of the most common ones.

Problem #1: The complexity of managing container infrastructures.

Solution: K8s automates routine tasks such as container startup, load balancing, instance restart, and disaster recovery. It also allows you to dynamically change configurations without having to restart containers.

Problem #2: Difficulties in scaling applications.

Solution: Kubernetes allows you to easily scale resources for applications both vertically (within a Pod) and horizontally (cluster growth). The system is capable of automatically increasing or decreasing the number of Pods depending on the load.

Problem #3: Ensuring application reliability.

Solution: K8s ensures high software availability by automatically restarting (self-healing) pods in case of failure and ensuring load balancing between them. This ensures application reliability even in the event of hardware or software failures.

Problem #4: Low resource utilization.

Solution: Kubernetes optimizes server load by placing containers in a way that maximizes the use of available resources, and also allows for even load distribution, preventing individual pods from becoming overloaded.

Problem #5: Application security.

Solution: K8s allows you to securely store confidential data such as passwords, cryptographic keys, API tokens, etc. using a logical entity called Secret. A “secret” is a special resource where confidential information, accessible to a limited group of users, is stored in a secure form.

Where Kubernetes is the best solution

Today, Kubernetes is widely used in various industries, from application development to engineering problems and scientific calculations. With K8s, you can automate routine tasks related to container infrastructure, improving application security and making them more flexible and scalable. You can also simplify the process of deploying and managing software in the cloud, optimizing costs and improving the performance of your infrastructure. Kubernetes makes it easy to scale individual microservices, update them without stopping the entire application, and provides fault tolerance, making the service highly resilient to failures. In addition, K8s can be used to automate CI/CD processes, enabling faster and more reliable application delivery by reducing the time from development to deployment. Recently, thanks to its advantages, Kubernetes is increasingly being used for big data, distributed information processing, and ensuring the functioning of Internet of Things (IoT) systems.

Kubernetes is a powerful tool that has revolutionized the way containerized applications are managed. It is a powerful, scalable, reliable, and efficient platform for running containerized workloads of any size. If you work with containerized applications, K8s is a must-have tool in your arsenal.

Note that there is a large and active community around Kubernetes that offers support, documentation, and other features. There are many web resources that will help you understand the nuances of K8s and get started with this solution. Here are just a few of the most popular ones:

Official Kubernetes documentation: https://kubernetes.io/docs/home/

Kubernetes blog: https://kubernetes.io/blog/

Kubernetes community on GitHub: https://github.com/kubernetes/community

Finally, we would like to remind you that De Novo offers a wide range of K8s-based cloud services. These include HCI, a private cloud platform of the “Kubernetes as a Service” class, and Kubernetes as a Service, a modern platform for orchestrating industrial-grade Kubernetes clusters in a collective cloud. We also offer De Novo Tensor Cloud and Hosted Tensor Infrastructure services — Kubernetes enhanced with powerful NVIDIA GPU accelerators with tensor cores for running artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) workloads. Tensor Cloud runs in a collective cloud, while HTI is deployed on the De Novo Hosted Private Infrastructure (HPI) private cloud.