Kubernetes (or commonly knows as “K8s”) is an open-source tool/platform written in GO-Lang programming language and is created by Google which is mainly used for container orchestration. Currently Kubernetes is an open-source project under Apache 2.0 license. Kubernetes provides some edge functions, such as Load-balancer, Service discovery, and Role Based Access Control(RBAC).
Kubernetes gives you the orchestration and management capabilities required to deploy containers, at scale. Kubernetes orchestration allows you to build application services that span multiple containers, schedule those containers across a cluster, scale those containers, and manage the health of those containers over time.
Features of Kubernetes:
- Scaling: It provides both horizontal as well as vertical scaling to the resources.
- Provides concept that can automate rollouts and rollbacks in case something falls back after a change made into it.
- Container Monitoring helps in continuous checking the status of the containers.
- Provides availability to run everywhere either be it in on-premises, or into clouds platform.
- Interacts with several groups of containers: Kubernetes is able to manage more cluster at the same time.
- Provides additional services: as well as the management of containers, Kubernetes offers security, networking and storage services.
Use Case by Peasron Company:
Challenge
A global education company serving 75 million learners, Pearson set a goal to more than double that number, to 200 million, by 2025. A key part of this growth is in digital learning experiences, and Pearson was having difficulty in scaling and adapting to its growing online audience. They needed an infrastructure platform that would be able to scale quickly and deliver products to market faster.
Solution
“To transform our infrastructure, we had to think beyond simply enabling automated provisioning,” says Chris Jackson, Director for Cloud Platforms & SRE at Pearson. “We realized we had to build a platform that would allow Pearson developers to build, manage and deploy applications in a completely different way.” The team chose Docker container technology and Kubernetes orchestration “because of its flexibility, ease of management and the way it would improve our engineers’ productivity.”
Impact
With the platform, there has been substantial improvements in productivity and speed of delivery. “In some cases, we’ve gone from nine months to provision physical assets in a data center to just a few minutes to provision and get a new idea in front of a customer,” says John Shirley, Lead Site Reliability Engineer for the Cloud Platform Team. Jackson estimates they’ve achieved 15–20% developer productivity savings. Before, outages were an issue during their busiest time of year, the back-to-school period. Now, there’s high confidence in their ability to meet aggressive customer SLAs.
