Why Kubernetes?

By: Chris O'Connell, David Nicholls, Kane Gyovai, and Daniel Dides

In today’s fast-paced digital world, organizations require ways to efficiently deploy, manage, scale, and secure applications. Teams have increasingly turned to containerization, the benefits of which are well established and documented, as a means for achieving those objectives. As more applications are containerized, additional automation and orchestration is required to manage the complexity associated with deploying and operating containers at scale. Enter Kubernetes – a powerful open-source platform that has become the standard solution for managing containerized applications in enterprise environments. In this article, we discuss Kubernetes in practical terms. After reading this you should have an idea of what Kubernetes does, why it was created, when it makes sense to use, and why it has become the industry standard solution for deploying applications.

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes, often referred to as K8s, is an open-source container orchestration platform designed to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It helps manage clusters of containers and provides a framework to run distributed systems reliably. To put it plainly, Kubernetes is a software system that helps automate when, where, and how containers run.

As a software system, Kubernetes must be deployed and operated. The Kubernetes software system, often referred to simply as a “Kubernetes cluster”, consists of multiple components encapsulated within two distinct architectural constructs – a control plane and nodes. The control plane is responsible for automating orchestration activities such as scheduling workloads, managing state, processing requests, handling events, and communicating with nodes. Nodes are primarily responsible for receiving instructions from the control plane, running containers, and routing cluster network traffic.

The core architectural components and distributed system characteristics of Kubernetes were originally developed by Google for the company’s internal cluster management system called Borg. In 2014, Google released Kubernetes as an open-source version of Borg. The project is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) with numerous contributors across the globe.

What Problems Was Kubernetes Created to Solve?

Kubernetes was created to address several key challenges associated with delivering and operating applications, particularly around efficiency, scalability, and flexibility. Some specific challenges include:

1. Slow Software Deployment and Time-to-Market - In traditional environments, deploying software updates or new applications often required significant manual intervention, leading to slower release cycles. Teams had to configure servers, allocate resources, and handle scaling manually, which slowed down innovation. Kubernetes automates many of these processes, enabling faster, continuous delivery of applications. With features like rolling updates, Kubernetes allows for seamless updates without downtime, drastically speeding up time-to-market.

2. Avoiding Vendor Lock-In - Prior to Kubernetes, many companies found themselves locked into specific infrastructure providers, like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, because their deployment tools were tightly coupled with those platforms. Kubernetes provides a vendor-neutral solution that works across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. This flexibility allows organizations to avoid being tied to a single vendor and switch providers as their needs change, which is particularly valuable for businesses looking to optimize costs or adapt to evolving requirements.

3. Managing Infrastructure Complexity at Scale - As applications grow and serve larger audiences, managing the underlying infrastructure becomes increasingly complex. Scaling applications manually can lead to inefficiencies and errors, while over-provisioning resources results in wasted costs. Kubernetes simplifies infrastructure management by automating scaling, load balancing, and resource allocation. It ensures that applications can handle increased demand while minimizing the waste of computing resources, helping businesses save on infrastructure costs.

4. Ensuring Application Resilience - Traditional systems often struggled with maintaining uptime and automatically recovering from failures. Kubernetes solves this by providing built-in self-healing capabilities. If a container or node fails, Kubernetes reschedules the workload on a healthy node, ensuring that applications continue running smoothly. This automated recovery reduces downtime and helps maintain business continuity.

By addressing these problems, Kubernetes enables organizations to build more efficient, scalable, and resilient applications, helping them stay competitive in an increasingly fast-paced digital landscape.

Comparing Kubernetes to Traditional Deployments and Other Platforms

A traditional application deployment typically involves packaging the application along with all required dependencies into a virtual machine (VM) image. In this type of deployment, applications run directly on VMs where each VM contains a full operating system (OS). The overhead required to provision and initialize an OS can slow down scaling within a system as each new node must initialize its OS. Coupling the application to the VM also results in less efficient resource utilization and additional complexity for updates. Kubernetes, on the other hand, runs applications in containers, which are typically smaller and faster to start. Containers share the same OS kernel but are isolated from each other, leading to better resource utilization and more efficient initialization.

When compared to other container orchestration platforms like Docker Swarm, AWS ECS, or Azure App Service, Kubernetes is more versatile and widely adopted, offering cross-cloud compatibility and a rich ecosystem of tools. While other container platforms have their strengths, Kubernetes’ flexibility, feature set, industry adoption, and proven reliability make it the preferred choice for enterprise applications.

Key Benefits

1. Scalability - Kubernetes can be configured to automatically adjust to demand, making it easier to handle fluctuating workloads.

2. High availability and Fault Tolerance - Kubernetes provides built-in self-healing and automated recovery mechanisms, minimizing downtime and ensuring resilience.

3. Cost Efficiency - By better managing how resources are allocated, Kubernetes reduces unnecessary spending on infrastructure.

4. Increased Agility - Kubernetes speeds up software delivery by automating the operational overhead, so teams can focus on development.

5. Avoiding Vendor Lock-In - Kubernetes allows businesses to deploy applications across multiple cloud providers or on-prem environments, giving them the freedom to switch providers as needed.

6. Thriving Open-Source Ecosystem - The active open-source community behind Kubernetes ensures constant innovation, a wealth of tools, and quick access to updates and security patches.

7. Fully Customizable - Unlike other platform solutions, Kubernetes is fully open and extensible, allowing users to mold it to support their unique software directly, enabling complex, application specific tasks to be handled effectively with ease.

8. Declarative Configuration - Users describe the desired state of their system, and Kubernetes will work to maintain that state. This approach simplifies management, improves consistency, and makes it easier to version control and audit system configurations.

Tradeoffs

While Kubernetes is a powerful and flexible platform, it is not always the best choice for every use case. There are situations where its complexity, overhead, or specific characteristics may make it less suitable than a traditional VM based deployment. Here are some scenarios in which Kubernetes might not be the best solution:

1. Small or Simple Applications – Depending on the size and complexity of an application, it might not make sense to assume the operational burden of a Kubernetes cluster. The distributed nature of Kubernetes and the breadth of tools comprising its ecosystem creates a steep learning curve. Managing Kubernetes requires skilled personnel, which can be costly.

2. Monolithic Applications – Kubernetes orchestrates containerized applications. Containerized applications are typically designed to be small, independently deployable, independently scalable services. For a large monolithic application, Kubernetes might not be the best approach due to tight coupling of components which could ultimately eliminate the benefits of optimized resource utilization and faster start times. Large monolithic applications should typically be decomposed into smaller, microservices when deploying to Kubernetes.

3. Real-Time or Low-Latency Applications – The automation and abstraction provided by Kubernetes comes with associated overhead which can result in latency that may be unacceptable for highly specialized applications designed for ultra-low-latency workloads. For the vast majority of enterprise applications, the latency and overhead are negligible and a welcomed tradeoff in exchange for the many benefits provided by the platform, but for use cases such as real-time systems this tradeoff may not be worth it.

4. Complex Stateful Applications - K8s has consistently proven to be an excellent solution for stateless applications but it may not always be the best fit for stateful applications that rely on fast, predictable storage and access patterns. While options for supporting stateful applications, such as custom resource definitions and controllers, have become more sophisticated over the years, it’s still worth carefully evaluating whether container orchestration is the right fit for stateful software such as databases.

Building Kubernetes Solutions with BridgePhase

At BridgePhase, we specialize in building robust, secure, and scalable Kubernetes platforms tailored to our customers’ needs. Our team has deep experience with CNCF projects, enabling us to leverage the latest innovations and best practices in the Kubernetes ecosystem. Whether it’s deploying on-premises or in the cloud, we’re experts in working with CNCF Kubernetes distributions such as RKE2, as well as cloud-native Kubernetes services like Amazon EKS.

Our Kubernetes Solutions:

• Hardened Kubernetes Platforms: Security is at the core of what we do. We build hardened Kubernetes platforms designed to meet stringent compliance and security requirements, ensuring that our customers can trust the infrastructure they deploy their critical applications on.

• Full DevSecOps Pipelines: We provide comprehensive DevSecOps pipelines, integrating security into every stage of the software development lifecycle. By automating security checks and integrating them directly into the CI/CD process, we enable teams to deploy software faster while maintaining high standards of security and compliance.

• Policy Enforcement and Governance: Our solutions include integrated policy enforcement mechanisms, ensuring that Kubernetes workloads adhere to strict operational and security policies. This includes the use of tools like OPA (Open Policy Agent) and Gatekeeper to define and enforce rules for cluster security and governance.

• Integrated Tools for Managing Kubernetes Workloads: We implement tools that streamline the management of Kubernetes clusters and workloads, from monitoring and observability with Prometheus and Grafana, to service mesh integration with Istio, and traffic management with NGINX. These integrated tools ensure that your teams can focus on delivering software without worrying about operational overhead.

By leveraging cloud-native solutions like EKS or CNCF-certified Kubernetes distributions like RKE2, we create platforms that are scalable, secure, and optimized for rapid software delivery. Our experience across a range of Kubernetes distributions allows us to tailor solutions for diverse environments, enabling organizations to scale their operations with confidence.

Our Kubernetes expertise allows us to build platforms that accelerate software delivery through automation and streamlined workflows. By implementing DevSecOps pipelines, policy enforcement, and integrated tooling, we help organizations ship secure, reliable software faster than ever before. Whether it’s deploying mission-critical applications for the DoD or building flexible platforms for enterprises, BridgePhase ensures your Kubernetes infrastructure is optimized for success.

Closing Remarks

Kubernetes has matured from an internal solution at Google to the mostly widely adopted, industry proven platform for deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications. It’s a well-designed solution with a comprehensive ecosystem and the backing of the CNCF open-source community. With the right team of experienced practitioners to deploy and operate clusters within an enterprise environment it’s easy to see why Kubernetes is trusted by so many teams.

Thanks for reading!