Top benefits of using Kubernetes

Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source container orchestration platform utilized for scheduling and automating the deployment and management of applications. The Kubernetes platform is designed to optimize the process of DevOps and allow easy scalability of containerized applications. One of the primary reasons why companies prefer using K8s for their products is the load-balancing capability it offers across multiple hosts.

As a DevOps engineer, you must learn Kubernetes. Firstly, it is the fastest-growing project in the history of open-source software after Linux, which is an impressive achievement. Also, the DevOps engineers’ demand increased by 67% between 2020 and 2021. There is an increase in the use of Kubernetes across companies, and here are the top benefits of using it for managing your microservices architecture.

1.Accelerates productivity of developers

Developer time is one of the most expensive resources for a software development company. With Kubernetes, DevOps engineers can better utilize the time by offering developers a medium for continuous integration (CI) of their code changes in the main branch frequently. This exposes failures faster and helps identify issues with the code during the early stages of development. 

With Kubernetes, developers can: 

• Write, deploy and debug code much faster than the traditional software development approach. 
• Faster deployment and integration of updates for the product. 
• Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery becomes much easier with the implementation of Kubernetes. 

Overall, developers can quickly accelerate app development by significantly reducing configuration time and simplifying the online management of Dev/Test clusters. 

2.Increased DevOps efficiency 

One of the significant challenges for adopting cloud infrastructure for microservices architecture is the complicated development, testing, and deployment processes. If your ecosystem is distributed over several hosts, then Kubernetes can simplify managing project development and deployment. 

With K8s, you can create container images that easily set up the ecosystem for running your applications on any cloud platform. Compared to virtual machine images, it’s much easier and translates into faster development and optimized release of updates.

DevOps engineers must deploy Kubernetes sooner in the software development lifecycle to test the code early and easily identify and prevent any expensive mistakes. When errors are found later in the development cycle, the cost of debugging is much higher. Kubernetes supports microservices architecture, which is an additional benefit. An app consists of separate functional units communicating through APIs in a microservices architecture. This allows freedom to maintain smaller teams, and each team can focus on its tasks. DevOps can create Namespaces that allow setting up multiple virtual sub-clusters within the same physical Kubernetes cluster. As each team can work on the same project without interrupting each other’s progress, this dramatically improves development efficiency.

3.Container orchestration savings

Irrespective of company size, Kubernetes offers cost-saving on CI/CD ecosystem by providing better management and automation of the manual processes. Kubernetes automatically provisions and fits containers that provide the best use of resources, whether it’s development, maintenance, or code deployment. Most companies use cloud platforms for their infrastructure, so they pay for every cluster. With Kubernetes, DevOps engineers can run fewer clusters requiring fewer API servers, reducing development and deployment costs.

Kubernetes clusters are configured to ensure minimal downtime. If one of the nodes in the cluster fails, others can take its place while engineers manually fix the issues. This container orchestration offers a more efficient workflow as there is less need to repeat the same processes. Simply put, you can provide services using fewer servers, avoiding inefficient administration.

4.More portability and minimal vendor lock-in

If you have used virtual machines for virtualization, you must know how complicated and resource intensive the whole process is. However, using containers, you can create virtual environments that are lightweight and more agile. This is because Kubernetes containers only use the resources that an application will need, such as code, installations, and dependencies. They use the operating system’s resources for the rest of the functionalities. It keeps the size of containers smaller and makes them faster and more portable. 

For example, if you want to host four apps using virtual machines, you will have to create four copies of the guest OS to run apps on the server. Whereas if you use a container for the same, you can host all four applications within the single container, and they can share the same version of the host OS. 

Kubernetes is highly flexible and can run container management on any possible infrastructure, including public cloud, private cloud, in-house servers, and others. It also supports virtually any container runtime, unlike other orchestrators, which are tied to individual runtimes or cloud infrastructures. 

Conclusion 

If your company implements DevOps for product development and maintenance, Kubernetes can significantly improve your team’s productivity. These benefits will encourage DevOps engineers to use Kubernetes for container orchestration.

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