Why Your Business Should Be Making the Move to Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source system for managing applications across many different hosts. It is a platform for automating the deployment, scaling and operations of application containers on cloud servers and distributed clouds. Let’s look at the reasons why your business should be making the move to Kubernetes.

Big Business Backing

On August 29, 2017, Business Insider published an article stating that Google and VMware joined together with a nearly three billion dollar startup using Kubernetes to get ahead in the cloud wars. When two of the biggest tech companies are investing in Kubernetes, you know that every level of IT on the cloud will be supporting it and integrated with it in a short period of time that isn’t already compatible. You’ll want to hire a Kubernetes consulting firm to make the move whether you want to work on Google’s cloud servers, Amazon’s AWS or any other major computing infrastructure because Kubernetes is quickly becoming the de facto standard due to the backing of Big Tech. And know that it was already endorsed by Red Hat before Google was onboard.

Performance

Kubernetes delivers performance at a level that previously was reserved for traditional software applications. It took “containers” and turned them into scalable applications that run as well as bare metal and virtual machines. This is partially due to the fact that applications inside containers have access to the hardware without the system overhead of virtualization.

Their “self-containment” makes them safe in terms of information security, while the “containers” themselves are portable. You don’t have to spend time configuring different servers, each with their own dependencies. All hardware essentially receives the same configuration, and you don’t have to waste time managing support libraries to get each server or PC running with the optimized configuration.

All container based infrastructure needs to have its networking and storage requirements maintained, but only Kubernetes makes managing both for optimal performance equally easy. And their high reliability ensures extremely high uptime. Kubernetes has built-in awareness of environmental faults and messaging when issues arise.

Cost and Labor Savings

Kubernetes provides automation to manage the containers whether networking, managing storage or automatically scaling. You save on cloud computing administration costs by adopting Kubernetes without having to create something in house via a massive investment into software development. If you are already working with a Linux application, Kubernetes is ideal because you can containerize it and run it directly on Kubernetes. In contrast, other “orchestrators” require a two tier architecture that impacts performance.

Another benefit of containers is that software developers can create apps, build them and test them inside of containers without impacting the rest of the system engineers are maintaining. When you’re ready to put the container on the cloud, the engineer only needs to know its network and storage requirements. You don’t have to devote time and talent to making the new app run on your servers after it is verified ready for release when you use Kubernetes. And Kubernetes clusters are very low maintenance for day to day operations.

The dramatically improved utilization of hardware via Kubernetes can reduce your hardware costs significantly. That is a hallmark of many open source projects but demonstrated in several case studies with Kubernetes, reducing hardware needs by up to 50%.

Kubernetes is lean, reliable and dramatically lowers infrastructure and system administration requirements. If you feel like Kubernetes would be a right fit for your operation, we strongly suggest that you consult with your IT department to see if they would be favorable to a switch.