Kubernetes is used in Industries, all use cases are solved by Kubernetes.☸️

Kubernetes is a popular open source platform for container orchestration — that is, for the management of applications built out of multiple, largely self-contained runtimes called containers. Containers have become increasingly popular since the Docker containerization project launched in 2013, but large, distributed containerized applications can become increasingly difficult to coordinate. By making containerized applications dramatically easier to manage at scale, Kubernetes has become a key part of the container revolution.

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available.

The name Kubernetes originates from Greek, meaning helmsman or pilot. Google open-sourced the Kubernetes project in 2014. Kubernetes combines over 15 years of Google’s experience running production workloads at scale with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.

Why you need Kubernetes and what it can do..

• Service discovery and load balancing Kubernetes can expose a container using the DNS name or using their own IP address. If traffic to a container is high, Kubernetes is able to load balance and distribute the network traffic so that the deployment is stable.
• Storage orchestration Kubernetes allows you to automatically mount a storage system of your choice, such as local storages, public cloud providers, and more.
• Automated rollouts and rollbacks You can describe the desired state for your deployed containers using Kubernetes, and it can change the actual state to the desired state at a controlled rate. For example, you can automate Kubernetes to create new containers for your deployment, remove existing containers and adopt all their resources to the new container.
• Automatic bin packing You provide Kubernetes with a cluster of nodes that it can use to run containerized tasks. You tell Kubernetes how much CPU and memory (RAM) each container needs. Kubernetes can fit containers onto your nodes to make the best use of your resources.
• Self-healing Kubernetes restarts containers that fail, replaces containers, kills containers that don’t respond to your user-defined health check, and doesn’t advertise them to clients until they are ready to serve.
• Secret and configuration management Kubernetes lets you store and manage sensitive information, such as passwords, OAuth tokens, and SSH keys. You can deploy and update secrets and application configuration without rebuilding your container images, and without exposing secrets in your stack configuration.

How big companies are using Kubernetes

Tinder’s move to Kubernetes

Due to high traffic volume, Tinder’s engineering team faced challenges of scale and stability. What did they do?

Kubernetes — Yes, the answer is Kubernetes.

Tinder’s engineering team solved interesting challenges to migrate 200 services and run a Kubernetes cluster at scale totaling 1,000 nodes, 15,000 pods, and 48,000 running containers.

Was that easy? No ways. However, they had to do it for the smooth business operations going further. One of their Engineering leaders said, “As we onboarded more and more services to Kubernetes, we found ourselves running a DNS service that was answering 250,000 requests per second.” Fantastic culture, Tinder’s entire engineering organization now has knowledge and experience on how to containerize and deploy their applications on Kubernetes.

Read this fascinating case study here.

Reddit’s Kubernetes story

Reddit is one of the top busiest sites in the world. Kubernetes forms the core of Reddit’s internal Infrastructure.

From many years, the Reddit infrastructure team followed traditional ways of provisioning and configuring. However, this didn’t go long until they saw some huge drawbacks and failures happening while doing the things the old way. They moved to ‘Kubernetes.’

The New York Times Journey to Kubernetes

Today the majority of their customer-facing applications are running on Kubernetes. What an amazing story:) The biggest impact has been to speed up deployment and productivity. Legacy deployments that took up to 45 minutes are now pushed in just a few. It’s also given developers more freedom and fewer bottlenecks. The New York Times has gone from a ticket-based system for requesting resources and weekly deploy schedules to allowing developers to push updates independently.

Airbnb’s Kubernetes story

Airbnb’s transition from a monolithic to a microservices architecture is pretty amazing. They needed to scale continuous delivery horizontally, and the goal was to make continuous delivery available to the company’s 1000 or so engineers so they could add new services. Airbnb adopted to support over 1000 engineers concurrently configuring and deploying over 250 critical services to Kubernetes (at a frequency of about 500 deploys per day on average). I want you to see this excellent presentation from Melanie Cebula, the infrastructure engineer at Airbnb.

Pinterest’s Kubernetes story

With over 250 million monthly active users and serving over 10 billion recommendations every single day, that is huge. (The numbers might have changed now) As they knew these numbers are going to grow day by day, they began to realize the pain of scalability and performance issues.

Their initial strategy was to move their workload from EC2 instances to Docker containers; hence they first moved their services to Docker to free up engineering time spent on Puppet and to have an immutable infrastructure.

And then the next strategy was to move to Kubernetes:) Now they can take ideas from ideation to production in a matter of minutes whereas earlier they used to take hours or even days. They have cut down so much of overhead cost by utilizing Kubernetes and have removed a lot of manual work without making engineers worry about the underlying infrastructure.

Pokemon Go’s Kubernetes story

How was ‘Pokemon Go’ able to scale so efficiently & became so successful? The answer is Kubernetes. Pokemon Go was developed and published by Niantic Inc. 500+ million downloads and 20+ million daily active users.

Pokemon Go engineers never thought their user base would increase exponentially surpassing the expectations within a short time, they were not ready for it, and even the servers couldn’t handle this much traffic.

Conclusion:

Around the world, many CIO’s and technologists have chosen to use Kubernetes, and it is expected to evolve much more in the years to come.

Containers are becoming more and more popular in the software world and Kubernetes has become the industry standard for deploying containers in production. We will expect a high growth rate of Kubernetes this year too.