What Is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It was originally developed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Kubernetes provides a platform-agnostic way to manage and scale containerized applications, making it easier to deploy and manage applications in a cloud-native environment.

Kubernetes is widely adopted and has become the world’s most popular container orchestration platform. According to a survey conducted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Kubernetes is used by over 50% of organizations surveyed. This popularity can be attributed to its flexibility, scalability, and ability to manage large-scale, complex applications.

Additionally, Kubernetes is supported by major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, making it easy for organizations to deploy and manage their applications in a cloud environment.

5 Kubernetes Adoption Challenges

Kubernetes is a powerful and popular container orchestration platform, but it can also present several challenges for organizations:

1. Complexity: Kubernetes is a complex platform that can take time and resources to set up, configure, and manage. Organizations may struggle to get the platform up and running, and may need to invest in training and expertise to effectively use it.
2. Security: Kubernetes can be vulnerable to security threats, such as misconfigurations, unpatched vulnerabilities, or malicious actors. Organizations need to implement robust security measures to protect their Kubernetes clusters, which can be complex and time-consuming.
3. Monitoring and logging: Kubernetes can be difficult to monitor and troubleshoot, particularly for organizations that have a large number of containers or need to troubleshoot issues quickly. This can lead to increased costs and complexity.
4. Upgrades and maintenance: Kubernetes requires frequent upgrades and maintenance to ensure that it is running smoothly and is secure. This can be challenging for organizations that have a large number of nodes or need to upgrade quickly.
5. Skilled resources: Kubernetes requires skilled resources to operate, maintain and troubleshoot. Finding and retaining skilled resources can be a challenge for organizations, particularly for those with limited resources.

Managing Kubernetes More Efficiently

Here are a few ways your organization can adopt Kubernetes more easily and improve the efficiency of teams working with it.

Using the Dashboard

The Kubernetes Dashboard is a web-based user interface that allows you to manage and monitor a Kubernetes cluster. It provides an easy way to view and manage the resources in a cluster, such as pods, services, and deployments.

The Kubernetes Dashboard allows you to:

• Monitor the health of your cluster: The Dashboard provides an overview of the resources in your cluster, including the number of running pods, the status of services, and the available capacity of your cluster. You can use this information to quickly identify and troubleshoot issues with your cluster.
• Deploy and manage resources: The Dashboard provides a user-friendly interface for creating and managing resources in your cluster, such as pods, services, and deployments. You can use this interface to deploy new applications, scale resources up or down, and perform other management tasks.
• Create and manage roles: The Dashboard allows you to create and manage roles, which are used to control access to resources in your cluster. You can use the Dashboard to create roles, assign roles to users, and manage access to resources.
• Debugging and troubleshooting: The Dashboard provides detailed information about the resources in your cluster, including logs, metrics, and events. This information can be used to troubleshoot and debug issues with your cluster.
• Cluster management: You can use the Dashboard to manage the cluster itself, such as scaling the number of nodes, adding or removing nodes, and upgrading the Kubernetes version.

Enforce Version Control for Resource Manifests

Enforcing version control for resource manifests in Kubernetes provides several benefits:

• Traceability: By keeping track of changes to resource manifests in version control, it is easy to see who made changes, when they were made, and why they were made. This helps with troubleshooting and auditing.
• Collaboration: Version control allows multiple people to work on resource manifests at the same time and helps to prevent conflicts.
• Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Version control is a critical aspect of CI/CD, in which changes made to the resource manifests are automatically deployed and tested.
• Rollback and upgrade: With version control, you can rollback to a previous version of resource manifests in case of a failed upgrade, and you can also easily track the changes made during the upgrade.

Service Mesh

A service mesh is a configurable infrastructure layer for microservices-based applications that makes communication between service instances flexible, reliable, and fast. It provides features such as load balancing, traffic management, service discovery, and observability that can be used to make the most of Kubernetes.

Some of the ways that a service mesh can help to make the most of Kubernetes include:

• Traffic management: A service mesh can be used to control the flow of traffic between services, such as routing traffic to specific versions of a service or redirecting traffic in case of a failure. This can help to improve the reliability and stability of your application.
• Load balancing: A service mesh can provide advanced load balancing capabilities, such as client-side load balancing and circuit breaking. This can help to improve the performance of your application by distributing the load across multiple instances of a service.
• Service discovery: A service mesh can provide service discovery features, such as automatic registration and deregistration of services. This can make it easier to manage and discover services in a large and complex Kubernetes environment.
• Observability: A service mesh can provide detailed observability features, such as metrics and tracing, that can be used to monitor and troubleshoot the performance of your application.
• Security: A service mesh can provide security features such as mutual authentication, encryption, and access control, that can be used to secure the communication between services.

Reducing Kubernetes Costs

Another challenge experienced by organizations is that adopting Kubernetes has a high cost. Even though Kubernetes itself is free, open source software, there are high costs involved in deploying Kubernetes clusters, either on-premises or in the public cloud. Here are a few ways your organization can save these costs.

Using AWS Graviton For Better Performance and Reduce Costs

AWS Graviton processors are custom-built by Amazon Web Services (AWS) using ARM-based technology. These processors are designed to deliver high performance and cost-efficiency for cloud-native applications.

AWS Graviton processors are available in various instance types, each optimized for specific use cases, such as the Graviton2 instances are optimized for high-performance computing workloads, including machine learning and high-performance databases, and the Graviton instances are optimized for web servers, caching fleets, and other compute-intensive workloads.

Here are the benefits of using Graviton:

• Reduce costs: Because AWS Graviton processors are built using ARM-based technology, they are less expensive to manufacture than traditional x86 processors. This allows AWS to offer lower prices for instances that use Graviton processors, which can lead to cost savings for users.
• Improve performance for certain workloads: ARM-based processors are optimized for compute-intensive workloads such as web servers, containerized workloads, and big data analytics.

AWS Graviton processors also support all the features that are available on x86-based instances, and can run the same software and libraries as x86-based instances. This means that users can run their existing applications on instances that use Graviton processors without having to make any changes.

Set Resource Requests and Limits for Pods

In Kubernetes, resource requests and limits are used to specify the minimum and maximum amount of resources that a pod should have access to. This allows Kubernetes to make better decisions about how to schedule pods and ensure that resources are used efficiently.

Resource requests define the minimum amount of resources that a pod needs to function correctly. When a pod is created, Kubernetes will ensure that the pod has access to at least the amount of resources specified in its requests. This helps to prevent the over-allocation of resources and ensures that pods have the resources they need to function.

Resource limits define the maximum amount of resources that a pod should consume. When a pod exceeds its limit, it will be terminated or throttled by Kubernetes to prevent it from consuming too many resources. This helps to prevent individual pods from monopolizing resources and ensures that resources are shared fairly among all pods.

Setting resource requests and limits for your pods can help to make the most of Kubernetes by:

• Ensuring that pods have the resources they need to function correctly: By specifying resource requests, Kubernetes can ensure that pods have the resources they need to function, which can improve the stability and performance of your application.
• Preventing resource over-allocation: By specifying resource limits, Kubernetes can prevent individual pods from consuming too many resources, which can help to improve the overall resource utilization of your cluster.
• Improving scheduling decisions: Kubernetes can use the resource requests and limits to make better decisions about where to schedule pods. This can help to improve the performance of your application by ensuring that pods are scheduled on nodes that have enough resources to meet their needs.
• Controlling the cost: by setting limits, you can prevent the pods from overusing the resources and hence reduce the cost of the resources.

Securing Your Kubernetes Clusters

Kubernetes offers a variety of security options to help protect your cluster and the workloads running on it. Some of the main security features in Kubernetes include:

• Network segmentation: Kubernetes allows you to segment the network to restrict communication between pods and services, this can be done using network policies.
• Role-based access control (RBAC): Kubernetes allows you to define roles and assign them to users or service accounts, this allows you to control who can access the resources in your cluster and what actions they can perform.
• Secrets and ConfigMaps: Kubernetes allows you to store sensitive information, such as passwords, tokens, and keys in secrets and ConfigMaps, this allows you to keep sensitive information out of your pod definition files and manage them in a secure way.
• Pod security policies: Kubernetes allows you to define security policies that are applied to pods, this allows you to control the security settings of the pods, such as the users and groups that can run the pods, the capabilities of the pods, and the privileges that the pods have.
• Network encryptions: Kubernetes supports encrypting network traffic between pods and services to protect against eavesdropping and tampering.
• Authentication and authorization: Kubernetes supports different types of authentication, such as client certificates, bearer tokens, and webhooks, and also supports different types of authorization such as ABAC, RBAC, and Webhook.
• Image scanning: Kubernetes allows you to scan the container images for vulnerabilities before running them in the cluster.

These are some of the main security options that Kubernetes provides. By using these options, you can improve the security of your cluster and the workloads running on it. However, it's important to note that security is a continuous process, and you should stay up-to-date with the latest security best practices and vulnerabilities.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Kubernetes provides a wide range of features that can be used to make more of your organization's infrastructure. By using Kubernetes' built-in scalability features, setting resource requests and limits, using a service mesh, and securing your cluster, you can improve the reliability, performance, and security of your applications.

Additionally, by using tools such as the Kubernetes Dashboard and AWS Graviton processors, you can easily manage and monitor your resources, reducing costs and increasing efficiency. Overall, Kubernetes is a powerful tool that can help organizations to manage and scale their infrastructure more effectively.

Author Bio: Gilad David Maayan

Gilad David Maayan is a technology writer who has worked with over 150 technology companies including SAP, Imperva, Samsung NEXT, NetApp and Check Point, producing technical and thought leadership content that elucidates technical solutions for developers and IT leadership. Today he heads Agile SEO, the leading marketing agency in the technology industry.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/giladdavidmaayan/