This May, Kubernetes celebrates its eighth year of existence. Eight years have sufficed to make this open source solution the essential technical base for the deployment and management of containerized applications and server clusters. Kubernetes, baptized K8s by its aficionados, has definitely won the orchestrator war against Docker Swarm or Mesos Marathon.
When it first appeared in mid-2014, the tool designed by Google benefited from fifteen years of know-how from the digital giant in the management of software containers. Borg, the old name of Kubernetes, was already used to administer massively distributed services like Gmail or Google Maps.
Today, in 2022, Kubernetes has practically become a de facto standard. In the latest edition of its “State of Kubernetes” report, VMware confirms that the platform has established itself as the reference orchestration layer for the infrastructure of private, public and hybrid clouds. “Its use is no longer reserved for pioneers, and has gradually become widespread,” said Michael Cote, staff technologist at VMware.
VMware is proof of this by the number of managed clusters. In 2020, 30% of organizations surveyed by VMware were advancing five or fewer clusters, and only 15% had more than 50. Two years later, the proportions reversed. Only 12% of companies manage five or fewer clusters, and 29% have more than 50.
Scalable, scalable and resilient infrastructures
Its success, Kubernetes owes it to its functional richness. Turnkey solution, it natively embeds the range of features that one is entitled to expect from a cluster manager: load balancing, auto scaling, authorization management, etc. The use of Kubernetes extends even beyond the cloud. It is used in a modified version to manage the IoT (internet of things). Which was not originally planned.
Site reliability engineer at Padok, Arthur Busser for his part highlights the efficiency of the operating mode of Kubernetes. “A declarative API allows the user to declare the desired state of their infrastructure. He wants, for example, three instances of his service to run and be exposed on the internet via a URL. Controllers will then compare this desired state and the actual state and take the necessary actions to reconcile the two states. »
A model which, according to him, makes it possible to build scalable, scalable and resilient infrastructures. “And if Kubernetes does not allow you to do everything, it can, thanks to its modular approach, be enriched with third-party services. To add features, the user just has to dig into the catalog of extensions such as Prometheus for monitoring or cert-manager for SSL certificate management. »
In line with the practices of the GitOps method, the open source Argo suite also provides a set of tools native to Kubernetes for managing containerized workflows. Among them, Argo CD controls the deployment of an application as well as its life cycle.
Mastering complexity
An extremely powerful and rich tool, Kubernetes is nonetheless complex. A complexity that can hinder its adoption. 51% of companies surveyed in the VMware study consider that they suffer from a lack of experience and expertise internally and 34% say they have difficulty keeping up with the rapid evolutions of Kubernetes and cloud native in general.
“The use of Kubernetes implies a necessary increase in skills to achieve automated deployments, to continuously measure service levels”, confirms Arthur Busser. “That said, doing it without Kubernetes would be much more complicated. »
For the expert, the major challenge for an organization is to be able to manage the complexity it develops. “There is a great risk of witnessing a headlong rush by always adding more components. By lending itself to this escalation of functionalities, a company can struggle to master and maintain the whole. This is the trap. It’s easy at first, the complexity comes later. »
This loss of control over Kubernetes environments can also create security breaches. “Particularly dynamic, the open source community immediately offers a patch at the slightest vulnerability detected”, observes Arthur Busser. “It’s up to the company behind to do the patching work. It only takes one outdated component to put the whole thing at risk. »
To overcome the complexity of Kubernetes, providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, OVHcloud or Scaleway offer managed versions. By using this type of “Kubernetes-as-a-Service” offer, the company no longer has to worry about the configuration, operation and maintenance of the orchestrator.