How Kubernetes is used in Industries

Hello Everyone!! As you all are aware of the word Kubernetes which are nowadays very prevalent in the industries but don’t know what it actually is. So let me introduce you what is Kubernetes(also called K8s ).

What is Kubernetes?

Consider the following scenario: you’ve been using Docker for a while and have it installed on a few different hosts. If your application starts receiving a lot of traffic and you need to scale up quickly, how will you get from three servers to the 40 servers you could need? And how are you going to decide which container goes where? How would you keep track of all of these containers and ensure that they are restarted whenever they stop working?

This is where Kubernetes comes in.

Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It is basically the container management tool that manages and add extra facilities to the containers like scaling, deployment, etc. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. It manages Pods which is like a box inside which container is wrapped adding some extra features on it.

Characteristics of Kubernetes

Containers, which are bundled microservices with their dependencies and configurations, are increasingly being used in modern systems. Kubernetes is an open-source platform for deploying and managing large-scale containers. It allows any number of servers of various sorts to share workloads for a single tenant at the same time, regardless of distance.

Most importantly, Kubernetes was created to be utilized everywhere, allowing it to orchestrate both on-premises and public cloud installations. Concrete actions can be done to improve IT security using Kubernetes. To provide a comprehensive container infrastructure, it must also be integrated with networking, storage, security, telemetry, and other services. This combines the ease of Platforms as a Service (PaaS) with the flexibility of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), allowing for portability between infrastructure providers.

Some of its features include:

• The ability to arrange containers automatically based on your resource needs without affecting availability.
• Service discovery and load balancing: Kubernetes assigns containers their own IP addresses and a unique DNS name for a cluster of containers and can balance the demand on them, so there’s no need to employ an external system for service discovery.
• Planning: it determines which node each container will operate on based on the resources it demands and other constraints. To improve resource usage and savings, it combines essential and best-effort workloads.
• Enable storage orchestration: Storage orchestration is enabled, which automatically configures the storage system as a public cloud provider. NFS, iSCSI, Gluster, Ceph, Cinder, and other on-premise networked storage systems are examples.
• Batch execution: Kubernetes can manage batch and IC workloads in addition to services, and it can replace failed containers.
• Configuration and secret management: Kubernetes stores sensitive information such as passwords and ssh keys in ‘secrets.’ Without needing to rebuild the image or disclose sensitive information, the application’s settings and secrets are deployed and updated.
• Self-repair: When nodes die, self-repair restart failed containers, replace them, and re-program them. Remove any containers that aren’t responsive and don’t publish them till they’re ready.
• Automated deployments in which updates to the application or its settings are made gradually while its status is monitored. This prevents you from deleting all of your instances at once. Kubernetes will undo any changes if something goes wrong.

Companies using Kubernetes

Google was perhaps the first firm to recognise that it required a better approach to implement and manage its software components in order to scale globally, and it spent years internally developing Borg (later dubbed Omega). Kubernetes was officially offered as an Open Source system built on learning utilising large-scale services in 2014, after nearly a decade of rigorous internal use. Kubernetes is now the industry standard for developing and deploying distributed applications.

ADIDAS

Adidas is supporting its front-end e-commerce platform with a cloud native architecture supported by the CNCF-driven Kubernetes System, which is now being deployed at scale for major events like Cyber Monday and Christmas. The open-source technologies that underpin cloud-native architecture are gaining a lot of traction, thanks to the Kubernetes-focused CNCF. In recent years, the Adidas team has been pleased with its software selections, but accessing all of the tools has been a challenge. “Just to receive a developer VM,” explains Daniel Eichten, Senior Director of Platform Engineering, “you had to send a request form, give the reason, give the title of the project, who’s accountable, give the internal cost centre a call so that they can conduct recharges.” To streamline the process, Senior Director of Platform Engineering Fernando Cornago says, “we started from the developer point of view” and looked for ways to reduce the time it required to get a product up and running and into the Adidas infrastructure. Containerization, agile development, continuous delivery, and a cloud-native platform with Kubernetes and Prometheus were used to find a solution. Six months after the project began, Kubernetes was used to manage the entire adidas e-commerce site. The e-commerce site’s load time was cut in half. The frequency of releases increased from every 4–6 weeks to 3–4 times each day. adidas is now running 40% of its most essential, impacting systems on its cloud native platform, with 4,000 pods, 200 nodes, and 80,000 builds each month.

“For me, Kubernetes is a platform made by engineers for engineers. It’s relieving the development team from tasks that they don’t want to do, but at the same time giving the visibility of what is behind the curtain, so they can also control it.” — FERNANDO CORNAGO, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF PLATFORM ENGINEERING AT ADIDAS

Tinder

Tinder’s engineering team experienced scale and stability problems as a result of the increased traffic volume. What exactly did they do?
Kubernetes — Yes, Kubernetes is the answer.
Tinder’s engineering team overcame unusual obstacles by migrating 200 services and running a Kubernetes cluster with 1,000 nodes, 15,000 pods, and 48,000 running containers on a scale of 1,000 nodes, 15,000 pods, and 48,000 running containers.

Was it simple? There’s no way. They had to do it, though, in order to continue running their firm smoothly. “As we onboarded more and more services to Kubernetes, we found ourselves running a DNS server that was handling 250,000 requests per second,” one of their Engineering leaders explained. Tinder’s whole engineering company now has knowledge and expertise containerizing and deploying their applications on Kubernetes, thanks to their fantastic culture.

Bose

Challenge

Bose, a well-known manufacturer of high-quality audio equipment, has offered connected items for more than five years, and as demand grew, the infrastructure had to adapt to meet it. “We needed to give developers a method to quickly prototype and deliver services all the way to production,” explains Josh West, Lead Cloud Engineer. The company chose to start creating a platform from the ground up in 2016. “To be one to two steps ahead of the various product divisions so that we are never trying to catch up with their scale,” Cloud Architecture Manager Dylan O’Mahony explains.

Solution

The team decided it needed a microservices design from the start. The team decided to use Kubernetes for its scaled IoT Platform-as-a-Service running on AWS after reviewing and developing a few orchestration alternatives. The platform, which also included Prometheus monitoring, went live in 2017 and has already served over 3 million linked devices. Fluentd, CoreDNS, Jaeger, and OpenTracing are among the CNCF technologies that Bose has implemented subsequently.

Impact

The platform currently supports 30,000 non-production deployments per year across dozens of microservices, thanks to the addition of roughly 100 engineers. There were around 1250 production installations in 2018. There are 1,800 namespaces and 340 worker nodes in a single production cluster. “In less than two and a half weeks, we took a whole new service from concept to code and deployment all the way to production, including hardening, security testing, and so on,” adds O’Mahony.

“At Bose we’re building an IoT platform that has enabled our physical products. If it weren’t for Kubernetes and the rest of the CNCF projects being free open source software with such a strong community, we would never have achieved scale, or even gotten to launch on schedule.” — JOSH WEST, LEAD CLOUD ENGINEER, BOSE

These were some out of the many companies that used Kubernetes to solve their use cases. That’s all from my side. Thanks for reading!!:)

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