Glossary

Kubernetes: What is it and how does it work?

SC Ingenium - Glossary: Kubernetes: What is it and how does it work?

Today at JSC Ingenium, network infrastructure solutions for MNOs and MVNOS, we want to talk to you about a platform that has revolutionized the way of managing jobs and services: Kubernetes.

Keep reading our today’s post to understand how it works and what advantages entails

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is a software platform to deploy services in production for different clients, both for large companies and start-ups.

A portable, open-source platform that allows you to manage both services and workloads.

It is a container-centric management environment with a storage and networking infrastructure able to free up user workloads. 

Docker created a system that allows to easily deploying applications on any type of machine. What Kubernetes has achieved is a platform for deploying containerized, but production-ready applications, ensuring the security and availability of applications in multiple ways. We will examine it throughout this article.

In short, Kubernetes is a layer “above Docker” that offers standards and tools to facilitate the effective deployment of applications.

Lifting a Docker container is relatively simple, but lifting multiple coordinated replicas that are resistant to errors on machines or on the network, that are updated without losing the capacity of services, etc., is more complicated. Thanks to Kubernetes, all this can be done easily. 

Kubernetes starts from the experience of the Google system in cutting Borg containers, which has been in production for more than 15 years running all Google services.

How did Kubernetes come about?

The first version of Kubernetes was released to the public in 2015. Since then the project has grown a lot thanks to the Open Source community. Today a large number of companies contribute to the development of Kubernetes, being in total more than 2,400 individual collaborators. In this way a huge ecosystem of tools has been created around Kubernetes and many of these projects are managed, along with Kubernetes itself, through the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

As a curiosity, Kubernetes in Greek means “ancient helmsman”, that is, the one who controls the ship that transports the containers.

So why is Kubernetes having such success?

There are many reasons, the main one being that it is not a technology to experiment or for enthusiasts, but a technology designed to deploy very large projects in production.

The other big reason is that Kubernetes gives us standardized methods to put containers into production. Any type of application can be built on any Kubernetes cluster, from your local computer to your data center, or from the Cloud.

This creates a large ecosystem of software vendors that have their applications ready to deploy.

These and many other advantages have made Kubernetes one of the fastest growing software projects in recent years. Although the internal mechanics of the platform is complicated, it is very easy to interact with it.

For JSC Ingenium, its cloud-native architecture is one of the aspects that provide flexibility and cost-effectiveness due to its wide variety of cloud capabilities. This complements the power of the JSC Ingenium approach; we achieve an unprecedented business agility, allowing the MVNO to take control of business changes.