Why Migrate to Kubernetes in 2021: Key DevOps and DataOps Benefits
Since the times of its first release in 2015 followed by multiple commits on GitHub, Kubernetes (or K8s, for short) has been scoring points across industries and professional communities. And if the reasons behind the success of Kubernetes are crystal clear for software developers, DevOps and Data Science engineers, it is not that obvious for business owners.
Indeed, why transferring company’s application-related processes to Kubernetes has become a mainstay? To find this out, let’s go over and brush up on some key concepts driving the benefits K8s can bring about.
So, this article is primarily for forward-thinking business owners and C-suite looking at how to gain a competitive edge with the migration of your workloads to Kubernetes.
“We’ve opted for Kubernetes for two reasons. First, we preferred it to the alternatives that we assessed, and it fit all our requirements. Secondly, we knew it would become an emerging standard.” – Sarah Wells, Technical Director for Operations and Reliability, Financial Times
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is a cloud native system for orchestrating containerized applications. Initially created by Google, now the popular open-source platform is sustained by The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Kubernetes is one of the most popular cluster management software solutions that enables smooth automated app deployment, operability and scalability. K8s provides your production runtime environments with highly manageable container-based applications at scale. Best designed to optimize your microservice architecture and orchestrate your applications packaged into containers, Kubernetes is what most app software developers and DevOps are happy about. This year, Stack Overflow has come up with its annual Developer Survey showcasing the preferences of 65,000 developers from all over the globe on software tools, frameworks, and technologies. Given the survey, 71.1% of professional respondents consider Kubernetes to be the best platform to develop with, now and in the future.
Simply put, if your apps can be containerized (say, with the help of Docker), they definitely should be run and governed by Kubernetes. Backed by K8s, you can greatly increase your on-prem or cloud-hosted infrastructure utilization as all the computational resources are dynamically and reasonably shared across multiple app-driven processes.
At the time of this writing, the latest version of Kubernetes released is 1.19.3. However, the communities on GitHub and GoogleGroups have started discussing update details for version 1.20.0 already. Since Kubernetes is open source, it enjoys timely and quick support from the global professional community when it comes to updating, bug fixing, and other improvements. Based on Kubernetes, some vendors have come to the market with their proprietary SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS offerings, like
What developers think of Kubernetes
What organizations think of Kubernetes
As of 2020, many decision-makers in enterprises are still on the fence about the quick adoption of Kubernetes across their application development operations. Fortunately, there is a growing number of early movers among companies that clearly realize the benefits standing behind the migration to Kubernetes. According to Statista’s latest research, more than one third of organizations are already underway leveraging the huge K8s potential. This way or another, companies start to future-proof its efficiency in terms of app development, testing, and running in production.
What is Kubernetes used for?
At its core, Kubernetes is all about the smooth orchestration of containerized applications. Being in the heart of hearts, containers by themselves, however, are not self-sufficient to be run in an efficient way in the process- and resource-intensive production environments. Sad but true, running containers at scale can drastically increase the app delivery time and product quality. Failing to meet your client’s time-to-market expectations, product delays eventually lead to poor customer experience.
So, having a holistic scalable tool for automated process optimization of container-based applications has become imperative. That’s where Kubernetes comes into play helping streamline workloads across multiple app-related processes.
Kubernetes for DevOps and DataOps optimization
What’s there for DevOps and DataOps engineers and practitioners, you may wonder? The statement that migrating to Kubernetes contributes greatly to their overall effectiveness improvement needs a bit more detailed explanation.
Despite the difference between these two methodologies, both DevOps and DataOps have many things in common that relate them to Kubernetes. They serve the same business goals when it comes to speeding up application software development, deployment, and delivery. In a nutshell, the two practices focus on improving application production through software development workflow optimization powered by data-driven insights.
Kubernetes follows the same principles being a powerful tool that provides a rock-solid technological ground for enhancements on both software and human levels. This said, your DevOps team finds it great to tap into Kubernetes for getting better operational efficiencies, and faster product delivery rates. At the same time, your DataOps engineers can leverage the accuracy of massive data assets for their BigData analytics through robust data orchestration, timely updates, persistent data storage, and streamlined data pipelines across platforms and departments.
With all that said, it’s better to think of the benefits Kubernetes brings to organizations in slightly more generic concepts. This is due to the fact that K8s can positively affect the workflows of various teams and departments at a time. What’s more, the benefits have an accumulative effect as you can capitalize on utilizing Kubernetes in the long run.
5 key benefits of migrating to Kubernetes
Both your DevOps DataOps teams and the entire business can benefit from migrating to Kubernetes. In the same way it improves the efficiency of container-based applications in terms of automated deployment and management, K8s adds much value to the whole company’s business efficacy. The key advantages of the migration to Kubernetes giving you a competitive edge boil down to the following:
- Cost-efficiency
- Consistency
- Portability
- Scalability
- Security
The idea of harnessing the huge potential of transferring microservices and containerized applications to Kubernetes is regularly backed up at the annual KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events hosted by CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation). Prominent speakers like Sarah Wells, a CTO for Operations and Reliability at Financial Times, are open to sharing their practical knowledge on implementing Kubernetes across a company’s IT operations. Her keynote presentation The Challenges of Migrating 150+ Microservices to Kubernetes speaks volumes and helps you estimate and fact-check the K8s effectiveness in terms of hosting, tech support, and migration costs.
With multiple containers being run at a time, Kubernetes provides a holistic production environment for software development, DevOps, QA, sysadmins, and other specialists. Whatever changes may occur while running Kubernetes clusters, the entire integrity of SDLC is preserved. It contributes greatly to high performance and risk minimization.
Kubernetes can be easily utilized on both on-premises and cloud-based environments, with containers run on clusters of bare-metal or virtual machines (VM). Since applications are containerized, they are totally platform-agnostic and can be orchestrated across various frameworks. The container orchestration technology supports most of today’s programming languages, which is another great advantage for migration.
Kubernetes is downright ready for any sporadic or planned scaling challenges while dealing with app-related workloads. Due to its elasticity and automation of container cluster processes, the burden can be smoothly lifted off and reallocated between the capabilities of corporate data centers, private and public clouds without any performance issues or downtimes. It means much for DevOps as scalable workloads ensure great improvements of CI/CD pipelines.
Last but not least, is making sure your container orchestration workloads are absolutely safe. Kubernetes has got you covered on that with transparent control mechanisms and compliance protocols, like Role-based access control (RBAC), Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux), and eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML). K8s offers enhanced security functionality to safeguard your IT infrastructure and ensures the health of container-based applications running across various production environments.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that Kubernetes is a true game changer in today's software development. The platform helps you boost the overall performance and productivity when it comes to efficiently managing containerized services and workloads. Not to mention its huge time- and cost-saving potential. With Kubernetes at your fingertips, you can drastically enhance the efficacy of your DevOps, DataOps, and GitOps workflows while creating automated CI/CD pipelines. For getting additional tech insights into Kubernetes, please refer to the great article on containerization and deployment created by our friends at Toptal.
All in all, migrating to Kubernetes is really worth considering. With this, any seamless integration with existing infrastructure requires a proficient helping hand. Here at Adimen, we are glad to be of any assistance in delivering actionable DevOps/DataOps solutions. Just drop us a line, so we can scrutinize your project needs and requirements.