What is Kubernetes? How it is used in Industries and what all use cases are solved by Kubernetes
Kubernetes is a flexible container management system that is developed by Google in 2014. It is used to manage containerized applications in multiple environments.
It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It aims to provide a “platform for automating deployment, scaling.
Kubernetes is also known as K8s, It is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. When we deploying applications as containerized images, there are many manual processes that come up to the management and scheduling of these containerized services at scale.
Manually scaling and deploying each of these services in an enterprise environment would take a lot of time! Kubernetes eliminates these manual processes by giving you the orchestration and management capabilities to run and deploy your containers at scale.
Kubernetes helps to orchestrate and automate your containers so that they can run efficiently. Some important roles of K8S are :
- Orchestrate your containers across multiple hosts
- Make effective use of your hardware resources to run your enterprise applications
- Manage and automate container deployments and updates
- Scale containerized applications on the go
- Mount and assign more storage to operate stateful apps
- Run regular health checks of your containers with auto-placement, auto replication, auto-restart, and autoscaling.
CASE STUDY: SPOTIFY
The audio-streaming platform Spotify App is launched in 2008. It has grown to over 200 million monthly active users across the world.
The challenge they faced :
It has already grown to over 200 million monthly active users around the world. At that time they realised that “having a small team working on the features was just not as efficient as adopting something that was supported by a much bigger community,”.
The solution comes up with K8s :
Then after they saw the amazing community that had grown up around Kubernetes, and they wanted to be part of that, before using k8s they were using Helios. Kubernetes was more features than helios so they decided to take benefit from added velocity and reduced cost, and also align with the rest of the industry on best practices and tools. At the same time, the team wanted to contribute its expertise and influence to the flourishing Kubernetes community. “Kubernetes fit very nicely as a compliment and now as a replacement to Helios. Kubernetes plays a pivotal role in helping you manage a large number of services and respective containers, saving your development team from a lot of manual labor.
A small percentage of Spotify’s fleet, containing over 150 services, has been migrated to Kubernetes so far. “they have heard from their customers that have less of a need to focus on manual capacity provisioning and more time to focus on delivering features for Spotify,” The biggest service currently running on Kubernetes takes over 10 million requests per second as an aggregate service and benefits greatly from autoscaling. “Before, teams would have to wait for an hour to create a new service and get an operational host to run it in production, but with Kubernetes, they can do that on the order of seconds and minutes.” In addition, with Kubernetes’s bin-packing and multi-tenancy capabilities, CPU utilization has improved on average two- to threefold.
