In the digital space, as well as in the material world, all kinds of innovative methods, technologies and tools are constantly emerging and gaining popularity. Containerization of applications can be attributed to the category of such popular methods. And this is quite justified, since the use of this method often allows companies to successfully compete in the software market. But that is not all. If IT companies carry out large-scale development of serious system projects, then another very trendy tool – Kubernetis will certainly be useful to them. With extensive container management capabilities, Kubernetes projects can be supported both by the companies themselves and by the support services of outsourcing partners when companies are interested in kubernetes migration.
Programs deployment history
In our life, every phenomenon has its own story. And the containerization technology that is popular today also did not arise from scratch. The entire history of the deployment of programs conventionally spans three perids. These periods are: traditional deployment, virtualized deployment and container deployment.
During the traditional deployment period, applications were run by companies on physical servers. With this method of deployment, the main problem was the emergence of situations when, running several applications on one physical server, one application could take up most of the resources to the detriment of others. In other words, resources were not distributed correctly, and the only way out was to run each application on a different physical server. At the same time, to maintain multiple physical servers was often financially unprofitable for companies.
The search for a way out of such situations led to virtualization and to the beginning of the virtualized deployment period. Virtualization has made it possible to use one physical server to run multiple virtual machines (VM). Thus, applications were isolated between VMs, and the information that one application possessed was not available to another one. Improved scalability has also become an undoubted advantage of virtualization. And since virtualization has led to the correct distribution of resources on one physical server, the costs of equipment maintenance for companies have been significantly reduced. With its help, a set of physical servers was transformed into a cluster of disposable VMs. And each of the VMs is nothing more than a full-fledged machine with its own operating system.
At first glance, it may seem that container deployment period did not revolutionize the deployment of programs, because containers are similar to VMs. Like them, containers have their own memory, processor, file system. They do, however, have one very handy feature: it`s an application isolation for sharing the operating system between applications. In other words, a container is an isolated and portable software package that contains all the necessary components to run applications in any environment.
What is the use of K8s?
Now let’s digress for a moment and imagine a musical orchestra and a conductor. What is the task of the conductor? Unlike every musician, who is focused only on his part, the conductor must manage the entire process. He must listen to the whole orchestra, watch the score, manage the musicians, make sure that everyone plays harmoniously and joins on time. In modern terms, a conductor is an effective manager.
The work of containers figuratively resembles the work of musicians in an orchestra. When deploying applications, there may be peak hours when you need to increase capacity, or a “fallen” server needs to be replaced with a new one without anyone noticing. Since there can be a lot of containers, they need to be somehow managed, load-balanced, updated, monitored, etc. Kubernetis, or K8s, is a container orchestration technology that paves the way for a wide variety of useful things. Returning to simple formulations, we note once again that the K8s tool helps to ensure that any application is always available, works quickly even during heavy loads, and in cases of unforeseen situations, quickly recovers without losing information.
Being a popular, although not the only such tool on the market, K8s can work with different types of containers. Summarizing all of the above, we recall once again that K8s is designed for containerized applications, and more specifically, for automating application deployment, for automating application scaling, and for automating the management of all applications.
