So, Q1 of 2024 is almost finished, and of course, we favor Kubernetes more than ever. The landscape of microservices deployments and management is more complex and dynamic than ever, and each business has its own unique needs to solve.
Here are five reasons why Kubernetes should be considered in 2024:
Community support and Ecosystem
Dynamic environments
Container Orchestration
Ready-to-use environments
Cost Effectiveness
Community and Ecosystem
As of today, kubernetes is one of the most significant open-source projects available to us. Endless posts, blogs, and a big community surrounds the project.
Kubernetes has been ground zero for many open-source projects that extend its ecosystem. For instance, secrets manager can be used to sync secrets from a secret store to a kubernetes secret, and external dns can sync dns records to a dns provider.
The flexibility of kubernetes allows us to tweek and implement environments based on our business needs. (below image from CNCF)
Dynamic environments
You can enjoy Kubernetes benefits in almost any environment that fits its minimum requirements. From data centers to cloud vendors, from your own PC to even edge computing, kubernetes can host your workloads on any of them.
The deployment options can help us reproduce almost identical Kubernetes environments to any cluster. The same applicative workloads, ci/cd flows, logging, and monitoring solutions can help us solve business requirements.
For example, at KubeGurus, we had a project that required edge computing. We used EKS as our main control cluster and k3s at the edge. The control cluster was responsible for collecting metrics, logs, and much more, but we were successful with the implementation because we could build upon our knowledge of Kubernetes.
Container Orchestration
When it comes to keeping application stable and available once they are running, kubernetes has number of tools in it’s sleeve.
Controllers such as deployment ensure the desired number of replicas reside on the cluster. The liveness and readiness probe ensures our workload is healthy at all times. HPA and VPA allow our workloads to scale and keep up with demand. Other open-source projects, such as Karpenter and cluster auto scaler, can assist with the infrastructure auto-scaling requirements.
Kubernetes also has self-healing capabilities and auto-service discovery that both reduces admins operations and maintenance regarding the workloads.
Kubernetes is not a fail-safe, and it won’t help us with bad programming habits or infrastructure misconfiguration, but it has many features that will benefit our organization.
Ready-to-use environments
Once we pick kubernetes as a fit solution to use, we will have the option to select from many bootstrapping and management tools.
In the cloud provider, we have an option to use managed service as of EKS. Those kinds of services will offload the controlplane management, ease the cluster upgrades, built-in integration with the cloud provider, and much more.
Tools such as k3d, k3s, and micork8s can deploy Kubernetes cluster on minimal hardware within minutes.
Enterprise solutions such as Rancher and Openshift are more widley used at on-prem and has there own unique features.
Each one of the services, tools, and distributions listed above allows us to deploy our kubernetes cluster in any environment and reduce adoption friction.
Cost Effectiveness
Open source projects can be used without any charge. The charges are usually billed on the underlying compute and service used to manage our Kubernetes environment.
AWS, for example, charges 2.4 dollars per day for EKS service which provide lots of value as shown in the previous point.
Kubernetes can get the most out of our infrastructure if we enable auto-scaling on our workloads and underlying infrastructure. Kubernetes will ensure that our applicative workloads will scale out and in based on the usage. An external project as Karpenter or cluster auto scaler will reduce and increase the amount of available nodes in the cluster.
Kubernetes can host stateful applications such as Redis and Postgres that can be very costly at non-production environments in the cloud.
Opensource project like opencost can help us determine our costs in the cluster and adjust according his recommendations to save costs.
To conclude,
While Kubernetes may not be suitable for some, it will be a great solution for most organizations. We expect that there will be many more features and advances on the project. Many more open-source projects will endorse and expand its ecosystem, making kubernetes even more valuable for organizations.
