Read also: Kubernetes: what is it and how you can use it (part 1/2)
In Part 1, we presented a brief history of virtualization approaches and an overview of the main features of Kubernetes. We now understand the concepts behind both traditional virtualization, and its current and most recent implementation in the form of VMs (virtual machines) and containers, and how K8s fits into the scheme of things. We now turn to six enterprise benefits K8s offers.
The power of open-source
K8s has developed into the de facto industry standard in the expanding universe of containerized apps. As a result, you’ll have a wide choice of service providers to help you implement it in your organisation’s IT infrastructure. Should any problems arise, the open community of K8s developers can be counted on to set things right. What’s more, K8s is not a project that will sit around and gather dust, but one that receives around four updates throughout the year.
Cost effective
Containers are lightweight in complexity and footprint, and setting them up is far more straightforward than setting up VMs. This makes K8s a very flexible platform for managing containerized apps. K8s configuration results in fewer ill-spent CPU cycles and GBs of RAM, leading to rapid response times that ultimately enhance system performance. And thanks to K8s’ load balancing engine, it can start, stop and prioritize given containers where required – all to keep performance humming along.
Portability
Thanks to its versatility, K8s can be set up and run locally within your organization on a broad number of underlying operating systems. Moreover, should you decide to migrate to an alternative OS throughout your lifecycle’s deployment, you can take your existing workloads along, without having to redesign your apps or scrap and remodel your infrastructure. K8s avoids vendor lock-ins, and your setup will continue to be both standardized and streamlined over time.
Extensibility
K8s has been designed from the ground up as a modular CM, and offers you the freedom to mix and match components at your discretion, enabling a truly turnkey and bespoke implementation. With K8s, you decide what OS to run, the app runtimes (Libs/Bins), file systems, processor architectures, and even cloud platforms. App developers can also make direct calls to the Kubernetes API (Application Programming Interface), and strengthen the integration of apps for enhanced performance and manageability.
Self-healing
Software will suffer the odd glitch from time to time, causing functionality to falter and systems to fail. These pitfalls will, however briefly, make you the victim of reliability woes. But fear not: K8s comes equipped to regularly monitor your full infrastructure (Containers, Nodes, Pods, Network, Hardware, OS). Should a software bug crash some part of your system, K8s will immediately restart the app. If the error is due to failing hardware, K8s will detect it and distribute the app across multiple pods. In both cases, app downtime is reduced to a bare minimum.
Cloud services
Because K8s is so popular, you need not handle in-house implementation yourself, nor blow money on hardware. In fact, you can outsource the process by signing up for a hosted K8s solution: PaaS (Platform as a Service) or IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). Your role is to focus on delivering the best user experience via your apps, leaving the load balancing and cloud services to Kubernetes.
Summary
As you can see, smoothly deploying and running apps can be a serious challenge. Thankfully, solutions like Kubernetes makes deployment, scaling and managing containerized applications much easier. Throw in Kubernetes’ other strengths and it’s no surprise why so many businesses choose it.
