Greetings programs.

In this post we’re going to do a brief overview of Containers and Kubernetes. My aim here is to set the stage for further exploration and to give a quick back of the napkin understanding of why they’re insanely great.

A brief history of distributed systems

Image taken from the Kubernetes documentation
( https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/what-is-kubernetes/ )

Traditional Deployment

From the earliest days of computers that had multitasking operating systems applications have been hosted directly on top of the host operating system. The process of deploying, testing and updating applications was slow and cumbersome to say the least. The result: mounting technical debt that eventually consumes more and more resources just to keep legacy applications operating, without any ability to update or augment them.

Virtualized Deployment

Virtualization enabled multiple copies of a virtual computer on top of a physical computer. This dramatically improved the efficiently of resource utilization and the speed at which new workloads could be instantiated. It also made it convenient to run a single application or service per machine.

Because of the ease in which new workloads could be deployed, In this era we started to see horizontal scaling of applications as opposed to vertical scaling. This means running multiple copies of a thing and placing the copies behind a load balancer, as opposed to making the things bigger and heavier. This is an example of how introducing a new layer of abstraction results in innovation, which is a hallmark of the history of computers.

However, Some problems emerged with the explosion of virtualized distributed systems. Horizontal scaling techniques add additional layers of complexity, which made deployments slower and more error prone. Operations issues also emerged due to the need to monitor patch and secure these growing fleets of virtual machines. It was two steps forward, one step backward.

Container deployment

Containers are a similar concept to Virtual machines, however the isolation occurs at the operating system level rather than the machine level. There is a single host operating system, and each application runs in isolation.

Containers are substantially smaller and start almost instantly. This allows for containers to be stored in a central repository where they can be pulled down and executed on demand. This new abstraction resulted in the innovation of immutable infrastructure. Immutable infrastructure solves the day 2 operations of care and feeding of the running workloads. However it doesn’t solve for the complexity of deploying the horizontal scaling infrastructure. This is where Kubernetes comes in.

Kubernetes: Container orchestrator

Kubernetes is a collection of components that:

• Deploys tightly coupled containers (pods) across the nodes
• Scales the number of pods up and down as needed
• Provides load balancing (ClusterIP, Ingress controller) to the pods
• Defines who the pods can communicate with
• Gives pods a way to discover each other
• Monitors the health of pods and services
• Automatically terminates and replaces unhealthy pods
• Gracefully rolls out new versions of a pod
• Gracefully rolls back failed deployments

Kubernetes takes an entire distributed application deployment and turns it into an abstraction that is defined in YAML files that can be stored in a version control repository. A single K8s cluster can scale to hundreds of thousands of Pods on thousands of nodes. This abstraction has resulted in an explosion of new design patterns that is changing how software is written and architected, and has led to the rise of Microservices. We’ll cover Microservices in another post.

Wrap up

I hope this was helpful and gave you a useful concept of what Kubernetes is and why it’s such a game changer. Would you like to see more diagrams? Let me know your thoughts.

Best regards,

-s