The article is originally published here.
Kubernetes being the buzz around has made enormous noise in the recent few years because of out of the box features it provides to the companies. It has become a de-facto tool for container deployments on the cloud for the firms around the globe; it has opened up a whole new era of innovation on the cloud for businesses today. Being backed by Google and now a part of the proud CNCF family, Kubernetes community is always focused on making this platform more mature by adding an increasing level of enterprise features. And it is time for everyone who is working on containers to take advantage of the broader Kubernetes ecosystem.
Microservices are booming, and modern applications rely on microservices to attain scalability and efficiency. Kubernetes is a powerful tool in the DevOps industry, provides a very preferred environment for microservices to be present and work together with the tools and features it offers. As each part and elements of the application get placed in a container, the system as a whole becomes more responsive scale and work efficiently. In the microservices architecture, when services are scattered around, it's essential to have service discovery and load balancing capabilities that Kubernetes provides.
Today, we will see the important features of Kubernetes that make it unique and popular.
1. Service discovery and load balancing
In simple words, service discovery is the process of figuring out how to connect to a service.
Kubernetes service discovery find services through two approaches:
- Using the environment variables
- Using DNS based service discovery to resolve the service names to the service’s IP address
Load balancing identifies containers by the DNS name or even IP address and redistributes traffic from high load to low load areas depending on the traffic congestion.
2. Storage orchestration
Kubernetes natively provides some solutions to manage storage.
This feature allows automatic mounting of any storage type of your choice, from local storage, a public cloud provider such as AWS, Azure, and GCP etc, or any network storage system.
3. Automated rollouts and rollbacks
Kubernetes provides developers with a robust toolkit to automate deploy, scale, and operate containerized applications in production for efficiency and scale. Also, the power of automated rollouts and rollbacks, this feature allows developers working on Kubernetes to define the state of deployed containers, systematically roll out changes with ease, and automatically rollback on failure or in any cases of emergency or alerts.
4. Automatic bin packing
This is one of the significant features of Kubernetes. This is where Kubernetes helps in automatically placing containers based on their resource requirements, limits, and other constraints, without compromising on availability. Mix critical and best-effort workloads to manage utilization and save more resources. Kubernetes has the ability to manage resources, and can automatically specify how each container in a pod uses CPU and RAM, etc.
5. Self-healing
This feature of Kubernetes acts as a superman. Containers that fail because of any reason are automatically restarted. If any node fails, the containers that contained in the node are redistributed. Kubernetes automatically stops the unresponsive containers if they do not respond to the user-defined health checks and restrict traffic until containers are ready.
6. Secret and configuration management
This feature is important from the security aspect, as Kubernetes has a built-in mechanism of storing configuration values that you would prefer to keep private. Sensitive information such as user name, passwords with encryption, and other credentials can be kept confidentially. Kubernetes can also manage app configurations by establishing and maintaining consistency of a product's functional, authentication, performance, and physical attributes.
These are the features that every developer should know who is working or going to work on Kubernetes. Kubernetes is all the way winning the game of container orchestration and has become one of the most popular and must know platforms in the DevOps world. More and more companies are looking for developers with Kubernetes’ knowledge and experience.
So, why wait then? Go and get your hands dirty with KodeKloud's Kubernetes for beginners course today.
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