Docker Kubernetes Tutorial

Businesses have seen a great rise in topics such as cloud computing, container orchestration, and containerization as they migrate their architecture and infrastructure to reflect a data-driven and cloud-native era. Docker Kubernetes has changed the way these businesses develop and deploy their software at scale. In this article, you’ll get to learn about it in brief.

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What is Docker Kubernetes?

Docker and Kubernetes both are comprehensive and effective solutions with powerful capabilities that intelligently manage containerized applications. Kubernetes is a system for container orchestration of Docker containers for automating their scaling, management, placement, and routing that has become famous among the developers and IT operations teams in the current years. It is more extensive than the Docker swarm. It is meant to efficiently coordinate clusters of nodes at scale in production. In short, it is a portable, open-source, and extensible platform that manages the containerized services and workloads. Kubernetes was developed by google first and it contributed to open source in 2014 but now it is maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Why Docker Kubernetes?

In a production environment, some containers need to be managed as they ensure that there is no downtime and the applications run smoothly. They are a good way to bundle and run the applications. For instance, if one container goes down then another one needs to start and it will be a lot easier if it was handled by a system. This is where Kubernetes is a lifesaver. It provides the companies with a framework to run the distributed systems flexibly. Kubernetes takes care of failover and scaling for the application, provides patterns for deployment, and much more such as easily managing a canary deployment of a system. This is why it is so popular among companies and organizations and becomes their first choice.

Why you should use Docker Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is a highly flexible container tool that consistently delivers even the most complex applications that run on clusters of hundreds of individual servers. One should always go with Kubernetes as it provides:

1. Automated rollouts and rollbacks – The user can describe the desired state of his/her deployed container. In short, it can efficiently change the actual state with a controlled rate to the user’s desired state.
2. Service discovery and load balancing – A container can be exposed by Kubernetes using the domain name system or their IP address. Further, deployment becomes stable as it loads the balance and distributes the network traffic when traffic to a container is high.
3. Secret and configuration management – The users can store and manage their sensitive information like SSH keys, passwords, etc. It lets them deploy and update application configuration and secrets without exposing secrets or rebuilding container images.
4. Automatic pin backing – It helps companies make the best use of their resources as it runs containerized tasks using the cluster of nodes efficiently. Moreover, the user can tell it how much CPU and memory to use on each container.
5. Storage orchestration – Kubernetes allows the users to prepare a storage system of their own choice like a public cloud provider, local storage, etc.
6. Self-healing – Kubernetes has a special self-healing process in which it kills the containers that don’t respond, restart the ones that fail, replaces them, and doesn’t publicize them to customers until they are ready to serve.

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Docker Kubernetes Features

Kubernetes has already won the container orchestration war proving why it is the best among every other similar system. It has a lot to offer to its customers. Let’s have a look at the number of features that Kubernetes has to offer to them.

• Portable and 100% open source
• High availability
• Workload scalability and designed for deployment
• You can create predictable infrastructure
• Automated Scheduling
• Auto-scalable infrastructure
• Self-Healing Capabilities
• Application-centric management
• Automated rollouts & rollback
• Offers enterprise-ready features
• Horizontal Scaling & Load Balancing
• Provides a higher density of resource utilization
• Offers environment consistency for development, testing, and production
• Infrastructure is loosely coupled to each component can act as a separate unit

Docker Kubernetes Architecture

Kubernetes has a quite complex architecture with several components in it. The components are:

• Master node – This is the first and the most important component in the Kubernetes architecture. It is responsible for the management of the Kubernetes cluster. There can be more than one master node to check for fault tolerance and it is the entry point for all the administrative tasks.
• Scheduler – It is the second component that has the responsibility of scheduling the tasks to slave nodes. Further, it distributes the workload and keeps the resource usage information for every worker node.
• Etcd – Etcd stores wright values and configuration details and communicates with the components to receive the commands and work accordingly. Moreover, it manages the port forwarding activity and network rules.
• Worker/Slave nodes – These nodes are the essential components of the Kubernetes architecture that allows you to assign resources to the container. They contain the required services to manage the networking between containers and communicate with the master node.

1. Kubelet: Ensures that described containers are up and running and get the configuration of Pod from the API server.
2. Docker container: Runs on every worker node that runs the configured pods.
3. Kube-proxy: Acts as a load balancer and network proxy for performing service on a single server node.
4. Pods: Combination of single or multiple containers logically running together on nodes.

Docker Kubernetes Benefits

There are a lot of similar products as Kubernetes in the market for container management, both commercial and open source. However, Kubernetes has surged in popularity and has become the most widely used solutions because of the benefits that it offers:

1. Impressive heritage: It has a proven and mature underlying architecture and its design has been built with the 10 years of operational experience by Google engineers that make it the largest container platform in the world.
2. Ongoing development: It is continuously developing as it releases new features constantly, fosters collaboration, and has a large and active community.
3. Outstanding community and industry support: Kubernetes stands out among all the other container orchestration platforms as it has a broad growth, support, adoption, and popularity. Moreover, it has the support of cloud providers, global enterprises, and IT market leaders.
4. The rich feature set and application support: As compared to other container management systems, Kubernetes has a rich feature set. It is flexible enough to meet the changing needs of users and supports a wide set of programming languages, frameworks, and workloads thus enabling stateful, stateless, and data-processing workloads.

Docker Kubernetes New Offerings

Enterprises and organizations are adopting the container technology as well as Kubernetes with breathtaking speed. It is because it strives to become the best version of itself by constantly upgrading and introducing new features and fixes. In its new upgrade, Kubernetes offers:

• Unified visibility by combining metrics, events, logs, and security for the view of performance, security, and uptime.
• CNCF endorsed collection tools such as Prometheus and FluentD
• Application-centric visibility
• Upgraded live out-of-the-box dashboards showing live state providing new services
• Reduction in time to identify and solve issues

Advantages and Disadvantages of Docker Kubernetes

Kubernetes facilitates declarative configuration and automation; it provides widely available tools, services, and support and has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem that may make you consider using its services. If you are thinking to adopt Kubernetes for your cloud infrastructure then this section will help you evaluate some of its advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages –

• If this application is used properly, it can greatly increase the efficiency of how your organization works. Additionally, it has a huge ecosystem that reduces the general complexity and gets solutions that you can hardly get yourself.
• Kubernetes is a modern technology ranking as the 3^rd most wanted platform. Software engineers nowadays want to work in companies that use such interesting technologies. In other words, it attracts new and experienced talent in the company.
• It is a future proof solution providing out-of-the-box solutions.
• This software helps in making the application run more stable by running it reliably.
• It helps to update the software without the downtime and supports high availability applications and large, distributed systems.
• At last, it is an extensible platform that runs and monitors applications without disturbing their state. Several simultaneously running containers can be single-handedly managed and monitored by an administrator.

Disadvantages –

• Firstly, the Kubernetes’ dashboard is not up to mark. It could’ve been made more useful.
• The security feature is not very effective and reliable.
• The application is a bit complicated and unnecessary in such environments where all the development is done locally.
• It is more expensive than its alternatives which can be a turn-off for small companies.
• Lastly, the adaptation to Kubernetes can be cumbersome as even with the experienced staff, it can take some effort and time.
• The software is an over skill for some applications and it reduces the productivity of the employees.