This article was originally posted on Enterpriser's Project and written by technology writer Kevin Casey.
Why is Kubernetes such a hot topic in IT?
To properly answer that question, you need to look at the advent of containers and microservices, which brought wonderful new capabilities – and new challenges – to software development and infrastructure.
“Containers are fantastic things: They allow for an even greater leap in resource efficiency over virtual machines than VMs claimed over hardware servers,” says Jeremy Thompson, CTO at Solodev.
That leap doesn’t come free of charge, however.
“The mandate that a container focus on a single service – your web app, a caching layer, the database, a logging system – means that a modern app can beget a small army of containers,” Thompson explains.
That “small” army might actually mean a massive number of containers that, Thompson notes, must communicate with one another, handle failures, and scale independently based on ever-changing needs. Managed in a manual fashion, these operational needs can overtax even the sharpest DevOps teams.
Enter container orchestration – and Kubernetes as the leader of the pack, in part because of its DNA: Kubernetes was originally an internal Google system used to manage billions of production containers a week. Today, Kubernetes is one of the liveliest open source projects around, another key reason for its popularity. (See also Kubernetes by the numbers: 10 compelling stats.)
“As an orchestration framework, Kubernetes eases the burden of configuring, deploying, managing, and monitoring even the largest-scale containerized applications,” Thompson says.
That's not where the story ends, however. The conventional wisd...
Read Full Article