Kubernetes 101: Why and How to Use Kubernetes to Grow Your Business?
The modern business landscape is extremely dynamic and highly hyperconnected, making the pursuit of efficient operations, scalable infrastructure, and seamless user experiences a fundamental business imperative. In this fast-paced environment built on the latest container technologies, the need for a highly efficient container orchestration tool reigns supreme.
This is where Kubernetes stands as the ideal technology to help businesses grow, thrive, and conquer. In fact, according to the State of Enterprise Open Source 2022 report, out of 1,296 IT leaders worldwide, 70% of them use Kubernetes.
Throughout the course of this article, we’ll dive into the true essence of Kubernetes, exploring the pivotal role it can play in driving the growth of your business, and how you can implement Kubernetes into your organization to leverage its immense potential and infinite capabilities.
Decoding Kubernetes: The Ultimate Container Orchestration System
Before we dive into the intricacies of Kubernetes and the value it brings to businesses, let’s take a step back to understand what it truly is. Kubernetes, often called K8s, is a sophisticated open-source container orchestration platform designed to revolutionize the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications through advanced automation capabilities.
From this definition, we can understand that the functioning of Kubernetes is built on the backbone of containers. But what exactly is a container? A container is a modern form of OS virtualization; it exists as a lightweight and isolated runtime environment that encapsulates an application along with its dependencies, libraries, and configuration files.
At its core, Kubernetes offers a highly robust framework for automating the complex process of deploying, managing, and scaling applications across a variety of environments, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid configurations.
Unleashing Your Business Potential With Kubernetes
In the old days, before the development and widespread use of containers, deploying and running software used to be an incredibly challenging ordeal. To deploy any application, businesses would need to spend time and money on purchasing physical infrastructure. Applications running on these traditional infrastructures would grab all the resources they could get and hog them at the expense of other applications.
It’s easy to understand why this would be a critical issue. Not only would other applications not be able to run simultaneously, but the costs for physical infrastructure would be through the roof. This problem was solved with the introduction of virtualization, which allowed CPU and memory to be shared. Now, these machines can be split into more efficient runtime environments called containers.
So, we can understand that the primary benefit of using Kubernetes is that it allows you to fully embrace and leverage the power of containerization. With the rapid proliferation of containers in the modern IT ecosystem, a sophisticated orchestration tool such as Kubernetes is of paramount importance to enable unprecedented efficiency in deployment, rollouts, load balancing, networking, scalability, and self-healing for availability. Let’s take a deeper look at why your company needs to embrace Kubernetes to reach its full potential:
Unparalleled Speed, Scalability, and Flexibility: Kubernetes allows for effortless scaling of applications, both horizontally and vertically, to constantly meet and exceed evolving demands. Enterprises can efficiently allocate resources, eliminate wastage, and reduce infrastructure costs, thereby facilitating rapid expansion and enhanced operational efficiency.
Full-Fledged Digital Transformation: Kubernetes allows organizations to reach unprecedented heights by completely revamping the digital ecosystem currently being used in the organization. Since Kubernetes is based on the orchestration of containers, if they are not already used, containers will consequently be embraced as a prerequisite. And as architectures built on the use of containers are undeniably becoming a must-have for modern IT companies, this is a major benefit.
Embracing the Power of Automation: The quest for incredibly simple and highly efficient deployment is incomplete without leveraging the wonders of automation. Kubernetes massively simplifies the development and deployment process by defining the desired state of the application in YAML files and then automating the provisioning and management of application containers, freeing up valuable resources from mundane tasks. Furthermore, orchestration supports an agile or DevOps strategy by automating operations, enabling teams to create and deploy in quick, iterative cycles and release new features rapidly.
Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD): Kubernetes enables enterprises to automate the process of continuous integration, testing, and deployment for their applications. It seamlessly integrates with CI/CD pipelines, allowing businesses to achieve faster time to market, improved software quality, and more efficient release cycles by automating these essential procedures.
How You Can Harness Kubernetes for Business Growth
In order to leverage the full potential of Kubernetes, your company needs to embrace certain prerequisites. First and foremost, the fundamental step to embracing Kubernetes is adopting containerization as a company-wide practice. As we’ve discussed earlier, containerization is the fundamental building block of modern IT business architecture. Businesses may create uniform application environments across a variety of platforms by encapsulating applications and their dependencies within portable containers, ensuring easy deployment and management on Kubernetes clusters.
Furthermore, businesses should emphasize the creation of robust applications to fully utilize Kubernetes' capabilities. Applications can tolerate failures and maximize uptime by following best practices for containerization, such as microservices architecture, loose coupling, and fault-tolerant design.
Leveraging the Power of Kubernetes Together
Like any modern technological marvel, embracing the wonders of Kubernetes can initially seem daunting. To support your business on this path to a highly efficient tomorrow, iView Labs stands as the complete Kubernetes implementation partner. Start this transformative journey towards unprecedented scalability and simplified deployment with the power of Kubernetes.