What is Kubernetes and how Industries are using it???

Kubernetes is one of the most widely used technology in the world right now.But, before knowing how industries are using it, let's understand what is it and how it solves real-time scenarios.

Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

What is Kubernetes and why is it used??

Let's understand the need of Kubernetes with a simple example.

Suppose you are the one who is responsible for handling and maintaining a company's website.

Therefore ,you need to deploy several containers using Container Engines like Docker, Podman, CRI-O etc. so that, your website is never down and clients can always access the website.

But, let's say, your one of the backend server having your website crashes at midnight and you are obviously not available for handling this issue.Hence, your one of the Backend Server will be down for a long time which can cause delay in responding to the client's request and hence, deteriorating the performance and reputation of the company.

Here, Kubernetes comes as a problem solver.

Kubernetes constantly check all the containers and if it finds that one or more containers are crashed or terminated, it deploys that many containers automatically.

Internally, Kubernetes just contacts Container Engine and commands it to launch the container.

Hence, Kubernetes is a very intelligent tool.

What are the use cases that can be solved using Kubernetes???

Some uses cases of Kubernetes are:-

1-Deploying a Simple App having PHP Website as backend and ReactJS as frontend on Kubernetes Cluster

2-Orchestrating complicated apps based on Microservice Architecture with many components

3-Facilitating the moving of on-premises app to the cloud

4-Managing Machine Learning Workflows to deploy faster AI-based apps

5-Enabling Computing-Heavy Tasks

6-CI/CD Pipelining tasks are easier to perform using Kubernetes

How Industries are using Kubernetes??

Let's take example of IBM and see how Kubernetes is solving their problems.

Challenge faced by IBM??

IBM Cloud offers public, private, and hybrid cloud functionality across a diverse set of runtimes from its OpenWhisk-based function as a service (FaaS) offering, managed Kubernetes and containers, to Cloud Foundry platform as a service (PaaS). These runtimes are combined with the power of the company's enterprise technologies, such as MQ and DB2, its modern artificial intelligence (AI) Watson, and data analytics services. Users of IBM Cloud can exploit capabilities from more than 170 different cloud native services in its catalog, including capabilities such as IBM's Weather Company API and data services. In the later part of 2017, the IBM Cloud Container Registry team wanted to build out an image trust service.

Solution provided by Kubernetes...

The work on this new service culminated with its public availability in the IBM Cloud in February 2018. The image trust service, called Portieris, is fully based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF) open source project Notary, according to Michael Hough, a software developer with the IBM Cloud Container Registry team. Portieris is a Kubernetes admission controller for enforcing content trust. Users can create image security policies for each Kubernetes namespace, or at the cluster level, and enforce different levels of trust for different images. Portieris is a key part of IBM's trust story, since it makes it possible for users to consume the company's Notary offering from within their IKS clusters. The offering is that Notary server runs in IBM's cloud, and then Portieris runs inside the IKS cluster. This enables users to be able to have their IKS cluster verify that the image they're loading containers from contains exactly what they expect it to, and Portieris is what allows an IKS cluster to apply that verification.

Impact...

IBM's intention in offering a managed Kubernetes container service and image registry is to provide a fully secure end-to-end platform for its enterprise customers. "Image signing is one key part of that offering, and our container registry team saw Notary as the de facto way to implement that capability in the current Docker and container ecosystem," Hough says. The company had not been offering image signing before, and Notary is the tool it used to implement that capability. "We had a multi-tenant Docker Registry with private image hosting," Hough says. "The Docker Registry uses hashes to ensure that image content is correct, and data is encrypted both in flight and at rest. But it does not provide any guarantees of who pushed an image. We used Notary to enable users to sign images in their private registry namespaces if they so choose."

Thank You!!!