What is DevOps? How does it work? What is Kubernetes? What is Kubernetes used for? How does Kubernetes help with DevOps? Why Kubernetes for DevOps is Important? Keep reading this article to find out.
DevOps is a set of practices and guidelines that improve the productivity of software development. DevOps shortens the SDLC (software development life cycle) to produce high-quality software with a steady and consistent code delivery. DevOps stands for ‘development’ and ‘operations,’ aiming to enhance the speed of developing software applications.
With the enhanced speed, DevOps enables organizations to serve their customers and meet their targets effectively. It also improves the quality of the software products, reduces bugs, and improves overall performance. The main benefits of DevOps are speed, security, reliability, CI/CD, scalability, and improved collaboration.
The DevOps practices include the following phases:
Planning: Workspace/productivity tools like Confluence and Jira enable DevOps teams to improve project management and ensure on-time delivery of software products.
Build and Delivery: For rapid development, deployment, and testing, developers rely on tools like Kubernetes for DevOps. Docker, Chef, Terraform, Puppet, and Ansible are some of the tools for DevOps.
Testing: Tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, and GitLab CI minimize the time, effort, and errors while testing the code. DevOps improve the testing capabilities of organizations without compromising the quality of code and user experience.
Software monitoring and logging: Performance monitoring, analysis, logging, processing feedback, and a few other tasks are included in this stage. Prometheus, Elastic (ELK) Stack, Grafana, Sumo Logic, and Splunk are some of the popular tools for monitoring.
What is Containerization? How does it help with DevOps?
DevOps implementation relies on a process called ‘containerization.’ In this process, the software component, its environment, and its dependencies are placed in an isolated container. Containerization improves the speed of deployment, patching, and scaling.
These days, virtual machines and cloud computing have greatly reduced downtime and broken programs. But running guest operating systems on them requires a lot of computational resources. Containers use ‘runtime engines’ that share the host operating system of machines that they are deployed onto. Runtime engines offer faster start-up times, improved server efficiencies, and smaller storage sizes. Most runtime engines are a few megabytes, while virtual machines need 4-8 gigabytes of storage space. Thus, containers are portable, highly scalable, secure, support multiple cloud platforms, and are DevOps-friendly.
Kubernetes for DevOps: Kubernetes
What is Kubernetes? Why do developers use Kubernetes for DevOps?
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for managing, scaling, and automating software deployment. Kubernetes helps organizations with DevOps, as it combines the development and maintenance phase of software systems to improve agility. Through the Kubernetes user interface, developers can view, access, deploy, update, and optimize container ecosystems.
Essentially, containerization is an efficient and effective way to implement DevOps than a monolithic application. Kubernetes creates and manages containers on the cloud-based server systems. Kubernetes helps DevOps teams to reduce the burden of infrastructure by letting containers operate on different machines/environments without breakdowns.
Master: The master runs the API for the entire cluster of the cloud application.
Nodes: Nodes are physical or virtual machines within the cluster that host the application.
Pods: Pods are the basic building blocks of Kubernetes that can run a set of containers simultaneously.
Replication controller: The replication controller ensures that the expected number of pods are running all the time.
Services: Services host a dynamic load balancer for a given number of pods
Why is Kubernetes important for DevOps?
Kubernetes offers the following benefits for DevOps:
No downtime for deployment
Kubernetes allows developers to deploy updates to their cloud-based applications without experiencing any downtime. The rolling updates and automated rollback features serve as a fail-safe for deploying updates. Kubernetes can be used to transfer traffic to the remaining available services, as it updates one cluster at a time.
Scalability
As an autonomous and continuous ecosystem for containerization, Kubernetes allows for effortless scaling of applications. Depending on the demand, burden, and resources, Kubernetes can scale an application up and down. The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler automates this process to ensure proper utilization and save resources.
Infrastructure and configuration as Code
Kubernetes helps developers build the ‘infrastructure as code’ and also helps them manage coding environment configurations as code. Thus, when deploying a new environment, scripts need not be executed continuously. Developers can link the source repository with its configuration files to Kubernetes.
Cross-functional collaboration
With role-based access controls, Kubernetes makes collaboration easy while ensuring that resources and configurations remain steady. For eg. Kubernetes can restrict testers to access only the builds and pending approvals. On the other hand, customers can be restricted to reviewing processes and deployment.
Kubernetes is popular due to its scalability, agility, streamlined approach, and its open-source nature. Some of the other reasons for the popularity of Kubernetes are:
Flexibility and portability
Kubernetes can work effectively in all scenarios, regardless of the type of container runtime or underlying infrastructure. Kubernetes runs perfectly on the on-site servers, private cloud, and public cloud infrastructure. Additionally, it is highly portable, as Kubernetes can be deployed on various infrastructures and environment configurations.
Infrastructure abstraction
Kubernetes, also known as K8s, can handle the storage, networking, and computational aspects of cloud applications on its own. So, once Kubernetes is installed, developers do not need to worry about the environment and can focus on the application development.
Automated operations
Kubernetes hosts a lot of built-in commands for automating many daily operations. Thus, it streamlines the application management process by automating a majority of the heavy-duty operations.
Summary
As the demand for cloud systems, DevOps, and virtual machines continues to grow, the demand for Kubernetes developers will be on the rise. Hiring experienced and capable Kubernetes developers will ensure that your cloud-based applications perform well under any circumstances.
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FAQs
How can developers prepare when applying for a Kubernetes job? Developers should learn about Kubernetes in detail, with the official Kubernetes documentation. They should practice locally using Minikube or Kind. Trying to set up multiple services with API servers will also help developers prepare for Kubernetes jobs.
How is Kubernetes different from Docker? Both Docker and Kubernetes are open-source cloud-native technologies. The main difference between the two is that Docker is useful for packaging containerized applications on a single node. Kubernetes is used to run applications in containers across a cluster.
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Kubernetes for DevOps allows automation in orchestration, along with multiple use-cases for building, deploying, scaling, and testing DevOps pipelines.
Kedar is a skilled technical content writer and a social media marketer. He has worked with Apollo Hospitals, upGrad, Lumina Datamatics, and other companies.
