Kubernetes Explained

Container Orchestration for Modern Applications

Platforms such as Docker have provided users with greater flexibility when running applications on both virtual infrastructure and physical hardware. They are extremely lightweight and efficient, meaning your services can easily be packed up, moved between environments and switched between testing and production. However, once your environment starts to grow and involves multiple containers on multiple hosts, things can start to get a little tricky. 

This is where Kubernetes comes in. Kubernetes is specifically designed for deploying and managing containerised applications at scale across all major public clouds and private infrastructure. This enables users to operate their own Kubernetes clusters on demand, or easily outsource their Kubernetes operations to orchestration experts – such as SUSE & Aptira.

Teaming up with our good friends at SUSE, we’re offering a free, comprehensive guide for Kubernetes Management. 

Download this complimentary guide here.

Extensive, Efficient and Open Orchestration

Kubernetes is an open-source system. This means that vendor lock-in has been eliminated by providing core capabilities without the typical vendor restrictions which are often imposed on other systems. 

Kubernetes takes a modular approach to architecture design, allowing for applications to be broken down into many smaller, specialized parts. This approach enables faster development, facilitates the isolation of dependencies and provides greater elasticity for scaling. Aptira designs these smaller, modularized containers to create a well-tuned containerized environment which is tailor made to suit specific requirements. The Kubernetes controllers make this infrastructure easy to manage throughout the full life cycle of your application.

The Aptira team are Certified Kubernetes Administrators (CKA), boasting real-world experience creating, configuring and managing several Kubernetes clusters in production environments. We perfect orchestration, taking developer outputs and putting them into production in a maintainable way.

Scale your applications

With container orchestration, it’s easy to ramp your application up or down to meet the fluctuations in demand. Software can be deployed in a scale-out manner across multiple pods, and deployments can be scaled in or out at any time. Kubernetes facilitates horizontal autoscaling, automatically scaling up/down the number of pods based on the usage of resources. Users can also pause/resume deployments to save time and resources. 

Kubernetes can also automatically orchestrate your storage platform of choice – local or network storage – and provide the provisioned persistent storage to your applications running inside containers. 

Fixing and Updating Software 

In the case of an application failure, applications can be fixed automatically using Kubernetes’ auto-healing feature to re-create the pod. When a node or server fails, they will simply be re-deployed on another available node/server.  

When deploying a new software version, multiple versions can run in parallel. The new version can be used to test the new deployment in production, then the previous version can be scaled down simultaneously. 

This allows rolling updates to take place with zero downtime, incrementally updating pods and automatically reverting to a previous version when needed. 

Simple Cluster Management

Kubernetes also facilitates simpler server maintenance. It provides the application design primitives necessary for end-users (your developers) to define the configuration of their workloads without operator support. Infrastructure operators can focus on deploying mostly homogeneous Kubernetes clusters without needing specialized knowledge of application workloads, saving you time and money.