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ICT

The Kubernetes conversation

By Synthesis’ Juan Roriston and Rodney Ellis

very company wants to accelerate business value. Kubernetes is Is this relevant for every size company?
one of many answers. But to those in the non-technical team, this Yes, the size and industry of the company are irrelevant when deciding
Emay sound like just another buzzword. Below we break it down so on whether or not to use Kubernetes but it is rather the application
the next time the word is mentioned, you can have an impactful say in itself that will determine whether or not you will need to use it.
the conversation.
How do you know if your organisation should be using it?
What is Kubernetes? According to a 2019 Cloud Native Computing Foundation survey, 84%
Kubernetes was developed by Google. The company announced it of respondents said that they were running containers in production.
in 2015, with version 1.0 being released July 21, 2015. It has seen If your business falls into this bracket, then you should be considering
multiple versions since then and is currently on 1.21. Kubernetes to manage your workload.
Kubernetes is an open-source platform that automates Linux The other considerations to make are the application itself and if
container operations. It eliminates many of the manual processes it is viable to be hosted on a Kubernetes cluster. Kubernetes can make
involved in deploying and scaling containerised applications. use of other tools such as Kafka for streaming data.

How and why does it drive innovation? What are the alternatives?
With most of the container management being handled by Kubernetes, You can manage your container deployments manually, but this takes a
businesses can focus on developing features for their application rather lot of time and effort to achieve and manual intervention often leads to
than worrying about its deployment. Manual configuration of container human error.
deployments carries a lot of overhead in terms of networking, security, Alternative orchestration tools are Docker Swarm or AWS Elastic
resource allocation and application availability. By automating this Container Service although these are mostly used for simple and small
using Kubernetes, you can cut down on the engineering time it takes applications. Kubernetes is needed for more complex workloads.
to deploy workloads. This will help developers focus on accelerating
business value. Is it expensive?
Kubernetes is open source and free to use. The cost you will incur will
What are its benefits? be on the underlying infrastructure needed to host the cluster. This can
Kubernetes can seamlessly integrate with CI/CD tools allowing for range in price as the cluster will need to meet the resource demands of
quicker deployments and consistent releases. It is also very flexible and the application.
portable, meaning that you will not be locked into a cloud provider or
containerisation tool. Kubernetes is free to use and is still supported by the Examples of where it improves businesses or create tangible
open-source community to this day. It also has self-healing functionality benefits?
built into it and will try and correct any faults and failures that the At customers, we have seen an increase in deployments and feature
underlying infrastructure may experience. Using some of the native built-in releases to staging and QA environments which allow for features
Kubernetes functionality, for example HPA (Horizontal Pod Autoscaling), to be deployed to production much faster than before. This greatly
will automatically scale workloads to meet the demands of the application. improves the business value. We have also seen fewer interruptions
to application and service availability. We have also lowered cost
Is this relevant for every application? by implementing scaling features such as HPA to decrease the
No, Kubernetes is a great tool, but it is just that, a tool like any other. infrastructure needed during times of low usage. n
Finding the right application to host on Kubernetes can be tricky as
it was not made to accommodate every application’s architecture Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source
type. Having a monolithic application architecture or a small-scale system for automating deployment, scaling, and
application that can be easily hosted on serverless should disqualify it management of containerized applications.
from being hosted on the platform.

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