Kubernetes For Beginners

Containers have become popular thanks to their focus on consistency across platforms from development to production. The rise in interest to containers has in turn brought in higher demands for their deployment and management. And in this post i will briefly give an introduction to Kubernetes.

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is an open-source platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts, providing container-centric infrastructure. With Kubernetes, you are able to quickly and efficiently respond to customer demand: Deploy your applications quickly and predictably. And it was developed by Google. Kubernetes benefits from Google’s hands-off approach to ongoing development, as well as its original engineering. Kubernetes works with many cloud and server products (Amazon EC2, Azure Container Service, Rackspace, GCE, IBM Software, and others). And the list is always growing as so many companies are contributing to the open source project.

Basics of Kubernetes:

Kubernetes helps in operation of multiple application containers across clusters of nodes. Kubernetes contains tools for orchestration, service discovery and load balancing that can be used with Docker and Rocket containers. As needs change, a developer can move container workloads in Kubernetes to another cloud provider without changing the code.

With Kubernetes, containers run in pods. A pod is a basic unit that hosts one or multiple containers, which share resources and are located on the same physical or virtual machine. For each pod, Kubernetes finds a machine with enough compute capacity and launches the associated containers. A node agent, called a Kubelet, manages pods, their containers and their images. Kubelets also automatically restart a container if it fails.

In a nutshell, Kubernetes is rocking because of the 15+ years of Google R&D that goes into its code, but also because of Google’s eagerness to encourage a community to take charge of the next 15-plus years of Kubernetes development.