What Is Kubernetes? All you Need To Know

Kubernetes is a vital tool for scaling as it enables the automation and orchestration of container-related tasks.

For IT leaders seeking a comprehensive understanding of Kubernetes, this article provides an in-depth exploration of its capabilities, essential terminology, recommended practices, emerging trends for 2023, and other relevant information.

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is a tool that helps automate and manage containerized applications. Containers are like small packages that hold all the parts of an application, so they can be easily moved around.

The word Kubernetes comes from Greek and means “helmsman” or “sailing master.” With Kubernetes, you can group together lots of containers and manage them efficiently. It helps to eliminate a lot of manual work involved in managing containers. The newest version of Kubernetes, called “Electrifying,” was released in December 2022.

What is Kubernetes used for?

Containers are useful for many different tasks, but using them for big projects can be difficult. This is especially true for stateful apps, like databases, that need lots of planning and coordination. That’s where Kubernetes comes in.

It helps manage all the containers and makes sure everything is working together. By using containers with Kubernetes, organizations can better manage their workloads and reduce risks. They can also use containers to improve their development processes and use cloud infrastructure more effectively.

This is especially true for organizations using DevOps practices, which involve short development cycles, testing, and trying new things.

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Ashesh Badani, SVP and General Manager for Cloud Platforms at Red Hat, says that once organizations understand how containers and Kubernetes can help with DevOps, application development, and delivery, it opens up many possibilities.

This includes updating traditional applications, using hybrid- or multi-cloud systems, and developing new cloud-native applications quickly and easily.

To explain this in simple terms, you can think of Kubernetes as an orchestra conductor. Just like a conductor tells musicians when to start and stop playing, and how loud or fast to play, Kubernetes manages containers and ensures everything works together smoothly.

Why use Kubernetes and containers?

If you’re looking to explain to your colleagues why Kubernetes and orchestration tools are important, here’s a simple explanation.

Kubernetes is a platform that helps you schedule and run containers on clusters of machines, while taking care of many operational tasks automatically. This is helpful for day-to-day work with containers and also ensures high availability of applications.

As organizations deploy more containers, especially in production environments, they find Kubernetes to be essential. This is why there is a growing trend towards using Kubernetes as the go-to deployment and orchestration solution.

If you want to explain why Kubernetes is valuable, think of orchestration as a way to effectively manage containers and microservices. Kubernetes is the right platform for this because it allows for greater automation, repeatability, and definability, which reduces the manual work involved in container and application lifecycles. This is especially important as container adoption grows and when working with multiple cloud providers.

Kubernetes is popular because it benefits developers, operations teams, and lines of business, increasing productivity, collaboration, and customer satisfaction. Without an orchestration framework, services can be running without clear management, making it difficult to fix if something goes wrong. With Kubernetes, you can declare how you want your environment to look, and it will ensure it appears that way.

What Kubernetes does?

The value of the open source cloud-native ecosystem lies in the complementary projects that revolve around Kubernetes. While Kubernetes is a crucial component of cloud-native technology, its surrounding ecosystem adds even more value to IT organizations.

According to Red Hat’s Haff, “The true power of the open source cloud-native ecosystem comes not only from individual projects such as Kubernetes, but also from the range of complementary projects that combine to create a genuine cloud-native platform.”

This collection includes Istio for service meshes, Prometheus for monitoring, Podman for command-line tools, Jaeger and Kiali for distributed tracing, Quay for enterprise registries, and Skopeo for inspection utilities.

Linux, which forms the foundation for the containers managed by Kubernetes, is also included. Of course, selecting and integrating multiple tools takes time, which is why enterprise open source platforms like Red Hat OpenShift can be beneficial.

The use of Kubernetes can alleviate the challenges of configuring, deploying, managing, and monitoring large-scale containerized applications. In some organizations, initial Kubernetes adoption may begin with a realization that it can help manage the growing number of containers in production.

However, as per StackRox’s Komoroske, a future trend could involve developing software with Kubernetes as the intended deployment platform, akin to the cart-and-horse analogy. This approach could lead to the creation of “Kubernetes-native” software.

What is a Kubernetes operator?

In the past, there was a belief that Kubernetes was only suitable for managing stateless applications, not for stateful ones like databases, which required more attention and manual steps, says Solodev’s CTO, Jeremy Thompson. These steps could include making changes to the app’s configuration, interacting with external systems like DNS, and communicating with a clustering mechanism.

This manual intervention increased the burden on DevOps teams and increased the likelihood of errors, which contradicted one of Kubernetes’ main benefits: automation. However, the introduction of Operators by coreOS in 2016 offered a solution to this problem and extended Kubernetes’ capabilities to stateful applications. Red Hat later acquired coreOS in 2018, expanding the capabilities of its OpenShift container platform.

The Operator Framework was launched in 2018 to enhance the capabilities of Operators, which are used for building and managing Kubernetes native applications.

According to Matthew Dresden, Director of DevOps at Nexient, Operators function as Kubernetes API clients that manage custom resources. By monitoring events without modifying Kubernetes code, they can automate tasks such as deployments, backups, and upgrades.

As stated by Red Hat Product Manager Rob Szumski in a blog post, Operators actively manage applications, including failover, backups, upgrades, and autoscaling, similar to a cloud service. Although backup may not be relevant for stateless apps, other tasks like log processing or alerting could be essential. The Operator model aims to provide a cloud-like, self-managing experience with expertise built-in.

What is a Kubernetes secret?

A Kubernetes secret is a pre-built security feature that enables the safe storage of sensitive information such as OAuth tokens and SSH keys. Secrets allow access to the information only when necessary, minimizing the potential for security risks due to unnecessary visibility.

As the Kubernetes documentation states, using a Secret is safer and more versatile than storing sensitive information verbatim in a container image or Pod definition.

Secrets serve as a cousin to the least privilege principle by providing your applications with essential data while safeguarding against undue access to that data by both applications and their administrators.

In essence, Secrets fulfill a technical requirement while addressing a problem that arises from that requirement. Containerized applications require specific data or credentials to function properly, but the storage and accessibility of that information is a significant security concern.

What is MicroShift?

MicroShift is a Kubernetes distribution developed specifically to cater to the unique demands and challenges of IoT and edge computing environments. It bridges the gap between stand-alone Linux edge devices and fully functional OpenShift/Kubernetes edge clusters, as stated by Frank Zdarsky, senior principal software engineer and edge technical team lead at Red Hat.

This open-source project is an essential component of Red Hat Device Edge, which helps to ensure consistency and operational standards across diverse edge and hybrid cloud environments – a crucial element of any edge computing strategy.

MicroShift’s design goals are geared towards edge computing and include minimal usage of constrained resources such as CPU, network, and storage, resilience and tolerance under harsh network conditions, and compatibility with optimized operating systems for edge computing such as Fedora IoT and RHEL for Edge.

Click here to learn more about the project. In the subsequent sections, we’ll cover Kubernetes tutorials, classes, and books, as well as security essentials and best practices for application building and migration.