Kubernetes

Getting Started with Kubernetes: A Beginners Guide

Companies are embracing microservices because they offer a more flexible and scalable approach to software development and deployment. Unlike the traditional monolithic architecture, which can be difficult to manage and slow-moving, microservices allow for the development of applications as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms.

This approach makes it easier for teams to work independently, deploy changes more frequently, and scale different parts of the application as needed. Ultimately, microservices enable companies to be more agile and responsive to changing business needs. Kubernetes is one of the most important tools in microservices management automation.

This article will discuss Kubernetes' role in microservices, its history, and powerful architecture.

What’s the Role of Kubernetes in Microservices?

Kubernetes plays a crucial role in microservices architecture. It provides a platform for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

With Kubernetes, you can easily deploy and manage individual microservices as containers, allowing for efficient resource utilization and seamless scaling. It also offers features for load balancing, service discovery, and automated rollouts and rollbacks, which are essential for managing a large number of microservices in a dynamic environment.

History of Kubernetes

Kubernetes, commonly referred to as K8s, is an open-source container orchestration platform that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

It was originally developed by Google and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2014. The project was inspired by Google's internal system called Borg, which was used to manage containerized applications at scale. Kubernetes was designed to provide a platform for automating the deployment, scaling, and operation of application containers across clusters of hosts. It has since become one of the most popular and widely adopted tools for managing containerized applications in production environments.

One of the reasons Kubernetes surged past its competitors is the magic of community and support behind it: Kubernetes is one of the largest open-source communities (more than 27,000+ stars on GitHub); It has contributions from thousands of prominent organizations (1,409 contributors); and is part of the open-source foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

What is Container Orchestration?

Containerization has completely changed the way software is built and shipped; it enables us to create, run, and manage a few containers. Kubernetes can easily and automatically scale, distribute, and handle faults on containers. In other words, Kubernetes orchestrates containers with ease, even when there are many.

Kubernetes architecture

Image source: Wikiwand

Kubernetes works on master-slave architecture.

Some Kubernetes master components

Kubelet: Kubelet is the principal Kubernetes agent, and it runs on every node in the cluster. It watches and listens for tasks sent from the API Server, then executes the job, and finally reports back to the Master.
Kubernetes Master: It is the central control component that distributes and manages the containers on the nodes.
Nodes: It is also referred to as a worker machine. It can be a virtual machine (VM) or a physical server. The so called pods run on the nodes.
Pods: Pods are the tiniest deployable units in the Kubernetes system. They hold one or more containers that share the allocated resources.
etcd: etcd is regarded as the brain of the Kubernetes cluster. It stores the configurations of the Kubernetes cluster and secrets and represents the key-value database. Anything we read from a ‘kubectl get ABC’ command is all stored in etcd.
API server: It acts as a main management point of the entire cluster in the system. API server contains all the information about the etcd and that makes it one of the most critical components of Kubernetes. It is also responsible for the authentication and authorization mechanism.
kube-scheduler: The kube-scheduler is one of the core components of the system, and it monitors and manages the utilization of the nodes by deciding based on the resources on which node a pod starts.
Controller Manager: It acts as a central controller that contains all control mechanisms and is, therefore, an essential component for monitoring. The controller manager watches the replication set, node, endpoints (services), and service accounts. It communicates with the API server to read and write all statuses. Besides all this, it performs tasks such as event garbage collection, namespace creation, terminated-pod garbage collection, cascading-deletion garbage collection, node garbage collection, etc.

Also read: Kubernetes Architecture Overview for DevOps Enthusiasts

Conclusion

We hope this article was helpful in getting you started with this amazing technology. The Key to mastering Kubernetes is practicing using different configurations and deployments.

Enroll in our Kubernetes for the Absolute Beginner course. It includes video lectures, interactive exercises, and hands-on labs to help you internalize concepts and commands.