4 Reasons Why You Should Switch to Kubernetes
Kubernetes is a popular, open-source container orchestration platform that has been generating buzz in the microservice world for some time now with seemingly no other competition out there. With the backing of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) along with industry leaders like Google and Red Hat, to name a few, it has become the most reliable and preferred container orchestration platform out there in the market.
In this article, we are going to discuss the top 4 Kubernetes benefits that are the reasons why you should switch to it as a container orchestration platform for your containerization needs:
- Community and Industry Support
- Scalability, Load Balancing, and Health Checks
- Vendor Agnostic Nature
- Deployments
Effective utilization of Kubernetes’ features can also help you avoid alert fatigue, creating a healthier work pipeline as well. Kubernetes annotations also make it a very user-friendly platform.
1. Community and Industry Support #
Since its inception, Kubernetes has been an open-source project and is currently being run by the CNCF. As an open-source project, Kubernetes has an active contributor community, based on more than 2,000 developers. Apart from that it is also widely supported by different industry leaders like Google, Redhat, and Intel among others.
The most exciting part about it is the ever-evolving nature of Kubernetes. For the past few years, Kubernetes has been rolling out major releases every quarter, which provide an increasing number of features and it shows no signs of slowing down. CNCF also organizes an annual conference for all on Kubernetes, which is known as Kubecon/CloudNativeCon and is one of the most awaited events for developers in the container world.
2. Scalability, Load Balancing, and Health Checks #
Kubernetes provides us with many out of the box features like auto roll-out and roll-back mechanisms, but what stands out among all of them is the programs ability to scale to meet the traffic demand, the effective load balancing of traffic among all the worker nodes in the cluster for efficient utilization of resources and the health check. These are the most significant features in my opinion based on personal usage.
Kubernetes provides internal load balancing between different replicas of a workload. Along with that, it scales your workload depending on resource utilization and network traffic. It helps us define if a container can be viewed as ready, alive, or failed with the help of health check probes. Kubernetes routes traffic to a pod/container only if it is healthy and ready.
3. Vendor Agnostic Nature #
Kubernetes has been offered as a managed service by various cloud vendors in their platforms. Some of them are Azure Kubernetes Services, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, and Google Kubernetes Engine.
Now instead of worrying about migrating your application from on-prem to cloud and vice versa, you can take a breather because Kubernetes works the same everywhere. Irrespective of the scenario, if you are moving from one cloud platform to another or taking a hybrid approach to deploying your workload, Kubernetes has you covered.
This also helps you avoid vendor lock-in in the future, which gives you more leverage and flexibility over your project.
4. Deployments #
What made containers so relevant was their ability to reduce the time taken to market applications. It also greatly reduced the time taken to build, test and release applications.
Deployment has been one of the core features of Kubernetes. With the help of deployment, we can do some amazing things—create a deployment to roll out a ReplicaSet or roll back to a previous deployment version to name just a few. Kubernetes helps in deploying a new version of a container instance or app with negligible downtime while also monitoring the health of the instance during the rollout.
And in case there’s a failure, it automatically rolls back to a previous version of the instance. It also supports canary deployment for deploying applications.
Conclusion #
Kubernetes has become a de facto industry standard for container orchestration and is being used by many developers that are building containerized solutions. In its early days, Kubernetes faced some stiff competition from other container orchestration competitors, but due to an amazing community supporting it by providing regular community contributions and the support from industry leaders, Kubernetes has leaped ahead of its competitors.
It has been developing and innovating with no signs of stopping. Features like its vendor-agnostic nature have been icing on the cake. It is also highly extensible and portable, which makes Kubernetes the ultimate option.