Kubernetes is a hot technology in the DevOps world. It’s an open source container orchestration platform that helps manage distributed, containerized applications at a massive scale. Born at Google, version 1.0 was released in July 2015. It has continued to evolve and mature and is now offered as a PaaS service by all of the major cloud vendors.

So, why is Kubernetes so popular? More than just enabling a containerized application to scale, Kubernetes has release-management features that enable updates with near-zero downtime, version rollback, and clusters that can ‘self-heal’ when there is a problem. Load balancing, auto-scaling and SSL can easily be implemented. Helm, a plugin for Kubernetes, has revolutionized the world of server management by making multi-node data stores like Redis and MongoDB incredibly easy to deploy.

Using Kubernetes for solutions that are already containerized can drastically reduce development time spent on operations and deployment. However, the effort to convert an existing brown field or legacy solution to be container-based so that Kubernetes can be used may not be a justifiable investment. The migration of isolated functionality or development of new features in a Kubernetes-compatible form are two approaches for learning about and methodically transitioning to this technology.

Here at Arcurve, we love dabbling with cool new tech, but we always ask ourselves if the hot new thing is going to be the best solution for the job at hand.

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