What is Kubernetes and Why Would I use it?

G’day from the land that gave you kangaroos, koalas, redback spiders and Paul Hogan….sorry about that! 

So….what is Kubernetes.  Kubernetes is an open-source orchestration platform that helps manage containers at enterprise scale.  Typically a large enterprise (say more than 1000 employees), tends to put a lot of stress onto the underlying technologies that are delivering business value.  These stresses include:

• Scaling resources and services to meet demand.
• Providing extremely high availability of services to customers.
• Being able to reconfigure the components on the fly, in an instance, in real-time to provide business services with shapechanger capabilities.

Can Kubernetes keep up?

Well….When you’re managing more than 50 containers, there are five key functions in Kubernetes you should probably know about:

1. Schedulers help with the heavy lifting and intelligently assigning the work and monitoring the container health.  
2. Service discovery helps keep track of all the services that are needed and monitors the health.
3. Load balancing services allow architectures to shapechange whilst maintaining service stability.
4. Resource Management of the CPU, memory, disk and network components to ensure workloads are correctly sized.
5. Self healing features automatically detect, kill and restarts failed instances.
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The biggest inhibitor for Kubernetes adoption, is the complexity of learning and using the service to achieve those business outcomes.  There are some great examples of cloud computing platforms that can kickstart your Kubernetes journey and simplify some of this complexity:

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) - 
​aws.amazon.com/eks/

​Microsoft Azure Kubenetes Service (AKS) -
azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/kubernetes-service/

Both AWS and Microsoft provide all of the infrastructure needed to run Kubernetes, as well as crystal clear documentation on container management best practices.

Have Fun!!!!

P