interesting Kubernetes Facts

Top 10 Kubernetes Facts You Need to Know

Kubernetes abstracts away the complexities in the management system and unlocks the vivid potential of the distributed applications from the containers. This open-source DevOps tool has become popular due to it’s potential to schedule and organize your application. If you want to know more about Kuberentes, here we bring some interesting Kubernetes facts to give you each bit of details about Kubernetes.

Have you ever thought what is Kubernetes? Before moving ahead to the top Kubernetes facts, let’s first understand what is Kubernetes.

Learn Kubernetes with AWS and Docker

It is basically a tool for container management that was open-sourced in 2014 by Google. Kubernetes is the most convenient platform for scaling, automating deployment, and application container operation across the cluster of hosts.  This eventually helps in lowering down the expenses of cloud computing and simplifies architecture and operation. The most important role of Kubernetes architecture is to manage and build distributed systems.

Some Important Kubernetes Facts that You Should Know

There are a number of facts about Kubernetes that you should know. Kubernetes lowers the hassle of keeping an eye on the specific machines that run a few components of all your desired application in the data center. Slowly and gradually, both start-ups, along with SME’s, are adopting this tool with breathtaking speed. It supports your strategic goals and business operations.

So if you’re looking for an efficient container orchestration tool then Kubernetes is the right choice for you. It will simplify the workload of the technical teams through automation of the processes of the service deployment application. Before you start using Kubernetes, here are the important Kubernetes facts that you should know.

1. Why Kubernetes is called K8s?

Do you ever get confused about what “K8s” revolves around?  This numeronym for Kubernetes appeared in the 80s when computer companies were facing new challenges while sharing their software all across the globe. Though many different stories depict how people started using this abbreviation for Kubernetes, most of them reflect the same idea. So let’s decode the Kubernetes fact about it.

The idea behind this was to simplify all types of communication in IT company. The people over there started abbreviating this word based on it’s first and last letter along with the number of letters that came in between. This is the reason you’ll sometimes even see i10n for localization and i18n for internationalization. Similarly, for Kubernetes 8 letters along with “K” and “s” letter.

2. Has Kubernetes been successful in creating a new ecosystem and market?

Kubernetes acts as a middleware that places between the applications and the infrastructure. It enables the operators and developers to focus on managing the applications by abstracting the underlying virtual and physical resources. What VMware was successful in doing to the data center in the last few decades, Kubernetes did the same to the modern infrastructure.

With the consistent rise in the adoption of Kubernetes, few startups started offering container-native network, security products, and storage. We can proudly say that Kubernetes contributes to the creation of the new ecosystem. Some of the leading startups are using the new wave of container native networking and storage. Kubernetes has been successful in creating a niche market that is having it’s worth in billions of dollars.

Earlier it was considered to be the choice of web-scale companies, but just within the starting three years, it made it to the segment of enterprise data.

3. How Kubernete Simplifies Containerized Deployment?

This Kubernetes fact might leave you startled. There are many out of the box advantages of Kubernetes. It uses a declarative-based system to allocate where your containers are running. It comes with a built-in discovery service which assigns a unique domain name whenever a new service comes in its contact. This way, all other services can get complete information and data about this service in the etcd. Here are a few other points that simplify containerized deployment through it.

  • If you’re looking for the deployment of your applications that can support diverse deployment strategy of container development, then Kubernete can offer flexible manifests. It even provides canary deployment support for all kinds of A/B tests. Prometheus-based monitoring and health checks are also possible through it.
  • Do you know that the rolling update strategy can save your app from downtime through maintenance of a few instances up and running at any point of time while updating the data? The rolling update strategy used by Kubernete rolls out any such pod version update. So when the new deployment version pods get ready to manage the traffic, the system activates them. Only after this, the old ones are shut down.

Thinking to validate your skills with a DevOps Certification? Check out the list of BEST DEVOPS CERTIFICATIONS and get one to  give your skills a recognition.

4. Kubernetes is an open-source tool, but how many developers contribute code commit to a piece of technology which is so inherently infrastructural?

To be honest, more than 1400 contributors like Red Hat, Google and Microsoft are a part of this list. Recently, Alibaba and Amazon have also become a few of the biggest companies to use this technology. The cloud computing foundation anyhow oversees this technology on the whole. Leading companies like Intel, Mozilla, Pivotal, Oracle, and many more are contributing code commit to this inherently infrastructural technology.

5. What’s the basic difference between a container and a pod?

Most of the people from the Doker world work only with containers. They try to transfer their knowledge and experience about using containers and Docker Swarm with Kubernetes. But it’s an effort that totally goes into the wrong direction as it doesn’t operate like this. You need to be aware of this Kubrnetes fact to gain maximum benefit from it. The control unit in Kubernetes ideally is pod and not the container.

If you want to know what a pod is, then it’s a group of containers performing the same task. They are useful in a single application. Kubernetes, on the other hand, manages scales, pods, and monitors their state.

In Kubernetes, the application scales not by the number of containers but by the sequence of pods. Most often, there is one single container in one pod, but there might be even many of them which might fix rigidly. Pod containers any way don not scale and you need to consider this while designing the applications.

6. Is Kubernete suitable only for the stateless applications?

Kubernetes is an easy way to scale the large workloads. You don’t need to worry about the performance issue or underlying infrastructure with it. To accomplish this, the nodes destroy, which then recreate whenever it’s necessary. This fact makes Kubernetes itself stateless with the benefit that any node can get destroyed, but no data will be lost. It is one of the important Kubernetes facts that you must be familiar with.

This was originally made for the stateless apps because of which support for the stateful applications became unreliable and limited. Kubernetes supports the claims of persistent volume and various other volumes like block storage that can easily mount to the pods in an exclusive mode along with file storage that mounts to several other pods simultaneously. Therefore to conclude, Kubernete supports stateful applications and keeps your data safe even when the pod kills down.

7. Are the leading vendors of cloud backing Kubernetes?

Let’s get deep into this Kubernetes fact that is necessary to resolve. All the leading cloud service users are now going on board with Kubernetes. Amazon EKS is offered by Amazon Web Services which it describes as an efficiently managed service that makes it easy o run Kubernetes on AWS. You don’t need to operate and install your own Kubernete cluster while doing this.

Microsoft Azure also offers the Azure container service that simplifies the operation, deployment, and management of Kubernetes. Kubernetes inventor Google also offers Kubernetes engine for Google Cloud Platform. So we can say that Kubernetes has got the backing of all the leading vendors.

8. Do you need an External Load Balancer to manage to run your applications in Kubernetes?

Based on the services, Kubernetes itself contains an automatic load balancing system to balance the load. An ingress controller is also present that supports the balancing of load by DNS path and name. But considering Docker Swarm, it was necessary to manage the external load by the external load balancer. It fully supports many other options, and it also comes with the integration with a cloud load balancer.

Many of you working in companies like Google Cloud and Amazon would be aware of the out of the box load balancers.

Are you a DevOps Engineer preparing for an interview? Go through top DevOps Engineer interview questions and get ready to ace the interview.

9. Why do companies need Container Orchestration?

Do you wish to scale your container solution up and handle the greater load by using more containers? Now you have a great container solution that is capable of handling a huge amount of traffic. But what if the machine goes down and you have to move the containers? Don’t worry! Container orchestrators are a great help when you have a microservice application that consists of diverse services consisting of containers.

It performs different tasks to place the container on the different set of servers while taking into consideration the load of the servers. To prevent your container from reaching the server that is overloaded and considering the process requirement and memory for one particular container, you can scale the application in the right way. Here are a few solid reasons why you need container orchestration.

  • To restore your application if it fails to work on the server. This is also called as rescheduling or auto-healing. When your server fails, it becomes necessary to restore your application. Kubernetes monitors every pod or container of your application to get an idea if the pod or container is alive. Kubernetes starts it if it has become dead. You can easily maintain the right amount of replicas with Kubernetes. It also effectively monitors the server on which your application runs, and if your server doesn’t function well, it reschedules all the containers on that particular server.
  • To scale your application horizontally. If your application is in the requirement to scale horizontally, then container orchestration scales it down or up keeping into account the resource consumption on the target server along with the resource requirement of the applications.

10. What’s the difference between Open Stack and K8s?

Kubernetes is basically responsible for managing the orchestration of the container. OpenStack, on the other hand, manages virtual machines. Both of them are generally open-source in nature, but Kubernetes was developed originally by Google under the patent name Borg for a long time. During this span of time, it delivered a stable service. Even it’s the first version was stable and functionally strong. OpenStack’s development ranges from scratch and has huge fragmentation.

It manages all the virtual machines like KVM. The best thing for cloud providers is that they have the ability to run Kubernetes even above OpenStack. There is a big difference in Kubernetes VS Docker also. Kubernetes runs without Docker, and the functioning of Docker is possible without Kubernetes. It is one of the important Kubernetes facts that you should know when you use Kubernetes.

Final Words

So these are some of the important Kubernetes facts that will definitely blow your mind. Simplify your container management hassle with it and automate the different type of manual processes by using it. Automate the management system of the containerized applications with it that has grown from Google’s project of small open-source tool to the main project of Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

So, you should adopt Kubernetes to get all the benefits of container orchestration. Also, if you are a DevOps professional or working in the cloud, you should advance your knowledge by learning Kubernetes. If you aspire to learn Kubernetes, join Kubernetes training course and learn Kubernetes with AWS and Docker.

About Dharmalingam N

Dharmalingam.N holds a master degree in Business Administration and writes on a wide range of topics ranging from technology to business analysis. He has a background in Relationship Management. Some of the topics he has written about and that have been published include; project management, business analysis and customer engagement.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *


Scroll to Top