Nate Matherson, co-founder and CEO, ContainIQ, explores five crucial reasons why your organization should consider migrating to Kubernetes in 2022.Â
Kubernetes is a hot and happening technology in the modern DevOps market. And according to recent dataOpens a new window , Kubernetes adoption is growing rapidly in production environments.Â
What is Kubernetes? How Is it Better Than Previous Technologies?
KubernetesOpens a new window (K8s) is a portable, open-sourced platform that helps you manage containerized workloads and applications. It focuses on automating the deployment, scaling, and other aspects of containerized workload management. You can deploy and manage swarms of containers for an application quite easily with Kubernetes.
Kubernetes helps to solve several CI/CD problems too. For instance, Kubernetes automatically balances incoming traffic load to all available containers and systems. Typically, you would have done this via additional dedicated servers.
Kubernetes helps to manage individual containers as well. If one of the containers goes down due to a software or hardware fault, the system replaces it in due time. This maintains the required capacity and bandwidth of the entire system. Together, these features provide you with a powerful tool to manage the CI/CD of your containerized applications.
See More: The Promise of Cloud Native: Does it Rely on Deploying Cloud Solutions Into Kubernetes?
Reasons To Migrate to Kubernetes
Now that you know what Kubernetes is, the next thing to understand is the impact that it can have on your projects and business in general.
Reason #1 – For optimizing cloud expenses
Before Kubernetes, developers had to project the expected traffic for their apps and provision resources manually. A manual effort was needed to provide additional resources in the case of a traffic spike. Even after that, the apps would not get the most out of hardware since a large portion of the resources would be left unused for redundancy.
Kubernetes solves these problems by optimally packing apps together in the existing hardware resources, which helps you get the most out of your investment. Kubernetes provisions and decommissions containers automatically based on the workload requirements. These optimizations go a long way in reducing hardware costs.
Spotify adopted KubernetesOpens a new window early in their roadmap and was able to utilize 2-3x of its standard CPU utilization using Kubernetes abilities which resulted in better cost optimization. Similarly, Pinterest adopted KubernetesOpens a new window quite early, too, and it reclaimed around 80% of capacity during non-peak hours, which reduced its costs by a large margin.
Reason #2 – Kubernetes simplifies DevOps and reduces time to market
Kubernetes simplifies the day-to-day DevOps for your project. It makes deploying and managing applications similar to managing microservices. So instead of worrying about how your app servers will scale with incoming traffic, you focus on building your application. This results in increased developer productivity & output and a reduced time to market for your projects.
There are many ways in which Kubernetes reinforces your CI/CD efforts. Instead of manually provisioning and fitting the desired number of containers in your nodes, Kubernetes can manage this intelligently to make the best use of your resources. You can use GitOps with Kubernetes, in which Kubernetes relies on the history of a git repository to deploy and update your project automatically. It also handles service discovery, enables containerized applications to talk with each other, and arranges access to various types of cloud storage.
Companies like Airbnb, Uber, and Tinder have made good use of these benefits as they’ve scaled.
Reason #3 – For high resilience and availability
Kubernetes is great at doing what it’s meant for—keeping containers available and consistent. Kubernetes takes excellent care of system security as well. Given that a large chunk of downtime comes from security breaches, a secure system goes a long way in maintaining good uptime and service for end-users.Â
One good example of this is the dependency management of OSes and applications. More often than not, OS and app dependencies are not updated at the same time to prevent stability and compatibility issues. But containerized applications abstract their dependencies from the underlying OS. Kubernetes makes use of this property to update OS and app dependencies regularly. This enables the rapid deployment of bug fixes, security patches, and even new features in the application.
Reason #4 – To scale up and down easily based on workloads
Most modern applications require frequent scaling based on incoming traffic and workloads. If you are not scaling your app based on your user traffic, you might be wasting resources.
As a container orchestration system, Kubernetes does a great job of scaling automatically. In cases like event ticketing and management systems, traffic requirements can change within minutes, which can be tricky to manage. Kubernetes solves this problem by enabling you to set thresholds at which automatic scaling is triggered. For instance, you can select a threshold of 90% consumption of CPU usage to scale up the system and start more instances. And when the load begins to reduce, Kubernetes will automatically shut down additional instances and optimize your resources.
A popular mobile AR game called Pokemon Go made good use of the Kubernetes autoscalers. They analyzed their requirements well before developing the app and used Kubernetes right from the beginning. Towards the end, they received 50 times more trafficOpens a new window than expected!
See More: Why Kubernetes Is Vital for Moving Cloud Native Technologies To the Edge
Reason #5 – To Gain the flexibility of using a hybrid or multi-cloud model
Vendor lock-in is a real issue. And more and more companies are falling into it due to lack of proper planning. Kubernetes can help you avoid it right from the beginning.
Kubernetes enables you to run your workload on any public/private cloud service or a combination of the two. Therefore, you can now choose the cloud vendors that offer the best services and pricing for your use case instead of getting locked in with just one vendor. Kubernetes also keeps you free to migrate to any cloud vendor whenever needed.
You can easily port apps deployed on Kubernetes across environments. This builds a level-playing field for all cloud vendors because customers are not tied to them anymore. This also means better service for the customers, since the competition has increased.
Bottom Line
In this piece, you have learned five crucial reasons why your organization should consider migrating to Kubernetes in 2022.
There are many organizational benefits including resource efficiency and general scalability. Forward-thinking DevOps teams are making the switch to containerization and Kubernetes in the year ahead.
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